CHAPTER 23
Yin Anyang
For the fourth time in my life, I felt like a sand sculpture blown apart by the wind, swept across a desert, and reassembled someplace else. I was lying on my back in a gully full of sun-warmed pebbles, staring up into a vividly blue sky with high, wispy clouds. The thunder of rushing water was gone, replaced by the sound of chirping birds.
Somebody groaned beside me.
I rolled over and there was Tom, soaking wet and gripping his head. He was on his knees, throwing up river water. Beyond him sat Mr. Ganto, with Frankie cradled lovingly in his arms. She slid from his embrace and staggered to her feet. Ishmael Dinklehooper was sitting on a rock to my right. He may have stretched the truth a bit about being dead, but he hadn’t been lying about his psychic dreams.
“Is everybody all right?” I asked, assessing myself and realizing I had escaped with only cuts and bruises, the cuts minor enough to have been washed clean by the river.
“Achy,” Frankie announced, limping over to Tom and putting a hand on his back as he spat up the last of his water.
“I’ve been better,” Tom said, letting Frankie help him to his feet. “But I’ll survive.”
“I can’t believe I’m dreaming this all over again,” said Ishmael, scratching his head.
“You’re not dreaming,” Frankie informed him. “You’ve traveled in time.”
“In time for what?”
“We’ve all gone back to a time about three thousand years before 1852, give or take a few decades.” She looked at me. “Or maybe a century. It gets less precise the further back you go. But that’s the area code you played.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I did my best. You warned me not to play the last note flat.”
“You did great,” said Frankie, unexpectedly hugging me. “You got us out of that mess. And you saved your many-greats-grandmother.”
“I also saved a lot of people you didn’t think should be saved,” I reminded her.
“Yes, well, I’m hoping I was wrong about that. We’ll know once we return to our own time.”
“Any idea where we are?” I asked, looking around.
“Not a clue. It doesn’t matter. We’re not staying.”
I started to hand Frankie the trombone, eager for her to take us back to our own time, but the sound of Mr. Ganto getting to his feet and then unexpectedly sitting down hard on his butt caused Frankie to turn from me and run to him.
“Little dizzy,” Ganto murmured.
Frankie touched the back of his head and he winced.
“You have a bump the size of my fist back here,” she told him. “And part of your shirt and some of your hair has been scorched away. Your back is all raw and pink.”
Mr. Ganto flexed and then shuddered. “There was a blast of steam,” he said. “I got in its way.”
“I’ve seen worse,” said Ishmael, coming over. He obviously still thought he was dreaming. He was taking everything quite calmly. “I could make up a poultice of aloe and butter; it would help him tremendously.” He glanced around. “If we had some aloe and butter.”
We were surrounded by low hills with rocky outcroppings and a few scraggly trees. Stretching away from us on either side was a pebble-covered expanse that might have been a dried streambed.
“We have to get to a place where there’s modern medicine!” snapped Frankie. “Immediately! Give me the Shagbolt!”
I handed it to her. She raised it to her lips and had a conniption.
“WHERE’S THE MOUTHPIECE?”
She whirled on me and I saw the trombone was incomplete. The brass mouthpiece was missing. I looked down at my feet, then back the way I had come.
“It won’t work without the mouthpiece!” exclaimed Frankie.
“It was there when I played the final note, going over the falls!” I said, sounding just as panicky as I felt.
“So it either fell off then, and it went down the falls, and it’s still in 1852, and we’re doomed, or it fell off here, and it’s in with all these pebbles, and we still have a chance! Nobody move! Look around you!” Frankie squatted and squinted at the ground closest to her. The rest of us checked our own areas. “Without the mouthpiece, we’re stuck here, wherever here is!”
“China?” Tom looked up. “Are you sure? How do you know?”
Mr. Ganto inhaled deeply. “One never forgets the smell of one’s birthplace. The local trees, the flowers, the scent of the earth itself.” He sifted dirt through his fingers. “This is the place I thought of as we went over the falls. When I was certain we were all going to die.”
“I was thinking of China, too!” Tom exclaimed, as though he had found a long-lost friend.
