Bridge Of Birds (25 page)

“Cold!” whispered the Duke of Ch'in. “Cold... cold... cold...”

I was so stunned that I forgot to hold on to the vines, and we plunged forty feet before I
managed to grab them again and break our fall. Unfortunately we were then dangling about
ten feet above the heads of some soldiers who were leaning against the wall swapping war
lies.

“Wait for a cloud,” Master Li whispered.

It seemed forever, but eventually a black cloud covered the moon, and I swung over the
vines to the nearest window and crawled into a room that was pitch-black. The darkness
vibrated with heavy snores. Li Kao slipped off my back and tiptoed across the floor and
cracked the door open. He closed it hurriedly.

“Soldiers guarding the halls,” he whispered.

We started back toward the window and froze. That damned cloud decided to move away from
the moon, and we were pinned in bright yellow beams, and the snores stopped suddenly, and
a grotesque figure sat up in bed and leveled a gangrened finger.

“What have you done with that ginseng root?”
roared the Ancestress.

Soldiers dragged me across the floor toward the throne upon which sat the Duke of Ch'in,
and thrust my face forward so that it practically touched the terrible mask. A hissing
sound came from the mouthpiece as the clammy mind crawled over mine, and then the golden
tiger jerked back.

The great and powerful Duke of Ch'in was terrified. Saliva trickled from the mouthpiece,
and the gold-meshed gloves trembled upon the arms of the throne, and an acrid stench of
fear stung my nostrils.

“I see the three handmaidens!” the metal voice whispered. “I see the ball and the bell and
the flute! I see the Legs and the Arms and the Head of Power!”

The duke was trembling so hard that his cloak of feathers fluttered as if for flight, but
he finally forced himself to lean forward once more. The slimy brain moved fearfully over
mine, and then I sensed relief and growing joy.

“But I do not see the birds, or the feathers, or anything else of importance,” he said
wonderingly. “I see only those useless children, and the right quest for the wrong reason.
You and your antiquated companion have followed paths that cannot be followed, defeated
guardians that cannot be defeated, escaped from places where escape was impossible, and
you have not had the slightest idea of what you were really doing, or where you were
really going, or why!”

Now the metal voice held a cruel gloating pleasure.

“You have managed to annoy me, and you shall discover what it means to annoy the Duke of
Ch'in.” The mask moved to the soldiers. “Take the old man and the boy to the torture
chambers. They shall die by inches in the Shirts of Iron,” he commanded.

Only the duke could have ordered such an execution, and I hasten to point out that in
every other part of China the Shirts of Iron had long been relegated to museums that
displayed the ghastly aberrations of the Dark Ages. Actually they aren't made from iron at
all, but from steel mesh that can be uniformly tightened by means of a neck loop or a
screw in back. The shirts are tightened around the victim's bare torso until flesh bulges
through the holes in the mesh, and then the executioner picks up something hard and rough,
a rock will do, and slowly scrapes across the shirt until there are no bulges. The flow of
blood is carefully stopped, and the next day the shirt is shifted slightly and the process
is repeated - and the next day and the next. A competent executioner can keep a victim
alive for months, and the only hope the victim has is that he will go stark staring mad
fairly early in the game.

Li Kao and I had been wrapped in so many chains that we couldn't move a finger, and the
soldiers groaned under the weight as they carried us down a seemingly endless flight of
stone steps. I counted eleven landings, each one guarded by more soldiers. The air grew
thicker and fouler, and slimy green water dripped from the black stone walls. Finally we
reached the bottommost dungeons. Brass-bound doors crashed open, and the panting soldiers
carried us into a torture chamber that was decorated with blood and entrails. The
executioner did not view us with friendly eyes. He was a fat fellow with a bald gray
skull, a bright red nose, four yellow teeth, and a grievance.

“Work, work, work!” he snarled as he bustled around us with a tape measure. “Do you
realize that each Shirt of Iron must be individually tailored for the victim? Do you
realize that it takes two full days to make a decent one? Do you realize that the duke has
ordered me to finish your shirts in two
hours
? And then I have to give you your first scraping, and do you realize that a decent job of
scraping takes another two hours?”

