The Dragon's Gate

by Barry Wolverton

  “We need to buy time,” said Sean. “Clew the sails to slow us down.”

  “Yes, I’ll relay that to the men,” said Barrett. “Meet you below.”

  While they waited for her, Bren turned to Sean and asked, “Why don’t you trust her?”

  “Why would I?” said Sean. “You have to admit, she’s a bit of a character.”

  Bren considered that more or less a compliment. “I know you don’t know my friend Mr. Black, but he wouldn’t have sent Lady Barrett if he thought I couldn’t trust her.”

  “Except he sent her to find you and return you to Map,” said Sean. “He didn’t mean by way of China.”

  The cabin door flew open and Barrett bounced in. “Marvelous, you’re all here. What do we need?” When no one replied, she asked, “Did I interrupt something?”

  “Not at all,” said Sean. “We need parchment, pen, and ink.”

  “I can do that,” said Barrett, fumbling around in a drawer that they all realized now wasn’t hers, until she found a blank sheet. After a bit more rummaging around, she produced pen and ink.

  “Most papers of transit I’ve seen start this way,” Sean began, and he went on to describe the formal language and the general length, spinning an official-sounding tale of scouting the South China Sea, per the new alliance in the works between Britannia and the Netherlands. They would explain in person, if it came up, how the ship rescued the survivors of the Albatross, but without mentioning the rogue governor. Bren added the seals of Britannia and the Netherlands and forged the two royals’ signatures. The last thing was the ship’s name. Sean and Barrett spent fifteen minutes arguing about it, neither willing to approve of the other’s suggestion, until Bren finally blurted out, “How about the Fortune?”

  The two combatants agreed to that and Bren wrote it down.

  “My God, lad, you have a career as a master forger if you want it,” said Sean.

  Bren smiled, until he heard the stern voice of Archibald Black in his head telling him that it wasn’t a compliment.

  “And you’re in luck, having a proper British captain on board.”

  “You mean me, of course,” said Barrett.

  “You?”

  “You did know I’m British, didn’t you? Or did the accent slip past you?”

  Sean had to keep from laughing. “You’re a lady!”

  Barrett marched over to where Sean was standing. He stood his ground, and she punched him in the face.

  “Come on, you big red dope,” she said as Sean rubbed his chin and tried to blink the water out of his eyes. “Hit me back, if you’re man enough.”

  Sean made a fist over and over again with his right hand, but he couldn’t bring himself to hit her. Instead he gave her a good shove, sending her tumbling backwards into the chair and desk. She didn’t hit the floor, though.

  “Stop it!” screamed Mouse, jumping between them and pushing Sean against the wall. He held up his hands to let her know he was done.

  “I just meant, you hired me to take you to China,” said Sean. “I assumed you meant me to captain the ship.”

  “Then you should’ve said what you meant,” said Barrett.

  They all kept out of each other’s way after that, and in a couple of hours they were pulling into the harbor at Bantam, the port at the narrowest point of the Rotterdam Straits. It was nothing as impressive as Cape Colony had been. In fact, from a distance it looked to Bren more like the part of Map he’d grown up in—a clutter of shabby wooden houses. Here, though, the ones near the water were on stilts, like a lady hiking up her skirts to traipse through a puddle.

  Barrett had no trouble convincing the clerks at the Bantam factory that she was in charge of the ship. Bren had thought she might take the opportunity to pretend to be a man, but she didn’t bother. Chief Clerk Boerhaven raised an eyebrow when he met Lady Barrett, but that was it. After all, Britannia was ruled by a queen; who’s to say her ship captains wouldn’t be women as well?

  The bigger challenge was that the chief clerk had received word of Admiral Bowman’s treason and the uprising at Cape Colony, and he was on high alert.

  “We’ve also had a trader go missing looking for tin deposits on nearby islands,” said Boerhaven. “Fellow by the name of Wycoff. Don’t know why I wouldn’t have heard that a British scout was passing through to the China Sea.”

  Sean started to explain, but Barrett jumped in.

