Dragonkeeper 4: Blood Brothers

by Carole Wilkinson

  Tao took the path that led from the monastery and plunged steeply down the mountainside. The path was seldom used and the vegetation that grew on either side met in the middle. No one but the nearby villagers knew of the existence of Yinmi Monastery and that was the way the abbot liked it. The outside world only distracted his monks.

  Tao’s companion shimmered and distorted, then turned into a dragon. Tao looked away to avoid the stomach-turning sight. Kai pushed past Tao and thrust the ferns and bushes out of the way with his forelegs, breaking fronds and branches.

  “Don’t damage the plants!” Tao snapped. He gently pushed the bushes aside so that they sprang back as he passed.

  Rain soaked into Tao’s robes and leeches reached out from the dripping vegetation to try and latch on to his hands and feet. As Tao shrank away from the blood-sucking creatures, he slipped and landed on his behind. Kai’s scales protected him from the rain and the leeches.

  After an hour, they reached a large rock shaped like a turtle. The mist thinned as the path opened onto a flatter area where the vegetation was less dense. Tao shuddered as he pulled off the leeches that had managed to attach themselves to his arms and legs. They were now full of his blood and had swollen to the size of his little finger. Kai found a few that had managed to wriggle between his toes. Tao carefully placed his leeches on nearby leaves. The dragon ate his one at a time.

  The path began to descend again. Tao walked as fast as he could. The sooner Tao got to Luoyang, the sooner he could return to his task of transcription. By spreading the Buddha knowledge in this way, he would accumulate good karma. By accumulating karma, a human could eventually escape the cycle of birth, death and rebirth and attain the perfect peace of nirvana. On the other hand, he had to be careful not to walk so fast that he accidently stood on insects or worms. That would be breaking the first precept and would result in bad karma.

  Eventually, they reached the plain and their path met a wider path that in turn led to the road to Luoyang. The rain had stopped.

  “We might meet people on the road,” Tao said, and Kai took on the shape of a boy again, this time dressed in robes like Tao’s.

  Tao couldn’t resist asking another question.

  “Why are you following me, Kai?”

  The dragon didn’t scratch his answer in the dirt. Instead, he reached beneath his chin, where there were five scales which were larger than all the others and lay in the opposite direction. He pulled a piece of purple gemstone from behind one of his reverse scales. It was smaller than Tao’s, no bigger than a walnut.

  Tao took his own piece of gemstone from his bag and held it alongside the dragon’s. Kai’s gemstone had a milky white vein running through it just as his did, and there were faint threads of maroon deep within it. It looked as if the two pieces had once been part of a single stone. Tao couldn’t explain, even to himself, why the stone was precious to him. Though he had tried to convince himself that the purple stone belonged to the monastery, for the use of any monk in need of a paperweight, the fact remained that he didn’t like to be separated from it.

  “My great-grandfather gave me the stone,” he said.

  Tao had intended to spend the entire journey in silent meditation, but as he walked he couldn’t seem to stop talking.

  “My mother says Great-grandfather spoke nothing but nonsense, but I liked to listen to his stories.” Tao stroked the purple stone. “He told me that this is a family heirloom which originally belonged to a female ancestor who was very special. This was long ago, before the nomads came, when the empire was ruled by a strong emperor and stretched far and wide. This ancestor was an imperial minister. No woman has ever held an imperial position before or since. The stone has been handed down through the generations, that’s what Great-grandfather said, always to a left-handed child, whether male or female. When the nomads are defeated and the empire is whole once more, the position will need to be filled again, and this stone will prove that the owner is the legitimate heir – not that I would ever want to be an imperial minister.”

  A real, live dragon had turned up. It had presented itself to Tao, and no one else. There was a connection between them, but Tao didn’t know what it was. He didn’t want to know. A dragon was not part of his plan. He couldn’t be diverted from his task of accumulating karma. He wished Kai would just go back to wherever he had come from but at the same time, he was enjoying the companionship.

  “I thought dragons could fly,” he said. There had been a winged dragon in his grandfather’s tales.

