“Who did this?” Rachel asked.
Yin shrugged.
“How evil, in such a holy place,” Rachel murmured. “I can’t tell—”
“It is more than that,” Yin interrupted—looking up at us clustering around the bench. “We did this.”
Her words shocked us into silence. But of course they made sense. It seemed likely that the soldiers had ransacked the temple as they looked for us. Then I stopped. We had outwitted the soldiers, left them behind as we diverted the tracker. How had they got here before us?
“But,” I said, “the soldiers are stuck halfway down the mountain.”
“The Empress has many soldiers. Another regiment came here. I think many days ago,” Yin said. “They look for the Book of Bones.”
“The Book of Bones,” I echoed.
Aunt Hilda was rigid, suddenly very alert.
“Imperial family, soldiers, merchants, foreigners …” Yin shrugged. “All seek the power in the Book. They think the Book will make them strong, powerful. They think with it they will rule the world.”
“Why now?” I burst out. “I mean, the Book of Bones has been in the monastery for years.”
“This is what I say. I think it is from us,” Yin answered. “Maybe the Empress find about Book from Mandarin Chao.”
“But he didn’t know about it,” I replied. Then fell silent. Perhaps he had overheard our talk or one of his spies had. I felt guilty thinking of that gracious, hospitable nobleman. His brave son. They had saved our lives. I hoped that their reward had not been disgrace. Had he confessed our secrets under torture?
Musing on this, my eyes followed a hummingbird which hovered above Yin, tame as a pet canary. It was a tiny thing, no bigger than the span of my hand, wearing an iridescent purple jacket. For a moment I thought it was going to land on her arm, but then it swooped away, spinning above a patch of plants. We watched its beating wings, moving so fast they were a shimmering blur. It dived down, dipping its long beak into the flowers. When I lifted my eyes, a nun had materialized in front of us.
At least I think it was a woman. She was so old, so very, very old, that she was almost beyond the difference between man and woman. She was gray all over, from her spider-web robe to her hair. She was an apparition. She must be. The ghost of a nun which had appeared to us. Nothing about her looked quite real. The shining dome of skull, the cheeks covered with wrinkles as fine as calligraphy, the slender, stooping back. Marbled eyes peered through shaggy eyebrows. She could have been a thousand-year-old sculpture come to life. All things were possible in China, this ancient land with its history running back to the dawn of man.
Yin had leaped up and was kowtowing to the ground. She turned to us, her face alight.
“Gray Eyebrows,” she explained.
I fell to the ground, kowtowing. Memories of what Yin had told us about her mentor, Gray Eyebrows, flashed through my mind. She had looked after Yin when she was brought to the monastery. The others followed my example, all except Aunt Hilda, who bowed her neck rather stiffly.
“Gray Eyebrows taught me everything. Kung Fu, meditation, English,” Yin explained. I could not take my eyes off the nun. There was something uncanny about her—so thin, pale and insubstantial that she appeared to float several inches off the ground. She didn’t even look like a Chinese ghost.
“You must be so proud of your pupil,” Waldo blurted out. “Kit tells me she is a great fighter. She destroyed soldiers of the Imperial army without any sweat.”
I blushed at Waldo’s remark. From what I knew of the Buddhist teachings they followed in this monastery, pride was not an emotion to be proud of—so to speak. The monks and nuns here strove to be humble. Fighting was also something to be avoided. Though the warrior monks practiced Kung Fu till they were highly skilled at it, they were meant to use their only art in self-defense. Never to attack others, or use it for evil. I feared the nun, Gray Eyebrows, would give us a lecture, but she merely smiled. Then she turned and her eyes locked into mine. They bored into me, bright points of fire that scorched. The smile had disappeared. A high voice issued from her, though her mouth didn’t move. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy, as if someone else was speaking through her.
“I must speak the prophecy.”
“What prophecy?” Aunt Hilda butted in.
The voice continued, ignoring the interruption:
“The Black Snake slithers
Around Yin and Yang,
Man and Woman,
Old and Young.
