A stroke here, a dash there, now a sudden flurry of her stick –Second Daughter squeezed her eyes, and opened them, and scratched out what she could in the dust. I knew what it was like for Second Daughter. Before my writing lessons began in Liang-jou, words were just so many bird tracks to me. It was only after I had learned a few that I could see the forms of the others more distinctly and noticed how certain shapes appear again and again in different words. The rest of us tried to keep ourselves from hanging over her. I sat near Baby and for the first time in months dared to fling a companionable arm around her shoulders.
That’s all,’ Second Daughter murmured at last.
It was precious little. She had written one word as its mirror image, and I could recognize one or two others; but most were simply scribbles, and several were represented by a blank.
Feng appointed himself scribe and recopied, below the original, what he could make sense of. He wrote. The stone… one word… a story,’ and then he wrote no more.
‘Can you remember anything else about it?’ he asked. ‘Was there – I don’t know – a title, or a signature, or anything?’
Second Daughter frowned at first, hurt by his. obvious disappointment. I vowed then that, if we remained together, I would teach her everything I knew about the art of written language. But her pluck sustained her. She closed her eyes again and thought, then picked up her stick.
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Three more words. At the very end. I can see the last two clearly now. Look. The second’s like a double doorway, sort of, don’t you think? And the third – on the left three dots, like dripping water, and on the right a kind of archway round a short line like this one, and a little square.’ She looked up hopefully.
‘Cave!’ Feng and I shouted it together. ‘And the second one is door or gate. Well done,’ Feng added, while I began saying, ‘Something-gate Cave, Something-gate Cave,’ in hopes of bringing the first word back to Second Daughter’s recollection.
‘Dragongate!’ she cried out. ‘At least there’s a Dragongate Cave near the foot of the mountain on the trail most pilgrims take down. Do you think that might be it?’
‘Lots of caves with “gate” in their names,’ Sparker muttered. But Feng, who had taken the stick from Second Daughter’s hand, ignored him and scratched one more sign in the dust.
‘Does that look right?’ he asked her, and pursed his lips in satisfaction when she said it did. ‘Dragongate Cave it is, then. We’d best be on our way.’
This time we set off eagerly together, and though the air was crisp at that altitude in the middle of the fourth month, the mountain’s changeable weather had turned about again. Clear views greeted us the rest of the way. Up and down we travelled, across perilous bare ridges and along passageways squeezed through the underbrush. Coming down from one rocky spine known as Stone Tablet Ridge, we crossed a gorge on a bridge of stone. Nearby I saw the huge imprisoned bones of strange fish, flung up into the rock face, as if this whole vast terrain had risen from the ocean floor. I shook my head. There was magic enough in Mothbrow Mountain without my adding more.
Soon we passed a twisted lofty stone, its proportions the same as a human figure, but three times the height. This, said Second Daughter, was the Lady Guan-yin Crag. From her bundle she pulled her last sticks of incense and insisted that we pause to make a proper reverence. The simple bridge we came to shortly after was likewise named for the good Lady; even Feng admitted that the peaks towering above us and the clear waters roaring below created an air of mystery.
Descending, we made better time, and eventually came to a whole series of caves, including one called Windy Cavern, from which the wind blows without ceasing. That night we camped nearby, huddled against the damp cold, but pleased that we would reach Dragongate the next day.
While Sparker cooked our supper, I put the others from my thoughts, tore a broad banana leaf from a tree, and settled down with Second Daughter to begin to keep my vow. A splint of bamboo from the frayed end of my walking staff would serve us as a pen.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘You’ve already learned some words. I’ll show you the proper order in which to make the strokes, so that the lines will flow correctly when you’re able to write them more quickly. Watch.’
Second Daughter started to cry off. Then the wilful intelligence that set her running from miserable respectability after a troupe of drifters gripped her. Her eyes brightened, and she bent to watch me as I scratched the words – clumsily – on the tough green leaf. Baby settled down on the other side of me to watch.
The stone… one word… a story,’ I wrote, saying each one clearly as I formed it. Second Daughter took the bamboo splint and began to write. I was pleased. Writing down my own poems sometimes seemed presumptuous to me. But surely no harm lay in teaching a copyist’s skill to someone else.
