The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  “Even in this place where Time is not,” Mei Ling said, “learning to make gold would take quite too long.” She stood now, a curtain half concealing her; and she beckoned. “There may be no contract to buy. There may also be a contract cost which you would never meet.”

  On his feet, he had Mei Ling in his arms as she reached over his shoulders and drew the curtains together behind him. “Where Time is not, it is always now,” he said, and tried at once to kiss her, to trace the elegant curve of her body, and to unfasten the loops which secured her gown.

  Mei Ling laughed softly. “Even with help, you couldn’t possibly tend to all that at once,” she said, and deftly plucked the first loop free.

  Another candle expired, leaving its lonely companion to stand watch, and coax reflections from the brocaded curtain of the alcove.

  CHAPTER IV

  “And now,” Mei Ling murmured, “what am I—Dragon’s Shadow, Dancing Phoenix, or Sing-Song Girl?”

  “We began as yang and yin,” he answered, “and now, with nothing left to desire, quietly waking-sleep, we still are yang and yin. You are Dragon Shadow, Dancing Phoenix, Sing Song Girl, all at once, and who cares because that is quite impossible?”

  She looked up through half-parted lashes. “You’re not really certain. You still wonder whether a mantram would make me vanish.”

  He sat up, took her by the shoulders, viewed Mei Ling from arm’s length, and sighed. “You didn’t ask me. You told me. But my wonderings are not quite as you think. Phoenix and Dragon—yin and yang—Moon and Sun—you and I, we held each other so closely that there was only one and no longer two of us. Something strange happened to us and we cannot be quite what we once were.”

  Her eyes narrowed ever so little. She almost smiled. “This is interesting, Li Fong. I’m not your first woman. But, I am different, you tell me. Another wine-riddle? Or do you tell me without prize or penalty?”

  “No wine game, now. Maybe I can tell you. If you insist.”

  “I do insist. Maybe you’ll guess, maybe learn why.”

  “This goes beyond words.”

  “Try. Even if wrong, your penalty could be a reward.”

  “You and I—yin and yang—but finally, we were balanced, neither female nor male.”

  “Yes…” Not assent, but breathless urging.

  “Yin became yang, Phoenix became Dragon. A moment of each being the other, while the entireness remained unchanged.”

  “Li Fong, you really do know. When I was completely Phoenix, I had to have my moment as Dragon—what else could I become? For I had to change—that is the Law. When the Sun reaches the Meridian, midnight begins—remember?”

  “All that, aiieeeyah, of course. But you are not like other women. There is something different. You’re trying to talk it away from me, but you can’t!”

  “I am so real that a mantram can’t make me vanish. I so intensely female that I reverse and become Fire and Dragon. And my momentary opposite nature is stronger than your ordinary nature! Drink a cup, Li Fong—that is your penalty, before you drive me mad, drive us mad!”

  She twisted, flipped herself, in a golden arc, landing poised on her toes. Balanced, Mei Ling whipped the brocaded gown about her, and parted the alcove curtains. Li Fong followed her to the table. Fresh lights had been set out. Incense fumed anew. The refilled wine jug was hot from its bath of water.

  “Aiiieeyah, Li Fong, how stubborn, how persistent! Very well, I’ll tell you. My body is no different from the body of an earth-born woman, but I am different. I am fire, Dragon, and Immortal. And until now, never a woman you have known except she was earth, and mortal. You learned this in the only way, at the only moment when it was possible to know the difference.” She filled the cups.

  Li Fong raised his, no more than half way, pausing to regard her.

  “You said I could not lose. That penalty could be reward. Well, now, Dragon Lady, Jade Lady, Woman of All Women, now that I am right, tell me about the reward that could be a penalty.”

  “Another lesson with that tao shih, and you’d be impossible! Tell me your thoughts on the matter.”

  “Since I am totally mortal, the more you are my reward, the greater is my penalty.”

  “For me, also. But think how much each would have lost, if you had not learned my inner and true nature.”

