Dragon Bones (Red Princess 3)

Hulan had been changed by what had happened in the cave. David had heard it in her voice when he was crawling through. He’d seen it in her eyes when he reached her. She was a different woman now, and he was deeply grateful. David had changed too. For the first time in his life, he’d gotten totally out of his head and had operated on a purely physical level. His body had paid a price for that, though. When he saw Bashan’s only doctor, he received thirty stitches and was diagnosed with five broken ribs and a concussion. Hulan joked that the concussion may have been what had caused him to act so out of character.

David also spent a lot of time agonizing over what happened to Wu Huadong’s wife and baby. After he had gone into the tunnel, the chopper pilot saw the widow dash into the storm and straight out and over the cliff, following, it turned out, the same path her husband had taken a few weeks earlier. That was the official version, but David knew something the others didn’t. He’d misread the widow’s gesture when she’d held her baby up to him and said, “The people will know.” She hadn’t been preserving the location of the hidden chamber; she’d been trying to protect her child. Sadly, although the widow had plenty of money stashed in the house—Lily had been generous in her final payments to Brian—she was still an uneducated peasant with a half-Caucasian child. She had no way to know the world of options that awaited her outside the Three Gorges. Perhaps her suicide was inevitable, but David felt his actions had accelerated the process. He’d carry those deaths with him forever. Hulan knew exactly how he felt.

By looking for greed and the inability of people to tell the truth, Hulan had found that even those who’d been altruistic and honest had helped create the cascade of events that had resulted in so many tragedies. Catherine, who had set so much in motion the previous summer with her prank about the Nine Tripods, now proved to be very forthcoming. In Brian’s efforts to get away from Lily and her obsession, he’d found his beach on the river’s edge, where he met Wu Huadong’s young wife. Their romance had started with small gestures—a little money from him, a container of noodles from her. Eventually, their picnics turned into something more. In his journal, Brian wrote that he’d gotten Lily to hire Huadong to help the couple escape their brutal poverty; in fact, it had been a very convenient way to get the husband out of the picture. When Brian returned this year, he’d been surprised to find the peasant girl hugely pregnant. Two weeks later, the baby was born. Huadong had taken one look at the infant and thrown himself over the cliff. When his body was found in the whirlpool, the other archaeologists mistakenly blamed Lily. Why had Brian confided all of this to Catherine? He was smart in so many ways, she said, but he didn’t have much experience with the messiness of real life. He wanted her advice, and she gave it.

From the journal, what Hulan learned in the cave from Michael Quon, and further interviews with Catherine, other aspects of Brian’s last year unraveled. Last summer Wu’s wife had told Brian her greatest secret—her husband’s clan had stood guard over this property and its hidden caverns for thousands of years. Brian had begun taking things from the chamber and selling them to Lily, which set in motion a whole other chain of events. Once Quon started making his increasingly threatening demands, Brian understood his fate. He’d fought to the death to protect something or someone. Since he’d already looted the chamber, even the most hard-bitten investigators chose to believe Brian had died for love.

David left Bashan for a day to accompany a team that descended on Cathay Antiquities in Hong Kong, where stolen artifacts from numerous sites, including Site 518, were found. He also paid a visit to Angus Fitzwilliams’s apartment. The auctioneer freely admitted that he’d ignored Bill Tang’s bid in favor of one by an older and more loyal Cosgrove’s customer. This was not a prosecutable crime, but shortly thereafter Fitzwilliams and his wife retired home to England.

David knew that Hulan saw everything in a geopolitical light—the struggle over image between countries, the battles within those countries for the hearts and minds of their citizens. But to him so much came down to familial actions—Catherine’s desire to impress her father, Brian’s desire to protect his child and its mother—that had resulted in the most deadly reactions. Perhaps none was more insignificant on the surface—but with more lethal results—than the pictorial message Brian had sent to his sister on his website.

In the photograph, Brian stood on a barren hillside with his arms outstretched as though he was presenting the whole panorama. Only Angela saw that his fingers were pointing to tiny golden mushrooms that had sprung up in the crannies around some rocks. Those mushrooms were known to surface after a rain above an Armillaria ostoyae, a much larger honey mushroom, which grew under the soil. Three years ago, Angela had been on a team that had discovered a twenty-five-hundred-year-old honey mushroom in Oregon that was three an

d a half miles in diameter, making it the largest organism ever found on the planet. What was now known as the Bashan Fungus was at least twice the size and perhaps twice as old.

It had grown from a single spore too small to see without a microscope. For thousands of years, black shoestring filaments had radiated underground, strangling roots, killing trees, and leaving behind a sticky substance. The fungus had spread across the surface of the earth, wiping out vegetation from the river’s edge to the tops of the hills above Site 518, from the outskirts of Bashan to another half mile past the Wu house. Rhizomorphs stretched down as far as ten feet and had permeated the caves, giving them their peculiar odor. Michael Quon had said the caves were alive; he just hadn’t known how alive they were.

