Watt O'Hugh Underground: Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh III Book 2)

by Steven S. Drachman

  But sometimes he would find himself walking through wilderness; or sometimes through a settlement of cabins; and sometimes through busy streets, dodging mechanical vehicles that ran without horses.

  In the mid-afternoon, he would sit in the park and put his thoughts to paper. Sometimes in the early evening, he would share these writings with Li-Ling, who, he learned, lived two floors above his little hole in the ground, which I think is the reason that he did not leave. He could not remain unmoved by her unpolished charms, and he had begun to believe that it required a certain nobility of character, and a certain beauty in the soul, to survive in the world by one’s wits and one’s strength, to earn money through labor and without the benefit of an allowance from the governor of the province.

  Why had he not seen this before? Because it was antithetical to everything that he had ever been taught.

  And yet it was true.

  As I have said, sometimes in the early evening, Master Yu would share his writings with Li-Ling in the stairwell outside of her room. Sometimes she would bring him tea. But always, when the hour grew late, she would bid him a friendly goodbye and return to her room. Usually Master Yu would linger by her door. Sometimes, he would imagine that he would hear Li-Ling talking to herself; sometimes he would imagine that he heard another voice. But the more closely he listened, the more he would convince himself that he heard naught but the wind blowing through the curtains, and he would put these concerns out of his mind. Then he would creep down the stairs very quietly, so that she would not hear him and realize that he had been lingering by her door.

  Sometimes Master Yu would then walk the night streets, watching the dark world through his dark new eyes. Sometimes he would return to his room deep in the earth and write by lantern light.

  One morning, Master Yu rose early. He reached a city park, and he sat down cross-legged in the meadow. His corneas clouded over, and his pupils closed. A mourning dove sat a few feet from him, squinting. His eyes cleared, and the bird was gone. Then Master Yu let his eyes cloud over again. The bird fluttered its left wing, cocked its head to the left then glanced down. A stray dog walked over to the bird and sat down beside it.

  The dog opened its mouth and yawned, one of those mighty dog yawns, so full of joy and exuberance. Master Yu’s eyes cleared, and the dog was gone. When they clouded over again, the dog was there before him.

  “Hello,” Master Yu said. “Hello, dog. Hello, bird.”

  He tossed the dog a bit of jerky. The dog ignored him.

  “Are you ignoring the meat because you are a ghost dog?” he asked. “Half-dog, half-ghost?”

  “Are you condescending to me because you seek some sort of tactical, psychological advantage over me,” the dog asked, “or because you believe that I am a stupid beast who will not even notice? Hmm?”

  At this, the bird seemed to laugh.

  The dog said all this in Chinese, spoken in the Northern dialect with a perfect accent, not the dialect of the peasantry.

  “Not stupid, not a beast,” said Master Yu. “Just different from humans. Like a human infant. The way one might say, ‘Hello, little fellow, how’s the weather?’ to a perfectly charming baby, even though one knows that no response will be forthcoming. One would not seek a tactical advantage over the baby, nor consider the baby stupid.”

  “We are not babies,” cooed the bird. “We have been here, in this park, since your last visit, Yang Hsiung. Humans do not realize it, but not all animals die. Some are born and do not die. Unlike humans, who must be born again and again. Yes, Yang Hsiung? You are Yang Hsiung, yes?”

  Master Yu nodded vigorously.

  “Yes,” he said excitedly. “That’s me.”

  The dog scratched behind his left ear with his paw.

  “Not the famous court poet of the Hsin Dynasty, however,” the dog said.

  “His bastard son,” said the bird. “Who also called himself Yang Hsiung, after his father’s death in the Red Eyebrows rebellion, and who has been lost to history.”

  Master Yu acknowledged this with an unenthusiastic shrug. He frowned.

  “Hark,” said the bird.

  “We are busy,” said the dog. “A lot to do. Business to attend to.”

  Master Yu stared at him, silently.

  “Madame Tang taught you to see?” the dog asked.

