Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  Hraldy gave the signal. The black horses leapt against their old-fashioned breast straps and picked up speed, manes flying, hooves churning dust that the morning sunlight transformed into a shining curtain boiling out behind them, Christine clinging desperately to the rail and to her lanky escort. As they passed through the two unmarked rocks, Worthington-Pontchart squeezed his thumb down on nothing and made a kissing noise with his lips. Smoky Hill Dan drew rein as they approached the sandpit, and back by the cars, where Mrs. Violet sat in the shade of an awning reading Photoplay, Chang Ming strained on his leash and let out a wild salvo of barks.

  “Too fast!” Hraldy waved his arms. “We get fast driving in another shot. Here we cannot see you for dust! Christine, Christine, you are Vashti, queen of Babylon, devourer of men, betrayer of kingdoms! Does Vashti cling to her charioteer for protection against a little speed?”

  “Can’t you put in a title that I’m checking to see how fat he is before I devour him?” Christine’s breathing was unsteady, but now that the first rush was over, her eyes sparkled with excitement. Dust clung to her face and hair and dimmed the glory of her silver armor; Mary DeNoux bustled up with a soft whisk broom to brighten it again, and Zena applied fresh powder and very gently shook the dust from the Persian queen’s disheveled locks.

  “I’ll undercrank it to about twelve,” said Alec, turning the camera back toward its starting point. The chariot went back for another run.

  “Aren’t they going to rehearse the fall itself?” Emily asked wonderingly, stepping so close to Norah that her parasol made flower patterns over them both. Behind them, all three dogs began to bark, throwing themselves against their leashes hysterically. Norah looked around almost subconsciously for Fallon but could see no sign of him.

  “I should imagine it’s better if they don’t,” said Norah. “She has to look as if she’s surprised. After the first take, she’ll flinch.”

  On this rehearsal Christine was ready. She reveled in speed, as Norah knew from heart-stopping expeditions in the yellow roadster, and once she’d learned to balance herself in the flimsy vehicle, Christine quite obviously enjoyed the chariot. “Do they still have chariot races at the Tournament of Roses in Pasadena?” she asked as the chariot slowed and turned away from the sandpit a second time. “Is it hard to learn to drive one of these things?” She was panting, her black hair a cloud of chaos.

  The cowboy driver was grinning. “Shucks, miss, no harder than one of those jalopies. They don’t run them races anymore, but after we’re all done here, I’ll give you a lesson or two.”

  Inwardly, Norah groaned as the team trotted back to position.

  Up on the ridge above the sandpit Ned the lesser scouted to make sure nobody was near the explosive charge. Voices called out, “Stay clear! This’s the take!” Mary DeNoux tweaked Christine’s dark draperies into place and gave her armor a final brush; Smoky Hill Dan adjusted the lines of the running W that would trip the horses precisely on the spot required. Mr. Worthington-Pontchart checked the first foot or so of his buried wires, then settled back with the little squeeze box between his knees, pale, bright-eyed, and eager as a demented child. “Hush,” Norah heard Mrs. Violet say mildly, “hush, you silly doggies...”

  Alec swabbed the lens with alcohol and double-checked the gate, snapped the camera shut, and pushed his cap back to put his eye to the aperture.

  “Camera!” yelled Hraldy, and Norah stepped forward with the slate as, far behind her, Smoky Hill Dan flipped the reins. There was, obviously, no music to get the performers in the mood; Alice and the Rothstein brothers sat in the shade of Mrs. Violet’s awning sipping Coca-Cola and trying to quiet the hysterical Pekingese.

  “Action!”

  Slow and deliberate, the thunder of hooves began. Norah could see how precise the man’s control of the horses was, slower than the two rehearsal runs, every hoofbeat timed. There was another frenzy of barking, and then, leash trailing, Chang Ming flung himself into the shot like a golden comet, snapping at the flying black hooves and leaping at the soft noses far above him.

