“A thought kept returning to my mind,” he said. “Was it merely the familiar landscape of the Valley of Sorrows that released memories of a long-forgotten existence, or was something more dramatic involved? The night before you were wounded, you sat here and heard the story of Wolf and Fire Girl. Folk epics of the heroic quest are almost always based upon historical fact and then embellished beyond recognition. Was there fact behind the flight of Wolf and Fire Girl? They were running beside an underground river that was lined with statues bearing heads of animals and birds. During your fever you relived parts of a terrible experience. Here’s some of it.”
He picked up his notes and found the place.
GRIEF OF DAWN: Faster… Must run faster…. Where is the turn? …Past the goat statue…. There’s the raven and the river…. Faster …Faster This way! Hurry! … Soldiers…. Hide until they pass…. Now run! Run!
“Interesting,” Master Li said thoughtfully. “Here’s how my subconscious mind reacted in Hell.”
TOU WAN: All I had was the sliver for my hairpin…. That maid always looking at it, always wanting it, trying to steal it. I stabbed her, but she ran away with the stone…. My maid and that concubine with the ring of Upuaut my husband gave her…. The soldiers killed them, but they could not find the stone.
Master Li shrugged. “I have no idea why I tossed in the bit about the maid having been stabbed, but other parts are clear enough. Anyone ever hear of Asyut?”
The sudden change of subject startled us. We shook our heads negatively.
“It’s a city in Egypt, or used to be,” he explained. “The patron deity was called Upuaut, and when the barbarian Greeks conquered the place, they retained the deity but renamed the city Lycopolis. Prince, can you provide a literal translation?”
The prince was obviously pleased to be able to contribute something. “City of the Wolf,” he said promptly.
“Exactly. The head of Upuaut is that of a wolf, and the artisans of the city are renowned for amulets and bracelets and rings with wolf heads.” Master Li carefully lifted the ring from the skeleton’s finger bones. He displayed the faint inner markings. “Hieroglyphs. It means ‘He Who Rules the West,’ which is one of Upuaut’s many titles.”
Master Li gently replaced the ring. “Did you know that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between male and female skeletons? All one had to go on is size. A fairly large boy and a small young lady would look precisely the same. You see, one of Upuaut’s duties was guarding women through pregnancy, and that is why his rings were strictly for females. Nobody would give such a ring to a man or a boy, but he would give it to a concubine.” He turned to his notes.
GRIEF OF DAWN: Faster…faster…. Where is the passage? … Hurry! …More soldiers…. Faster…faster…. Hurry, darling! … There’s the ibis statue….
Master Li put his notes away. “I strongly suspect that more than seven and a half centuries ago a maid and a concubine were forced to run for their lives from the construction site of the tomb of the Laughing Prince,” he said. “Over the years the boys of the valley transformed them into Wolf and Fire Girl, but many details of the story are still accurate history. Here in this cave the concubine was caught and killed. The maid was no doubt also killed, and if I may borrow an atrocious poetic style: The Great Wheel turns, the lives roll on, the maid returns as Grief of Dawn.”
She was stunned and shaken, and Master Li patted her shoulder.
“Dear girl, we need more than this delightful hypothesis to go on,” he said quietly. “May I have your permission to try to bring buried memories of a previous incarnation up to the surface?”
“You have my permission,” she whispered.
I had seen him do it before, but it always fascinated me. Master Li took his business card from his pocket and attached it to a leather thong. (The card is a seashell, and the half-closed eye painted upon it seems to say: “Part of the truth revealed; some things I see, but some I don’t.”) Slowly the shell swung before Grief of Dawn’s eyes, back and forth, back and forth, while his soft voice told her she was getting sleepy. Her eyes closed. Grief of Dawn slept yet didn’t sleep, and when she awoke she wasn’t Grief of Dawn. She was Hyacinth Bud, the personal maid of Tou Wan.
“We’re your friends, darling,” Master Li said soothingly. “We’re going to help you. Do you remember running up to this cave?”
“I think so,” she whispered.
“Soldiers were chasing you?”
“Yes.”
“You and your friend?”