“We really should have taken a vote,” muttered Frankie. To Ganto she said, “You were born three hundred thousand years ago. We’ve only gone back three thousand. Same trees? Really?”
“Similar. This is the place. A mile or two in that direction is the river now known as the Anyang. We’re in Henan province. Near the thirty-sixth parallel.” When Frankie just gaped at him, he added, “I have studied your father’s GPS. I wanted to learn about where I came from.”
“If the Anyang is over there,” said Tom thoughtfully, “and we’re near the thirty-sixth parallel, we must be close to the ancient imperial city of Yin! It was on the Anyang!”
“That, I would not know.” Mr. Ganto frowned and shook his head.
“We’ll be living in Yin, if we don’t find that mouthpiece!” Frankie reminded us, dropping to her knees and raking her fingers through the pebbles in front of her.
We all continued our search, following Frankie’s example and getting down on all fours, even Ishmael, who I’m sure had no idea what he was looking for or why he was looking for it.
“The city of Yin?” I asked Tom as we barely missed butting heads. “On the Anyang River? Yin? Anyang? Yin and yang? Isn’t yin the name of the broken lines in the I-Ching hexagrams? And yang the name of the unbroken ones?”
“Quite a coincidence, isn’t it?” replied Tom, in a tone that suggested he didn’t find it a coincidence at all.
Somebody, at a great distance, shouted. A chorus of shouts replied.
“People!” said Frankie. “We really don’t want to run into people! That always leads to trouble!”
“I will investigate,” said Mr. Ganto, getting to his feet.
“You’re injured!” Frankie protested.
“I am fine. I will climb that hill and have a look.”
He stood shakily and started climbing the hill to our right.
“He’s very articulate for an ape,” said Ishmael.
“He’s not an ape,” growled Frankie, searching a piece of ground she had already searched.
“No offense. I may have seen him in a dream a few nights back. The same way I had been seeing the white whale during the early days of the Pequod’s final voyage. I’m pretty sure I’m having the same dream again, right now.”
“You have the gift of oneiromancy,” Frankie informed him. “Dream prophecy. Only people with a psychic gift can time travel.”
“Oh. You think my dream will come true? Most often, they don’t.”
“What was it about?” I asked warily, searching so far from where I had landed that I knew I wasn’t going to find anything.
“I forget the details. There was the ape—or whatever it is—and this strange place we’re in right now, and I was with a party of three other people. Very young, they were.”
“And?”
“And, in the end, we lost one of them.”
“Find the mouthpiece!” Frankie barked.
“I’ve looked everywhere!” I snapped back, not wanting to think about what Ishmael had just said.
“Look again!”
“The slide horn is important, is it?” asked Ishmael, earnestly searching the lower branches of the nearest tree. “Music can transport one. Can it transport one through time?”
“Played on the right instrument, it can,” said Frankie. “The Shagbolt—the slide horn—was created by this genius inventor back in the year 1592.” I could tell she was talking to take her mind off other things. She swept her hands back and forth across the ground in front of her so vigorously she raised dust devils. “He was brilliant. His greatest invention was an automaton made out of clay. And, at the time of his death, he was working on a perpetual-motion dreidel that would have solved all the world’s energy problems. But the thing he took the greatest pride in was his Shagbolt. He never fully perfected it, which is why it works only for the psychically gifted. He had hoped to use it to transport his people out of danger in times of crisis, but he did not want to leave any of them behind just because they lacked extrasensory perceptions. He kept tinkering with it, trying to get it right.”
“How did your family wind up with it?” I asked, and got a flashing glance in reply.
“One day the inventor welded a new piece to it, and he put it on a windowsill to cool. One of my ancestors came along and borrowed it.”
“What? The way we borrowed the Katzenjammers’ pies? That’s not borrowing—that’s stealing!”
“No, it’s not! We borrowed it! It’s a time machine! Eventually, one of us will return it to a time only one minute after my ancestor borrowed it, and its inventor will never know it went missing! Then he and his descendants can go about saving his people from persecution throughout history.”
“You’ve had it for over four hundred years! When were you planning to return it?”
