Everything Under the Sky (18 page)

I had no idea what this Wei-ch'i they were talking about was. I thought the floor looked more like a huge game of checkers or chess with its black and white squares (although there were many other colors of brick there as well). It was unlike any sort of board game I'd ever seen. To begin with, there were many more squares than necessary, in the neighborhood of two or three hundred. What I didn't know was that the white and black ones weren't squares but the game pieces themselves.

“Don't you know what Wei-ch'i is, Young Mistress?” I clearly heard Biao whisper to my niece not far away. “Really?” The boy sounded so incredulous I was about to turn and remind him that my niece and I were from the other side of the world, but Paddy Tichborne had heard him, too.

“Outside China,” the Irishman began, trying to escape the antiquarian's cold stare, “Wei-ch'i is known as Go. The Japanese call it Igo, and they were the ones who exported it to the West, not the Chinese.”

“But it's a Chinese game,” Lao Jiang qualified, turning back to look at the floor.

“Yes, it's a truly Chinese game. According to legend, it was invented by Emperor Yao, who ruled around the year 2300 b.c.”

“Everything in this country is over four thousand years old,” I said. “In reality, madame, it may be much older, but written records only begin at about that time.”

“In any event, I've never heard of Go either,” I added.

“Do you know the rules, Biao?” the antiquarian asked.

“Yes, Lao Jiang.”

“Then explain them to Mme De Poulain, so she doesn't get bored while Paddy and I study this game. And bring more light, please.”

We lit a few more candles, and Lao Jiang had us set them on the bricks that were not black or white. By the looks of it, those two were the only ones that counted.

“All right, then, mistress,” Little Tiger began, nervous at being given such an important task. Fernanda stood by my side and was listening, too. “Imagine that the board is a battlefield. The winner is the one who has taken the most territory at the end. One player uses white stones, and the other uses black stones. Each one takes a turn and puts a stone on one of the three hundred and sixty-one points where the nineteen vertical and nineteen horizontal lines intersect. That's how they mark out their territory.”

That's why I saw so many squares! Three hundred sixty-one no less! You'd have to invent eleven new chess pieces to play on a board like that.

“And how many pieces does each player have?” Fernanda asked.

“White has one hundred eighty. Black, which always begins the game, has one hundred eighty-one,” he said. “Now, Wei-ch'i doesn't have many rules. It's easy to learn and a lot of fun. All you have to do is gain territory. The way you take it from your opponent is by getting his stones off the board, surrounding them with your stones. Of course, that's the hard part”—he grinned—”because your enemy tries to stop you. But once a stone or a group of stones has been surrounded, it's dead and taken off the board.”

“And since that space is surrounded,” my intelligent niece commented pensively, “it doesn't make sense for the loser to put pieces back inside.”

“Exactly. That territory belongs to the player who surrounded it. That's where the name Wei-ch'i comes from.
Wei,
as Lao Jiang said, means ‘surround’ or ‘encircle.’ ”

“And
ch'i
?” I wanted to know.

“Ch'i
is any kind of game, mistress. Wei-ch'i, pronounced like that, the way I just said it, means ‘Surrounding Game.’ ”

A short distance away, Mr. Jiang and Paddy were having a much less amicable conversation.

“But what if it's black's turn?” Paddy asked angrily, his cheeks and ears as red as if they were on fire.

“It can't be. The legend says it's white's turn.”

“What legend?” I asked, raising my voice so they'd hear.

“Ah, madame!” Tichborne replied, turning toward me with great affectation. “This damn shopkeeper swears that the game at our feet is an old Wei-ch'i problem known as ‘The Legend of Lanke Mountain.’ But how can he be sure? There are two hundred eighty-two pieces on the board! Could someone really remember the exact position of each one? And even if that were the case, whose turn is next—black or white? That could completely change the outcome of the game.”

