The Fourth Sacrifice (17 page)

‘Shots of the Terracotta Warriors here,’ Chuck said. ‘We’ve got loads of stock.’

‘
The account of the construction of his tomb told of pearls, jade and all kinds of treasures. Candles made of dugong grease were lit and kept burning. Hidden crossbows and arrows were installed inside with an automatic propulsion system to prevent robbery. The coffin was surrounded by a river of mercury, kept flowing mechanically. Above was a celestial body with the sun, the moon and the stars, and below was a landscape with rivers and mountains …
’

Michael walked into close-up and looked very earnestly at the camera. He was incredibly photogenic, Margaret thought. He looked good in the flesh, but the camera made him beautiful. The camera loved him. A tiny, involuntary, frisson made her shiver.

He said, ‘
Rivers of mercury? If they existed, they would certainly be rivers of death for anyone trying to enter Qin’s tomb. So has anyone tried? Well, actually, no. They have dug up the Terracotta Army, ranged in battalions around the tomb. But to this day, no one has had the courage to attempt to enter the tomb itself. Why? Because soil tests show a dangerously high level of mercury. So was it any wonder that Hu Bo and the others, under the direction of the venerated Xia Nai, approached the opening of the Emperor Wanli’s mausoleum with fear in their hearts?’

He turned away from the camera. ‘Shit! I missed out the bit about the stones painted with cinnabar.’

Chuck leaned forward. ‘That’s OK, Mike, we’re off you at that point. We can pick it up in dubbing. But, really, I don’t think we miss it.’

Michael turned back to camera. ‘We miss it,’ he said firmly. ‘I want to do it again.’

‘Goddamn perfectionist,’ Chuck muttered. Then, ‘OK, cut it and set it up from the top.’ He turned to Margaret. ‘What did you think?’

‘Sounded good to me.’

‘Me, too.’ He sighed. ‘We could be some time at this.’

She stood up. ‘I think I’ll take a wander. Catch up with you later, if that’s OK?’

‘Sure,’ Chuck said. ‘Mind if I join you?’ He grinned. ‘If only.’

Outside, the hot September sun beat down, throwing the mountains that rose out of the north-west into sharp relief. The sweet smell of pine rose from the spruce trees all around. Margaret walked away from the activity surrounding the technical wagons, through the shade of the trees, to the outer crenellated wall that encircled the tomb. A bleak and barren landscape, bleached white by the sun, surrounded this walled oasis. The foothills of the mountains were dotted with the tombs of Wanli’s ancestors, symbolising the desperate attempts of history’s rich and powerful men to maintain their status over the rest of us, even in death. Futile attempts at immortality. And now, centuries later, they served only to provide entertainment for the MTV generation. If only those rich and powerful men had known.

Margaret pushed her hands deep into the pockets of her trousers and scuffed her way idly along the paved top of the outer wall, pushing a pine cone in front of her as she went. It was all interesting enough, and Michael was charming and attractive, but she was still emotionally raw. She would almost certainly recoil from the merest hint of romantic interest. She still ached when she thought of Li.

As she approached the stele pavilion, the third assistant director, a young Chinese girl, put a hand up to stop her, and placed a finger to her lips warning her to be silent. To her right, in the deep slash that cut through the hill to the stone façade of the tomb’s entrance, she saw Michael in the glare of lights mounted all around him doing his piece to camera again. The camera dolly tracked back from him as he approached the design team’s re-creation of the diamond wall. She could hear his voice echoing back from the walls that leaned over him. ‘
If they existed, they would certainly be rivers of death for anyone trying to enter Qin’s tomb
 …’

Ahead, up a flight of broad steps, the stele pavilion towered over everything, one roof atop another, curling eaves supported on ancient wooden beams. The stele itself, a standing stone tablet inscribed with ancient script, stood more than twenty feet high, framed by open arches in each of the four sides of the red-painted pavilion.

Thirty feet below it, in a tree-shaded square, extras in period costume sat round stone tables on seats carved in the shape of elephants. A long paved walkway led off, across three marble terraces, to the distant gates, and the parking lot beyond where production vehicles – make-up, wardrobe, a catering wagon, Michael’s Winnebago – clustered in the shade of the trees around its fringes.

She heard someone shout, ‘Cut!’, and then the third assistant listened intently to a garble of instructions coming over the walkie, before relaying them in Chinese to a cluster of production runners in the square below, who began rounding up the extras. She waved Margaret on, and Margaret walked up the steps to the stele pavilion. From here she could watch the activities in the square below as well as the crew resetting at the diamond wall. Months of preparation, she reflected, dozens of people, hours of filming, all to put a few minutes on screen. She was not sure she would have the patience to survive in a business like this.