“Yes, Golden Belt. We ran and ran, but the soldiers were getting closer, and then we saw a small hole in the hillside and hid in here.” She looked around puzzledly and frowned. “I don’t remember a skeleton.”
“Can you remember the path you took up here?”
“I think so.”
“Darling, it is very important for you to show us how you got up here to the surface. You were underground, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Will you lead us to the exit you took?”
She moved like a sleepwalker. The altered landscape frightened her, but Master Li told her to concentrate on the unchanged landmarks, like the old monastery and Dragon’s Head, and she began to walk straight toward the area of Princes’ Path that had been destroyed at the death of Brother Squint-Eyes. Her hands were out in front of her, and she stopped with both of them pressed against a huge boulder.
“The door is closed! It’s closed!” she whispered.
She was becoming increasingly agitated. Master Li thought it might be dangerous for her to continue to relive the experience, and he brought her out of her trance.
Again she was Grief of Dawn, and Moon Boy held and soothed her. We could have searched for a lifetime and not found the secret door. The workmanship was nearly supernatural. I finally found the lever, but it wasn’t until the door in the boulder swung open that I saw the shape in the intricate patterns of apparently natural cracks.
It opened silently, which meant recently oiled hinges. Inside was a rack of new torches, and a flight of steps leading down toward the bowels of the earth.
Now we knew how nasty people in motley appeared and disappeared and somewhere down there—almost certainly—was the mysterious stone that lay behind all of this. I led the way with my axe and a torch. Master Li followed with a throwing knife ready. Prince Liu Pao had his spear in one hand and his dagger in the other. Moon Boy held a spear and Grief of Dawn’s belt.
Grief of Dawn was a born fighter, and the job of an archer in close quarters is to guard the exposed rear. She walked backward, totally secure at the touch of Moon Boy’s guiding hand, and she was surefooted as a mountain goat. I placed my foot on the first step and we started down.
Recent torch cinders marked the steps, and there were smoke stains on the ceiling. The steps were smooth and regular and steep, and we came to four landings. The air was fresh but rather moist, and Moon Boy said he could hear water. Finally I could too, and as we arrived at the last step our torchlight reached out to an underground river.
The story of Wolf flashed through my mind. The water was jet black because of the rock bed it ran through, and on the other side was something huge and dark. It made no movement or sound. I bent down and swung my torch until I found the right angle, and light bounced across the water to an enormous stone statue. It was of a man, and the features were rather familiar.
“Yen-wang-yeh, the former First Lord of Hell,” Master Li said in a normal tone of voice. “There’s no need to whisper, you know. Our torchlight will have already announced our presence.”
He studied the statue thoughtfully. “The representation of a guardian of the dead suggests that this cavern actually is an extension of the tomb of the Laughing Prince, as we had assumed. Considering the fact that the bastard tunneled under most of the valley, he may have built the largest tomb in history.”
The cavern was immense. Our torchlight barely reached the ceiling. The slap of our sandals echoed away
in the darkness and came bouncing back in a distorted manner, as though filtering through a maze of side tunnels. Master Li started off upstream, while I clutched my axe and glared ferociously at the shadows. Grief of Dawn’s bow swung back and forth behind us, with a notched arrow ready.
Spaced at about two-hundred-foot intervals were more huge stone statues. Master Li identified the strangely named Emma-hoo, the Japanese King of the Dead, and muttered something about the Laughing Prince having enlisted deities from every culture he could think of. Many of the figures Master Li couldn’t identify, but he bowed deeply to a strong young hero who was holding a captured lion, and as he walked on he began chanting under his breath. I caught part of it.
“In the house of dust
Lives lord and prophet,
Wizard and priest,
And Gilgamesh whom gods
Have anointed in death
Great was his glory.
Great was his pride.
Dust is his nourishment,
And his food is mud.”
“Doesn’t sound very heroic to me,” I muttered.
“Dear boy, the story of Gilgamesh makes our epics of the heroic quest look like scribblings of half-witted children,” Master Li said sternly.
I was in no position to argue with him. The next statues were Egyptian underworld deities, and there were an extraordinary number of them. I nearly jumped out of my sandals when the torchlight picked up a huge threatening mummy holding some kind of hideous creature, but Master Li said it wasn’t intended to represent the Laughing Prince, but Osiris and the monster Amemait. He identified a god with the head of a jackal as Anubis and a lady with a feather as Ament, but he seemed to be looking for something else. Finally he stopped and pointed.