  Li Fong laughed happily. “Cannot win. Cannot lose. As long as we stay here, where it is always now, I am immortal.”

  She looked at him over the rim of her cup. “Old Master, you’ve not been wasting your time. Next time you see Master Tai Ching, kowtow three times. Tell me—have you really truly forsaken the Red Earth?”

  “Master Tai Ching asked for nothing of the sort.”

  “Odd, wasn’t it, how you crawled up out of the desert, and in spite of being starved and dying, you remembered the Soaring Dragon and the Dancing Phoenix. I’ve told you what I am—now tell me who and what you really are.”

  So he told her, and their wine became cold as she listened. “Father would be sad,” he concluded, “thinking I had been robbed and killed, but he would be ashamed and embarrassed if he learned the facts. So, better for me to disappear from the Red Earth. He will adopt Younger Uncle’s son, my cousin Shiu Shen. Younger Uncle died last year.”

  “That girl, Hwa Lan? What of her?”

  “I do not know her as I know you. Nevertheless, I say again, I know she was honest.”

  Mei Ling smiled. “You have no fear of mockery. That is very good. It would be so easy to blame a sing-song girl, or a flower-boat girl for whatever your stupidity brought. Now, this matter of being mortal. The Way of Fire is the only way to me.”

  “The Way to you?”

  “Yes. This tiny world of mine is real, but only relatively so, not absolutely real. To be here with you, I must have my reality partly veiled. For you to be here with me, your reality has to be, has been, somewhat increased.”

  “Aiieeyah!” He pounced to his feet. He caught Mei Ling by the arms, looked at her as though seeing her for the first time. “Now I know—what happened to us—during a strange moment—”

  “That moment will never leave you. But the Way of Fire cannot make you immortal. The most you can do is to risk the next step, and go with me into the next stage of NOW-NESS.”

  He glanced about, as though seeking a gateway.

  She said, “While you work in the garden, I’ll shape the next now.”

  Her voice was a dismissal. Li Fong asked, “How find you again?

  “I have never been away from you. So, after this meeting, could we be further apart? But your earth-habit, too wise ever to be sure of a female creature, is it not?”

  “The Way of Fire may burn that out of me.”

  Mei Ling turned to a lacquered cabinet. From it she took an embroidered pouch, opened and thrust into it several jewels which she gathered from the drawer. “Sapphire and rubies,” she said, “to keep the gold company,” and thrust the treasure into his hand. “This will remind you that no mantram can ever make me vanish—that there is reality between us.”

  Mei Ling nudged him toward the brocaded curtains. “Many ways into our little world, and many a way out of it, Breathe deeply as you leave—exhale a reminder of me, into your world.” Li Fong’s merging with the boundary was as incomprehensible in departure as it had been when he entered.

  He walked in cold moonlight, near the pool in the monastery garden. He had an embroidered pouch, amazingly heavy for its size. Sweetness lingered in his nostrils. When he licked his lips, the cosmetic taste assured him that this was no hallucination. Whatever treasure a sleepwalker might have found in his prowlings, a smudge of lipstick was impossible.

  Li Fong looked up. What he still termed, in his mind, “last night,” had been lighted by a full moon. Now the frail sliver of a new moon was rising.

  He was still grappling with h
is perplexity when Master Tai Ching emerged from the dark entrance of the monastery.

  “The people of the Red Earth enjoy Moon watching,” the tao shih remarked. He listened to Li Fong’s none too coherent queries and statements, then resumed, “That is the new Moon, and you did surely quit this place under a full Moon. That you still fancy that you left ‘last night’ is illusion. Harmless, of course, yet, error.”

  “I apologize for rudeness. I intended nothing of the sort.”

  Li Fong would have kowtowed, but Tai Ching prevented him. “Please desist. I am neither your father nor your teacher.”

  “Venerable Sir, I deserve this dismissal.”

  “This is not the sort which you have in mind,” Tai Ching said. “This is recognition. Your return with the perfume of the Dancing Phoenix tells me that you have taken a step along the Way of Fire. She will lead you as far as you dare go.”

