Dragonkeeper 2: Garden of the Purple Dragon (15 page)

Ping nodded. “The Duke of Yan had him killed.”

“That wasn’t the end of it,” Liu Che explained. “As an added punishment, his body was strung up on the city wall. The Duke forced her to watch every day as rats gradually consumed the body.”

Ping’s appetite disappeared completely. “I didn’t know.”

“I would much rather have had Hua put to death, however the Longevity Council may wish to study him more. But if he escapes again I will order the servants to lay poison.”

Ping nodded quietly. “As you wish, Your Imperial Majesty.”

Ping knew Hua was too clever to eat poison, but she wished he hadn’t upset the Princess so.

A distressed cry from across the room broke the silence. Ping knew immediately who would be responsible. Kai was up to some sort of mischief. She went across the room to investigate.

The Dragon Attendant and several servants were gathered around a painted pottery vase that was almost as tall as Ping. Its curved sides bulged in the middle and then tapered at the neck. It was an elegant ornament decorated with patterns of clouds and strange animals.
She could hear a muffled but familiar squawking. It was coming from inside the vase. Kai had tried to leap from a windowsill over the vase. He had dived into the vase instead. The servants were all talking at once, telling her that the vase was a hundred years old and had been painted by a famous artist using gold paint and the blood of a previous emperor. It was worth many thousands
of jin
.

“Stuck!” moaned Kai.

“Yes, I know you’re stuck,” said Ping impatiently. “You’re a silly dragon.”

Ping ordered the servants to lay the vase gently on its side.

“Xiao Zheng, reach inside and pull the dragon out.”

The Dragon Attendant did as he was told.

Kai screeched in pain as if his talons were being pulled out.

“Ow!” he wailed. “Saggypants hurt Kai’s nose.”

The Dragon Attendant pulled as hard as he could, but though Kai’s head emerged from the vase, his shoulders just became wedged.

“You got in there,” Ping said. “You must be able to get out!”

She sent the Dragon Attendant to the kitchens for oil.

“Turn around, Kai,” Ping demanded, “We might be able to pull you out backwards.”

“No pull tail,” said an unhappy voice inside the vase.
Everyone else heard only a shrill piping, like someone blowing the highest note on a tin whistle.

“Well stay there then!” said Ping crossly.

After a moment’s silence, Ping heard the dragon wriggle around inside the vase, moaning miserably.

The Dragon Attendant returned from the kitchens with a jar of oil.

“Pour it in the vase,” Ping said. “It will make him slippery.”

“Stop, Saggypants!” said Kai as the Dragon Attendant poured in the oil.

Ping grabbed hold of Kai’s tail and pulled as hard as she could, but the dragon remained stuck.

The servants suddenly dropped to the floor. The Emperor had come over to see what the fuss was.

“Break the vase,” he said.

“But Your Imperial Majesty … Ping began.

Liu Che held up his hand to stop her.

“Do as I say,” he commanded.

One of the guards fetched an axe and hit the vase as hard as he could. It shattered to pieces, revealing an oily dragon with a shard of pottery balanced on his head.

“Broken,” said Kai.

The following day, when Ping went to the Princess’s chamber for her reading lesson, the serving women wouldn’t let her enter.

“The Princess is unwell,” they said.

She pleaded with Dong Fang Suo to convince the Emperor to let her continue her lessons. He was successful. Imperial ministers took over the job of teaching Ping to read and write. Without the Princess, it was not such an enjoyable experience. She’d been very patient, going over each character again and again, explaining the meaning of the components of each character and making up stories to help her remember them. But Ping and the Princess had talked about other things besides characters and books. Princess Yangxin spoke of her childhood and the bond she’d had with her brother ever since he was born. Ping had enjoyed hearing about the young Liu Che and his devotion to his sister. As they drank tea, Lady An had taught her how to tie up her hair in a neat knot. The lessons had lasted for entire afternoons.

Now a minister came each morning and wrote Ping’s new characters on her calfskin. It was a different minister each day. He told her what each character meant. Ping recited the characters back to him and then he went away. Ping practised the characters by herself, in the garden if it wasn’t raining or in her chamber if the weather was bad. In the afternoon, the minister returned to test her. If her characters weren’t well formed, he made her write them again and again until she got them right.

