Everything Under the Sky (37 page)

I heard something nearby and turned to look. Four pairs of eyes were smiling down at me; everyone was awake and waiting.

“Good morning, Auntie.”

Good morning indeed; as good as if it weren't the most dangerous one of our lives. Still, despite my fears, I enjoyed doing my tai chi on that balcony in front of the palace, contemplating the distant red walls, the grand esplanade with flames on top of the pilasters, and the empty ponds. If this was going to be the last time, then we might as well do it in style.

I was still savoring my tea when Lao Jiang gave the order to get moving.

“Where do you suppose you're going?” I mocked, taking the last sip.

“Not far.” He smiled. “How about the throne room?”

“Do you want us to die?” I joked.

“No. I want us to pick up our things and start studying the terrain. First, we'll use our bundles to see if the old crossbows still work. If they do, we'll try to find where the arrows come from in order to avoid them.”

“Here, use mine,” I said, tossing it to him. “Yours had better stay right here.”

The children hurried to gather their things as soon as they saw Lao Jiang, Master Red, and me approach one of the doors and stop, kneeling just in front of the wooden sill. That great hall was impressive. If it had been a real administrative palace, thousands would easily have been able to gather there. Nearby we could see what was left of a handful of ancient skeletons. In among the virtually disintegrated bones and tattered clothing were fifteen or twenty bronze arrows as long as my forearm.

“Are you sure we can use your bag?” Lao Jiang asked, glancing at me suspiciously.

“I have a hunch the crossbows aren't going to work,” I replied optimistically. Even if worse came to worst, my passport and Fernanda's, as well as my sketchbook and pencils, were safe in my pockets.

Why do I always speak too soon? The moment my belongings touched the ground on the other side of the sill, you could hear the sound of chains, and before we knew it, a single arrow came from the north wall, somewhere between the coffin and the gold dragons, and speared the bag as if it were a pincushion.

“Well, your hunch was wrong,” Master Red noted very seriously.

“I see that,” I replied.

“Now we know everything we needed to know,” Lao Jiang said. “First, the crossbows still work, and second, they're very precise and a great distance away. There's no way we can get to the firing mechanism.”

“The problem's with the floor,” I added pensively. “When something touches it, the arrows fire.”

“Well, we can't fly to the other side,” Fernanda joked.

“It's time, Master Red Jade, for you to hear what the third piece of the
jiance
says regarding this trap,” Lao Jiang said. “Your vast knowledge has already helped us once. I hope it will be able to help us again.”

Master Red, who was already kneeling, bowed so deeply before the antiquarian that his prominent chin nearly dug into his throat.

“It would be a great honor for me to be able to help you again, Da Teh.”

The monk called Lao Jiang by his courtesy name, Da Teh, the one Fernanda and I were supposed to have been using.

“The architect Sai Wu wrote to his son, ‘On the first level, hundreds of crossbows will fire when you enter the palace, but you can avoid them by studying the founder of the Xia
⁴⁹
dynasty's achievements.’ ”

Master Red crossed his arms, burying his hands in his “sleeves that stop the wind,” and slipped into a state of deep meditation (although, rather than meditation it must have been thought, because Taoist meditation consists of emptying the mind and thinking of nothing, the exact opposite of what he had to do). I began to ponder as well. Something in what Lao Jiang had read of Sai Wu's words caught my attention.

“In reality, hundreds of crossbows didn't fire,” I commented in surprise, “just one.”

Why just one? Would Sai Wu mislead his son, especially to warn him of a danger far beyond what was real? I didn't think so. Therefore, he truly believed that hundreds of arrows would be fired when Sai Shi Gu'er stepped on the black floor of the palace. If he believed that, then he had actually ordered that hundreds of crossbows be placed behind the walls, even if he didn't know how they would work.

“What would happen if we threw the bag somewhere else?” I asked out loud.

“What do you mean?”

