She was intrigued by this part of their story. Tao didn’t like to recall those terrifying events, but he recounted it again.
“You never saw anything when you were in the underground cavern?” Pema asked.
“No, it was pitch black most of the time. We didn’t see the ghosts, we felt them. They were cold and their icy fingers poked and prodded me.”
Pema pondered this information. “I don’t think there were any ghosts.”
“You weren’t there!”
“Which is why I can look at it more realistically. I have spent a lot of my life underground, but I would have been terrified if I was in darkness like that.”
Tao didn’t say anything.
“So what is Pema’s theory?” Kai asked.
Pema couldn’t understand the dragon like Tao, but she had learned to interpret the mood of each different sound, and to guess his meaning.
“I think it was him in the cave. He was following you.”
“The blue dragon?” Tao said.
“Yes. He has long, thin bony toes, like fingers, and his talons are sharp. His breath is cold. And he can make himself invisible.”
Kai made a slow clinking sound like someone striking a bowl with a spoon. It was the sound he made when he was thinking hard.
“That makes sense,” he said. “It would explain why I found his tracks on both sides of the mountain.”
“But you said you were tracking him.” Tao didn’t want to be proved wrong. “How could you have been tracking something that was following you?”
Kai looked at the snoozing blue dragon. “He is clever. Much more clever than I thought. He must have made himself invisible, so he could occasionally make a few paw prints ahead of us on the path.”
“You think I’m right, don’t you?” Pema said to Kai.
Kai nodded. The blue dragon was snoring contentedly. He was the one who could confirm Pema’s theory, but none of them could communicate with him.
Tao wasn’t ready to concede.
“But the ghosts left us a gift. The cinnabar.”
“I have been thinking about that,” Kai said. “That pile of ‘treasure’ in the cave did resemble a dragon’s hoard.”
“So you think the cinnabar belonged to him?”
“It is the sort of glittery mineral that dragons admire.”
“But you believed that the ghost of Gu Hong was haunting you.”
“I did, but when I was finding food for the old man and the baby, I wondered why I kept finding piles of half-eaten insects that some creature had regurgitated.”
“You suspected the monster was following us, even then?”
Kai was unwilling to admit that he had been wrong about his ghost.
“But why would he follow us?” Tao asked.
“It makes perfect sense,” Pema said. “He was following another dragon, his only hope of finding food.”
“But he pushed me down into the Puqingshuo.”
“Perhaps he didn’t.” Pema was pleased with her powers of deduction. “Perhaps he was trying to show you the way out. Perhaps he was prodding you so you would go in the right direction.”
Tao and Kai looked at each other, both feeling foolish for believing in ghosts.
“There were no ghosts!” Pema announced.
Chapter Thirteen
DRAGON FOOD
Tao spent the rest of the morning digging the vegetable gardens and planting seeds. He carefully set aside any worms or slaters he came across, so they weren’t injured by his spade.
“Unless you’re going to stay here, you’re wasting your time.”
Pema had come up behind him, unheard, as she had a habit of doing.
“Wei loved being out here, enjoying the garden. It gives me pleasure to return it to how it was when he was here. And anyway, Kai and I have a plan.”
He told her about his plan to help the people of Huaxia.
“This compound would be a good place to live. Kai and I could go out into the countryside, find people in need and bring them back to safety behind these walls.”
The more he thought about it, the more Tao realised he wasn’t quite ready to leave humanity behind and go to the dragon haven. He wondered if he could enlist Pema to be part of their plan. If she were involved, the scheme would be perfect. She could use her skills as a spy to listen for news of people in need. But he couldn’t find the courage to ask her.
“Your new friend is undoing all your work.”
Pema pointed. The blue dragon had dug up the seeds that Tao had just planted. He was playing with the worms that Tao had saved.
“Don’t do that!” Tao clapped his hands to shoo the dragon away.
The dragon slunk off, his usually erect tail hanging like a wilted chrysanthemum.
