China !

I wasn’t expecting anything to change, but then one day, completely out of the blue, Van Heatsink had visitors and announced that he had to go off on a personal journey to faraway China, from which I deduced that we weren’t actually very near China.
I was quite hurt and disappointed to learn that he would be abandoning me, but he insisted that whatever he had to do was something he had to do by himself.
Van Heatsink translated what he had just been told by the scroll-bearing emissaries who had caught up with him.
Apparently, he told me, there had been an outbreak of Leprechauns infesting the Great Wall, and they were being such a pain that he had to go and lay them, as he put it.
“Leprechauns?” I queried, unconvinced.
To me, as far as I remembered, leprechauns were characters in rather dumb children’s stories with plots warning the reader to be careful with wishes.
“No, really!” Van Heatsink had insisted, “to be sure it’s as true as I’m standing here.”
It seems a gang of repairmen had very kindly knocked on the Imperial door to deliver a dire but timely warning to the Great Qianlong, incumbent Ornament of the Jade Throne.
“We were just in the area,” the gang foreman had told the Emperor, “and we noticed that there are some areas of your wall that badly need the pointing, to be sure, and that they do.”
“Pointing?” queried Qianlong’s baffled Grand Vizier.
“Pointing,” confirmed the fast-talking foreman, “Now, just by chance we have a bit of mortiferous compo left over from a job we were just doing down the road, and it would be a tragedy, that it would, to be takin’ it all the way across half the world just to leave it in our depot, wouldn’t it now?”
“Umm?” asked the Emperor, who had not noticed that his Great Wall was in any need of repair.
“I can see that you are shrewd and intelligent, your Gracious Imperial Majesty on whom the sun would never be daring to set, and being such a fine and perspicacious monument to tradition, it’s plain to see your very clever and exceedingly wise divine personage, to be sure, add no one would be pulling the wool over such a fine pair o’ eyes as those that you’ll be having there, so I’ll tell you what we’ll do:
“A more foolish man might leave it till tomorrow, or even a few weeks over, before dealing with the problem, by which time the decay will have spread and instead of a little bit o’pointing, you’ll be having huge great areas o’wall-rot with rubble a-falling down about your ears and any minute after that the barbarians will be pouring in like an overflowing bathtub, rapifying and pillaging this fine country o’yours, and that wouldn’t be a good thing at all.”
“At all?” echoed the Emperor.
“At all, at all – no,” confirmed the foreman, “’For the wanting of a nail, a kingdom was lost,’ as Uncle Remus said.”
“Unker Lemus?” Qianlong repeated, confused
“Indeed that he was, and as he’d have been saying if he’d had a Great Wall of his own, “For the wanting of a bit of mortiferous compo, an empire was lost.
“If you act today, instead of tomorrow or the day after, because by then again you’ll be having to send out for quotes and new estimates, why not give the job to us, now, while we’re here in the area?’
“But wait — there’s more!
“If you settle up by, say, next Wednesday, we’ll knock you ten percent off, and give you a lovingly crafted necklace with a Lucky Shamrock mounted in it, plus the work will be fully guaranteed with a five point indemnity all-seasons warranty for materials and labour right up until when it goes wrong – but of course you’ll not be wishing to think about it too much because o’ the bad luck.”
“Bad ruck?” repeated the Emperor.
“It’s the curse, yes.
“Now while we’re here, why not have a new suit o’clothes made up for your exceedingly wise and all-seeing person?”
“New crothes?”
“Indeed they would be, yes.
“It just so happens that Murphy here has some silk o’ the finest fine-ness ever woven by a silk-worm. “
“But…”
“It’s made of a thread that is so fine it can only be seen by the cleverest and wisest of men, and while the rest of the team are preventifyng your wall being turned to rubble, Murphy here could be a fixin’ up your wardrobe so that when you take a stroll along the very fine wall of yours, everyone will see just how wise you truly are.
“Now you can’t say better than that now, can you? The lucky shamrock will ensure that you live a charmed life and won’t be bothered by the rheumatics or Mongol Hordes.”
It seems that the flustered Emperor had given the lads the job, and they’d squirted a bit o’ mortiferous compo around and then departed with all haste, leaving a lucky shamrock necklace and a sheaf of warranty small print that not even the Emperor’s cleverest advisers could decipher.
A week later, amidst much publicity, Qianlong took a stroll along the shoddily repaired wall in his new suit.
He was exceedingly proud of his new, bespoke apparel, and the crowds cheered their approval for his good taste and his wisdom – until a young lad’s voice rang out from the throng.
“Why the Emperor he wear only shoe?
“He rook rike comprete pirrock! The Emperor he rook rike pirrok. Sirry pronker!”
The boy was shushed and told off for talking like a racist pantomime character from no specific country, but he kept shouting that as he couldn’t see the emperor’s fake “clothes,” then nobody else could either. They were a con trick from beginning to end, he shouted. They didn’t exist and the emperor was not as wise as he would have liked to have been seen…
Eventually those around him began to agree, and then they began to laugh – and the laughter and derision rippled out until the entire country was pointing and laughing at what only very few of them could actually see.
The shame-faced emperor hurried away, closely surrounded by his robe-spreading advisors who had suddenly realized they were not going to come out of this episode very well – if at all.
As it departed, the imperial party began hopping about, trying to avoid their ankles being bitten by the small, jig-dancing fairy-folk who had appeared over the edge of the wall and who were gnashing their teeth and shouting, “Begorrah!” at them..
The emperor was not happy about what the cowboy tricksters had done to him. He was even less happy when he discovered that the itinerant contractors were also responsible for leaving the tribe of stowaway little people – Leprechauns – behind.
It wasn’t just the emperor and his entourage that had been plagued; the little chaps had taken to sinking their teeth into the ankles of any unwary traveller making their way along the top road of the Great Wall.
A couple of months on, the Leprechauns’ behaviour had started to get more than annoying, and Van Heatsink had been sent a message saying his services were required to, “get rid of the little buggers,” just as the services of his ancestors were frequently called upon to deal with hauntings and supernatural infestations.
“I can’t turn the gig down,” Van Heatsink announced as he folded the illuminated, hand-made summons up and slid it into his knapsack, “it’s the family honour at stake, you see, plus for centuries we’ve been paid a retainer to to be available at a moment’s notice.”
“But…” I started to ask, but he cut me dead and wandered off on his own tangent before I could finish.
“Orson. I’ll catch up with you at The Blue Sack, if the weather holds.”
“When?” I asked, forgetting that I didn’t know where the Blue Sack might be, or even what it was, though it sounded like an inn or tavern.
“Oh, I think that’ll be in 1732, or if you’re running late, it might be around 1720 or so.”
With that he climbed into the waiting sedan chair and was carried away by two pigtailed Chinamen wearing black pyjamas and hats like cymbals.
I was so dumbfounded I never even finished my next question which started, “Seventeen hundred and twenty? But it’s already nineteen…”
He was gone.
I didn’t see how he could meet me again over two hundred years before he left. I supposed that gave me plenty of time to think it over, though. Meanwhile, I had no idea how the messengers had found him, where we were or what had happened to the money that had come our way since I’d met him.,
I was left standing, lost and bemused, at the side of the road in a country I couldn’t even pronounce.
It was nineteen hundred and… wasn’t it?