The Dragon's Gate

by Barry Wolverton

  Barrett, for once, seemed chastened. “Oh, of course,” she said. “I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.”

  “So how far is it, altogether, from here to there?” said Bren.

  Yaozu stroked his scraggly beard for a moment before answering. “A thousand miles. Give or take.”

  Sean sighed so hard he almost cleared the table.

  “They have an old saying around here,” said Yaozu. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

  “Confucius, I assume?” said Barrett.

  “No—Laozi,” said Yaozu. “Everyone makes that mistake.”

  “Marco Polo traveled twenty-five miles a day on foot,” said Bren, who had read the legendary travelogue dozens of times. “So if we have a thousand miles to go, it should only take us forty days.”

  “Forty days and nights, wandering in the wilderness,” said Sean, with the flourish of a preacher.

  “Feet come later,” said Yaozu. “First, dragon boat.”

  “Dragon boat?” said Bren.

  Yaozu smiled. “I think it would help if you looked more Chinese,” he said. “I mean new clothes, of course.”

  Barrett looked disappointed. Bren imagined that she must’ve fancied the idea of a full disguise.

  The owner of the house pulled a heavy wooden trunk from under a bench and handed trousers and tunics to each of them, along with jackets that wrapped around them like robes. Bren marveled at how soft they were compared to his woolen uniform.

  “Silk!” said Barrett.

  They all stared at one another when they were dressed, giggling at how different they looked. Even Mouse, who was Chinese, looked strange to Bren out of her grey sailor’s clothes.

  When it was time to leave, Bren rushed ahead of Yaozu toward a small covered boathouse. He was picturing a large, leathery hull, armored with iridescent scales, the prow a massive reptilian head, teeth bared. Instead the dragon boat was barely a boat, as far as he was concerned. It was a long, narrow, teakwood craft, with a draft so shallow it was almost a sled. The bow and stern curved upwards, suggesting a head and tail, he supposed.

  “Why the glum look?” said Barrett. “You didn’t think it was going to be made from a real dragon, did you?”

  Bren turned as red as her magic sword.

  “The Chinese do dress up the boats for special occasions,” Yaozu assured him. “Very impressive looking then. Now, are we ready?”

  “I’m ready for anything in these clothes,” said Barrett.

  “I have a feeling we’ll need to be,” said Sean.

  The dragon boat, while unimpressive to look at, was quite agile in the water. Even with only four of them rowing, the boat knifed along the shallow stream through the flooded delta, past rice farms and fishing villages. Yaozu explained to them how this part of the south had become a haven for all sorts of Chinese minorities, through constant turmoil caused by warring dynasties across centuries. Smugglers also called it home. They had little fear for now of being targeted as outsiders.

  Yaozu had purchased a few other items from the owner of the house to ensure they were welcomed when they needed food or shelter: tools, supplies, and extra clothes they could barter.

  Their plan was to eat any fresh food they had brought from the Pearl Cliffs—fruit, for instance—and save dried meats and other durable rations as long as possible, for when they might need them most. As it turned out, there were plenty of locals along the river willing to share meals and offer sleeping mats without compensation, and Bren quickly learned that the food was far better than he had expected.

  When he first looked into a bowl of fish-head stew or rice, some of the glamour of the Far East wore off immediately. It was just like Map! Fish and grain! But this was infinitely more flavorful. Bren was convinced it was some sort of magic, but Sean, noticing the happy look on Bren’s face when they were eating, offered a more logical explanation:

  “And now you see why the spice trade has made men rich and built empires,” he said with a laugh.

  Bren again thought of the Jamaica-bound ship that he had attempted to board last year. It seemed that flavorful food had indeed launched a thousand ships.

  In the coming days, they paddled upcountry, twisting and turning through several stream offshoots and tributaries, and they passed large groups of men and women out harvesting a tall flowering plant with dark green, leathery leaves.