Suddenly Baby shook my arm and clapped her hands and began signing furiously. She must be jealous again, I thought, though she had never shown her jealousy this way before. ‘Baby,’ I said rather sharply, trying to temper my irritation by saying the name in Khotanese.
She snatched the leaf from under the tip of the bamboo splint. Then she squatted, holding the leaf up to the fire. Her free hand gestured wildly in the direction in which Feng had strolled off.
By now Sparker too stared at Baby’s antics in amazement. Just when she leapt up and backed away from the leaf as if terrified by what was written on it, he shouted out, ‘The poem! Don’t you see? She’s telling us that the words Second Daughter has remembered are from the poem Master wrote in secret ink to fool the soldiers. How did it go? “One word and stones they’ll be.” What was the rest of it?’
I ran and pulled a fresh leaf from the banana tree, then chanted the words aloud as I wrote them out:
If men with swords should seek the stone.
One word: and stones they’ll be.
If history’s a story, then
Which story’s history?
Baby clapped her hands.
I added the name of the cave. ‘Does this look right?’ I asked Second Daughter, and she nodded vigorously.
‘I suppose I could be mistaken, but –’ She broke the sentence off. ‘No, that has to be it. I’m sure of it.’
While Sparker and Second Daughter talked excitedly, I thought about the second half of the poem, trying to make some sense of the gibberish. Surely it was just something Feng threw in to spook the soldiers. But it kept bothering me. ‘Those last two lines,’ I said. ‘They’re nonsense in Chinese, at least as far as I can see. But in Soghdian…’ Second Daughter blinked as she realized I actually spoke that language, but she said nothing.
Soghdian, I explained, has words for things that Chinese doesn’t. Sparker and Second Daughter didn’t seem to like that idea much, but Baby nodded. I quickly added that sometimes it went the other way. ‘So in Soghdian, there’s a word for when you tell about something that happened that means maybe it’s sort of true and sort of isn’t. You know, maybe it’s real history, only changed, and maybe just rumours, or even something someone made up on purpose. Like what they tell in the marketplaces, to be amusing and teach a lesson, too.’
‘Or maybe like a lie,’ said Sparker, grinning.
‘Well, yes,’ I admitted, ‘like a lie. But you must have heard a wandering monk reciting in the markets in Chang-an, Sparker, and there are more of them out west. Or there are those books Feng has told us about – what are they called? Transmitted Records of the Bizarre? They report events from the past, but a lot of what’s in them is just gossip.’
Second Daughter interrupted. ‘You mean educated people read books they know are lies?’
Sparker started to pick at the frayed edge of one of the torn banana leaves. Baby’s fingers twitched slightly as they sometimes did when she was thinking deeply.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Soghdian has another word for things like that. The ones that aren’t true but aren’t lies either.’
Sparker tucked his chin in skeptically. ‘That�
�s what you think the poem says history is? I used to listen to the Old Master, Tutor Feng, when Young Master and I were boys back in Jia-jou, and the whole point of history is that it’s absolutely true.’ He grinned again. ‘Anything else is just a trick, like one of ours.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘when I was a little girl in Khotan and a monk’s words gave me a bad dream, my Nanny told me it was “just a story”.’ The last I’d had to say in Soghdian. I said it again for Baby in Khotanese. She knitted her brows and gave one slow nod. ‘I can’t say it in Chinese. That’s the point. But if you could say it, then the poem means that history is – that there’s more than one way of looking at it, or even that it’s something we make up…’
I stopped. Baby remained deep inside her own thoughts. Second Daughter’s polite look had frozen over into incomprehension. She might never had heard a travelling storyteller, in an out-of-the-way place like Mothbrow Town, I realized, nor a story not put forth as fact.
And Sparker grumbled to himself, ‘Can’t say it in Chinese! I never heard such rubbish!’ He turned to lift the pot lid and peek at the rice. ‘Nearly ready,’ he announced in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Master should be back soon.’