  Kai made a miserable sound. With the tip of his tail, he indicated two lumps near his shoulder blades.

  “Did something happen to your wings?” Tao asked.

  Kai shook his head and picked a bud from a bush with yellow pea flowers. He pointed a talon at the bud and then at the lumps on his back.

  “Your wings haven’t grown yet?”

  The dragon bowed his head.

  “When will they grow?”

  Kai picked up a twig and scratched some numbers in the wet earth.

  “Five hundred?”

  A stream of mist trailed from Kai’s nostrils as he let out a frustrated sigh.

  “Do you mean five hundred years? That’s how long it will be until your wings grow?”

  Kai bowed his head again.

  “How old are you?”

  Kai wrote more numbers.

  “Four hundred and sixty-six!” Tao said, staring at the dragon. “That’s extremely old.”

  Kai shook his head.

  They walked on. Tao had only been alive for fifteen years. Kai had lived for centuries. For the first time, he wished the dragon could talk to him, to tell him the things he had seen.

  Patches of blue sky became visible as the cloud broke up. The plain was pretty with late summer flowers. Tao’s damp robes dried out.

  Though Kai couldn’t fly, he had other skills. To amuse Tao he transformed himself into all manner of things – a pig wearing a gown and standing on its hind feet, a beetle, a giant plum. Tao couldn’t help laughing. The dragon had already demonstrated how, with his breath, he could create a cloud of mist big enough to conceal him, but the sun was shining and his mist disappeared as fast as he made it.

  The dragon also had amazing eyesight. A shepherd with a small flock of boney sheep was the only person they passed all day, and Kai saw him long before Tao did. As the shepherd grew closer, Kai walked off the road into the grassland and his scales took on the colour of the waving grass, so that he seemed to disappear. He could have just shape-changed, but the dragon wanted to impress Tao. He was showing off.

  They passed groups of empty and broken houses disintegrating into the earth, and the ghosts of fields, their crops run to seed. The vast plain had once been dotted with thriving villages and flourishing fields, but no one lived there any more. It was too dangerous. Sometimes Kai scanned the sky as well as the road, watching birds, particularly those gliding high. Occasionally, Tao saw bones by the side of the road which he knew were human bones, the remains of an unfortunate victim of war or murder, but they didn’t pass another living soul.

  The sun was out. It seemed that the summer rains had finally stopped, on the plain at least. Tao had to admit he was enjoying having someone to talk to, even if it was a one-way conversation. His brother, Wei, didn’t speak either, so he was comfortable with that. Wei was his best friend. He had no friends among the novices, who all thought he took his vows too seriously. Perhaps this was how people who owned dogs felt. They could speak their secret thoughts to their pets without having to worry if they would laugh or repeat them to anyone else. And, like the owner of an intelligent dog, Tao knew that the dragon understood every word he spoke.

  When they reached the Luo River, they stopped to rest. Tao gently removed three ants and a beetle from the patch of ground where he had chosen to spread his mat. It was still before noon, and Tao needed to keep up his strength. He took out the two dumplings that the kitchen woman had given him for the journey and the
crabapples he had picked along the way. Kai had collected wolfberries, as well as catching dragonflies and finding some birds’ eggs. Tao covered his bowl with his straining cloth, cupped some river water in his hands and poured it through the cloth. The dragon watched, his head on one side.

  “Followers of Buddha must strain the water they drink,” Tao explained, “in case there are any small creatures in it.”

  He took the straining cloth and gently rinsed it in the river. Kai just dipped his snout in the river and drank. There was an altar to heaven by the side of the road, just before a rickety bridge took the road across the river. The dragon’s appetite seemed to be insatiable, and he had wolfed down his food in seconds, so Tao was surprised that Kai kept a few berries and two of the eggs and solemnly laid them on the altar, before closing his eyes as if in prayer. The altar was long neglected and crumbling. Most people had lost faith in the old ways since no amount of prayer or offerings had induced heaven to stop the nomads invading their land and letting them go hungry.

