Bridge Of Birds (32 page)

“Lotus Cloud was right. He's crazy,” I said firmly.

“As a matter of fact, he isn't,” Master Li replied. “You see, everything would fit neatly
into place - the money, the monsters, the labyrinths and other trappings of fairy tales,
the lack of sensible precautions and the ridiculous precautions where none are needed - if
the right kind of face were concealed behind the mask. Suppose that hiding behind a
terrible snarl of a tiger...”

Master Li leaned forward. His voice was hypnotic, and his eyes were as cold as a cobra's.

“Was the face of a frightened rabbit,” he whispered.

Li Kao's eyes had warned me to leap, and all I needed to know was where. I smashed the Key
Rabbit to the floor, and Li Kao's hands darted out and snatched a chain and jerked a key
up over the Key Rabbit's head. We had once become entangled in that chain, and at the end
of it was a key that was shaped like a flower, with sixteen tiny points. Li Kao pulled a
golden casket from beneath his tunic. A casket that contained the heart of the Duke of
Ch'in, and that was secured by a pressure lock shaped like a flower, with sixteen tiny
slits. Each point had to fit into each slit with precisely the right amount of pressure,
and Li Kao's forehead wrinkled with concentration as he applied the key to the lock.

Lotus Cloud, who was not the screaming type, was screaming her head off, and outside in
the garden the dogs were going insane. When I lifted from the floor I was not riding upon
the back of a man, but on the back of a snarling, clawing tiger.

I was in the best position that I could manage, with my arms wrapped around the tiger's
throat and my teeth buried in the fur on its neck, and we went bounding around the room
while Master Li struggled with the lock, and I am alive today because the Duke of Ch'in
was unquestionably the stupidest of all the pupils of the Old Man of the Mountain. When he
discovered that he was not dislodging me as a tiger he transformed himself into a serpent,
and then into a wild boar, and then into an enormous spider, and all the while I was
praying: “August Personage of Jade, cleanse this idiot's mind of all memory of scorpions!”
I could almost feel the lethal tail whipping around to impale me like a bug. “Wipe his
brain of all images of porcupines, cacti, quicksand, and carnivorous plants!” I don't know
whether or not the August Personage of Jade had anything to do with it, but certainly the
duke wasn't reading my mind at the moment because he obligingly transformed himself into a
crocodile. Unfortunately, the lashing tail knocked Li Kao beneath a heavy table that
collapsed on top of him, and the casket and the key went spinning across the floor. I spat
out a mouthful of tiger fur, boar's bristles, spider hair, and crocodile scales.

“Lotus Cloud, open the casket!”
I yelled.

The Duke of Ch'in transformed himself into a giant ape. We went bounding around the room
again while Lotus Cloud, her eyes glazed with shock, slowly reached down toward the casket
at her feet. Then the duke transformed himself into a boulder. We crashed to the floor,
and the huge heavy thing slowly rolled over on top of me. I gasped for breath while a pair
of pink-rimmed Key Rabbit eyes appeared in the boulder. A pair of Key Rabbit lips opened,
and a piece of the rock quivered like a long twitching nose.

“I can grow heavier,” the duke giggled. “Heavier and heavier and heavier.”

The breath was being squeezed out of me, and my ribs were cracking. I could see Li Kao
wrestling with the heavy table, and Lotus Cloud dazedly trying to fit the key into the
lock. The tip of her tongue protruded from between her lips, and she looked for all the
world like a little girl who was trying to thread a needle for the first time. Above me
the pink-rimmed eyes were glittering, and I realized that sheer terror was driving the
Duke of Ch'in to the edge of insanity, as it had done so often in the past.

“I shall hang you and the old man in a cage beside my bed,” he whispered. “My dear friends
shan hsiao
shall rip your flesh with their claws and beaks, and your flesh will grow back, and the
claws and beaks shall rip it again, and your screams will soothe me to sleep at night, and
thus you will spend eternity.”

I had no breath left. The room was swimming before my eyes, and my ears were throbbing
with hurtful heartbeat sounds. The boulder grew heavier and heavier, and I could stand it
no more.

Lotus Cloud screamed. She screamed so piercingly that a thin porcelain bowl broke in half.
The open casket fell to the floor, and a wet throbbing heart lay sickeningly at her feet.