Now that she understood the different components of the characters, it didn’t take Ping long each day to learn six characters. Even when she persuaded the
ministers to increase the daily number of new characters to ten-and-two, and she practised every character she knew, it still only took a few hours. She supervised Kai as he swam in the ponds. She tried to teach him not to trample the flowers. His attendants took care of most of his needs. Though the Emperor was always too busy with the Longevity Council to spend time with Ping, he still found time to be with Kai.

Ping missed the Princess’s company. She walked every path in the garden until she knew each tree and rock. She watched ducks in their arrowhead formation fly away to warmer lands for the winter. She felt as lonely as she had at Huangling.

Ping went to visit Hua. She had managed to ensure that his cage only had a latch, so that Hua could use his dexterous claws to free himself every night. Ping felt bad that he had to spend so much time confined. He would have been better off if he’d stayed on the Isle of the Blest.

“It’s not fair, Hua,” she told the rat. “Kai can get away with all sorts of bad behaviour, and no one minds. Just breathing is enough to get you into trouble.”

Ping didn’t like going back to the cages. She didn’t want to be reminded of the time she’d been imprisoned. The monkeys and the black cat were no longer there. They had been freed to roam the Tiger Forest. She hoped that one day she would get a chance to wander in the wild forest.

Ping couldn’t sleep. Hailstones were battering the roofs. It sounded like the Immortals were pelting the lodge with rocks. An angry wind rattled shutters and lifted tiles off the roof above her chamber. Kai was curled up next to her. His bed consisted of a large feather mattress on a brick platform that was heated from beneath by hot coals. Most nights it was empty, while Ping and Kai were squashed together on Ping’s straw mattress. She had suggested that she might sleep in the big bed where there would be more room, but Saggypants
wouldn’t hear of it. The bed was for the imperial dragon only. Ping would have brought the matter up with the Emperor but he was so busy she didn’t want to bother him with such a trivial matter.

The sound of the wind whispering and whistling through the rafters frightened the little dragon. He had wriggled and whimpered for more than an hour. Ping had told him stories until he was finally asleep—curled up in a knot, taking up three-quarters of the bed and snoring softly. A flash of light lit up the room briefly. It was followed half a minute later by a deep rumble. Then the night was as black as a crow’s wing again. She could hear a rustling sound. It was Hua rearranging some of the bedding straw to suit his own ratty purposes.

Storms had never kept Ping awake before. She was thinking about the books on dragons and their keepers.

“Those books are only to be read by members of the Longevity Council,” Dong Fang Suo had said when Ping had asked if she could look at them. Even though she still didn’t know enough characters to be able to read them, his stubbornness annoyed her. If there were books on dragons and their care, why shouldn’t the Imperial Dragonkeeper read them?

Ping lay on her side and then on her back, but she couldn’t get comfortable. She got up and rearranged the blanket, which was all on Kai’s side of the bed. She tried lying with her head at the bottom of the bed
and her feet near Kai’s nose. She had been in bed for hours, but still felt no closer to sleep. Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t felt hungry at the evening meal and had left her favourite dish (green goose with ginger sauce) untouched.

“I’m hungry now, though,” she whispered to Hua. “Let’s see if we can find something to eat in the kitchens.”

It was so dark, Ping had to feel her way to the door. She checked that Kai was still snoring and then went out into the corridor. Small wicker baskets containing oil lamps were placed on the floor at intervals. It was at least two hours past midnight. Many of the lamps had burned up their supply of oil or had been blown out by gusts of wind. Only a few were still alight.

The corridors and halls were eerily empty. Through the shutters, she glimpsed one or two guards standing miserably under eaves with rain dripping off their caps, but no one was awake inside. Hua was enjoying this freedom. He darted around inspecting what was behind wall hangings and beneath holes in the floorboards. It reminded Ping of the times they had explored Huangling Palace together at night. The memory left her smiling, which was strange, since she had been a hungry, ill-treated slave back then.