  Kai stood on the riverbank, picked up three pebbles and threw them at a rock sticking up out of the river. With each throw he hit the rock. He picked up three more stones and held them out to Tao.

  “I’m not good at throwing,” he said.

  Kai persisted. He put the three pebbles into Tao’s hand. Tao aimed the stones half-heartedly at the rock. He missed with all three. Kai sighed. Tao could tell that he was proving to be a disappointing travelling companion.

  Luoyang came into view midafternoon. It was an ugly sight. Its walls were crumbling. There were gaps where strong gates had once been, and rubbish in piles where people had thrown it outside the walls. The landscape was dotted with hundreds of mounds of stones, which marked where people had buried relatives and friends. A larger mound, just covered with earth, marked the site of a huge pyre where the bodies of the unclaimed dead had been burned. With so much war for such a long time, Luoyang’s dead far outnumbered the living occupants.

  When they reached a fork in the road, Tao didn’t take the branch that led to the city. Instead, he turned north. Kai didn’t follow at first.

  “Luoyang’s not safe at night,” Tao explained. “When I go to visit my family, I always spend the night at a temple on the other side of the city. We’ll walk around the walls.”

  Kai took on his monk shape. They followed the road that threaded its way between Luoyang’s northern walls and the foothills of Mang Shan, and then turned to hug the western walls of the city. Since he had become a novice, Tao had passed the city twice each year without entering it. There was a tent encampment outside the western walls of the city where soldiers lived. Pennants hung limply on poles, marked with the same eagle insignia Tao had seen on the saddles of the nomads they encountered in the mountains.

  Late in the afternoon another building came into view on their right. Lush trees were visible over repaired walls.

  “That’s the White Horse Temple,” Tao told Kai. “It’s the oldest temple outside of Tianzhu. More than two hundred years old.”

  Tao realised that Kai was twice as old as that. He waited to see if the dragon went his own way, to resume whatever it was dragons usually did, but Kai showed no sign of leaving.

  The temple was much bigger than Yinmi Monastery, with many halls and a pagoda three storeys high. A thousand monks had once lived there, so it was said. Though the numbers had decreased since the empire had fallen, there were still more than a hundred monks at the White Horse Temple. Tao could have served as a novice there – it was closer to his home – but a temple was a busy place, with people coming and going all day to pray and give offerings. Tao had chosen the seclusion of a remote monastery.

  The gates were open, and the statue of a horse carved from white stone was the only guard. Tao entered the courtyard. The buildings had been damaged in the wars fought over Luoyang, but the monks had worked hard to rebuild them. He felt protected, as he always did when he was within the walls of the temple. But that sense of safety soon disappeared.

  The monks were not going about their lives with their usual serenity. They were running in all directions. Some were shouting. Tao had never heard monks shout before. The abbot was usually friendly to him, but this time he didn’t even notice that strangers were in the courtyard. He was standing outside the temple’s three-storey pagoda, staring up at the red brick walls as if they had betrayed him.

  Tao grabbed a passing monk by the arm. “Reverend Brother, what has happened?”

  “Our sutras have been stolen.”

  Tao was stunned. “They have a collections of sutras,” he whispered to Kai. “At least they used to. Two monks brought them from Tianzhu on a white horse long ago. They are most holy, written on birch bark during the lifetime of the Buddha.”

  Since there was no one to stop him, Tao ducked through the pagoda’s arched doorway that led to the temple’s shrine. He had only been inside once before, on his first journey to Yinmi as a seven-year-old child. A monk from Yinmi had escorted him and the abbot had shown them the shrine. Inside were the temple’s most precious possessions. As well as the birch-bark sutras, there was a casket inlaid with mother-of-pearl which contained a piece of woven straw from a sandal worn by the Buddha, and threadbare robes that had belonged to one of the monks who had brought the sutras to the temple hundreds of years before. The casket and the robes were still there. Only the sutras were missing.

