Bridge of Birds

by Barry Hughart

  Lotus Cloud grabbed the Key Rabbit just before his head hit the floor. After several applications of smelling salts he was able to sip some wine, and color began to return to his face.

  "You are going to help us," said Master Li.

  Lotus Cloud grabbed her husband in the nick of time, and I ran for more smelling salts.

  "Feel better?" Master Li said sympathetically when the Key Rabbit had regained some color. "Perhaps I should begin by explaining why the duke deserves to be assassinated. It all begins with a charming story that Lotus Cloud is sure to enjoy, because it involves the handsomest god in Heaven and the most beautiful girl in the world."

  "And her wicked stepmother!" Lotus Cloud said, with shining eyes.

  "Oddly enough, the wicked stepmother doesn't appear. I can't imagine why," Master Li said thoughtfully.

  "Thank goodness!" the Key Rabbit exclaimed. "Wicked stepmothers terrify me. Come to think of it, most things do," he added sadly.

  Li Kao played the host and refilled our wine cups, and then he followed Henpecked Ho's account almost word for word as he told the tale of the Star Shepherd and the Princess of Birds. No one could ask for a better audience than Lotus Cloud, who hopped up and down in excitement when the August Personage of Jade placed the crown upon the head of Jade Pearl, and who wept for joy when the princess stepped from the beautiful Bridge of Birds and ran to the arms of the Star Shepherd. It didn't take a genius to see that my darling Lotus Cloud was daydreaming that she could be the most beautiful girl in the world, and become a goddess who could climb to the stars.

  "And they lived..." Master Li refilled his cup. "No, I am sorry to say that they did not live happily ever after. You see, there was a slimy fellow who wanted to live forever. He learned that if he stole something that belonged to a god he would never age so long as he possessed it, and that he would be invulnerable if the wisest man in the world, the Old Man of the Mountain, removed his heart. So he set a trap for the most innocent and gullible deity that he could find, meaning Jade Pearl, the Princess of Birds."

  "Oh no!" Lotus Cloud cried.

  "Oh yes," said Master Li. "She had three handmaidens who were as innocent as she was. The slimy fellow bought three marvelous trinkets from the Old Man of the Mountain, as well as three feathers that precisely resembled the feathers of the Kings of Birds. Then he disguised himself as a lame peddler and he approached the handmaidens with some sort of tale — he worshipped the princess from afar, for example, and would give anything to own something that she had touched — and he offered to give the marvelous trinkets to the maidens if they would do him one small favor. Simply substitute the feathers in his hand for the feathers on Jade Pearl's crown, and bring the real ones back to him."

  "They would never do such a thing!" Lotus Cloud said indignantly.

  "Did the girls know that the feathers on the crown were important?" the Key Rabbit wondered.

  "The Key Rabbit has put his finger on it," Master Li said approvingly. "The handmaidens didn't know that the feathers were those of the Kings of Birds, and one should remember that this was a thousand years ago, when feathers were used to decorate headgear of all sorts, including crowns. Why should it be a terrible crime to substitute new decorations for old ones? Besides, those trinkets were truly irresistible. But the handmaidens were firm on one point. The peddler must swear a binding oath that if for any reason the princess wanted her old feathers back, he must return them in exchange for the trinkets. Of course he took no chance of that happening. One by one they returned with the feathers, and one by one he handed them the trinkets, and one by one he stabbed them to the heart."

  Lotus Cloud began to cry. "Poor girls," she sniffled. "Poor faithless handmaidens."

  "And poor Princess of Birds," said Master Li. "I would imagine that the slimy fellow committed his crimes on the seventh day of the seventh moon, so that Heaven would have no warning. Jade Pearl had been commanded to return to her husband, so she called to the birds of China, but the birds could no longer hear her because she no longer wore the feathers. Poor little princess. Calling birds that did not come, turning around helplessly, gazing up at the Great River where her husband waited — and waited in vain, because the seventh day of the seventh moon had come and gone. A vow had been made, a vow had been broken, and the Princess of Birds passed from the protection of Heaven. Then it was a very easy matter for a sly fellow in a peddler's robe to steal a crown from a simple peasant girl."

  "Tragedies terrify me!" the Key Rabbit wailed.

