“Thank you.”
Tao was glad that no one had commandeered Wei’s room. Kai scratched up the spare quilt on the floor next to Wei’s bed, turned around three times and settled down without complaint. Tao climbed into bed. He was exhausted and with Kai so close, he wasn’t afraid. In any case a thick layer of cloud had blotted out the stars and … the moon.
Tao woke from a deep sleep and was enjoying the comfort and warmth of a good bed and a thick quilt. The sound of a dragon snoring close by reassured him, but something had disturbed his sleep. Back at the monastery he had often woken during the night. But here he was warm, with no bedbugs biting him and no homesick novices sobbing. It was still dark, but the pale shape of the moon was visible through the thinning clouds. As Tao watched, a shaft of moonlight stabbed through and shone down on the garden.
“Something’s wrong,” he said, but Kai didn’t hear him.
Tao knew what had woken him – a smell. It wasn’t pleasant. He was reminded of a time when a mouse had died behind a wall. There was also a sickly sweetness like decaying fruit. A screeching sound, something like a chicken whose neck was being wrung, set his teeth on edge. It was coming from the stables. Something had happened to Sunila. He got up and went outside.
There were no horses in the stable. Just the naga, tethered to the side of his stall.
And Baoyu.
The ghost girl was hovering above Sunila, snarling, her snake hair coiling. It was her smell that had woken Tao. He realised he had smelled it before when she appeared, but had thought it was the decaying leaves in the garden. It was the sweet, rotten reek of death. She was paler than the previous night, but still terrifying.
Baoyu wasn’t interested in Tao any more. She had turned her wrath on the naga. Tao looked up at the night sky. There would be no help there, the clouds had melted away. The ghost girl wasn’t trying to kill Sunila. Not yet. The naga breathed out mist in an attempt to create his own cloud to cover the moon, but Baoyu circled around him, causing a wind so cold that his mist turned to ice crystals and fell to the ground like a tiny shower of snow. She entered the naga. Tao remembering the awful sensation of having the ghost inside him, and being unable to breathe.
Kai came into the stable. Tao’s fear was so strong it had woken him.
“We must do something!” Tao said. “She will kill him.”
Baoyu didn’t stay inside the naga. After a few heartbeats, she drifted out and away. The naga took a shuddering breath of air and let out an anguished cry. To Tao’s surprise he strained to go after the ghost girl. Tao untethered him.
“She has learned something from him,” Kai said. “Stolen one of his thoughts.”
They followed Sunila into what had been Meiling’s room. Baoyu was there, hovering next to a curtain covering an alcove. Sunila rushed up to the ghost girl and shape-changed into a seven-headed snake, roaring at her, but she was not disturbed by the apparition. She created a gust of wind and the curtain blew aside, revealing an untidy clutter of what looked like rubbish. The moonlight was stronger now. Tao pushed open the shutters and pale light flooded in. The pile contained a shawl and some jewellery, a silver bowl, and the head from the broken statue of the kitchen god. There was a ripe pomegranate and some wilted chrysanthemums.
“It is a dragon hoard,” Kai said. “Sunila has made a new one.”
Kai was right. Tao recognised the length of blue ribbon that had been in the naga’s hoard in the cave.
Baoyu moved closer to the hoard, swirling around it, creating a draught of air which blew the lighter things from the pile – feathers, scraps of silk gauze, a gold earring. She whirled faster, until she was a blur of grey, sparks of silver streaming in her wake. Heavier things were lifted into the air – a hair comb, a bronze incense burner, a piece of a broken vase – and then they were flung against the wall. Sunila made a screeching sound as he saw his hoard destroyed, but he did nothing to save it.
Kai pointed at something in the hoard that was reflecting the moonlight.
Tao caught his breath. The object had a purplish colour. He could see what it was now. His dragon-stone shard. His heart sang to see it again, but Baoyu’s icy blast grew even faster, until it picked up the shard and spun it in the air. That wasn’t what she was interested in. Tao gasped as she flung it aside. He dived to save it, but was too slow and it hit the corner of a chest. Tao snatched it up, cradled it in his hands, tracing the creamy white veins, feeling its cool, smooth shape. Tao ran his finger over the unfamiliar sharp edge of a chipped corner and it cut through his skin.
