Day of the Djinn Warriors (17 page)

T
he tip of Marco Polo’s little finger was missing. He noticed Philippa looking at it and lifted his hand self-consciously.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” explained Philippa. “We were wondering why you only had two hundred and five bones, instead of two hundred and six. And I guess now we know.”

“Questo
? This? I lost it at the Battle of Curzola in 1298,” he explained. “When I was the gentleman commander of a Venetian naval ship. A Genoese cannonball exploded near my hand. This was after my first trip to China, you understand. In life, I had the honor and fortune to be an emissary of the great Chinese emperor, Kublai Khan. And in death also, I am his emissary, for he was very good to me always and I was much exalted by his grace and favor. Both during and after his reign, the great Khan sent out a number of emissaries in death like me. To the four corners of the known world.
So that men could be warned of the great danger that lay within his kingdom.

“This is why China closed itself to the world and to other foreign visitors for so long. To protect the world against the warrior devils. The
Dong Xi
. If this is indeed why I have been summoned from a sleep of almost two hundred years, then I am here to tell you a story and to offer you some help. If not, then please be kind enough to return my bones to the chest where you found them and disturb me no more.”

“We do indeed seek your help against the warrior devils, sir,” said Nimrod. “And we should be very honored to hear your story. Wouldn’t we, children?”

“Yes,” said Philippa. “But I’d like to know how it is that you speak such good English, sir.”

“Death is the most important passport you can obtain,” said Marco Polo. “When you die, all the mysteries are solved. Including that mystery that is how the English language works.”

Marco Polo nodded at Sister Cristina’s chair. “Would you mind if I sat down?” he asked. “It’s a long story.”

“Please,” said Nimrod, pushing the chair, which was on wheels, toward the great explorer.

For a moment Marco inspected the chair and seemed fascinated by the wheels on the legs, then he sat down and started to tell his story.

“The first emperor of all China was the Emperor Qin Shihuang.” Marco Polo pronounced the name of the emperor
“Chin Shir Hwong.” “He lived many centuries before the Great Khan. Before him there was no China. Instead, there were seven separate kingdoms of which Qin was the largest and most warlike, and it was not long before the ambitious ruler of Qin had eaten up his neighbors like a silkworm devouring a mulberry leaf.

“You can tell what kind of a man he was by the name he gave himself: Qin Shihuang. It means ‘the first emperor, God in heaven, and the most mighty in the Universe.’ Despite this grandiose title, the Emperor Qin was scared of one thing: dying. He wanted to be like any other god and live forever and, to this end, he took many secret medicines to help prolong his life. None of them worked. But he had heard stories of an elixir of life that might enable him to achieve his wish. Therefore he summoned the wisest men in the kingdom to his palace — some four hundred and sixty of them — and ordered them to go and find it. He chose wisely because these men were scholars of the great philosopher Confucius, very practical, sensible men who tended not to believe in elixirs of life, nor indeed in life after death. They only believed in what could be proved to their own satisfaction. And being of a skeptical frame of mind they would not, the emperor reasoned, be easily tricked into believing something was an elixir of life when it was not.

“Now the emperor had banned all books in his kingdom to stop his people getting ideas above their station, as he saw it. Which meant that the scholars had little love for their emperor. But they had no choice but to do his
bidding, for all disobedience was met with immediate execution.

“One of these Confucian scholars was Yen Yu. He was very young but also very clever. Secretly, he had read many books about the great city of Baghdad, many hundreds of miles to the west of the Chinese empire. He had read stories of the magical things that had happened there. Yen Yu decided that if a magic elixir existed anywhere, it would be in Baghdad. So that was where he chose to go.

“When he got there, he was amazed at what he saw. The women were beautiful, the bookshops were full of interesting books, and the scholars he met were very enlightened. Most amazing to him was what he saw in the bazaar. Here there was a circus. Among the performers in the circus were fire-eaters, a beautiful lady sword-swallower, and a man who could throw his voice into a dog, a tree, or a bottle of wine. He was what you would call a ventriloquist. Thanks to the Emperor Qin, who hated the idea of his people amusing themselves with any idle luxuries, there existed nothing like this circus anywhere in China.