  The nearer horse flung up its head with a wild snort, Christine screaming “NO! STOP!” in the same instant that the cowboy driver hauled on the reins. The chariot swerved, throwing dust everywhere, Christine still calling Chang Ming’s name and Hraldy swearing in German and Hungarian as he ran forward, Norah at his heels.

  The horses had stopped a good fifty feet short of the sandpit, snorting and rolling their eyes. Chang Ming darted to the pit, sniffed and pawed worriedly at it, raced back toward Norah, then ran away again. Christine sprang down from the chariot crying “No, no, darling, it’s all right, it’s only a movie!” while the little dog circled, bounced, and barked just out of Norah’s grasp.

  “He’s gotten worse and worse since he’s been out here,” Norah said, trying to catch the leaping, skittering dog and nearly turning her ankle in the soft sand.

  “Now, the woman at the kennels said Pekingese got protective,” argued Christine, kneeling and patting her chest in the sign all the dogs knew meant “come.” She was trembling with shock. “Come to Mother, Changums, it’s all right. It’s all right. I’m not hurt. Oh, darling, are you all right? He could have been killed!” She pressed the little dog to her, cradling the domed grapefruit skull against her cheek. Chang licked anxiously at her chin.

  “He could have got you killed,” Norah said, and bent down to rub her ankle. She paused in midgesture, studying the sand underfoot.

  There were wires under the sand, where no wires should be.

  Wires like those connected to the plunger in Worthington-Pontchart’s hands.

  Worthington-Pontchart ordered everyone from the area, as he had no idea how much, if any, of his guncotton might have been stowed among the cardboard boxes and loose sand of the pit into which the chariot would have slid. In the end he extracted pounds of it, buried just under the surface and rigged to a second set of wires spliced in from the explosives behind the hill.

  “They’d have found you in pieces,” he said with unimpaired cheer to the silent and white-faced Christine back at Frenchy’s. “If they’d found you at all.”

  To do her credit, Christine didn’t flinch or squeal, but her onyx eyes seemed to grow darker against the pallid makeup. She was cradling Chang Ming, whose tongue lolled with pleasure. Black Jasmine was so loud in his indignation at this favoritism that Smoky Hill Dan picked him up and held him against his chest, covering the black fur with “motion-picture orange” and dust. Almost blindly, Christine reached out, and Norah took her hand.

  “Someone wanted to kill me.” Her voice was little more than a whisper, and she shivered in her butterfly kimono. “Someone wanted... Who?” She looked up into Norah’s face, into Alec’s, into Hraldy’s. “Who would... would want to do something like that?”

  Norah said quietly, “Mr. Hraldy, organize a search among the extras. One of them is an old Chinese gentleman with very long white hair; his name is Shang Ko. Have him brought here.”

  THIRTEEN

  WATER OVER MOUNTAIN

  Good omen for seeking advice...

  Those who give advice frequently

  get into trouble for it...

  “IT IS THE Rat-God.”

  Shang Ko looked from Norah’s face to Alec’s and then to Christine’s, where she sat a little distance from him in the old assay office’s single straight-backed wooden chair, surrounded by her three dogs. The assay office was the only brick building still standing in Red Bluff, and Mikos Hraldy had moved his clothes and personal effects out of it and into the tent Alec shared with Doc to give the company a combined interview room and jail. Through the stout door Norah could dimly hear the director arguing with Ned the greater about the advisability of summoning the San Bernardino county sheriff, as opposed to waiting until Mr. Brown could be notified.

  The old Chinese leaned forward on the lower bunk where he sat, broken hands clenched on his knobby knees. His eyes were deadly earnest. “Da Shu Ken, the Great Ra
t of the North, the Kara-Kudai. Bringer of plague, misfortune, and death. It is he who pursues you, who has been pursuing you since the full moon of autumn, the season which is his. It is to him that you have been pledged as a bride.”

  “The hell I have!” Christine exclaimed, sitting up a little straighter and reaching automatically for her cigarettes. She was still wearing Queen Vashti’s silver armor, however; Norah automatically dug the required gold case, amber holder, and rather prosaic box of kitchen matches from her own pockets and handed them to her sister-in-law.

