Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  “I am Shang Feng, great-grandson to the Shining Crane,” he said. “He has asked that you come with me.”

  As they rose, the proprietor of the restaurant hurried over, also bowing. Black Jasmine trotted out from under Norah’s chair to meet him in a ludicrous parody of his self-importance. Christine gestured grandly with her chopsticks and said, “If you’d box this all for us, we’ll pick it up on our way back.”

  Shang Feng led them down age-blackened oak stairs barely wider than Alec’s shoulders to the market on the ground floor. In the gloom of the thick-walled adobe room, jars, tins, and wooden boxes, their lids pried off to reveal strange wares, sat on the uneven tile of the floor and fish stared mournfully at passersby from crates of ice. Instead of leading them through to the outer door and thence to the street, Shang Feng nodded to the grocer, turned, and opened the door to a small back room, where, amid more boxes labeled in scribbled ideograms, a trapdoor gaped in the floor. Christine gathered Black Jasmine into her arms.

  In a cellar below that smelled of earth and cabbage, their guide opened a second trapdoor. Heat rolled up to meet them from darkness mitigated by the ocher smudge of a kerosene lamp: dirt, unwashed clothing, a musky whiff of incense. They descended a ladder to a subcellar containing three narrow, unoccupied bunks, where bright red half-pound tins labeled in yellow were stacked floor to ceiling on the opposite wall. A door was set in a third wall—all the walls were built of aged brick almost completely black with smoke—and Shang Feng took up the kerosene lantern that burned beside it and led them through. Alec’s hand slipped into his pocket for the brass knuckles he’d borrowed from Captain Oleson when they’d stopped at Enyart’s for breakfast on their way to the studio. By the way he moved, Norah guessed he was wishing he’d borrowed a gun as well.

  The tunnel through which they passed was very narrow, though its earth walls and floor, shored up with timbers, were not damp and the air was relatively fresh. Now and then they passed roughly curtained doorways through which voices could be heard, along with the rattle of pai-gow tiles or dice. Once Norah heard music, thin and nerve-racking and whiny, the sound of it touching something in her memory, a dream, perhaps.

  She had dreamed, just before morning, something about Alec. Something about taking the dogs and locking them in the bathroom. Something about putting on her robe and walking down the stairs, across the parlor where he slept in a tangle of spare blankets on the divan, to open the front door. The dream had been so vivid that when she’d woken, she’d had to look at her feet to make sure they weren’t wet from the dew on the rough California grass that grew along the edge of the pavement. Yes, she thought, she had dreamed of going down the porch steps and along the edge of the street to the eucalyptus that overhung the steep dip of the drive. Remembered how bright the full moon had been, riding in midheaven by then, ringed with halos of ice.

  Unlike so many dreams, this one had been clear in all its senses, the changing textures of the concrete porch and brick steps and then the wet grass under her cut, smarting feet. The smell of predawn darkness in the hills and the deep silence of the birdless trees.

  Somewhere she thought she had heard that caterwaul twang of Oriental music and smelled incense, as though the one who waited for her in the shade of the eucalyptus had been someplace where the smoke of it had permeated his clothes. For some reason she thought that the shadow unseen beneath those trees was Jim.

  Shang Feng led them down three or four rough steps and around a corner, then opened another door and ducked low to enter. At the end of a long brick room the Shining Crane rose from his chair and came toward them, passing from the globe of candlelight that seemed to hang like a glowing bubble at that end of the room, through the intervening shadows, and into the zone of light shed by the lantern in his great-grandson’s hand.

  “Miss Christine, Miss Norah.” The old man held out a crooked hand to each of them in turn. Norah thought he was leaning more heavily on his staff than he had before, and his face bore the marks of sleepless nights, worry, and fatigue. “Forgive me for leaving you in the desert, for not remaining by you...”

  “Remaining by me and ending up in the San Bernardino county pokey?” Christine cocked a slightly impish eye up at the figure towering over her, whose scarred and uneven fingers Black Jasmine was desperately trying to lick. “It was Blake,” she added after a moment, her voice suddenly very small. “He... that is...”

