Master Li - Bridge Of Birds Part 17

I stared at him. "Isn't that the place where the peddler took the Princess of Birds?" I asked.

"He undoubtedly took her there, perhaps to find the city where her G.o.dmother lived, but it would be quite useless for us to search for Jade Pearl," Master Li said patiently. "If the Duke of Ch'in had a brain in his head, he would also take her to the Old Man of the Mountain. She couldn't be killed, but she could be transformed, and the Princess of Birds might now be a raindrop hidden in a thunderstorm, or a petal in a field of flowers, or one special grain of sand among a billion on a beach. No, you and I and the August Personage of Jade are engaged in mutual back-scratching because there is one thing upon the face of the earth that we can use to force the duke to hand over the Great Root of Power, and it can also force him to hand over Jade Pearl: I will bet anything you like that the Emperor of Heaven will see to it that we can't get one without the other."

He stretched and yawned and scratched his scraggly beard.

"Let's get some sleep. In the morning we'll go after the sick slimy heart of the Duke of Ch'in," said Master Li.

27. The Lake of the Dead

We left at dawn, and by the fourth day we reached the foothills. When we began to climb the mountains we left summer behind, and the green trees and fragrant flowers and rippling streams were replaced by the most depressing landscape that I had ever seen.

A strange chill gripped that mountainside. It was dead and stale, as though a monstrous iceberg had been scooped up and deposited upon a peak, where it had lain lifeless and unmelting for a thousand years. Sometimes we went for an hour without seeing a squirrel or hearing the song of a bird, and on the third day of the climb all signs of life vanished. We looked in vain for so much as an ant on the ground or an eagle in the sky.

We had been hearing the faint sound of falling water, and finally we reached the source. A meagre waterfall was trickling down the side of a chaotic cliff, and when we climbed to the top we saw that the cliff was part of a gigantic rock-slide that had blocked the narrow mouth of a valley many centuries ago. In the distance we could see another waterfall trickling down a higher cliff, and the entire valley in between had become a vast lake. It was the coldest, grayest, most unappetizing body of water that I had ever seen, and I knew in my bones that it was evil. Li Kao sat down and made some rapid calculations.

"Ox, this lake is the right size, the right shape, and at the correct angle," he said. "This is what we saw that first burned silver and then burned gold, and it very much looks as though we'll have to find out what's on the bottom of it."

It turned out to be more difficult than he expected. We made a raft and paddled to the center of the lake, but when we tried to reach bottom with a stone tied to a rope of vines we went down two hundred feet without touching anything. For practical purposes the lake had no bottom at all, and Master Li turned bright red while he scorched the air with the Sixty Sequential Sacrileges with which he had won the all-China Freestyle Blasphemy Compet.i.tion in Hangchow three years in a row. Finally he decided to climb the cliff at the other end of the lake and look at the problem from a different perspective.

It was a hard climb and very dangerous. The cliff was mostly shale that was held together by clay, and when we reached the top we found that the ground was soft and porous except for the path where the stream ran along a bed of solid rock. Master Li teetered at the cliffs edge and gazed down nearly five hundred feet to the gold-gray lake glinting dully in the sunlight.

"Why, it's a matter of elementary hydraulic engineering!" he exclaimed. "We can't reach bottom, so we'll bring the bottom up to us. The first order of business is to get hold of a lot of strong backs."

We had to go a long way down the other side of the mountain before we reached a village, and the villagers wanted no part of a job that required getting close to that lake. They called it the Lake of the Dead, and swore that not even fish could live in the water.

"Once a year, at midnight on the fifth day of the fifth moon, a ghostly caravan approaches the Lake of the Dead," an old woman said in a quavering whisper. "Once in my grandmother's time some foolish men crept out to spy upon that evil procession, and they were found with their bellies slit open and their guts ripped out! Since then we lock the doors in our village and hide beneath the beds on the fifth day of the fifth moon."

Master Li glanced at me, and I knew what he was thinking. That should be the time when the Duke of Ch'in completed the final leg of his tax trip and started home again, and his route should pa.s.s the cold mountain and the Lake of the Dead.

