Dragon Moon (20 page)

Many blank days passed and she didn’t bother to count them anymore. The sun was making it hard for her to think of anything. She felt like her brain was melting. Every time she concentrated on a thought it would slip from her mind, like a weighted string slipping through her fingers, like a dream fading on waking.

Throughout the days, Ping thought of nothing. If she allowed her mind to wander, it only came back to her misery. And anyway, thinking took energy. She moved without thinking. As soon as night fell, she collapsed into an exhausted sleep wherever she happened to be, only to wake in the dark, shivering with cold and unable to get back to sleep. Then she would start walking before dawn, tripping over rocks and stumbling down slopes in the darkness.

She had been hungry before, but never like this. She remembered meagre meals at Huangling—thin gruel and scraps of grisly meat left on Master Lan’s plate. Her mouth watered at the thought of such feasts now. She rummaged in her pouch. Perhaps there was a scrap of food in there—a nut, a shrivelled berry, a piece of mouldy mushroom. All she found was a mirror, a purple shard and a faded dragon scale.

She couldn’t remember the name of the Emperor’s
sister. She’d forgotten how long it was since she left Beibai Palace. It would only be a matter of time before she forgot who she was and where she was going. She thought for a moment. Where was she going? She couldn’t remember. She still had her name though. She clutched at the silk cord around her neck. She could never forget her name. She looked at her bamboo square. It was blank. The sun had faded the single character that used to be written there. Too tired to stand, she sat down and closed her eyes. All her senses were shut down. She had become an empty shell.

Her fingers closed around the purple shard. It felt cool in her hands. She stroked its smooth surface and admired the pretty purple colour. There was an itchy feeling in her chest. Her mind, empty of all other thoughts, focused on the itch. It wasn’t so much an itch as an ache. Her mind couldn’t make sense of it. All it understood was walking and sleeping. Anything else was confusing. She sat for a long time. The ache grew more painful, as if a branch were sticking into her, pressing harder and harder all the time. She opened her jacket and examined the patch of skin that hurt. There was no cut, no bruise, no insect bite, nothing that could have caused the discomfort. She knew that she had experienced this sensation before, but she couldn’t remember when.

The bronze mirror lay in her lap. On one side there was a creature reaching out for the central knob as if it
was something it wanted badly. It was a nice creature with four feet, a curving body and horns on its head. What sort of a creature was it? She couldn’t remember. She turned over the bronze disc. On the other side was a face. A human face—grimy, scratched and red raw. Skin was peeling off the nose, and the eyes were vacant. She turned the disc a little and the sunlight flashed in her eyes. She saw the face on the disc move, the eyes squint. It wasn’t painted on or carved into the bronze, it was a reflection of a real face. Her face.

Memories trickled back into her mind. She remembered what the feeling in her chest was. It was the thread pulling her. She had this ability, part of her second sight. When she wanted something badly, more than anything else, it would lead her to it. She turned over the mirror again. She knew now what the creature was called. It was a dragon. Her name was Ping and she was searching. For her dragon.

It was as if the thread was joining her to Kai. A thin strand like a single thread of silk spun by a silkworm. It was so fragile, so delicate, but it was unbroken. This thread had led her to things before. A shard of dragon stone had intensified the link. She grasped the shard with both hands. In some ways it was easier this time—her body and mind weren’t distracted by anything else. She got to her feet and allowed herself to be pulled along. She wouldn’t give up searching for Kai while she was still alive.

She found tubers to eat and some of the tasteless wild melons. She hollowed out one of the gourds so that she could carry water in it. The water tasted of rotten melon, but it quenched her thirst. When she came to a patch of long, coarse grass, she picked some of the grass blades and wove a misshapen hat. She caught a pigeon with a loop of cord. The cord was made of strands of hemp pulled from the fraying hem of her trousers and braided together. Ping made a fire that night and roasted the pigeon and the melon. She ate watercress leaves and berries. She found a sheltered place, made a bed of dried moss and slept well for the first time in many nights.

Day after day she walked. Each day she grew stronger and her mind became clearer. The invisible thread felt less likely to break, more like string now than thread. She was getting closer, but she knew that Kai was still hundreds of
li
away.

