BAF 64 - Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, page 17
part #64 of Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series
“Would that your ever-protecting shadow might cover a whole province,” was the response, as Kai Lung shouldered his penurious burden.
It was characteristic of Ming-shu’s low-minded taste that he had chosen as his stronghold a mountain pass that was inaccessible to force. Although the sides of this retreat were high and precipitous, the gorge in which the repulsive outlaw had pitched his camp was too wide for rocks or offensive messages to be hurled upon him from above, while the only portals that the fastness offered—one to the north and the other to the south—were so narrow that two defenders standing there abreast could resist an army.
“This calls for a more than special effort on the part of my sympathetic ancestors if they are not to see their menaced Line dwindle incapably away,” ran the burden of Kai Lung’s thoughts when he grasped the position as it then existed, though to Hai Shin, who fanned himself leisurely near at hand, he maintained an unbending face. “Even if no official band exists, preeminence,” he remarked to the one who stood beside him, “there are doubtless many resolute-minded persons in Chi-U who would not scruple to lend their aid on the side of loyalty and justice once they were assured that it could be prudently achieved?”
“Suffer no derangement of your confidence on that account,” replied the over-captain definitely. “In this matter of the extermination of Ming-shu’s discordant horde we stand on a common footing and each will play an effective part. If you will but involve these chicken-stomached rebels in headlong flight, I will lead out a sufficiency of trusty henchmen to desecrate their shrines, pillage their abandoned tents, and stab fatally between the shoulders any who tarry too long about the scene of their undoing.”
“A concrete plan is in the process of being revealed to me by inner sources, but I must have a substantial force behind, even though their tactics are a purely spectacular function,” bargained Kai Lung. “That much is assured?”
“Short of taking part in actual warfare, bloodthirst in its most intensive guise may be safely looked for,” was the agreeable reply. “There are not a few among the habitually disinclined of Chi-U who have grown respected and obese in this form of belligerency, they being, indeed, the mainstay of this person and his forerunners in office on those occasions alluded to, when from time to time it has been desirable to anoint the eyes of those higher in authority. Say on, O fount of ingenuity.”
“It is no longer possible to doubt that inspiration decides my path,” exclaimed Kai Lung as his mind sought backward. “In Ming-shu and the treacherous Shan Tien, opposed as they are by the empty arraignment of authority, it would be inept not to recognize the two hyenas and an effete tiger so presciently foreshadowed by the soothsayer of Ching; while the hollow sovereignty of a devastated province may be fitly likened to a sick cow’s bones. This is the very quintessence of prognostication, and all uncertainty must fade and hesitation vanish.”
“So long as you are foreordained to sweep the despicable rabble from our path, none will gainsay that inspiration gilds your palate,” assented Hai Shin freely. “Indicate where we can the fittest lie concealed while you clear out this nest of pirates.”
“Thus and thus shall you act,” began Kai Lung; and he then proceeded to unfold his plan. “Anything that is still elusive in the way of detail will certainly be communicated by the attendant spirits of my ancestors as the occasion rises.”
“It shall be as you ordain; for, ’Tranquillity will roof a house but discord can wear away the foundations of a city,’” was Hai Shin’s notable admission. “Lo, minstrel, I go to instruct the apter of the hirelings in the simple parts they have to play.”
When, on the morning of the day that next ensued, certain of the rebels were searching the ground that lay between Chi-U and their own ill-conditioned lair, to see if perchance an ambush lurked there (or haply a misdirected duck had opportunely strayed in that direction), the upraised voice of one in torment drew them to a grove of cedars. There, nailed by the ears to a tree of suitable girth and standing, was he who claimed their pity. He had the appearance of being a stranger from one of the Outer-Lands near beyond, for his skin was darker than the wont, his hair unplaited but trimmed in a fantastic spread, and his speech mild though laboured. For covering he wore crude cloth of an unusual pattern, and his manner was sincere and profuse.
“Here is a fitting target for our barbs,” cried some of the more illiterate of the band, and they would have shot their arrows forth, but one who wore a mark of stentority upon his sleeve spoke out.