  “Venerable Sir, there is more than I understand.”

  “The Dragon Lady will clarify.”

  “But the Way of Fire—is there a point of no return?”

  “In this respect, and I know not how much more, your experience has gone further than mine. If you vanish, and I do not see you again, I must conclude that there is such a point.

  “Meanwhile, you are welcome to stay here. I cannot accept any of the gold in that purse. Each day, you must work to earn your food.”

  The tao shih bowed, and left Li Fong to examine, by the candlelight of the shrine, the rubies and sapphires from the land of the southern savages, the Indian mohurs, and the staters stamped with the head of Flavius Claudius Julianus, Emperor of the Western Barbarians…and gold coined by earlier monarchs…

  CHAPTER V

  Whether because of fancy, or out of necessity, Mei Ling waited until the full moon to seek Li Fong. This time, she led the way into her world of everlasting now.

  “Sing-Song Girl, or Dancing Phoenix?” he quipped, as she made her way into the reception room.

  “We’ll be all things, all at once, Old Master. And you’ve brought the gold and the trinkets back with you—you knew, surely, that I offered them as a gift, and not a proving that you and I had met?”

  “Your gift raised questions.”

  “Wine game riddles, with penalties?”

  Her brows rose, and her smile matched the sweet mockery of her voice. He shook his head. “While you’re still all stately, with your tall headgear, tell me things, before my understanding begins to dance and go wild, or falls on its face. Master Tai Ching says that he can teach me nothing about the Way of Fire.”

  “Aiieeeyah! So, he knows?”

  “He knew, before I spoke.”

  The spray of peacock plumes swayed as Mei Ling nodded. “So, you don’t know whether to study in the monastery, or to come here and take the Way?”

  “Yes.”

  “Those who quit the Red Earth before they are truly ready sometimes have their regrets.”

  “They cannot return?”

  “You mean, whether you could not return.” Without waiting for assent, Mei Ling continued, “Was it more difficult to enter, this time, than the first?”

  “It was easier.”

  “Then?”

  “I didn’t find my own way. You came to guide me.”

  She smiled tantalizingly. “You’re not sure but what I might through forgetfulness, indifference, leave you tramping the dust of the Red Earth, no longer belonging there, but not able to return to the Land of Fire.”

  “Jade Lady, this is not bargaining,” he protested. “This is not distrust of you.”

  “All you want is to know what you’re about to do?”

  “Of course.”

  “Fire,” she flashed back at him, “is knowing without reason! Without thought. Without clod-like intellect!”

  He got to his feet. “Dragon Lady, I bow three times. I am a clod of the earth.”

  “With one tiny spark which knows! Tell me, Li Fong, why is all this?”

  He slapped the embroidered purse to the table.

  “With this, I could repay my father for all that I cost him, just to benefit a thief. There is sufficient more to buy land, so that he could establish the family, before he dies. I am sure he has already adopted my cousin, Shiu Shen, to pay funeral respects when the time comes. And it is said that the seven generations just past are ennobled, when a son quits the Red Earth.”

  “Aiiieeeyah! Inimitable Li Fong! Becoming half-immortal, and sleeping with me to the weariness, in a world without day or night or time, this will make seven generations of ancestors happy?” She sighed, shook her head, but could not keep her eyes from mocking him. “That would make them envious—unhappy!”

  “Penalty! Drink one cup! Only the male ancestors would be envious.”

  “You learn, you learn,” she conceded, and moved to the doorway. “See, how lovely-strange the lake!”

  Pulsing fire towered without limit. The golden ruddy column became greenish and then clear blue. It expanded until the coping of the tiny lake was in the purple heart. Mei Ling’s lips moved. She made an invocatory gesture. The color changed, until it became—to say white would have been an absurdity, yet to have called it colorless, nonsense equally devoid of meaning.