It wasn't easy to persuade them, but we could offer more money than they could hope to earn in twenty lifetimes, and at last the men gathered picks and shovels and fearfully followed us back to the cliff. They worked like demons in order to get out of there as fast as possible. We began by digging a trench from the bank of the stream to a deep ravine, and then we ran connecting trenches to other ravines until we had a ditch that ran from one end of the cliff to the other. We felled trees and made a dam. It wasn't easy to persuade the stream to move to a new home, but eventually the water roared angrily from its bed of rock and began snarling through the porous earth at the bottoms of the ravines. We gave the men bonuses, but they barely paused to thank us before taking to their heels.

Master Li and I moved to the other side of the lake and pitched a tent. We had no idea how long it would take, and we pa.s.sed the time by making divers' equipment: air tanks from the bladders of wild pigs, and breathing tubes from the intestines. We fas.h.i.+oned bamboo spears, and made loops in our belts for the rocks that would give us extra weight. It happened far faster than either of us thought possible.

I was looking out across the smooth cold surface of the lake toward the cliff that was s.h.i.+mmering in the moonlight, and Li Kao was at a table writing down songs in the light of a lantern. Suddenly the lantern began to move. We stared in astonishment as it slid all the way down the table and crashed to the earthen floor, and then the floor started to buck beneath us like a wild horse. We ran from the tent and gazed at the cliff, and there was a rumbling, grinding sort of sound, and the cliff moved in the moonlight. Not even Master Li had expected something so spectacular, but the stream had tunneled so deeply into the spongy earth that almost half of the mountain leaned out, hovered in the air, and then plunged five hundred feet straight down into the Lake of the Dead.

We grabbed a tree and hung on for dear life. I saw a huge ma.s.s of water, silver in the moonlight, rise into the air like a cloud. The monstrous wave appeared to move very slowly toward the dam, and we felt a blast of icy wind, and then the wave plunged over the dam and smashed into the valley below. We saw a forest turned instantly to pulp, and we saw enormous boulders picked up and hurled through the air like grains of sand. The mountain beneath us shuddered, and huge rocks ground together and screamed deep in the bowels of the earth, and an icy mist closed around us. The tree that we were clinging to jerked and pitched and strained at its roots, and it seemed forever until the earth stopped bucking and the roar of water faded away.

The mist gradually dissolved, and we stared at an incredible sight. A forest of domes and spires and towers had lifted through the shallow water that remained, and my brain finally accepted the fact that the Lake of the Dead had been covering an entire city! Li Kao whooped with delight and grabbed my waist and began dancing around in a circle.

"What a lovely place to hide a heart!" he yelled. "Absolutely lovely!"

I danced with Master Li, but I could not agree that the place was lovely. The ghostly spires were reaching up to claw at the moon like the fingers of drowning men, and the water dripped from the turrets like tears.

The night pa.s.sed, and the bright sun of morning that shone upon our little raft could warm us, but nothing could warm the water of the Lake of the Dead. I checked my pig bladders and breathing tubes, and the rocks in my belt and my spear.

"Ready?" asked Master Li.

"Ready," I said. I put the breathing tube from the first bladder in my mouth, held my nose, and jumped.

The water was very cold, but my body was covered with pig grease and it was bearable until I encountered a strange icy current that nearly sent me back to the surface - I could see the tips of my fingers turn blue - but it was a very narrow current and I soon left it behind. I was sinking faster than seemed safe, so I jettisoned rocks until I was drifting down easily. A rope of vines led up from my belt, and Li Kao counted the knots as they slid through his fingers, and when my feet touched bottom, I had gone down thirty feet.

I expected total darkness, but phosph.o.r.escent rocks produced an eerie greenish glow that enabled me to see quite easily, and I walked down one of the streets of the drowned city, waving my arms like a swimmer to battle the weight of the water. The air from the pig bladder tasted terrible, but the breathing tube worked and I had two more bladders tied to my belt. I came to a house and cautiously peered through the door, and it took quite some time for me to realize that what I was seeing was impossible.

I switched to my second bladder of air and began moving as fast as I could through the city, and everywhere I saw the same impossible sight. When that bladder ran out I switched to the third one, and retraced my steps until the rope tied to my belt was leading almost straight up. Then I jettisoned rocks until I drifted up and broke water a few feet from the raft.

"Master Li!" I gasped. "Master Li!"