  "I'm afraid that it gets worse," Master Li sighed. "The slimy fellow returned to the Old Man of the Mountain, who removed his heart. Now he was invulnerable, and so long as he held the crown, he would never age. As the centuries passed he bought many secrets from the Old Man of the Mountain, and his power grew. And you, my dear Key Rabbit, know him better than any of us, because he became the Duke of Ch'in, and he has been sitting upon the throne ever since, concealed behind a golden mask."

  I grabbed the Key Rabbit in mid-fall, and Lotus Cloud waved smelling salts.

  "The same duke throughout the centuries!" he gasped when he had recovered. "One thing I beg of you. Do not force me to see the face behind the mask, for it must be the most terrible face in the world!"

  "Well, maybe not, because we are talking about a very unusual man," Master Li said thoughtfully. "He burned the books of China and massacred millions to erase all records of the Princess of Birds, but why did he bother? She had already passed from the protection of Heaven, so millions died for no good reason whatsoever. He built a castle with thirty-six imperial bedrooms to confuse assassins, but the assassins couldn't harm him because he was invulnerable. He lives only for money, but does he guard his hoards with iron vaults and armies? He does not. He guards them with labyrinths and monsters that might have come from children's books, and while the monsters are frightening, they are not very effective. Great Buddha, any half-witted staff sergeant could plan better defenses!"

  "Do you think that he is crazy?" Lotus Cloud whispered.

  "Oh, not at all," said Master Li. "This is a fellow who arranged things so that anyone who went after him would have to wander through the landscape of a homicidal fairy tale, which makes no sense if you think of him as a great and powerful ruler, but which makes perfect sense if you think of him as he once was: a cowardly little boy lying in bed at night, staring in terror at every noise and seeing monsters in every shadow. He grew older, but it can scarcely be said that he grew up, because he was so frightened at the thought of death that he was willing to commit any crime, and even to lose his heart if it would keep him from the Great Wheel of Transmigrations. There is one more thing about the Duke of Ch'in that is perhaps the strangest of all."

  Li Kao reached into his belt and pulled out the gems that I had picked up along with the casket: a diamond, a ruby, a pearl, and an emerald. He placed them upon the table.

  "Key Rabbit, look at this stuff," he said. "We have been talking about a little boy who lives only for money, yet he employs you as Assessor of Ch'in. You are forced to impose his fines, and collect his share of every transaction, and accompany him on tax trips and determine what every village owes. Night after night he forces you to stay in his treasure chambers and count every penny of his loot. The mysterious Duke of Ch'in, who lives only for money, has arranged matters so that his Assessor must spend far more time with it than he does. Peculiar, isn't it?"

  "Lotus Cloud was right. He's crazy," I said firmly.

  "As a matter of fact, he isn't," Master Li replied. "You see, everything would fit neatly into place — the money, the monsters, the labyrinths and other trappings of fairy tales, the lack of sensible precautions and the ridiculous precautions where none are needed — if the right kind of face were concealed behind the mask. Suppose that hiding behind a terrible snarl of a tiger..."

  Master Li leaned forward. His voice was hypnotic, and his eyes were as cold as a cobra's.

  "Was the face of a frightened rabbit," he whispered.r />
  Li Kao's eyes had warned me to leap, and all I needed to know was where. I smashed the Key Rabbit to the floor, and Li Kao's hands darted out and snatched a chain and jerked a key up over the Key Rabbit's head. We had once become entangled in that chain, and at the end of it was a key that was shaped like a flower, with sixteen tiny points. Li Kao pulled a golden casket from beneath his tunic. A casket that contained the heart of the Duke of Ch'in, and that was secured by a pressure lock shaped like a flower, with sixteen tiny slits. Each point had to fit into each slit with precisely the right amount of pressure, and Li Kao's forehead wrinkled with concentration as he applied the key to the lock.

  Lotus Cloud, who was not the screaming type, was screaming her head off, and outside in the garden the dogs were going insane. When I lifted from the floor I was not riding upon the back of a man, but on the back of a snarling, clawing tiger.