In fact, Feng returned a moment later, just in time to be served the first bowl of rice. Sparker gleefully began to relate Baby’s discovery of what Second Daughter had written in her dream, not bothering to bring up my muddled thoughts about the poem’s meaning. ‘So perhaps. Master, it was the Moon Lady’s way of letting us know she approved of your trick with heating the invisible ink by the fire. And she’s named Dragongate Cave as the place we’ll find the stone she wants. What do you think?’
Feng stroked his chin. He had removed the false beard of horsehair shortly after the soldiers left, claiming he was glad to be rid of it. But he kept up the sagelike habit of rubbing his chin when he thought things over, even now, when only a few sparse whiskers grew there. ‘Makes sense,’ he said in his best magisterial tones. ‘Though one thing has been bothering me about that poem. I haven’t mentioned it before, but I only wrote the first two lines.’
In the Realm of Transformations
Come. Enter the realm of transformations. Do not mind the pythons’ slither. These scaly tutelary demons will not poison you, and surely you know how to evade their coils. Here on Mothbrow Mountain, they are known as Dragon Laymen, after the devout gentlemen pilgrims, the patrons of the serene temples scattered across its leafy slopes. In another country, another age, one of their number possessed the women of an oracular cult. And what harm lay in that? Only one warning: do not dismiss them as mere fiction. And do admit you know that word, though it hasn’t yet been uttered on this fine spring eighth-century day. Ficcioun they’ll say in English four hundred years beyond the great Tang’s fall, harking back to an earlier tongue’s fingere, ‘to feign, to mould, to form’ – like clay squeezed breathless by undulating muscles. But, no, that simile is a mere invention. Leave your fears behind.
Climb to Golden Summit, on the eastern edge of the great central plateau. Unlike the eager travellers who have rushed on towards the next chapter in their tale, you are at leisure, you can choose your time. So: a sun-streaked day, here at the heights. Westwards, Tibetan ranges float in midair. Eastwards, a fabric of cloud coalesces below your feet. As the vaporous network weaves itself towards substantiality, it becomes a soft terrain they call the ‘silver world’. Just at the right hour (some say the day’s eighth watch, some the ninth), a sphere of light takes form, round as a mirror, seven-layered, prismatic at the edges. Should the cloudy web grow thick enough to catch, your own shadow will appear, as if some odd design had been impressed upon the silvery textile. And glowing all about that shadow, the sphere of light becomes your rainbow halo, bright nimbus, aureola, Heiligenschein, your glory. Then the clouds unravel into hanks of silk floss, and the image disappears. The orb of light remains, reflecting this world’s things in a giddying brightness of illusion that dazzles your aching eyes. Your retinas ring like clashing cymbals, bright bronze bells. It is too much. You look away.
Or come in the evening. Phosphorescent flecks drift up through the gorge beneath your feet. They glint and dapple like fireflies seeking out their mates. Right now, in the Tang, the people say these lights are the cleanest lanterns of the foothill villagers, come to pay respects to the temple of The Enlightened One. More and more lights gather, and if the ground were crisp with snow (but it is the year’s fourth month, remember?), you would hear their quiet hissing as they extinguished themselves and fell. Try to grasp one – ah, impossible. Try, then (the monks will urge you to it; success is a sign of the heart’s purity), to pull one towards you with a cedar branch. But wait. First invent a sturdy railing on the cliff’s edge. And having done that, if you are certain you will pass the test, reach forward, out over the void. Draw in one of these wonders, and never mind if it is real or not.
Suppose now that you take the descending path to Windy Cavern and beyond. You will still have to scramble upwards from time to time, or trudge on piety’s stairs. A good while later, you’ll arrive – cheeks blowing, winded – at Thunderdemon Shrine. Here it is always dank and sullen, however bright the sunbeams that paint the peaks. Hush. Not one word! Those superstitious soldiers were not entirely fools. Utter a single sound and the storm wyverns will hurl bolts of deadly lightning at your head.
Nearby, you’ll pass a monastery already nearing its millennium. To its right – see that jagged escarpment there? – Nu Wa the Genetrix selected the stones with which she repaired the sky. All the caves of the mountain’s honeycombed interior ooze dramatic power.
