Undercover - In China - Book 7

Part 48 - Stone the bleeding crows

We spent the night squashed together on the floor of Grandpa's tiny house and, in the morning, he served us lor bak in fish soup for breakfast. It was so delicious I started to refill my bowl but I lost my appetite after discovering two fishy eye balls staring at me. Licia ate them and said they were delicious.

The boat was made from three wide, roughly carved wooden planks, one forming the flat bottom and the others the two sides. The planks ended at a blunt, squared off bow and stern. Licia told us it was called a sampan, literally three planks in the south China Cantonese language.

'Eeeuww! What's that stink?' she gasped.

Miguel held his nose as he mumbled, 'A few thousand fish must have died in this boat.'

 'This is getting to be the stinkiest adventure yet,' Licia gasped. 'Skunk juice, honey wagons and now this! Let's clean it up.'

'Wouldn't it be easier if we launched it first?' I asked. We dragged the boat into the river and scrubbed until we could breath without throwing up.

'Uh-o, Houston,' Miguel said ominously. 'I think we have a leak.'

Grandpa Chen showed us how to hammer bits of greasy old rope into the gaps between the planks to slow the leaks. He said it would get better when the plank soaked up some water. 

 We spent most of the day fitting the mast into a socket near the middle of the boat and repairing the sail, which consisted of bamboo battens laced together with reeds and folded up like an accordion. Grandpa Chen pointed to a fleet of boats manoeuvring on the river and chuckled. Licia said. 'He thinks Cho Cho's soldiers have a lot to learn about sailing the Jingzhou war boats . . . And he just remembered the rudder needs repair.'

Grandpa Chen decided to take the rudder to a friend who lived in the hills nearby. Miguel harnessed our horse to the cart and we all climbed aboard for the trip. Grandpa said was only about five Li but it took us about two hours to find the place. The road ascended into a steep forested valley and we saw an incredible structure at the base of a rocky cliff. It was a bamboo tower with two huge wheels, like a Ferris wheel without the chairs. 

 As we approached, we could hear voices from a small shed at the bottom of the tower. Grandpa Chen called out and the argument stopped as two men came out of the shed squinting in the sun light. 

 One of them said, 'Cor stone the bleeding crows!' And that didn't sound like Mandarin.

He was dressed like a local but his luxuriant handlebar moustache was a dead give away. Licia threw herself at Denny and hugged him so hard he had to beg her to stop so that he could breath. 

 Miguel and I joined in the group hug while the other man stared in astonishment. Denny told us how he had arrived at the Dragon Well monastery several months earlier. The monks had helped him, and he repaid them by repairing broken hinges and other metal fittings. And, deciding that he might be there for a long time, he persuaded the monks to teach him Mandarin. He was beginning to feel at home when the local bureaucrats, hearing rumours of a foreign devil, sent soldiers to arrest him. 

 The monks told the soldiers that he had gone to Jiangling but in fact they hid Denny and later escorted him to the water wheel and begged the owner for help. Denny introduced the man standing next to us as the owner, Lu Bu. Lu Bu, a short heavily built man with muscular arms, had quickly appreciated Denny's metal working skill and provided accommodation and food in return for Denny's work. Grandpa Chen explained we needed help fixing our damaged rudder and Lu Bu agreed, provided we assisted him, and this meant we had to learn a lot about deep well drilling in a hurry.