  “Star anise!” said Barrett, and she had them pull the boat to shore so she could run out and grab one of the fruits from the plant. When she returned, she showed Bren and Mouse an odd-looking eight-legged piece of fruit. It reminded Bren of the starfish he caught in the tide pools of Map’s harbor.

  “Can I try it?” said Bren.

  “It’s not that kind of fruit,” said Barrett. “You dry it out and then grind it into spice. I tried it in India.”

  “It’s one of the so-called five spices of China,” said Yaozu. “Baijao, dingxiang, rougui, huajiao, xiaohuixiang.”

  “Do you know what those are called in English?” said Bren.

  “I don’t,” he said regretfully.

  Bren didn’t care. He wanted more. Spices had come to Europe, of course, thanks to traders like the Dutch Bicycle & Tulip Company. But only the wealthy could afford them. Bren had tasted salt and sugar . . . pepper a few times. He wanted more, and he’d had nothing very tasty in Bantam. He guessed the Dutch refrained from eating spices in the colonies so they’d have more to sell.

  As they continued traveling north, Yaozu told them some of the history of the region, most of which was tragic.

  “The Three Kingdoms period,” he began, “was the worst of all. After the fall of the Han. Constant warfare, and the South did not want to give up its independence. By the time the Jin reunited the country, almost forty million people had been killed.”

  Bren couldn’t believe it. “Forty million?”

  “So many deaths, it was said that all the rivers turned red carrying away the blood.”

  Sean was shaking his head. “My God, that’s worse than the plague.” He seemed to remember a moment too late that the plague had killed Bren’s mother.

  “I’m sorry, Bren.”

  Bren shook his head. He realized his hand was clutching the black stone around his neck, and he let go, embarrassed.

  “It’s okay,” said Mouse, grabbing his hand, the one that had been touching the stone.

  “I know,” said Bren irritably, pulling his hand away brusquely as he said it.

  Finally they went as far as the dragon boat would take them, and they traded the teak craft to another farmer for some dried fish and fruit.

  “Now what?” said Barrett.

  “Now we cross the mountains,” said Yaozu.

  CHAPTER

  17

  BIG RATTAN GORGE

  Over the next several days, they climbed into a land that seemed impossibly unspoiled to Bren. He had never seen greener trees or lusher vegetation, drunk cleaner water, or breathed purer air. It was like a glimpse of the world at creation, in its most perfect state. The steep hills and wondrous rocks and abysmal gorges existed to inspire awe, not guide travelers from one point to the next, nor provide them shelter or succor. If any mortals had trod this path, they had been swallowed up without a trace.

  And yet the group made its way, slowly but steadily, and all the while Bren felt he was trespassing on something sacred. In the mornings, a snow-white fog pooled around the mountaintops that Yaozu called “the breath of the dragon waking.” At dusk-fall, when the setting sun turned the horizon to flame, Yaozu said that “the dragon was forging his scales in the mountain’s furnace.”

  It was obvious that this landscape had inspired awe and worship since the dawn of time. Yaozu could point to any rock formation or river and recall a story of the gods at play. On the banks of a river there was a cliff face that looked as if it had been carved into a mural of nine horses. They were the stray herd of the Monkey King, turned to stone by his wrath after they tried t
o escape back into the wild.

  Another stream appeared to be a ribbon of yellow cloth, because of the golden flagstone that lined its bed. Seven jagged peaks towered over both sides of the river, and Yaozu explained that they were seven faery maidens who came to the river to bathe and were so struck by its beauty that they refused to leave, turning themselves to stone to avoid being summoned back to heaven by the Jade King.

  Bren turned to Mouse as Yaozu told these tales, trying to catch her eye. She had such an extraordinary tale about her own past, where she came from and how she came to be. Admiral Bowman had told her. She had told Bren she didn’t believe it, and he wondered if perhaps the admiral had heard one of these local folktales when he was trading on the black market in the Pearl River Delta.

  “What sort of wild animals live here?” Sean wondered aloud.

  “Are you worried?” said Barrett, a sly grin on her face.

