Everything Under the Sky (42 page)

No! Of course not! Nothing at all! Just a fall of I don't know how many hundreds of feet, but I had taken the first steps and had to keep going. It was best to carry on and not think about it. Hadn't I heard that bravery didn't mean you weren't scared, just that you faced and overcame your fear? I was brave. Yes, very brave. My legs might be shaking, but the very fact that I was even crossing that bridge proved it.

“Well done, Elvira!” Lao Jiang congratulated me as he reached out to help me with the last step. I was still dazed when I finally set foot on the pillar. Had I reached the end? Really? Was I on the pillar? Had I made it all the way across?

“Just look at the view from here,” he said, reaching an arm down. “No thank you. I'd rather not look if you don't mind.”

He smiled. “Let's get on with the next,” he said. “You go first, and I'll keep an eye on you.”

Oh, no! Not again!

I took a deep breath and moved unsteadily toward the second walkway that continued straight ahead. It was crazy: There was absolutely no way to know which one led to the exit. A cold sweat broke out all over my body once more. No, you never get used to fear, and it never disappears; you just learn to live with it and not let it get the better of you.

So as not to offend the beaming Master Red, I resisted the impulse to hug him as soon as we reached the pillar he was on. I was very happy I'd lived to see him again.

“Do you know how to get out of here?” Lao Jiang asked with barely disguised impatience.

“Of course,” the monk replied, holding up his
luo p'an
proudly. “We follow the path of energy along the Nine Stars of Later Heaven.”

“Incredible!” Lao Jiang blurted out. “Yes, incredible,” I agreed quietly.

“You have no idea what we're talking about, do you, Elvira?”

“No, Lao Jiang, and I'm not sure I want to.”

The antiquarian smiled, then laughed. “Remember Yu, the first emperor of the Xia dynasty, whose dance we followed on the first level?”

“Of course.”

“Well, it was Yu who discovered the drawing of the Nine Stars of Later Heaven on the shell of a giant tortoise that emerged from the sea when he stopped the floods and saved the earth.”

“No, hold on, that wasn't what happened. Master Tzau told me that some old kings named Fu Hsi and Yu had discovered signs consisting of solid and broken lines that then made up the hexagrams of the
I Ching.
King Fu Hsi discovered some on the back of a horse that rose up out of a river, and King Yu or Emperor Yu of the Xia dynasty discovered a few more on the shell of the tortoise that emerged from the sea. Later some king from a subsequent dynasty combined them to compose the sixty-four hexagrams of the
I Ching.
Master Tzau hadn't mentioned anything about any kind of star or heaven, much less ‘later heaven.’ ”

Master Red looked at me admiringly. “Not many women know so much about these matters.”

I refused to accept his apparent compliment. If not many women did, it was because no one encouraged or allowed them to study things that were considered exclusive to men. It was sad that I, a foreigner, could know more than 200 million Chinese women about their own culture. “You see, madame, when Emperor Yu, under orders from the celestial spirits he visited in heaven thanks to the Steps of Yu, managed to finally save the world from the floods, he saw a giant tortoise come out of the sea with strange signs on its shell. These signs weren't the yin and yang lines of the hexagrams, however. Let's just say that Master Tzau told you a simplified version of the story so you would get the basic idea. Emperor Yu saw the Pa-k'ua of Later Heaven.
Pa-k'ua
literally means ‘Eight Signs,’ and ‘Later Heaven’ refers to the sky after the change, the universe in constant motion and not static like Early Heaven. But I don't want to confuse you. Suffice it to say that those Eight Signs represented a pattern of the variations in the flow of energy in the universe. They gave rise to the eight trigrams that were the basis for the sixty-four hexagrams of the
I Ching,
as well as the eight directions they pointed, the eight cardinal points (south, westsouth, west, westnorth, north, eastnorth, east, and eastsouth) plus the center. These, then, are the Nine Stars, the name they've been known by in feng shui for thousands of years. Thanks to the Nine Stars and the
luo p'an,
the compass, we can understand how chi energy circulates in a given place, whether a building, a tomb, or any other space.”