  “I know,” the Shining Crane said somberly. “I saw all of it in the water bowl, though, as is the way of such things, I could not see the demon clearly or identify what body he wore.” He gestured toward the wooden table at the far end of the room, an old door mounted on sawhorses, stacked high with papers, scrolls, and crumbling black-bound volumes in Latin and strange, thick, wooden-covered Chinese books. In a cleared space around the candles Norah could see an eggshell-fragile celadon bowl filled with clear water that winked in the dim golden light.

  “You defended yourself with a warrior’s spirit,” the old man added softly.

  Christine looked away. “I didn’t have much choice.” Her voice was small, with breaks in it like shattered pottery. “One of the girls in the chorus at the Follies showed me... that. I thought it was horrible at the time. I never thought I’d ever really... really gouge out somebody’s eye. I mean, I just wouldn’t.” She looked up at him again, a steady, terrible knowledge in her dark gaze. “But you know, I didn’t even think. I knew he was going to kill me. I knew that from the first second. It’s as if I knew it wasn’t really Blake.” Her breath left her in a sigh. “Blake’s dead now, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Shang turned to bow to Norah and Alec. “Last night you both played the warrior,” he said. “I honor you both. Your courage has made me ashamed.”

  “It ain’t like we volunteered,” said Alec, but Norah saw the look that passed between him and Shang, a look of apology for his disbelief and acceptance of that apology. Norah realized that the young Chinese who had brought them to this place had departed, leaving the lantern on the floor beside the chamber’s shut door. “What he did—blowing up the gas underground...” He hesitated. “You really are a wizard, aren’t you?” Somehow in this underground room that was easier to believe. “And he really is a... a demon.”

  The Shining Crane bowed his head. “I am. I was.” Leaning heavily on his staff, he led the way back toward his desk in its aureole of hazy gold. “Once upon a time. Sometimes I do not know. When I was a young man—when all things were not only possible but glorious... I knew then. Now...” He brought up other chairs into the light, old and mended, and, from a jar in the corner, dipped a little water into a tin dish for Black Jasmine to drink.

  His voice was infinitely weary. “I perform little magics. It has been more years than I care to count since I dared undertake the great. At first it was because I feared the warlords’ agents, for their power extended to this country and they had wizards of their own. Had I done great magic, they would have known and sought me out. Then it was because few people believed, and those who did not believe did not ask more than small spells. And then...”. He shook his head and settled himself stiffly into his chair again. “As I grow older, I question more and more the use of magic at all. Oh, there are always little magics, as there are always tricks which counterfeit magic, and you, I think, know that.” Eyes like ebony beads met Alec’s, as if they read the past in his skepticism. “But you know, too, there are things which are real.”

  Slowly Alec said, “I know I saw a woman once raise three horse brasses and a couple of candlesticks from a tree stump in Congo Square without touching them and then throw them in all directions on the ground. I went and picked up one of the brasses. The metal was hot when I touched it. If it was faked, I don’t see how.”

  “Even so.” Shang sighed, and there was silence for a time. Norah took note of the dried tortoise shell sitting atop one stack of books, the old-fashioned school slate with dozens of trigrams jotted on it amid evidence of hundreds written and r
ubbed out. A polished black instrument of disks within disks, each disk painted with tiny signs in red and gold, leaned against three scrolls brown with time. In an empty Coca-Cola bottle a stick of incense stood unlit.

  “I have told you,” he said at last, “how years ago I followed the banners of the holy madman Hung Hsiu-Chuan, until I sickened of the killing and went away. But his cause against the Manchu might have succeeded, and his cousin, his adviser, might have restored peace and order to my country in Hung’s name. This adviser came to me in Soochow and told me that he had heard that the emperor had summoned up the Rat-God to destroy this upstart who threatened the Manchu throne.”

  “I saw that,” Norah said suddenly. Alec and Christine looked at her with surprise; Shang, only with a grave curiosity, as if asking which streetcar line she had used to arrive in Chinatown or whether she had learned this information from the Examiner or the Times.