Only one can cut the knot.
One who rides the great sleep.
In the land of white sun the Shaman awaits.
Then can the fruit return to the tree.”
The shrill voice ceased abruptly, leaving us all silent. I was chilled by the tone and by the sound of the words, though I could make no sense of them. I could see the same fear on my aunt’s face, all of us shocked and uncomprehending. I sneaked a look at Yin, but her eyes told me nothing. Abruptly the nun’s head jerked and her eyes refocused.
The nun gestured to Yin to come with her and the two of them walked away. We watched until the two tiny figures disappeared into the bamboo grove. I think all of us were unsure how to react—and what the appearance of this nun meant for our mission.
“This is a pretty kettle of fish,” Aunt Hilda said once they’d vanished. “What do you think all of that means?”
“Doesn’t look very good for my chances, if nothing else,” I said.
“Oh, don’t go getting all nervy again,” Aunt Hilda harrumphed. “For heaven’s sake. They’ve gone and left us. What are we supposed to do now?”
“Patience,” Waldo replied, surprisingly. “We’ve got to learn patience.” He sat down on the bench and I slumped by his side. My feet were aching and my head felt woozy. “Yin would never abandon us,” he continued. “She said before she would meet us at the rock.”
“She kept her word that time. She will now,” Rachel agreed.
“But she never explained anything this time!” Aunt Hilda pointed out triumphantly. “She’s simply skedaddled without rhyme or reason.”
We waited. We collapsed on that bench and waited, till the sun began to sink in a glowing bundle. The birdsong was constant, a musical chatter. No one talked much, as we were all affected by the monastery’s strange presence and the nun’s enigmatic words. I thought of Shamans and white suns. At some stage Waldo and Isaac went to find our bags, which we had left tethered with the ponies at the entrance. They came back with steamed buns, which we ate washed down with warmish liquid from our water skins.
I would be lying if I didn’t say we were anxious. All of us, each in their own way, were weighed down by doubts.
When even I thought Yin had abandoned us for some mission of her own, our friend appeared. She had changed her blue cotton pajamas for a nun’s orange robe, which caught the last rays and made her appear as a blazing phantom, gliding toward us. Her head had been shaved, all the black fuzz that had so softened her features brutally cut off. The sight was a cruel reminder of the Yin we had first seen on the Mandalay but without those black lines scrawled all over her skull.
I rose to meet her, suppressing my dismay, but she gestured me to sit.
“We rest here tonight. Tomorrow we go.”
“But what if they come back?” Rachel shivered.
“They do not,” Yin replied with calm certainty. “The soldiers have gone.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Gray Eyebrows speaks to me. She knows why you are here. She tell me, tomorrow we go.”
This was cryptic, even for Yin. “Go where?” Isaac asked.
“We go to real place. I have much sadness for the monastery, but Gray Eyebrows tell me that the monastery is not in the stones. It is in heart and soul of our people. So we go.”
“Where?” Aunt Hilda snapped.
“To the cave. This is where Book of Bones is hidden.”
Blood rushed to my head, pounding in my fevered
brain. Tomorrow we would go. This was it. My opportunity to save myself from the Bakers’ poison and the madness coursing through my own thoughts. I could feel the Book of Bones calling to me, its voice clear above the birdsong. What was this book? We knew so little about it. Yin had been reluctant to tell us more. But I felt its signal nonetheless, spreading golden warmth. It would heal me. I was sure it was a force for good. This was my last chance, and as I rose and clasped Yin’s arm my hand was trembling.
“Thank you, Yin. Thank you.”
Chapter Thirty-one
I clung to Orchid’s neck and stroked her mane, which hung down her flanks in rough hanks. She smelt of horse, smoky and moist. I would have liked nothing better than to groom her, to wash away the dirt and brush her tangled hair. Instead I had to say goodbye.
“At least you’ll be safe here. Gray Eyebrows will look after you.”
I could not forget my last horse, Tara, cruelly murdered in the Himalaya mountains by agents of the Baker Brothers. Orchid nuzzled my face. Her big brown eyes looked dolefully into mine. She seemed to know we would never see each other again.
