”Are these magic waters?” Ping asked, trailing her hand through the snow at the pool’s edge.
“Not magic,” replied Danzi. “Hot water springs from deep in the earth.”
“That sounds like magic to me,” said Ping as she cupped water in her hands and poured it over her hair. She’d forgotten about Hua. He dived off her head into the water and swam to the shore where he sat shivering miserably—but looking very clean.
When they had finished bathing, Danzi insisted that Ping wear the gown that the peasant had given her. Ping pulled on the gown and wrapped it around her, tying it at the back. There were flowers embroidered on the end of the ties.
Ping traced the flowers. “Is this what mothers do for their daughters?” she asked the dragon.
He didn’t answer.
The gown was much thicker than her jacket. The fabric felt strange against her skin. It wasn’t coarse like a new sack; it was soft. The sleeves were larger than the sleeves of her jacket. They were not so wide that they made it difficult to attend to a fire. Nothing like as wide as the Empress’ sleeves. Not even as wide as the palace ministers’ sleeves, but to Ping the simple gown felt as elegant as a silk robe.
She picked up Hua. “Look, Hua,” she said. “There’s plenty of room for you.” She put the rat in one of the folds that fell around the gown’s neck. “And you’ll be much warmer.”
As soon as the fire was burning strongly, Danzi dropped her old clothes into the flames, just to make certain she didn’t put them back on.
“Now comb hair,” the dragon said.
“I haven’t got a comb, Danzi,” said Ping. Bathing was one thing, putting on a new gown was another, but who had heard of a slave girl combing her hair?
“Has Danzi told Ping about scales?” asked the dragon.
“No.” Ping normally got confused when he changed the subject suddenly, but this time she was happy to drop the topic of hair combing.
“Dragons have 117 scales,” Danzi told her. “Each has magical powers. Eighty-one can be used for good purposes and thirty-six for bad.”
Such numbers had little meaning for Ping, but he certainly had many scales.
“Under chin there are five scales which lie in reverse.”
Five was a number she could comprehend. Sure enough, on the dragon’s chest there were five larger scales which grew up towards his head instead of down towards his tail like all the others.
“Do those scales have special magic powers?” Ping asked Danzi.
”No,” replied the dragon. “But very useful for storing things.” He inserted the talons of his left forepaw behind one of the reversed scales and pulled out a lovely comb. It was carved from ebony and had the finest teeth Ping had ever seen. The handle was inlaid with glittering mother-of-pearl.
“It’s beautiful!” exclaimed Ping.
“Gift from grateful princess rescued by Danzi,” said the dragon. Ping thought she sensed a hint of pride in the wind chime sounds he made. “Ping comb hair now.”
Ping patiently explained to the dragon that only wealthy women—such as princesses and ministers’ wives—combed their hair. They did this to pass the hours of their long, idle days. Danzi was not about to take no for an answer. When Ping continued to refuse, Danzi held her down with one paw while he combed her hair with another.
“It hurts!” she cried. Danzi didn’t worry about being gentle. He dragged the comb through the knots and snags in her hair. Ping could feel clumps being pulled out by the roots. Now she knew why hair combing was unpopular with ordinary people. Danzi paused to remove the knotted hairs from the comb and then continued his combing. The pile of tangled hair, as well as leaves, small twigs and dead insects that Danzi combed from her head, grew steadily.
”I won’t have any hair left if you continue much longer,” Ping complained.
Danzi ignored her. After a while, the comb passed through more easily and he stopped. Ping reached up and felt her hair. There was still plenty of it left and it was smooth as corn silk.
“Now must cleanse dragon stone,” Danzi said.
Ping sighed.
“Take to small pool.”
The dragon pointed a talon to a smaller pool. Its waters were hot and milk-white.
“Small pool contains arsenic.”
Ping vaguely remembered that the dragon had said something about arsenic earlier.
“But isn’t arsenic a poison?” asked Ping.
“Poisonous to humans,” the dragon said cheerfully. “But beneficial to dragon stone.”
It was also, it seemed, beneficial to dragons, as Danzi lowered his mouth to the surface and drank a little of the cloudy water.
Ping didn’t have the energy to argue. She fetched the stone and dropped it into the pool. Using a bundle of twigs she scrubbed the stone, careful not to get any of the milky water on her skin. Hua stayed well back from the pond’s edge. He’d had enough of water.
“How long will it take us to get to Ocean, Danzi?” Ping asked when they were back on the eastward path.
The dragon didn’t answer. Though he didn’t like to admit it, Ping had come to realise that Danzi was a little hard of hearing. She repeated the question in a louder voice.
“Long time,” the dragon replied.
“How many days?”
“Many days.”
Now that her legs had got used to the walking, Ping had begun to enjoy travelling. The days settled into a familiar rhythm. Each morning, they rose early, walked until midmorning and then rested for an hour or so as the traffic on the path increased. Then, when the weary farmers stopped to eat and rest in the afternoon, Ping and Danzi started out again.
