Bridge Of Birds (19 page)

"I had no money, so I set out to make some. Like anyone else who sets out to make money I
lied and I cheated and I ruined my friends, but nothing mattered except getting enough
money to bring little Ah Chen back to life. 'Beloved husband, you must forget our
daughter,' my wife told me. 'If you continue this way, you will surely go insane.' Then
she fell ill, but I was too busy making money to care for her. She died, and I wept, but I
went right on making money. The money mattered, only the money, and I could not spend a
penny of it because I would need it all for the Old Man of the Mountain. I was not aware
of losing my mind, but as the years passed I forgot what the money was for. Now and then I
would remember, but I would tell myself that I needed twice as much money to pay the
wisest man in the world to bring my daughter back to life. I buried gold in chests and ran
out to grab for more. I became Miser Shen, the greediest and most miserable of men, and so
I would have remained if Lotus Cloud had not bankrupted me and brought me to my senses.

“Noble Sirs, there are women who can see right into the heart of a man, and I would like
you to know that Lotus Cloud never accepted the love of Miser Shen. She accepted the love
of a poor peasant who loved his little girl too much, and who went insane.”

We traveled at night, and spent the days huddled in the tent while we fried in the heat.
When we peeped through the folds we saw multiple images of the sun reflected in the
glaring white salt, surrounded by orange and violet halos that spun round and round and
made us sick to our stomachs. Whirlwinds danced in mad patterns, and the wind howled
horribly. Even at night the heat never released us from its blazing fingers, and often the
moon and stars were obscured by flying salt. The faint trace of what we hoped was a road
ran on and on, seemingly without end, and it was a relief when the mirages began, because
they gave us something to look at.

I would see a castle with a silver dome, standing in the center of an emerald lake. “No,
no!” Miser Shen would say. “It is a large rock in the middle of a river, and the rock is
covered with nesting birds. Seagulls, I think, although I cannot imagine what seagulls are
doing in a desert.” Master Li would snort and say, “Nonsense. I can clearly see a large
pleasure barge floating in a pond, and the banks are lined with bright green trees.”

Then the mirage would dissolve into nothingness, and we would gaze at an endless expanse
of white salt.

We saw cities and cemeteries and armies arrayed in battle formation, and always there was
water and a green oasis of some sort. As the days passed we had to ration water, and
thirst began to torment us. Then one day Miser Shen pointed ahead.

“Look at that ghastly mirage!” he exclaimed.

“Mirage?” I said. “Shen, it's the nightmare of a demented baboon.”

Li Kao studied the shimmering image carefully and said, “Tell me what you see.”

“Well, I see the usual green oasis, but it is standing in the middle of a mess of
shattered stones,” said Miser Shen. “Geysers of steam are hissing up from the bowels of
the earth, and I smell a horrible stench of sulphur.”

“The whole mirage is surrounded by a broad belt like a moat, and it's filled with a
strange fiery liquid that makes a sickening sort of bubbling sound,” I said.

“My friends, I regret to report that I see precisely the same thing,” Master Li said
grimly. “That is not a mirage, and the path we are following leads straight to it.”

As we came closer we realized that we were looking at the ruins of a once great city, but
what a terrible catastrophe had befallen it! The walls were tumbled ruins. One narrow span
of what had once been a mighty stone bridge still crossed a moat that had formerly held
blue water and white swans and golden fish, and now bubbled with fiery red-black lava. On
the other side a pair of enormous bronze gates stood open, but bent and twisted by some
unimaginable force, and when we nervously crossed the moat and passed through the gates a
terrible sight met our eyes. Steam hissed like the breath of angry dragons through great
gaping holes in the earth, and pools of murderous lava heaved and bubbled, and it seemed
to me that the harsh wind that howled through the ruins was wailing death, death, death. A
lunatic tangle of side streets branched from both sides of a central avenue - if one could
call them streets, since not one building remained standing - and in the distance we saw a
great mass of tumbled stones. It had probably been the palace of the king, and we decided
to climb to the top of it to try to find the green oasis that we had glimpsed from a
distance.

It had certainly been a palace. We climbed over smashed statues and beautiful stone
friezes, and then we stopped dead in our tracks and stared. Ahead of us was a wall about
thirty feet high and perhaps five times as long, and the three of us had the same thought
at once.