“It is not thus that refined warfare should be waged among polite and civilized communities,” he cried, “nor could such an action be logically upheld. Inasmuch as the one before us has been harassed by the foe, it is only reasonable to sustain him. If on inquiry we are dissatisfied with what ensues, he will still be available for the more gravity-removing spectacle of goading blindfold among pits of boiling water, or being pegged down naked on a stirred-up ant hill. In the meanwhile, to have taken him alive increases our repute for zeal.”
Accordingly they drew out the spikes that held the stranger to the tree and led him back in triumph to the camp where presently Ming-shu impeached him in his tent.
“Every detail of your two-faced past and discreditable present is recorded on our unfailing systematic tablets,” asserted the pock-browed outcast, displaying his aggressive teeth in his usual manner, “so that no defence is lawful,” and he continued to throw about the various weapons that were hung around him so as to confuse the other. “Now confess your various crimes unflinchingly.”
“Magnificence,” replied the supine captive, “your lowly thrall—”
“Slave!” interposed the insatiable Ming-shu.
“Your excrescence,” amended he who stood there docilely. “Mang-hi my ill-sounding name is and I am of the Outer-Land of Kham.”
“When I have consumed Chi-U, it is my fixed purpose to reduce Kham to an evil-smelling cinder,” vaunted Ming-shu.
~“It is as good as done—at the mere opening of your lordly fiery mouth,” was the confident admission. “Howbeit, hearing in Kham that the Banners of the Knife had been raised in this our Over-State, we held a muster, and the lot fell upon me that I should secretly encroach and extricate the truth.”
“Ha!” exclaimed Ming-shu. “Then are you now an admitted spy. Yet herein lies the obvious falsity of what you say, for if they of Chi-U had caught you thus, not your ears but your narrow-minded life would have been forfeit.”
“Such was their warm-hearted purpose, highest, and without doubt it would so have been done, but as they led my too unworthy steps toward the roasting vat, an eagle, a mole, and a tortoise crossed our path. At this manifestation the augurs dare not proceed until the Books had been opened and the Omens searched, whereupon it appeared that the cause of those who destroyed me would be fated from that moment to be ruined.”
“If this is as you say, how comes it, then, that the elders of Chi-U did not set you free, but, rather, insured that you should pass as a captive into our requiting hands?” demanded Ming-shu in slow-witted uncertainty.
“Omnipotence,” replied Mang-hi, not without an element of reprehension in his voice, “wherefore? Why, but in the hope that you would fall into the snare and yourself incur the doom?”
At the disclosure of this pitfall, much of the assurance faded from Ming-shu’s doglike features, and he caught several flies to gain time before he spoke again, but when he did so it is doubtful if his heart was single.
“A person of your stunted outlook need not be expected to know the Classics,” he remarked, “but it is no less truly written, ’One cannot live forever by ignoring the price of coffins,’ and your case, Mang-hi, is clearly analogous. Sooner or later in the day that powerful thinker, the Mandarin Shan Tien, will wake from his virtuous slumber, and then your fate will be decided. Meanwhile”—here the insufferable rebel beat upon an iron gong to summon an attendant—“you are, except for the formality- of being tried, provisionally sentenced to one of the more distressing forms of ending. You, Li-loe, take charge of the condemned, and your head shall answer for his keeping.”
“That, chieftain,” grumbled the mulish Li-loe as he led the captive forth, “is the only part of me that can ever answer for the others.”
Chapter Seven
THE CONCAVE-WITTED LI-LOE’S INSATIABLE CRAVING SERVES A MERITORIOUS END AND TWO (WHO SHALL BE NAMELESS) ARE LED TOWARD A SNARE
When they were come to a convenient distance from Ming-shu’s tent, Li-loe indicated to Mang-hi that they should sit down upon the ground and converse more at their leisure.
