The Book of Bones

by Natasha Narayan

  “Yin!” I called in panic.

  Already the mud was up to Orchid’s knee. She was struggling wildly, whinnying as she tried to pull herself out. Her bulging white eyes were frantic with fear. Her whole flank was overbalancing toward the bog.

  Yin turned around and with one look took the situation in. For a moment my courage failed as I feared she was going to tell me to leave my trapped animal. Thank goodness her heart prevailed. With two steps Yin was at my side and was pushing with all her might at Orchid’s flank. Her help made all the difference. Her calm murmuring cooled down my pony and enabled us to lift her hoof out of the mud.

  It was a close thing and we had lost valuable time, for I could now see that the soldiers were on the edge of the bog. I felt a pang of pity for the soldiers. They would fall in like Orchid. Being slowly drowned in mud was a foul death.

  “Do not fear,” said Yin as we saw the soldiers hastening toward us. “They will be trapped but not—”

  Her words were cut off by an arrow that whistled over my shoulder, skimming the top of her hair.

  “Quick!” She turned and was off. I followed as quickly as I could. More arrows were pelting toward us, then poor Orchid gave a howl of pain. A feathery shaft had sped by me and pierced her flank. Blood dripped down her hide, but we could not stop. Not for a second. Though it hurt me to do it, I slapped her ferociously, urging her onward. If we stopped they would cut us down.

  As Orchid stumbled on I risked a fleeting glance at our enemy. They were flying toward us, skimming over the surface of the bog like dragonflies. The tracker led the way, yellow flags streaming from his fur hat. Blood pounded in my ears as I realized what this meant. Yin’s plan was not working. The tracker knew the path through the bog.

  “Yin,” I called, “they know the way.”

  My friend stopped and glanced backward. The horror I saw in her eyes showed she had never expected this. She had always told me that she couldn’t accurately foresee the future. Her visions were mischievous and came to her only in brief, obscure flashes. Well, here was proof.

  “Follow!” Yin growled, her eyes blazing and voice ferocious.

  She veered to the left, making for a large boulder that stood in the middle of the marsh, fringed by feathery bushes. The path was even thinner here. At every step I felt the clutch of the mud, willing me to fall so it could suck me into the underworld. I held on, I think, more by luck than skill, Orchid just surviving too. The mist of last night had been burned away. The sun was straight overhead, lighting the scene without mercy. As we reached a spar of land about ten feet wide and surrounded by bog on all sides, Yin bounded ahead. She crouched in the shadow of the rock. I reached her a second later, knowing this was it. We had no chance. We would be cut down here, cut down and slaughtered.

  Well, this was what I had volunteered for. Death approached in the shape of three Bannermen. It was time to be strong, for Waldo’s sake, for the sake of all my friends. It wasn’t time to indulge in regret. I could only hope it was swift—and that they took pity on Yin. I had to meet this with courage.

  Yin glanced up, calm. “We fight.”

  “What?!”

  “I fight,” she corrected herself.

  “We have no weapons.”

  Her eyes held mine steadily. “We have me.”

  “You?!”

  “Yes, me.”

  “But Yin—” I began, then, unable to go on, stopped. How deluded was Yin if she thought she could take on three trained Bannermen?

  “If we can’t run we must fight,” the mad girl said.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Seconds later the men came round the bend. The tracker, with the long pigtail and mustache, was ahead of his two men. He fingered his saber and slowly looked us over. It was an odd moment of suspense. There was no shouting or firing of weapons, just a lazy appraisal of us—two girls crouching in the shadow of a rock. So calm was the atmosphere that our ponies were unaware of the tension as they chewed on the bushes.

  Yin surprised me. She rose from the rock and very slowly bowed down before the soldiers, beating her head on the ground. What was she doing? Then I understood. This was Yin, I told myself. The Chinese were an oddly formal people. Even in the eye of death it was vital to maintain good manners.

  Rising slowly from her bow, Yin spoke and the tracker replied. They exchanged several remarks in a language I didn’t understand and the tracker began to smile in amusement. Behind him his two companions were chuckling. The two figures faced each other. Yin, no more than four foot tall and the lithe, muscular tracker—a grown man. A ferocious Tartar of six foot or more. Unbelievably it looked as if they planned to do battle.

