Ping hadn’t thought past this point. She had fulfilled Danzi’s wishes. She had brought Kai to the dragon haven. She’d expected to find dragons on Long Gao Yuan. More than one. Instead they were alone on a cold mountain with night closing around them like a black cloak. They had no rugs, no food. Ping had imagined a joyous welcome from the dragons, and one of them flying down to get their belongings.
Ping went back to the edge of the cliff. She knew she couldn’t climb back down the way they had come. Not now. Not ever. It was too dark to see the bottom of the falls. She called down to Jun, but the noise of the waterfall swallowed her voice. She hoped he wouldn’t try to follow them up.
Night settled on the plateau, black and cold. They took shelter in the cave. It was too dark to see, but Ping could feel dried grass on the floor. And there was a smell. The smell of stale dragon urine. It wasn’t much warmer in the cave, but it was dry. They huddled together in the darkness while the slow minutes of the night crawled by.
When morning came, Ping was stiff with cold. Kai had stopped wailing, but he wouldn’t speak. Eventually the sun appeared over the rim of the plateau. It warmed them, but it also revealed the bones again. Ping looked around the cave. There were piles of dry grass, some dried meat. It was the den of wild animals. Kai was curled up. He wouldn’t leave the cave.
Outside, the sunlight revealed that the dragon bones were bleached white. The dragons had been dead for many years. There was a rusty weapon among the bones. Ping hadn’t needed proof that people had been responsible for the massacre, but there it was. She was glad that Lao Longzi wasn’t there to witness it. He had died believing he was bringing Danzi’s son to safety.
Ping searched the plateau foot by foot. She peered into the pools, where the water was crystal clear. She didn’t need dragon sight to see that they were empty. She remembered that Danzi had lived on Long Gao Yuan for many years and she was grateful that his restless spirit had led him away before the massacre. Her own life would have been very different if he had stayed.
During the morning, Ping half-expected to see Jun clamber up over the lip of the waterfall. She went as close to the edge of the cliff as she dared and peered down, though it made her dizzy. She threw rocks down to get Jun’s attention, but there was no sign of him.
“He must be looking for another way up,” Ping said to Kai.
She hadn’t eaten for more than a day. She found a few small mushrooms, some berries. The dried goat’s meat in the cave was tough but still edible. She lit a fire and heated up some water in a gourd. Kai wouldn’t eat.
“It’s not the end of our journey, Kai,” she said. “A dragon survived whatever happened here. We saw it. It has found somewhere else to live. It’s wary of people, that’s understandable. We have to find the white dragon, convince it that I’m a friend. We have to think of a new plan.”
She began to wonder if Kai would ever recover.
“We could stay here,” Ping said. “It’s where Danzi wanted you to live. Whoever killed the dragons is long gone and will never return. You could hunt. There might be fish in the pools.”
“No.” Kai’s answer was swift and firm. “This is a sad, bad place.”
Ping didn’t argue.
They spent the morning looking for a way down. She didn’t dare suggest that Kai climb down the way they had come. In his misery, he might slip and fall. One thing was certain—she couldn’t climb back down.
Kai still wouldn’t eat, but Ping forced herself to chew the goat’s meat. She sat in the sunlight, hoping that along with the warmth and food she would find new inspiration. She had slept very little through the cold night. The sun made her sleepy. She closed her eyes, just for a few moments.
A strange noise woke her, a sound like someone shaking out heavy blankets. She opened her eyes and the glare of the sun blinded her. It was the wing-beat of a bird. A large bird. Kai called out. It was a strange cry—like wind chimes in a storm, but with a faint sound of knives being sharpened. A mixture of joy and fear. She shielded her eyes. A huge, winged creature was hovering above them, bigger than any bird.
Ping’s eyes grew used to the bright light and she saw talons and horns, wings and scales. It was the dragon. High in the sky it had looked white, but close up, she saw that it was yellow. It reached down with its front paws and grabbed hold of Kai, digging its talons into his hide. She saw drops of purple blood surround each talon.
