Bridge Of Birds (29 page)

I am not usually so intelligent, but the answer popped unbidden into my mind.

“Seven times seven,” I said. “Jade Pearl could escape if she reached the Star Shepherd
before the seventh day of the seventh moon. But, Master Li, why couldn't there be ten or
twenty other interpretations of the Hopping Hide and Seek Game?”

“Ginseng,” he said promptly. “The moment that the children of your village took the
tiniest taste of the Great Root their racial memory was stirred, and instinctively they
began to play their ginseng game. A slightly stronger taste dredged up a deeper racial
memory, and an understanding that had eluded the conscious minds of the children who had
first experienced it. The moment that they began to chant a nonsense rhyme, they were able
to find the Princess of Birds. Ox, that was no accident when Monkey reached out and
touched Fang's Fawn.”

Li Kao began a slow rhythmic beat upon the rim of his rice bowl with his chopsticks.

“The ghost of poor Wan must have been very lonely,” he said. "Ghosts also share racial
memories, and when he saw the children play the Hopping Hide and Seek Game he realized
that the question that the game asks is, 'Where is the Princess of Birds? Where has the
lame peddler taken her?' Wan knew the answer. He wanted to join the game, but he was
determined to play fair - how many times had he listened to the riddle games of children?
- and his impromptu effort was so good that I strongly suspect that he had been far more
than a simple soldier.

"Jade plate,

Six, eight.

Fire that burns hot,

Night that is not.

Fire that burns cold,

First silver, then gold."

Master Li tossed the chopsticks into the bowl and winked at me.

“Ever since the standard was set by Yang Wan-li, what has been the common metaphor for the
moon?”

“A plate of jade,” I said. “Sailing across ten thousand miles of blue-black sky.”

“In relation to the moon, what can you make of 'six, eight'?”

“The sixth day of the eighth moon?” I guessed.

“Try it the other way around.”

“The eighth day, the sixth moon - why, that is today!” I exclaimed.

“It is indeed. We've begun with the moon, so what about the fire that burns hot?”

“The sun?” I said.

“And the night that is not?”

I scratched my head. “An eclipse?”

“It could be, but I don't recall any eclipse of the sun on the eighth day of the sixth
moon. Try something simpler.”

“Sunset,” I said. “The sun has gone, but the light remains.”

“Excellent,” said Master Li. “So in their game the children were asking, 'Where is the
Princess of Birds?' and Wan told them that if they looked from his watchtower when the sun
sank below the horizon on the eighth day of the sixth moon, they would see where the lame
peddler had taken Jade Pearl. Specifically, they would see something that looked like cold
fire, and that first burned silver and then burned gold. In a few minutes,” said Master
Li, “that is precisely what we are going to look for.”

I felt myself flush, and I said, almost angrily:

“Master Li, we are trying to find the Great Root of Power for the children of Ku-fu! We
are not trying to find a little goddess for the Emperor of Heaven!”

“Dear boy, don't you think the emperor realizes that? Be patient for a few minutes more,”
Master Li said soothingly.

The sun slowly sank behind distant mountain peaks, and the clouds began to glow with the
colors of sunset. I saw nothing like cold fire. The light began to fade, and I could see
faint stars, and still I saw nothing. It was almost dark, and to tell the truth, I had no
faith at all in Master Li's analysis of the nonsense rhyme.

Suddenly the concealed sun sank to an invisible gap in the western mountain range. A
brilliant shaft of light shot like an arrow across the valley to the eastern mountains. At
no other time in no other day of the year would the angle have been perfect, but now a
small circular spot that was concealed among peaks began to glow like cold fire. It
shimmered like silver, and then it faded to dull gold, and then it vanished.

Master Li motioned for me to get down on my knees and clasp my hands together.

“Well done, Wan!” he cried. “You have fulfilled the mission for which you were chosen by
the Emperor of Heaven, and surely your spirit will be allowed to ascend to the stars.
There you will find many children who will ask you to join their games, and the goddess Nu
Kua will be delighted to have such a sentinel to help her guard the Celestial Walls.”

We performed the three obeisances and the nine kowtows, and then we got to our feet. Li
Kao grinned at me.