  “Yin,” I hissed as my friend raised her left arm above her face, “what are you playing at?”

  “Kung Fu,” she murmured, her eyes never leaving the tracker’s face. “Stand like a Pine, Sit like a Bell, Move like Lightning, Walk like the Wind.”

  “Soft as Cotton, Light as Swallow, Hard as Steel,” the tracker replied in Mandarin—at least I think these were his words, for I remembered them vaguely from the Forbidden City.

  I sank back against the rock, my legs turning to jelly. The tracker and Yin slowly began circling each other, their steps formal. It was like the early stages of a waltz.

  “You’re no fighter,” I cried out, but even as the words left my lips I doubted their truth.

  Swift as lightning, the tracker broke the dance, slashing at Yin with his right hand. Fast as the wind, she parried the blow, raising her left hand to her face. The next moves passed in a blur, with the tracker attacking and Yin defending. Punch after punch, to abdomen, solar plexus and throat. She hit back, swift and sure, moving so fast I could scarcely follow her small figure. No doubt she was getting the worst of it, because even though she was fast she was small and frail.

  Or was she?

  Small for sure. But maybe Yin was not as frail as I feared. The tracker raised his hand in a claw-like movement that made me think of a crane rearing its head. Yin chose that moment to parry, charging at him with feet flying in the air. He caught her ankle and for a moment it looked over for my friend. But she pulled out her foot, back-flipped and then somersaulted right over the tracker, catching him in the back with all the force of her small body. And something more, some concentrated fire, for the tracker fell down heavily, landing on his face in the rocks. Yin advanced on the fallen man. His soldiers grew agitated and I saw one of them reach out for his saber.

  But the tracker was rising from the ground, the left side of his face heavily bruised. Rage was glittering in his eyes. He had been made to look a fool—and by a child. He gestured for his man to put away his saber and pulled something from his belt—a cruel pike with a lethal pointed end.

  “Hai!” the tracker bellowed, bearing down on Yin.

  I didn’t see her do it, but she must have picked up her staff because there it was in her hands. A piece of wood against a lethal weapon.

  The tracker struck her with his pike and she retaliated with her staff, cutting it off. Crack, crack, crack, their sticks met mid-air, a dizzying blur of sounds and movements. A swipe of the tracker’s pike at Yin’s blue cotton jacket slashed it open from shoulder to elbow. My heart stopped. Blood dripped from a scratch on her skinny upper arm. “Hai!” the tracker shouted in triumph. Yin hardly noticed the injury. She shrugged off the torn material and was grasping her staff again.

  Pain makes me lose my head, makes my vision blur and anger rise up like mist before my eyes. I’d seen this happen to the tracker when he fell into the mud. Not so Yin. She shook off her wound and moved with the same cool deliberation as before. Flick, flick, flick went her staff, meeting her opponent’s pike. But she was unlucky. The tracker feinted left, drawing Yin’s eye. For an instant her attention was distracted and the tracker pounced. With a sudden stroke he disarmed her, sending the staff flying till it thumped down at my feet. Yin backed away and the tracker advanced, grinning.

  I picked up the staff an
d sent it flying clumsily back to my friend. She caught it mid-air, moving like lightning. She thrust her staff behind his pike and flicked it away. In a second the tables had turned. His pike spiraled into the air, a shimmer of wood and steel. Yin dropped her staff. The tracker and the girl both rose to catch the pike. She hadn’t a hope. He was taller than her. But while I was still thinking this, Yin soared up and grasped the pike as it fell downward. She held it firmly and pushed the tracker back, the spike held against his chest. His fellows were calling now, and one notched an arrow into his bow. Yin stabbed the tracker in the chest. He fell to the ground, screaming, blood splashed across his tunic. With a single movement, her pike snickering and flashing in the sunlight, Yin pushed the other men off the edge of the land and into the bog. The one who was trying to shoot his bow clutched at a rock, his hands scrabbling for purchase. She caught the bow and sent it whirling away into the bog. The other was looking at this small girl as if she was a demon, naked fear in his bulging eyes. He was clutching and clawing at his companion.

