Dragon Dance (7 page)

Afterwards the mist settled down thicker than before. Nor did its occasional thinnings provide any reassuring outlook: one sudden view into a ravine plunging within feet of the track prickled the hairs at the back of Simon's head. It was very quiet. The guards, who had earlier talked cheerfully among themselves, fell silent. The only sounds were footfalls and the padding of the mules, both eerily muffled by the mist.

Simon started wondering about the next night stop. He was not sure whether the mist was deepening or dusk was coming on. The thought of another night in the open was daunting: it would
be a lot colder at the height they must have reached by now.

But almost on that instant there was an extraordinary change. A doubtful brightening ahead swiftly turned to gold, and then to full visibility as his mule lurched into the clarity of late afternoon. He saw deep blue sky and the sun's orb seemingly poised on a mountain peak ahead.

The path in front continued to rise, but through cropped grass; white goats grazed among bushes and small trees. Brad came up from behind to bring his mule alongside Simon's.

“There's a sight for sore eyes,” he said.

Looking at the sun, Simon said: “I'd almost given up hope of seeing it again.”

“No, there.” Brad pointed to the left, up beyond the goats and trees.

“Shangri-La, wouldn't you say?”

•  •  •

Simon could remember a holiday he had spent with an aunt in a small dreary north-country town when he was nine or ten. The first couple of days, when rain kept him indoors, had been terribly dull; but at last the weather cleared, and he was able to go for a
walk. The nearby countryside was as drab as the town—fields of potatoes and beet—but then he turned a corner in a lane and saw coming towards him, incredibly, a man with an elephant.

His aunt, when he told her, was unimpressed: the farm belonged to a circus family, who sometimes sent animals down there for convalescence. It wasn't remarkable that he had seen an elephant being exercised.

For him, though, it was and remained one of the most astonishing and thrilling encounters of his life. He felt the same way about the building that now confronted him. Behind was the mist through which they had plodded for so many weary hours; ahead, clear and sunlit, lay a mountain landscape whose jagged wildness seemed totally divorced from and alien to human activities. But also there, nestling beneath the mountain peak, was an elaborate and extensive complex of buildings, which must have taken decades, perhaps centuries, to erect.

They were red and white against the grey of rock. On closer view, he could see that the white was granite, the red timber. He marvelled again at its existence here. The granite might have been quarried
somewhere nearby, though he saw no evidence of that, but the wood must have been carried all the way up from the plains.

The massive gates were open, revealing a long drive of stone flags flanked by blossoming gardens. He saw irises and peonies, lilies and lupins, and low-lying gold-cupped flowers that looked like oversized celandines. Except that, obviously, they weren't. Celandines were marsh plants which could not survive at such an altitude.

An archway led to a courtyard, where they parted from the guards. Bei Tsu conducted them to a patio with a pool where fat fish floated in the shade of water lilies. At the far side, two snarling porcelain dogs, oversized Technicolor Pekingese, guarded a doorway. They went through to a hall whose floor and ceiling were black, walls a deep rose-gold, furnished only with two low tables on which lamps stood. The hall gave on to a corridor, with more lamps in niches. At the end of it, before a second doorway, Bei Tsu stood to one side, put his hands together, and bowed his head in farewell.

His departing footsteps echoed as they went in. This room was smaller and not so bare. A frieze
about a yard in depth ran round the walls, depicting a continuous landscape: mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes and waterfalls, deer-parks and villages succeeded one another. It was a living landscape, with birds and fish and small animals, peasants working, mandarins contemplating nature. The ceiling here was creamy white, and the walls blue above a polished azure floor. Lamps glowed behind blue glass. A smell of something like incense came from enamelled bronze urns set at intervals along the walls. There was furniture: tables and chairs.

“Is this the guest room?” Brad asked. “Those mats over there look as though they're meant for sleeping on.”

Simon felt unsettled. “Is it all right to talk?”

“Who's to stop us? Who's here, anyway? They maybe don't need guards on top of a mountain—but no servants? No hellos?”

