Bridge Of Birds (11 page)

In the middle of all this a miracle occurred that could have converted the most stubborn
atheist in the whole world.

An exceptionally saintly lacquered lohan was admiring the diamond-encrusted imperial
sceptre that the Ancestress had placed at his feet, and apparently he feared that the
other funeral gifts might be defiled by demons. So he stood up from the meditative mudra
and began making a tour of inspection. Bonzes screamed and fainted in droves, and even the
Ancestress, who had been screaming “Off with their heads!” turned pale and drew back in
fear. The lacquer glinted like dull gold in the sultry light, and the saint appeared to be
floating through the clouds of incense as he drifted among his fellow lohans and inspected
each gift to make sure that it was safe. The last gift was inside a small jade casket,
which the saint picked up and opened.

“Got it!” he exclaimed happily.

Unfortunately the light coat of lacquer had wiped fifty years of wrinkles from the lohan's
face, and the Ancestress sat up straight.

“You!” she screamed. “You and your damned praying mantises nearly ruined me with Emperor
Wen! Soldiers, seize this fraudulent dog!”

Master Li took to his heels, clutching the jade casket, and I hopped up from Fainting
Maid's grave and raced in pursuit. The army of the Ancestress ran after us, and the
diversion was a godsend to Cut-Off-Their-Balls Wang, who emerged from the bushes and
gathered his men and began stealing everything in sight, and confusion degenerated into
chaos. Then the storm that had been hovering all day broke with a bang, and lightning and
thunder joined the drums of the wizards and the howls of the victims, and blinding rain
became an even better cover than rolling clouds of incense. We escaped quite easily and
reached our hiding place, a small natural cave in the riverbank. Then we stripped and
dried off, and Li Kao opened the casket and held it out to me.

Inside was the most magnificent ginseng root imaginable. No wonder the Ancestress had
included it among her most valuable possessions, as Master Li had foreseen, and the aroma
that came from it was so powerful that it made my head spin.

“Ox, this is truly extraordinary, but the Root of Power in no way resembles the Great Root
that Henpecked Ho described,” said Master Li. “Of course Ho doubts that his root was
ginseng, and we must pray that this will do the job.”

I was convinced that the children were as good as cured, and I cannot describe the joy in
my heart. The rain soon ceased and the clouds drifted away, and we tiptoed through a thick
swirling mist. Henpecked Ho was waiting for us at the entrance to the cemetery, and his
eyes were sparkling as they had been when Bright Star passed safely through the door. We
started off through the graves, and as we approached the mausoleum of the Ancestress we
heard the faint sound of shovels.

“Ho, I rather suspect that some of the scum of the earth that Cut-Off-Their-Balls Wang
recruited are digging up your daughter,” Master Li said thoughtfully. “Do you have any
objection to having her coffin plundered?”

“None whatsoever,” said Henpecked Ho. “My beloved wife and her seven fat sisters provided
some rather expensive jewelry, and I seriously doubt that my dear daughter deserved to
take it with her.”

There was a good deal of iron beneath his meek exterior. We heard the sound of shovels
striking the coffin, and then the sound of the lid being removed.

“This stuff any good?” asked a voice that was oddly familiar.

There was a pause for inspection, and then another oddly familiar voice answered,
“First-rate.”

The mist cleared enough so that I could see a blade glint in the moonlight.

“You use the knife,” said the first voice. “I'm scared of corpses.”

“Ho, we can't let them desecrate your daughter's body!” I whispered.

“Hair and fingernails,” he whispered back.

“What?”

“Hair and fingernails,” Master Li said quietly. “It's a very ancient practice. Grave
robbers dig up the bodies of ladies of quality and clip their silken tresses and flawless
fingernails, which they sell for a high price to an expensive courtesan. The courtesan
claims the hair and fingernails to be her own, and gives them as a fidelity gift to a
wealthy lover. The lover assumes that the lovesick lady has handed him the power of life
and death - any decent witch could use such things to destroy the donor - and is inspired
to reply in kind with immensely valuable fidelity gifts, and thus many a departed beauty
has continued to bankrupt lovers long after her demise. A rather interesting form of
immortality,” said Master Li.

The shovels were pitching earth back into the grave, to delay discovery and pursuit, and I
stuck my head through some bushes. My eyes very nearly popped out of their sockets.

