He explained the ornaments to me.
“Upper garment: sun, moon, stars, mountain, dragon, and the flowery fowl. Lower garment: temple cup, aquatic grass, flames, rice, hatchet, and symbol of distinction. Only the emperor of China is allowed to wear all twelve ornaments, and the Laughing Prince added a thirteenth: the peacock eye, which symbolizes the Second Lord of Heaven. One assumes he was preparing to place his throne beside the August Personage of Jade.”
Now the strange unfocused eyes took on a different aspect, and I decided I was looking at a man who had found the world not to his liking and stepped outside it—like Pea-Head Chou in my village, who joined the roosters every morning and commanded the sun to rise.
When the prince led us away I found that I was tiptoeing, and the painted eyes appeared to be following me. The prince made his way to a brassbound door and unlocked it with an ancient key that was as big as his forearm. “As I said, this place was paradise for a boy,” he remarked.
Paradise indeed. Inside was the old armory, and some of the axes were so huge they could only have had a ceremonial function. A thousand weapons hung in racks along the walls, and we found some that were better than anything modern. I chose a small axe and a short sword, and the prince selected a spear and a dagger, and Master Li stuck a row of knives into his belt. The next door took us outside into an inner courtyard, and in a tool shed I found a modern steel pick and bar. In the center of the courtyard was a stone building that housed an abandoned well, and a flight of steps led down to deep basements.
“The old cold room is at the bottom,” the prince said. “I doubt that anyone has been down there since I played at being a hero locked in a terrible dungeon.”
Master Li searched for any signs of recent entrance, and his eyes gleamed when he saw layers of untouched dust. I had brought some torches, and we lit them. The prince started forward, but I jumped ahead of him. “A thousand pardons, Your Highness, but this is what I'm here for,” I said politely. I started down the stairs, clutching my axe. The prince, I decided, had been a very brave little boy, and I couldn't suppress a small shudder as I cut through thick cobwebs that hung like blankets, and dozens of spiders scuttled over my hands and arms.
Then I was assaulted by a hundred demons—no, bats—no, white bats—and I let out a yelp and dove to the stairs and covered my head with my hands. When I dared to peek I saw that Master Li was standing calmly behind me, regarding me with a mixture of exasperation and amusement.
“Number Ten Ox, there is not one word of truth to peasant legends about white bats,” he said wryly. “They aren't even albino. They suffer from a parasitical skin disease, like the so-called white elephants of India, and they do not live a thousand years, and their black blood is not an Elixir of Life, and if you touch them, your hair will not fall out.”
The prince smiled at me reassuringly. “As a boy I caught a few and kept them as pets,” he said. “Unsanitary, but no worse than that.”
He ran a hand through his wild mop of hair, and I sheepishly uncovered mine. I got to my feet and reclaimed my axe and torch and started down again, feeling very foolish. There were four landings. The last flight of stairs ended in the cold room, which was enormous, and Master Li and the prince examined the solid stone floor and walls for some sign of a secret tunnel. I began to cheer up as I watched them. Finally Master Li stepped back and clapped his hands to his hips and glared at me.
“Why are you standing there like a statue?” he growled. “You should know something about digging tunnels. Find the damn thing.”
It was childish, but I had to do something to counter the humiliation with the bats. I made a great show of examining the floor. “Aha!” I said. I examined the walls. “Aha!” I said. I stood thoughtfully, posing for a portrait of The Young Genius. “Ssu-ma Ch'ien wrote ‘cold room,’ but not ‘in the cold room,’ ” I said. I made my way back to the stairs and examined them carefully. “Aha!” I said, and I started climbing to the last landing.
Master Li had a smile on his face as he followed, and I couldn't keep it up.
“I saw it on the way down,” I explained. “I was thinking about the labor involved in carrying huge chunks of ice up five flights of steep stairs, so I looked and found what I was looking for.”
I swung my torch to both sidewalls to show old bronze rings set in them. “Pulleys, with center ropes hauling some kind of sleds,” I said. “They're evenly spaced and neatly in line except for here.” I lifted the torch to the right-hand wall and showed an arc in the line of rings that ran almost up to the ceiling. “This made it awkward to get equal leverage on both sides. The only possible reason for it is that the wall isn't solid.”