“Pass me my bag,” I said to Lao Jiang, because he was closer. He reached out carefully and got it. I rashly pulled the arrow out and threw my bag on the tiles again, this time to the right. An arrow appeared from the far east wall and plunged in with the same precision and force as the first, but, surprisingly, this time it had been fired from eight hundred to a thousand feet away and at another angle. After hesitating for a few seconds, I stood up, took my niece's bag out of her arms and Biao's as well. Using both hands, I threw one to each side, at different distances away from us. It was incredible: two bronze arrows appeared from the east and west walls and again hit the center of their targets. That thousand-year-old mechanism against tomb raiders not only had extraordinary aim, but it behaved exactly as if it had the eyes of a great archer.

Seeing what happened, Lao Jiang brought his hands to his head as if struggling to remember something important. He brushed his white hair back off his forehead again and again.

“It could be …” he finally said. “It could be a combination of earthquake detectors and automatic crossbows. I'm not entirely sure, but that's the most logical explanation. The detectors would register both vibrations in the ground as well as the point of origin and would activate the corresponding crossbow.”

“Lao Jiang, please,” I entreated. “What are you talking about? Earthquake detectors?”

“The dragons,” he asserted.

I didn't understand a word, and by the look on Biao's and Fernanda's faces, neither did they.

“What dragons? Those?” I asked, pointing to the two enormous dragons that flanked the altar where the coffin lay.

“Yes. We in China learned to detect earthquakes a long time ago. A few old seismoscopes can still be seen in Peking and even Shanghai. The first reference to such an invention is from the second century, although scholars have always suspected that a similar device had existed much further back. I think we have the proof of that here, in those dragons.”

“Why in the dragons?” Biao asked.

“Seismoscopes have always been built in the shape of a dragon. It may be because of the superstition around good luck, I'm not sure. The earthquake detector works by means of little metal balls in the animal's mouth. These vibrate in a certain way and in a certain number depending on the intensity of the tremor and where it occurred. They say the dragon in the Peking observatory could tell of earthquakes that occurred anywhere in China, so why couldn't an older mechanism detect simple footsteps inside a room?”

“You mean to say that … seismoscope,” I asked, “registers our steps on the black tiles and sets off the precise crossbow aimed at the place where the vibration occurred?”

“That's exactly what I'm saying.”

“And how many arrows could each crossbow fire?”

“Perhaps twenty or thirty, I'm not sure. The largest ones, for war, had to be transported by four men. They were used to hit targets at great distances, firing on a far-off enemy who could even be hidden behind walls or mountains. Every machine was equipped with twenty or thirty arrows placed on a horizontal bar underneath the bow so the crossbowmen could reload quickly.”

“Hundreds of those huge crossbows intended for war won't fit behind these walls. Weren't there other, smaller ones?”

“Yes, of course. You're right: The ones hidden behind these walls can't be that big. That would be absurd. They're probably small crossbows, the ones carried by a single bowman, and in that case they were equipped with no more than ten bronze arrows. That was the most a man could carry.”

“But there are no men here, Lao Jiang,” my niece objected. “It's just some sort of automatic mechanism.”

“Let's not complicate matters,” he said dismissively. “Wars then weren't like they are today, and machines weren't as sophisticated either. Most likely there'd have been a limited number of arrows per crossbow in an imperial mausoleum. How many attempts could be expected on a place like this? How many have there been over the last two thousand years?”

“I think I have the answer!” Master Red then exclaimed. We all turned to look at him. He was still sitting in the same position but had opened his small, wide-spaced eyes, and his head was tilted to look up at us.

“Really?” Biao asked admiringly.

Meanwhile, being a woman of little faith, I picked up the first arrow that had hit my bag and resolutely threw it at the bones of the Han servants, resulting in what could be considered a dusty sacrilege. Some of the remains and cloth flew into the air and fell on nearby tiles. The interesting part of this experiment was that only two arrows were fired from the north wall and another from the west. It was hard to know, but intuition told me that surely there should have been more. If I was right, it must indicate that the crossbows were emptied after firing only two or three times. I wasn't about to go and test my theory, but it was a point that could come in handy if Master Red, contrary to his assertions, really hadn't solved the problem.

“Have you had quite enough fun, Elvira?”

“Yes, Lao Jiang. I'm very sorry, Master Red Jade. Please, tell us what you've found.”