  Tao hadn’t actually seen the scrolls. The monk had only shown him the bamboo cylinder that housed them. At the time, Tao had found the colourful wall paintings of more interest. They depicted one of the stories from Buddha’s previous lives – the one about the elephant and the dog, a particular favourite of his. Now, it was the scrolls and their precious sutras that interested him.

  Out in the courtyard, Tao touched the abbot’s sleeve and he came out of his trance.

  “All strangers and workers must leave the temple,” the abbot said. “We will close the gates. We need to beseech the Buddha, to find out why our treasured sutras have been taken and what we must do to make amends for our loss. Search everyone as they leave.”

  Kai made anxious noises and, as a monk searched Tao’s robes, he quickly transformed into a dog. Tao walked out of the gate and Kai, in his dog shape, trotted after him.

  The sun was low in the sky and the clouds were gathering again when they reached one of Luoyang’s western gates.

  Tao didn’t want to go in. “Have you been to Luoyang before?”

  Kai shook his head.

  The gatehouses were ruined and empty. No one stopped them as they entered.

  Kai seemed as anxious as Tao that they had been thrown out of the temple. He looked at the city walls and then wrote in the earth with a talon.

  “Emperor?” Tao laughed as he read the characters. “There is no emperor.”

  Chapter Five

  LUOYANG

  Luoyang was in ruins. It had once been the capital of an empire and home to more than half a million people. Now it no longer deserved to be called a city. Tao’s mother was fond of recounting how magnificent its palaces had been, all several storeys high, with yellow-tiled roofs and window blinds made of mother-of-pearl.

  “According to my mother,” Tao told Kai, “all the inhabitants of Luoyang were wealthy, and their houses were large and elegant. She says that, at sunset, the buildings glowed like jewel-studded gold.”

  Kai, in his monk shape, shook his head in disbelief.

  Luoyang had been famous for its three markets – the metal market in the middle of the city; the horse market in the eastern sector; and, outside the walls to the south, the general market where you could buy every sort of food imaginable, as well as bolts of silk and brocade, porcelain dishes, elegant rosewood and camphor furniture, and other goods, all made with the finest craftsmanship.

  There were twelve gates in the walls of Luoyang. Tao and Kai had entered through the West Brilliance Gate that led to what had once been the main boulevard. The entire city had been bur
ned to the ground when nomads invaded twelve years earlier. Since then it had been fought over, claimed and reclaimed many times. All that was left of the grand buildings were black stumps and trampled ash shapes on the ground. Waist-high weeds were swallowing up the ruins. The earth wall that surrounded the city was four chang thick at its base and five chang high, but it was crumbling and completely collapsed in places. The tallest sections were covered with strangling vines, which were helping to hold them up.

  “It’s hard to believe that this was once the place where the Emperor lived,” Tao said, “and from where the ministers governed the entire empire.”

  The city was not entirely abandoned. A few people in ragged clothes shuffled through the broken streets. They looked at the newcomers with suspicion, but no one questioned their right to enter. People lived among the ruins of the once-grand building like rats. Their miserable dwellings had been cobbled together using segments of walls that remained standing and burned wood scavenged from derelict buildings. The few newer houses were inexpertly constructed from rough saplings, roofed with damp thatch made from the grass that grew out on the plain. There were no more than three hundred households in the entire city. Some of the inhabitants peered out at Tao and Kai as they passed. Tao thought their squinting scowls did not promise generosity. A small crowd of urchins trailed after them expectantly, as if they thought the strangers might give them something. Tao wondered how his abbot could have thought these people would be a source of alms.

  The road beneath their feet was at least fifteen chang wide, but it was no longer an imperial way with the smoothly paved centre only for the use of the Emperor, and cobbled paths along each side for ordinary people. It had been reduced to an uneven track, littered with animal bones, broken pots and dung. Most of the paving stones had been dug up and used for other purposes. Those that remained were cracked, with weeds growing between them. This was Bronze Camel Street, which had once led to the imperial palace. There was no sign of the huge bronze statue of a camel that had given the street its name. No trace remained of the massive palace gates.