He told me to shut up, and hauled me aboard and rubbed me down. Then he made me drink some wine before I told my tale. I began with the strange icy current, and the phosph.o.r.esence, and then I said: "Master Li, in the first house I saw the skeletons of a woman and a baby. That lake must have taken years to build up behind the rockslide, but the woman had drowned so quickly that she hadn't had time to grab her baby from the crib!"

Everywhere it had been the same. I had seen gamblers drowned with dice in their hands, and blacksmiths tumbled over forges, and women whose bones were mingled with the pots that they had been using to cook dinner.

"Master Li, that city was destroyed in an instant!" I gasped. "If the Duke of Ch'in was responsible for such a ma.s.sacre, he must have the coldest heart in the world!"

Li Kao grabbed my arm. "Repeat that," he ordered.

"Er... if the Duke of Ch'in is responsible, he must have the coldest heart in the world," I mumbled.

The expression on Li Kao's face was rather odd, and I decided that he reminded me of a cat that was creeping up behind a large complacent bird. He waved at the thicket of towers and spires.

"Ox, this is another labyrinth, and we no longer have the dragon pendant," he said. "But do we need it? It occurs to me that when the Old Man of the Mountain told us about the stupidity of some of his pupils, he may have been slyly saying something about the Duke of Ch'in."

Li Kao hurriedly greased his body and grabbed his diving equipment.

"After all, the wisest man in the world could scarcely be pleased with a pupil who chose a vast city as the hiding place for his heart, buried it beneath hundreds of feet of water, and then left a path that would lead straight to the rather peculiar nature of the extracted organ. Ox, lead me to that strange icy current," purred Master Li.

28. The Coldest Heart in the World

We drifted down into the eerie greenish glow, and in a minute I found the current. It nearly froze us to death before we learned that we could follow it from a safe distance by watching a tiny trail of bubbles. We followed it for hours, through a tangled maze of streets. I would swim back up to the surface and paddle the raft ahead, and then Master Li would break water and climb on board, and we would rest and replenish our air bladders. We were slowly working our way toward the center of the city, and in late afternoon we paddled the raft toward a copper dome that lifted through the water in the center of four stone towers. A boulder from the fallen cliff had crashed through the dome, and that trail of tiny bubbles was oozing up through the hole.

We squeezed through the hole and drifted down toward a pile of treasure that was so huge that it was ten times larger than the other h.o.a.rds added together!

Above the loot was a large copy of the duke's tiger mask, hanging upon a stone wall. The tiger's mouth was wide open, and behind the teeth was a niche where the choicest gems were piled. I swam closer and saw that the gems were heaped around a golden casket, and my heart leaped joyfully when I saw that the bubbles were trickling out from the keyhole. My hand reached out, but Li Kao grabbed it. He nodded urgently at the mask. I noticed that the tiger's teeth were pointed steel, and I swam to one of the towers and managed to pry a stone slab from the wall. I swam back and shoved it between the terrible jaws.

The teeth snapped together and began grinding through the stone with a screech that seemed to be magnified by the water, but the stone held long enough for me to reach through the gap and grab the casket. I dropped it into a sack that was tied to my waist, just as the stone dissolved into powder and the teeth snapped shut with a terrible crash. We turned to swim back to the surface, and my heart nearly stopped beating. Three pearly figures were drifting toward us in the greenish glow, and if I had not had the breathing tube in my mouth I would have cried out in pity. They were the three murdered handmaidens of the Princess of Birds, and their bodies were uncorrupted after all the centuries, and the horror in their eyes was blended with a strange helpless pleading. They moved through the water like fish, with small wriggles of their hips and legs, and their long black hair drifted behind them like clouds.

The hair defied the pressure of the water. It reached out in front of the girls and floated toward us like ma.s.ses of snakes. The cold wet coils curled around our breathing tubes and jerked them from our mouths, and then the tendrils closed around our faces and clogged our mouths and noses. We turned turtle and dived, and jerked out the second pig bladders and inserted the breathing tubes in our mouths, and then we flipped over and swam back up, thrusting at the girls with our bamboo spears. We were wasting our time. The limp bodies had been lifeless for centuries, and the clouds of hair pa.s.sed through the spears and reached out again. The second tubes were ripped from our mouths and air bubbled away from the bladders. Again we dived, and we inserted the tubes of our last bladders, but even as I fixed my tube in my mouth I felt heavy coils of writhing wet hair crawl over my shoulders. Then the last tubes were ripped away. I thrust desperately at the handmaidens, and I saw that their pleading eyes appeared to be weeping, but their hair lifted to form an impenetrable cloud. We could not pa.s.s.

