Bridge Of Birds (3 page)

In house after house the result was the same, except that I exited in a more dignified
manner - my fists were clenched and there was a glint in my eyes, and I am not exactly
small - and I decided that I was going to have to hit a wise man over the head, stuff him
in a bag, and carry him back to Ku-fu whether he liked it or not. Then I received a sign
from Heaven. I had reached the end of the avenue and was starting to go back up the other
side, and suddenly a shaft of brilliant sunlight shot through the clouds and darted like
an arrow into a narrow winding alley. It sparkled upon the sign of an eye, but this eye
was not wide open. It was half-shut.

“Part of the truth revealed,” the eye seemed to be saying. “Some things I see, but some I
don't.”

If that was the message it was the first sensible thing that I had seen in Peking, and I
turned and started down the alley.

The sign was old and shabby, and it hung above the open door of a sagging bamboo shack.
When I timidly stepped inside I saw smashed furniture and a mass of shattered crockery,
and the reek of sour wine made my head reel. The sole inhabitant was snoring upon a filthy
mattress.

He was old almost beyond belief. He could not have weighed more than ninety pounds, and
his frail bones would have been more suitable for a large bird. Drunken flies were
staggering through pools of spilled wine, and crawling giddily up the ancient gentleman's
bald skull, and tumbling down the wrinkled seams of a face that might have been a relief
map of all China, and becoming entangled in a wispy white beard. Small bubbles formed and
burst upon the old man's lips, and his breath was foul.

I sighed and turned to go, and then I stopped dead in my tracks and caught my breath.

Once an eminent visitor to our monastery had displayed the gold diploma that was awarded
to the scholar who had won third place in the imperial
chin-shih
examination, and in school-books I had seen illustrations of the silver diploma that was
awarded to second place, but never did I dream that I would be privileged to see the
flower. The real thing, not a picture of it. There it was, casually tacked to a post not
two feet from my eyes, and I reverently blew away the dust to read that seventy-eight
years ago a certain Li Kao had been awarded first place among all the scholars in China,
and had received an appointment as a full research fellow in the Forest of Culture Academy.

I turned from the picture of the rose and gazed with wide eyes at the ancient gentleman
upon the mattress. Could this be the great Li Kao, whose brain had caused the empire to
bow at his feet? Who had been elevated to the highest rank of mandarin, and whose mighty
head was now being used as a pillow for drunken flies? I stood there, rooted in wonder,
while the wrinkles began to heave like the waves of a gray and storm-tossed sea. Two
red-rimmed eyes appeared, and a long spotted tongue slid out and painfully licked parched
lips.

“Wine!” he wheezed.

I searched for an unbroken jar, but there wasn't one. “Venerable Sir, I fear that all the
wine is gone,” I said politely.

His eyes creaked toward a shabby purse that lay in a puddle. “Money!” he wheezed.

I picked up the purse and opened it. “Venerable Sir, I fear that the money is gone too,” I
said.

His eyeballs rolled up toward the top of his head, and I decided to change the subject.

“Have I the honor of addressing the great Li Kao, foremost among the scholars of China? I
have a problem to place before such a man, but all that I can afford to pay is five
thousand copper cash,” I said sadly.

A hand like a claw slid from the sleeve of his robe. “Give!” he wheezed.

I placed the string of coins in his hand, and his fingers closed around it, taking
possession. Then the fingers opened.

“Take this five thousand copper cash,” he said, enunciating with a painful effort, “and
return as soon as possible with all the wine that you can buy.”

“At once, Venerable Sir,” I sighed.

Having performed similar chores for Uncle Nung more times than I cared to count I judged
it wiser to buy some food as well, and when I returned I had two small jars of wine, two
small bowls of congee, and a valuable lesson in the buying power of copper coins. I
propped the old man's head up and poured wine down his throat until he had revived enough
to grab the jar and finish the rest of it at a gulp, and long practice enabled me to slip
a bowl of congee into his fingers and get it to his lips before he realized that it wasn't
wine. Two spots of color had appeared in his cheeks when he finished it, and after the
second jar of wine he willingly attacked the second bowl of congee.