Though she had intended to go to the kitchens, that wasn’t where her feet were taking her. The lodge was not a neat symmetrical building like the palace at
Huangling. It had been built to fit the contours of the hillside. It straggled crookedly across a slope and then abruptly turned uphill. The corridors changed direction unexpectedly and suddenly turned into stairs, sometimes leading up, sometimes down. Some chambers were completely separate, joined to the main building by enclosed passageways that zigzagged up and down the hillside.

Ping found herself in the walkway that led to the Hall of Peaceful Retreat where the Longevity Council worked on their potions and elixirs. She only ever saw the strange members of the council at the evening banquet. The rest of the day (and for all she knew the night as well), they studied and experimented. She had never been to the hall. Guards had barred her way whenever she tried to approach it.

During the day the walkway gave pleasant glimpses of hidden gardens and pools full of large goldfish. Now the shutters were all closed. Only two lamps were still burning in the passageway. Ping bent down to lift one from its wicker basket, shielding the flame with her hand as it flickered in a sudden gust of wind. A shutter blew open with a bang. Her heart pounded like a hammer beating metal. Through the open window she saw the wet garden lit up by a flash of lightning. It looked unnatural and frightening. Silvery shapes of twisted rocks loomed like ghosts. The branches of a weeping cherry tree were blown horizontal by the fierce wind.
Then it was dark again.

Ping felt the floor slope down beneath her feet as she continued along the passageway. The wail of the wind died for a moment and she could hear the gentle pattering of Hua’s feet on the polished floorboards. Then she heard another sound—heavy flat-footed steps. It sounded as if two or three guards were blundering clumsily down the passage behind her. There was a crash. Ping spun round. The first wicker basket had been knocked over, its oil spilled out. The flame from the wick licked greedily along the trail of oil. The wicker basket started to burn.

“Fire,” said a voice in Ping’s head.

By the light of the flames Ping could see that the culprit wasn’t a band of clumsy guards, just one small dragon.

Ping rushed back and stamped out the fire.

“Kai, you could have burnt down the whole lodge,” Ping snapped. “What are you doing here? You should be asleep.”

“Lonely,” said Kai. “Frightened.”

The dragon’s green eyes blinked in the lamplight. At any other time of the day, she might have been pleased with the improvement in his speech, which for the last week had consisted of nothing but bad words he’d learned from the imperial guards.

“Well, if you’re coming with me, you have to be very, very quiet. Do you understand?”

Kai nodded. “Quiet.”

There was no guard outside the Hall of Peaceful Retreat. Ping pushed the door open a chink, half expecting the strange Longevity Council members to be still at their work, but no light leaked out. She went into the hall. Her lamp spread only a small circle of light. She could see jars and bowls, a mortar and pestle on a bench. There was an unpleasant smell, sharp and sour, like vinegar and urine mixed together. It was a familiar smell, but Ping couldn’t place it. The rumble in her stomach had become an ache. Hua jumped up onto the bench and sniffed the contents of the bowls.

Kai made a high-pitched noise.

“Sssh, Kai. Remember what I said?”

“Quiet.”

Ping held up her lamp. Bamboo books were stacked on a shelf above the bench. They were neatly rolled, tied with thin ribbon and each had a tag hanging from it. One was spread open on a bench. Ping held the lamp close. She recognised the characters for
long
and
life
. She examined the tags on the other books. She found two that had the character for
dragon
written on them. She opened out one of these books. There were many characters that she could understand—
heart, eye, blood
. She couldn’t make out the meaning of the sentences, but she had an unpleasant feeling that it was a list of uses for dragon parts. She pulled the other dragon book from the shelf. The neat stack of books collapsed with a thud.

“Sssh,” said Kai sternly. “Quiet.”

Ping ran her finger down the columns of characters. The
dragon
character was repeated many times. She sighed with frustration. Though she knew many of the characters, she still couldn’t make sense of it.

A noise startled Ping. She held up her lamp. A curtained doorway led off the hall to an inner chamber. The wind had died, the hail had stopped and there was just the patter of rain. She heard the noise again. Someone was on the other side of the curtain. The ache in Ping’s stomach had turned to a sharp pain. But it wasn’t hunger that had made her stomach hurt. It was the sense of dread that she felt when enemies were near.