“Soon! I’m sure!”
“And I thought it was just you who was irresponsible! It’s your whole family!”
“Irresponsible? You’re the one who lost the mouthpiece! If we never return the Shagbolt, it will be your fault!”
“Maybe this gentleman will help us search,” said Ishmael.
I looked up. A bony Chinese man with scraggly long hair stood in tattered clothing about twenty feet from us. He darted forward, put something on the ground, then ran back to his original place and fell to his knees, bowing until his forehead touched the earth.
“Where did he come from?” I asked.
“Popped out from behind those rocks.” Ishmael pointed to the only available hiding place.
Tom picked up the object the man had left. It was a balled-up piece of cloth. He opened it and revealed a glob of brown rice.
“He’s making us an offering,” Tom decided. “This is probably the only food he has.”
Tom spoke to him in Chinese. The man looked up, and his eyes shifted nervously from side to side.
“Nope,” said Tom. “Mandarin doesn’t work.”
Tom tried again, using different words that, I guessed, might have been in the rare dialect his great-grandfather used. This time the man replied, Tom answered, and they spoke back and forth repeatedly.
“He says his name is Jiang Ziya.” Tom finally went back to English. “He saw us pop out of nowhere. He asked me if we are sorcerers come to free his people.”
“And what did you tell him?” Frankie asked, sounding alarmed.
“I didn’t say yes, and I didn’t say no.”
“This is very dangerous,” said Frankie. “If he winds up believing we’re sorcerers, it could start a brand-new religion. That’s the last thing the world needs.”
“He says the name of the current king is Di Xin,” Tom continued excitedly, ignoring Frankie’s warning. “Do you realize what that means? Di Xin was the last king of the Shang dynasty, just before the Battle of Muye, when he was overthrown, and the slave-keeping Shangs were replaced by the more enlightened Zhou. We’ve come to one of the most important time periods in Chinese history! Fiduciary! This is so great!”
“These Shang guys were slave owners?” I asked, appalled that we had gone from one slave society to another.
“Oh, yeah! The Shangs put the ‘nasty’ in dynasty! King Di Xin and his evil wife, Daji, punished people by having their hearts ripped out and their feet chopped off, not necessarily in that order. They were awful. They’ve enslaved Jiang’s people”—he waved at our new friend, who was still groveling—“because they prefer to wear their jerkins with the seams on the outside rather than on the inside. Queen Daji calls that an abomination, and she says it proves Jiang’s people are inferior, and fair game for slavery.”
“Wait,” I said, trying to understand. “A jerkin is a—?”
“Sort of vest.”
“A piece of clothing? And just because Jiang’s people like to wear them inside out, they’re persecuted? Turned into slaves? Everybody knows if you accidentally put on a shirt inside out, it’s good luck!”
“Not if you’re living in the Shang dynasty,” said Tom.
Shouts came from the hill to our left, opposite the direction Mr. Ganto had taken. I looked up and three men with spears were running toward us. I looked to the right, hoping to see Ganto, but there was no sign of him.
Jiang jumped to his feet and cowered behind Tom, chattering hysterically.
“He says he’s escaped from the palace, and these guys are palace guards sent to take him back,” Tom translated.
“So these are the Chinese equivalent of Archie Killbreath and his boys,” I said, watching them approach. “How could we possibly have run into more slave catchers?”
“Because no age in human history has ever been free of slavery,” Frankie informed us, stepping to my side. The three of us had, without consulting one another, positioned ourselves in front of the terrified Jiang. “The further back you go, the odds actually favor something like this happening.”
“Aren’t you afraid we’ll change history if we get involved with this?” I asked, surprised at the pride I felt when she stood beside me.
“Yes. Totally. But I like your idea that it might be changed for the better!”
Ishmael joined us, standing next to me with his arms folded.
The three guards halted about ten feet from us and leveled their spears.
Jiang stuck his head out from behind Tom and jabbered at them. The spears wavered a bit and the men looked confused.
“What did he say to them?” Frankie asked stonily.
“He told them we are powerful sorcerers and they should prepare to meet their doom.”
“Fiduciary!” I said.