Everything Under the Sky (33 page)

I made sure Biao dressed warmly before he left the
lü kuan
through the woodshed. He was going to spend the next few hours hiding beside the trail that led to Xi'an, in the middle of the night and in the snow, and I didn't want him to freeze to death. Then our doubles left. The woman who was pretending to be me had protested loudly, because, she said, I had such a strange walk that it was hard for her to imitate. It wasn't because she had “Golden Lilies” (it was rare for girls from poor families to suffer that monstrous deformity, because they'd have to work in the fields with the men when they were older), but because I moved my whole body when I walked, especially my hips, and she'd never seen such a thing. The woman practiced in our room until she was satisfied. So did the young girl who was playing Fernanda.

Biao returned less than an hour later, nervous and shivering from the cold, with the news that a couple of men had indeed followed our doubles as soon as they left Shang-hsien.

“It's time!” the antiquarian exclaimed, quickly putting on his coat. “Let's go!”

We mounted the remaining horses and left Shang-hsien. Those of us who didn't know how to ride had to swallow our fear, keep our balance, and hold on to the reins as best we could. The mules loaded with the rest of the boxes and bags followed meekly behind, and one of the locals who'd been paid at the
lü kuan
led the way. The good man took us along a narrow trail that encircled the city, along the Danjiang River and slightly up the side of Shangshan Mountain. After a few hours, Lao Jiang stopped his horse in the middle of a thick forest of pines, dismounted, and spoke with our guide. The children were holding up well despite the late hour and freezing temperatures. I was the one having the most trouble: The cold air on the left side of my face felt like a knife slicing my skin into thin ribbons.

The guide left us there, and Lao Jiang and Master Red conferred for quite a while. In the faint light of a waning moon, they consulted something the size and shape of a plate that looked like a compass. We then continued on through the forest, following a nonexistent path in an unknown direction. The sun rose, but we didn't stop for breakfast, nor did we stop for lunch; we simply ate without dismounting. When the sun began to set and I started to think we'd never get off those poor animals, the antiquarian finally ordered a rest. Nothing in the landscape had changed through the entire day. We were still surrounded by trees, with snow up to our ankles, but now that it was nightfall, a mysterious fog slid softly between the trunks. We made camp there, and the next day was identical, as was the next. Nothing differentiated the time: trees and more trees, scrub peeking through the snow, the horses’ hooves sinking into it with a dry, insistent crunch; a fire at night to scare off wild animals—felines and bears—and to prepare the night's dinner and the morning's breakfast. We erased all signs of our passing before mounting and continuing on our way. Occasionally Master Red would stay behind for a while, crouching down in the trees to make sure no one was following us. The children were always sort of dazed, lulled almost to sleep by the monotonous swaying of the horses. The only time they woke a little was when we did tai chi, but they soon fell back into their torpor. By the end of our eight-day journey, we'd crossed four or five rivers, some not very deep and others so wide and with such swift currents that we had to rent rafts to reach the other side.

The first sign that we were reaching more “civilized” areas was the apocalyptic vision of villages that had been razed or burned to the ground with the unmistakable tracks in the snow of passing military troops and gangs of bandits. Things were getting more difficult. We didn't have much food left, just a little bread that we soaked in our tea and some dry crackers. Fernanda gave me the happy news that my bump was noticeably smaller and that the left half of my face had turned a lovely shade of green. At least I was beginning to heal. Since we were still hiding from people and didn't want to be seen, we continued to take absurd detours with the help of that strange compass called a
luo p'an,
made out of a broad wooden plate with a magnetic needle in the center that pointed south. It was the strangest Chinese artifact I had seen so far, and I was determined to draw it at the first opportunity. The plate contained between fifteen and twenty narrow, delicately carved concentric circles, each ring containing trigrams, Chinese characters, and strange symbols, some in red ink and others in black. It was very pretty, utterly original, and Master Red, who owned it, explained that it was used to discover the energies of the earth and calculate the forces of feng shui, although we were using it for a much more vulgar purpose: to guide us to the First Emperor's mausoleum.