I grabbed Master Li and swam to the tower and used my spear to pry out another stone slab. The hole was just big enough, and I shoved Master Li through it and squeezed in after him and wedged the spear in the gap to delay the handmaidens. I jerked rocks from our belts and we began to rise. My lungs were bursting, and my eardrums were exploding, and my eyeb.a.l.l.s seared with pain. I was nearly unconscious when our heads broke through the surface of the water into a small air pocket just below the copper roof. I held Li Kao's head above water while I gulped air, and I screamed when it touched my tortured lungs. Finally I could breathe well enough to start thinking again, and I saw that the wall to my left had nearly crumbled into nothingness. A few kicks knocked a hole in it, and I carried Li Kao through the hole and climbed up upon the flat roof.

Master Li was an inert weight in my arms. I laid him on his face and began to apply artificial respiration. I wept when I thought that it was too late, but I soon heard him cough. I cried out for joy and kept at it while water spurted from his mouth, and finally he began breathing on his own. Then I fell back on the roof and we lay side by side, gasping like beached fish. Finally we were able to sit up and look around, and we saw that we were still in bad trouble. It was more than a mile to the sh.o.r.e, and those handmaidens were swimming around the tower like sharks. Master Li pounded some water from his ears and pointed a quivering finger.

"Number Ten Ox, we are witnessing a crime so terrible as to transcend belief," he said hoa.r.s.ely. "The Duke of Ch'in murdered those poor girls, and then he bound them with a spell that would force them to defend the heart of their murderer. Since he fully intends to live forever, he has sentenced three innocent girls to eternal d.a.m.nation."

He was so angry that he was turning purple.

"Not even the Emperor of Heaven has the right to sentence anyone to eternal d.a.m.nation!" he said furiously. "There must be a trial, and the accused must be defended, and the Yama Kings must concur in the verdict before such a terrible sentence can be imposed!"

I growled and pulled the casket from the sack at my waist. When I held the icy thing to my ear I heard a faint thump... thump... thump...

"Shall I slice it or squeeze it?" I snarled.

The question was academic. Li Kao went to work with his lockpicks, but he had never encountered a lock like that one. It was the most complicated pressure lock that he had ever seen, and nothing but the proper key could open it. A dagger could not scratch the casket. I smashed it to the stone with all the strength that I had, and I couldn't even dent it. Friction could not produce the slightest trace of warmth upon the icy surface. I hurled the casket down and we sat there and stared at it. Apparently when I had grabbed the casket from the niche I had taken a few jewels as well, and Li Kao slowly reached out and picked them up: a diamond, a ruby, a pearl, and an emerald. He stared at them wonderingly.

"Checkmate," he said softly. "I told you that the August Personage of Jade was going to tie the two quests into a nice neat knot. There is only one way that we can escape from this tower, and we are going to have to make a sacred vow."

I had no idea what he was talking about.

"To find a raindrop in a thunderstorm, or a petal in a field of flowers, or a grain of sand concealed among a billion on a beach," Master Li whispered. "I am a dolt. My poor brains have turned to b.u.t.ter. Ox, since I can no longer trust what I used to call a mind, do you happen to remember the names of the handmaidens of the Princess of Birds?"

"Snowgoose," I said slowly. "Little Ping... and Autumn Moon."

Li Kao put the jewels into a seash.e.l.l on his smuggler's belt and had me replace the casket in the sack and tie it securely to my waist. Then he painfully got to his feet and faced the poor girls who slowly circled the tower.

"Snowgoose," he said quietly, "Little Ping, Autumn Moon, listen to me. The quest is almost at an end. We have the flute and the ball and the bell. I know where to find the three feathers of the Kings of Birds. I know where to find the golden crown. Now I know where to find the Princess of Birds. You must let us pa.s.s. You must fight as no one has ever fought before, and let us safely reach the sh.o.r.e."

I stared at him stupidly. He took a deep breath.