“Who you?” he said between slurps.

“My surname is Lu and my personal name is Yu, but I am not to be confused with the eminent
author of
The Classic of Tea
. Everyone calls me Number Ten Ox,” I said.

“My surname is Li and my personal name is Kao, and there is a slight flaw in my
character,” he said matter-of-factly. “You got a problem?”

I told him the whole story, and I was weeping at the end. He listened with interest, and
had me go over it again, and then he pitched the empty bowl over his shoulder so that it
smashed upon the rest of the crockery. When he hopped up from his mattress I was
astonished to see that he was as spry as a goat.

“Number Ten Ox, eh? Muscles are highly overrated, but yours may come in handy,” he said.
“We will have to hurry, and for a variety of reasons you may be required to twist
somebody's head off.”

I could scarcely believe my ears.

“Master Li, do you mean that you will come to my village and find out how a plague can
learn to count?” I cried.

“I already know how your plague learned to count,” he said calmly. “Bend over.”

I was so stunned that I bent over backward until he advised me to try it the other way
around. Master Li hopped nimbly upon my back and wrapped his arms around my neck and stuck
his tiny feet into the pockets of my tunic. He was as light as a feather.

“Number Ten Ox, I am no longer as fast on my feet as I used to be, and I suspect that time
may be crucial. I would suggest that you take aim at your village and start running like
hell,” said the ancient sage.

My head was spinning, but my heart was wild with hope. I took off like a deer. Li Kao
ducked as I bolted through the door and my head struck something, and when I skidded from
the alley and glanced back I saw that my head had struck the bottom of an old shabby sign,
and that a half-closed eye was spinning around and around as though it was peering at
mysteries in every corner of the empire.

I have no idea whether or not it was premonition, but the image remained with me
throughout our journey back to Ku-fu.

Auntie Hua looked somewhat askance at the sage I had brought back to our village, but not
for long. That antiquated gentleman stank of wine, and his robe was as filthy as his
beard, but such was his air of authority that even the abbot accepted his leadership
without question, and Li Kao walked from bed to bed, peeling back the children's eyelids
and grunting with satisfaction when he saw that the pupils of their eyes were not fixed
and dilated.

“Good!” he grunted. “It is not a question of teaching a plague how to count, which is
quite simple, but of which agent was used, and I had feared that there might be brain
damage. Now I shall need samples of mulberry leaves from every grove, clearly labeled so
that we will know where they came from.”

We raced to do his bidding, Basket after basket of mulberry leaves was carried up the hill
to the monastery, and Li Kao placed them in vials and added chemicals, while the abbot
adjusted the fires beneath alchemists' stoves. When the eighteenth batch of leaves turned
the chemicals pale orange Li Kao began to work with great speed, boiling the leaves to a
pulp, adding more chemicals a drop at a time, increasing the heat and reducing the liquid.
The pale-orange color began to turn green. When the liquid had been reduced to nothingness
a tiny pile of black crystals remained in the vial, and Li Kao placed half of them into a
new vial to which he added some colorless liquid. Then he straightened up and stretched
wearily.

“Another minute and I will be sure,” he said, and he walked over to the window. Some of
the younger children who had escaped the plague were wandering disconsolately in the
abbot's garden, and Li Kao pointed to a small boy. “Watch,” he said.

We watched and nothing happened. Then the boy absent-mindedly plucked a leaf from a tree,
and he lifted it to his mouth and began to chew.

“All children do that,” Master Li said quietly. “The children of your village who were old
enough to work in basket brigades chewed mulberry leaves, but the older they were, the
more self-conscious they became about doing childish things, and that is why the seizures
were limited to children between the ages of eight and thirteen. You see, we are not
dealing with a plague but with an agent that was deliberately designed to kill silkworms.”

He turned and pointed to the vial. The liquid had the evilest color that I had ever seen:
slick and green and slimy and garish, like gangrene.

“That is
ku
poison, for which there is no known antidote,” he said grimly. “It was smeared upon the
leaves in the mulberry grove that belongs to a certain Pawnbroker Fang.”