“He must have gone back for the ribbon and the shard after we left the cave, “ Kai said, “and brought them here.”
“I didn’t lose my shard.” Tao glared at Sunila who hid behind a screen. “You stole it from me.”
The ghost girl’s wind had died to nothing more than a draught of cold air. Tao thought that everything in the pile had been dispersed, but Baoyu was still circling slowly. He looked closer. There was one small item left that hadn’t been scattered. The ghost girl hovered over it. Her sadness filled the room like fog. The object wasn’t shiny or sparkly like the other things in Sunila’s hoard. It was black, and no bigger than a soya bean.
Tao moved closer but he still couldn’t make out what it was. “What is it? A pebble?”
Kai’s dragon eyes were focused on it. “It is a small bone.”
“What sort of a bone?”
Kai pointed a talon at the ghost girl’s right hand and the little finger with the tip missing.
“It is hers,” he whispered. “It is her finger bone.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
EARTHLY REMAINS
Baoyu circled the bone and held up her fleshless fingers. Each one was made up of three blackened bones – except for the little finger which had only two. Tao now understood why she was so angry. When Sunila had attacked Shenchi village, starving, looking for food, he had bitten Baoyu, who had just happened to be in his way. His fangs had dug into her flesh, but he had sunk them so hard he’d bitten off the end of her finger. That was what she’d been searching for – her missing finger bone. The naga’s venom had entered her body. It had slowly eaten away the flesh of the little girl’s fingers, and then spread to the rest of her body, poisoning it day by day until she died.
The ghost of that young girl turned to face her killer. Her still sadness disappeared. She snarled and her sharp little teeth glittered in the moonlight like deadly pearls. She had found her missing bone, and now she was ready to kill the naga. Sunila turned into his half-human, half-snake shape. The snake heads growing from its shoulders reached out to her and spat venom, but it couldn’t hurt her now. He turned into his snake form and slithered from the room. She followed him.
Outside, he flashed from one shape to the other and shrieked, but that didn’t deter Baoyu. She entered his shape-changed body and the illusion was broken. Frost formed on his scales, so thick he looked like a silver dragon. He was frozen, unable to make any movement, not a blink, not a twitch. Tao knew what Sunila was experiencing – a desperate desire to suck in air, yet an inability to make his lungs work. He remembered that terrifying feeling, knowing that his body was healthy, uninjured, and yet he was about to die. There wasn’t a single cloud in the night sky, no hope that the moon would be obscured. And it would be several hours before it set.
The naga’s blue eyes were frosted over, but Tao was sure they were pleading with him.
“She’s going to kill him. How can we stop her?”
Kai roared and ran at the silver dragon, but he stopped dead before he reached him.
“I cannot help him,” he said. “It is as if there is a wall of ice surrounding him.”
Tao and Kai had some impressive skills, but none that were of any use at that moment.
Tao knew that after the ghost girl had killed Sunila, it would be his turn.
“Tell me what it is that you want.”
The ghost girl emerged from Sunila’s body. The naga collapsed to t
he ground, sucking in breaths quickly, afraid that she would attack him again. But she didn’t.
Tao could feel the yearning emanating from Baoyu’s body. She reached out her poor blackened hand as if she longed to pick up the bone. Moonlight tears fell from her hollow eyes. It made Tao’s body crumple with sadness, and salty tears filled his own eyes. He tried to swallow them, but couldn’t stop them from brimming over. The ghost girl was so close to him that the icy chill radiating from her froze the tears on his cheeks. She was a child who had experienced the pain of losing her family. He remembered how miserable he had been the first year in the monastery when he was seven. He had missed his family so much – his father’s quiet calmness, his sister’s carefree happiness, even the stern presence of his mother, but especially Wei. He had never felt such an empty feeling before or since, such sorrow. And yet his family had been alive and he was able to visit them twice a year.