“Yen Yu was very impressed with these performers, even to the extent that he half believed they genuinely possessed supernatural powers; to him, it seemed only logical that they might also know about other things such as magic elixirs of life. The circus performers thought Yen Yu was stupid and laughed at him, and only the sword-swallower, who was herself Chinese, confessed that there was no great secret to what they did. Just practice. Now the ventriloquist, who loved the
sword-swallower, was worried that Yen Yu might steal her affections away from him. And he told Yen Yu that a magic elixir was to be found in the desert outside Baghdad. In this way the ventriloquist hoped that Yen Yu would get lost in the desert and die.

“He very nearly did. When he traveled into the desert, to look for the elixir, Yen Yu ran out of water and quickly began to die of thirst. But crawling across the sand dunes, he came upon a long-necked bottle and, hoping that it was full of water, picked it up and shook it. The bottle was empty. As he tossed it away in despair, however, he heard a human voice coming from inside the bottle. The voice inside the bottle told Yen Yu that he was a djinn and begged Yen Yu to release him and promised him three wishes if he did.

“Desperate for water, Yen Yu, who suspected his mind was playing tricks on him, reasoned he had little choice but to agree and pulled out the cork. From the bottle came forth a large cloud of smoke that swiftly turned itself into a djinn, who thanked Yen Yu and said he would keep his word, and granted the young scholar three wishes.

“Yen Yu’s first wish was for water, of course. But before making his second wish, he told the djinn about the Emperor Qin and how he wished to know the secret of eternal life. The djinn answered that it was impossible for anyone to live on Earth forever, but that anyone could live again in heaven if they wanted to, and that, most likely, his emperor wanted to know the secret of how to live well after he died or perhaps how to rule in the afterlife. For this he would need a quantity
of djinn spit and the
Living Book of Life
, which was a most ancient and wise book. These two things would enable the emperor to achieve what he wanted. It goes without saying that Yen Yu’s second wish was to have this book and some of the djinn’s spit. The djinn was glad to spit a large quantity of his own spit into the bottle and to give it to Yen Yu, for he had no wish ever again to see a bottle in which he had been imprisoned for many long years.

“Almost as soon as his wish was granted and the
Living Book of Life
was in his hands, Yen Yu realized he was now in an awkward situation. For he had remembered that the emperor hated books. How was he going to present his emperor with a book without also forfeiting his life? Then he had an idea. Remembering the skill of the ventriloquist from the circus, Yen Yu decided that if he could throw his voice into a bottle, he might be able to command the emperor’s attention. Better still, he might read whatever nonsense was in the book — for that was how Yen Yu regarded all such talk of an afterlife — and use the voice in the bottle to retell its fantastic contents to the gullible emperor, and keep himself alive in the process. And this was his third wish: to have the skill of a great ventriloquist.

“So it was that armed with the book, his newfound voice-throwing skill, and the bottle containing the djinn’s spit, Yen Yu, who loved his people and feared abandoning them to the cruelty of Qin, returned to China. He hoped that with his bottle of spit, the book, and his skill in throwing his voice,
he might bring the emperor under the influence of Confucian thought, and make him a nicer person in the bargain. This was a not unreasonable ambition. And a very practical solution to his country’s problems. But, as we shall see, it was also the scholar’s mistake, for there are indeed more things in the world than in Confucian philosophy — certainly more than Yen Yu could ever have dreamed of.

“Arriving back in China, Yen Yu discovered that the other Confucian scholars that had returned before him, and with nothing to show for their extensive travels, had all been buried alive by the devil Emperor Qin. Yen Yu now took all of his courage in his hands and traveled to the palace, where he presented the bottle to the emperor. He told Qin that it contained the elixir of life, but that the elixir was not, as had been supposed by everyone, something to drink at all, but a wise oracle to whom all of the secrets of life were known. After which he threw his voice into the bottle that then announced that it would not speak to the emperor, but only to the man who had found him, namely Yen Yu.

