Shanghai (2 page)

Wherein two prophecies are put forward;
one proceeds, the other is fulfilled, and
a city at the Bend in the River grows.

January 207 BC

As the late-afternoon winter sun slid behind the towering dark clouds, a shadow swelled across the beautiful but usually desolate foothills of the Green Mountain, the Hua Shan. In the murky light, thousands upon thousands of rebel troops readied themselves to spring a trap that would end the life of the most powerful man the world had ever known, or very possibly would ever know—Q'in She Huang, China's First Emperor.

A village fisherman raced to the far side of a partially frozen upland lake where his prized eels were supposed to be hibernating in their underwater pen. As he approached, the water was roiling and rich with blood. Females had slithered up onto an ice floe and were
giving birth while the thicker, more powerful males thrashed the open water as they gorged themselves on their young. The fisherman watched in shocked silence, then turned his eyes upward, toward the darkening sky. Just down the winding mountain path a hunchbacked farmwife smacked the ice from a blanket she had hung to dry on the bamboo stand the night before and was amazed to find that the coverlet, although frozen stiff, was hot to the touch. Farther back in the foothills, a toothless peasant pinched the night-soil collector's product between his thumb and forefinger and brought it to his nose. To his amazement, the product was as fresh as the man had claimed it to be. He dropped the human fecal matter to the ground and stared at the night-soil collector. Then he looked to the black clouds, sniffed the air, turned, and ran.

Peasants always recognize the distinctive ozone reek that precedes change.

But as they retreated to their huts and drew their children close to them, none knew the nature of the change that was beginning, not in the foothills with the rebel troops but on the upper plateau of the Hua Shan, the Holy Mountain. Change conceived and brought into being by the renowned Q'in She Huang himself.

* * *

“YOU THINK ME MAD,” China's First Emperor said in a hoarse whisper. “You—all three of you—think I am beyond my wits. That I was tempted here in the depths of winter to this lonely mountaintop to …” His voice trailed off. For a moment, Q'in She Huang allowed himself to look toward the vine-covered mouth of the
cave behind him. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly in a fine line of white mist.

His breath dusted the faces of the three people he trusted most on this earth, his Chosen: his personal Body Guard; his head Confucian; and Jiang, his favourite concubine.
What are you thinking now, in your secret hearts?
he wondered, then put the thought aside. He knew there was no way to know another's hidden self. There was no way to find the mind's construction in a person's face.

He raised his arms, setting the abalone shells sewn into his silk coverlet tinkling. Then he spoke loudly. “Do you believe that I, who had the Great Wall built, I, who receive personal tribute from the barbarian lands far to the west, from the cruel kingdoms of the south and the arrogant men of the island called Nippon, that I, who united the Middle Kingdom for the first time, am now beyond my wits?”

The Confucian noted the subtle shift in the First Emperor's language. No longer was he using the immoderate style of the ancient writers. Now his words were succinct and to the point. More importantly, his thoughts weren't the erratic, unpredictable rantings of a man insanely searching for the secret to eternal life. These were the lucid, considered thoughts of the man who had designed the longest man-made waterway in the world, joining the Yangtze River with Beijing, who had standardized the character writing distinctive to the Black-Haired people and created the Mandarin system of examinations that had led to the world's first organized civil service. This was the First Emperor he had known as a young man, not the one who had burned Confucians along with their books—a madness that he had witnessed and written about in his private journal.

“Do you believe that I am now infirm of mind—mad? That I brought you here to this barren place in search of some mountebank's charade, some alchemist's folly—a stone that would grant me eternal life? Do you believe that is why we now stand here and shiver in the cold while below the rebel troops surround this mountain? Do you believe that of me?”

Yes,
thought the Body Guard,
that is precisely what I believe. It all began with your madness—your madness within madness. Then its seductive strands slithered beneath the latched door of your chamber and out into the world.