“Ping, Ping.” The joyful sound of tinkling wind chimes disappeared from Kai’s cry, and was replaced by the clashing of copper bowls.
“Ping!”
The dragon lifted Kai into the air. Ping reached up pointlessly. Circling above, the yellow dragon glared at her as if she were a spider or a snake. Then it flapped its wings and flew away with Kai clutched in its talons. Ping called out useless threats and frantic pleas. But the dragon was gone. And so was Kai.
Ping sat, staring at the bright sky for a long time. Her brain wouldn’t work. She thought that the dragon might come back for her, but then she remembered its cold eyes.
She spent the rest of the day desperately searching for a way down from the plateau, but wherever she looked over the rim, the cliff plunged down vertically. Night drew near. Ping crawled into the dragons’ cave and lay down in the dried grass.
She remembered what the seer at Beibai Palace had said about the final reading of the Yi Jing divination. Read it only when you are faced with your greatest difficulty. This was it. She had lost Kai, nothing could be worse. She pulled the calfskin from her pouch and unfolded it. On one side were the six solid lines, each with its own reading. An auspicious reading, the seer had told her, the most auspicious. She turned it over. On the other side was the single line of characters. She read it for the first time. A cluster of dragons without heads. Great good fortune. Ping read the column of characters again. She must have misread it in the dim light. She had seen dragons without heads, without hearts, without scales. They were nothing but a pile of bleached bones. How could that possibly mean good fortune? Tears of rage ran down her face as she screwed up the calfskin and threw it as far away as she could.
The next morning when Ping woke, she thought she was on Tai Shan. Then she remembered. Kai was gone. Since she’d left Huangling Mountain, she’d cared for two dragons, she’d made many friends, kind strangers had helped her. But as quickly as they had entered her life, they had all left again. No one had stayed with her for long. She was alone. Totally alone. She had experienced loneliness and loss before, many times. She remembered the heartbreak when she’d learned that Danzi had left without a word, replacing her with Wang Cao. She’d had a friend to turn to then. Liu Che had helped her recover and she had found her path again. She remembered the dreadful feeling when she had lost the dragon stone, but then she’d had Danzi at her side. Even in the lonely years on Huangling she’d had the comfort of Hua’s furry companionship.
She and Kai had trekked across the Empire. They had solved the mystery of Danzi’s puzzle. Against all odds they had found the one place in all the Empire that Danzi had wanted them to find. Ping had reached the end of her journey. But there was nothing there.
She went out into the crisp mountain air. This time there was no one to comfort her. No one to help her. She had never been so alone in her life. And there was a wound in her heart—the place where Kai had been ripped from her. She knew that it would never heal. She went back to the cave and didn’t come out again that day. She made herself a nest in the dried grass, just as Kai would have. It was comfortable. She huddled there, curled in a ball through the night.
All through the next day she stayed in the same place, only stirring to go and pee in a corner. Her eyes had grown used to the dim light. She saw markings on the cave wall. She moved closer. There were two characters scrawled in a shaky hand. The two characters meant betrayal. Ping went back to her bed of grass. She didn’t eat. Another night passed. She no longer expected Jun to rescue her. He might have tried to climb the Serpent’s Tail. And fallen. She wo
uld just wait until the world went away.
Ping felt a cold breeze on her cheek and shivered. She was angry with it. It had spoilt the only thing she had left, the relative warmth and comfort of the dragon cave. She turned away from the breeze. Then she realised that it wasn’t coming from the cave mouth, it was coming from somewhere in the dark depths of the cave. She got up and felt her way towards the rush of cool air. The back of the cave was solid rock. There was no way out. She could no longer feel the breeze on her face. It was now stirring hairs on the top of her head. She reached up to the cave roof above her. There was a hole.
She had searched for an escape route that led down, but instead she had found a tunnel that led up. It wasn’t built for dragons. It was human-sized. She collected what food was left in the dragon cave and stuffed it into her pouch. She dragged a large stone into the cave so that she could reach into the overhead tunnel. Handgrips had been carved just inside. She grabbed onto them and, despite having eaten nothing for two days, she found the strength to lift herself up.
