The rock moved. Lu Beiping almost fainted from fright. Then he got a grip on himself and, peering through the rain, saw that it was a cow—Maria! She lay slumped on the ground, her huge belly bulging. When she saw him her nostrils flared and she opened her mouth, but no sound came—the roar of the tempest had long ago superseded all sounds that any human or animal was capable of making.
—Maria! It’s you! he cried, throwing his arms around her as if embracing a long-lost relative. Now, with his head up close to hers, he could hear her groaning faintly, and the thought flashed through his mind that she might be going into labor. He gave a shout of dismay and, panicking once more, saw through the drive of rain that they were sitting on an exposed windward slope. If the calf were born out here in this cold trough of rain, it would freeze to death in its first moments on earth. Just as this thought occurred to him the wind picked up again, ripping through the trees like a titan’s saw.
—Come on! Lu Beiping shouted. We can’t stay here! Maria, get up!
Wiping water from his face, Lu Beiping tugged on the rope that trailed from Maria’s nose ring while hollering to her at the top of his lungs.
She struggled, swaying, to her feet, and as she did so the wooden clapper that hung around her neck gave a few hollow knocks. Then she collapsed again under the force of the wind. No! Lu Beiping cried. Move, Maria! Move! The wind subsided for a moment, and Lu Beiping yanked on the rope with all his might, shoving and tugging at the ponderous bulk of her body. She managed another few swaying steps, then toppled back into the dirt and began lowing in anguish, her shrill moans knifing through the howling curtain of rain.
Crap, Lu Beiping thought, it’s about to happen. Her eyes were bloodshot, and the muscles of her belly were twitching. She really was about to give birth.
The tock-tock-tock of the wooden clapper resounded in the wind. This clapper was one of two improvised cowbells that he’d carved several weeks ago out of a chunk of solid heartwood, one for Alyosha, the lead bull, and the other for Maria, so that he could track her down if she wandered off into the forest alone. (When I made that clapper, Lu Beiping said to Tsung, I had no idea that it would save Maria’s life—and the life of her calf—and mine!)
With Lu Beiping tugging at the rope and pushing the pregnant heifer, they inched forward together through the rain, tottering a few steps, resting, then tottering a few more. As they lurched through a grove of wild banana trees overshadowed by a high bluff, Maria’s legs went limp and she crumpled into a pool of mud, where she lay and refused to move any farther. Just then Lu Beiping heard a loud ripping sound above him, and looking up he saw all the trees in the grove lose their tops to a single, scything gust of wind. For a moment whirling leaves and branches filled the air, then the foliage, reduced to confetti by the churning gale, scattered like a flock of birds. Seconds later, from the far side of the bluff, there came a series of wrenching cracks that sounded very much like a wooden structure being twisted off of its foundations.
He sprang to his feet. That was his hut! Sure enough, he’d built the hut and corral too close to the water; a channel for water was a channel for wind. But at least he knew where he was now—somehow, he couldn’t guess how, he’d gotten turned around and headed in the opposite direction from the one in which he’d set out that morning. He thought he’d been following Mudclaw Creek out toward the valley bottom, but here he was, back on the slope near his hut, in the banana grove from which Smudge and Jade had watched him bathe, having crossed the creek without even realizing it. How the heck had that happened?
But before he had a chance to regain his senses, the howling of the wind was drowned out by the roar of water. He stiffened in panic. No—was that the sound of a flash flood? He glanced down at Mudclaw Creek through the headless trunks of the banana trees and saw that the stream, once a thin, clear rivulet, was now rushing in a wide, muddy torrent, the water racing in turbid swells around the roots of the trees. The water was already rising swiftly, advancing right up into the banana grove.
Now, finally, there came a deafening crash of thunder.
For a brief moment lightning illuminated his surroundings, and Lu Beiping looked around and assessed his position. Here beneath the bluff they were shielded from the full force of the wind, and it wasn’t a bad spot for Maria to rest. She looked exhausted. After collapsing into the mud she’d just lain there quietly, her eyes closed, her nostrils flapping and foaming. Now, spooked by the boom of thunder, she raised her voice again in a shrill, urgent bellow.