Finally, toward the end of the first week of December, having left the mountains and the snow behind, we came to a one-horse town called T'ieh-lu, where we stocked up on provisions in a little shop inside the railway station.

As soon as we'd left, Lao Jiang pointed to a mountain in the distance and announced, “There's Li Shan, the Mount Li that Sima Qian mentions in his chronicle regarding Shi Huang Ti's tomb. We'll be at the dam on the Shahe River in a few hours.”

He sounded so optimistic and encouraging. The end of our long journey was approaching, and precisely for that reason my stomach flipped in fear: We'd reach the Shahe dam only if we'd managed to trick the Green Gang, and if we hadn't, the next few hours were going to be extremely dangerous. In any event, arriving at the dam wasn't exactly a panacea. An undesirable dive into frozen waters and arrows fired by Shi Huang Ti's phantom army awaited us there. No matter how you looked at it, it was going to be a perilous afternoon.

Master Red, who even at this point on our journey still didn't know exactly where we were headed, showed interest when he heard the bit about the dam on the Shahe River. As a precautionary measure (although I'd say it was more of a misguided sense of distrust), Lao Jiang had refused to show the
jiance
to the brothers Red and Black or tell them about the clues Sai Wu had left to help his son get into the mausoleum and guide him through it. All poor Master Red knew was what Sima Qian said in his Basic Annals, and he was the only one of us who knew nothing about the cold bath that lay ahead.

The children, on the other hand, couldn't have been happier. As far as they were concerned, the best, most exciting part of the past few months was drawing near. This was a fantastic adventure with a considerable treasure for a prize at the end. What more could you ask for at thirteen and seventeen years of age? It had always been my intention to keep them safe, but things kept going wrong. I felt terribly guilty about exposing them to the same risks and dangers we would face inside the tomb. If anything were to happen to Fernanda or Biao … I didn't want to even think about it. And all this was to pay debts that weren't even mine. The law that burdened me with Rémy's financial problems was absolutely unfair. None of this would be happening if only he'd been responsible. Suddenly, I don't know why, I thought of the advice Lao Jiang had given me when we were in Nanking and learned that Paddy Tichborne's leg would have to be amputated: “Let me give you your first lesson in Taoism, madame: Learn to see the good in the bad and the bad in the good. They're both the same thing, like yin and yang.” What could have been the good in all that? I couldn't see it, to be honest, and it was amid these dark thoughts that we passed through great, empty fields that must have yielded rich crops for their owners in more peaceful times but now lay abandoned. All the peasants had fled, and a great loneliness hung over the land.

We still hadn't seen the Shahe River when Master Red pointed out a verdant hill approximately 150 feet high, strangely alone in a vast stretch of farmland, the five Siamese peaks of Mount Li silhouetted behind.

“We've done it!” Lao Jiang exclaimed, standing up in his stirrups to get a better look from that distance. We all smiled happily, filled with emotion.

“Trees and bushes were planted to give the appearance of a mountain,” Sima Qian had written. The description was a little pretentious, since it didn't exactly look like a mountain, but it was certainly impressive to think that the tomb of the First Emperor of China, lost for two thousand years, was there, under that insignificant, low hillock. The truly incredible part was that we were going to be the first to go inside.

Suddenly something seemed to infuriate Lao Jiang.

“We should already be alongside the Shahe,” he said. “According to the map, it flowed from Mount Li toward the river Wei, behind us. But there's no water here.”

“The Shahe River doesn't exist?” I asked, perplexed.

“It might have dried up over the last twenty-two hundred years,” he grumbled. “Who knows?”

Increasingly worried, we continued heading south, with the mausoleum on our right. Not a river could be seen anywhere in that vast space and, what was worse, no dam, no artificial lake…. We should have been looking right at it but weren't; only wasteland stretched between there and the slopes of Mount Li.