The tunnel led up almost vertically, but on one side she could feel narrow steps that had been carved into the rock. She clambered up them, feeling her way in the dark. The tunnel continued up for a short way and then turned at right angles and became horizontal. She crawled along the tunnel for several minutes, then, though it was difficult to tell in the dark, Ping thought that it began to slope down. The air was stale but she found the dark strangely comforting. She crawled headfirst for a long time. Her hands were grazed as she tried not to slip forward too quickly. The slope was definitely becoming steeper. She felt the walls for places she could turn around in, but the tunnel was narrow everywhere she touched. She didn’t think she’d be able to inch back again, so she kept going. Then, she lost her hold on the tunnel floor and slipped. She couldn’t stop herself. She slid headfirst, grazing her arms and knees and bashing her head as she tried to stop her fall. Then the tunnel ended and Ping landed hard. She was lying on a pile of grass that was probably meant to have broken the fall. It had become so dry and brittle that it wasn’t much of a cushion.
She didn’t get up at first. She couldn’t. Her body hurt all over. She could feel blood running from her forehead. In front of her, light filtered through branches. A bush had grown over the entrance to the tunnel. Her arms were grazed and cut. Her trousers were ripped at the knees and bloody skin was visible through the holes. She lay for a while and considered whether she wanted to get up or whether she would just lie there until she became food for the plants and small animals.
But she couldn’t die without knowing what had happened to Kai. The yellow dragon could have been a kind female who wanted to care for him. He could be happily basking in the care of another dragon for the first time in his short life. Or it could have been an angry territorial male who didn’t want another young male in his area. Whatever his fate, she had to find out. She broke off the branches covering the tunnel entrance and crawled out into the light.
From the angle of the sun, Ping knew it was midafternoon. She still had hours of daylight left. She got to her feet and walked around the base of Long Gao Yuan to the Serpent’s Tail.
“Jun,” she called “Jun!”
There was no sign of Jun or the saddlebag that contained her belongings. Ping kept walking and calling, stopping only to drink from a spring and eat some berries, until she had completed a full circuit of the base of Long Gao Yuan. The sun had sunk nearly to the horizon. She couldn’t find Jun.
Ping sat and rested for a while. She had been confident Jun would wait for her. She would have staked her life on it. She called out again. Her voice echoed off the cliff face. He was just another person who had entered her life briefly and then left. He had returned to his safe, reliable world of silkworms and mulberry trees. He had gone too.
• chapter fifteen •
THE TOP OF THE WORLD
Throughout the days Ping thought of nothing.
If she allowed her mind to wander,
it only came back to her misery.
The Yi Jing had let Ping down. Danzi’s map had led her to despair. There was only one thing left that she could do. She had to find Kai. She would search the Empire, search the world if she had to. If she couldn’t find him, she would die trying.
It didn’t matter that she’d lost her bag. She could do without spare clothes, cooking utensils and gold coins. Her most precious things were in the pouch around her waist—her mirror, Danzi’s scale, the shard of dragon stone. It was late afternoon. Ping could stay where she was until morning—sleep in the mouth of the tunnel on the pile of straw. Or she could start straightaway, even though there were just a few hours of daylight left. The journey ahead promised no shelter, no dry straw to sleep on, and one night of relative comfort would be lost among many nights of discomfort in the open air.
She set out immediately. The yellow dragon had flown south-west. That was the way she would go. Except she didn’t have wings. All she could do was creep across the undulating landscape like a snail. When it got dark she kept walking, using the stars to guide her, until she couldn’t walk any longer.
Ping walked from dawn till dark every day, for many days. She rarely bothered to light a fire. She had nothing to cook. Instead she ate raw mushrooms, berries and the strips of dried goat meat that she’d brought from the dragons’ cave. There were good days when the sun wasn’t too hot and the hills offered her gentle slopes. She made fair progress then. There were also bad days when the wind blew and the mountainside was too steep to climb, forcing her to walk many li out of her way.
