The bucket was just big enough. I released the rope and lowered us slowly down into darkness. The windlass was creaking loudly, but the rope was thick and strong. I could see a pattern carved on the walls: frogs circling around and around, head to tail. A terrible odor was lifting from below. It was the reek of rotting flesh, and something down there was growling like muted thunder. I tried to tell Yu Lan we must go back, but she pointed firmly downward.
I kept lowering the bucket. Yu Lan was looking hard at the walls, straining to see in the faint light from above. Now I could hear a bubbling sound below us, and the air was so hot we might have been in an oven, and again a low murderous growl reached up to us. The stench was almost unbearable.
Yu Lan touched my shoulder and pointed. I saw a large dark circle on the wall, but I couldn’t reach it. I began rocking, swinging the bucket, hauling back and forth on the rope. We swung in wider and wider arcs. My hands were covered with sweat and I was terrified that the rope might slip through them and send us tumbling down to whatever was waiting below. I held on, though, rocking farther and farther, and finally my left hand could reach out to the circle. It was a hole in the wall. The third time I swung to it I caught a projecting rock, and I was able to haul us right to the edge. Yu Lan lithely swung up and into a narrow tunnel, and I followed her after tying the bucket to the rock.
The shamanka led the way toward a soft glowing light. It was a chamber that had a floor of moss like a thick soft carpet, and holes high up in the ceiling that let sunlight in. The puppeteer’s daughter smiled at me and lifted her hand to her lips. She blew between the two prongs of the tiny pitchfork and the healing and generating power of yin filled the chamber, mist and pattering raindrops and rainbows, and Yu Lan stepped into the circle of my arms.
“Peculiarly lascivious,” Master Li said, lingering lovingly on “lascivious.” “The fact that sex is women’s business is recognized in the yin metaphor we use for it, ‘clouds and rain,’ which accounts for the mist and rainbows, but then you wake up—and clean up—and do you really have to turn the color of a ripe tomato and get your tongue entangled in baling twine every time Yu Lan walks past?”
“I can’t help it,” I said miserably. “I know it’s ridiculous but I can’t help it.”
“How about jumping like a frightened rabbit every time her father looks your way?”
“Put yourself in my position!” I yelped.
“How can I? I haven’t played the cloud-rain game since I was ninety.”
The sage sauntered off to collect his wine jar, whistling “In Youth Did Beauties Seek My Bed, but an Old Man Is a Bedful of Bones,” and I gathered up an armload of rushes to use for towels and rolled over and went back to sleep.
The terrible drought had showed no signs of slackening by the time we reached Peking. The city was stifling in heat and choking in the acrid red brick dust it’s famous for, and in addition the sky was thick with Yellow Wind, meaning clouds of fine yellow sand blowing in from Mongolian deserts. Usually the sandstorms are over by the fourth moon, but when Yen Shih’s wagon rolled through the gates on the evening of the second day of the fifth moon the wheels scraped furrows through a hard grainy yellow blanket, and the wind against the canvas was making hissing sounds like cats warming up for a fight.
Master Li arranged for Yen Shih to meet us the following morning on Hortensia Island, and then the puppeteer and his daughter turned the wagon toward their house. I rented a palanquin and proceeded with the sage to the house of the Celestial Master, and we arrived just as drums announced the closing of the gates to the Forbidden City, which was sparkling like a jeweled crown in the light of sunset. We were admitted at once, but at the door to the saint’s study our way was blocked by an old woman who had served the Celestial Master for years.
“He is not well today,” she said. Her face was worried and tired. “He has great energy, but something is wrong, and I must beg you to come back tomorrow. He usually gets better after he sleeps.”
The study door was partially ajar and I could hear the Celestial Master inside talking to somebody, using archaic formal language almost like a priestly chant, and from what little I knew about him that wasn’t his style at all.
“If it continues to feel ill,” the Celestial Master was intoning, grandly and resonantly, “anoint it with clarified fat of the leg of a snow leopard. Give it drink from eggshells of the throstle thrush filled with juice of the custard apple, in which are three pinches of shredded rhinoceros horn. Apply piebald leeches, and if it still succumbs remember that no creature is immortal and you too must die.”
The door opened. I had a brief glimpse of the saint standing beside his desk, eyes closed, hands out as in a blessing, and then the door closed behind a young servant girl who was carrying a small dog on a silken pillow. The dog was clearly sick, panting weakly, and the girl was so concerned with it she didn’t even see us. She had a plain, simpleminded sort of face, and I would have bet anything she made her own slippers: a pattern of pink chipmunks hopping through yellow flowers.
“Does your master get like that often?” Master Li asked the old woman.
“No, Venerable Sir. Only now and then, but then he rests and he’s his old self again.”
“We’ll call again tomorrow,” Master Li said, and he turned and led the way back outside.
Riding back in the palanquin was like swimming through a sea of fantastic colors—sandstorms are glorious when it comes to sunsets—and Master Li’s face was changing from gold to vermilion to purple to pink, while deep furrows of worry made black jagged lines across the palette.
“I fear for my dear old teacher,” he said. “Let’s not forget that he somehow tricked a mandarin who had one of the cages, and used the thing to give a tongue-lashing to the others. Those fellows are dangerous. If his mind wandered off on a side trip when he was dealing with them we could all be in bad trouble, and we’d best get the bastards behind bars as fast as possible.”
“Sir, don’t you have enough already?” I asked. “We know about the cave, and now you know how they’re counterfeiting Tribute Tea.”
“We also know that the top man is Li the Cat, and he has enough power to make a cave beneath Coal Hill disappear,” Master Li said grimly. “He can hold up an investigation for six months, during which time every single witness against him, including us, will drop dead from mysterious diseases. No, our next step must be to identify the remaining mandarins of the conspiracy, find the weak link, and force him to testify against the others.”
He flung his hands apart and gazed up toward the stars.
“But, damn it, the mandarins’ affairs aren’t important,” he said in a frustrated tone of voice. “It’s those cages, and the creatures that seem to be associated with them, and a burglar that may or may not be a cavalier transformed into Envy. If only the Celestial Master could regain full mental control! Nobody knows more about the gods and demons of three thousand years ago, and he’d get to the bottom of it if anyone could.”
We’d reached Heaven’s Bridge at the junction of the Street of Eyes and the Alley of Flies, and Master Li had the palanquin bearers let us out at the Wineshop of One-Eyed Wong. He hired a few slinky people to trace the whereabouts of Ho Chang-yu, the mandarin whose image had appeared in the cage before that of the Celestial Master, and in two hours we learned that the mandarin had journeyed to the imperial palace in Ch’ang-an and wasn’t due back for a day or two. After eating dinner we made our way to the shack in the alley, and this time Grandmother Ming didn’t greet us with screams about big monkeys. Both of us slept soundly, but I would have preferred to sleep fitfully, dreaming of Yu Lan.