Everything was new to her. The landscape was bursting into colour. There were trees and plants Ping had never seen before. The sound of the birds singing was beautiful and unbelievably loud. Occasionally she glimpsed animals—deer, rabbits, pangolin. She was always asking questions. What is the name of that plant? What does that signpost say? Are there really such creatures as monkeys? The dragon was patient and always answered. Master Lan had taken great pleasure in telling her nothing. Whenever she’d asked him a question, he’d laughed at her ignorance or said, “If you don’t know that by now, I’m not going to tell you.”
Ping’s memories of her life as a slave were starting to fade. She hadn’t forgotten about her miserable years at Huangling, but they seemed more like a bad dream than something that had happened to her. Her days were filled with small freedoms. She might decide to stop and collect mushrooms or berries. She might decide to catch a fish. She chose what they would eat from their small store of food and where they would spend the night. Danzi was happy to let her take charge of these things, while he concentrated on instructing her and checking on the dragon stone.
“Ping must learn to focus qi,” the dragon announced.
“What is qi again?”
“Spiritual energy.”
“Do I have any?” Ping asked.
“All creatures have qi.”
As they walked the dragon tried to get Ping to focus on the spiritual energy that she had inside her. She couldn’t find any. Danzi explained that when she had learned this skill, it would be the only weapon she needed. Her qi would stream out of her fingertips with a force to block arrows and knock attackers to the ground. Ping didn’t believe this for a minute.
They reached the crest of a small hill and, in the valley below, Ping saw her first village. She forgot about trying to focus her qi.
“Look, Danzi. There are so many houses.”
”Twenty-seven,” replied Danzi.
“I wish I could count beyond ten,” said Ping sadly.
“If you can count to ten you can count to ten thousand,” Danzi said.
Ping didn’t believe him. As they descended towards the village, Danzi explained that adding one to ten would take her to ten plus one, adding another would take her to a dozen. Carrying on in this fashion would soon take her to twice ten and then three times ten. He then explained that ten times
ten was a hundred and ten hundreds were a thousand and before she knew it she was able to count to ten thousand.
“Master Lan told me that I was too stupid to learn how to count beyond ten,” she said, her head dizzy with numbers.
“He was stupid one,” replied Danzi. They had both suffered at the hands of the spiteful Dragonkeeper.
Ping turned to the dragon. “Can we—?”
Danzi had vanished.
“Now where have you gone?” she exclaimed.
“Someone approaches.”
Ping looked around for the old man, but he wasn’t there. All she could see was a snake slithering through the grass.
“I can’t see you,” she said.
A traveller came along the path. He looked suspiciously at the young girl talking to herself and hurried on. The snake stopped slithering. Its scales grew large and more greenish. It sprouted whiskers. Ping felt her stomach convulse and a wave of nausea made her giddy and unable to focus. Then the snake disappeared and the dragon was in front of her.
“Don’t watch shape changing,” the dragon reminded her.
Ping sat on a rock until the nausea passed.
“Can you change into anything, Danzi?” she asked.
“No.”
Ping sighed. There were times when the dragon filled her head with too much knowledge, but other times, like this, when she wished he’d tell her more.
The dragon continued to walk along the path which passed the village. Ping looked at the cluster of little houses.
“Can’t we stop at the village? Perhaps someone will invite us to stay the night.”
“No,” replied Danzi. “No more shape changing.”
Ping reluctantly followed the dragon. She guessed he was too weary to change shape again.
Though the dragon instructed Ping about many things, he particularly liked to tell her about his own kind. He told her that dragons could live to an age of two thousand years or more. When they were born they had no horns or wings. It wasn’t until they were five hundred years old that their horns were fully grown.
They were close to a thousand before their wings first sprouted. He also told her that dragons were one of the four spiritual animals—the others were the giant tortoise, the red phoenix and a strange animal with one horn called the qilin.
“I have never heard of any of these creatures,” said Ping. “Apart from the dragon of course.”
“Nowadays qilin and red phoenix have left the earth,” Danzi said. “There are few dragons. Only giant tortoise still seen in some numbers.”
“What makes these creatures more spiritual than pigs and goats?”
“These four creatures are celestial. Their shapes can be seen in sky at night, marked out by stars. On earth they have more shen or soul substance than other animals. Dragons have most of all.”
“What is soul substance?” asked Ping.
“Is what makes beings good and wise and humble,” he replied. “Makes them see world as a whole with each insect, every blade of grass as important as Emperor.”
Ping remembered the day she had seen the Emperor. He had looked very important. Hua peeped out of her gown.
“Is Hua as important as the Emperor?”
“Indeed. We are each unique and therefore of great worth.”
“Even me?”
”Even Ping.”
Danzi spent the rest of the day telling her about the plants which were rich in shen—ginseng root, pine needles, and the leaves of a plant which Ping had never heard of called red cloud herb which Danzi told her grew at the side of rivers after rain storms. She yawned. Some of what the dragon told her was interesting, but there was only so much information she could take in at one time.
• chapter eight •
THE CITY OF ETERNAL PEACE
Ping had a strange feeling, a foreboding that
something bad would happen if they went into the
capital. She tried to explain it to the dragon, but
he wouldn’t listen.
“I can’t do it,” Ping said angrily.