"Handmaidens, if you can defeat the spell and let us pa.s.s, I swear by all that is holy, and in the sacred name of the August Personage of Jade, that the birds will fly!" Master Li yelled. "On the seventh day of the seventh moon the birds of China will fly!"

I doubt that I can ever again be decently impressed by courage, because I have been privileged to witness courage that pa.s.ses mortal comprehension. Li Kao's voice echoed back from the spires of the tragic city and faded into silence. Then the bodies of the murdered girls began to spin in the water. At first I thought that they were out of control, but then I realized that they were spinning in order to wrap their hair tightly around their bodies.

I felt a searing wave of pain that nearly knocked me into the water, and while I could not hear the screams of the handmaidens in my ears, I could hear them in my heart. Master Li hopped upon my back and I dived into the water and swam toward the distant sh.o.r.e. A soul-shaking agony surrounded the spinning girls, and scream after scream ripped through my heart, and the water turned choppy from the jerks of their bodies. I pa.s.sed so close to one of them that I could see her tears and see that she was jerking in agony hard enough to snap her spine. And then I plowed ahead and they faded behind me. The handmaidens did not give up their terrible fight until I crawled up to safety upon the sandy bank.

We faced the maidens and banged our heads against the ground, but Li Kao did not have time to honor them properly.

"Ox, we are bound by a sacred vow, and it's time to find out how much strain those muscles of yours can bear," he said grimly. "The Castle of the Labyrinth is halfway across China, but we must reach it by the seventh day of the seventh moon. Can you do it?"

"Master Li, get on my back," I said.

He climbed up and I turned and faced south, and then I set off at a gallop.

In the late afternoon of the seventh day of the seventh moon we stood upon a sandy beach and gazed across the water toward a sheer cliff upon which loomed the great hulking ma.s.s of the Castle of the Labyrinth. Sunlight was s.h.i.+ning through dark clouds and turning the Yellow Sea into molten gold, but a high wind was whipping the bay into hard choppy waves, and seagulls were sailing like snowflakes across a sky that promised rain. I could not possibly carry Master Li across those waves without killing one or both of us, and I stared at him with stricken eyes.

"I rather think that help is on the way," he said calmly, pointing toward a small flotilla of boats that was rapidly skimming toward us.

The lead boat was a tiny fis.h.i.+ng vessel with a bright red sail, and it was being bombarded by spears and arrows. The wind whipped screams of rage toward our ears. "My purse!... My jade belt buckle!... Grandmother's life savings!... Powdered bat manure does not cure arthritis!... My gold earrings!... There wasn't a pea under any of those sh.e.l.ls!... Bring back my false teeth!"

The little boat ran aground practically at our feet, and two gentlemen of low appearance climbed out and shook their fists at the pursuing fleet.

"How dare you accuse us of fraud!" screamed p.a.w.nbroker Fang.

"We shall sue!" howled Ma the Grub.

The howling mob scrambled ash.o.r.e, and Ma and Fang took to their heels. We climbed into the little fis.h.i.+ng boat and shoved off, and the wind obligingly s.h.i.+fted around and caught the sail. We raced across the waves while the sunlight was extinguished, and lightning flickered across the sky, and rain began to fall. The cliff loomed in front of us, and I steered between jagged rocks and found a place where we could land.

The wind was shrieking around us, and the rain was so heavy that I could barely see as I swung a rope around my head and sent a grappling hook flying up the side of the cliff. On the third try I caught a rock that held the hook securely, and Master Li hopped up on my back and I began to climb. The sheer stone was slippery in the rain, but we had to take chances if we were to reach the labyrinth before the tide did.

We just made it. I climbed over the ledge into the little cave where we had found the first of the duke's treasure troves, and I secured a hook and a rope and climbed down the stone chimney into the labyrinth. Li Kao lit a torch and looked around thoughtfully.

"It's a pity that we no longer have the dragon pendant," he observed mildly. "If ever I could use the ironclad memory of Henpecked Ho, it would be now."

Master Li's mental processes were as alien to me as the inner thoughts of Buddha. He never wavered, even though he had to retrace every twist and turn and do it backward, and I trotted behind him listening nervously for the first metallic snarl of the tiger. The duke had not been idle since his return from the tax trip. The air reeked with blood and rotting flesh, and fresh corpses stared blindly down at us from crevices in the ceiling. I stared in terror at dark streaks that were sliding across the floor, and back in the blackness a tiger began to growl.