Later, following Black Dragon River, stumbling with fatigue along the bank, mesmerized by its downpours and its eddies, you come to a foaming chute emerging from a spray-drenched portal – inviting, fearsome – in a high wall of dark marbled jade. This is Dragongate’s Chasm. Enter.
What’s this? You have caught up with the other travellers. Damp and weary, they struggle across the rock face, up the pearl-foamed tributary. Be still and watch.
What light there is within the mossy chasm refracts off water-washed stone and tumbling waves. A rivulet hurls itself from far overhead. The five hide most of their belongings in a cranny, then proceed. They push past upthrust brushy clumps of thin bamboo. Seeking out shallow hand- and footholds, they angle some twenty feet up the green-shot cliff, and pull themselves at last inside Dragongate Cave. Why not follow after? It’s easier for you.
At first, everything is dim and slippery. The travellers steady one another, catch their breath, and look around. A few feet inward – inexplicable! – a diffused light irradiates the interior. Not sunrays sifted through some skyward crack. Not the blue glow of bioluminescent life-forms, though it sometimes wavers sea-green, sometimes cool violet. Never mind: Second Daughter has heard of this phenomenon, and her recounting of what they see seems to reassure the party.
All around them sheets of flowstone hump and dish, now cataracts, now giant writhing claws. Stalagmites rise, every day a droplet or a ripple different, where stalactites in their myriad variations swell. Baby starts. A cave salamander, mutated into blindness, scuttles past her, avatar of metamorphosis. Wordless, the travellers concur; there’s nothing for it but to plunge deeper in.
A sudden boom: a rumbling drum? a rainfrog’s thundercall? The beating reverberates within the cavern, within the travellers’ skulls, as Bronze Age rituals reverberate in devolved form through five successive dynasties. The five stand close together in a pear-shaped chamber. The mute dancer steps away. Skywhistle (Parrot now to all around her) listens to the booming, blinks in the curious light, and trembles with a powerful sense of things already seen. At Horsecrest Post Station, once, she dreamed a dream…
Baby begins her dance. In tempo with the pulsebeat rhythm, slow now, slow now, quick and quicker, hastening to hysteric frenzy, she flings out her arms in a sword dance older than any written record, the ancient dance of women speaking for the sky. She moans, she shrieks, and th
e others know that this time she cries out unfeigned: ‘Purple Thunder, Meteor, Damasktip’ –it comes in gasps – ‘Iron-gloam, Liquidhues, Pure Filament, Steely Pleiades’ – she sucks in air, she wheezes – ‘Flowerygraph, Rainbowwhite, Frostblade, Flying Constellation.’ The drumbeat stops. She finishes. She faints.
Parrot and Second Daughter rush to her. Feng looks on helpless. Sparker keeps his distance, grinning like a holy idiot. Parrot scoops water from a pool next to Baby in the cave floor and splashes the dancer’s pallid face. She blinks and sits up, safely mute once more.
‘We’ll rest awhile,’ says Parrot, and Second Daughter nods. Feng removes his small haversack and sits upon it. But Sparker is too uneasy to relax. The rapturous look, the silly grin, has been washed off his face.
He turns to his master in the unnatural light. ‘Those words. What did she mean?’ he asked, taking the cup from his belt, giving Master Feng a drink of water before he can make an answer. Only then – devoted servant! – does he drink deep himself. Hushed echoes whisper hollow overhead.
After some consideration, Feng replies. Some of the dancer’s cryptic words named swords renowned in history. The rest were suitable to be engraved on other blades. But as for why –
‘And why here?’ Second Daughter interrupts, forgetting in her excitement her maidenly modesty.
Sparker frowns at her, disapproving, and then resumes his usual perceptive look. ‘Because a sword – or swords – awaits us. Probably right in this dragon cave. I’m sure we’re meant to find them before we can get the stone the goddess wants. Master! Tell us how we ought to make the search!’
This last he adds not because he himself lacks direction, but rather because – though Parrot stays beside her friend, stroking her hair and murmuring soothing words – Second Daughter has leapt up already and begun to look about her. She grasps a dangling stalactite, as if considering whether to break it off and make of it a cutlass, but restrains herself from such defacement of the cave.
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