  Wave after wave of heat billowed against Li Fong, yet his garment did not scorch or smolder, nor did hair or eyelashes curl or smoke. Mei Ling ceased intoning the mantram which came to him, clean out, resonant as a war drum, and also, no more than a whisper. She shaped a final mudra.

  And, “Svaha!”

  The pagoda of white-colorless fire stabilized.

  Li Fong flipped off his sandals.

  “This is the test?”

  She nodded. The plume-sprays wavered.

  He turned his back to the silent strange flame whose immeasurable heat did not consume.

  “Do you lead—do I lead—or do I go alone?”

  She regarded him with eyes inscrutable, dark and deep as the gulfs between stars. Whether challenge—warning—or benediction, he could not tell. When, finally, she said, “Li Fong, this is no wine game,” he knew that he was on his own. He had neither an ally, nor any second chance.

  Deliberately, he took off her headdress. He unfastened the loops of her tunic, and plucked it, so that it crumpled about her ankles. He nudged Mei Ling, and she stepped clear of the garment.

  “Dragon Lady, you knew that I knew where your fire is.” He did not glance back, since behind him there was only a tiny lake, and no tower of elemental flame. “Nice riddle. No penalty.”

  “Nice tunic,” she said, smiling, and retrieved garment and headgear. Then, as she went with Li Fong, “You know where the fire is, and you know its Way. No penalty.”

  Darkness and brilliance came and went. When they awakened, Mei Ling would serve rice and bean curd with mushrooms, or steamed bamboo shoots and crisp water chestnuts. And always, after breakfast, the Great Book Room invited Li Fong. Learning the Way of Fire had been only the beginning of study.

  Sometimes, she would bring tea and a tray of dim sum to the library, and hear him expound what he thought he had learned. Often, she would set him right, and they would laugh, and add to the score of penalties to be assessed at the next pouring of wine.

  “Old Master.” Mei Ling finally wondered. “I am still far from sure how you learned the Way of Fire.”

  He set down his tea cup. “Dragon Lady, there was no fear of passing through the flame. Why this was so, I cannot say. I knew simply that the attempt would have been no test at all.”

  “Aiieeyah! Elegant, spontaneous liar! The way you did take, not too long after we quit the garden—that was an ordeal?”

  She snapped her fan shut.

  “That is not what I said. Do not make as though to slice my head off with the edge of that fan. The first time I entered the land of here and now you as
ked me things, and I answered. After many wrong replies, with penalties to match, I had learned more than I’d realized, at the time. So it came about as it did.

  “And we were speaking, you remember, before I faced the flame? Speaking of those who quit the Red Earth, and of those who return to it and what might happen to them?”

  Mei Ling sighed, spread her fan made a slow gesture with it.

  “I remember, and I have been thinking. There is the Great Law, the all-containing Tao, which has its own order. Neither Gods nor Dragons can evade. At times, they cannot even foresee, and in their own way, they are helpless as any man of the Red Earth. Least of all could they help you upset your karma, the sum total of all the lives you have ever lived.”

  “You have in mind, for instance—”

  “Once it was your fate to be robbed. Once, you were taken out of jail to fight the barbarians in Hotien. What you did not escape, you may meet it again, and be snared. And what you did escape, it may trap you this time, without recourse.”

  Li Fong hefted the purse of gold. “Maybe I’d not lose this. But there might be an army I could not desert.”

  She recited,

  “…not one battle famous in history

  Sent all its fighters back again…”

  “So, I should forget my obligation to my father, and stay here in the everlasting now?”

  “No! That is not the way of the Dragon. I will teach you mantram and mudra to use against whatever assails, whatever traps you. This is not outwitting karma—you will gain only a postponement of it. The enchantment I will teach you is deadly beyond all imagining. I will not tell you its nature. If I did, you might shrink when the time came, fearing that what you set in motion would include you, and destroy you.”

  She fixed him with eyes dark and smoldering. He endured her gaze as he digested her words. Finally he said, “When postponed karma is finally paid, the interest is heavy. But I accept that, too.”