“Sometimes, Paddy,” Lao Jiang said, coldly emphasizing each syllable, “you're like a monkey that shrieks when it's been bitten by a flea and doesn't know enough to scratch. Keep banging your head against the bars to see if that gets rid of your itch. Listen, madame, one of the most famous Wei-ch'i legends, one every good player knows,
²²
tells of a great mountain located in the province of Chekiang—note that here we find another clue with respect to the artisan Wei and the Prince of Gui's message. As I was saying, on this mountain in Chekiang, around 500 b.c., there lived a young woodcutter named Wang Zhi. One day he walked higher than usual looking for wood and came upon a couple of old men playing Wei-ch'i. Since he was a great enthusiast, he placed his ax on the ground and sat down to watch them. It was a very interesting match, and time flew by, but just before the game was about to end, one of the old men turned to him and said, ‘Why don't you go home? Or are you going to stay here forever?’ Wang Zhi was embarrassed and stood up to leave, but when he reached for his ax, he was surprised to see the wooden handle fall apart in his hands. When he got back to his village, no one recognized him and he didn't recognize anyone either. His family had disappeared, and his house was a pile of rubble. Astonished, he came to realize that over a hundred years had passed since he left to look for wood and that those old men must have been two of the immortals who secretly live in the mountains of China. Wang Zhi retained the entire game in his mind. Like the good player he was, he could remember each and every one of the moves. Unfortunately, he hadn't seen the end, so he didn't know who won, but he did know it was the white's turn to move next. This is known as ‘The Legend of Lanke Mountain,’ because
lanke
means ‘rotten handle,’ just like the handle on Wang Zhi's ax. The layout of the game has been reproduced in various old collections of Wei-ch'i games and is exactly the one represented by the bricks here.”

“And no one has been able to solve the problem in the last twenty-five hundred years?” Fernanda asked innocently.

“Exactly!” Paddy burst out with a laugh. “Besides, Lao Jiang, how many times have you seen the famous Lanke diagram
²³
to know for sure this is it?”

Mr. Jiang placed one knee on the ground and leaned over a group of black bricks. “Not often, that's true,” he admitted without moving. “Once or twice at most. But just as I know the legend, I know that Lanke Mountain from the story is located in what is now Quzhou, formerly Xin'an, province of Chekiang. I suspect that a Ming hiding place was built right here under our feet when the Jubao walls and gates were built. Every member of the Ming family must have known about it and used it as needed. When the Prince of Gui gave the second piece of the
jiance
to his friend Yao the physician, the fact that he had the same name as the emperor who invented Wei-ch'i must have reminded the prince that this place existed. That's why he sent Yao here. He probably told him which bricks to move, even though that isn't in the document we found in the hundred-treasure chest.”

“So what do we do now?” I asked.

“We think, madame,” Paddy replied. “This game can be devilishly subtle, just like the Chinese themselves.”

“But, Mr. Tichborne,” Biao protested in a voice that suddenly became serious, “it's not difficult at all.”

As the boy cleared his throat, Lao Jiang crossed the distance between them in an instant and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck— though he had to lift his arm to do so, because Biao and he were the same height.

“Show us,” he demanded, pushing the boy into the middle of the room. Little Tiger seemed like more of a cub than ever, poor thing.

“I'm sorry, Lao Jiang. I don't know what I was saying,” he squealed, intimidated, and began to beg and plead in Chinese. Though we couldn't understand a word, we knew exactly what he was saying.

“Don't speak unless you're capable of following through,” the antiquarian chastised, letting him go.

Biao fell and mumbled something inaudible.

“What? What did you say?”

“If it's white's turn to play …” the boy said in a wisp of a voice. “I … I don't know who's going to win, but white's next move has to be to eliminate the two black stones in
jiao chi
between the southwest corner and the south side.”

“Jiao chi?”
Fernanda repeated. The girl's Chinese accent wasn't all that bad.

“In
atari,
²⁴
in check …” Paddy Tichborne tried unsuccessfully to explain. “When the next move threatens to capture stones that are surrounded everywhere but the spot that's about to be taken—”

“Enough, Paddy!” Lao Jiang exclaimed. “We can't waste any more time. Biao's right. Look.”

Paddy politely ignored the antiquarian.

“What I mean is, the stones that are about to be surrounded are in
jiao chi;
that is, they're about to die. That doesn't mean the end of the game, of course. It's just that those stones are definitely going to be taken off the board.”

“And as Biao said,” Mr. Jiang concluded, kneeling next to the southern wall of the tunnel, just in front of the stairs we'd come down, “these two black stones are in fact in
jiao chi,
so I'm going to take them out of the game this instant.”