“Ox, what do you think that we're being sent to find?”

I stared at him. “Isn't that the place where the peddler took the Princess of Birds?” I
asked.

“He undoubtedly took her there, perhaps to find the city where her godmother lived, but it
would be quite useless for us to search for Jade Pearl,” Master Li said patiently. “If the
Duke of Ch'in had a brain in his head, he would also take her to the Old Man of the
Mountain. She couldn't be killed, but she could be transformed, and the Princess of Birds
might now be a raindrop hidden in a thunderstorm, or a petal in a field of flowers, or one
special grain of sand among a billion on a beach. No, you and I and the August Personage
of Jade are engaged in mutual back-scratching because there is one thing upon the face of
the earth that we can use to force the duke to hand over the Great Root of Power, and it
can also force him to hand over Jade Pearl: I will bet anything you like that the Emperor
of Heaven will see to it that we can't get one without the other.”

He stretched and yawned and scratched his scraggly beard.

“Let's get some sleep. In the morning we'll go after the sick slimy heart of the Duke of
Ch'in,” said Master Li.

We left at dawn, and by the fourth day we reached the foothills. When we began to climb
the mountains we left summer behind, and the green trees and fragrant flowers and rippling
streams were replaced by the most depressing landscape that I had ever seen.

A strange chill gripped that mountainside. It was dead and stale, as though a monstrous
iceberg had been scooped up and deposited upon a peak, where it had lain lifeless and
unmelting for a thousand years. Sometimes we went for an hour without seeing a squirrel or
hearing the song of a bird, and on the third day of the climb all signs of life vanished.
We looked in vain for so much as an ant on the ground or an eagle in the sky.

We had been hearing the faint sound of falling water, and finally we reached the source. A
meagre waterfall was trickling down the side of a chaotic cliff, and when we climbed to
the top we saw that the cliff was part of a gigantic rock-slide that had blocked the
narrow mouth of a valley many centuries ago. In the distance we could see another
waterfall trickling down a higher cliff, and the entire valley in between had become a
vast lake. It was the coldest, grayest, most unappetizing body of water that I had ever
seen, and I knew in my bones that it was evil. Li Kao sat down and made some rapid
calculations.

“Ox, this lake is the right size, the right shape, and at the correct angle,” he said.
“This is what we saw that first burned silver and then burned gold, and it very much looks
as though we'll have to find out what's on the bottom of it.”

It turned out to be more difficult than he expected. We made a raft and paddled to the
center of the lake, but when we tried to reach bottom with a stone tied to a rope of vines
we went down two hundred feet without touching anything. For practical purposes the lake
had no bottom at all, and Master Li turned bright red while he scorched the air with the
Sixty Sequential Sacrileges with which he had won the all-China Freestyle Blasphemy
Competition in Hangchow three years in a row. Finally he decided to climb the cliff at the
other end of the lake and look at the problem from a different perspective.

It was a hard climb and very dangerous. The cliff was mostly shale that was held together
by clay, and when we reached the top we found that the ground was soft and porous except
for the path where the stream ran along a bed of solid rock. Master Li teetered at the
cliffs edge and gazed down nearly five hundred feet to the gold-gray lake glinting dully
in the sunlight.

“Why, it's a matter of elementary hydraulic engineering!” he exclaimed. “We can't reach
bottom, so we'll bring the bottom up to us. The first order of business is to get hold of
a lot of strong backs.”

We had to go a long way down the other side of the mountain before we reached a village,
and the villagers wanted no part of a job that required getting close to that lake. They
called it the Lake of the Dead, and swore that not even fish could live in the water.

“Once a year, at midnight on the fifth day of the fifth moon, a ghostly caravan approaches
the Lake of the Dead,” an old woman said in a quavering whisper. “Once in my grandmother's
time some foolish men crept out to spy upon that evil procession, and they were found with
their bellies slit open and their guts ripped out! Since then we lock the doors in our
village and hide beneath the beds on the fifth day of the fifth moon.”

Master Li glanced at me, and I knew what he was thinking. That should be the time when the
Duke of Ch'in completed the final leg of his tax trip and started home again, and his
route should pass the cold mountain and the Lake of the Dead.