  “They... There was a girl in a red dress,” said Norah, fumbling for fragments of half-forgotten memory. “I dreamed it. I don’t remember when. Maybe in the desert. The girl had bound feet, lily feet. There was a man and a group of princes... there was a woman among them, wearing a high headdress with pearls hanging down. The priest started to dance...” She broke off and passed her hand across her face.

  “I left then,” she said. “I mean, in the dream I walked out of the hall. Dust was blowing, and I saw roofs and walls and pavements in the moonlight.”

  “They were the princes of the clan Aisin Gioro.” The Shining Crane’s voice was very low. “Tun, and Kung, and Chun, and the emperor’s brothers, and with them the great warlords, Seng and Prince I... and the woman who became the empress dowager, the mother of the emperor’s heir. Yes. They summoned the Rat-God, Da Shu Ken, the Kara-Kudai, in the Forbidden City at the full moon on the threshold of winter. He killed the bride they gave him and so devoured her strength. Then he owed them a favor, owed the one who had put the Moon of Rats upon the girl’s throat. They sent him south against the rebels and their mystic, visionary chief.”

  “And you met him then?” said Alec.

  The wizard once more inclined his head. “I was a fool,” he said softly. “I agreed to fight. In my foolishness I thought that he could be destroyed. Some demons can.” He sighed wearily and rubbed his broken hands. “I knew that he was powerful, like a minor god. And I knew that Hung Hsiu-Chuan was no longer my affair. But sometimes to do nothing against evil is not a neutral act. I put forth all my strength, and he swept me aside as I would sweep a roach from the wall. I was hurt inside. It was long before I could work magic again.”

  The silence lapped back like water swept aside with a broom that had nowhere else to go. Black Jasmine put his forepaws against the old man’s calf, his single dark eye gazing up anxiously, and Shang Ko reached down to rub the silky black ears.

  “I’m so sorry,” whispered Christine. “If you met him before—if he hurt you before—it was doubly brave of you to... to come forward to help. Thank you.”

  His hand moved a little, but he did not look up.

  Voices echoed dimly in the tunnel outside the door, speaking English. Norah recalled Alec telling her that half-pound tins of opium could be had for $60 if one knew who to ask. All those little ivory snuffboxes and powder compacts of cocaine had to be coming from somewhere, she thought, and suddenly Captain Oleson, running in Mexican hooch in the Whatshername, seemed no more than a harmless Long John Silver who lacked only a parrot and an eye patch.

  After a long while she asked, “What can we do?”

  “Very little.” The wizard raised his head then, and the lines in his face were canyons of pain. “We do not know what shape he will take to come at you again, Miss Christine. The young man who was also pledged by the wearing of the necklace—the young man whom he killed—that death has given him even greater strength. From now until the beginning of the new year—the lunar year, not as they reckon years here—you will be in gravest danger and must live surrounded by such protection as I can give you. Since he is a god of the desert, a god whose fixed sign is earth, it is best that you remain near water, which will weaken his power. He has lost the body he held, so the moon may be waning again before he finds another. But at the next full moon, the last full moon of the lunar year, you will surely be in greatest peril. After the new moon of the new year, the stars will change and the Rat-God will lose his power until his season and his stars come again.”

  “And what happens then?” Christine squeaked protestingly. “Will he be back?”

  Shang Ko shook his head. “I do not know. Never has his victim evaded him until the new year.”

  “Well, that’s a fine thing!” She bristled like an affronted kitten, all her fear forgotten. “And what happens if you get run over by a streetcar on the Fourth of July? What if I decide to move to Miami?”

  “It is folly,” the wizard said quietly, “to look too far ahead. We can only do what we can...”

  “What happens if you’re wrong about him not showing up after New Year’s Eve? Or Chinese New Year’s Eve or whatever? Do I get to spend the rest of my life wondering about every cute young waiter or good-looking mechanic, wondering if Norah looks the way she did yesterday and locking myself in my room every time she starts messing around with a kitchen knife or a bottle of champagne?”

  Her voice was indignant, but the glance that she cast from the old man to Norah and back was pleading.