  Yin was already spurring her pony away from the shrub, herding it back in the direction we had come from. I stood stock still, frozen in shock, staring at the grasping, wailing men with their piteous, contorted features begging me for mercy. I had come here to die—and instead this.

  I realized now, with the smell of blood in my nostrils, that I didn’t want to die. Not really. If, as Yin said, there was hope, I wanted to grasp it. But still less did I want to condemn others to a terrible end.

  “We can’t leave them. They’ll be sucked down in the bog.”

  “Follow quick,” Yin replied, over her shoulder. “Now.”

  “It’s not right.”

  “They will not die here. The mud in this rock is not deep enough. In an hour, maybe less, the rest of the army will save them.”

  Without a second glance she was gone. I followed in her wake, hoping she was right. If Yin was wrong the fate that awaited the soldiers was horrible. Their screams followed us as we went down the narrow path through the bog. At the fork where we had taken the detour to the boulder, we turned left, walking away from the forest. I couldn’t begin to understand Yin. Just as I couldn’t understand China. I had never before encountered such calm, almost detached, ferocity.

  It was a sop to my weak English soul that just as we were out of sight of the soldiers—traversing the plain—Yin suddenly froze.

  “Have no fear, Kit,” she murmured. “The soldiers are rescued. The army is here.”

  I could see black dots moving through the landscape of sedge, bush and bog, coming from the direction of the forest. Was that a cry I heard magnified by the wind? I couldn’t be sure, but relief lightened my step. Then I stiffened.

  “That means they’ll find us again.” I said. “It was all for nothing.”

  “Maybe,” Yin replied. “We must ride fast to your aunt. I pray that without the tracker the army will be blind.”

  It was too much for me. The soldiers, the bog, the savagery of the Kung Fu fight. I could smell the blood, hot in the marshy air. Bile rose in the back of my throat. I was going to be sick.

  “I wish I’d never come,” the words were out of my mouth before I had time to bite them back.

  Yin turned to look at me, surprised. “If you were not here, I would be dead.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You gave me back my stick. You saved my life.”

  Chapter Thirty

  China is full of wonderful surprises. Delicate bridges that seem to defy the laws of gravity, porcelain pagodas like lotuses in the sky. Here was another: a rock. This boulder, carved into a wonderful dragon shape, was so white it was almost translucent. We saw it from far off in the forest and my heart did a somersault. I understood now that I had never been ready to say goodbye. I had no desire to be a human sacrifice. Somehow we would all get through this. But as we neared our rendezvous, there was no sign of my friends. No grumpy, stocky aunt. No glowering Waldo, fatigued Rachel or irritated Isaac.

  “They will come,” Yin dismounted from her pony and walking over to Orchid patted her flank. “Take sleep while we wait.”

  I was grateful for her advice. My head was light, spinning from the Kung Fu. Along with the nausea that dogged me night and day, there was the taste of blood in the back of my throat. I kept seeing the crimson spurt on the tracker’s tunic.

  I must have fallen into a deep sleep nestled against the hard shoulder of the dragon rock. When I woke up Aunt Hilda was glaring at me, red-faced.

  “Sick or not, this is no time for forty winks,” she boomed as I opened bleary eyes. “What with a whole regiment of the Chinese army on our tail.”

  Waldo, Rachel and Isaac were clustered behind her, weighed down by saddlebags and baskets. They were dust-stained, their clothes ripped by thorns, but very much flesh and blood. As my aunt’s hectoring voice went on and on I stood up and threw my arms around her, squeezing her ferociously. She hugged me back, her eyes looking suspiciously tearful.

  “We should never have let you go,” she grunted.

  “You didn’t let me go.”

  “Obviously she didn’t need our permission,” Waldo muttered, as I tried to struggle out of my aunt’s grip. She would not release me. “Kit is bloody-minded enough to tackle the entire army.”

  “We must put all our bags on horses,” Yin said, relieving Rachel of a cotton bag and loading it onto Orchid. “Come. We must waste no time.”