For in Q'in She Huang's madness, his imperial madness, he had somehow eternally bound them all to him. But none of them then understood that. All they knew was his lunacy, his screams for light in the darkness, for them to “Find it. Find it for me now!” And now these new orders. Two porters to be hobbled and then their flesh slashed so that “their blood will bring to light that which will be.”

The sun, almost at the western horizon, broke through the dense cloud cover and instantly banished the gloom. Suddenly the massive clouds were in furious motion, racing away to the north.

Q'in She Huang looked up and marvelled at their speed. Shortly, the sky was perfectly clear—and still, so still.
As if some deity had swept it clean with one great breath,
he thought. Then a cold wind, all the way from the Gobi Desert, swept up the mountainside and blew the long plaits of his lacquered hair against his cheek, creasing the wind's sudden howl with a sharp
thwap, thwap, thwap.

Jiang, the concubine, wrapped her woven shawl tightly around her, but still the cold entered her, hurt
her, like an angry lover. She looked to her last angry lover, Q'in She Huang, and remembered his exacting instructions about the way to reveal a sacred relic. She shivered involuntarily at the memory. More madness!

The First Emperor turned to face the coming cold. “Even nature is in harmony with my intent,” he said softly, and was tempted to smile—but didn't.

—

At the western base of the mountain, the rebel general's Mongolian pony stirred beneath him as the desert wind engulfed them. From the desert. Madness wind, he thought.

A tear formed, then fell from his left eye. The malformation of the socket, like that of his father and his father before him, prevented the eyelid from fully covering the pupil. The gusting wind found the point of access to his eye and the irritation always brought tears. It infuriated him.

He turned to his adjutant. “Are our men in place?”

“Yes, General.”

“Their orders?”

“As you commanded, to kill on sight anyone who comes down from the Holy Mountain.”

The rebel general was about to retort that there were no holy mountains but was distracted by the commotion of the horses behind him. The unfamiliar desert wind was frightening the animals. “Hold your ranks,” he ordered. “Every man is to control his horse on pain of death!” Then he bellowed, “Q'in She Huang either freezes to death on the mountain or is slain as he comes down. His infamy dies with him and his followers this night.”

A cheer rose from his men.

As it did, the sibilant voice of the court's Head Eunuch, Chesu Hoi, whispered in his ear, “There are caves, great General.” Even with the swirling desert wind, the general smelled the jasmine-scented breath of the half-man. He didn't like the Eunuch to be so close to him, but he managed a smile. The First Emperor's Head Eunuch had powerful allies at court.

“Your meaning?”

“The mountain's white stone is porous.”

“What?”

“The Hua Shan is riven with caves and tunnels, General. If Q'in She Huang has a proper guide, he could perhaps escape through …”

“You knew of this before but—”

“I was not asked, Great General. I am, as you have said so often, merely a court creature,” Chesu Hoi said with a barely concealed smile.

The rebel general looked toward the mountain. The sun was setting. The cold seemed to be rising from the ground itself.

He turned in his saddle. His army was spread across the foothills, one great, living thing. With them behind him he was strength itself. China's new emperor. Then why was he filled with such misgiving? Suddenly he was off his horse and shouting orders and running—running toward the Holy Mountain.

* * *

THE SHARP REPORT of snapping branches came from the thick vines that obscured the cave's mouth behind Q'in She Huang. An elderly man hacked through the vines with a short scythe. Behind him, two barefoot
porters carried a large, silk-covered object on their shoulders.

The Emperor caught his Body Guard's eye and nodded slightly.
So these are the two,
the Body Guard thought as he stepped back and to the side.

Q'in She Huang barked at the porters, “Come forward and put down your burden.” The men emerged from the darkness of the cave and then carefully leaned forward from the waist and placed the long, heavy object on the frozen ground.

The Body Guard leapt forward and in one motion slit the porters' hamstrings. They crumpled to the ground beside their load. The desert wind plucked their cries of pain and flung them eastward, off the mountain, toward the sea.

“Make known the relic,” Q'in She Huang said.