  After a moment Norah said, “You say that a demon can’t be killed, but can it be... trapped? Sent back to where it came from? If water weakens it, can it be... I don’t know. Locked up in a bottle and thrown in the sea?”

  The wizard said nothing for a long while, only sat, Black Jasmine in his lap, stroking the sable fur with his crooked hands. Norah saw his fingers tremble and remembered the fear in his eyes on the platform of the station when he had urged her to guard Christine in the desert. Remembered, too, the terror she had felt building around her in her dream of the dark pavilion, the girl’s screams and the trip-hammer heartbeat of the drum. He swept me aside as I would sweep a roach from the wall...

  She wondered if his time of hiding had dated from that battle, if what had been damaged within him had ever been completely repaired.

  Still he did not look up. “There are ways. I have heard of means to imprison demons. To imprison gods.”

  “That are within your power?” Alec asked gently.

  The old man was silent for a very long time, thinking deeply, his hand moving automatically over the little dog’s head. Then he sighed, like the release of life from his bones, and nodded slowly. “I think so. Not my power alone, you understand, but working together with one of my grandsons, who is also a wizard. It may work. And it may hold him. And what was true before is true now: that not to fight evil is not neutral—it is an aid to the demon itself. And for this, I suppose, Buddha causes us to be born with the mark of his power in our souls. But you see...”. He turned to Christine, an emerald figure like a disheveled nymph in the candlelight, and there was concern for her as well as fear for himself in his face. “To trap the demon, he must be summoned. And to summon him, Miss Christine... he must be summoned to you.”

  EIGHTEEN

  HEAVEN OVER LAKE

  Treading on the tiger’s tail

  without getting bitten...

  An escape from darkness is possible

  for the steadfast...

  Treading on the tiger’s tail

  requires extreme caution...

  “IN THE DAYS of the Han,” said the Shining Crane, “lived Ku K’ai-Chih, the greatest painter ever to lay hand on brush. So real were his paintings that those who saw them swore he captured not only the faces but the souls of his subjects.” The lantern in one crippled hand, he moved along the low-roofed passage, the swaying light making their shadows stagger across the smoke-stained two-by-fours that shored up the earthen walls. A bent nail glinted. Black Jasmine yakked gruffly and struggled against Christine’s arms at the sight of a mouse
fleeing into the darkness. “One day Ku K’ai-Chih painted a scroll of the seven gods of good fortune sailing in their treasure barge. That night he had a dream in which he heard their voices muttering and complaining how they were trapped in such a ridiculously small vessel—for the painting was not a large one—how the sea was too choppy and they feared they would fall overboard, and how Shou Hsing—the god of longevity—was getting seasick. The next day the painter woke to find that all good luck had vanished from the world.”

  “I suppose that’s better than waking to find he’d turned into a cockroach, like that silly film Mikos wants to make,” said Christine, picking her way carefully over the rough floor in her far from sensible green satin shoes. “But go on.”

  Shang Ko regarded her with grave surprise. “And here all Americans I have encountered laugh at the tales we tell of children being born out of peaches or of fish which speak.” He shook his head. Now that he had reached a decision, some of his weariness seemed to have fallen away, and he did not lean so heavily on his dragon-carved staff as he walked. “In any case, so serious did the situation become that the emperor came to Ku K’ai-Chih and ordered him to lock up the painting of the seven gods of good fortune in a box where no one could look upon it and had the box placed in the imperial archives. Since no one beheld the painting, the gods were not obliged to remain in it and were then free to go about the world again.”

  “Bishop Berkeley would approve,” Norah remarked. A rough ladder at the end of the tunnel took them through a trapdoor and up to a walled chamber filled with collapsed paper lanterns, vases, kimonos, embroidered slippers, boxes of silk tassels, and white bales of coarse canvas lettered in strange calligraphy.

  Shang Ko, the last to emerge, drew his staff up after him and closed the trapdoor again, shutting out the light of the lantern he had left below.

  “Perhaps,” he assented. “Though I do not understand why, in that case, the emperor did not simply burn the scroll and so set the gods free permanently.”