Gray Eyebrows stood on the mountain path, very calm and still. Her ash-colored robes moved gently in the breeze. Her eyes locked with Yin’s and she moved her head downward, saying goodbye. I could see no emotion, nothing that I could spot anyway, on either of their faces. But I knew they must feel this renewed parting very painfully. The older nun was the closest thing to a mother Yin had known in the monastery.
As you know, I have no mother myself. I had only dreamed of having a mother. Still, I could imagine how it felt to say goodbye after the briefest of reunions.
Taking the reins of the two China ponies, Gray Eyebrows moved off down the track leading back to the monastery. She had come halfway up the mountain, to the spot where the path split in two, to show us the way. She was going back to her wrecked home. Though the nun seemed hardly of this world, her presence had given me a sense of safety. Now she was gone.
Yin led the way up the mountainside. I followed her, silently concentrating on my feet. It was very cold this far up. There was not a single place to hide—no trees or bush on the rocky slopes. The wind howled, stinging hands and faces. Bending my head, I battled on. The further we went, the more the path dissolved. We moved slowly, finding ledges for our feet. One stumble would be fatal, for the mountainside fell cleanly to the plains, thousands of feet below. Aunt Hilda was finding it especially hard work. She is as tough as an old boot, my aunt, able to withstand desert and glacier. But she is stocky, even a little stout, and hauling all sixteen stone of herself up bare rocks is not something she found easy.
I did not want to let the others down, did not mean to be a burden even for a moment, but I was not myself. My legs were slow to obey my brain, my hands annoyingly jelly-like. My fingernails were scabbed and bleeding from scrabbling around on the rocks to find crevices to hang onto. The soles of my feet had cracked and blistered and the pain was excruciating. Worst of all was my mind. It was dizzy, floating. The lack of oxygen in the air intensified my feeling of weightlessness. The moment in the monastery garden when I had imagined I’d heard the Book of Bones calling me felt remote.
We had been climbing for several long hours before we stopped for lunch on a patch of earth, by a large red boulder. It was more steamed buns, white and gluey, along with dried fish. I had become used to the buns and scarcely noticed the taste of the dry meal. Waldo and Isaac gathered a few stunted twigs and made a brush fire so we could boil a little water. It was incredibly hard to get lit, for the wind was so strong it blew out the first flames. After much trial and error Isaac managed to get it going. I think Aunt Hilda was more of a nuisance to him than a help, for she bustled around, poking at the twigs and generally getting in the way.
Suddenly the fire exploded. A gout of red flame shot up into the sky and burst in a shower of sparks. The sparks left a trail of gray smoke in the air, directly above us. We all screamed and jumped back, not that there was much place to move in the shadow of that boulder.
“Isaac!” Rachel howled. “This isn’t the time for tricks.”
“What tricks?” Isaac yelped, his face white and shocked.
“Your mad science experiments.”
“I have no wish to attract the Bannermen!”
“Calm down,” I said quietly, and because I was ill they stopped. “Isaac is telling the truth.”
“How do you know?” she retorted angrily.
“I just know.”
Isaac, his face gray, said, “It must have been something in the wood.”
While the others bickered, Waldo actually did something practical, shoveling earth with his bare hands and throwing it on the glowing embers. We all followed his example and soon the fire was covered.
“We must go. Run,” Yin commanded. “Very bad if someone sees smoke.” I knew she suspected a joke or a trick.
We hefted our bags and trudged upward, past bleak boulders and stunted scrub. My blistered feet were aching and my throat was parched. My brain followed its own circular trail of thoughts about the explosion. It could have been a piece of wood, yes, or some bizarre properties of the sand and gravel on this mountain. Or it could have been one of us. If not Isaac, then who? Aunt Hilda? She always played a deep game. I didn’t really know what her motives were here in China. But why would she want the Imperial army to find us? As an English spy, she would suffer more than anyone else.