Every day she was confronted by a new peak, the same as the previous one, only higher. It was as if she were endlessly climbing the same mountain, struggling to the top, scrabbling down the other side, only to find herself back at the bottom again. When she stopped to catch her breath, she looked around and there were nothing but mountain peaks in all directions. She felt like she was climbing to the top of the world. Although it was summer, she noticed patches of dirty snow still hiding in shadowy corners of rock.

The mountains were covered with small, mossy plants that had a reddish tinge to them. They looked rusty brown from a distance. She watched a white eagle glide high above her in search of food and wished she had wings. If she could fly it would take no time to travel from peak to peak. But she had to crawl along the ground like an insect. Whether she chose to walk around a peak or clamber over it, she was always walking many times the distance that the eagle flew.

Some mornings, after a particularly steep climb the previous day, she found it difficult to wake. When she stood up, the mountains spun around her and she had to sit down again. Her head throbbed and she had no appetite. Every step took a great effort. All she wanted to do was sleep, but when she lay down, sleep wouldn’t come. She found that if she rested for a day, she felt better. She didn’t want to rest, but she made more progress if she waited for the sickness to pass than if she stumbled on while she was feeling ill.

One day she struggled to the top of a slope and found a mountain plateau stretching perfectly flat in front of her. She hadn’t walked along a flat surface for such a long time it seemed strange. It was effortless after so much climbing, she almost felt as if she were gliding a few inches above the earth. But on the other side of the plateau was another mountain range, soaring ever higher and topped by snow-capped peaks. Impatience overwhelmed her. She wanted to find Kai
now
.

And then there was the weather. How would she survive in the mountains once summer passed and winter approached? How would she stop herself from freezing? What would she eat? She inspected her food supply which consisted of a few roots and some large snails that tasted quite good when roasted in ashes. She had only enough for one meal. She looked at the height of the sun in the sky and tried to work out how long it would be before winter came. But in the mountains, it would come earlier than she was used to. She remembered the freezing winters on Huangling Mountain. She was much higher now. She didn’t know if she could survive the winter.

As she crossed the plateau she saw some people in the far distance. They were nomads, like the Ma Ren. They didn’t have a permanent home. They followed the sun and the grass to feed their yaks. If those people could survive winter, then she could too. She would try to buy furs from them. She would find out what food they ate. If that was what she had to do, she would do it. But she no longer had the gold pieces. She had nothing else to offer them, so she watched the nomads disappear from sight.

A quiet, slow-moving stream meandered across the plateau, in no hurry to reach the other side, enjoying the flatlands, just as she was, before it had to hurry on its way down the mountain slopes. Ping rested on the bank of the stream, sipping the icy water,
wondering if there were any fish that she could catch.

A shadow fell over her. Ping hadn’t seen a cloud for months. She looked up. Something hit her across the back of the head. She was knocked to the ground face-down, her head ringing. She didn’t know who or what her attacker was. Was it a wild animal, a leopard perhaps, or was it one of the nomads she’d seen earlier? She tried to twist round to see who had hit her, but drops of liquid sprayed over her face. Some got into her eyes. It stung. She blinked and rubbed her burning eyes. She opened them again, and found she couldn’t see at all.

Her body was picked up and thrown on top of something hard and spiky. She felt rough rope crisscross her back, binding her tight. She struggled but it made no difference. Her hands were bound, her eyes were blind. She had no idea what was happening to her.

There was a smell that she recognised but couldn’t place. It was a strong smell, fishy but with a hint of plums just about to rot. Then a cold wind started to whistle past her ears. The spiky thing beneath her rocked and swayed. That was familiar too. There was another sound above the rush and whistle of the wind. It sounded like dust being shaken from a large carpet. Suddenly Ping’s mind put all these things together—the spiky shape, the sounds, the smell. The spikes beneath
her were dorsal spines. The sound was the flap of large wings. The smell was that of a dragon. She was flying on the back of a dragon.