In an instant the boulder had become the Key Rabbit, and he frantically tried to reach his
heart. I clung to his ankles with the last bit of strength that I had, and he wailed in
fear as he slowly dragged me across the floor. The Key Rabbit's hand reached out, and
Lotus Cloud watched him with eyes that were wide with horror. Then that marvelous girl
reached down and scooped up the slimy thing at her feet, and she wound up in the manner of
a peasant girl who had been the terror of crows, and she hurled the heart on a dead line
across the room and through the window to the garden. The hysterical guard dogs descended
upon the heart of their master.

The Key Rabbit stood quite still. Then he slowly turned to his wife, and he reached out
with a strangely tender gesture, and his lips parted. I will never know what he wanted to
say. The flesh withered upon the face of the tyrant who had given his name to China, and I
stared at the clean white bones of a skull, and then the bones themselves dissolved into
the dust of centuries, and an empty robe slowly floated down and settled limply upon the
floor.

I managed to crawl over and lift the table from Li Kao, and he staggered to his feet and
dived for the wine jar.

“The Yama Kings have been waiting a long time, and I would imagine that the Duke of Ch'in
is receiving a rather warm welcome in Hell,” he said when he came up for air.

Master Li handed me the wine jar. I drank deeply and passed it to Lotus Cloud, who swigged
like a soldier. The wonder had overcome the horror, and her eyes were wide and bright and
filled with marvels. Master Li walked over to the robe on the floor. He bent down and
reached inside it, and his right hand lifted with a small golden crown.

“What better place to keep the greatest of all treasures than the hole where a heart had
been?” he said.

His left hand lifted, and I cried out in joy as an unbelievably powerful aroma of ginseng
reached my nostrils. It was so strong that it revived me in an instant.

“Master Li, has our quest come to an end?” I cried.

“Not quite yet,” he cautioned. “This is indeed the Heart of the Great Root of Power, but
we must remember that it is also the Queen of Ginseng. Her Majesty must never be forced.
If she is to help the children of Ku-fu, it must be of her own free will, and we must ask
her goddaughter to transmit her wishes.”

Master Li clasped his hands together and bowed deeply to Lotus Cloud.

“Meaning your Highness, the Princess of Birds,” he said.

Lotus Cloud stared, but her eyes were not as wide as mine.

“Master Li, you can't be serious!” I gasped.

“I have never been so serious in my life,” he said calmly.

“Me? With my thick legs and flat face?” Lotus Cloud exclaimed. Her sense of the fitness of
things was outraged, and she flushed with indignation. “The Star Shepherd fell in love
with the most beautiful girl in the world!”

“Mere literary convention,” Li Kao said, with an airy wave of a hand. “Beauty is
ridiculously overrated, and if that was all that the Star Shepherd wanted, he had the
young goddesses of Heaven to choose from. The Star Shepherd had enough sense to want a
peasant girl whose eyes held all the hope and joy and wonder in the world, and whose grin
could fell an ox at fifty paces. Ask this ox here,” he said with a wink in my direction.
“Ox, remind me to change my business sign so that the eye is nine tenths closed. I should
have known that Lotus Cloud was immortal the moment that Miser Shen reacted to her exactly
as you did.”

Lotus Cloud stamped her foot. “I refuse to believe one word of this nonsense,” she said
angrily.

“Why should you? The Duke of Ch'in took you to the Old Man of the Mountain, who removed
your memory,” Master Li said reasonably.

He strolled over to the table and sat down, and placed the little crown and the Great Root
of Power beside the wine jar. Then he opened his smuggler's belt, and the three feathers
of the Kings of Birds jumped eagerly into place when he touched them to the rim of the
crown.

“It is truly said that men die like trees, from the top down.” Master Li sighed. “If my
poor brains had not been riddled by wood rot and little green worms I might have
considered the fact that Miser Shen was not jealous of Number Ten Ox, and Number Ten Ox
was not jealous of Miser Shen. None of Lotus Cloud's lovers was ever jealous. Now that
simply isn't human if we're talking about love, but it is very human indeed if we're
talking about worship. One is not jealous of a fellow-worshipper, and the pure in heart
will always recognize a goddess. I have had occasion to mention the purity of Ox's heart,
and beneath his repulsive exterior Miser Shen was solid gold. I have no doubt that her
other lovers were equally admirable, which is why I was unable to recognize the young lady
myself.”