“Who, pray tell, is shoveling earth so that it piles up neatly on the other side of the
hole?” snarled Pawnbroker Fang.

“In answer to your question, my esteemed colleague,” hissed Ma the Grub, “I would advise
you to piss upon the ground and examine your reflection in the puddle!”

Li Kao stuck his head out beside me, and his eyes narrowed as he examined the unlovely
pair.

“Strange,” he said thoughtfully. “Destiny, perhaps, since Pawnbroker Fang is not the sort
of man who would write down all he knows in his files. How do I look?”

“Look?” I asked stupidly.

“Lacquer holding?”

I examined him with a slight shudder. The lacquer was cracking, and he resembled a
six-month-old corpse.

“You look ghastly,” I whispered.

“Careful with that shovel!” yelped Ma the Grub, leaping back in fear. “You almost trapped
my shadow inside the grave!”

“Why don't you tie your shadow to your body with a cord, like a sensible person?”
Pawnbroker Fang grumbled.

“Splendid. Superstition has its uses,” Master Li said happily.

Li Kao slipped from the bushes, and a lacquered lohan drifted eerily through the mist.
“Oooooooooooooooooooo,” the horrible spectre moaned.

Ma the Grub toppled upon the half-covered coffin in a dead faint, and Pawnbroker Fang
dropped to his knees and covered his eyes, and a hollow haunted voice with a thick Tibetan
accent vibrated through the night.

“I am Tso Jed Chonu, the Patron of Ginseng. Who dares to steal my Root of Power?”

“Spirit, spare me!” howled Pawnbroker Fang. “I knew that the Ancestress possessed such a
root, but I swear that I did not know where it was hidden!”

“Not the lesser root!” roared the Patron of Ginseng. “I mean the Great Root!”

“O Spirit, only one Great Root of Power exists in all the world, and no lowly pawnbroker
would dare to touch it,” Fang sobbed.

“Who has my root? Where has he hidden it?”

“I dare not say!” Fang wailed.

Tso Jed Chonu lifted his horrible face to Heaven and extended his hand for a lightning
bolt.

“The Duke of Ch'in!”
screamed Pawnbroker Fang.
“It's hidden in his labyrinth!”

The terrible lohan stood lost in thought for nearly a minute. Then he flicked a finger.

“Begone!”

Ma the Grub's faint was not what it appeared to be. He vaulted from the coffin and passed
Pawnbroker Fang in twenty steps as they raced away into the mist. Li Kao was looking
thoughtfully down into the grave, and then he got down on his knees and reached for
something. He stood up with an object in his hands, which he turned this way and that in
the moonlight, and then he walked back and handed it to Henpecked Ho, who yelped in
delight. It was a fragment of a clay tablet, and it was covered with the same ancient
ideographs as the fragments that Ho had been working on for sixteen years, but it was big
enough to contain whole paragraphs.

In the distance we could hear that his wife and her seven fat sisters had joined the
Ancestress. “Off with their heads!” they howled, and Henpecked Ho wondered whether his joy
might be made complete.

“Li Kao, in your journeys around the estate did you happen to encounter any more old
wells?” he asked hopefully.

“I would advise using an axe,” said Master Li.

“An axe. Yes, an axe by all means.”

We started off again, toward the wall beside the old well. Li Kao hooted like an owl, and
a dog replied with three yelps and a howl. We said our farewells to Henpecked Ho, rather
tearfully on my part, and Li Kao climbed upon my back. The patch in the wall was now a
cleverly painted piece of canvas, and I pulled it aside and raced across the empty
corridor. As I began to climb a rope ladder up the side of the opposite wall I glanced
back and saw that Henpecked Ho was holding the precious clay tablet in one hand while his
other hand wielded an imaginary axe.

“Chop-chop!” he chanted happily. “Chop-chop-chop-chop-chop!”

The mist swallowed him up, and I swung down the other side to Cut-Off-Their-Balls Wang and
his scum of the earth. It had been twenty years since they had enjoyed a windfall like the
funeral of Fainting Maid, and they begged Master Li to stay as their leader. We had other
things to do. I was off like the wind, racing across the hills toward the village of
Ku-fu, while Master Li rode upon my back clutching the Root of Power.