  “Just curious. I mean, we have nothing to fear, do we? With you and your magic sword?”

  “Still not grateful that I rescued you from a rogue elephant?” said Barrett. “Not to mention a rogue Dutch clerk? With help from Mouse, of course.”

  “Quibbling won’t help us cross the Bridge Across the Sky,” said Yaozu, and everyone became quiet, either from embarrassment or because their hearts were stuck in their throats picturing the highest bridge they could possibly imagine.

  Bren thought there weren’t enough magic swords in the world to tame all the wild creatures here. On the river they had been able to hear the howls of the forest animals . . . warnings, greetings, mating calls, sounds of happiness and irritation . . . he wondered if Mouse could understand any of it. Once they had entered the forest the sounds of the animals had just become a part of the environment, yet taking on a different tone and color from day to night.

  Yaozu held out his hand to ask for Bren’s journal. He turned it over, and Yaozu slowly flipped through the pages, admiring the precise drawings of the small monkeys they’d seen, the leaf and stem detail of many trees and shrubs, birds of extraordinary variety . . . their deliberate pace had allowed him to do many of these even as they were moving.

  “A true appreciation for the natural world,” said Yaozu approvingly, and they walked on a while longer until the sound of running water gradually took over the forest.

  “A waterfall?” said Bren.

  “This way,” said Yaozu.

  They walked in a semicircular path through the trees, until the roar of the water became almost deafening.

  “It sounds like the entire Indian Sea is pouring over a cliff,” said Sean.

  When they broke from the trees, Bren almost lost his breath—and his footing. They had emerged onto a ridge above a gorge . . . no, a gorge is deep, but finite. This was a black chasm with no bottom, a mouth that reached to the very bowels of the earth.

  The stone walls were perfectly vertical, and sheer but for thick clumps of trees that somehow managed to cling to the surface in spots like moss. The waterfall was a raging torrent hundreds of feet wide, plunging into the chasm like a wild animal.

  “We don’t have to cross that, do we?” said Bren.

  “No, we walk around,” said Yaozu. “But beautiful, yes?”

  “Even more beautiful less close to the edge,” said Sean, who had already backed away toward the trees, ready to take a less precipitous path.

  Yaozu smiled again. “I’m afraid you’re not going to like what’s coming next.”

  No one said much after that. What exactly was coming next? Bridges. Natural bridges, high above . . . what? The ground? A bottomless pit?

  What came next did not come soon, however. “The Vast Land” proved to be an apt description, and Bren felt like he had walked a thousand miles already. As one day passed into another, he became convinced that the old mapmakers, knowing so little of China, or Cathay, or the Middle Kingdom—whatever name was used by whatever outsider—had made a colossal underestimation of the empire’s size. Which would make sense. Bren’s father, who had been a mapmaker for Rand McNally for more than twenty years, had told Bren stories about how those advocating for Crusades in the Middle Ages were rumored to have shown the pope maps that made the path to victory look far easier than it was, minimizing the breadth of Moslem territory, shrinking the distance troops would have to travel, even erasing a bothersome mountain range. “We are all at the mercy of the mapmaker,” Rand McNally had once said, summing up the powerful position he had secured by trading in information.

  They still had dry rations they had saved from the ship, and the forest offered plenty of fruit and seeds and freshwater. But the climate was cooler and damper than it had been, and Bren was worried that his loose silk clothing might not be enough if they continued to head north, and into higher regions, this early in the year. He had never counted on China being so large that they might walk through several different climates in the span of a few weeks.

  Finally they began to descend out of the mountains, and Bren secretly hoped they had somehow found another way to pass this way without crossing perilous bridges. When they emerged from the forest, they were on the side of a hill that sloped toward a fast-moving river. The river was walled in by mountains on both sides, bending from sight to the east and west, with another quick turn directly below them.

  “Big Rattan Gorge,” said Yaozu. “And that is the Xi River.”

  “Do we swim it?” said Sean.