Mopping water out of his eyes, Lu Beiping watched the rain slap down on Maria’s twitching flank and felt like his heart had sprung a rent, cracked open, and fallen into a thousand pieces.
It was completely dark now. The wind still howled in his ears, but it had slackened a bit, and the rain had diminished to a steady drizzle. Now, from high up on the mountainside, he heard, faintly but distinctly, that strange, low-pitched, sepulchral wail, the sound of the Child Crying from Beyond the Grave, piercing the darkness for a split second. He pricked up his ears, but he heard nothing more. The sound was gone, like the fleeting glimmer of a marsh light: a trick of the brain, an aural hallucination.
His hands and feet were freezing. He shuddered involuntarily, yielding to a tremor that welled up from the depths of his soul. The wind had slapped him silly, and for a long time he’d been oblivious of the cold, numb to the passage of time and even to the fear of death, conscious of nothing but the storm’s endless, pitch-black, silent roar, a primordial chaos where sight, touch, and hearing were all rendered irrelevant. Now the sky was somehow both darker and clearer; he wiped off his glasses, which he still held clenched in one hand, put them on, surveyed his surroundings, and, as his wits returned to him, felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. Yards away from him lay a massive boulder, fallen seemingly out of nowhere, riddled with cracks. If he had been lying just a little bit to the left, he’d now be a fine powder coating the bottom of that rock.
It was cold. Bone-chillingly, brain-numbingly cold. In the hills the temperature always dropped dramatically after sunset, and now, drenched, wind battered, and completely in the open, Lu Beiping felt like his clothes had turned into a carapace of ice, and a numb feeling was already seeping outward from the pit of his stomach. He thought of cuddling up to Maria for warmth, but when he touched her he found her hide cold as a snake’s skin. He let his mouth fall open and permitted his teeth to chatter while his whole body convulsed from the cold.
What was he going to do about Maria? He didn’t know the first thing about helping cattle give birth. Animals are animals, the Gaffer had said, they squeeze out their young faster than you take a shit. But it seemed like Maria had been twitching forever, and still there was no sign of the calf. And her cries were growing fainter, the foam around her nostrils growing thicker and thicker . . .
No sooner had that awful thought crossed his mind than another, even worse possibility transfixed him. Already the racing torrent had climbed halfway up the slope, and muddy water swirled around the trunks of banana trees standing not ten yards away from the foot of the bluff. He knew how quickly mountain streams rose during a typhoon; in no time at all, he and Maria would be submerged.
He sprang to his feet. Get up! he shouted at Maria. Get up, we’ve got to get out of here! He yelled at her, pushed, pulled, yanked on the rope, but Maria just tossed her head, summoning a few feeble tocks from the clapper, her body’s huge bulk remaining still as a rock. As they struggled, the rain began pelting down again. Wide-eyed, Lu Beiping gazed down at the dark, glinting water that was steadily gobbling up their last few feet of earth. He wanted to run, but Maria, lying on the ground wracked by painful spasms, was unable to take even a single step.
Right at that moment she began lowing again, her anguished bellows growing shorter, higher pitched, more breathless. The clapper clacked loudly as she swung her head forcefully, seeming to strain inward with all her muscles. But she was
exhausted; gradually her moans of pain, along with the knocks of the clapper, grew weak and irregular, then expired in darkness.
The water churned up the slope steadily, insatiably. He couldn’t just lie here, waiting for death to claim him. But Maria . . . the thought of having to leave her made Lu Beiping sink into despair.
The awful fear that had consumed Lu Beiping during his first few nights in the jungle now seeped out of the darkness, paralyzing him once more. The end of life, the simple fact of death, lay before him, its features plain. The wind railed on in endless, pointless fury. The slope on which they sat was a sinking vessel, soon to slip down irrevocably beneath the waves. The bluff behind him offered no path of escape, not even a single, withered tree branch to which he could cling. The time to abandon ship had passed long ago.