“You told me, Da Teh,” he began explaining, “that you could avoid the arrows by studying the founder of the Xia dynasty's achievements. I began thinking about the Xia dynasty and its founder, Emperor Yu, who carried out great works and innumerable feats such as being born of a father dead three years earlier, speaking with animals, knowing their secrets, raising mountains, becoming a bear at will, or, much more important, discovering on the shell of a giant tortoise the signs that explain how the changes in the universe occur.”

That was beginning to sound familiar. Wasn't it that Master Tzau, the old man in that cave in the heart of a mountain in Wudang, who told me about this Yu? Yes, yes, it was him. He told me that bit about the solid yang lines and broken yin lines that form the symbols of the
I Ching
and were discovered by Yu on the shell of a tortoise.

“None of this has any apparent relationship to the crossbows,” Master Red continued. “However, one of Emperor Yu's most important achievements does: containing and controlling the overflowing waters. He lived during the time of the great floods that ravaged the earth. The rains and rising water levels resulted in many deaths and destroyed crops. According to the
Shanhai Jing, The Book of Mountains and Seas
—”

“You also have a copy of—”

“Lao Jiang, please!” I cut him off. Was there a single ancient book that didn't interest him?

“—the emperors of heaven and the celestial spirits ordered Yu to save the world from the dangerous waters. Why did they order Yu? Well, they knew him; he had often traveled up to heaven to visit them.”

“And how did he travel up to heaven?” Fernanda asked, intrigued. “By means of a dance,” I said, remembering what Master Tzau had told me. Master Red smiled and nodded. “Yu had a magic dance that would take him up to the stars.”

“A dance that only a few of us who practice the internal arts know and is called the ‘Dance of Yu’ or the ‘Steps of Yu.’ ”

“I still don't see the connection,” the antiquarian protested.

“A dance, Lao Jiang!” I exclaimed, turning to face him. “Dance, steps …” He looked at me as if I'd gone crazy. “Steps, footsteps, tiles, crossbows, dragons … !”

His eyes grew wide, indicating that he had finally grasped what I was trying to say.

“Now I understand,” he murmured. “But you're the only one who knows the steps to this dance, Master Red Jade. The rest of us can't start learning it now.”

“True, it is rather difficult,” Master Red admitted, “but you could follow me. You can step where I step, copying my gestures.”

“The gestures won't be necessary,” I noted.

“Will we be able to get our bags back?” Fernanda asked.

“That may be a problem,” I admitted remorsefully. If we didn't dance anywhere near them, they'd be lost forever, and it was my fault for tossing them so blithely.

“Shall we begin?” Master Red Jade encouraged.

“But what if that dance isn't the answer?” Biao asked worriedly. In addition to Lao Jiang's theories, the boy was picking up my neuroses.

“Then we'll think of something else,” I said, putting a hand on his back and pushing him toward the doors. “What worries me now is that we don't know where the starting point is, which tile to step on first.”

But Master Red had already thought of that. He bent over and calmly picked up a long bone from one of the Han servants that had fallen near the doorframe after I'd scattered them with the arrow.

“Get up against the walls, away from the doors,” Master Red Jade instructed. Any arrow that came out of the north wall and didn't find a target would fly out into the esplanade below, spearing whoever happened to be in its way. Master Red was the one who would be in danger, even though he lay on the ground, hidden behind the doorframe and also took cover behind his bundle, just in case. With the bone in his right hand, he hit every tile in the first row one after the other, slithering along like a snake from the first door on the right to the last one on the left, nearest us. The first tap filled our hearts with gladness: No arrows flew, but that's because Master Red had been unsure of how strong the bone was and tapped it too softly. The second tile set off an arrow from the north wall as expected. It flew out the door and over the stone balustrade on the terrace. The same thing happened with the next tile, and the next, and the next…. We didn't get discouraged no matter how slim our opportunities were becoming; we knew we were on the right track. Thus, when Master Red hit the same tile twice without an arrow's being fired from the other end, we all let out a happy whoop.

“It's here,” he said confidently. “The next one should be safe as well.”