Tao had found that the blue dragon would eat almost anything if it was mixed with honey. He wasn’t sure how the creature fitted into his plans, but he was confident that its arrival would prove to be useful. The Huan compound would be their secret hide-out, a place to rest and plan, a place to grow food, so that he could distribute it to those who needed it most.
Tao had cleaned the house, tended the vegetable garden, recited many sutras, but there were still several hours until it got dark. It was pleasant sitting in the garden in the autumn sunlight, but he couldn’t possibly do that all afternoon. Pema had sat with him for a while, but she had dozed off. He spent some time doing his qi exercises. Then he placed a pear on a wall and tried to get the qi to shoot out of his fingertips and knock it off. As usual, he was unsuccessful.
He went to the small hut that his father had used as a workshop. His carving tools were hanging neatly from hooks. When Tao was young, his father had taught him how to carve simple things. He tried to think of something he could carve now. He didn’t need a spoon or a bowl, there were enough of them left around the house. Then he realised he had the perfect project in his hand. His simple staff had once been a Zhao lance and it had served him well since he commandeered it, but the wood at the top was split and broken. Tao decided he would saw off the broken top and carve a new one, something decorative.
Half of the workshop was taken up with bits of wood of all shapes and sizes that Mr Huan had collected. He’d picked up fallen branches as he walked in the nearby countryside. Whenever the trees were being trimmed, he would sort through the prunings. If a chair or a bed broke and it couldn’t be fixed, he salvaged any wood he thought might be useful. There was one piece in particular that caught Tao’s eye. It was a tree branch with a sudden bend, like an elbow. Tao recognised the dark gnarled bark. He knew that it had come from an old cherry tree that used to grow in the courtyard.
One of his ancestors had planted the tree a thousand years ago, on the hill where the Huan house now stood, or so Tao’s father had told him. The tree’s branches had been gnarled and bent this way and that, like an old man’s limbs. They were so thick and heavy that they were supported by props, preventing the branches from breaking under their own weight. It had been the home of birds and small animals, and many wuji. Tao had tried to climb the tree when he was small, reaching a branch almost ten chang above the ground. Tao remembered Wei’s delight. But their mother had shrieked with horror when she saw Tao up in the branches, making him slip and almost fall. One of the servants had to climb up and get him down. After that, Tao was forbidden to climb any trees. He had vowed that, when he was a little older, he would practise climbing the tree when his mother was away, but he never did.
Despite this memory, Tao had always loved the tree. So had Wei. In winter, its crusty trunk and dark branches had loomed over the courtyard, but Tao had never been afraid of it. In spring, the tree’s branches were covered with pink blossoms and in summer it bore sweet cherries. One night during a storm a branch had blown down and fallen on the chrysanthemum bed near the peony pavilion. Though Wei loved the tree, their mother had decided that it was too dangerous and insisted it be chopped down. Wei and Tao were only six at the time, and they had both cried when their father fel
led the tree.
With the cherry tree gone, there was a large bare area left in front of the peony pavilion. Mrs Huan had decided to design a garden especially for Wei.
“He’ll like this,” she said as the gardeners worked on it. “It’ll be like a corner of the imperial garden in the painting in my room.”
The new garden had clumps of bamboo and chrysanthemums. It also had tall slender rocks that narrowed at the top and were arranged so that they resembled a mountain range seen from a distance. To replace the old tree, a small weeping cherry tree was planted. It had inedible fruit no one picked and that got squashed on the path. Every winter, it was pruned back so that it didn’t grow tall enough to climb and never spoiled the symmetry of the garden design. Wei had enjoyed seeing the flowers change with the seasons, but Tao suspected he’d never liked the garden as much as he’d liked the old tree that was always so full of life.