  “You’re quite right, Mr. Boerhaven. These are uncharted waters, if you’ll forgive the pun. Top-secret stuff, in fact, and the governor will be getting his own briefing. For now this is for your eyes only, do you understand? This is all part of the new Britannia-Netherlands alliance. Exploring new trade options, if you will.”

  Whether Boerhaven was dazzled or just outright confused by Barrett, it didn’t matter, because he eventually stamped the letters of transit “approved” and returned them to Barrett.

  “How about a tour of the factory then, for those of you new to Bantam?”

  Bantam itself was small, but Java island was large. Beyond the rickety-looking houses were acres of cultivated farmland: flooded rice fields in one direction; rows of cotton as far as the eye could see in another. The chief clerk walked them through a sea of green stalks twice as tall as any of them, and when he explained that it was sugarcane, Bren’s eyes went wide. The last British ship he had tried to stow away on was one bound for Jamaica, where they supposedly had grass made of sugar. Was this the same thing?

  The chief clerk laughed at Bren’s expression. “Would you like to try some?”

  Bren nodded eagerly and the chief clerk pulled out a large knife and cut away a hunk from one of the massive stalks. “Just chew it,” he said, and when Bren put it in his mouth, it was like sucking on a piece of soft wood, pulpy and fibrous. But then he tasted the sweetness. . . .

  “Maybe Mouse would like a sample?” said Barrett, and the chief clerk cut away a piece for her too.

  When they came back to the heart of town, Boerhaven showed them bushels of spices called nutmeg and clove, which he explained came from tropical trees all through the islands, and burlap sacks of coffee beans. The smell was overwhelming. There were also large flat carts stacked with ivory—elephant tusks longer than a man, and rhinoceros horns. But the chief clerk seemed most proud of an enormous tent, where table after table was covered with small, milky white cakes. It was rubber, he explained, collected and dried and ready to be turned into tires for the bicycles that gave the Dutch Bicycle & Tulip Company part of its name.

  “This is primarily a trading post, of course,” said Boerhaven. “We do our share of farming here on Java, but the bulk of everything we export comes from all over the Dragon Islands and Southeast Asia. To ensure steady profits, the company negotiated with local farmers to convert to commercial crops like the ones you’ve seen.”

  “Negotiated?” said Barrett with a laugh. “What did the farmers get in return?”

  Boerhaven was taken aback. “Our protection, of course,” he said, waving an arm in the direction of military barracks Bren had missed before.

  When the chief clerk walked on ahead, Bren whispered, “Protection from whom?” Barrett whispered back, “Protection from another country wanting to ‘negotiate’ with local farmers.”

  “Quiet, you two,” said Sean, trying to whisper but not entirely succeeding. “We’re guests, remember?”

  “Come, children,” called the chief clerk. “There’s something else here you might find entertaining.”

  He led them to a part of Bantam occupied solely by local Javanese people, and down a twisting alley they came to a sort of wooden stage, covered with a brightly colored curtain. There was a small crowd gathering—golden-skinned men, women, and children with black hair, some dressed very plainly in loose-fitting clothes, others in draped clothing so multi-colorful it looked as if it had been painted. A few Netherlanders and their children were there as well. Before long the curtain was drawn to reveal a pair of figures against a white backdrop.<
br />
  “Puppets!” said Bren and Mouse.

  The chief clerk smiled approvingly at their excitement.

  The puppets were unlike any Bren had seen—elongated two-dimensional figures made of leather, finely cut and decorated, held up on slender pieces of bone. The first show began, performed in Dutch, about a girl named Timun Mas, who outwits a green giant determined to eat her.

  The second featured a hideous creature known as the Wewe Gombel, the ghost of a wronged wife who kidnaps children from bad families and cares for them in her nest. This was followed by several episodes from the Panji cycle, about a famous prince of Java, and one of the tales of Kancil, a cunning little mouse deer who uses intelligence to triumph over larger animals.