Devastated, we stopped a little while later at the spot Sai Wu had mentioned in the
jiance
as the place to dive in. After surveying the land for as long as we could, until the sun went down, Master Red, Lao Jiang, and I came to the conclusion that the dam had existed sometime in the past. We discovered slight elevations in the ground that coincided with the big oblong shape on the map and a depression in the middle that seemed to indicate that there had indeed been a lake there at some point. Time and nature had undoubtedly eroded and finally destroyed the dam and any other works or diversions the First Emperor's engineers may have made to the Shahe. Only after reluctantly admitting to this distressing situation did we prepare to spend the night, already enveloped in complete darkness. It was a new moon, and so we didn't light a fire to prepare dinner or warm ourselves; it would have been far too visible across that immense, empty plain. In silence we ate some of what we'd bought that morning at the small store in the train station, and though it was bitterly cold and there was nothing to do but go to sleep, none of us moved.

All those many months of struggle and danger, all the dead and wounded, all that suffering for nothing. That was my only thought; actually, it was more of a sensation, an image that encompassed the whole idea and remained fixed in my mind. I didn't notice the passing of time. I wasn't aware of anything. Inside, I'd come to a complete stop.

“What are we going to do now?” came Fernanda's voice from far away.

“We'll find an answer,” I murmured.

“No! There is no answer!” Lao Jiang thundered furiously. “We'll give the
jiance
to the Green Gang so they can see for themselves that the entrance has disappeared. Then they'll leave us in peace and we can go back to our lives in Shanghai. This madness is finally over.”

I was outraged. I hadn't expended all that energy and subjected my niece to all these dangers just to admit such an absurd, humiliating defeat.

“I do not want to hear that again!” I shouted. The antiquarian looked at me aghast, as did Fernanda, Biao, and Master Red. “You want to give the
jiance
to the Green Gang? You're insane! We'd be handing them the mausoleum on a silver platter. All they'll have to do is come with a crew and start digging. We'll give them the First Emperor's tomb and its incalculable riches in exchange for our little lives in Shanghai or Paris, is that it? Oh, and don't forget to tell them how to avoid the traps inside! We'll give it all to them just so they'll leave us in peace, is that right? You seem to have forgotten that the Green Gang is nothing more than the criminal arm of the imperialists and Japanese you despise and fear so much. Think! Use your head if you don't want to bow to an all-powerful Manchu emperor who'll force you to wear the Qing queue again!”

“What do you want? Do you want us to start digging?” he mocked. “I want us to do something, anything, to find some other way into the mausoleum!” I shouted, leaving them dumbfounded. “If we have to dig, we'll dig!”

I was getting fired up just listening to myself. I knew I was right, that was what we had to do, but if anyone had asked me how to resolve the problem, I'd have deflated like a popped balloon. However, my speech unexpectedly seemed to wake Master Red as if from a dream.

“It might be possible,” he said very quietly.

“What did you say?” I asked, feeling somewhat in command of the situation.

He glanced at me, embarrassed (it was still difficult for him to address me directly), and looked down at the ground before repeating, “It might be possible to find another way in.”

“Don't be ridiculous!” Lao Jiang snapped.

“Please don't take offense,” Master Red entreated. “I remember having read something, a long time ago, about some shafts that were dug by bands of thieves who wanted to loot the mausoleum.”

“The First Emperor's mausoleum?” I asked, bewildered. “
This
mausoleum?”

“Yes, madame.”

“But, Master Red Jade, that's impossible,” I reasoned. “To begin with, they had to know where it was, and no one has known anything about it for two thousand years.”

“Exactly, madame,” he agreed quite calmly. “There is a passage in the
Shui Jing Chu
—”

“Commentary on the Waterways Classic
by the great Li Daoyuan?” the antiquarian asked, taken aback. “You've seen a copy of
Commentary on the Waterways Classic
?”

“Indeed,” the monk admitted. “A copy as old as the work itself, which was written during the Northern Wei dynasty.”
⁴⁴

“One day the abbot of Wudang and I will have to talk business,” the antiquarian mused.

“And what did this passage in
Commentary on the Waterways Classic
say?” I interrupted, before it became a discussion about all the valuable books in the Mysterious Mountain libraries.

“Xiang Yu was founder of the Han dynasty, the one that came after that of the First Emperor. According to the text, Xiang Yu assassinated the Qin imperial family and razed Xianyang, the capital, then went to Shi Huang Ti's mausoleum and set it on fire after taking all of the treasures.”