Ping felt the wind rush past. While she had been creeping along the ground, she had longed to skim above the world on a dragon. Her wish had come true. She could imagine the mountain peaks marching beneath her. And the thread was getting stronger by the moment. She could hear something in her mind—not words, not sounds, but an emotion—just as she had before Kai was born, when he was still inside the dragon stone. What she heard was a mixture of pleasure and fear. The dragon was taking her to Kai.

They flew for hours. The air grew colder so she knew they were getting higher. At last the wing beats slowed, the wind stopped rushing by. They were hovering. Then they were descending.

The air suddenly became warmer and more moist. And there was a new smell, a bad smell like when you break open an egg that’s rotten inside. With a thud, they were on the ground again. Ping could hear the scratching of talons on stone. Her bonds were loosened and she tumbled to the ground, landing on hard rock. She heard a wonderful sound in her head—the tinkling of wind chimes.

“Ping, Ping, Ping.”

She held out her arms in the direction of the sound, but Kai didn’t come to her.

“Are you all right?” She didn’t speak the words aloud.

“Yes, yes. Kai is all right.”

“I can’t see,” Ping said. “The dragon sprayed something in my face. I don’t know what it was.”

“Spit,” Kai said. “Dragon saliva makes human eyes blind.”

“The dragon spat in my eyes?” Ping exclaimed.

“It won’t last. In a while Ping will be able to see again.”

Her sight was returning. She could make out dim shapes now.

“Where are you?”

She peered at the blurred shapes. They were starting to take on a more solid form. She thought she was standing in the centre of a circle of large, jagged rocks, different coloured rocks.

“They are holding me,” Kai said.

“They?”

Had she been captured by a tribe of people who had enslaved a dragon? Were the blurred shapes tall, cloaked men?

Something rushed towards her. It was Kai. He had broken away from whoever or whatever was holding him. He nearly knocked Ping over. She threw her arms around him, feeling his familiar scales and spines beneath her fingers. She touched his nose, fondled his ears.

“I thought I’d lost you.”

“Kai is not lost.”

The tears that began to flow soothed her sore eyes. She heard his happy wind-chime sounds. She could see him now, though he was blurred. He was safe.

The jagged shapes around her came into focus. Ping turned in a slow circle. She wasn’t surrounded by rocks or men. She was surrounded by dragons.

There were seven dragons—two red, three white, two yellow. The white ones were the smallest, not much bigger than Kai, but two of them had fully developed wings. All three were females. Ping could tell because of their undulating noses and thicker tails. The yellow dragons were medium sized. One was male, the other female. They were both winged.

Danzi had told Ping that a dragon’s horns didn’t start to grow until it reached 500 years of age, which meant that even the youngest white dragon, whose
horns hadn’t finished growing, had to be older than that. The two red dragons were the biggest. They were bigger than Danzi, and both were female. The younger one had full-sized horns, but no wings. A dragon’s wings didn’t form until it was a thousand years old. The other red one was huge and ancient. Her eyes were dim, and one wing hung unfurled at her side, ragged and criss-crossed with old scars.

Ping stared at the seven dragons and they stared back, as if she were the uncommon creature. Their colours weren’t bright like fruit or flowers. The yellow dragons were the colour of sand, like the yellow of the Yellow River. The white dragons weren’t bright white like snow, but a very pale grey. The reds were rusty orange, a similar colour to a fox. The old one’s scales had faded almost to brown. She was two or maybe even three thousand years old. Kai was the only green dragon. He was so young compared to these dragons, not even two years old. His baby scales had all gone now and his fresh, new ones were jade green. He looked like a polished jewel among them.

Ping finally dragged her eyes away from the dragons and looked at her surroundings. They were on a high plateau with the deep blue sky surrounding them on all sides. This plateau was very different to the one she’d been plucked from. The earth was almost white. At first she thought it was snow, but it was white clay pitted and pocked with holes and craters, dotted with mounds, as
if someone had dug holes all over the ground. Steam rose from the holes. Some of the craters were filled with water, but they weren’t ordinary pools. They were all steaming and the water within them was brightly coloured. The largest pool was orange. There were two bright green ones, another was luminous pink, while others were white, yellow and purple. Elsewhere there were pools, not of water, but of mud which bubbled like boiling gruel.