  Alec asked, “Is that why you put the explosives in the sandpit?”

  “I did not place those explosives there,” replied Shang, not appearing in the slightest surprised by the question. He had changed from his Persian armor before Hraldy had located him and, in his faded, too-large street clothes, looked frail and harmless except for the ageless darkness of his eyes. “The Rat-God is here. He is in this camp. He is trying to kill Miss Christine, to take her for his own, and she must be protected against him. At the very least she must be taken out of the desert, for in the desert his powers are great.”

  Norah flinched as something—a strain of wailing music, the memory of incense on dust-laden wind, the full moon over curving roofs—ghosted through her memory. A dream? She could not recall.

  Alec leaned a hip against the side of Christine’s chair, spectacles flashing in the burning knife of light that slanted from the window through the snuff-colored gloom. “And you came out here to save her?”

  The old man hesitated, his face suddenly taut with pain. “I came to warn her,” he said at last. “I do not know if anyone can save her, can defeat the Rat-God. Once, many years ago, I tried.” He shook his head. “Yet I could not... stand aside. I could not know, and not warn her, not do what I can. And now...”

  “And how did Chris get to be this Rat-God’s bride?” asked Alec softly. “He see her outside the premiere like you did?”

  Shang Ko looked surprised. “It is the necklace,” he said. “The Moon of Rats, they call it, for the legends say it is a rat’s shadow which can be seen on the moon.”

  An image sliced through Norah’s mind: candles and three opals gleaming like evil moons in vast gulfs of dark. Music.

  Her hand moved involuntarily to her throat, and Shang’s dark eyes touched her, not asking but knowing. For a moment she had the impression that he had seen into her dream. Then he returned his gaze to his own hands, folded like a stack of broken oracle bones, and sat silently, as if debating how much he could tell them without being dismissed as a lunatic. As well he might debate, thought Norah. He, too, had watched Nadi Neferu-Aten and her lumber-footed Graces and had heard the comments Christine had traded on the porch with Flindy McColl.

  But when he raised his head, his expression was flatly matter-of-fact, as if he knew that in the face of accusations of attempted murder, he really had little to lose.

  “You realize,” he began, “that the Manchu, the last imperial dynasty to rule over my homeland, were not Chinese at all.”

  “Yes, I knew that,” said Alec, and Christine turned to him with indignant surprise.

  “Then why does everybody call them Chinese? I mean, this is the first I’ve heard that the emperor of China isn’t even from China.”

  Shang’s mouth flinched under its long white mustaches, fighting a smile at her expression of cheated outrage. “They conquered China three centuries ago,” he explained, “riding down out of the deserts of the barbarian north. They adopted the customs and the religion of my people, as they adopted the government which ruled the country, which kept the tax records and performed the civil service examinations.”

  “They have a civil service in China?” Christine stared at him, appalled and disillusioned. “You mean people typing up things in triplicate in offices?”

  He bowed to her just slightly. “Even so, Miss Christine. China is a great country whose day-to-day business was far beyond the comprehension of the barbarians from the north. And so, to rule China, they must perforce become Chinese. But at heart there was always a streak of the northlands in the Manchu. There were things about their nomad life which they did not forget.

  “In the imperial palace, the Forbidden City in Peking, there is a pavilion, the Hall of the Tranquil Earth. Among all the pagodas and shrines built by the Ming, the last of the Chinese dynasties, that pavilion was kept as a hall of worship for the older gods, the wild gods of Manchuria, the tribal gods of vengeance and war and the fertility of beasts. And behind those gods there lurked other gods still. Secret gods, demon gods, wild spirits all but forgotten except by those who handed their secrets along.”

  Christine, who had made three unsuccessful tries at getting the cigarette into the holder, finally gave up and handed the whole business to Norah with a pleading look. Norah fitted them together and handed them back, lighting the cigarette when Christine’s hands proved still too unsteady to put flame to tobacco. Christine drew a long breath of smoke, but her trembling did not subside.