  The last show they watched was the story of Malin Kundang, a boy from a poor family who sneaks away from home on a trading ship and eventually becomes rich and marries a princess. But he becomes so proud of his accomplishments that he refuses to acknowledge his mother and his humble origins the next time he comes home, and in retribution, his mother turns her son and his ship to stone.

  Bren was ready to leave after that.

  “Yaozu, I was wondering something,” said Bren. “You said that at one time, you didn’t think these artifacts existed. What changed your mind?”

  They were all in a common room of a guesthouse the chief clerk had put them in. The remaining crew of the Albatross was asleep, while Barrett, Sean, Yaozu, Bren, and Mouse sat up enjoying some sort of homemade spicy ale.

  “I told you China was my home, but that wasn’t completely true,” said Yaozu. “One cannot feel at home in a country that does not welcome you. I was born on one of the many small islands off China’s mainland that have become home to outcasts. My parents were scholars, as were their parents and grandparents before them, and scholars were among the first to be shunned under the new dynasty. Research was forbidden.

  “My family taught me about the Ancients and the Eight Immortals, which I considered mere folklore, and when I was old enough, they sent me away from a world they considered lost. I’ve only returned once since then, for my parents’ funeral. They were killed in an accident. Then I returned to the Near East, which is when I learned that the Immortals might be real and could be found. I read about a king named Prester John, supposedly a descendent of the Three Magi and the last Christian king of the East. I say supposedly because Marco Polo had written of him, and no one knows better than the Chinese that Marco Polo had a flair for exaggeration.”

  Bren stole a glance at Mouse. He’d always heard the same thing, but the letter of Admiral Bowman’s had proved real enough.

  “Anyway,” said Yaozu, “it was written that Prester John had among his possessions a mirror with which he could survey his realm. I investigated, and found a group of what one might generously call zealots living in poverty in Ectabana, where I met you, Lady Barrett. They had made a shrine around what they believed to be Prester John’s magic mirror, though of course they had no idea how it worked.”

  “So you just took it?” said Sean.

  “As soon as I saw it, I suspected it might be the jade tablet. I had to know. It was nothing but a useless relic to those people, and it would have been reckless to leave it there. You know most of the rest of the story.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Sean. “You want to find this tomb of Qin; why not use the magic tablet?”

  “It was the first thing I tried,” Yaozu admitted. “Knowing of these objects and even possessing them is a far cry from understanding and controlling them. Another reason they are dangerous. The only thing I can assume is that no one anywhere possesses the knowledge of Qin’s tomb, and therefore the mirror cannot show it to me.”

  “He’s right,” said Barrett. “The first thing I tried to do was find you, Bren. It showed me your face, but not where you were. Then it showed me the place you might be, but with no context for me to locate it. Fortunately I had the Ptolemy map and was able to use the two together.”

  “But wait, neither of you knew about Mouse until you rescued Bren,” said Sean. “What was your master plan before that?”

  He seemed determined to poke holes in their story, but Yaozu was unflappable.

  “To avail myself of Lady Barrett’s expertise . . . take her home with me, research the history of the Eight Immortals, make educated guesses about where they may have ended up . . .”

  “He’s just being polite,” said Barrett. “I was going to steal this relic he told Mouse about and take it back to London. See if we could decipher it there.”

  “Speaking of maps,” said Bren, “maybe I should start working on a more detailed map we can use? Yaozu, would you be able to help fill in more detail?”

  “I can try,” he said.

  “That’s a splendid idea,” said Barrett. “You really do have mapmaking in your blood.”

  “Don’t say that,” said Bren, as if he were afraid his father and Rand McNally might overhear her.

  “Oh no, I can tell you have adventure in your blood too,” she said, grabbing his hand. “A full share.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  THE TEMPLE OF THE FIVE LORDS

  Bren got up before dawn to watch the sun rise over Bantam. He had read that the Far East was called the Land of the Rising Sun by old sailors, and he wanted to see what they meant. What was so special? He could see the sun rise just fine from his hovel in Map, couldn’t he?