  I was in the best position that I could manage, with my arms wrapped around the tiger's throat and my teeth buried in the fur on its neck, and we went bounding around the room while Master Li struggled with the lock, and I am alive today because the Duke of Ch'in was unquestionably the stupidest of all the pupils of the Old Man of the Mountain. When he discovered that he was not dislodging me as a tiger he transformed himself into a serpent, and then into a wild boar, and then into an enormous spider, and all the while I was praying: "August Personage of Jade, cleanse this idiot's mind of all memory of scorpions!" I could almost feel the lethal tail whipping around to impale me like a bug. "Wipe his brain of all images of porcupines, cacti, quicksand, and carnivorous plants!" I don't know whether or not the August Personage of Jade had anything to do with it, but certainly the duke wasn't reading my mind at the moment because he obligingly transformed himself into a crocodile. Unfortunately, the lashing tail knocked Li Kao beneath a heavy table that collapsed on top of him, and the casket and the key went spinning across the floor. I spat out a mouthful of tiger fur, boar's bristles, spider hair, and crocodile scales.

  "Lotus Cloud, open the casket!" I yelled.

  The Duke of Ch'in transformed himself into a giant ape. We went bounding around the room again while Lotus Cloud, her eyes glazed with shock, slowly reached down toward the casket at her feet. Then the duke transformed himself into a boulder. We crashed to the floor, and the huge heavy thing slowly rolled over on top of me. I gasped for breath while a pair of pink-rimmed Key Rabbit eyes appeared in the boulder. A pair of Key Rabbit lips opened, and a piece of the rock quivered like a long twitching nose.

  "I can grow heavier," the duke giggled. "Heavier and heavier and heavier."

  The breath was being squeezed out of me, and my ribs were cracking. I could see Li Kao wrestling with the heavy table, and Lotus Cloud dazedly trying to fit the key into the lock. The tip of her tongue protruded from between her lips, and she looked for all the world like a little girl who was trying to thread a needle for the first time. Above me the pink-rimmed eyes were glittering, and I realized that sheer terror was driving the Duke of Ch'in to the edge of insanity, as it had done so often in the past.

  "I shall hang you and the old man in a cage beside my bed," he whispered. "My dear friends shan hsiao shall rip your flesh with their claws and beaks, and your flesh will grow back, and the claws and beaks shall rip it again, and your screams will soothe me to sleep at night, and thus you will spend eternity."

  I had no breath left. The room was swimming before my eyes, and my ears were throbbing with hurtful heartbeat sounds. The boulder grew heavier and heavier, and I could stand it no more.

  Lotus Cloud screamed. She screamed so piercingly that a thin porcelain bowl broke in half. The open casket fell to the floor, and a wet throbbing heart lay sickeningly at her feet.

  In an instant the boulder had become the Key Rabbit, and he frantically tried to reach his heart. I clung to his ankles with the last bit of strength that I had, and he wailed in fear as he slowly dragged me across the floor. The Key Rabbit's hand reached out, and Lotus Cloud watched him with eyes that were wide with horror. Then that marvelous girl reached down and scooped up the slimy thing at her feet, and she wound up in the manner of a peasant girl who had been the terror of crows, and she hurled the heart on a dead line across the room and through the window to the garden. The hysterical guard dogs descended upon the heart of their master.

  The Key Rabbit stood quite still. Then he slowly turned to his wife, and he reached out with a strangely tender gesture, and his lips parted. I will never know what he wanted to say. The flesh withered upon the face of the tyrant who had given his name to China, and I stared at the clean white bones of a skull, and then the bones themselves dissolved into the dust of centuries, and an empty robe slowly floated down and settled limply upon the floor.

  I managed to crawl over and lift the table from Li Kao, and he staggered to his feet and dived for the wine jar.

  "The Yama Kings have been waiting a long time, and I would imagine that the Duke of Ch'in is receiving a rather warm welcome in Hell," he said when he came up for air.

  Master Li handed me the wine jar. I drank deeply and passed it to Lotus Cloud, who swigged like a soldier. The wonder had overcome the horror, and her eyes were wide and bright and filled with marvels. Master Li walked over to the robe on the floor. He bent down and reached inside it, and his right hand lifted with a small golden crown.

  "What better place to keep the greatest of all treasures than the hole where a heart had been?" he said.

  His left hand lifted, and I cried out in joy as an unbelievably powerful aroma of ginseng reached my nostrils. It was so strong that it revived me in an instant.