“Perhaps we're meant to wait here till someone comes.”

Brad went over to a table on which there were various bowls and dishes.

“A waiting room, laid for supper?” He examined the display more closely. “Rice, of course, and rice
cakes. But this looks like fish in some kind of sauce. And
that
is cold lobster. And look here.”

He picked something from a bowl and held it up: an apple.

Simon said: “I suppose it could have been brought up from the valley.”

“The apples in Li Nan were still tiny. This is ripe.”

“An early variety?”

“And
we're a couple of hundred miles farther north. And what about this?”

There was a twig attached to the fruit, and the twig had a leaf. Brad plucked and smelled it.

“Fresh.”

“So how do you account for it?”

“I wish I knew,” Brad said. “It's all crazy. Those flowers blooming outside. . . . None of it makes sense.”

Simon had followed him to the table. In the bowls he saw cherries and pomegranates, yellow berries he did not recognize, purple plums. With a feeling of recklessness, he took a plum and bit into it: juice ran down his chin.

“Tastes great,” he said.

Brad was staring at the apple. “It just can't be real. There's no way you can have cherries and apples ripe at the same time.”

Simon finished eating the plum and tucked the stone away behind the bowl. He felt more hungry rather than less. He took a small bowl and filled it with the food on display. Brad, after some hesitation, followed suit. There were chopsticks and a flask containing wine. They ate and drank, and Simon refilled his empty bowl.

Brad had put his down and was staring round the room with a puzzled, almost angry look.

“It's not some kind of illusion,” he said. “You can't eat illusions. So what is it?”

“Does it matter? We didn't eat better even in Cho-tsing's palace.”

Suddenly, though, Simon felt a chill of apprehension. It was like being in a fairy story—the vast mansion at the mountain top, no one in evidence, tables laid for a feast. . . . That was the kind of scene, he remembered, which usually ended badly, when the giant returned, or the troll, or the wicked witch.

“There has to be an explanation,” Brad said.

He told himself it was a long time since he had
believed in fairy stories; at the same time, he wished Brad would stop fussing about it. He said brusquely: “It can wait till morning. I'm dead beat.”

He unrolled one of the mats and lay on it. Something else was odd, he realized; although there was no sign of heating, it did not feel cold. He decided against mentioning that to Brad, in case it brought on another fit of speculation. Anyway, he was very tired. Weariness soon dragged him down into sleep.

•  •  •

In this dream, Simon was once more back in the time before the fireball, resting on a river bank on a drowsy summer's day. The voice crept into the dream. It was low, lulling, scarcely distinguishable from the sound of the breeze in the willows. Gradually it grew closer and louder. He could tell it was a man's voice, though he could not make out what it was saying. He became aware of something else, too—hands on his wrists, gentle but firm, holding him.

He was in some twilight state between sleep and waking. He heard tinkling music, a pattern of notes rising, then falling. The voice began to take on meaning.

“There is nothing to fear. Be at peace. Bid second mind be still. Be at peace. There is nothing to fear. Be at peace, be at peace. . . .”

He had a sense of time having stopped; or perhaps of it being caught up in a loop, with notes and words repeating, forever and ever. He felt he was slipping into something unknown and unknowable, like a rudderless boat drifting downstream. Towards what—an open lock, a weir? Uncertainty became doubt, suspicion, fear. His mind shut tight against the voice.

“Be at peace. There is nothing to fear.”

He resisted still, on the edge of panic but refusing to surrender. He had an image of a small animal caught in a trap, wire tightening round it as it struggled. He would not give in. Then somehow the image changed: the small animal was being lifted from its confinement by strong but gentle hands.

“There is nothing to fear. . . .”

And, unaccountably but wonderfully, it was true. Fear went, like a cloud from in front of the sun. The voice was stronger and gave him strength.

“Peace, and the mingling of minds . . . peace, and the mingling of minds . . .”

He was aware of a second voice and realized it was his own, echoing: “Peace, and the mingling of minds . . .”

