Its words hung in the now empty air, only a faint sulphur smell left behind. Ebenezum had a final sneezing fit, then was able to breathe again.
Alea ran toward us out of the woods, followed by Samus walking at a more leisurely pace. She rushed straight to me, saying how worried she had been and how brave I was. After so arduous a day, I decided that I could stand there for a moment and absorb the praise.
“What happened?” Samus asked as he approached Ebenezum.
The wizard shrugged his sleeves out to a more respectful position before looking the gentleman farmer in the eye. “Alas,” he said. “Poor Glauer. He let the bottle get the better of him.”
(III)
“There is nothing so rewarding as a day’s work well done, save perhaps for a full stomach with a warm fire, a purse full of gold, or a three day vacation in the pleasure gardens of Vushta.”
—The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. 23
Ebenezum had gone into the great house with Samus to explain what had happened on the farm, as well as to demand a larger fee (It had been a demon, after all!). So it was that I found myself alone with Alea again. I must admit, had it not been for her presence, I would have long since quit this dismal countryside.
I walked with her in silence around the farm, caught in her fragile web of beauty. She took my hand at last and led me to the door of the barn, the place where we had first come together—unpleasant though the initial circumstances might have been. Now, with all sorcery fled, the enclosure was a different place, filled with quiet dark and the soft smell of hay. I looked into Alea’s face, the lines even more graceful in shadow.
“Alea,” I said, my voice stuck in my throat, “do you think that—the two of us . . .”
She laughed; the wind through a mountain stream. “Dear Wuntvor! I’m afraid that’s impossible. Father would never allow it. You are far beneath my station.”
My world fell away from me. Agony stabbed my chest. My eyes searched the straw-strewn floor for answers.
Alea pulled my hand. I blindly followed. She spoke brightly. I forced myself to make sense of the words.
“—and I want to show you the hay loft. It’s very comfortable. And very private.”
She turned to me, her eyes catching mine. “Father conducts my formal affairs. He pays no attention to my recreation.”
She smiled a tiny smile and led me to a ladder in the hay strewn dark. I began to see some advantages to the farming life.
M. LUCIE CHIN is a promising young fantasy writer who specializes in tales with Oriental settings. Her Chinese ghost story. “Ku Mei Li,” was one of the highpoints of Elsewhere, Volume I, an Ace anthology series edited by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold. “Lan Lung” first appeared in the premier issue of Ares magazine in an abridged version entitled “Dragon . . . Ghost” which, nevertheless, was selected as one of the year’s best fantasy stories (DAW series, #7). At the author’s request, the complete and retitled tale appears below.
Lan Lung
By M. Lucie Chin
Hsu Yuen Pao was a Taoist monk; an eccentric wanderer, an educated man, a poet and a magician. To me he was mentor, protector, Companion and friend. He was sometimes called by the peasants we encountered The Man Who Walks With Ghosts.
I am the ghost.
Or so I have been told. So often in fact that after all the time I have been here that alone might be enough, but there is more. I remember dying. That is I remember the event; the time, the place, the circumstances, the stupidity . . . but not the moment itself. Sometimes I think I am still falling; it was a long way from the top of the Wall, and all my life since that asinine mistake is just a dream, one long last thought between living and dying. But only sometimes. It is hard to believe when the night is cold enough to freeze dragon fire. It is hard to believe when drought turns rivers to muddy washes and rice fields to waste lands and a poor traveler must become a thief to eat. At such times it is easier to believe I have always been here, following Hsu Yuen Pao across the land, that the first thirty years of my life as I recall them are the dream.
But in the end that too is utterly unbelievable. I know too much of another place and time. In my childhood mankind reached for the stars. The Sons of Han have yet to reach across the sea.
I do not know the date by any measure of time I was ever taught. I can not translate the Lunar calendar into the Julian of my memory. It is ancient China; the women have not yet begun to bind their feet and no man in this land has ever seen a European. That is what I know of now. What of then?