He stepped back and leveled an indignant finger.

“Look at those chains!” he snarled. “Do you realize that it will take another hour just to
unlock, unwrap, rewrap, and relock those things? And do you realize that the Ancestress
has ordered me to draw and quarter another prisoner? And do you realize that a decent job
of drawing and quartering takes another two hours? When am I to rest, I ask you? Is there
no pity? Is there no concern for the welfare of the working man?”

He was not the only one with a grievance.

“How about us?” the soldiers yelled. “We have to stand guard in this slimy hole until the
prisoners die, and if you're halfway decent at your job, that will take months! And that
crud of a master sergeant refused to issue earplugs, and we'll be stone deaf from the
screams inside of a week! Look at those cockroaches! Look at those leeches! Look at that
slimy dripping water! There's fever down here as sure as you're born, and even if we live
to return to our wives, what good will it do us? The duke made us wrap these poor bastards
in so many chains that they can't move, and carry them down eleven flights of stairs, and
quadruple hernias have made eunuchs of us all!”

It appeared to be a day of grievances.

“Woe!” somebody howled as feet pattered down the stairs. “Woe! Woe! Woe!” wailed the Key
Rabbit as he trotted into the torture chamber. “The duke has ordered me to be present at
the torture of my dearest friend and the most generous protector that my dear wife has
ever had, and to make a full report of their sufferings! Good evening, Lord Li of Kao.
Good evening, Lord Lu of Yu. It is delightful to see you again, but how can the duke do
this to me?”

The little fellow posed dramatically, one forearm across his brow and the other hand
outflung.

“I become violently ill in butcher shops!” he howled. “I faint when I cut my finger!
Crimson sunsets make me dive beneath my bed! Bloodhounds drive me into screaming fits! I
once threw up all over a very distinguished nobleman who introduced me to his blood
brother! I disgraced myself at a state banquet when I was informed that I was eating blood
pudding! And now I must witness the bloodiest execution ever invented by man! Woe!” wailed
the Key Rabbit. “Woe! Woe! Woe!”

“Damn it, get out of the way and let a man work,” the executioner snarled.

He began to bang furiously on strips of steel mesh, and the soldiers panted and groaned as
they carried us into an adjoining dungeon and dumped us upon the floor. They staggered
out, clutching their hernias, and slammed the door, and we stared at the fellow who was to
be drawn and quartered. He was attached to the wall with a leg chain, and he was eating a
bowl of rice.

“What are you doing here?” Master Li asked.

“At the moment I am eating my last supper,” said Henpecked Ho. “Good evening, Li Kao. Good
evening, Number Ten Ox. It is a great pleasure to see you again, although one rather
regrets the circumstances. May I offer you some rice? They have even given me a small jar
of wine. Quite decent of them, don't you think?”

“Wine, by all means,” said Li Kao.

Henpecked Ho's leg chain was just long enough for him to reach us and pour wine down our
throats. They really were treating him with consideration because it was very expensive
wine: Wu-fan, which is jet-black and so sweet that it tastes like molasses flavored with
engraving acid.

“Have you really been sentenced to be drawn and quartered?” I asked.

“It's a very distressing story.” He sighed. “Do you remember that I had spent sixteen
years trying to decipher fragments of clay tablets?”

“A very ancient ginseng fairy tale,” said Master Li.

“Precisely, and do you remember that those grave robbers dug up a very large clay tablet?
Well, it turned out to be the key to the whole thing. I could scarcely believe how quickly
the pieces fell into place, and the story that emerged was so interesting that I could
scarcely wait to see what came next. Then one day I entered my workshop and discovered
that every clay fragment was gone, and I ran around weeping and tearing my hair until my
dear wife told me to stop making a fool of myself. The Ancestress had remarked that
fiddling with clay tablets was a frivolous hobby for a grown man, so my dear wife had
ordered the servants to dump the tablets into the river, where, of course, they dissolved
into mud.”

“I would have slit her miserable throat,” Master Li growled.

“Indeed you would have, and I thought about you a great deal,” said Henpecked Ho. “You had
advised me to use an axe, so I stole an axe and went after my dear wife.”

“Did you get her?” I asked.

