were doing that by themselves! The coarse shapes became graceful as the leaves rolled and tightened, the frayed edges vanished, and we were looking at perfect tea of the highest possible quality. Fit for an emperor, which was precisely the point.
“In appearance and smell it’s perfect Tribute Tea,” Master Li said happily. “Actually the only flaw is that it’s too perfect: uniformly bluish green, whereas the real thing would have faint yellowish imperfections. For purposes of transport it would be molded into little cakes and stamped with the imperial seal, like the stuff the mandarins are selling to gullible barbarians, and they can turn it out by the ton. I would estimate the profit margin at ten thousand percent. What a lovely racket!”
The taste was another matter. We boiled a pot of water and tried it and promptly spat it out. It was awful, and Master Li said the mandarins had to be adding a certain percentage of decent tea to make it drinkable.
The steam from my saucer swirled upward, distorting images, and I thought Yen Shih was glaring angrily at me, but I blew steam until his ravaged face was clear and all he was doing was grimacing at the tea taste. Yu Lan began putting things away: silent, graceful, distant as a drifting cloud, secretly smiling.
Heat waves were twisting my village as though it were made from soft wax, and laughter was rising on all sides—harsh laughter, hard laughter, forced laughter—and I looked through a gap between cottages and saw the abbot of our monastery gazing toward something. His eyes were pitying and his face was sad. I ran forward until I could see the central lane, and there was my mother laughing and my father trying to. Everybody was trying to. A wedding procession was just ahead, and my heart sank to my sandals. “Laughing at the Dog” is the last resort in time of drought. If sending swallows to water dragons and putting the statues of our Place Gods out in the hot sun doesn’t work the only thing left is to fit out a bridal procession complete with flower-decorated cart and gongs and bells and drums, except the bride is a dog. A bitch dressed in a girl’s wedding dress, and everybody points and laughs and makes a lot of noise, and maybe that will cause the Little Boy of the Clouds to look down at the silly sight and laugh until he cries, and his tears are rain.
I walked forward toward my parents but the heat waves were back again, swirling like clouds, and I couldn’t see anything clearly. The laughter was getting shriller and higher. I saw something moving in a circle, and then I realized I wasn’t looking at dancers around a wedding cart, and it wasn’t laughter I was listening to.
I came through heat waves in time to see the goat break free and run after the other children. The lute that had accompanied them still played. I turned toward the sound and walked through more heat waves. A sudden flashing light blinded me, and when my eyes cleared I saw Yu Lan standing with a cage in her hand. She lifted the other hand in the ritual gesture and I imitated her: left eyebrow, right eyebrow, tip of nose. The shamanka’s fingers opened and I saw another little two-pronged pitchfork. This time she didn’t raise it to her lips. She looked somberly at me and turned and walked toward the low stone wall around a well, and then she pointed to a huge bucket attached to a windlass. Her gestures made it clear that I must take both of us down inside the well.
The bucket was just big enough. I released the rope and lowered us slowly down into darkness. The windlass was creaking loudly, but the rope was thick and strong. I could see a pattern carved on the walls: frogs circling around and around, head to tail. A terrible odor was lifting from below. It was the reek of rotting flesh, and something down there was growling like muted thunder. I tried to tell Yu Lan we must go back, but she pointed firmly downward.
I kept lowering the bucket. Yu Lan was looking hard at the walls, straining to see in the faint light from above. Now I could hear a bubbling sound below us, and the air was so hot we might have been in an oven, and again a low murderous growl reached up to us. The stench was almost unbearable.
Yu Lan touched my shoulder and pointed. I saw a large dark circle on the wall, but I couldn’t reach it. I began rocking, swinging the bucket, hauling back and forth on the rope. We swung in wider and wider arcs. My hands were covered with sweat and I was terrified that the rope might slip through them and send us tumbling down to whatever was waiting below. I held on, though, rocking farther and farther, and finally my left hand could reach out to the circle. It was a hole in the wall. The third time I swung to it I caught a projecting rock, and I was able to haul us right to the edge. Yu Lan lithely swung up and into a narrow tunnel, and I followed her after tying the bucket to the rock.
The shamanka led the way toward a soft glowing light. It was a chamber that had a floor of moss like a thick soft carpet, and holes high up in the ceiling that let sunlight in. The puppeteer’s daughter smiled at me and lifted her hand to her lips. She blew between the two prongs of the tiny pitchfork and the healing and generating power of yin filled the chamber, mist and pattering raindrops and rainbows, and Yu Lan stepped into the circle of my arms.
“Peculiarly lascivious,” Master Li said, lingering lovingly on “lascivious.” “The fact that sex is women’s business is recognized in the yin metaphor we use for it, ‘clouds and rain,’ which accounts for the mist and rainbows, but then you wake up—and clean up—and do you really have to turn the color of a ripe tomato and get your tongue entangled in baling twine every time Yu Lan walks past?”
“I can’t help it,” I said miserably. “I know it’s ridiculous but I can’t help it.”
“How about jumping like a frightened rabbit every time her father looks your way?”
“Put yourself in my position!” I yelped.
“How can I? I haven’t played the cloud-rain game since I was ninety.”
The sage sauntered off to collect his wine jar, whistling “In Youth Did Beauties Seek My Bed, but an Old Man Is a Bedful of Bones,” and I gathered up an armload of rushes to use for towels and rolled over and went back to sleep.
The terrible drought had showed no signs of slackening by the time we reached Peking. The city was stifling in heat and choking in the acrid red brick dust it’s famous for, and in addition the sky was thick with Yellow Wind, meaning clouds of fine yellow sand blowing in from Mongolian deserts. Usually the sandstorms are over by the fourth moon, but when Yen Shih’s wagon rolled through the gates on the evening of the second day of the fifth moon the wheels scraped furrows through a hard grainy yellow blanket, and the wind against the canvas was making hissing sounds like cats warming up for a fight.
Master Li arranged for Yen Shih to meet us the following morning on Hortensia Island, and then the puppeteer and his daughter turned the wagon toward their house. I rented a palanquin and proceeded with the sage to the house of the Celestial Master, and we arrived just as drums announced the closing of the gates to the Forbidden City, which was sparkling like a jeweled crown in the light of sunset. We were admitted at once, but at the door to the saint’s study our way was blocked by an old woman who had served the Celestial Master for years.
“He is not well today,” she said. Her face was worried and tired. “He has great energy, but something is wrong, and I must beg you to come back tomorrow. He usually gets better after he sleeps.”
The study door was partially ajar and I could hear the Celestial Master inside talking to somebody, using archaic formal language almost like a priestly chant, and from what little I knew about him that wasn’t his style at all.
“If it continues to feel ill,” the Celestial Master was intoning, grandly and resonantly, “anoint it with clarified fat of the leg of a snow leopard. Give it drink from eggshells of the throstle thrush filled with juice of the custard apple, in which are three pinches of shredded rhinoceros horn. Apply piebald leeches, and if it still succumbs remember that no creature is immortal and you too must die.”
The door opened. I had a brief glimpse of the saint standing beside his desk, eyes closed, hands out as in a blessing, and then the door closed behind a young servant girl who was carrying a small dog on a silken pillow. The dog was clearly sick, panting weakly, and the girl was so concerned with it she didn’t even see us. She had a
