out what those children were doing in there.”
“They were playing the Hopping Hide and Seek Game,” I said.
“The what?”
“The Hopping Hide and Seek Game,” said the abbot.
The monastery supported itself by manufacturing a very good brand of wine, although the abbot and the bonzes were forbidden to touch it themselves, and he poured cups for Li Kao and me.
“It's a sex and courtship game, and it's been played by the children of Ku-fu for as long as anyone can remember,” the abbot explained. “The object is to get possession of the girls’ red hair ribbons. A large circle is drawn upon the ground, or perhaps natural barriers are used. The boys try to snatch the ribbons from the girls, but they must hop on one leg, which is what they were doing when their shoulders shook up and down. The girls try to trip the boys with the ribbons, thus the swooping pulling gestures. A boy who is tripped becomes the girl's prisoner and drops out of the game, and a girl who loses her red ribbon becomes the boy's prisoner and drops out of the game.”
Li Kao was far more interested than I would have expected. “Considering the boys’ one-legged handicap, the girls should win easily,” he said.
“They should, except that they instinctively know that the best way to begin a long campaign in the battle of the sexes is to surrender, and the real point of the game is that there is a great deal of giggling and grappling and feeling of bodies,” the abbot said drily. “Thus its longevity. Eventually only one girl will be left, and when she is captured she becomes the queen, and the boy who gets her ribbon becomes the king. In this case it was Fang's Fawn and Little Hong. The other children put on blindfolds. The king hides the queen somewhere inside the circle, and the others must try to find her by touch. This leads to more giggling and grappling and feeling of bodies, but there is a time limit. When Little Hong moved his lips, he was slowly counting to forty-nine.”
“Is the count ever changed?” Master Li asked.
“No, sir,” I said.
“Do they have formal titles, such as King of X and Queen of Y?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“The peculiar thing,” said the abbot, “was that suddenly they broke off and listened, and then they repeated that ancient nonsense rhyme that is said to have come from Dragon's Pillow. That is not part of the Hopping Hide and Seek Game.”
Li Kao helped himself to more wine, and then he walked to the window and gazed out at the strange stretch of wall where the ghost of Wan was said to keep watch.
“Yet when they repeated that rhyme, they were able to find the queen,” he said thoughtfully.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Monkey touched Fawn before the count reached forty-nine, and she smiled because she had won the game.”
Li Kao swallowed his wine at a gulp and turned back to the room.
“Those children were completely unconscious. Then they had one tiny taste of the Great Root, and how did they react? Every single one of them instantly started playing the Hopping Hide and Seek Game, and every single one of them recited a nonsense rhyme that children from this village had first heard many centuries ago at Dragon's Pillow. I am beginning to suspect that the simple quest for a ginseng root is wrapped in more riddles than that Mysterious Mountain Cavern of Winds, where the White Serpent crushes heroes in the cold coils of enigmas, and while I am probably hallucinating, I am willing to bet that the ghost of a murdered maiden fits in here somewhere.”
He turned to the abbot. “Reverend Sir, in your studies of myth and folklore, have you ever encountered a ghostly handmaiden who pleads that birds must fly?”
The abbot shook his head negatively.
“Or ghosts who beg people to exchange things for feathers? Possibly things like this?”
He took the tiny flute from his smuggler's belt. The abbot studied it with interest but without recognition, and Li Kao sighed and lifted it to his lips and blew gently into the mouthpiece. Then he hurled the flute to the floor, and all three of us jumped back and stared at it as one might view a cobra.
No flute sound came from that incredible thing. Instead we heard an old woman whose voice was so rich and warm that she might have been the grandmother of the entire human race.
“Aiieeee! Aiieeee! Come closer, my children! Spread ears like elephants, and I will tell you the tale of a girl named Beauty, and of her wicked stepmother and her good fairy godmother, and of the magic fishbone and the carriage and the little slipper that fell from Beauty's foot and led her to a handsome prince!”
Li Kao lunged. He grabbed the flute and covered the first of four tiny fingerholes and the voice stopped abruptly. He covered the second fingerhole and blew lightly into the mouthpiece.
“Aiieeee! Aiieeee! Come closer, my children! Spread ears like elephants, and I will tell you the tale of the old woman and her little boy, and of the cow and the corn and the peddler, and of the beanstalk that grew to the clouds, and what happened when the little boy climbed it into a world of wonders!”
Li Kao tried the other fingerholes, and each one produced a tale that had been delighting Chinese children for at least two thousand years, and which have even spread to the barbarian tribes. He stopped the last tale and glowered at the marvelous thing.
“Master Li, we could exchange that flute for ten thousand tons of feathers,” I whispered.
“With the island of Taiwan tossed in for good measure,” the abbot said shakily.
Master Li looked from the flute to the infirmary where the children lay, and back to the flute.
“That does it!” he snarled. “Ox, we have an evil duke who reads minds and laughs at axes, treasure troves that are hidden in labyrinths that are supposedly guarded by monsters, flutes that tell fairy tales, an incomprehensible ghost who might have come from one, an ancient children's game, and a ghostly message from Dragon's Pillow. If you're wondering about the wicked stepmother, just wait, because she's bound to turn up.”
He replaced the flute in his belt, and shook a finger in front of my nose.
“Nothing on the face of this earth—and I do mean nothing—is half so dangerous as a children's story that happens to be real, and you and I are wandering blindfolded through a myth devised by a maniac. Mark my words!” he shouted angrily. “If the Key Rabbit can slip us into another one of the duke's treasure troves, we will most certainly shake hands with a two-hundred-foot armor-plated winged water moccasin that can hit the eye of a gnat with a spit of venom from twenty miles away, and that can only be slain by a hero who was born inside a knitting needle during a total eclipse of the moon on the thirty-first day of February.”
I flushed, and looked down at my toes.
“If it's all right with you, I'd rather worry about real heads splashing into real basins filled with real blood,” I said meekly.
“You have a point.” He sighed.
Master Li looked wryly at the abbot and shrugged his shoulders.
“The supernatural can be very annoying until one finds the key that transforms it into science,” he observed mildly. “I'm probably imagining complications that don't exist. Come on, Ox, let's go out and get killed.”
The Duke of Ch'in had left on his annual tax trip, with the Key Rabbit and Lotus Cloud, and we caught up with them in Chuyen. Unfortunately, the Key Rabbit's apartment was high in an unclimbable tower in the palace of the duke's provincial governor. There were no vines to cling to, and no foot- or handholds, and every entrance was guarded by soldiers. Master Li did not appear to be greatly disturbed.
“Ox, I learned a valuable lesson in natural history when I was exiled to Serendip,” he said. “When a foraging ant discovers something of value, it grabs a sample and dashes back to the colony screaming, ‘Awake! Arise! Beat the drums! Sound general quarters! I have discovered wealth beyond the dreams of avarice!’ Then the whole colony follows the ant back to the treasure, but are they content to take what they see? Not if it is a trail of something. Ants that find trails of something they like will follow those trails to the source, even if it means crossing half of the world. Do you see the significance of that?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“You will,” said Master Li.
In the marketplace he bought a large jar of honey and a box that contained a colony of ants. Then he bribed a maid to bring a message to Lotus Cloud, and on the first cloudy night we scaled the outer walls of the governor's palace, slipped past the guards, and made our way to the tower. I hooted three times like an owl. Lotus Cloud, who