“Momentarily, the emperor was furious and threatened to have Yen Yu buried alive, at least until the voice inside the bottle reminded the emperor that there was surely nothing to stop him listening to that which he could only tell Yen Yu: namely, the secret of how a man might rule forever in the afterlife. And seeing the sense of what the voice said, and persuaded that it would be better to rule the gods in heaven than a few stupid men on Earth, Qin spared Yen Yu’s life.
Indeed, as his delight with the idea of ruling the gods grew and grew, the Emperor Qin even made Yen Yu his first minister.

“The
Living Book of Life
, which as you will remember was the book given to Yen Yu by the djinn, said that he who would rule the afterlife needed only to equip his tomb with models of soldiers to do his bidding. And thinking that he might divert his emperor with this apparently harmless activity, which would then leave the new first minister to govern the country properly, Yen Yu accordingly instructed Qin in the construction of the soldiers that would fight for him in the afterlife. These soldiers were to be made of terra-cotta (which is a kind of waterproof ceramic clay), the spit of the djinn, and then fired at great heat in enormous kilns. Certainly, it never occurred to Yen Yu that what was in the
Living Book of Life
was entirely feasible.

“Now Yen Yu had told the emperor that when the army was complete the voice inside the bottle would deliver the last part of the ritual that would bring Qin’s army to everlasting and eternal life. But after a while, distracted by the business of trying to run the country justly and fairly, Yen Yu quite forgot the task he had effectively given his gullible emperor. He seemed harmlessly preoccupied with the nonsense from the book that Yen Yu’s bottled voice told him about. The emperor, however, had never been a man to do things by halves and, over the years, Emperor Qin managed to assemble a terra-cotta army numbering some eighty thousand warriors. When he discovered this, Yen Yu was appalled for,
quite unknown to him, a large number of poor peasants had been forced to work on the construction of Qin’s underground tomb and terra-cotta army. But much worse was to follow.

“Prompted by his discovery of the true size of the terra-cotta army, Yen Yu sought to bring an immediate halt to Qin’s lunacy and declared that the time had come when the voice inside the bottle would deliver the last part of the ritual. Now the plain fact of the matter was that Yen Yu, who believed only in what he could see, had never bothered to read to the end of the
Living Book of Life
. It is a failing in many scholars that they are easily distracted and not single-minded. If Yen Yu had read the end of the
Living Book of Life
(which perhaps might better have been called the
Deadly Book of Death)
he would surely never have started the business of the terra-cotta army. For the last page described how each terra-cotta warrior required to fight in the afterlife could only become the emperor’s
Dong Xi
, or creature, if it was first animated by the souls of ten living children. Yen Yu was horrified, for while he thought there was no chance of the emperor’s huge army of warrior devils ever being brought to spiritual life, it was horribly clear that if the emperor found this out he would certainly order the sacrifice of some eight hundred thousand children — which at that time was the number of all the children in China.

“But once again, Yen Yu’s resourcefulness came to the fore. When the emperor ordered the bottle brought and commanded the voice to speak to Yen Yu — which was how it
usually happened — the voice ‘told’ Yen Yu that with the army of
Dong Xi
now complete, it only remained for Qin to drink a large quantity of mercury and die so that he could live again more powerfully than before, and proceed with the conquest of heaven itself.

“Anyone other than Qin might have seen the obvious flaw in what the voice from the bottle had told Yen Yu must happen. But to Qin, this made perfect sense, and to everyone’s relief he proceeded to do exactly what Yen Yu had suggested. He drank enough mercury to kill a horse and died. All the children in China were saved. Yen Yu then ordered that Qin be buried alongside his army of warrior devils in his tomb, with the important difference that the last part of the
Dong Xi
ritual was never completed. The burial mound containing the huge army of warrior devils was then very carefully covered over by several tons of earth, and all the exits sealed up so that no one would ever again find the emperor’s terra-cotta army. And, in time, the Emperor Qin was forgotten.”

“You know,” said John, “I’ll bet these are the same terra-cotta warriors that were found by some Chinese workmen in 1974. Some of which are on loan to museums all over the world.”