Then it happened. It was not so much a voice in his mind now as a mind in his mind. No words were spoken, but the message was clearer and surer than speech.

“Friend, you are welcome at the Bonzery of Grace.”

•  •  •

Brad's hand on his arm wakened Simon. He asked: “What time is it?”

“Morning, or near enough. It's beginning to get light outside.”

“You've been out?”

“Just to look.”

“No sign of anyone?”

“No.”

The recollection hit him as he got up. He asked Brad: “Did you dream during the night, by any chance?”

“Music,” Brad said. “Hands—a girl's voice. Peace, and the mingling of minds.”

Simon shook his head. “Not a girl.”

Brad shrugged. “I'm telling you my dream.”

“And a sort of telepathic welcome at the end?”

“Something like that.”

“It must tie up. Dreams don't come in duplicates. What sort of weird stuff goes on here?”

Brad did not answer, which Simon found slightly surprising after his nagging questions the previous evening. He had an odd look—remote but relaxed, happy.

The sound of footsteps came from the corridor, and they both turned towards the door. Now, Simon thought, there might be some explanation.

The man who came in was in his fifties. He wore a simple blue tunic which left his arms and lower legs bare. Except for his face, he looked like a peasant, but the face had wisdom and authority.

A second figure entered with him, and Simon stared harder. It was a girl in her midteens, dressed as simply, but very beautiful.

T
HE PLATEAU COVERED PERHAPS FIFTY
acres, and was unequally divided by an avenue leading from the main buildings. To the left there were fields, with crops under cultivation; the smaller area on the right extended to the cliff's edge and featured ornamental gardens and pools and a number of greenhouses. At the end of the avenue stood a pagoda; straightforwardly Chinese except that it was approached through a columned portico.

The man's name, they had been told, was Bei Pen, the girl's Li Mei. Simon and Brad went with them
down a path through a shrubbery to an open space where there was a pool filled by a small waterfall. Troutlike fish flapped against the current, and Simon noticed a crayfish crawling among rocks at the bottom.

It was a bright morning; although the surrounding foothills were heavy with cloud, the peak of the mountain was sharp against a blue sky broken only by a few drifting puffs of white. A rustic bridge spanned the pool. It only needed a couple of doves hovering above it, Simon thought, to look like the design on a willow pattern plate. The sense of wild improbability he had felt on first seeing the bonzery came back.

Bei Pen said: “There are probably many questions you will wish to ask.” Neither replied, and after a moment he went on: “Then let me question you. What do you know of the Laws of Bei-Kun?”

Simon waited for Brad to respond; this was his sort of situation. Eventually he himself said: “Not much. I know they're to do with the two minds, first mind and second mind, and the law of suggestion. And Bei Tsu mentioned other laws—far movement, far speaking. . . .”

Brad broke in: “Was that far speaking last night, when Li Mei seemed to be talking inside my head?”

Li Mei smiled slightly. She had high broad cheekbones, dark glossy hair tied back to show pretty ears, a golden skin flushing to rose. She was nothing like the women in Li Nan. And she did not teeter along in the preposterous lily walk. Her sandalled feet were small but perfectly formed.

“Yes,” Bei Pen said, “that was far speaking, B'lad. As all things are, it is governed by the law of suggestion, so impeded by adverse thoughts. Your mind was more open to Li Mei than Si Mun's was to me.” Simon thought: I'll bet it was! “All the laws are based on a simple truth: that there is mind in every living thing. Not just in men and women, horses, dogs, monkeys. . . . The tiniest insect has mind. Plants, too.”

He touched the branch of willow which overhung the pool.

Simon asked: “Are you saying you can do this far speaking with trees?”

It came out more sceptically than he intended. Bei Pen said: “Is that so strange? Stranger than to speak with men thousands of miles away, or to see
things that are happening on the far side of the world?”

There was a silence which lasted too long. Bei Pen broke it.

“We know of the place from which you come—not the land of the Lomani, but the land beyond the fireball. In his far speaking with Li Mei, B'lad revealed much.”