My brain was as sluggish as my body. Hardly surprising that I did not find answers.
As I trudged on, lagging behind the others on that bare mountainside, I felt as if my stuffing was leaking out. My thoughts were on the prophecy. The Black Snake. The land of the white sun. The sleeper and the fruit returning to the tree. I could make nothing of it. It sounded like gibberish. Yet I had a sense that it had meaning, some message especially for me. I rested for a moment on a ledge no bigger than a tea tray, my back pressed against the rock, my knees trembling with the pressure to keep still. Then I did it. I looked down.
“Don’t look!” Yin had commanded at the start of our journey.
I’d scaled a cliff before. I knew the importance of keeping my energy coiled and my mind focused on the task of inching step by step upward. But here I was dawdling, gazing down.
A very strange thing happened. I didn’t feel the world tilt. I didn’t swoon. Instead, a gust of wind whooshed through my head, blowing away the dust. What a glorious sight—ravines tumbling, monastery and fields laid out like a patchwork quilt. I felt elated. I was a hawk soaring high over a world of mists and tiny human ink spots. I was free, with one flap of wing, I was wheeling high.
“Kit,” came the anxious cry from above, “are you sick?”
I didn’t respond for a moment, unable to place the voice.
“Do you need help?”
It was not Rachel, the worrier, but Waldo, backtracking perilously down the mountain to find out where I was.
“I’m coming,” I called back, but I do not know if my words were blown away.
He came for me, his handsome face flushed. “Here, I’ll give you a hand,” he said, grabbing my arm. I tried to brush him away but he insisted. I saw Isaac grinning away, several feet above us, and decided to submit. Sometimes it is more relaxing just to give in.
I found it much easier to scale rock and boulder. Perhaps it was Waldo’s guiding hand. My fingers seemed to know where to grip, my feet where to stand. I moved up, forgetting my cracked feet. My dizziness had somehow evaporated when I looked down. I was freed by the knowledge of certain death if I fell. The sight had brushed away the self-pity that had coiled about my heart for weeks, suffocating my energy.
Within minutes Waldo and I had caught up with the others. A new sound buffeted us, adding to rushing wind. Water drumming, tumbling, falling, swishing all around us.
“We must go through Water Curtain Fall before coming to Echo Pavilion,” Yin murmured.
Turning the corner of the cliff, we had come to a
magnificent waterfall, which pounded down the mountain for hundreds of yards. A fine spray whirled off the water, coating everything in mist. But a path had emerged, traversing the mountain sideways. Yin scrabbled up to it. We followed, thankful when we reached it. Though it was still treacherously slippery, it was a definite track. Other feet had trodden this way before ours.
Except that it seemed to be taking us into the heart of the waterfall. We followed Yin’s darting orange form. She was like a flaming sprite, luring us on. Somehow we were passing under the water, which roared and pounded above us as we walked through. Suddenly we were in twilight. A wavering, aquatic world, the sunlight filtering through the falls in streaks and uncertain shafts. Yin was dappled with dark patches, striped like an orange tiger.
I had a feeling we were nearing the end of our journey.
Yin stopped and turned to us. “We are going into the mountain,” she murmured.
“Into the mountain?”
“Yes.”
“This is where the monks are hiding?”
She didn’t answer my question directly. “It is the Shaolin way. We fight only when we have to. Other times we hide.”
“But inside the mountain?” Rachel said wonderingly.
“There are secret places here. Echo Pavilion. Wandering Nun Grotto. Tranquility Pool. Places to disappear.”
Behind Yin was an opening in the rock, a gash of raven darkness, deeper than the smoky rock all around. We would have to crouch to go into this hole, this passage to her secret world.
“Gray Eyebrows tell me the Book of Bones is hidden here,” she whispered, so low I was unsure of her words. “But to find the Book we must go through the Wooden Men Lane.”
“The Wooden Men Lane?” I asked absentmindedly. “What is that?”
“They fight,” Yin replied, flashing me a dark look. “The Wooden Men kill.”
The Book of Bones Page 18