The weather grew hotter. She didn’t have a water bag, so she could drink only when she chanced upon a stream or a shrinking pool. She ran out of dried meat. There were no mushrooms growing because the earth was too dry. Birds had stripped the bushes of the sparse crop of berries. Her face was sunburned, her lips blistered. She didn’t have a hat or even the remains of her nightgown to shield her face and head from the sun. There were no trees to offer any shade. The sun felt as if it would burn a hole in her head.
Many blank days passed and she didn’t bother to count them anymore. The sun was making it hard for her to think of anything. She felt like her brain was melting. Every time she concentrated on a thought it would slip from her mind, like a weighted string slipping through her fingers, like a dream fading on waking.
Throughout the days, Ping thought of nothing. If she allowed her mind to wander, it only came back to her misery. And anyway, thinking took energy. She moved without thinking. As soon as night fell, she collapsed into an exhausted sleep wherever she happened to be, only to wake in the dark, shivering with cold and unable to get back to sleep. Then she would start walking before dawn, tripping over rocks and stumbling down slopes in the darkness.
She had been hungry before, but never like this. She remembered meagre meals at Huangling—thin gruel and scraps of grisly meat left on Master Lan’s plate. Her mouth watered at the thought of such feasts now. She rummaged in her pouch. Perhaps there was a scrap of food in there—a nut, a shrivelled berry, a piece of mouldy mushroom. All she found was a mirror, a purple shard and a faded dragon scale.
She couldn’t remember the name of the Emperor’s sister. She’d forgotten how long it was since she left Beibai Palace. It would only be a matter of time before she forgot who she was and where she was going. She thought for a moment. Where was she going? She couldn’t remember. She still had her name though. She clutched at the silk cord around her neck. She could never forget her name. She looked at her bamboo square. It was blank. The sun had faded the single character that used to be written there. Too tired to stand, she sat down and closed her eyes. All her senses were shut down. She had become an empty shell.
Her fingers closed around the purple shard. It felt cool in her hands. She stroked its smooth surface and admired the pretty purple colour. There was an itchy feeling in her chest. Her mind, empty of all other thoughts, focused on the itch. It wasn’t so much an itch as an ache. Her mi
nd couldn’t make sense of it. All it understood was walking and sleeping. Anything else was confusing. She sat for a long time. The ache grew more painful, as if a branch were sticking into her, pressing harder and harder all the time. She opened her jacket and examined the patch of skin that hurt. There was no cut, no bruise, no insect bite, nothing that could have caused the discomfort. She knew that she had experienced this sensation before, but she couldn’t remember when.
The bronze mirror lay in her lap. On one side there was a creature reaching out for the central knob as if it was something it wanted badly. It was a nice creature with four feet, a curving body and horns on its head. What sort of a creature was it? She couldn’t remember. She turned over the bronze disc. On the other side was a face. A human face—grimy, scratched and red raw. Skin was peeling off the nose, and the eyes were vacant. She turned the disc a little and the sunlight flashed in her eyes. She saw the face on the disc move, the eyes squint. It wasn’t painted on or carved into the bronze, it was a reflection of a real face. Her face.
Memories trickled back into her mind. She remembered what the feeling in her chest was. It was the thread pulling her. She had this ability, part of her second sight. When she wanted something badly, more than anything else, it would lead her to it. She turned over the mirror again. She knew now what the creature was called. It was a dragon. Her name was Ping and she was searching. For her dragon.
It was as if the thread was joining her to Kai. A thin strand like a single thread of silk spun by a silkworm. It was so fragile, so delicate, but it was unbroken. This thread had led her to things before. A shard of dragon stone had intensified the link. She grasped the shard with both hands. In some ways it was easier this time—her body and mind weren’t distracted by anything else. She got to her feet and allowed herself to be pulled along. She wouldn’t give up searching for Kai while she was still alive.