In addition to the paleobotanists who’d arrived to study the fungus, archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, biocultural anthropologists, and linguists descended on Bashan. David and Hulan watched their activities with interest. Some were engaged in DNA testing, hoping to prove that the Wus were longtime descendants of the wild ones that Yu the Great had met in his travels. Since no coffin or mummified remains had been found, others researched the purpose of the chamber. Had Yu brought these artifacts with him as gifts of culture—music and art specifically—to the wild ones? Had the Wu clan been left to guard the treasures—the white jade chimes, the bi disks, the pottery, the weapons of war, and the ruyi? Or had the Wus been left to guard the fungus? Some believed that Yu left the ruyi with the Ba as a symbol of the tasks they were to do, just as Emperor Shun gave a symbol to Yu when he went about clearing the land of floods. Others thought that, instead of bringing culture and civilization, Yu’s gift had actually sown the seeds of the Ba’s destruction by birthing the invasive Bashan Fungus. Others wondered if the fungus could actually be shi tu, the “swelling mold” or “living earth” that Yu and his father had used to control the flood. Meanwhile, old Dr. Strong was doing his best to help a team examine Brian’s theory that not only had geography informed early Chinese language but this very area might be the birthplace of characters like dragon, cliff, cave, and river, predating those found on oracle bones by hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The land itself might be that long sought after proof of five thousand years of continuous Chinese culture.

Debates raged about Brian’s discoveries. Could one graduate student find both the Rosetta stone of Chinese language and China’s Holy Grail? Some felt that he’d just lucked into the ruyi, which, since it was lost again, was suspect anyway. Some felt that his theories about the connection between his so-called geographic dragon bones and the thoughts and culture of the people who dwelled in the gorges had limited academic validity. Others found his research truly significant and were thoroughly analyzing and critiquing his journal. All agreed that Brian’s premature death was a great loss to the field of archaeology and that further study was required.

Everyone would have to work quickly though. Although this had been a major discovery, the lower caverns would begin flooding in 2003, and by 2009 all of this area would be below the Lake Within the Gorges. This knowledge impelled a group of engineers to examine the impact the inundation might have on the dam. Would flooding the caverns—no one knew just how deep they went—trigger earthquakes? Might Ba Mountain collapse, causing a massive tidal wave? The scientists put a positive spin on these possibilities, but David was glad he wouldn’t be living downstream. In the meantime, every day the river saw more luxury cruise ships for tourists who were plying the waters between Chongqing and Wuhan for a last-chance view of the Three Gorges.

On Hulan’s last day in Bashan, she met with Vice Minister Zai on the veranda outside the guesthouse’s dining room. It was a beautiful day. Sun filtered through the bamboo, and the koi pond glistened. Zai, who’d arrived once the weather cleared, congratulated her on her success. He praised her for upholding virtue and compassion, eliminating those who destroyed order, and stamping out corruption. He reminded her that the excesses of the past could not be repeated or else, like previous dynasties, this one too would collapse.

“Remember that the slogans of Mao and Deng are not so different from those of any ruler,” Zai said. “Remember that the first Xia Dynasty collapsed through corruption.”

But by now she’d learned something about her nation’s history. Powerful slogans and great monuments did transcend time. Mao had understood this very well, but so had Confucius, who’d compiled the Shu Ching from many sources, and Qinshihuangdi, who’d built the Great Wall. What Zai and the men who controlled him had forgotten was that corruption comes in many forms. Building a dam—no matter how many patriotic slogans were used—wouldn’t divert the masses from the truth forever.

“A monument doesn’t make an empire,” Hulan told him.

“You’re right, Xiao Hulan,” Zai agreed, summoning up the diminutive he’d used with her when she was a child. “But it does encourage an atmosphere of political enthusiasm and harnesses it at the same time. This leads to stability. Without stability, nothing can be achieved and successes attained will be lost.”

“The problem with nationalist sentiment,” Hulan responded, “is that it focuses attention on leadership.”

“Again you are right,” Zai said, obviously pleased by her understanding. “If we are unable to meet the people’s expectations, we may find, to use an old expression, that in promoting nationalism, we have ‘mounted a tiger that cannot easily be dismounted.’”

Hulan and Zai quietly considered this as doves cooed and wind blew gently through the stand of bamboo.

“We have entered a new century,” Zai went on. “If you go back to the end of the nineteenth century, Britain still thought it ruled the world, but it was on its last legs. Go to the end of the twentieth century and America thought it ruled the world, but I believe it’s on its last legs and doesn’t realize it. Outsiders once called our country a sleeping dragon. That dragon has awakened. This will be China’s century. As the Great Helmsman said, the east wind will prevail over the west wind. You understand all of this, Hulan, because you are Chinese—”

“You’ve often accused me of not being Chinese enough.” She felt her courage waver for an instant, then she said, “I have a facility to understand the frailty of human nature. You sent me out here—”

“Because we have friends abroad and friends at the site who told us a trusted presence was required. Li Guo, the one they call a vulture, is a true patriot. For years he has kept the Ministry of Public Security apprised of Dr. Ma’s activities on behalf of State Security.”

“Li must also have told you that Brian had found the ruyi —”

“And that the boy was somehow involved with the All-Patriotic Society.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before you sent me here?”

“Following traditional leads had not helped you bring down the cult,” Zai explained. “I thought that letting you use your best gift—your intuition—might get a better result.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “You didn’t send me here to find Xiao Da. You sent me here because I’ve always been susceptible to the powerful and to indoctrination. I’ve always followed the wind, and you gambled that Xiao Da would find me.”

Zai had no response for this. How could he when she spoke the truth?

“You know my failings, and you’ve played upon them very well,” she continued sadly.