“That wall could not possibly have survived the catastrophe!” I cried. “It must have been
built afterward, from the toppled stones.”

“I would not like to meet whatever it was that knocked a hole in it,” Master Li said
thoughtfully.

Nor would I. Some incredible force had jerked out enormous stone slabs and tossed them
aside like pebbles. A great gaping hole confronted us like a screaming mouth, and when we
cautiously stepped through it we stared at great piles of human bones. Miser Shen turned
quite pale.

“I swear that those poor souls were chewed!” he gasped.

He was right. Nothing but monstrous grinding teeth could have shredded bones like that,
and not only bones. Armor had been pulverized as well, and Miser Shen and I were greatly
relieved when Li Kao examined it with critical eyes and said:

“This armor is in the style of five hundred years ago, or more. Perhaps a thousand years
would be closer. Whatever the creature was, it has been dust for centuries.”

He bent over and examined the mangled skeletons.

“You know, I recall a monster that could have done this to armed warriors,” he said
thoughtfully. “It was discovered frozen in the ice of a Mongolian glacier. Half mammal,
half lizard, one hundred feet from head to tail, and equipped with teeth like steel
doorposts. The sages wanted to preserve it for scientific study, but we had an
exceptionally idiotic emperor at the time, and I regret to say that the imperial dolt had
the beast cut up and boiled for a state banquet. The fact that it smelled like two
thousand old unopened rooms and tasted like diseased whale blubber didn't bother the Son
of Heaven one bit. He happily awarded himself the medal 'Heroic Slayer of Inedible
Monstrosities,' which he wore on all state occasions.”

I was staring at a large toppled slab.

“Master Li, I think this is covered with writing, but the script is so ancient that I
can't make any sense of it,” I said.

He examined the slab with interest, and brushed a layer of salt from it. Time and the wind
had made much of the writing illegible, but enough remained to make my hair stand up on my
head.

“It begins with a prayer to the gods,” he said. “Then some words are missing, and then it
says: '... punished for our sins, and the earth opened with a great roar and flames
engulfed us. Fiery black rock sprayed up like water, and for eight days the earth heaved
and shuddered, and on the ninth day the earth vomited forth the Hand That No One Sees,
from the very depths of Hell.' ”

“The what?” Miser Shen asked.

“The Hand That No One Sees, but don't ask me what it means,” said Master Li. “More words
are missing, and then it says: '... sixth day of our doom, and we labor on the wall but we
are faint of heart. We pray and sacrifice, but the gods remain implacable. The queen and
her ladies have chosen the more merciful death, and have jumped into the lake of fiery
molten rock. We did not try to stop them. The Hand moves closer. Our spears are hurled at
nothingness and bounce away from nothingness. The wall is beginning to shake. The HandÉ' ”

Li Kao straightened up. “That's all there is,” he said quietly.

“Whoof!” Miser Shen gasped. “I don't care how many centuries ago that happened. I want to
get out of here.”

So did I. I scrambled up to the top of the wall and peered around.

“I see the oasis!” I cried. “There's a lake of lava covering the back of the palace, so
we'll have to try to reach the oasis through the side streets.”

That wasn't as simple as it sounded. Time and again we came to dead ends where scalding
steam or bubbling lava blocked the way, and we were not the only ones who had reached dead
ends. Skeletons, chewed to pieces in their useless armor, littered almost every side
street.

“Whatever that thing was, it certainly ate well,” Miser Shen said nervously.

We tried street after street with no success, and finally we were almost back where we had
entered the city. Li Kao looked at the huge bronze gates and the narrow span of bridge and
shrugged his shoulders.

“Perhaps we had better go back across the moat and see if there is another bridge on the
side where the oasis is,” he said.

We started forward, and then we stopped and gaped with eyes that nearly popped from the
sockets. Those gates weighed tons. Nothing was touching them, but they were creaking shut!
They came together with a terrible crash of metal, and a mark appeared in the layer of
salt upon the ground. It took several moments for my brain to believe what my eyes were
showing me. I was staring at the print of an enormous thumb, and four huge fingerprints
followed, and then an immense sliding mark. An enormous invisible hand was crawling toward
us, dragging the palm and heel behind the terrible fingers!