  I could see my friends looked gloomy. I didn’t know if they had eaten or rested—it was after lunchtime. But somehow Yin was now in command and no one, not even my aunt, had the nerve to contradict her orders. We trekked down the mountain and toward a plain. The countryside was wild, with a raging snow-melt river, which had fed the bog, and sedge, bracken and fern dotted with stunted trees. Some distance from the mountain we saw black smoke rising into the sky and with a cry of alarm Yin urged us forward.

  As we came closer we understood, wordlessly, the source of her distress. A graceful set of buildings with arched terracotta eaves nestled in the lap of the mountain. The buildings unfurled like many-petaled lotus flowers. Two mighty stone lions stood by a flight of stone steps leading to a brick gable and stone entrance. This was the famous Shaolin temple we had heard so much about. This was where Yin had been raised by nuns, where she had learned Kung Fu.

  It took but one glance to see that something was dreadfully wrong. The thick ropes of gray smoke. The drunken gate, smashed and pulled off its hinges.

  We entered the monastery, sick with apprehension. Yin led the way, swaying from side to side. As we emerged into the huge courtyard she cried out and fell. I just managed to catch her before her body hit the flagstones.

  It was scene of utter devastation. In front of us were four rows of stelae, ancient stone tablets, wrought with fine inscriptions. Many were engraved with delicate calligraphy. I saw one tablet bearing the image of a fat monk in a flowing robe. I had heard of these treasures. Some were said to have been decorated by Ming and Tang emperors in centuries gone by. Many of the tablets had been toppled and smashed. Worse, the building itself had been set on fire. The magnificent wooden eaves had been destroyed and were now a smoldering heap.

  Yin rose out of my arms, babbling in Mandarin, and walked in a trance. We came to a hall, room after room, with fabulous painted eaves. They were all smashed and burned with a savage indifference to their beauty. In one such hall there were statues of two monk warriors with snarling faces and bulging biceps. One of the statues had been so thoroughly destroyed that all I could see was a remnant of its blue cheeks. The other, bizarrely, had been left intact by the vandals.

  There was no sense to the destruction. It was just savagery. We wandered through the temple—dining rooms, training halls, shrines. The kitchens had been thoroughly demolished, ovens battered, metal pots cracked, porcelain bowls smashed to smithereens. It was a ghostly place. Not a single monk, nun or warrior remained. In the kitchen I saw a foot poking out of the huge oven
. For a moment I didn’t understand. Then I realized that it was the body of a monk, perhaps one of the cooks who had stayed behind when the others fled. One of the invaders had stuffed him into the oven. I hurriedly urged Yin away from the sight. We emerged from the kitchens into the fresh air with huge relief. Bad enough was the destruction. Yin’s anguish, shown only in her mute, strained face, was heartbreaking. This was her home. The Shaolin temple had meant more to her than anywhere else in the world.

  “They’ll rebuild it,” Aunt Hilda muttered, once we were out.

  “At least the monks got away,” Waldo added.

  “Most of them,” I said, before I could stop myself. Luckily no one seemed to hear.

  We scurried after Yin. She strode through the grounds, avoiding our sympathy and our foolish talk. We followed her as she skirted the Pagoda Forest, with tiered stone tablets reaching to the sky. Some were elaborately carved, some simple—but all were graves. I knew that many of the monastery’s abbots were buried here. We tramped after our friend, not really knowing what comfort we could offer. I couldn’t rid myself of the nightmare sight of the monk’s body thoughtlessly stuffed into the oven.

  Out here in the gardens, soothed by birdsong, lulled by the backdrop of ice-tipped mountains, the violence seemed far away. The invaders had not destroyed trees, thank goodness. They had left the ancient sycamores, the sun-dappled willows, the regiments of pines marching straight-backed toward the hills. We passed a gate into the peony garden. An explosion of crimson, scarlet and orange with here and there the deepest velvety aquamarine. The flowers turned their petal-draped faces toward the sun, and I longed to sink to the ground among them, to forget that such destruction happened in this world for no good reason at all.

  My friend was sitting on a stone bench staring at a bed of peonies. Her eyes were clouded again, wearing that look she had when we first rescued her from the Baker Brothers’ doctor. Isaac, Waldo and my aunt were hovering about her. It was Rachel, with her gift for empathy, who sat down next to Yin and took her hand. It took some bravery to do this, as Yin looked so remote. But she didn’t pull her hand away.