  “Not very well,” the bird tweeted. “Is that Madame Tang’s fault? Were her instructions faulty? Or was there some flaw in the student?”

  She trembled, ruffling her feathers dramatically.

  “Yes?” the bird continued, a bit taunting. “Some arrogance in the student? A refusal to open his mind fully to the invisible world? A failure to acknowledge that he could have been so blind, so ignorant?”

  Master Yu nodded.

  “It is probably a result of the student’s arrogance,” he said. “I have a lot to learn. There is much in me that must change.”

  “And what will our thanks be?” the bird asked. “You will poison us –”

  “Throw rocks at us,” added the dog.

  “And eat us,” said the bird. “You eat golden pheasant, yes.” She cooed. “With dancing girls, prostitutes. Slaves, really, I suppose. Do you think that they love you, that they enjoy your attentions? As you recite your rancid poetry, drink your sweet plum wine, and spend the money you didn’t earn and don’t deserve on birds killed to satisfy your appetite, wise, lovely creatures who deserved to be floating on the clouds, on a pinnacle far above you.”

  “You gnaw on the beautiful, unwilling girls,” the dog growled, “after gnawing on the beautiful, dead bird, whose delicate wings are broken for your whims. Yes?”

  “We are all beautiful creatures,” the bird said. “These creatures you enslave and kill. We are all more beautiful than you, terrible-poet-who-calls-himself-Yang-Hsiung.”

  Her chest puffed out angrily.

  The dog barked.

  “But the battle needs to be fought,” he growled. Then, after a pause: “Watch where I piss, you wretched, undeserving, cowardly bastard.”

  Master Yu watched, his eyes still blind to the real world. And he saw through feet of dirt and rock, into the distant past. And there it was.

  “It has been calling out to you, for your entire life,” said the bird. “This one spot, this one spot in the world. It has been calling to you, like a mother calling to her lost child.”

  His eyes cleared, and the dog and bird were gone. He knew that they were still there, staring at him and judging him angrily, but that he could not see them, and he was glad of that.

  Master Yu went back to Chinatown and bought a spade and pickax from a dim shop on The Street of the Men of T’ang, then went to Hang Far Low for dinner, where he waited for the sun to set and then waited for the kind of darkness in which a man could be invisible. He drank a couple of glasses of moutai, just for courage, then a couple of glasses of moutai to reward himself for his courage. When the real darkness descended thick and heavy over the streets of the Chinese city, he grabbed his spade and pickax and returned through empty avenues to the park, where he shut his eyes and went to work, his muscles straining as he mined 1800 years of history.

  After a few hours, he retrieved a splintered wooden box from the earth, which he slid open, and he put his hands on it, the treasure he sought, which he must have always known was waiting for him here.

  It was the scroll of Emperor Wang Mang, the scroll that had already been ancient when the Hsin dynasty Emperor had found it, alone, on a walk in the mountains. Torn by time and eaten away by the sand and the rain, but there it was. Just a Chinese scroll, just Chinese words on a piece of parchment, in the middle of an American park, thousands and thousands of miles from home.

  After a day’s absence, Li-Ling finally found Master Yu eating eggs and potatoes at 5:30 in the morning in a little food-shop by the docks, already filled with seamen, and reeking of unidentifiable fishy grub.

  She pulled up a chair and sat down across from him. The chair wobbled a bit,
and the slave girl almost fell. Then she caught her balance and settled comfortably.

  “Eggs and potatoes,” Master Yu said. “I don’t think very highly of Americans. But sometimes, in their simple-minded way, they accidentally get something just right.”

  And he took a big bite of leaky eggs slopped together with oniony potatoes, browned in fat.

  “You bought a horse,” she said.

  “Yes,” he replied passively. “I bought a good one, I think. A brown horse with strong legs. That sounds good to you, yes? A brown horse with strong legs?”

  “You are leaving us,” she said.

  “How did you find me?”

  “I found you, that’s all.”

  She was tired. She rested her head in her hands.

  “Yes,” Master Yu said. “I am leaving all of you.”