The ghost girl had lost her parents, but she had still continued to care for her grandfather and little brother after her body was poisoned.
“You have family, here in Huaxia,” Tao said. “Your grandfather and brother are travelling to the southern city. Do you want to go to them? To be near your living family?”
Baoyu snarled and raked her silver claws through him. They couldn’t wound his body, but they left tracks of cold pain inside him. He hunched over, unable to speak. Kai moved closer so that he could support him.
The dragon made an anxious sound. “I told you before, a ghost cannot stray far from its grave. She cannot go south.”
“I’m sorry. You can’t follow your family. Forgive my ignorance.”
Baoyu’s ice-cold presence had slowed Tao’s brain. His Buddhist teachings mentioned ghostly spirits, but had not given him any useful knowledge about what to do if confronted by one. Baoyu was hovering in front of him, her ghostly anger contained, but threatening to burst out. He couldn’t understand why she was now focusing her anger on him. He was not responsible for her death.
“Perhaps she wants her bones to be with the remains of the other villagers in the cave,” Kai said. “Or with her mother’s.”
Tao shook his head. “She knows where those graves are. If she wanted to return to them she would have already. There is something else, some reason why she followed us.”
The ghost girl circled the tiny finger bone, her moon-shadow fingers elongating and reaching out to it. There had been women living in the compound who still followed the old ways. They used to visit their family tombs in the fields every year to sweep them and leave fresh food offerings for the dead. They went out even when nomads had been seen in the area. They considered hungry ghosts to be a threat worse than armed soldiers. Tao’s mother had never quite let go of the old ways, so she used to send someone to the Mang Hills once a year to do the same at the Huan family tombs.
Tao remembered the image of Baoyu’s burial cairn that the ghost girl had left in his mind when she passed through him. He suddenly understood the ghost girl’s yearning.
“You want all your bones to be together! You want your finger bone to be returned to your cairn.”
Baoyu stopped circling. She faced Tao, but this time she was not radiating anger. Tao’s sluggish brain was trying to think how he could achieve this.
“We’ll have to escape from the compound and find our way back to her cairn.”
As the words came out of his mouth, Tao realised how difficult that would be. It was a long way to walk, and it was in the opposite direction to the dragon haven. They would risk running into nomads again.
Kai was following his meandering thoughts. “There is an easier way to achieve this.”
“How?”
“I can take it. I know where the cairn is. I can run there.”
Tao looked at the moon. “No. It would take too long. Sunila should take it. He can fly.”
Kai made an angry rumbling sound. “His wings are small, meant for flapping up into trees, not flying long distances! My legs are powerful. I can run faster than he can fly!”
Tao was sure that Kai was exaggerating. “But he can fly straight from here to there. You would have to run up and down mountains.”
In his stumbling and inadequate Sanskrit, Tao explained their plan to Sunila, but the naga was learning the language of the Huaxia. He already knew what Tao wanted. The ghost girl also understood what they were saying, though in life she had never heard a word of Sanskrit. Sunila reached out to pick up the finger bone in his talons. Baoyu swept back to him, ready to enter his body again.
“No. You don’t trust Sunila,” Tao said. “Why should you?”
Tao could feel the ghost’s cold breath on his face. He tried to keep his voice calm. “We understand. Sunila is the one who brought about your death, though he didn’t mean to. But he will return your finger bone to the cairn. And if he doesn’t, you have the power to kill us all.”
Baoyu circled Tao. She was paler and less substantial. He could see through her.
“I think she has stayed away from her remains too long,” Kai said. “She has used up her strength and now she is too weak to make the journey back.”
“What will happen to her if she doesn’t return to her grave?”
“She will lose her ghost body.”
Tao shivered. “Perhaps there’s a place in hell for bodiless ghosts.”
Neither of them suggested just letting her fade away.
Silver tears fell from Baoyu’s eyes.