“Bravo,” Master Li said, and I felt much better.
He held my torch and I spat on my hands and swung the pick. It didn't take very long. Soon I had a crack I could work with, and I pried out a stone slab with the steel bar, and the torches almost went out as the flames joined the air rushing into the dark space behind. In a few minutes I had a hole big enough to pass through, and we entered a tunnel carved through stone, sloping downward.
“Be very careful,” Master Li cautioned. “If this does indeed lead to a tomb, it may have been set with traps for grave robbers.”
We moved slowly, testing the floor in front of us for pits and nervously examining the ceiling for things that could fall on us. The tunnel sloped even more sharply downward, with many turns. We descended for such a length of time that I was willing to bet we had reached the level of the valley, or even below it, when the tunnel finally leveled out, and then after a hundred feet or so it began to slope upward. We climbed steadily, in total silence except for the sounds we made ourselves. There were no signs of traps. Finally our torchlight reflected back to us from the surface of a brick wall that completely blocked the tunnel. Master Li examined it and found nothing dangerous. My pick and steel bar went to work again, it was a double-thick wall, but no match for steel, and with a crash and a cloud of red brick dust, a large section of it soon collapsed. We coughed and wiped our eyes and held up our torches, and the dust slowly cleared, and we stood rooted to the spot, staring in horror at what lay upon the floor behind the wall.
No wonder the tunnel had remained a secret. The workmen had never left it. We were staring at skeletons, hundreds and hundreds of them, piled almost to the ceiling. The prince was beyond speech as he gazed at the memento his ancestor had left behind. Master Li's voice was cold and angry.
“So much for the peasants. The soldiers who herded them here and bricked them up were probably rewarded with a banquet at which nobody survived the second course, and then the poisoners received their own rewards, and so on. It's estimated that Emperor Shun killed eighty thousand men to keep the secret of his tomb, and even then it was discovered and looted inside of a century. Prince, this should put all doubts to rest. Your esteemed ancestor is indeed sleeping somewhere inside here.”
He stepped past me and began tossing skeletons aside, and I forced myself to move. Piles of white bones rose like mounds of snow beside a road as we slowly cleared a path down the tunnel. After an hour we finally reached the end, and it was a blank brick wall. Three swings of the pick were enough to knock bricks loose, but then I felt a shock that numbed my hands and arms. The pick had struck solid iron. I moved to different positions, knocking bricks away, and discovered that a seamless iron wall ran from one side of the tunnel to the other, and from the top to the bottom.
“There's probably another brick retaining wall behind this one, and molten iron was poured into the gap,” Master Li said thoughtfully. “Ox, what do you think?”
I shrugged. “Iron is tough but it will break, and my bar is steel,” I said. “If I can pound four holes in it, I should be able to crack an opening big enough to crawl through.”
After that my memory of the tunnel is one of noise. The steel bar produced hard harsh sounds that echoed back and forth between the narrow walls and banged against my head and ears and made me sick. I had to stop every now and then and sit with my head down between my legs until my stomach stopped heaving. I had a terrible headache, but I got into the slow steady rhythm of a woodcutter or ditch digger, and cracks like cobwebs appeared beneath the point of the bar. Then small chunks of iron broke loose, and finally the bar plunged through. As Master Li suspected there was another brick wall behind, but that caused no problem. The other holes went more quickly now that I had the feel of it, and in about three hours I was able to crack the iron between two of the holes. Another hour was enough to finish the job. We crawled through the small opening and lifted our torches and looked up at a ceiling gilded with real gold. The floor was marble, and the walls were richly ornamented with silver and bronze. We were in a long hallway lined with side rooms, and we clutched our weapons nervously and stepped into the first one.
No wonder criminals would do anything to find the place. Chests were piled so high with gold and jewels that the lids couldn't close, and bars of gold and silver were stacked like firewood around the walls. Prince Liu Pao was
