“It's another labyrinth, but my old lungs won't last much longer,” Li Kao panted, and I could believe it because his face was nearly as blue as the torchlight. “Ox, tie me to your back with the cord from the monk's robe. We'll have to extinguish the torch, so you must follow the dragon by feel.”
I tied him to my back, and we barely fit through the hole in the wall, and when Li Kao extinguished the torch my throat constricted so tightly that I nearly suffocated then and there. Blackness was pressing down upon me like a heavy shroud as I began to crawl, and what little air was left was foul. My fingers traced the path of the green jade dragon as it wound through the holes in the red coral pendant, while I groped for openings in the walls with the other hand. Third left… First left… Fourth right… Li Kao was almost unconscious, and the words that he muttered faintly in my ear made no sense.
“Ox… not a tiger but a little boy… games… rules of games…”
Then he sighed, and his body lay limply upon my back, and I could scarcely sense a heartbeat. There was nothing to do but crawl ahead, and my own consciousness was slipping away with every gasp of my aching lungs, and death was beckoning me to join my parents in the Yellow Springs Beneath the Earth. Second right… Second left…
“Master Li, the dragon can lead us no farther!” I panted.
There was no answer. The ancient sage was out cold, if not dead, and now everything depended upon the slow wits of Number Ten Ox, but what was I to do? The last direction of the dragon had led me against the stone wall of a dead end, and the dragon had wound all the way to the bottom of the pendant. It went no farther, so how could I? To turn back would be suicide, and I frantically felt around in the darkness. There was nothing but smooth unbroken stone, although my fingers found one small crack in the floor that might have been big enough for a mouse. Nothing else. No slab with mortar around the edges, no lever to pull, no keyhole. I lowered my head and wept.
It was some time before I was able to think about the strange words that Master Li had muttered in my ear, and even longer before I remembered how he had muttered in his sleep while we flew on the Bamboo Dragonfly. “Why not on the island, waiting at the end of the bridge?” he had muttered. “Games. A little boy?” Was he saying that the duke was not the Tiger of Ch'in but a child, and that the Hand That No One Sees had not been waiting for victims at the end of the narrow bridge on the oasis because the victims would have no chance, and that would ruin a game?
My head seemed to be packed with wool, and my ears were ringing. In my mind I saw the dying face of Miser Shen as he prayed to his little girl. “You played at guessing games…. You played at guessing games…. Guessing games… Guessing games…”
What was the name of the game that we were playing with the Duke of Ch'in? Follow the Dragon, that's what, and what is the rule that a child must learn when playing a follow game? Keep following. Never assume and never give up. You can continue to follow, if only you try hard enough. The dragon had stopped, but was it possible that it could still go somewhere, and somehow I would be able to follow?
My fingers crawled across the floor to that one tiny crack in the stone. It was a couple of inches long and irregularly oval. Lack of air had turned me into a small child, and I actually giggled as I removed the red coral pendant from the chain around my neck. It was a couple of inches long and irregularly oval, and it fit precisely into the crack.
“Follow the dragon,” I giggled, and I released the pendant.
The dragon dropped down. I waited for the sound when it landed, and waited and waited, and finally, far below, I heard a click as though it had landed like a key in a lock, and then I heard a second click, as though tumblers had turned.
The stone floor tilted beneath me. I slid toward a side wall, and as the floor tilted more steeply a hole opened, and then I followed the dragon, with Master Li tied to my back, shooting out and down into moonlight and starlight and air. My lungs felt as though they were touched with fire as I gulped and gasped, and Master Li moaned softly, and I felt his lungs begin to heave. We tumbled down the side of a steep hill and landed upon something that glittered.
Moonlight shone down upon a tiny glade, sunken way down in the center of Stone Bell Mountain, and upon an immense mountain of treasure. Instinctively my eyes lifted to the top of the pile to a shadow where no shadow should be. Then the third girl from that painting was gazing at me beseechingly, and blood stained her dress where a blade had pierced her heart.
“Take pity upon a faithless handmaiden,” she whispered. Ghost tears trickled slowly down her cheeks. “Is not a thousand years enough?” she sobbed. “I swear that I did not know what I had done! Oh, take pity, and exchange this for the feather. The birds must fly.”
Then she was gone.
I crawled up a slope of diamonds and ripped the lid from the small jade casket that the ghost had cradled in her hands. Ginseng aroma stung my nostrils, but it was not the Heart of the Great Root of Power. It was the Head, and beside it lay a tiny bronze bell.
My head sank wearily and I closed my eyes, and sleep cradled me like a baby. I did not dream at all.
Part Three—THE PRINCESS OF BIRDS
22. The Dream of the White Chamber
Night rain is falling on the village of Ku-fu, glinting through moonbeams that slide through thin clouds, and the soft splashing sound outside my window blends with the drip of ink from the mouse-whiskered tip of my writing brush. I have been trying as hard as I can, but I am unable to express my emotions when the Arms and the Head of Power brought the children back from death's doorstep, and then failed to complete the cure.
Once more they awoke, but into the strange world of the Hopping Hide and Seek Game, and once more they smiled and laughed and chanted the nonsense rhyme from Dragon's Pillow. Then once more they yawned, and their eyes closed, and they sank back upon their beds. Once more they dropped into the depths of their trances.
People with nothing else to turn to must revert to the superstitions of their ancestors, and grandparents began to tie mirrors to the children's foreheads so that the demons of sickness would see the reflections of their own ugly faces and flee in terror. Fathers shouted their children's names while they waved favorite toys tied to long poles, hoping to entice the wandering souls, and mothers stood tensely at the bedsides with cords that would tie the souls to the bodies should they return. I turned and ran into the abbot's study and slammed the door.
Nothing but the Heart of the Great Root of Power could save the children of my village. I was sick with fear, and my eyes lifted to a framed quotation from The Study of the Ancients:
I was a long way from drawing nearer to Tao, and children's games and nonsense rhymes and ginseng roots and birds and feathers and flutes and balls and bells and agonized ghosts and terrible monsters and the Duke of Ch'in whirled round and round in my brain without making any sense at all.
The door opened and Li Kao walked into the study. He drank three cups of wine, one after another, and then he sat down across from me and took the little bronze bell from his belt and gently rang it.
We listened to the beat of a drum, and then the beautifully trained voice of a young woman began to chant and sing the story of the great courtesan who grew old, and who was forced into the indignity of marrying a businessman. A second ring of the bell produced a lively tempo, and the hilariously pornographic tale of Golden Lotus. A third ring brought sarcasm and suppressed rage, and the story of Pi Kan, who was put to death because an idiot emperor wanted to see if it was true that the heart of a wise man is pierced by seven openings.