I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 12th of June 2010, a fourth generation American of Chinese descent. My name was Daniel Wing and the extent of my ethnic education was limited to the salutations exchanged on Chinese New Year and the names of my favorite edibles. Barefoot on the road I stand five feet nine-and-a-half inches and at the time of the accident atop the Great Wall of China I was as much a tourist as any of the obvious caucasians who made up my group, following the polite guide who filled our heads with images of the past.
It was early April atop the Wall. Somewhere on the way down, as I exchanged one reality for another, it became warm and balmy late spring and I became gwai . . . the ghost. Towering above that diminutive ancient population, dressed strangely, babbling incomprehensibly, understanding nothing and no one I was a perfect candidate for ghosthood; a nonperson, inhuman. Gwai. It is the only word the Chinese have for those who are not of the Sons of Han, the True People, the Chinese themselves. It expresses, more than a lack of life, a lack of reality. It suits perfectly, these days, my own concept of myself.
It is said that a ghost grows faint when touched by the breath of a living man. To spit upon him robs him of his powers to change form and vanish. I was spit upon often in the days before Hsu Yuen Pao found me. He was a wise man. He understood about ghosts far better than the peasants who harried and chased me from their villages and fields. I did not trust him particularly but he was quiet and patient and fed me and talked for me until I learned enough to speak for myself.
He was a small man, even among his own people, and he wore his garments oddly and in a most casual manner. He was young in appearance, though generally travel worn, but his obsidian eyes seemed old as time, deep as wells, seeming to hold yet conceal the knowledge of great age. Villagers sometimes whispered that he had found the secret of eternal life, the personal immortality the ancient Taoist monks sought relentlessly. His hair was very black and carefully braided into the longest queue I have ever seen, which he wore looped through his sash in back for convenience. There hung about his person and around his neck an array of bags, pouches and containers of many types and sizes, and across his back was slung a long, narrow sheath. It was curved, seemingly to better fit the line of his body, and nearly a yard long, black and slim enough to house only the most needle thin of blades. A most unusual and impractical weapon, I felt, but surely one of great value, for the hilt was the purest and clearest of pale pink crystal and in gossamer script of gold upon the scabbard were the two characters yü and yu; one the ideograph for abundance, the other the symbol for fish.
He was afraid of nothing. Brave, in my opinion, to the edge of foolishness, mischievous as a child when the mood struck him, and we were frequently in trouble of one sort or another.
There was not a dialect we encountered which he did not speak with fluency and command, and he wrote poems I have never gained the skill to appreciate. I loved them, though I could not read them.
In the quiet of night or as we walked the endless land, migrating more or less with the seasons, he would tell me of ghosts and he would tell me of dragons.
“The face of the earth is covered with the endless, invisible trails of the dragon Lung Mei. To build a house or bury the dead upon such a spot is a great fortune.”
He often said he felt that he and I had met upon such a spot.
In the second summer of my new existence we made a leisurely journey toward the western mountains. At the convergence of certai
n mountain streams there is a cataract called the Dragon Gate. The great carp of the rivers migrate yearly to this spot to make the valiant but usually futile attempt to leap the falls. Those fish who succeed and gain the higher waters are immediately rewarded and transformed into dragons. They then climb to the highest peaks, mount the passing clouds and are born off into the heavens.
The Dragon Gate and the slopes around it are also the site of rare dragon bones of the finest quality and Hsu Yuen Pao had made this journey often to collect them for geomancy and medical uses. Among the bags and pouches he wore were several in which he carried such things in small shards or ground into powders. I had seen him use them on occasion in the villages we passed through, sometimes to good effect, sometimes not. I think that if there is anything to be said for the power of belief to heal, those bones have worked miracles.
I had my suspicions about them, not that I could positively identify them. That was the point. They could have been anything. They were not abundant except at the foot of the falls (where the implications to me were obvious) but Yuen Pao picked through such as we found with selective care.