A lynch mob poured down the hill, but the warehouse door was locked. “Ox!” the abbot
snarled. I kicked the door halfway across the room, and a pathetic sight met our eyes. Ma
the Grub was lying on his back. Traces of ku poison smeared his lips, and he was as dead
as Confucius. Pawnbroker Fang was still alive, but barely. His glazed eyes tried to focus
on us, and his lips moved.

“We never intended to... It was the silkworms,” he whispered. “If they died... the IOUs...
own everything... Now my daughter...”

He was almost gone. The abbot knelt and placed a small jade Buddha in the pawnbroker's
hands and began to pray for his miserable soul. Fang's eyes opened one last time, and he
looked blindly down at the jade Buddha, and he made a truly heroic effort.

“Cheap, very cheap,” he sneered. “No more than two hundred...”

Then he too was dead.

Li Kao gazed down at the bodies with a rather strange expression on his face, and then he
shrugged his shoulders.

“So be it,” he said. “I suggest that we leave them here to rot and return to the
monastery. We have far more important things to worry about.”

Pawnbroker Fang and Ma the Grub had almost certainly killed the children of my village,
but when I looked back at the bodies I could find no anger in my heart.

The abbot led the way. We lit candles, and our shadows loomed like twisted giants upon the
gray stone walls as we trudged down the long winding flight of steps to the great vaulted
cellar where the scrolls were stacked in long rows of wooden shelves. Our monastery is
very old, and over the centuries the abbots had added to the library. The medical texts
numbered in the hundreds, and I helped the novices bring scroll after scroll to the long
tables where the abbot and his bonzes checked every reference to
ku
poison. The references were extensive, since the poison has been a favorite agent for
assassination for nearly two thousand years, and the information was always the same: The
victims' vital signs would drop so low that they expended almost no energy at all and
could last for months, but nothing could restore them to consciousness, and death was
inevitable. There was no antidote.

The poison was said to have been imported from Tibet. Li Kao was the only scholar who was
qualified to interpret the ancient Tibetan texts such as
Chalog Job Jad
, and he said that the abbot's copy of
Zaraga Dib Jad
was so rare that there might not be another one in existence. The rustle of the old
parchment was punctuated by Master Li's soft curses. The Tibetan physicians had been
magnificent at describing treatments but terrible at describing symptoms, and apparently
it had been taboo to mention by name any agent whose sole purpose was murder - possibly,
he pointed out, because the alchemists who invented such things belonged to the same
monkish orders as the physicians. Another problem was the antiquity of the texts, which
were faded and spotted to the point of illegibility. The sun had set and was rising again
when Master Li bent close to a page in
Jud Chi, The Eight Branches of the Four Principles of Special Therapy.

“I can make out the ancient ideograph for 'star,' and next to it is a badly spotted
character that could mean many things, but among them is the ideograph for 'wine vessel,'
” he muttered. “What would you get if you combined the ideographs of star and wine vessel?”

“You would get the logograph 'to awake from a drunken stupor,' ” said the abbot.

“Precisely, and 'drunken stupor,' if used figuratively, is such a maddeningly vague
description of symptoms that it could mean almost anything. The interesting thing is that
the preceding text suggests seizures and clawing of air,” said Master Li. “Can we say that
the children are now lying in stupors?”

He bent close to the text and read aloud.

“To awake from a drunken stupor, only one treatment is effective, and this will succeed
only if the physician has access to the rarest and mightiest of all healing agents....” He
paused and scratched his head. “The ancient ideograph for 'ginseng' is accompanied by an
exceptionally elaborate construction that I would translate as 'Great Root of Power.' Has
anyone ever heard of a ginseng Great Root of Power?”

Nobody had. Li Kao went back to the text.

“The Great Root must be distilled to the essence, and three drops must be applied to the
tongue of the patient. The treatment must be repeated three times, and if it is truly the
Great Root, the patient will recover almost immediately. Without such a root no cure is
possible....” Master Li paused for emphasis. “And while the patient may remain in his
stupor for months, he cannot be awakened, and death is inevitable.”