Jiang, the concubine, stepped between the two hobbled men and knelt as the First Emperor had instructed her. For a moment she allowed her fingers to luxuriate on the surface of the black silk that covered the long, curved, tubular object on the ground. She took a deep breath, then reached for a far corner with her right hand and pulled it between the second and third fingers of her left. It whispered her name as it moved—
Jiang, Jiang, Jiang
—as Q'in She Huang had so often whispered in her ear as he reached for the clouds and rain.

She pulled at the sheer blackness again and the wind snatched the silk from her hands and lifted it high in the air. And there the silk hung for a moment, like a canopy over all of this
.

The First Emperor looked up. Through the black silk he saw the last rays of the weak winter sun—the last sun rays he would ever see. His role was almost completed, destiny's portal within sight.

“When you leave here, a black trail will appear in the sky. Look for it. Follow it. It will point the way.” The Chosen Three stared at their Emperor, but before any of them could speak, he continued, “Now, cast your eyes down.”

At their feet lay a five-foot length of ivory tusk clamped at each end to a square jade stand. At its thickest it was as big around as a young man's thigh, at its point, the size of an infant's clenched fist.

“Narwhal?” asked the Confucian. Astonishment arched his voice.

“Tribute from the far north. It dwarfs the ivories we have from the beasts of Annam. This may well be the largest intact piece of ivory under the heavens. It is beyond doubt the single most powerful object in the world of men and gods.” He nodded to the Body Guard. The man shoved one of the porters to his knees, then slid his swalto blade across the man's throat—the man's cry was nothing more than a liquid burble. Then the Body Guard grabbed a handful of the dying man's hair and pulled hard. The neck wound gaped open, and blood, like the falling water upriver from the great gorge, sprayed over the whiteness of the Narwhal Tusk. Quickly the Body Guard repeated the process with the second porter.

Thousands of slender lines of filigree etched on the Tusk's surface guided the blood toward an oblong pool at the thicker end of the ivory. Every eye followed its progress. The pool bulged slightly above its lip, then overflowed its lower rim in a thin, even, crimson curtain.

Beneath the blood, the surface of the narwhal ivory began to change, from something solid and opaque to something delicate and translucent. Shadows of hundreds of tiny carved figures lurked in the Tusk's interior, as if ready to be born.

Then beneath the blood a crack appeared in the ivory. And another. Then the entire surface beneath the blood curtain fell away, revealing an intricately carved world within.

“Strike a taper.”

The flickering light brought to vibrant life what appeared to be hundreds of drunken Han Chinese men with unusually long pigtails and bizarrely shaven foreheads and lengthy reeds coming from their mouths. Some stood, many were lying on pallets. Servants carrying trays and small braziers dotted the tableau. But it was the drunken, pigtailed Han Chinese men that dominated the montage.

The Three gasped as one. “This is the future,” the First Emperor said. “This is what I have seen and why we are here. Now, listen to me carefully. For many years to come, the Middle Kingdom will rule supreme. The kingdom will divide, then divide again. Invasions will follow, and at times barbarians will sit on my throne, but we will control them—never them us. The great Sea of China will salt every river.” He pointed to the scene carved within the Tusk. “Until this.” He paused to allow his listeners a moment to take in his words. Then, he repeated himself. “Until this.” He glanced at the dancing figures. “This is the Age of White Birds on Water. It will be the beginning of the darkness. The onset of China's decline into chaos. With the arrival of the White Birds on Water your challenge begins—your families' challenge begins.”

He scraped the long, yellowed nail of his baby finger along the Tusk's length, from the blood-filled pool, past the unmarked middle pool, to the far end. He rubbed the surface there. “The Age of White Birds on Water begins the darkness.” Then he tapped the ivory sharply and two large panels slid to the frozen ground. Behind the panels
was a vista of great structures on the far side of a bend in a river. Structures in shape and design the likes of which had never been seen. Some shot straight up and then curved, others were wide at the base and then rose in two towers, while others seemed to balance magically on almost invisible pedestals. “This is the Age of the Seventy Pagodas. It signifies the end of the darkness, the rebirth.” He looked at his Chosen Three. They did not meet his eye.