In the evenings as we sorted our small horde, setting some to dry by the fire and grinding the more fragile ones into fine powders, he would instruct me as best he could, considering the still simple state of my vocabulary.
“Small bones marked with wide lines are female,” he said. “Rough bones with narrow lines are male. The variegated colors are most esteemed while yellow and white are of medium value and black are inferior. The light, yellow, flesh-colored, white and black are efficacious in curing diseases of the internal organs having their respective colors. If bones are impure or gathered by women they should not be used.
“Dragons occasionally change their bones, regularly shed their skins and horns. The lofty peaks of mountains, cloud shrouded or misty, contain the bones of great and venerable dragons which attract moisture and passing clouds.
“Remember, Little Brother, Lung is the god of all waters and the lord of all scaled creatures. When Lung is small all fish are small. When he is of great size and well pleased with himself there is abundance in all the land.”
He was patronizing and often condescending. But he was also totally fascinating; no less so for believing himself everything he told me. And I learned. Sifting through the convoluted speech patterns the Chinese love, the multiple meanings and implications, carefully sorting fact from myth and tradition, anecdote from parable, I slowly built a body of knowledge I could rely on . . . in one way or another. My preconceptions and skeptical nature frequently got in the way, however, and my memories of another place and time. The first severe blow to these notions came at the end of a month on the slopes around the falls.
There had been a great display of heat lightning far off on the eastern plain during the night and I had been amused by Yuen Pao’s suggestion that it was an omen of some sort, by the seriousness with which he sat up much of the night watching the patterns of light and the scanty film of clouds hovering above the mountaintops looking for interpretations. He found none, though.
We spent the morning descending to lower slopes through forests of hardwood and conifers and rhododendrons. Farther north and west the giant panda roamed these mountain ranges. Below on the plain, bamboo and catalpa and a great diversity of flora had not yet been obliterated by the demands of cultivation. It had been a lush world we passed through on our way up to the Dragon Gate. On our way down we became increasingly aware that the character of the vegetation had changed. It had lost its robust verdancy.
In the afternoon we passed a village nestled where three mountain streams converged. In spite of this the crops which had earlier promised abundant yields were now only mediocre and that at the cost of great labor to irrigate. At the next village we spent the night.
Their situation was much the same but there was word that the central flatlands were suffering badly. What had been scanty rain upon the mountain slopes and valley in the past month had not reached the plains at all. Even here there was fear that the harvest would be disastrously poor—if, indeed, the crop would be harvestable before the monsoon. Every morning the women and girls offered sweet rice steamed with sausages and nuts, bound in leaves, to the rain god, tossing them into the streams by the dozens. Beside the fields and in the bamboo groves braces of swallows hung from poles with long banners of red paper inscribed with respectful prayers.
Hsu Yuen Pao looked about, nodding sagely as we walked, and did not bother to explain. But I got the gist of things pretty well by that time. The Chinese system of education by osmosis was quite workable . . . if it was the only thing you had to do with your life, which in my case was literally true.
He marked our course southeast as we continued toward the plain. It was his contention that we must reach the coastal lands before the monsoon season. For transients such as we, the semitropical climate of the southern coast was a necessity of life. That had not occurred to me the year before. Then I had simply followed. The journey would take weeks on foot and in a rarely used corner of my mind I wondered how long it would have taken by car.
Things were not yet so bad in the lowlands as we had expected to find on that first day down and at noon we stopped in a bamboo grove, still delicately lovely in the motionless air. No breeze rattled the stalks or stroked the leaves but there is something inherently cooling about bamboo groves, especially the fresh yellowgreen shoots which we collected to boil with a little rice for our meal. I took the pack which I had become accustomed to carrying from my back and went about collecting the youngest shoots. When I returned with my pockets full I found Yuen Pao standing across the grove looking at me so oddly it stopped me in my tracks.
“Brother Gwai,” he said somberly. “The night of the lightning was indeed an omen. But it was not for me to understand.” I have never been an endlessly patient man. Occasionally the obliqueness of his technique exasperated me.