The water kept rising. Pale, phosphorescent flashes trembled in the sky, briefly illuminating the dark contours of the hills. Really? he thought. Was he really going to sit patiently on this hillside and wait for the waters of death to close over him? All of a sudden the tune to the one of the Red Book songs, which he and the other re-ed boys used to belt out together half-ironically, sprang into his mind, and at the top of his lungs he shouted those Immortal Words into the darkness as if they were profanities: I’ll fight—to my—last BREATH! You’ll nev—er see—me YIELD! Let the can—nons RING! Let the bul—lets SING! I’ll MEET my DEATH on the BA—TTLE—FIELD! He could barely hear his own voice over the keening wind, but singing helped drive away the chill and the fear, and he thought jokingly to himself: Damn, if I really am going to meet my death out here, I wish there were some fireworks, at least.
The sky above him erupted in light.
—Ha! he cried, scrambling to his feet as the thunder rolled over him. That’s more like it! Waving his fist at the pitch-black sky, he jumped up and down, yelling: Come on! Let’s have another! Do it again!
Again the sky lit up with a deafening boom.
—Yes, yes! he shouted, tearing his shirt off and waving it hysterically like a flag in the face of encroaching darkness: Is that all you’ve got? Come on, do one more, blow me to bits!
As if in answer to his challenge, a bone-shaking, ear-shattering, eye-searing explosion of thunder and lightning enveloped the entire valley. Light caromed off the mountains, and Lu Beiping danced in the afterglow, exulting and sobbing, teetering at the peak of ecstasy and despair. On all sides the thunder rolled away from him in waves, pulsing and reverberating, drumming in accompaniment.
(I believe, Lu Beiping said to Tsung years later: I believe, I really do, that when a human life is pushed to its limits, there is a critical threshold where light and shadow, the human world and the spirit world, meet, and we can converse with the divine. As sure as my name is Lu Beiping, I believe that.)
But then the thunder ended as abruptly as it began, plunging Lu Beiping once more into darkness and silence.
This truly was the silence that heralded death. The sound of the wind and rain receded far into the distance, and the wilderness became a dark void, engulfing him. In his wild raving he’d forgotten the world, forgotten even about Maria—had it not been for the knocking of the clapper, she’d have been nothing more than a lifeless black stone. Now, the world had forgotten him.
Emptied, exhausted, he slumped to the cold, wet earth.
After a span of time—he had no idea how long—he heard an odd noise layered in faintly with the wind and rain. What was this? Were his ears playing tricks on him again? Was this the music of the dead, drifting over the border from the land beyond? No. It was a real sound: soft, intermittent, prodding insistently at his hearing. Was it the sound of his lost cattle rustling through the undergrowth as they found their way back to their master? He had no idea what had become of the rest of the herd. Had Alyosha, Judas, Peter, and all the others been swept away by the flood?
Slosh . . . slosh . . . slosh . . . It was water. Someone was sloshing through the water. Now he barely made out, through the veil of rain, a figure half-wading, half-swimming through the swollen river, heading directly toward the spot where he and Maria lay.
Was it the foreman? During typhoon season the cattle’s welfare was one of foreman’s most pressing concerns. Suddenly he remembered his date with Wing, the showdown he’d planned, and now missed, with his stammering brother-in-law. Could it be Wing, maybe?
He gave another deep shudder. Through the slanting rain he discerned the faint firefly-glow of a lantern, winking in and out of sight, drawing steadily nearer.
—Four Eyes! . . . Four Eyes! . . .
A hoarse voice drifted up to him out of the darkness. Maria stirred at the sound, her clapper clacking with excitement. There was no mistaking it—that voice belonged to Jade.
He felt like he’d emerged from the darkness after death back into the sunlit world of the living.
Once more Lu Beiping rushed over to Jade and embraced her at the water’s edge. He opened his mouth to cry but no sound came out, and silent tears streamed down his cheeks.