“How are you going to get them out?” I asked in surprise. “Those stones … I mean, those bricks have been there for six hundred years.”

“No, madame,” the antiquarian reminded me. “Physician Yao was here in 1662 or 1663 by order of the last Ming emperor. If we're right, they were taken out and put back just two hundred sixty years ago.”

“Besides,” Paddy interjected condescendingly, “for thousands of years the Chinese have made their mortar out of a mixture of rice, sorghum, lime, and oil. It won't be hard to remove.”

“Their buildings have certainly stood up well over the centuries!” Fernanda commented with an ironic smile. Was it my impression, or had the girl lost weight? I shook my head to erase the optical illusion: Chinese clothing could be very deceiving.

By then Lao Jiang was using the handle of his steel fan to scrape around the bricks. The resulting dust formed a gray cloud lit by a ray of midday sun coming obliquely down the gloomy stairwell. We all watched in silence, eager to see what would happen next.

The bricks came loose without his having to dig very much at all. The two were actually one long piece, joined on their shortest sides and set over a worm-eaten wooden board that was also easy to remove. When it was gone, and even though we were blocking the light as all of us tried to see at once, we discovered a sort of
bishachu
like the one in Rémy's office. It was very deep, and the sides cut into the granite were perfectly smooth. Paddy brought a candle closer, and way at the bottom we saw an old bronze box covered in green rust, exactly like the one we took out of Yuyuan Lake in Shanghai. There was also a metal cylinder with pale gold decorations. According to Lao Jiang, this was a Ming document case that would be worth a fortune on the antiquities market. He took the case out first, but apart from its being truly beautiful, there was absolutely nothing inside. Not so with the bronze box. There was the second piece of our
jiance,
with its old green threads and six bamboo slats. I couldn't see very well, but it didn't look like there were written characters on it, just seemingly meaningless drops of ink. Lao Jiang, however, let out a happy whoop.

“It's the missing piece of the map!”

“We'd better go,” Paddy commented, standing up with a groan. “There's not enough light in here. Oh, my knees!”

“Let's put everything back in its place,” the antiquarian said. “First the wood and then the bricks. We'll put what's left of the mortar back along the joints. It won't be perfect, but with the humidity it'll hardly be noticeable in a few days.”

“Come on, let's get out of here,” the journalist insisted. “I'm starving.”

Suddenly the light coming down through the stairwell disappeared. Unconsciously, we all turned to look, but the light from the candles didn't reach that far; that area was completely in shadow. Lao Jiang passed the bronze box to Paddy.

“Get back,” he whispered. “Move over into that corner.”

“The Green Gang?” I stammered, obeying his order.

The antiquarian didn't have time to answer. Less than a second later, ten or fifteen thugs with knives and guns had slipped into the tunnel and were threatening us, shouting hysterically and gesturing aggressively. A terrible thought crossed my mind: There were too many of them. This time Lao Jiang wouldn't be able to handle them alone. A single gunshot could finish off any of us in an instant. We were easy prey. The ringleader was screaming more than anyone else. He walked quickly over to Lao Jiang and seemed to be demanding the box. The antiquarian remained calm and spoke without getting upset. The others pointed their guns at us. I could feel my niece sidling up to me. I lifted my arm very slowly, so as not to provoke anyone, and wrapped it around her shoulders. Lao Jiang and the Chinese thug continued conversing, one speaking quietly and the other shouting. On my left I could feel Biao also moving closer in search of protection, so I put my left arm around him and pulled the two of them close to calm them down. The strangest thing of all was that I wasn't scared. I really wasn't afraid. Instead of gasping for air and having heart palpitations, I had a clear mind, and the only thing worrying me was that something could happen to Fernanda or Biao. I felt them shaking, but I was strong, and it felt wonderful. Hadn't the very idea of death terrified me for years? Now that it was staring me right in the face, how was it that I couldn't have cared less? As the antiquarian and the assassin continued talking, I realized how much of my life I had wasted worrying about this moment, when in reality it made me feel more alive than ever, stronger and more secure than I'd felt in ages. If only I could have gone back in time and told myself how silly my anxiety was! Distracted by such happy thoughts, I hadn't realized that Mr. Jiang was speaking to us.