Well, I didn't understand it all, but the basic idea was clear: The Nine Stars were the eight cardinal points plus the center, the nine spatial directions.

“You see this labyrinth of iron walkways?” he asked, glancing around. “Well, if I'm not mistaken, this labyrinth hides the path of chi energy through the Nine Stars of Later Heaven.”

“It's so complicated!” I burst out after taking a quick look at the tangle of bridges filling that enormous space.

“No, madame, it's really not. As I told you, the labyrinth hides a pattern. The sheer number prevents you from seeing the simplicity of the route.”

“Pass me your sketchbook and pencils, Elvira,” Lao Jiang said.

I shook my head sadly. “I don't have them. I left them with the children so they'd have something to keep themselves busy.”

“Well then, imagine a grid that's three by three, a square with nine boxes. All right?”

“All right.”

“The eight boxes around the outside are the eight directions. The middle box in the top row represents the south; to its right, going clockwise, the box is southwest; beneath it the box is west; and so on until you're back at the top. Do you see?”

“Yes, that's easy. I'm picturing tic-tac-toe.”

“What?”

“It doesn't matter. Go on.”

“Well, chi energy would always circulate through these boxes following the same route. Once we find south, we can follow that route. What Master Red Jade was trying to say is that the path chi energy follows is here, laid out using some of these bridges.”

“Do you remember that there are nine square columns?” Master Red asked me. “Well, those are the nine boxes Da Teh was talking about. Each one of these columns is a box, and only one of the bridges that connect them is correct. The First Emperor's master geomancers simply copied the outline of the Nine Stars. As you can see, it couldn't be simpler.”

I was dying to make a sarcastic comment but refrained.

“In fact,” Lao Jiang explained, “right now we're in the center box of the Nine Stars grid. The previous platform, the one we just came from, would be north.”

“And that's also where the energy begins; though don't ask me why, because it's too complicated to explain in just a few minutes.”

“Don't worry, Master Red Jade, I assure you I wasn't going to ask. The question is, where should we go now?”

“Well …” he faltered. “We should actually go back. The chi energy starts in the north and goes directly to the westsouth, but we can't get to the westsouth from here.”

“On that bridge?” I said, staring horrified at a walkway that went clear from the first pillar we came in on to the one in front of us and then to the right. It was as long as two bridges plus a pedestal, only without the pedestal in the middle.

Crossing was going to be the death of me, not because I'd fall into the void (which could happen), but out of sheer nervous strain.

We went back to the pillar in front of the tunnel where the children were waiting. I waved, but only Biao waved back. After all those centuries without use, the iron chains had withstood the weight of one person, then two, and finally three at the same time without a problem. Would that blasted two-hundred-foot bridge stand up as well? It was best to not think about it. One thing was clear: If I had to die, I'd die. It was too late to go back now.

Placing one foot in front of the other, we moved toward the southwest. Master Red Jade went first, then I, and Lao Jiang brought up the rear. The scene was worth painting: two Chinese men and one European woman walking along an iron suspension bridge by the light of whale-oil lanterns, hundreds of feet underground and hundreds more above the floor. It would have been funny if it hadn't been so frightening. I did have to laugh when I thought of the treasures Lao Jiang wanted to take out of there. Perhaps others could after we'd paved the way, but none of us was taking anything other than what we could carry in our pockets. Thankfully, Chinese clothing had a lot of very big pockets.

We reached the southwest pillar and from there went toward the one in the east, passing right next to the central pillar we'd already been on. Two bridges that started and stopped on other pillars we had yet to reach crossed above and below us.

From the east to the southeast in a straight line and from there back to the center, which we were already familiar with, and from the center to the pillar in the westnorth, as they call it. I didn't understand why we had to go back through the center if we'd already been there. Wouldn't it have been simpler (and safer) to go directly to the northwest without doing the whole route from the beginning, backtrack included?

“I had to confirm the flow of energy through the Nine Stars of Later Heaven, madame,” Master Red justified, making a strange face when I asked him.