Miser Shen and I stood rooted to the spot in horror, but Master Li whirled around and
gazed back at the tangle of the side streets. Then he yelled, “Ox, pick us up!”

I scooped up Master Li in one arm and Miser Shen in the other, and Master Li grabbed the
dragon pendant that dangled from the chain around my neck. His fingers found the place
where the dragon had stopped after leading us to the treasure trove.

“I should have realized at once that this place was another labyrinth,” he said grimly.
“Turn into the second street on the right, and I would advise you to hurry.”

Even though I was carrying the two of them I doubt that my record for the course will be
surpassed until a Tibetan snow leopard tries it, but the Hand That No One Sees was almost
as fast. Those great invisible fingers were stretching out twenty or thirty feet, and salt
was billowing up behind the sliding palm. “First left!” Master Li yelled. “Second left!...
Fourth right!... Third left!... First right!... .” I panted through the maze, leaping over
lava and darting around geysers of steam, and at last I saw the tops of green trees and
realized that the dragon was leading us to the oasis. Then I skidded to a halt.

“May Buddha have mercy on our souls!” howled Miser Shen.

There was the beautiful green oasis, right in front of us, but it was encircled by a moat
of bubbling lava. A narrow stone bridge led safely across the fiery rock, but the Hand
That No One Sees had taken a shortcut. The bridge was far too narrow for the monster to
cross, but that would do us no good unless we were on the other side, and I stared in
horror at the salt on the ground in front of the bridge. Great invisible fingers pawed,
and salt billowed, and then the Hand from Hell began crawling toward us, blocking any path
to the oasis.

At the edge of the moat was the only upright building that we had seen, a watchtower,
probably, tall and narrow and teetering upon cracked stone slabs. I unceremoniously dumped
Li Kao and Miser Shen and raced up and put my shoulder to the thing. I heaved with
everything that I had, and the tower began to tilt. Then I heaved with more than I had,
and when I heard a snapping sound I assumed that my spine had split in half. Instead it
was one of the supporting slabs that had split, and the tall tower dissolved into a shower
of stones that toppled down into the moat.

The lava was nearly as dense as the stones, and they sank very slowly. I ran back and
scooped up Li Kao and Miser Shen, and then I raced to the edge of the moat and jumped. My
feet touched the first stone and I vaulted to the second. My sandals were smoking and my
lungs were raw from bubbling sulphur as I hopped from stone to stone, and the last one had
nearly sunk out of sight. I sent a prayer to the August Personage of Jade and leaped, and
my toes touched the searing surface and I leaped again, and perhaps the August Personage
of Jade gave me a helpful shove because I landed with my face buried in green grass.

I was dimly aware that Master Li and Miser Shen were shouting in my ears and pounding my
back, but the world was spinning before my eyes, and I felt as though I were falling down
a hole that had no end. Then a cool, peaceful blackness closed around me.

I awoke to see Li Kao smiling down at me, and Miser Shen tilted a gourd filled with
delicious spring water to my lips. It revived me as if by magic. Soon I was able to get up
and examine the little oasis, which had clearly been used as a pleasure garden.

Trees and shrubs from every corner of the empire had been planted there, and the variety
was astonishing. Silver bells had once tinkled in the branches, and paper lanterns had
glowed in the night like fireflies, and lovers had walked hand in hand through mazes of
moonflowers. Then the horrible eruption, and the Hand That No One Sees. I wondered what
terrible crime the city had committed to deserve such a fate, but then I decided that I
didn't want to know. I turned around and shuddered as I saw the marks of invisible fingers
angrily pawing in the salt at the other end of the narrow bridge. The Hand was waiting.

A clear path led through wildflowers toward the bronze roof of a pagoda that sparkled in
the light of the setting sun. We started toward it, and as we drew closer we saw that the
pagoda had escaped destruction because it was nearly solid stone. Only the wooden doors
had rotted away. The sun sank below the horizon, but the moon had already lifted into the
sky, and a pale path of moonbeams reached through the hole where the door had been and
touched something that sparkled. Tears began to trickle down Miser Shen's cheeks as he
stared at a pile of treasure that was even larger than the one at the Castle of the
Labyrinth.