“For,” he explained, “it seldom occurs that nothing may be gained by the interchange of mutual ideas. Thus, for instance, it lies with me, as the one who holds the rope about your neck, to lead you along comparatively smooth paths, for the short time that you are destined to be here among us, or to bring you up sharply against the rock-strewn traverses of my disfavour, and this almost entirely depends upon how you treat me from the outset.”
“Yet, if I am to be confined meanwhile, awaiting this high lord’s pleasure, how shall the merit of ways or rock-strewn barriers affect our intercourse?” inquired Mang-hi simply.
“It is very evident that you are certainly a barbarian from an outer-land,” replied Li-loe, with an air of superior culture. “The reference to the prudence of arranging for my priceless friendship was in the nature of a primitive analogy that would have been very well understood by a person having the least experience of refinement. As it is, the only path you seem likely to discover is that leading by very short stages to the public execution ground.”
“But surely it ought not to be beyond our united effort to discover a path leading to a discreet seclusion where for a suitable consideration a jar of wine might shortly be obtained to quench our common thirst.”
“It is scarcely credible,” exclaimed Li-loe, pausing as he scrambled to his feet to regard Mang-hi with a look of wonder, “that one who is so obtuse at grasping a well-meant suggestion should be so alert in going to the very essence of the matter, as it were unaided…What is the full extent of your negotiable worth, O brother?”
“Those who so charitably released me from the tree have already roughly computed that,” explained the prisoner, “but we of the outer-lands are not prone to wear our taels about our sleeves,” and by a movement which the covetous Li-loe could not satisfactorily follow, he produced a piece of money from a hidden spot among his garments. “Lead on, thou lodestone of moisture.”
When the piece of money had been spent and Li-loe had consumed the greater part of what it purchased, that shameless bandit sought by dropping his voice to a sympathetic cadence to penetrate still further into Mang-hi’s bounty.
“Behold,” he urged, “between now and the moment of your extinction a variety of things may happen for which you are unprepared but wherein a trusty friend standing by your elbow and furnished with a few negligible coins to expend on your behalf would be worth his weight in jasper. Reflect well that you cannot carry money with you to the Above, no matter how ingeniously it is concealed about your person, and if you delay too long you will certainly incur the fate that overtook the procrastinating minstrel.”
“It is good to profit by the afflictions of another,” agreed Mang-hi. “Who was he to whom you so dubiously refer, and what was the nature of his failing?”
“Kai Lung the dog’s name was, and this person succoured him as though we had been brothers. Yet in the event he played a double part, for having found a cask of wine concealed among some rocks he shunned this one ever after, so that at the last he came to a friendless and a very thirsty end, and his secret perished with him.”
To this recital Mang-hi made no response at first, and his head was sunk in thought. Then he looked round with a slowly gathering sense of recognition.
“What you tell me is very unaccountable,” he remarked at length, “for in some ambiguous way it is woven into the fabric of a dream that has accompanied me about the Middle Air for three nights past. This concerned a barrel of the rarest grapejuice spirit, as large around as three men’s arms could span and very old and fragrant. Furthermore, one whom I now recognize as you accompanied me.”
“Proceed, O eloquence, proceed,” encouraged the dissolute Li-loe. “Even to talk about a dream like that is better than to exist in a state of ordinary repletion.”
“Together we searched for this keg of potent liquid which, be it understood, was hidden from our knowledge…until we at last came to a rocky valley which I now recognize as this.”
“This!” exclaimed Li-loe, leaping to his feet to regard the gorge with acquisitive eyes. “And you dreamed the dream three times? Come, O sharer of everything I have, let us explore its length and breadth until you recognize the very rock that guards this treasure. Employ bamboo upon your sluggish mind, O would-be grateful friend; quicken as with a mental goad each fleeting image, and by means of an intellectual crowbar raise the barrier that separates the dimly grasped from the half-forgotten.”
“None of these will, alas, avail—” demurred Mang-hi.