“I understand your unhappiness. You grieve for your dead mother, like I did for my dead brother who was so close to me it was as if he was my own flesh. My parents and my sister have moved south, the same as your grandfather and brother have. It is unlikely I will ever see them again.”
He had never really considered that before. The thought did make him sad, very sad.
“If you were my sister, I would be praying for you to begin a new life as I did for my brother. Please, let me say the words to release you.”
Baoyu was still for the first time. Her grim face softened. She shook her shadowy head as she lingered to gaze at her ghostly reflection in the pool, causing a small breeze that made leaves fall gently from the cherry tree and float on the surface of the water.
“She likes it here,” Tao said.
Raucous laughter from up on the walls cut through the silence. The guards, cold and bored with staring into the darkness, had lit a fire in a brazier on the ramparts and were drinking hot kumiss to warm themselves. The courtyard was hidden by trees and the guards weren’t doing their duty anyway. They were amusing themselves by hurling the Huan cups and bowls they’d been using from the top of the wall. They found the sound of the pottery smashing on the ground outside hilarious.
“I wish I could get the nomads out of here before we leave,” Tao said.
“If Baoyu had more strength,” Kai said, “she could frighten the Zhao away.”
“That’s the answer!” Tao couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to him before. “That will solve both problems.”
Neither Kai nor the ghost girl understood what he meant.
“If Baoyu is happy here, she should stay. She can haunt the Zhao so that they leave. If anyone tries to live here who she doesn’t like, she can scare them away. It will be known far and wide that this place is haunted. She can protect my home.”
“But she’s fading, you can see that,” Kai said.
“Then we will bring her cairn here. Sunila, you must go to the grave in the mountains and bring back all Baoyu’s bones. We will rebury them here!”
“But how will Sunila carry her bones?”
Kai didn’t trust the naga to collect every bone and bring them back safely.
Tao’s brain had finally woken up. “He won’t have to. I’ll go with him. I’ll carefully collect all her bones and carry them back.”
Specks of moonlight erupted from Baoyu’s hair like sparks from a fire. Tao was sure that this was a sign that she was happy with his plan.
“Will yo
u do it, Sunila? Will you take me to Baoyu’s grave?”
The naga didn’t need words. Tao could tell from the way his blue eyes shone that he was keen to help. Kai didn’t need words either. He couldn’t hide his envy.
“While we are gone, Kai, you must dig a grave, a deep hole somewhere within these walls, a place where Baoyu’s bones will be undisturbed forever. I’ll say a sutra. If ever she decides she’s ready to leave and start a new life, she can.”
Moths had gathered around Tao, hovering above him, as if they approved of the plan.
“And the insects will help keep intruders away.” Tao wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he was confident it was true.
Baoyu’s tears stopped falling. She turned in a circle, her shadow gown billowing. She was happy.
“It is not safe,” Kai said. “You have no control over Sunila. He might fly anywhere. You might fall off. ”
Tao would not be dissuaded. “I’ll use the harness. And he’ll keep me safe, won’t you, Sunila?”
The naga stood upright and unfurled his wings. He looked as pleased and proud as the ghost girl did. They were both glad to be given a task, to be useful.
This time it was Tao who could hear Kai’s thoughts. Tao’s safety wasn’t the dragon’s only concern. This would be Tao’s first dragon flight, but it would not be with him. It would be hundreds of years before Kai’s wings grew. Tao wouldn’t live long enough to fly with him.
“I’m sorry, Kai, but I have to do this,” Tao said. “Then Baoyu might forgive Sunila for her death, and she will be at peace.”
Tao fetched the harness and saddle from the stables and fastened them onto the naga. He climbed onto his back and buckled the straps across his shoulders. He’d found an empty rice sack in which to bring back the bones.
“The moon is out. Sunila will glow,” Kai said. “The nomads on the wall, those out searching in the darkness, they will see him. They will shoot him down.”
Tao thought for a moment. He remembered a sutra about the devas who could not be seen by humans. He spoke to the naga. “Invisible!” he said in Sanskrit. “Make yourself invisible.”