“Toth,” he said. “Grief of Dawn, in your delirium you said, ‘There’s the ibis statue,’ and here he is. What we’re looking for, incidentally, is a statue with the head of a raven.”
The only sounds were the lapping of water and the slapping of sandals and the hiss of torches. The shadowed emptiness seemed infinite. I felt the cold chill of eternity pressing down on me and I clutched my axe tighter; statue after statue, secretive, monstrous, eternally guarding the mummy of a laughing madman whose coffin was empty; I would not have been surprised to hear deadly shrieking squeals and see seven black bats lapping overhead.
Master Li grunted with satisfaction. Moon Boy had bounced torchlight across the water to another statue. It was a woman whose head was that of a raven. “I have no idea what she represents, but Grief of Dawn said, ‘There’s the raven and the river,’ and just before that she said, ‘There’s the goat statue.’ We can assume that she had just come in sight of the river, so start looking for a side passage. If we don’t find one here, we’ll try the other bank.”
We were on the right side. Sixty feet farther on we found a side passage with steps leading up, and on the first landing was a statue of a deity with a goat’s head and horns. We reached countless landings, and I was willing to bet that we had climbed far above the level of the valley and were inside one of the hills. Finally the steps came to an end. We had reached a semicircular marble floor like that of an anteroom. Four iron doors were set into the stone wall, and beside each one was a stone statue with a porcelain jar in its hands.
“Back to Egypt,” said Master Li. “These represent the four sons of Horus, whose jars hold organs removed during embalming. The one with the human head is Imstey, who protects the liver. Doghead Hapi protects the lungs, jackal-head Duamure protects the stomach, and hawk-head Qebhsnuf protects the intestines.” He scratched his nose thoughtfully. “The style isn’t Egyptian but Chinese, and I wonder if the Laughing Prince had a different symbolism in mind. Hapi’s head resembles that of the Celestial Dog, and perhaps the Laughing Prince felt he deserved a bodyguard equal to that of the Emperor of Heaven.”
Not everything was stone and rigid, so Master Li reached out and lifted the jar from the statue’s hands. The rest of us jumped backward as the door beside the statue slid open. The prince jammed his spear in the frame to keep the door from accidentally closing. We lifted our torches and stepped inside, and Grief of Dawn and Moon Boy cried out in wonder.
They hadn’t seen it before, but we had. We were back inside the formal tomb, and the door was so neatly hidden in the wall that we would never have found it. Now we knew how fresh air could get in and a mummy in a jade suit could be carried out. There was no sign or sound of merry fellows dressed up in motley.
Nothing had been taken since we had been there. When we looked into the room where the skeletons of poisoned concubines lay in their beds I saw tears trickle down the cheeks of Grief of Dawn. Once she had laughed and cried with these girls, and one terrible day she had run away with one of them. What must it have been like to live in the shadow of Tou Wan, and to be at the command of a lunatic torturer and murderer like the Laughing Prince? Looming over all of them had been the strange power of a mysterious stone, and Master Li had the stone in mind as he led the way to the burial chamber and the exposed mummy of Tou Wan.
“Ox, see if you can get the jade plates away from the skull,” he said.
It was a slow process, but finally I managed to break the gold wire at the corners of one of the plates, and after that it went more quickly. White bones appeared, and then I let out a howl of terror and jumped four feet backward. I know nothing of embalming, but somehow the hair had survived. I thought it was a living creature as it bulged out between cracks. I got hold of myself and removed the last plates. Master Li reached out and withdrew the hairpin, and a lustrous black lock, shocking against the bare white bone, slid over my hand like a snake. Master Li swore. The tip of the hairpin had been snapped clean off.
“The sliver is gone, the piece of stone from the sacristy is gone, and if the Laughing Prince used the third piece for an amulet—hell, he’s gone,” Master Li snarled. He scratched his head and frowned. “Odd. Something deep inside my mind had expected this,” he muttered. “In Hell I had Tou Wan say that the stone from her pin had been stolen, possibly by her maid. Why did I suspect the sliver was gone?”