  “And where are you going?” she asked.

  “I won’t tell you,” he said. “I didn’t want to tell you that I was leaving. And I won’t tell you where I am going. I don’t want to put you at risk.”

  “Won’t the Sidonians ask?” she wondered. “Won’t they kill me anyway, if I don’t tell them what they want to know?”

  “No,” Master Yu said. “They will realize without even asking. You will be safe.”

  “You found something?” she asked.

  He grunted an affirmation.

  He wanted to tell her. Everything.

  But what he wanted to tell her most of all was that Wang Mang, their eternal Emperor, then and always, had known that he was going to die. He had known that he would fail, and that he would die. That was why he met the rebels in the palace hallway without fear, and why he didn’t flinch.

  But instead, Master Yu said, “There are some things that one must do, even if one knows that he will die. That he will be vilified, and spat upon. And that he will die in pain, and die a failure.”

  Li-Ling nodded as though she understood, although she didn’t understand.

  “How did you know where to look?” she asked. “For this great treasure? This treasure that will kill you, and ruin you, and ensure that you will fail? How were you so lucky?”

  He smiled.

  “I shut my eyes,” he said, “and I saw things in a new light.”

  Li-Ling heard the warmth in his voice, and although just a minute earlier she’d had no foreboding whatsoever, now she suddenly knew exactly what was coming, and she flinched, as though bracing herself for a blow.

  “This is your fault, after all, Li-Ling,” he whispered. “Had you not chased after me, I would have ridden out of San Francisco and gone away, probably to my death. And that would have been that. And we would never have had this conversation, and you would never have heard what I am about to say. But you did chase after me, did you not?”

  When Yu Dai-Yung spoke to her now, he felt as though he were the greatest poet in the world, rather than one of the worst.

  He spoke of having wings with which they could fly above the clouds; of lovers on a riverboat that would sail forever on a golden current, as the mighty sea opened its arms and welcomed them; of a love that had surprised him, and confounded him, and which he could no longer deny. In ordinary times, he admitted, he might take a peasant girl to bed but not kneel before her in an offer of marriage, but these were not ordinary times, and he was no longer a typical man of his class.

  “Could you possibly,” he said, in conclusion, “reciprocate my feelings and share life with me as my wife?”

  After all of this, these sincere poetical flights of fancy, this baring of his heart, Li-Ling merely averted her eyes, touched his hand shyly, and whispered a small, forlorn “No.”

  In spite of Master Yu’s rudeness to Li-Ling when they first met – and his continuing refusal, even up until that day at the food-shop, to admit to himself that he could understand her language – it had not occurred to him that she (or, indeed, any woman) could refuse a man of his breeding, wealth and (he had to acknowledge it) handsomeness. Indeed, he had awoken before dawn and crept away because he knew that, were he to see her again before he left town, he would propose to her, he was convinced that she would say yes, and he feared the scandal it would cause him.

  “As I said,” Master Yu whispered. “There are some things a man must do, even if he must fail.”

  Li-Ling smiled sadly, for just a fleeting moment.

  “It is another man?” Master Yu asked.

  “It is another man,” she agreed.

  “Are you in love with this other man?”

  She nodded her head and looked down at her hands.

  Master Yu noted aloud that she seemed very sad for a woman in love. Not happy at all when the subject arose. Not glowing, as a woman in love ought to be.

  “Perhaps he is dead?” he asked. “Perhaps he is dead, and you are committed to his memory, and you will love no one else until you are reunited in the hereafter?”

  She nodded a little, and then she shook her head.

  She said a few things about the man she loved. Intelligent, well-read, dashing, heroic. He promised that she would never be hungry, never be lost. He was loyal, and he was funny. He had a little mustache and beautiful, twinkling eyes, and a smile that made her dizzy. And he had made these promises to her about what her life might be, but he had lied.

  “He is now dead,” she said. “I loved him truly while he lived. But he is dead, and still I see him every night.”