  Yaozu laughed. “Oh no. You would never make it. You would be swept away by the river, likely dashed on rocks. Also, there are alligators.”

  “So what then?” said Sean.

  Yaozu looked up and down the gorge. “There is supposed to be a bridge. Made of rattan. Thus, Big Rattan Gorge. That is the only way.”

  Barrett walked upriver a bit. “You sure it might not be elsewhere? The Xi looks like a long one.”

  “It should be here,” Yaozu insisted. “We came the only way I know through the forest, and see how the river nearly oxbows here.” He showed them the place he was talking about on their map.

  Sean sat down. “I suppose we sit here until the bridge appears then? By magic?”

  Yaozu said nothing, and Bren thought Sean had hurt his feelings. But then he snapped his fingers. “Magic! I do remember a story from my childhood, about a bridge that rose only at night and sank in the daytime. A means of protection from invasion, if I recall.”

  He walked over to Mouse. “Perhaps you could try something? See if the bridge is there?”

  “No!” said Bren, a little more forcefully than he’d meant to. “She can’t just become a fish or anything like that.”

  “I apologize,” said Yaozu.

  “It’s okay,” said Mouse. “I could try, perhaps. I don’t really understand how I do it.”

  “She could become a fish and swim off to spawn and we’d never see her again,” said Bren.

  “No one’s becoming a fish!” Sean bellowed, now lying on his back.

  Mouse walked down to the edge of the river and just stood there for a while, saying nothing. After a bit she put one hand inside her jacket—where she’d hidden the white stone, Bren assumed—but still just stood there, even as afternoon turned to dusk.

  She was still standing there as the others sat together for a small meal at sunset, and when night had officially fallen, she held the white stone aloft in her palm, just like she had in the cavern when she summoned the mercury dragon. The memory of that made Bren’s heart start beating rapidly, and his chest grew tight as he wondered what was about to happen. He could see Sean and Yaozu and Barrett wondering, too. The white jade glowed in the dark like a small moon, and then, almost imperceptibly, something began to rise from the river.

  Bren jumped to his feet and the others followed, except for Sean, who just sat staring as a pair of long ropes broke the river’s surface, stretching from one shore to the other. Not rope—they were stiffer than rope. It was rattan, two long poles as thick as a person’s forearm, parallel to each other, with a third
pole of rattan connected to the pair above by tendrils of thin cord.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Sean. “It’s a bridge!”

  “Indeed,” said Yaozu. “Shall we cross? Or do you prefer to sit longer?”

  CHAPTER

  18

  THREE BRIDGES

  “Just put one foot in front of the other,” said Barrett.

  “I know how to walk,” snapped Sean.

  Bren would have laughed, except he was too busy concentrating on doing just that—walking. The V-shaped bridge was simple enough to understand: you walked across a single rattan pole while using the two handrails for support. But even though the bridge had seemingly risen by magic from the depths of the river, it had not magically dried itself off. The smooth, hard stems of rattan were slick, which made footing tricky.

  “Stop swinging the bridge,” said Bren. “I’m getting queasy.”

  “Not the bridge,” said Yaozu. “The water. Look forward, not down.”

  Bren immediately did the opposite and saw what he meant. They were only a couple of feet above the river, and it was now completely dark, but there was a near-full moon, and the moving water gave the illusion that the bridge was swaying.

  “Rattan is one of the strongest materials on earth,” said Barrett. “You could knock a building over with it. Look . . .”

  To everyone’s horror, Barrett began to jump up and down to demonstrate the sturdiness of the bridge.

  “Point made!” said Sean.

  “You heard what Yaozu said about the natural bridges to come,” said Barrett. “If you chaps can’t handle this . . .”

  “We’re handling it just fine,” said Sean.

  “Can we just get this over with?” said Bren. They were only halfway across and it felt like they’d been at it for an hour.

  Bren was bringing up the rear, and even though he knew how to put one foot in front of the other, he kept looking down to measure his steps, and in doing so, he noticed a dark shape pass under the bridge.