The puppeteer’s beautiful daughter looked at me for a long moment. Her lips parted and I saw the glitter of fangs, and one of her claws lifted through spray and fell back. Two of the drops that trickled slowly down her face weren’t music-water. Then she dove. Yu Lan disappeared beneath the waves and I was never to see her face again, but I did see something else. Ahead of us and to the left the water boiled in front of the yang boat, and then a great shining fish tail lifted into the air. Harsh sunlight blazed on the scales, and it whipped around with tremendous force and smacked squarely against the prow.
For an instant the yang boat paused as though tied to a leash that somebody had jerked, and when it moved forward again the gap had gone. We were dead even, or perhaps we even had a bit of an edge in that the smooth strokes of our oarsmen hadn’t been disrupted, and Master Li began to roar like a volcano.
“On, First Doer! On, Ancestral Intelligence! On, Lungs and Stomach! Hao! Hao! Rising and Soaring, Seizer of All, Sharpener and Amputator! On, Husky Lusty One! On, Extreme and Extraordinary One! Hao! Hao! Hao!”
Bounding and Rushing pounded his drum with all the force he had, and Gliding Sliding One smashed his clapping boards, and the rowers strained to match the strokes of the lead oars. Master Li’s right hand was out and I waited for the scarf to uncoil and shoot back. It came. Down, shove, hold steady, aim, lift just above the surface and wait for the scarf… Down, hard left, up… Down, soft right, up…
We had a slight lead and had cut across the path of the yang boat, oars were scraping oars, wood was screeching against wood, the long, slim, glowing horn from the prow of our boat was reaching out—and then it plunged through, and the shimmering pi ring was snugly around the tip. In an instant the finish line had vanished, and the banks had vanished, and the rowers leaned back and hauled in their oars, and two great Dragon Boats floated side by side in a soft mist.
Master Li turned slowly to the puppeteer. Envy turned at the same time and they examined each other for a moment, and then—at a cost beyond my comprehension—the glorious sunrise smile lit up the garish ape face.
“Poetic justice is a bit too neat for my taste, but I have to admire its effectiveness,” Envy said. I realized that his boat was turning transparent, and so was the crew, fading into the mist. Only the puppeteer remained as before, and he bent down and came up with the last cage he had taken. “There’s a way to get the key without releasing the creature inside, you know,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s time for you to meet the last of my brothers, but have no fear. It would be a poor cavalier who accepted a challenge and resorted to murder when he lost.”
He did something with his left hand and there was a bright flash, and when I could see I was looking at the last demon-deity. The God of Sacks was surely the final creation of a dying race, Master Li later told me, surely the clearest statement of what it means to lose an entire civilization. It’s a shapeless bag, that’s all. Its father was Chaos and its mother was Nothingness, and it has no reason for existence, no beginning, no end. The great cavalier I had known as Yen Shih reached out tenderly and embraced his brother, and the bag opened for him, and then they lifted into the air and fluttered like a blind moth, flapping this way and that. Envy and Anarchy, aimless and inseparable, flying away to find nothing in nowhere.
The yang boat and crew had vanished. The yin boat I stood on seemed to be becoming translucent, but somehow I wasn’t afraid of melting away. I left the oar and walked past the resting rowers to Master Li.
“Look, Ox,” he said softly.
The mist ahead of us was breaking up, and we were floating gently forward and then nudging to a stop at a long gray dock, and the ghosts were waiting for us.
The dead were in a festive mood as they climbed on board. They seemed to take up no space, no matter how many walked up the gangplank that Gliding Sliding One and Bounding and Rushing slid out, and I somehow understood that my job was done, and so was Master Li’s, and from now on the experienced crew would take over. The dock finally emptied. The lead oarsmen shoved off, and the boat began moving forward again into mist. I was standing with Master Li on the high prow and I could look back over the stern, past my steering oar, and see ghosts leaning out over the water, beckoning and calling. I turned to Master Li with questions in my eyes.
“The dead are trying to coax lung dragons to follow the boat and bring rain,” he said quietly. “You see, Ox, it’s a pact made long ago. At the Festival of Graves we bring summer clothes and food and wine to the dead, and clean the graves and make them comfortable. At the Hungry Ghosts Festival we feed spirits too unfortunate to have family to care for them, and we pray for their souls. At the Festival of All Souls we bring the dead paper money so they can redeem their winter clothes from the pawnshops of the Land of Shadows, and we bring new clothes when necessary and supplies of everything they might need for the winter. In return the ghosts help bring rain, and fight disease and illness, which no longer have any power over them.”
We had passed through the mist and were gliding out on North Lake. Fear had kept the crowds from the banks, but the old woman called Niao-t’ung, “Chamber Pot,” and the old man called Yeh-lai Hsiang, “Incense Which Comes by Night,” meaning the smell when he removed his sandals, were not going to be denied a ritual they’d performed since they were children, and they painfully hobbled to the water’s edge. Puzzlement was apparent in their gestures as they shaded their eyes and looked at us, and then right through us. The authorities had said there would be no boat race this year, but instinct told the two tottering wrecks that there was indeed a boat race, and they nodded firmly to each other and placed their little paper sung wen boats in the water. The boats carried the diseases their families might encounter during the next six months, and Incense Which Comes by Night tossed a pocketful of tiny dogs made of clay as well. The dogs would bite any diseases that slipped out of the paper boats and keep them from swimming back on shore.
Paper boats are drawn in the wake of racing ones, and the ghosts were calling and beckoning, and the little bobbing things drifted out and turned obediently to follow the gentle rippling trail behind us.
The boat was vibrating like a tuning fork. On the shore I saw buildings shake and loose tiles fall. The great Yu was sounding the final notes to announce the precise second of the solstice, and a gauzy graceful waterspout was lifting into the air on the port side, higher and higher, spreading dragon wings, forming a cloud. Another dragon followed, and another, and they turned on the dirty fingers of Yellow Wind and began chasing them back into Mongolia. Clouds were spreading across half the sky, just in time to catch the light of the setting sun, and rain began to fall, and a cool fresh breeze washed the city, and people began pouring out, running to the water carrying their families’ paper boats.
“Ox…”
I turned and cried out as two ghosts came through the crowd of the dead. My mother embraced me, and my father smiled and twisted his hands together awkwardly.
Hundreds of ghosts were greeting Master Li. A huge flotilla of disease boats was following us now, bobbing up and down over gentle waves, glowing in the sunset, and when I looked up from my parents I saw some kind of dark barrier like a wall of low fog, with a shining open archway in the center, and the water that led into it was woven from the colors of the sky.
“But, Mother, Peking really isn’t all that much different from the village,” I said. “You shouldn’t believe all the alarming things you hear…”