Mr Huan had kept all the wood from the tree and made handsome pieces of furniture from its lovely reddish wood. The family had taken the furniture to the south. This branch, too small and crooked to be turned into anything useful, was all that remained. As soon as Tao saw it, he realised that a carving was already embedded in the piece of wood. He hadn’t carved anything since he’d become a novice, but he had his father’s tools. He started carving the wood immediately. In a few minutes it began to take the shape he had seen within it – a dragon’s head. The elbow of the wood was the top of the dragon’s head and there were two lumps that he would turn into ears. One angle of the branch formed the neck, the other the dragon’s jaws.
Tao spent the rest of the afternoon shaping the ears and a wavy mane.
Kai appeared in the doorway. He had been hunting in the fields. Tao didn’t want to know what was in the bag that contained his catch.
“That is very good,” Kai said. “I did not know you could carve.”
“It’s to go on top of my staff. I don’t know what to do about the horns though. This piece of wood isn’t big enough to carve long branched horns like yours. I could carve them separately and fix them onto the head, but they’d break off.”
“It does not need horns. It can be a young dragon, less than five hundred years old.”
Kai had come up with his own way of passing the time.
“You must not eat meat. I understand that,” he said. “But dragons need meat. I would like to cook my own food tonight. A meat dish if you will permit it.”
Tao didn’t object. “I’m sure Pema and the blue dragon will also enjoy a meat dish. I can make something for myself.”
It was dusk. Kai disappeared into the kitchen to start preparing his meal. Tao sat on Wei’s couch in the peony pavilion. He’d worked hard in the garden and on his carving, but he still felt a little guilty having time to relax.
The pavilion was open on three sides and the couch had been placed facing west so that Wei could watch the sunset. The drift of clouds turned different shades of pink. The warmth of the day faded with the light. Pema came and sat next to Tao, and they watched the sky like scholars studying a painting. Except that this work of art was changing as the cloud shapes altered, and the pink deepened and turned purple.
Large moths were fluttering around them. Or around Tao at least. He held up his arm to shield the bright rays of the setting sun from his eyes. His sleeve slid back and some of the moths settled on his bare arm. They were large moths. They opened their wings, which were almost a handspan wide, coloured in soft dusty brown shades and marked with purple eyes that matched the colour of the sunset. Tao liked their furry bodies and their many branched antennae, which looked like tiny leaf skeletons. They would make a reasonable snack for the blue dragon, but Tao couldn’t bring himself to catch them. He stood up and raised his left hand so that his other sleeve slipped back. More moths settled on that arm and on his head. Pema and the blue dragon watched in amazement as if he was a street performer. As the orange disc of the sun finally slipped below the horizon, the moths all took off together and circled around Tao’s head in the deepening orangish light. Tao muttered a fragment of a Sanskrit sutra and the moths flew off.
As Tao spoke the last line of the sutra, the blue dragon was suddenly alert and made his hissing tweets, interspersed with pretty melodic sounds, like notes from a flute.
“I think he’s trying to speak to you,” Pema said.
“What do you mean?”
“He understood what you were saying in the language of Buddha. He’s trying to communicate with you.”
The blue dragon continued to chatter away.
Kai had been watching from the kitchen door. “I believe Pema is right.”
Tao was still bathed in the glow of the sunset and the pleasure he had felt when the moths settled on him. It took him a moment to understand what they were saying.
“You think he understands Sanskrit?”
“Yes,” Pema said. “Say something else.”
Tao was suddenly flustered. “I learned Sanskrit so that I could read it, so that I could translate sutras. My teacher didn’t converse with me in Sanskrit. I can’t speak it.”
“But you can speak it. You just did.”
“I recited part of a sutra I had memorised.”
“So you know some words. Say something.”
Tao had only ever thought of Sanskrit as a language for communication with the Blessed One, not for chatting to dragons. He had learned strings of words that someone else had composed. And they were all about the stories of Buddha. Tao searched his memory for some words that would be suitable to say to a dragon.
“The sun has travelled to the end of the endless sky, the fruits of the trees await us. Will you eat?”