—Oh, Four Eyes, Jade said, laughing gently while wiping the tear-streaked mud from his face: Careful, you’ll put the lantern out.
Jade held an old barn lantern, its flame guttering low. Wet hair spilled down one side of her face. She was soaked from head to toe, but her body was warm from exertion. She grinned, panting breathlessly.
—That was some storm. The thunder just about deafened me. Four Eyes, it’s a good thing your cow was wearing that clapper, sometimes dumb wood’s a sight smarter than a human being. If it wasn’t for that knocking sound I don’t think I’d ever have found you, and you might’ve been washed away by the flood.
The rain was still coming down. The wind picked up again briefly, and the piece of “dumb wood” hanging around Maria’s neck gave a couple of faint tocks.
—Is everybody okay? Lu Beiping said when he finally regained his senses. How are Smudge and Kingfisher and the others?
—Doing fine. The hollow kept us safe. We lost a few trees, but the bluffs break the wind. Kingfisher was worried for you, said it was a lousy idea to build your hut so close to the water. Is it all gone? I didn’t see a single log or roof beam on the way over here. I was afraid you’d gotten blown away with it!
As Jade spoke, gesturing animatedly, Maria asserted her presence with an agonized groan.
—Four Eyes, good heavens!
Before Lu Beiping could explain the situation, Jade’s eyes alighted on Maria’s belly and went wide with disbelief.
—She’s pregnant, Jade gasped as she cast the light of her lantern over the dark mass of the cow’s body. It’s the middle of a typhoon and she’s about to give birth! Why didn’t you say something?
She reached out a hand to touch Maria’s flank, then pulled it away reflexively.
—She’s cold as death! You idiot! How’s she ever going to give birth if it’s this cold?
Lu Beiping opened his mouth to speak, but Jade cut him off again.
—Don’t even think about it! We can’t move her. She’s dying, she’s having trouble squeezing out her own flesh. She needs to stay here and rest.
—But, but . . . Lu Beiping stammered, and pointed to the racing water, which had already risen another two feet.
The rain had thinned to a drizzle. In the lantern’s dim glow Jade’s face was a mask of fury and indignation. Holding the lantern aloft, she cast its light first over the encroaching water, then over Maria, then up into the darkness above her—the flame wriggled like a glowworm against the sky’s infinite blackness—then finally along the bluff that rose up behind them.
—Damn it! she exclaimed. Don’t mind the water! Fire’s what we need. Fire’ll keep us alive!
Lu Beiping furrowed his brow, puzzled by this. Was this another of Kingfisher’s weird superstitions?
Jade handed him the lantern, crouched down and ran her hands over Maria’s squirming bell
y, then wiped the lather from her nostrils. Looking up at Lu Beiping, she said:
—There’s still hope. Build a fire. She needs warmth. She needs her strength back so she can push out the calf.
—But . . . Lu Beiping protested, There’s no time! Look at the water! See how fast it’s rising? We’ve got to get out of here, quick!
—I told you, don’t worry about the water! Jade snapped. Did you even hear me? We need a fire! She needs warmth, safety! Get that? You men don’t have a clue.
—What the hell are you talking about? Lu Beiping burst out. The whole world’s a soaking mess, and you want me to start a fire? Look at this—he thrust a finger upward at the sky, which was still steadily dripping water—everything’s drenched! Where are we going to find dry wood? It’d take a magician to start a fire in this rain!
—I don’t believe it, Jade said, her eyes flashing. Wait here.
Jade snatched the lantern and disappeared into the darkness. When the speck of light slipped behind the bluff, the night seemed to grow so cold and still that it might freeze around him. The rain had stopped, the hurrying eddies had slowed their pace; above him the dark forms of the mountains huddled together like a band of giants fomenting some savage plot. He stroked Maria’s flank. It was frigid. She made no sound. Except for an occasional twitch, she lay lifeless as a pile of stones.
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