  “Upon certain nights the old shamans, the Manchurian witches who knew nothing of K’ung Fu Tze, nothing of the Tao or the Book of Changes, nothing of the teachings of Buddha, would perform sacrifice to those old gods for the inner cult of the imperial family, the Manchu cult of the far north. Sometimes, when they worshiped the gods of the tribes, they sacrificed sheep, sometimes bullocks or a pig. The shamans would interpret their oracles from the squawking of sacred crows, and the emperor and his brothers and the high Manchu princes would feast upon the meat as they had feasted centuries ago in the black tents of the north.”

  “Good heavens!” said Christine, startled. “I thought all the Chinese ever did was burn incense and quote those little sayings like you get in fortune cookies. I mean, people don’t sacrifice things anymore... do they? I mean, except in places like darkest Africa and cannibal islands and like that.”

  “Go to Haiti sometime,” Alec said softly, but he did not take his eyes from Shang.

  “Sometimes,” the old man went on, “if the danger was very great or times very troubled, in the last full moon before the coming of winter, they would worship the secret gods, the forbidden gods, and sacrifice a young girl.”

  Alec was silent. Norah could see in Christine’s face the rapt attention she had given Nadi Neferu-Aten’s tales of reincarnation and tried to identify the strange sense of déjà vu she felt at the old man’s words.

  “They were civilized enough by then to realize that this was wrong.” Shang Ko reached down to scratch Buttercreme’s head, where the little dog lay beside his foot. “But they reasoned that if their victim was Chinese—to them an inferior race—it did not matter. Perhaps, in forgotten time, some princess of the royal house would volunteer for the good of all, for there is great magic in such things. But as the secret cult grew in power, they would select a girl from the lower part of town and dress her as a bride and put about her neck the Moon of Rats, the bridal necklace of Da Shu Ken. Sometimes the emperor himself performed the rite, or whichever prince of the family was the head of the cult, whose councils were the true power behind the Dragon Throne. But more often it was a priest into whose body Da Shu Ken would enter, and it was said that the priest never remembered doing the things that it was clear he had done.”

  The old man spread his crooked hands. “After that the Rat-God would owe a favor to the head of the cult. Being a demon, he could go anywhere, enter into anything to accomplish this favor, killing, maiming, or poisoning whomsoever he was bid.”

  “The necklace...” Christine’s hand crept to her throat as if the white jewel she had worn in two films still rested there in its nest of bronze chains.

  Shang Ko bowed his head again. “I saw the Moon of Rats in the advertisements for your film,” he said. “I hoped—since I understand from the newspapers that films are made some months before they can be shown—that it had been made before the full moon of autumn and that all that was required of me was to warn you never to put the necklace
on again. And I prayed that this was so. I know the Rat-God, Miss Flamande. I know his power. But even as I stood waiting in the crowd, I saw you wearing the jewel, and I knew that it was too late.”

  He sighed and looked down at his hands again, his brow laddered with the memory of pain. For a time there was no sound except for the thin humming of the wind through the tin stovepipe hole and an extra swearing in the street.

  “How the Moon of Rats came into this country I do not know. It was kept with the other regalia—the iron hand drum and the antlered headdresses and the sacred bags of hair—in a great cupboard in the Hall of the Tranquil Earth. Perhaps a eunuch stole it, not knowing what it was. Since the emperors have declined and warlords struggled for control of the Middle Kingdom, much treasure from the imperial palaces has appeared in the markets of Hong Kong, Shanghai, Manila, and San Francisco. Perhaps during the uprising of the Society of Righteous Fists—the so-called Boxers—the troops which invaded the Forbidden City and drove forth the empress and her nephew looted it. I do not know.”

  He leaned forward again, as if he spoke to Christine alone, willing her, at least, to believe.

  “What I do know is that the first time you put that necklace on again after the full moon of autumn, you were given to the Rat-God. You became his chosen bride whether he who put the necklace upon you knows it or not. Now as the year wanes into winter, the power of Da Shu Ken grows with the weakening of the sun. By ancient reckoning it is the season of the Rat-God, the time of the north winds, the desert winds, the time of dust and darkness, the time of the dead.”