When Margaret got back to the control truck Chuck was more animated than she had seen him all morning. A tall, lanky man, with a shock of prematurely grey hair, he seemed to have folded himself over the control console and was talking rapidly into his walkie-talkie. ‘We get one shot at the master, guys,’ he was saying. ‘We get it right, or we spend the rest of the day setting it up again.’ He had lit a cigarette, the first she had seen him smoking. He waved it at her apologetically when he saw her. ‘Sorry about this,’ he said. ‘I only smoke when extremely stressed. So if you ever see me with a cigarette in my hand you know I’m about to implode. Design have been setting this up for days. It’s cost an arm and a leg, and I don’t want to have to reshoot.’

‘What’s the scene?’ Margaret asked.

‘It’s the moment when they remove the first bricks from the diamond wall and open the tomb. Special effects are great.’ He paused. ‘I hope.’ Then he grinned and puffed some more at his cigarette. ‘I’ve got three cameras on it, so it had better be good.’

Margaret saw that two other monitors, which had previously been black, now showed the pictures being fed from the other two cameras. The master shot was set wide and showed the ladder leading up to the top of the inverted V. Dozens of extras dressed as peasants in blue cotton Mao suits were gathered around the foot of it. The actor playing Hu Bo stood at the top of it, a trowel-like implement in his hand, ready to start digging out the bricks.

Another camera had been set somewhere higher up the wall, giving a view from above Hu Bo, down to the upturned peasant faces. The third camera was set low, among the legs of the gathering at the foot of the ladder. In the background Margaret could see camera and crew. She said to Chuck, ‘Are we meant to see them?’

Chuck laughed. ‘They’re supposed to be the film crew that shot the real opening of the tomb. That’s how we know exactly what it was like. We’re going to intercut our stuff with some of the original footage.’

It was another forty-five minutes before they were ready to go for a take. Hu Bo and the peasant Wang Qifa had run through their lines several times, going through the actions of removing the first brick without actually doing so. Sound recordist, camera operators, lighting director, all seemed happy to go for it.

‘OK, Dave,’ Chuck said. ‘When you’re ready …’

Dave, a burly young man with long red hair beneath his baseball cap, gave a thumbs-up to camera and ducked out of shot. Then Margaret heard him on foldback. ‘OK everyone, quiet please. Roll VT. Very still. And … action!’

Wang Qifa, clutching a trowel, climbed the ladder to join Hu Bo. ‘
What are you doing?
’ Hu Bo asked.

‘
I thought we might remove the first bricks together
,’ Wang Qifa replied.

‘
Ah, but there might be hidden weapons
,’ Hu Bo replied. ‘
And chickens’ blood is not always foolproof. You’d better wait at the foot of the ladder and I’ll hand down the bricks. That way only one of us will get killed.
’

That was enough to send Wang Qifa back down the ladder. It was deathly silent as Hu began scraping with his trowel to remove the first brick. The overhead camera caught, in close up, the concentration on his upturned face. The brick slowly came loose and, using both hands, he pushed and pulled it from side to side until finally it came free of the wall. There was a loud pop and a sucking sound like the rushing of air. A voice shouted, ‘
Poisonous gas!
’ And almost immediately a thick black mist came belching out of the opening, accompanied by a noise like the growling of an animal.

Hu put his hand to his mouth, dropping the brick, and slid down the ladder, choking and coughing. The peasants had all thrown themselves to the ground as the mist descended and engulfed them. The air was filled with the sound of choking.

Then Margaret saw, on the third monitor, a figure emerging from the mist, incongruous in white shirt and jeans. On some signal she couldn’t see, the coughing stopped and the set became quiet. Michael addressed himself to the camera in an eerie silence while still walking towards it, the black mist billowing around his legs.
‘But it wasn’t poison gas. It was simply an accumulation of rotten organic materials released by the inrush of air after nearly three hundred and forty years of decay. Vile and unpleasant, but not toxic. And if there were hidden weapons within, they were still to be encountered.’

‘Cut!’ Chuck shouted. ‘Brilliant! Check it. Sound, do you need a wild track?’

A voice came back from somewhere. ‘Yeah. Lots more coughing and choking.’

‘OK, we’ll do it after we’ve checked tape. Dave, kisses all round. Tell Design I owe them a very large drink.’