  "Master Li, has our quest come to an end?" I cried.

  "Not quite yet," he cautioned. "This is indeed the Heart of the Great Root of Power, but we must remember that it is also the Queen of Ginseng. Her Majesty must never be forced. If she is to help the children of Ku-fu, it must be of her own free will, and we must ask her goddaughter to transmit her wishes."

  Master Li clasped his hands together and bowed deeply to Lotus Cloud.

  "Meaning your Highness, the Princess of Birds," he said.

  Lotus Cloud stared, but her eyes were not as wide as mine.

  "Master Li, you can't be serious!" I gasped.

  "I have never been so serious in my life," he said calmly.

  "Me? With my thick legs and flat face?" Lotus Cloud exclaimed. Her sense of the fitness of things was outraged, and she flushed with indignation. "The Star Shepherd fell in love with the most beautiful girl in the world!"

  "Mere literary convention," Li Kao said, with an airy wave of a hand. "Beauty is ridiculously overrated, and if that was all that the Star Shepherd wanted, he had the young goddesses of Heaven to choose from. The Star Shepherd had enough sense to want a peasant girl whose eyes held all the hope and joy and wonder in the world, and whose grin could fell an ox at fifty paces. Ask this ox here," he said with a wink in my direction. "Ox, remind me to change my business sign so that the eye is nine tenths closed. I should have known that Lotus Cloud was immortal the moment that Miser Shen reacted to her exactly as you did."

  Lotus Cloud stamped her foot. "I refuse to believe one word of this nonsense," she said angrily.

  "Why should you? The Duke of Ch'in took you to the Old Man of the Mountain, who removed your memory," Master Li said reasonably.

  He strolled over to the table and sat down, and placed the little crown and the Great Root of Power beside the wine jar. Then he opened his smuggler's belt, and the three feathers of the Kings of Birds jumped eagerly into place when he touched them to the rim of the crown.

  "It is truly said that men die like trees, from the top down." Master Li sighed. "If my poor brains had not been riddled by wood rot and little green worms I might have considered the fact that Miser Shen was not jealous of Number Ten Ox, and Number Ten Ox was not jealous of Miser Shen. None of Lotus Cloud's lovers was ever jealous. Now that simply isn't human if we're talking about love, but it is very human indeed if we're
talking about worship. One is not jealous of a fellow-worshipper, and the pure in heart will always recognize a goddess. I have had occasion to mention the purity of Ox's heart, and beneath his repulsive exterior Miser Shen was solid gold. I have no doubt that her other lovers were equally admirable, which is why I was unable to recognize the young lady myself."

  He stood up and bowed to Lotus Cloud again.

  "There is," said Master Li, "a slight flaw in my character."

  He sat down and filled two cups from the wine jar and slid them across the table toward Lotus Cloud and me. Then he picked up one of the jewels that he had shown to the Key Rabbit.

  "My stupidity was such that I remained unaware of the obvious until I found this," he said sadly. "It is a very rare pearl, jet-black, with one small white flaw in the shape of a star. Lotus Cloud, I once gave this pearl to Ox, who rolled it toward your feet. The next time I saw it was in a drowned city, where it was lying beside the casket that contained the duke's heart. Dear girl, I knew very well that you forgot about a gift of pearls and jade ten minutes after you received it, but it never occurred to me to wonder what happened to the stuff."

  He turned and thoughtfully examined the crumpled robe upon the floor.

  "The Duke of Ch'in was abysmally stupid, but on one occasion he showed real intelligence," Master Li said. "After removing the memory of the Princess of Birds, the Old Man of the Mountain almost certainly offered to transform her into a raindrop or a rose petal, for a stiff price, but the duke knew better. He lived only for money, and if he left Jade Pearl precisely as she was he would have something that was worth a thousand gold mines. You see, it is in the nature of men to worship a goddess and to bring her valuable offerings, and it is in the nature of a goddess to accept their worship and their offerings. The men are not being lecherous. The goddess is neither greedy nor promiscuous. They are merely acting out roles that were ordained at the beginning of time, and to my own certain knowledge Lotus Cloud has collected more pearls and jade than the entire army of the Duke of Ch'in. Every bit of it has wound up in treasure troves guarded by monsters."