“I chopped her to pieces, and then I chopped her seven fat sisters to pieces. It was
delightful,” said Henpecked Ho. “Then I came here to try to chop the Ancestress to pieces,
but her soldiers caught me first. Oh well, I suppose that one can't have everything.”

“Ho, you did splendidly!” Master Li said.

“Do you really think so? Some people might consider my behaviour rather gross,” Henpecked
Ho said dubiously. “I was maddened beyond endurance because now I will never know how the
story came out, and it concerned two delightful deities that I had never heard of, even
though I am familiar with the entire Heavenly Pantheon.”

Li Kao thoughtfully chewed a wisp of his scraggly beard, which was about all the movement
that he could manage.

“Ho, as a matter of rather academic curiosity, have you ever encountered a deity called
the Peddler? He wears a robe covered with Heavenly or supernatural symbols, he leans upon
a crutch, and he carries a flute and a ball and a bell.”

“The Peddler is not one of the six hundred named gods, but our knowledge of the Pantheon
is incomplete,” Ho said thoughtfully. “It must be remembered that the first Duke of Ch'in
destroyed the temples and priests and worshippers of any cult that annoyed him, and
knowledge of many minor deities disappeared from the face of the earth. The Peddler might
have been among them, and I am morally certain that the two delightful deities in the
story on the tablet also suffered the duke's displeasure. After all, peasants treasure
ginseng fairy tales, and they would never willingly abandon a story about the handsomest
god in Heaven and the most beautiful girl in the world and a crown and three feathers and
-”

“What!” Master Li yelped.

“Er... and a crown and three feathers.”

“And three faithless handmaidens?”

“Well, I don't know about faithless, but three handmaidens were indeed briefly mentioned.
Their names were -”

“Ho, let's hear it in sequence,” said Master Li. “Your unmatched memory has surely
retained every word, and I cannot imagine a better way to pass the time before being
tortured to death than to listen to a fairy tale.”

“Would you really like to hear it?” Henpecked Ho said eagerly. “I had so hoped to be able
to share it with somebody, and perhaps my years of labor won't have been wasted after all.
Even in half-completed form it's a very good story.”

One of my clearest memories of the whole baffling affair is that of lying upon a dungeon
floor, wrapped in chains from my neck to my toes, listening to the gentle voice of
Henpecked Ho while the executioner banged upon our Shirts of Iron in the next room.

It was, as Henpecked Ho promised, quite a good story.

"Long ago there was a little girl who lived in a little village with her loving parents.
Her name was Jade Pearl. One day the village was raided by bandits, and Jade Pearl was
picked up and carried off by a bandit who thought that he might be able to sell her, and
several days later they reached a beautiful city, but the bandits were recognized and had
to run away and in the confusion Jade Pearl managed to escape.

"The little girl wandered into a park where beautiful flowers were growing, and Jade Pearl
sat down beside the loveliest plant of them all and began to weep. Now this was a very
long time ago, before men had recognized the ginseng plant for what it was, and the lovely
plant beside Jade Pearl was nothing less than the Queen of Ginseng. The queen listened to
the sobs of the frightened child and her heart was moved, and when Jade Pearl uncovered
her eyes and looked up she saw to her astonishment that a tall woman with a cheerful brown
face and laughing eyes was smiling kindly at her.

" 'Little girl, are you lost?' the queen asked.

"Jade Pearl told the kindly woman what had happened, so far as she understood it, and the
Queen of Ginseng took her by the hand and told her not to worry because she was going
home. Many days later they reached the little village, and the little girl's parents ran
out joyfully to greet her, but when Jade Pearl turned to introduce the kindly lady who had
brought her home the queen had vanished into thin air. The queen returned to the other
plants that grew in the beautiful city, but after a while she realized that she had grown
very fond of the little girl and would like to see her again.

"One day Jade Pearl heard somebody call her name, and she ran into a bamboo grove and
there was the kindly lady with the laughing eyes. The queen became the little girl's
godmother, and visited her often, and it was because of the contact with ginseng that Jade
Pearl grew in health and comeliness. By the time she was eighteen she was the most
beautiful girl in the whole world, although she did not know it, and it was then that she
had another marvelous visitor.