*

It was cold in the Underground Palace, and damp, and Margaret shivered. Michael put his jacket over her shoulders, covering her thin cotton blouse. And she wasn’t sure whether it was the cold or his touch that raised goosebumps on her forearms. She shrugged the thought aside and looked around the vast chambers with their arched roofs and shook her head in amazement. ‘I had no idea this would be so big.’

‘Built from giant stone blocks, each one hand-cut and polished,’ Michael said. ‘The cost of building the tomb nearly bankrupted the country.’

‘And there were no hidden weapons after all?’ Margaret was disappointed.

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Well, isn’t that a bit of a cheat? Building your audience up to think there were?’

‘No,’ Michael said earnestly. ‘I want the audience to experience the same sense of the unknown, of hidden dangers, as Hu Bo and the others. So the tomb wasn’t booby-trapped, but they weren’t to know that. And then once they were inside they had other problems. They couldn’t open the huge marble doors to any of these chambers, including the door to the central vault.’

Margaret looked at the doors. They were massive studded affairs that must each have weighed several tons.

‘They were locked, apparently from the inside,’ Michael said.

‘You mean people locked them and then stayed in here to die?’ Margaret was shocked.

Michael smiled. ‘For a while they thought that might be the case. Then Hu discovered the secret of a hook-shaped key that could be slipped between the doors to move a stone buttress on the other side, and one by one they managed to open all the doors. To find the chambers empty.’

‘Empty?’ Margaret was surprised. ‘So the emperor wasn’t buried here after all?’

‘For a time they thought perhaps the tomb had already been robbed. They found three white marble thrones, one for the emperor and one for each of his empresses. There were various sacrificial objects, but no coffins. Until,’ he said, ‘they opened the very last chamber at the far end.’ And he led her past the marble thrones to the end chamber. ‘And there, on a raised dais, each on its own golden well, sat the coffins of the emperor and his two empresses, surrounded by twenty-six red lacquered wooden chests.’

Three huge red lacquered boxes sat on the dais before them, surrounded by the twenty-six chests.

‘And that’s them?’ Margaret asked.

Michael shook his head. ‘Reproductions.’ He sighed. ‘You must remember when it was that these tombs were being opened up. The late fifties in China was a time of political purges and great social upheaval. The director put in charge here was a political appointee. He knew nothing about the history of the place, and couldn’t care less about the contents of the tomb. The original coffins had deteriorated with age, and reproductions were made to go on public show. So the director ordered the originals to be thrown away.’

‘You’re kidding!’ Margaret was appalled. ‘They didn’t, did they?’

‘When the archaeologists objected, the director ordered some soldiers to throw them over the outer wall where they were smashed on the rocks below.’

In spite of herself, and to her great surprise, Margaret found herself full of furious indignation. ‘But these things were hundreds of years old, priceless historical relics.’

Michael looked sombre. ‘Unfortunately, much worse was to happen to the contents of the coffins. Wonderful, irreplaceable artefacts.’ He put his arm around her shoulder, and she felt his warmth, even through his jacket and her blouse. ‘But you’re cold down here. And the rest of the story can wait. I think we should go and get some lunch.’

It required the fifteen minutes it took them to walk the full length of the paved walkway, down to the parking lot, for the warmth of the sun finally to reach and banish the chill that seemed to have set in Margaret’s bones.

On the walk she asked him, ‘Why are you so fascinated by this Hu Bo?’

He smiled, a little sadly. ‘Because all his life he was a victim. Of circumstance, and of history. And every time fate knocked him down he got up and hit right back.’ His hand clamped itself around her upper arm. ‘Think about it, Margaret. At the age of ten he was
sold
by his father. Sold to work in the camp of a Swedish explorer, Sven Hedin, who was just setting off on an exploration of the remote western regions of China. A disaster for a young boy, forced to become what was little more than a slave. He suffered great hardship, trekking across the western deserts, crossing uncharted mountain ranges. He lost three fingers to frostbite. But he also learned tailoring, and cooking, and barbering, how to bake bread, how to ride and shoot, how to collect samples of ancient relics in the field. He became familiar with the methods of survey, and the essential principles of excavation. He developed the skills needed to restore and preserve disinterred relics.’ Michael’s eyes were shining with wonder and admiration. ‘He took a disastrous sequence of events, and turned them to his advantage. By the age of twenty, a peasant boy from nowhere, he was studying archaeology at the university in Beijing.’