“Oh, come now, Master Red Jade!” I protested. “All you had to do was take a look at the bridges. However complex the labyrinth might be, it was ridiculous to go back to the beginning in order to end up in the center again. Do you know how many of these walkways we could have saved ourselves?”

“Leave it be, Elvira,” Lao Jiang ordered. “Leave it be?” I raged.

“You don't understand the way we think. You're a foreigner. We believe that things must be done well, fully, so their end will be as good as their beginning, so everything is in harmony.”

Harmony? That did it. We had unnecessarily risked our lives on superfluous walkways for universal harmony?

“As Sun-tzu says, Elvira, ‘The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand.’ One small error could lead to enormous failure, so why not follow the proper route if all it takes is a little extra effort?”

I wasn't going to reply to that.

“I had to confirm the
luo p'an
calculations, madame. I had to make certain my theory was correct before we got lost on the bridges and couldn't find our way out.”

Next we went from the northwest to the west and from the west to the eastnorth (or northeast). Finally, from the northeast we walked along another of those two-hundred-foot walkways to the south, on a lower level. This bridge suddenly descended to the top of a pillar some sixty-five feet below. I had memorized the sequence of directions we'd taken, because I didn't know how else to mark the way out. All I was left with was my memory in case anything happened. I used the popular song “Por Ser la Virgen de la Paloma” to hum “north-southwest-eastsoutheast-center-northwest-west-northeast-south” over and over again. That line in the second verse about the “shawl from China” must have had something to do with my musical choice.

“Well,” Master Red said, “I think it's time to follow the energy descending through the Nine Stars.”

So much for my memory trick, and it was sounding so good. “And until now it has been ascending?”

“En effet,
madame.”

All right, then. Once again we found ourselves walking along a very long bridge that went back toward the northeast. And from the northeast to the west, and … wait a minute. The sequence was the same but in reverse. Descending meant the energy traveled in the opposite direction, but since I wasn't interested in further explanations regarding why chi energy would suddenly decide to turn and go back through the starry universe, I didn't comment and simply played dumb, following Master Red as if nothing else were on my mind. Unfortunately, the music of
Por ser la Virgen de la Paloma
no longer worked. It didn't really matter, though, because all I had to remember was that the proper direction on the second level was the inverse of my musical sequence. After that, everything went as smooth as silk: I got the knack of those fussy little steps we were forced to take on the chains, and that feeling of security allowed us to move more quickly. Further, the energy lines were always the same, ascending on uneven levels and descending on even ones. The only thing that didn't repeat was that first bridge on the first level between north and center, placed there in order to confuse. It was indeed all very carefully thought out, and once I understood the general outline in plain language, I felt I could go back up to where Fernanda and Biao were waiting without getting lost. We finally reached the ground after descending eight levels, and I did a little happy dance in my hardy Chinese boots, thrilled to no longer be hanging in the air, walking like a trapeze artist. Lao Jiang and Master Red looked at me somewhat disconcertedly, but I didn't pay them any mind. We'd descended from a dizzying height, surely over five hundred feet, arriving safe and sound thanks to our prudence and, above all, thanks to those solid iron bridges it seemed the millennia hadn't touched. I thanked Sai Wu from the bottom of my heart for his good work.

Everything looked different from down here. I tilted my head as far back as I could, cupped my hands around my mouth, and called the children by name. I couldn't see them through that mesh of iron but heard them shout something indecipherable back. The important thing was that they were fine and had stayed put. I hadn't been so sure they would, knowing the sorts of tricks they'd gotten up to on our journey thus far. Now I could turn my attention to these mysterious Bian Zhong on the fourth level.

“Lao Jiang, why don't you tell Master Red Jade what Sai Wu said in the
jiance
about the Bian Zhong?”

“Master, do you know what Bian Zhong are?” the antiquarian asked. “Sai Wu told his son that there was a chamber with Bian Zhong on the fourth level and that they had something to do with the Five Elements.”

“Bian Zhong are bells, Da Teh.”