It was early afternoon, and dust danced in the sunlight that filtered into the monastery.
The only sounds came from Li Kao and the abbot as they prepared the essence, and from bird
songs that drifted with the breeze through the windows. The children had not moved so much
as an eyelash since we had left, and the bonzes had been able to do no more for them than
to bathe them and move them to different positions at regular intervals. It was hard to
believe that the small pale bodies could still show faint vital signs, and the parents
were as silent as the children.

An alchemist's stove burned beneath a bubbling vial of sugared water, in which Master Li
had placed the Root of Power. The water began to turn orange, and the ginseng root took on
a copperish-orange color that was almost translucent, like amber. Master Li moved the root
to a fresh vial that was filled with mild rice wine. The abbot heated the liquid, and as
it slowly bubbled down Master Li replaced it with the orange liquid from the first vial.
Then the level of the liquid lowered until the root was barely covered, and the liquid
turned saffron, and Master Li sealed the vial and placed it in a pan of boiling water.
Both the liquid and the root began to turn orange-black, and then jet-black. Only a small
puddle of liquid remained, and Master Li removed the vial from the pan and opened the
seal. An incredible fresh and pungent aroma filled the room, like a whole forest of
mountain herbs just after a rain.

“That's all there is to it, and now we will see what we will see,” he said calmly.

The abbot and Li Kao walked from bed to bed. The abbot parted the children's lips and Li
Kao dipped the blackened root into the liquid and carefully applied three drops to each
tongue. Three times the treatment was repeated, and there was just enough of the ginseng
essence to go around.

We waited while the sounds of chickens and cows and water buffaloes drifted upon the
breeze, and willows brushed their branches against the gray stone walls, and a woodpecker
hammered in the garden.

Color was returning to the pale faces. The bedcovers began to lift and fall with strong
regular breathing, and warmth flushed the cold limbs. Fang's Fawn sighed, and a wide smile
spread across the face of Bone Helmet. All the children began to smile happily, and with a
sense of humble awe I realized that I had witnessed a medical miracle. Parents wept for
joy as they embraced their sons and daughters, and the grandparents danced, and the bonzes
ran to the ropes and swung lustily up and down as they rang every bell in the monastery.
The abbot was dancing a jig while he bellowed,
“Namo Kuanshiyin Bodhisattva Mahasattva!”
which is how good Buddhists say “hallelujah.”

Only Li Kao remained unmoved. He walked from bed to bed, examining each child with
analytical coldness, and then he signaled for me to pry Big Hong loose from his son. He
bent over the boy and began testing his pulse: first the left wrist for the functions of
the heart, liver, kidneys, small intestine, gall bladder, and ureter; then the right wrist
for the lungs, stomach, parta ulta, large intestine, spleen, and vital parts. He beckoned
for the abbot to come and repeat the same process and compare results.

The abbot's face turned puzzled, and then anxious, and then desperate. He ran for his pins
and began testing acupuncture and pain points, with no reaction whatsoever from the
children. Little Hong's color remained high, and his pulse remained strong, and the happy
smile remained on his lips, but when Master Li lifted one of his arms and released it, the
arm remained suspended in air. He moved the arm to different positions, and it stayed
precisely where he placed it. The abbot grabbed Fawn and shook her violently, and she did
not even register a change in her pulse.

Li Kao straightened up and slowly walked back to the table and stared blankly down at the
empty alchemist's vial. All eyes were fixed on him. He was immeasurably weary, and I could
tell that in his tiredness he was struggling to think of words that would soften the fact
that there is no such thing as an almost miracle. The Root of Power had almost done it,
but it simply wasn't strong enough.

I couldn't bear it if his eyes turned to mine. I knew that he had only one thing to tell
me, and the words of the ancient Tibetan text echoed in my mind. “Only one treatment is
effective, and this will succeed only if the physician as access to the rarest and
mightiest of all healing agents, the Great Root of Power.” I saw the terrified face of
Pawnbroker Fang as he swore that only one Great Root existed in all the world, and I heard
him scream, “The Duke of Ch'in! It's hidden in his labyrinth!” Even an ignorant country
boy knew that the Duke of Ch'in was ten thousand times more dangerous than the Ancestress,
and that copper coins do not purchase suicide. If I went after the Great Root, it would be
on my own, and never in history had anyone returned alive from the duke's labyrinth.