The bleak mountain range was now behind them. Rain had been falling all morning. Wet, fertile countryside stretched ahead, divided into neat fields, some brown, some yellow, others dark green. They’d had a cold, damp meal at midday, sheltering under the dripping branches of a tree. The wet morning turned into a drizzly afternoon.
Danzi had been trying to teach her to focus her qi all day. He showed her how he could focus his qi on a rock and move it an arm’s length without touching it. He asked Ping to throw a branch at him and he stopped it in midair. He’d suggested she start with a leaf. So far the leaf had stubbornly stayed still.
“Ping try again.”
Ping’s gown was soaked. At least the dragon’s scales seemed to be waterproof. She felt very silly pointing her fingers at the sodden leaf as Danzi asked her for the hundredth time to concentrate.
“I’m sick of trying. I haven’t got any qi to focus! I wish you’d stop trying to make me do it.”
The leaf fluttered to the ground.
“Was that the wind?” Ping asked.
“There is no wind.”
“I did it!”
“Anger focuses qi,” the dragon remarked. “But better if use more positive emotion.”
Ping was pleased with herself, though she couldn’t see that the ability to move leaves would be very useful. She walked ahead. She’d had enough dragon instruction for one day.
After an hour or so of walking in silence, she turned to ask Danzi if they could shelter from the rain, and found a young man walking along the path behind her. He was dressed in sturdy travelling boots and had a hemp cloak over his shoulders. On his head was the sort of bamboo hat she had seen peasants in the fields wear to keep off the sun. There was no sun, but the hat was doing an excellent job of keeping the man’s head dry.
“I wish you’d stay as one thing or another,” Ping complained. “Just when I get used to travelling with an old man, I turn round and you’re a young man.”
Ping was expecting to hear the low rumbling noises that the dragon made when he was angry. Instead the young man spoke to her in a clear voice.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, backing away from her as if she might be dangerous.
“Oh,” said Ping, glancing in the trees on either side of the path for the missing dragon. “I thought you were someone else.”
Danzi was nowhere to be seen. All she could see was a bronze hoe with a tarnished green handle leaning against a tree. The young man peered at Ping and decided that she wasn’t dangerous after all.
“Are you going to the capital?” he asked.
“No.” Ping remembered Danzi’s warning not to tell people where they were going. “Not that far.”
He was a young man of about twice ten and two who was happy to have someone to talk to as he walked. Ping fell into step alongside him. She glanced back just in time to see the bronze hoe grow scales and a tail. The air around it started to shimmer and twist. Ping looked away as her stomach started to turn. It was the first time she had seen Danzi transform into something that wasn’t living. She wondered if this was a sign of the dragon’s weariness. It was now her job to hold the young man’s attention so that Danzi could resume his dragon shape and walk at a safe distance behind them.
Some travellers, she’d discovered, were wary and would exchange nothing more than a nod in greeting. This man, however, seemed to have been storing up conversation for days. As soon as Ping showed an interest in his journey, words poured out of him like grain from a split sack.
“I have been waiting for this for many years,” he said excitedly. “I am on my way to the imperial capital to become a scholar.”
Ping was thinking of a polite question to ask, but she didn’t have a chance to speak before he continued.
“I am honoured to be the only person from my village ever to go to the imperial school in Chang’an,” he said. “The village elder had his eye on me from a very young ag
e. He thought he saw potential in me, though I don’t know why.”
Ping had only to nod from time to time to keep the man talking.
“I came into possession of a copy of a page from the Book of Rites—one of The Five Classics. I have studied this page for six years. It is my hope that if I study hard and pass the examinations that I will be able to work with the Scholar of Great Knowledge who is the expert on the Book of Rites and…” he drew a deep breath so that his excitement didn’t overcome him entirely, “…if the great man will permit it, I will study the WHOLE BOOK and be privileged to gaze on the original copies found hidden in the walls of the house of CONFUCIUS HIMSELF.”
By this time the scholar was hopping from one foot to the other like an excited child. “Can you imagine?” he asked Ping. “The bamboo books that were actually in the hands of such an illustrious man.”
Ping had never heard of a man called Confucius, but she was enjoying the story.
“Why did he hide the books in a wall?” asked Ping.
“To save them from the great burning, of course.” He looked at Ping as if he could hardly believe she was so ignorant. “A hundred years ago the First Emperor was so concerned about ordinary people having more knowledge than himself, that he ordered all the books in the empire to be burned. Some scholars memorised entire volumes. Other brave souls risked death and hid books. Thanks to their courage, we still have copies of the great books today.”
The man strode ahead as if inspired by the brave scholars. Ping had to hurry to keep up with him.
“I am very fortunate. There will be many illustrious scholars in the capital at this time.”
“This time?” asked Ping.
”Haven’t you heard?” The scholar stopped dead and turned to Ping in astonishment. Ping was relieved to see that the dragon was back in his hoe shape.
The scholar tried to change his smile into a look of sadness, though it wasn’t convincing. “The Emperor has died, Heaven protect his souls.”
“The Emperor is dead? What happened to him?”
“I believe it was something he ate,” replied the scholar.
Ping turned pale, but the scholar didn’t notice.