  A tear came to her left eye. It hovered there, touching her lashes. Finally, the little tear dropped to the table and dissolved in the rough grains of the wood.

  “And you love him still,” the poet said.

  “I love him still,” the peasant girl replied, with a deep, woeful sigh. “In a way. I love the memory of what he was to me, and the bit of his true heart that has survived death. And when I see him now, the way he is now.…”

  She thought about this for a moment, then she spoke with certainty.

  “Yes,” she said, “I do love him still, and I can never leave him while he yet walks the Earth as a deadling. But even if I did not love him, I could not marry you. He is a jealous deadling, Master Yu. It is due to his jealous rage that I am a free woman to-day, and not a slave. But this is how I know that were you and I to wed, he would kill you on our wedding night. Because he has killed before. To save me from slavery, to deny me to other men, and to keep me for himself, he has killed before.”

  “And so if it were not for Sidonian magic –”

  “I would consider your proposal with an open heart,” Li-Ling said. “Yes. If it were not for Sidonian magic, the love of my life would be permanently dead, not just usually dead, and I would listen to your proposition with something other than woe and shame.”

  Master Yu rested his elbows on the table. He touched the tips of his fingers together, and he stared at them.

  “The defeat of Sidonia would mean the end of your true love,” he said. “And still you fight against Sidonia?”

  “He does not want to be a deadling,” she said. “He hates it, to be alive for scattered moments. When he is alive, he is confused, and when he can stay awake no longer, it terrifies him to go back, to face the extinction of his mind. His moments of life are nothing more than terror and anger and pain.”

  Outside the window, a ship was pulling into the harbor. A crowd of dock workers gathered, shouting to each other and laughing. Gulls shrieked. The day was beginning.

  “Once you defeat Sidonia,” Li-Ling said, “and the world is safe yet again, ride back here on your horse and find me.”

  She smiled, and her wet eyes brightened.

  “And I will consider it then,” she said, “with an open heart. All you must do, Master Yu, is defeat Sidonia and save the world. And I will think about marrying you.”

  She laughed, and then he laughed along.

  She walked with him until she tired, and then she walked with him some more, as the sun rose up over the far mountains in the East. At the southern end of San Francisco, he mounted his hor
se, and he rode off. After a quarter of a mile, he looked back, and he could still see Li-Ling there, standing at the edge of the city, watching him leave her, just a faraway thin line. He couldn’t see her face from this distance, and so he didn’t know if she looked sad, but he thought she probably did. She waved, and he waved back.

  Chapter 11

  The pirate ship made haste for the open sea and then headed south; the ship hit landfall in South America in early January of 1879. By late spring of that same year, we had settled quite comfortably into a small, two-story wooden house about a quarter mile from the central plaza of a little village hacked out of the Amazon jungle. Almost no one could find us, and those who could find us couldn’t hurt us. A little balcony on the top floor, a canopy of jungle overhead, little manioc trees underfoot, toucan birds alighting on branches just beyond our window pane, smiling at us through the cold, misty morning, shivering through the torrential rains that showered the jungle forest just beyond our paradise, a thick forest broken up by swamps and tiny, twisting streams that fed into the great river that slithered through the jungle like a mighty snake. The sacha runa lived on the upper bank in huts roofed with palm leaves, and they stood guard with blowpipes and poison darts. In the distance, a snow-capped volcano. I had never seen a volcano before, and I liked it. I had never imagined that a volcano could be capped with snow and ice. But there you are.

  The village was populated by people who’d wanted to vanish – men hiding out from their wives, a couple of bankers hiding out from the bank, one famous actor who’d needed to be invisible for a while and decided to be invisible forever. But for the most part, our little nameless town was a haven for outlaws. We had some retired thieves and mostly retired murderers. (Since Hester and I were plotting the deaths of Allen Jerome and [especially] Darryl Fawley, I suppose we fell into this latter category, as well as the former.) I suspected that not all of the rapists had entirely retired from their raping ways. Hester and I considered ourselves special cases – as did everyone, I reckon.