The dragon’s blue eyes grew wide as rice bowls. He made more flute sounds and ran over to the kitchen door.
“He does understand you!” Pema said. “What did you say?”
“I asked him if he was hungry.”
Kai stopped him from entering. “It is not ready yet.”
The blue dragon made a mournful sound.
Kai didn’t need much help in the kitchen. Two of the talons on each of his forepaws worked like a human finger and thumb, so when he sat on his haunches he could hold a spoon to stir a pot, and he could use a knife to chop things, though he held it high and let it fall like an axe. He did need some help to lift pots on and off the stove, but Pema was willing to assist with that and Tao could stay out of the kitchen.
“I think the blue dragon must be a naga from Tianzhu,” Tao said. He and Pema were waiting for Kai to finish his cooking.
“I didn’t know there are dragons in Tianzhu.”
“They are creatures in the stories of Buddha,” Tao replied. “They don’t look like dragons. They are sometimes described as half-snake, half-human, sometimes as seven-headed snakes. I should have realised before! That is what the blue dragon transforms into when he shape-changes. In the Buddha stories, the nagas must have always been shape-changed. When the texts were translated into the language of Huaxia, naga was written as dragon.”
“So someone must have known that nagas were dragons.”
“Yes. One of the monks who brought the stories to Huaxia long ago. Perhaps one of those who founded the White Horse Temple in Luoyang.”
Using his few words of Sanskrit to communicate with the blue dragon, Tao discovered that he was indeed a naga. He had lived with many other nagas in a huge forest that had been home for so long his ancestors had sat at the foot of Buddha. In this forest, it rained often and the trees grew tall. Discovering these three facts took more than an hour of stumbling Sanskrit and guesswork. Tao tried to find out if the naga had a name, but he couldn’t make the blue dragon understand what he meant.
“I will give you a name. There are many nagas in the sutras.” He tried to remember their names. “Pandaraka. Samkhapala. Mucalinda.”
“Those names are too hard to pronounce,” Pema said. “Give him a simple name. What is Sanskrit for blue?”
That was a word that T
ao did know. “Sunila.”
“That’s a good name,” Pema said.
Tao patted the naga on the head. “Sunila. That’s what we will call you.”
The blue dragon was unaware that he had a new name. He was more interested in the strange smells emanating from the kitchen.
“Kai’s been in there a long time,” Pema said.
When Kai eventually emerged, Tao told him that he thought the blue dragon was a naga. Also that they had given him a name.
“I think Sunila is an excellent name.”
“Is your meal ready?” Pema asked.
“It is.”
Kai carried out three bowls of food on a tray and proudly sat them on a low table. Tao lit a small oil lamp. Pema and Tao stared at the food. Tao moved the lamp closer to the bowls.
“There are three courses,” Kai explained.
“What are they?”
Kai pointed to one of the bowls. Tao peered at the watery grey liquid with feathers floating on top.
“Firstly, sparrow broth.”
Kai picked up the bowl and drank some of the soup. “Very tasty,” he said. “I first had this at an imperial palace in the presence of an emperor.”
Then he pointed to the second bowl. “This is the main course. I created the recipe myself – baked field mice with worm sauce.”
Tao could see the mouse tails and ears. Kai hadn’t bothered to skin them.
“And finally, fried cicadas.”
Kai stood back and waited for Tao and Pema to admire his creations. When they just stared, Kai pushed a bowl of sparrow broth towards Sunila. The naga sniffed it suspiciously, as if it might be poisoned. He wouldn’t eat it. Kai offered him some of the main course. Sunila licked the worm sauce off the mice. He ate one fried cicada and then spat it out.
Mist streamed from Kai’s nostrils. “This is good dragon food,” he said, though Tao was sure that wild dragons didn’t cook. “I do not understand why he does not like it.”
Tao fetched a jar of honey and spooned a little over the mice and mixed some into the remaining sparrow broth. Sunila made a chirruping sound and buried his snout in the bowls, eating everything.