We had no answer, of course, and Master Li finally shrugged and started back to the exit. “At any rate, we know for certain that the stone was taken before she was encased in jade, which leads us back to the Monks of Mirth who very probably provided perverted prayers at her deathbed. If the order has continued to this day, hidden down here in a cavern, they’ve had all three pieces of the stone for more than seven hundred fifty years. What in the name of Buddha have they been doing with it?”
It was another unanswerable question. We went back out to the semicircular anteroom, and Master Li replaced the jar in the hands of the statue and the door slid shut. The next statue was the one with the head of a jackal. Master Li said that jackals meant many things to ancient Egypt but that the symbolism here was probably Chinese and we should keep tight hold on our stomachs. He lifted the second jar and the second door slid open, and when we walked inside his warning wasn’t good enough. Both Moon Boy and Grief of Dawn threw up, and the prince and I were close to it.
It was another medical research center, but even worse than the grotto. The dry air had better preserved the graphically illustrated experiments painted on the walls, and it was harder than ever to believe that any man could do such things to human beings. Prince Liu Pao couldn’t take his eyes from the iron cages. Skeletons of peasants lay there, patiently awaiting their turn to entertain the Laughing Prince. Master Li’s attention was drawn to the charts and formulas that annotated the experiments.
“Ch’i and shih, the life and motion forces that animate the universe,” he said matter-of-factly. “He was using an extraordinary stone to chart the energy patterns of life as it slowly drained from the bodies of dying peasants. The man who could master the flow of energy would become a god, of course, and if he had also used Ideal Breathing to create the Embryonic Pearl, he would be immortal. Show me a quest for personal immortality and I’ll sh
ow you a path through a slaughterhouse, and the incense of personal divinity is the stench of other people’s corpses. Ox, when I decay to the point where I start dabbling with potency potions and the Elixir of Life, lead me to the Eye of Tranquility and hand me a fishing pole and a jar of worms.”
He led the way back out and closed the door behind us. The third door was guarded by Quebhsnuf the hawk-headed, and the hawk is the hunter. The Monks of Mirth would have to go out to grab more peasants, and Master Li said it would be a good idea to see if there were other exits in case we had to get out fast. The door slid open and we walked into a long tunnel, lined with side passages.
Master Li ignored the side passages and continued down the tunnel until we reached a dead end. Then he started back to check the passages one by one. When we turned around, Prince Liu Pao took the lead and confidently stepped into the first dark opening. He disappeared.
“Aaaarrrrgghh….”
His scream of terror dropped down and down, echoing ever deeper in the depths of the earth, and then it faded away. The silence was more frightening than the scream.
I forced my feet to move. Apparently the prince hadn’t been paying attention to his sandals, because a black pit opened in the floor just inside the entrance. I knelt and thrust my torch down. The drop wasn’t vertical. A smooth stone chimney sloped down through solid rock, as slick and even as packed snow. I remembered how the prince had nursed Grief of Dawn, and I saw his warm glorious paintings glowing before my eyes. I sat down and slid my legs over the edge.
“Can you see him?” Master Li asked.
“No, sir, but I will,” I said grimly.
I pushed off before anyone could stop me. Moon Boy yelled, and then all I heard was the air whistling past my ears as I picked up speed. The slick stone was faster than the ice on Boat’s Head Hill behind my village. The flame of my torch was streaking behind me like the flags on racing boats during the Dragon Boat Festival, and I shot around another curve, sailed up the smooth wall almost to the ceiling, and skidded back to the center groove at ninety miles an hour. Even in my terror I felt the thrill of excitement. I shot around another curve and sailed up the smooth bank and back down to the center again, and the wild exhilaration of the ride was furthered by the fact that I was racing into pitch blackness, and for all I knew, the chimney was going to branch into a pair of six-inch holes with a jagged fanged rock in the center. The speed was incredible. I careened like a comet around three more curves, and then the slope leveled and lifted, and I was shooting upward when the chimney came to an abrupt end. The next thing I knew I was flying out into the air, and water was rushing beneath me, and I just had the wit to hurl my torch ahead before I plunged down and splashed into a river.
The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox Page 49