He stood up and bowed to Lotus Cloud again.

“There is,” said Master Li, “a slight flaw in my character.”

He sat down and filled two cups from the wine jar and slid them across the table toward
Lotus Cloud and me. Then he picked up one of the jewels that he had shown to the Key
Rabbit.

“My stupidity was such that I remained unaware of the obvious until I found this,” he said
sadly. “It is a very rare pearl, jet-black, with one small white flaw in the shape of a
star. Lotus Cloud, I once gave this pearl to Ox, who rolled it toward your feet. The next
time I saw it was in a drowned city, where it was lying beside the casket that contained
the duke's heart. Dear girl, I knew very well that you forgot about a gift of pearls and
jade ten minutes after you received it, but it never occurred to me to wonder what
happened to the stuff.”

He turned and thoughtfully examined the crumpled robe upon the floor.

“The Duke of Ch'in was abysmally stupid, but on one occasion he showed real intelligence,”
Master Li said. “After removing the memory of the Princess of Birds, the Old Man of the
Mountain almost certainly offered to transform her into a raindrop or a rose petal, for a
stiff price, but the duke knew better. He lived only for money, and if he left Jade Pearl
precisely as she was he would have something that was worth a thousand gold mines. You
see, it is in the nature of men to worship a goddess and to bring her valuable offerings,
and it is in the nature of a goddess to accept their worship and their offerings. The men
are not being lecherous. The goddess is neither greedy nor promiscuous. They are merely
acting out roles that were ordained at the beginning of time, and to my own certain
knowledge Lotus Cloud has collected more pearls and jade than the entire army of the Duke
of Ch'in. Every bit of it has wound up in treasure troves guarded by monsters.”

Cold fingers were crawling over my spine, and I lifted my cup and drained it at a gulp.
Lotus Cloud stood frozen, with her cup halfway to her lips.

“I don't believe it,” she whispered.

“I'll bet that the duke also struggled with disbelief,” Master Li said. Then he began to
laugh - a real belly laugh, with a happy whoop at the end. “There is something
indescribably comic about the greediest man in the whole world who gets his hands on the
least acquisitive goddess in history,” he panted, wiping tears from his eyes. “Ox, the
duke must have suffered terribly from ulcers until he discovered Lotus Cloud's one weak
spot. Think about it. Think very carefully about pearls and jade, because it may help you
to do something unpleasant.”

He refilled my cup while I tried to think about pearls and jade. My mind refused to
function at all, but something from deep down was trying to work its way up, so I stopped
trying to think and let whatever it was take over. I closed my eyes tightly, and then I
was inside a strange world of glowing milky whiteness, and a thirteen-year-old girl was
looking at me gravely.

“Ever since we held hands and recited the Orphan's Song, I knew that you w^ould fall in
love with Lotus Cloud,” Mouse said softly. “Ox, you must use all of your strength to touch
the queen before the count reaches forty-nine. Forty-nine can mean for ever and ever and
ever.” Mouse was fading into the whiteness. “Is not a thousand years enough?” she said
faintly. “The birds must fly.... The birds must fly.... The birds must fly....”

The image was gone, and I remembered that the world had been white because in my dream I
had been inside a pearl, and with a sudden shock I understood the meaning of the pearl.

I opened my eyes to find Li Kao looking at me with a stern expression, but kindly eyes.

“Number Ten Ox, in a little while the watchman will rap three times, and the seventh day
of the seventh moon will have come and gone,” he said quietly. “For the thousandth time
the Star Shepherd will gaze down from the Great River at an empty sky, and for the
thousandth time he will weep bitter tears. Thus he will weep throughout eternity,
considering that the Emperor of Heaven quoted the odds against bringing the princess back
to the stars at one in ten thousand billion trillion. Of course there is a slight chance
that somebody might want to give the Celestial Bookmaker a heart attack.”

Master Li slid the crown toward me. I blinked through my tears and picked it up. This was
the only life that Lotus Cloud could remember, and she backed away fearfully.

“No,” she whispered. “I love you, and you love me, and we can find a desert island and
live happily ever after!”