Li Kao grunted with satisfaction, and trotted through an archway to the cavern where a pool of water lay beneath a trapdoor high overhead. I tied a rope to a jutting rock on one side of the pool, and another rope to another rock on the other side. Then I secured both ends around my waist with a slip knot that I could release with a jerk, and I glanced up fearfully at the darkness where the trapdoor should be. If it didn't work from this side, we were going to join those happy fellows wedged in crevices.

The water was rus.h.i.+ng in faster and faster, climbing around my thighs. I began to float upward, treading water, with Master Li riding on my back. I heard the tiger screaming, and then the full force of the tide struck us. We were buffeted from all sides, but the ropes held firmly and we continued to lift straight up. Master Li got as high as he could on my shoulders and reached up. I could hear him strain and grunt, and then there was a screech of metal as a bolt slid through grooves. He ducked and the falling trapdoor missed his head by an inch, and I jerked the slip knot and released the ropes and climbed through the hole into the throne room of the Duke of Ch'in.

From a chance comment by the Key Rabbit some time ago, we knew that the throne room was locked at sunset, and n.o.body but the duke was allowed to enter. Li Kao's torch flickered palely in the darkness, and I heard the clash of weapons and the heavy tread of the soldiers who patrolled outside the golden doors. Then the storm pa.s.sed as swiftly as it had come, and the wind drew the clouds as though opening curtains in front of the rising moon, and light poured through the windows. I gasped in horror and stopped dead in my tracks.

The Duke of Ch'in was seated upon his throne, and the terrible mask was glaring straight at us.

Li Kao continued to trot ahead without a care in the world. "Don't worry, Ox, it's just an empty sh.e.l.l," he said rea.s.suringly, and when I forced my feet to move again I saw that he was right. Moonbeams stretched out like pale gold fingers and reached through the eye-holes in the tiger mask and touched the back of the throne. It was just a mask and a long cloak of feathers, propped upon a light metal framework.

"Well, Ox, we have a promise to keep before we can worry about ginseng roots," Master Li said. "That means that we have only a few hours to find the feathers of the Kings of Birds, the golden crown, and the Princess of Birds. We'll also need the key to a casket, so let's get started. The first time you hit the duke with that axe, it bounced right off him. Do you remember where the blade struck?"

I reached out toward three tiny white feathers that were woven into a cloak of feathers.

"Feathers that stop axes?" I whispered. "Master Li, are these the feathers of the Kings of Birds?"

"We'll soon find out," he said. "Try to pull them out."

The feathers could not be pulled, and they could not be cut, and Li Kao's torch couldn't even scorch them. He opened sh.e.l.ls in his smuggler's belt and handed me three trinkets. I placed the tiny tin flute upon an arm of the throne with trembling fingers, and I reached out to the cloak.

"Snowgoose returns the flute in exchange for the feather," I whispered, and the first feather slid from the cloak as smoothly as straw sliding from warm b.u.t.ter. I placed the crystal ball upon the arm of the throne.

"Little Ping returns the ball in exchange for the feather," I whispered.

The second feather slid out as easily as the first. I placed the little bronze bell upon the arm of the throne.

"Autumn Moon returns the bell in exchange for the feather," I whispered, and the third feather practically jumped into my hand.

Li Kao put the feathers in his smuggler's belt.

"The rest of it isn't going to be so easy," he said grimly. "We're going to need help, so let's go find it."

We waited for the tide to go out. Then we jumped back down into the pool and Li Kao retraced our steps through the labyrinth. The rope and hook had held, and I hauled us up the stone chimney to the cave. Then we used the ropes and hooks to swing back down the side of the cliff to a sea that had calmed enough to allow me to swim across the bay to the city.

The greatest pleasure city in the world was coming to life. Laughter and oaths and the cheerful sound of smas.h.i.+ng wine jars followed us through the streets, and lurching merrymakers swarmed around us, but we shoved them aside and hurried on. We climbed a wall to a small garden. The guard dogs knew us well, and after a few pats they made no objection when we climbed through a window. Sometimes one can find help in the strangest places, such as a modest little house where a meek little man and his gloriously greedy wife were enjoying a rare evening of domestic tranquility.