It wasn't easy to persuade them, but we could offer more money than they could hope to
earn in twenty lifetimes, and at last the men gathered picks and shovels and fearfully
followed us back to the cliff. They worked like demons in order to get out of there as
fast as possible. We began by digging a trench from the bank of the stream to a deep
ravine, and then we ran connecting trenches to other ravines until we had a ditch that ran
from one end of the cliff to the other. We felled trees and made a dam. It wasn't easy to
persuade the stream to move to a new home, but eventually the water roared angrily from
its bed of rock and began snarling through the porous earth at the bottoms of the ravines.
We gave the men bonuses, but they barely paused to thank us before taking to their heels.

Master Li and I moved to the other side of the lake and pitched a tent. We had no idea how
long it would take, and we passed the time by making divers' equipment: air tanks from the
bladders of wild pigs, and breathing tubes from the intestines. We fashioned bamboo
spears, and made loops in our belts for the rocks that would give us extra weight. It
happened far faster than either of us thought possible.

I was looking out across the smooth cold surface of the lake toward the cliff that was
shimmering in the moonlight, and Li Kao was at a table writing down songs in the light of
a lantern. Suddenly the lantern began to move. We stared in astonishment as it slid all
the way down the table and crashed to the earthen floor, and then the floor started to
buck beneath us like a wild horse. We ran from the tent and gazed at the cliff, and there
was a rumbling, grinding sort of sound, and the cliff moved in the moonlight. Not even
Master Li had expected something so spectacular, but the stream had tunneled so deeply
into the spongy earth that almost half of the mountain leaned out, hovered in the air, and
then plunged five hundred feet straight down into the Lake of the Dead.

We grabbed a tree and hung on for dear life. I saw a huge mass of water, silver in the
moonlight, rise into the air like a cloud. The monstrous wave appeared to move very slowly
toward the dam, and we felt a blast of icy wind, and then the wave plunged over the dam
and smashed into the valley below. We saw a forest turned instantly to pulp, and we saw
enormous boulders picked up and hurled through the air like grains of sand. The mountain
beneath us shuddered, and huge rocks ground together and screamed deep in the bowels of
the earth, and an icy mist closed around us. The tree that we were clinging to jerked and
pitched and strained at its roots, and it seemed forever until the earth stopped bucking
and the roar of water faded away.

The mist gradually dissolved, and we stared at an incredible sight. A forest of domes and
spires and towers had lifted through the shallow water that remained, and my brain finally
accepted the fact that the Lake of the Dead had been covering an entire city! Li Kao
whooped with delight and grabbed my waist and began dancing around in a circle.

“What a lovely place to hide a heart!” he yelled. “Absolutely lovely!”

I danced with Master Li, but I could not agree that the place was lovely. The ghostly
spires were reaching up to claw at the moon like the fingers of drowning men, and the
water dripped from the turrets like tears.

The night passed, and the bright sun of morning that shone upon our little raft could warm
us, but nothing could warm the water of the Lake of the Dead. I checked my pig bladders
and breathing tubes, and the rocks in my belt and my spear.

“Ready?” asked Master Li.

“Ready,” I said. I put the breathing tube from the first bladder in my mouth, held my
nose, and jumped.

The water was very cold, but my body was covered with pig grease and it was bearable until
I encountered a strange icy current that nearly sent me back to the surface - I could see
the tips of my fingers turn blue - but it was a very narrow current and I soon left it
behind. I was sinking faster than seemed safe, so I jettisoned rocks until I was drifting
down easily. A rope of vines led up from my belt, and Li Kao counted the knots as they
slid through his fingers, and when my feet touched bottom, I had gone down thirty feet.

I expected total darkness, but phosphorescent rocks produced an eerie greenish glow that
enabled me to see quite easily, and I walked down one of the streets of the drowned city,
waving my arms like a swimmer to battle the weight of the water. The air from the pig
bladder tasted terrible, but the breathing tube worked and I had two more bladders tied to
my belt. I came to a house and cautiously peered through the door, and it took quite some
time for me to realize that what I was seeing was impossible.