“We will, if necessary, regard each point of the landscape from every variety of angle,” pleaded Li-loe. “In a dream, remember, you would inevitably be observing what is below from above, whereas now you are regarding what is above from below. Adapt your supple neck to this requisite inversion, comrade. Are we to be duped in the matter of this cask of wine of ours—”
“It fades,” rejoined Mang-hi definitely, “in that the keystone of the arch is missing.”
“Disclose yourself more fully.”
“When, in the progress of the dream, we reached this valley, we were met here by a being of the inner room whose face was like the petal of a perfumed flower. ‘Inasmuch as she before you is a mouse,’ she said with some significance, ‘she creeps through narrow ways and she alone can lead you to the threshold of what you seek.’ The vision faded then, but in a camp of warlike men it ensues that no such being—”
“Manlet!” exclaimed Li-loe, casting himself bodily upon Mang-hi’s neck and embracing him moistly and repeatedly in the excess of his gladness, “your lips are honey and the ripple of your voice is like the music made by pouring nectar from a narrow-throated bottle. Such a being as the one you designate is here in our midst and this cask of wine of mine is as good as on the spigot.”
“Here in this martial valley!” doubted Mang-hi. “Who then is the one whose furtherance we need, and how may we approach her?”
Before committing himself to speech, Li-loe looked round several times and made a displeasing sound among his teeth to imply the need of caution.
“It is necessary to have a thin voice now to escape the risk of a thick ear in these questionable times,” was his modulated warning. “She whom you describe fills an anomalous position among us, for though a prisoner here, by balancing Shan Tien’s rashness against Ming-shu’s caution and setting the infatuation of the one against the disinclination of the other, she not only contrives to sway more authority than the leader of five companies of archers but walks along a muddy road dryshod.”
“If she exercises so much rule among the high ones, how can we, being both men of the common sort, hope to engage her ear?”
“Leave that to me,” replied Li-loe vaingloriously. “Although I have said nothing so far about it—for, after all, what is it to one who has occasionally held an umbrella above the heads of nobles?—when she was known as the Golden Mouse (whence the analogy of her saying to you) this Hwa-mei relied very greatly on my counsel in all affairs and though she has deteriorated overmuch in the ensuing, years she seldom fails, even now, to return my greeting when we encounter…I will contrive to cross her path when no one else is by, but it may be another matter to persuade her to give ear to an Out-land man.”
“As to that,” replied Mang-hi, “I have thought out something of a plan. I will gather for this purpose a red flower growing on a thorny stem (as she was wearing in the Middle Air), and this you shall give to her saying that the one of whom she has dreamed of late has made his way here to rejoin her. Thus she will be somewhat prepared for what may follow.”
“It may serve,” admitted the short-sighted Li-loe. “The one thing needful is that you and she should have an opportunity to put your wits together to determine where this cask of mine is hidden.”
“Under the fostering eye of your benevolent authority, that should not be beyond our united skill,” was Mang-hi’s pronouncement.
As Hwa-mei, warned by the sign that Li-loe had been enticed into conveying to her, did not fail to recognize Kai Lung through his disguise it would be obtuse to maintain the figment of Mang-hi’s existence any longer. Let it be understood, therefore, that when, later in the day, the summon came and the feeble Li-loe led his prisoner to the tent where Ming-shu and Shan Tien sat in judgment, a movement of the curtain disclosed to Kai Lung that one who was not unmindful of his welfare was there to play a part.
“Before you, High Excellence,” deposed the calumnious Ming-shu, “is the ferocious brigand chief, Mang-hi, whom a mere handful of our intrepid guard, while peacefully engaged in gathering wild flowers outside the camp, surprised in the act of lurking in a wood, and made captive.”
“They would appear to have picked a very untamed blossom,” remarked the gifted Mandarin pleasantly. “Why does his misfitting head still disfigure his unbecoming body?”
“Doubtless to afford your all-discerning brilliance the high-minded amusement of deriding the obscene thing,” replied Ming-shu, with his usual lack of refinement. “To a less degree, it has been judged more profitable to hold the dissipated thug as hostage, rather than dispose of him offhand. Subject to that, he is at the will of your unquenchable sense of justice.”