“Brother Pao,” I said. “I do not understand. I am not a prophet. I know nothing of dreams or omens. I am ignorant. Please speak more plainly.” I had learned to talk humbly in this land.
“Lan Lung,” he said in a low tone.
The lazy deaf one? I was perplexed. Colloquialisms are confusing in any language. Particularly so in Chinese. But lung is also the word for dragon. Being unable to hear, the dragon came to be known by the word for its only handicap. Lan Lung, then, was also a lazy dragon. I had heard the term as an epithet hurled at street beggars. It made utterly no sense in a bamboo grove. I did not understand and said so.
Yuen Pao instructed me to stay exactly where I was till he returned, then he seemed literally to vanish. I sat down and waited for nearly an hour. When he returned there was a brace of swallows in his hand and the odd look was still on his face.
I went to my pack as he told me, folded back the flap, stepped aside and waited. Yuen Pao approached the pack cautiously, slowly swinging the dead birds by their feet, wings trussed with red cord.
At first I watched Yuen Pao. Then I watched what he watched. There was the smallest ripple of movement within my bag. Hsu Yuen Pao said one word.
The creature that emerged was tiny, palm-sized. It seemed, as the young of many reptiles may, exquisitely perfect in miniature.
“This,” I said, my smile broad with delight, “is a dragon?”
“Do not deceive yourself, Little Brother, Lan Lung is dragon enough for any man.”
Gesturing for me to move farther aside, he offered the swallows before him and backed slowly away. Within the shadow of the pack tiny eyes flashed incandescently orange, bobbed up and down, and were extinguished by daylight as it crept from cover.
It was not as tiny as I had at first thought, though still small and precious. A large handful then, perhaps a foot long head to tail. It had a vaguely bovine head with a long, broad nostrilled snout. Scalloped plates of scale, white rimmed in blue, green and orange, lay flat against the head, three rows deep behind the eyes and below the jaw. Its muz
zle bristled with catlike lavender whiskers and upon its crown were short, blunt, double-branching horns.
Eying the birds greedily the little lizard arched his sinuous, serpentine body and rose upon his haunches stroking the air with four clawed paws. The sleek body was covered with lacelike scales, white edged in pale blue, and the curved claws were deep cobalt. There were flat plates of scale similar to those about his head at each shoulder and hip. It had no wings nor was the spine serrated, but there played about the body a vague bright aura.
As the little dragon’s muscles bunched and he sank down upon his haunches, tail braced, he opened his mouth, but instead of a hiss there was a sound like the chiming of small brass bells. Hsu Yuen Pao swung the birds in a gentle arc, tossing them several feet into the grove. The dragon sprang, covering incredible distance in a single leap, as though gravity had no meaning for him. And as he moved he seemed to grow. He was catsized when he landed upon the swallows and began to devour them quickly.
With the dragon thus occupied, Yuen Pao, moving carefully, collected our few belongings and steered me with deliberate lack of hurry from the grove.
We shortly came upon a road and followed it for a couple of hours in silence before stopping to prepare the bamboo shoots still in my pockets. Yuen Pao was deeply contemplative but for the first time in my admittedly limited experience he also seemed burdened by a weight of uncertainty. As we ate he told me a story.
Lung is the greatest of all creatures living in the world besides man himself. But as there are lazy men, so too are there lazy dragons. They do not like to exert themselves in the task of directing rain clouds about the sky. So they make themselves small and drop to earth where they hide in trees, under the roofs of houses and even in the clothing of unsuspecting men. Lung Wang, the dragon king, learning of their desertion from duty, sends messengers into the world to search for them. Lung may also make himself invisible, as is usually the case when man is present. These messengers are seldom seen, but when Lan Lung is found the Lung Wang, in fury, raises a great storm, killing the deserter with lightning bolts. This explains what might often seem a wanton destruction of life and property during such storms.
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