  He walked north from the factory, from the barracks where they’d been quartered, past the rice fields and the stilted houses of the fishermen, until he reached the eastern end of the harbor, where he waited. He chewed on a handful of coffee beans that the clerk of Bantam had given him. They were painfully bitter, but Bren had never felt more alert this early. Despite being exhausted he had tossed and turned in bed, unable to stop thinking about the adventure that awaited them.

  And then the first glow of light appeared on the horizon, like a lamp from someone unseen coming up a darkened hill. The light grew in area and intensity until Bren was convinced some great fire was about to consume the earth, a fire that reminded him of that night in the cavern, when he had to shield his eyes from the heat. . . .

  He blinked. Just for a moment, but when he opened his eyes again, the sun was right there, not so much rising as poised at the edge of the ocean, as if it were about to roll across the waves. It wasn’t beautiful; it was terrifying, and Bren shut his eyes again, as hard as he could.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” came a voice, and Bren spun toward it, still sitting, his eyes still closed. When he opened them he saw Lady Jean Barrett, bathed in light, her arm cocked to shield her eyes.

  “What am I thinking?” said Bren.

  “That it all seems so close, that the world can’t possibly go on and on beyond the horizon. Like the sun is popping up out of a slot between the sea and the sky.”

  She sat down next to him.

  “The emperors saw the same sun, the same close horizon,” she said. “Remember Yaozu’s theory about the map of the Hidden Sea? That it came from a fruitless search for an island of immortality? Well, Emperor Qin was convinced that the island must lie this way. He sent a naval captain named Xu Fu sailing toward the rising sun. Qin had also once employed a magician named Anqi Sheng, who was already a thousand years old when Qin reigned, and some think it was Anqi Sheng that Xu Fu went in search of, after the magician disappeared.”

  Bren perked up. “Did the magician look like a catfish?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Nothing. Did Yaozu tell you all this?”

  “Some,” said Barrett. “Some I may have read on my own. I stole a glance now and then at those rare books I used to fetch for Mr. Black.”

  She smiled at Bren, and any doubts about his decision to go with her evaporated.

  “Come on,” she said, standing and offering a hand to Bren. “Let’s help Sean and Mouse load some supplies.”

  They estimated a week’s journey through the South China Sea
and provisioned themselves accordingly. This meant two things: food and water for themselves, obviously; and items they might use to barter—or bribe—their way through the mainland. The first was provided by Chief Clerk Boerhaven, who was happy to give but also drew up a complicated contract that ensured he would be absolved of blame should disaster strike. The second was provided by Mouse, who without the chief clerk’s knowledge sneaked into one of the factory’s storehouses to pinch nutmeg, cloves, coffee beans, and a handful of other goods that would be desirable to mainlanders. She also nipped two bottles of jenever from the chief clerk’s office, since he had not seen fit to provide the crew with any spirits.

  None of the Netherlanders had sailed into the South China Sea, nor Sean, but they had acquired a reliable map from the chief clerk that showed them how to navigate north from Bantam, across the equator, through the gap between the Dutch Siamese peninsula to the west and Borneo to the east, until they were hugging the coastline of Indochina, going north-northeast. The Pearl Cliffs, their target, was a sizable island in the northern part of the sea. Most of their week under sail was blissfully calm, and Bren had never been so glad to be bored. He spent the time adding more detail to their map of China, with Yaozu’s help.

  Then they hit the fog. Barrett hadn’t been kidding about that. It was nothing like the vapor that had concealed the Vanishing Island. That had seemed somehow not real . . . enchanted even. This was just fog, but it was thick as cotton, and it was everywhere.

  “The Pearl Cliffs should be in sight,” said Sean, standing on the quarterdeck with Barrett, comparing his charts to their map.

  “Are those mountaintops?” said Bren, pointing to what looked like a pair of green peaks above the white shroud.

  “I believe you’re right, Bren,” said Barrett.

  “How shallow are the waters?” said Sean. “Do you know, Yaozu?”

  “Where most boats land is here, on this side,” he said, pointing to the southeast corner of the island. “There was a port established there on an inlet, so smugglers could bring supplies to exiles here.”