They are on their way back up the hill when I meet them. What’s left of them, anyway. Mushu and Rollerskate have already disappeared into the Tunnel.
I explain as coherently as I can what happened with the Islanders; after that we don’t talk much at all, but just make our way to the end of the Bridge.
Here, I stop, ‘cause I can barely believe the sight that meets my eyes. Coiling away from us into the darkness are wet, gleaming rivers of concrete. It’s like being in a giant’s bowl of chow mein. After a long moment of awful staring, I consult the map in my head, choose a noodle that points Southeast and we go.
I got ooga-boogas running up and down my spine the whole time, ‘cause beyond our headlamps there is a murkiness unbroken by any manmade light. A lazy huichen dong makes a filmy bubble around us, scooting fore and aft — now close, now far. After a while, we enter into a canyon of sorts. The walls are manmade and pretty tall. Over the tops of them, I see occasional pinpricks of light up in the hills, but that is all. If there are people here, they stay out of these canyons at night. I gotta hope we don’t find out why.
The only sound we hear is the purr of Vespas, which I sincerely hope are gassed up and carrying full reserves, ‘cause otherwise, this is gonna be one short quest.
Every so often, one of Firescape’s knighties glides up from behind to signal that there is no one on our back trail...yet. What they mean is, they can’t see anybody, but I know Somebody is there. Nothing I can do about it. All I can do is follow the map in my head and pray that we have enough of a head start.
We are out of the strange canyon when the huichen becomes a polvo and then dries up and just stops. So do we, ‘cause such a sight as we are seeing demands some boggled ogling. A moon is up and it has laid a silver blanket over hill and dale. There is, in addition, one hell of a lot of hill and dale. A lot more than is suggested by any of the maps I been studying.
Above, there are stars — more stars than I’ve ever seen, and muy, muy brighter. With the lights and fog of the Gam Saan, and the smoke of Potrero, you sometimes forget they’re there at all. Now, over our heads is this humongous black bowl full of glittering lights.
I have a moment of prodigious vertigo and shut off the engine of my scooter. One by one, my traveling companions do the same. Then, we hear something I realize we have never heard before — complete and total silence. The Farm is pretty quiet, ni dong, but that’s a close, cozy quiet in which you can hear the wind singing lullabies and animals going about their animal-type business. You can wrap yourself up in the quiet of the Farm. This is a big, wide-open, cold, awesome quiet in which there is no sound whatsoever.
“Whoa,” somebody says.
“Amen,” says somebody else.
“Can you see the Mountain?” asks Firescape, then, “Which one is it?”
The answer to this is I don’t know, ‘cause nothing looks at all like the map in my head. I scan the awful darkness, but see nada that makes any sense to me. There is the black of the sky, which is looking more and more like a watercolor, bleeding purple at the horizon. And there is this other black that is immense and looming. Those are the mountains, but I can’t tell one monster lump from another.
I remember seeing a vid at the Wiz about high-tech field glasses that let you see long distances in the dark. I sure wish I had a set of those now. But I don’t.
What I do have is that I am wearing a ton-o-magic and Dougness. I also have Pedro’s story. Pedro talked to the Mountain. More to the point, the Mountain talked to him. As I am a shaman of sorts (or at least, Pedro says I am), there is an outside chance I can talk to the Mountain, too.
Well, duh — of course I can talk to the Mountain, it’s the reciprocal that’s problematic.
While I am chewing my lip and stewing on my lack of shamanly aplomb, Fresca glides out of the huichen at our collective backsides and whispers to Firescape (loud enough for me to hear), “There’s somethin' back there, General. Behind. We best zhou.”
Firescape nods, but holds up her hand. She is watching me like she expects I’m gonna do something miraculous like maybe smack a 97 mph fastball into the Bay in a one run game at the bottom of the proverbial ninth. Instead, I pull the rattle out of my inside coat pocket and the little Doug bough out of my amulet bag. I crush two tiny needles on one finger of the branch and inhale, holding the rattle up before me like I’ve seen old-time knights-o-the-realm hold their swords. Believe it or not, the Doug branch twitches.
This brings a thought into my head, which is that if Chen thinks a combination of magics will work for him, it might just work for me. I lay the Doug branch alongside the handle of the rattle and hold both out in front of me like I’m dowsing. The end result of this is that I start twitching.
Yowza, as Mr. Lopez-Alvero was wont to say, what a rush!
I am hot and cold and tingly all at once, and I feel like I’m getting ready to levitate. Neon, I think. But then I gotta wonder what good all this twitching and tingling does if I don’t get clear instructions from on high.
I send my mind back to the smoky dream lodge, where I sit across from Pedro.
The Mountain came to you, Pedro, I think. How can I get it to come to me?
Shaman! whispers a Voice like many voices.
I sit up straighter on my scooter. “Yes,” I answer.
Behind me I hear someone ask, “What’s he doin'? Who's he talkin' to?”
Would you become a shaman?
“He’s envisioning.”
“You betcha.” No disrespect to Pedro, but I can surely learn from someone else’s mistakes.
Come to the Mountain.
“He alright?” someone else asks.
“Lead me,” I say.
“He’s fine,” says Hoot.
Then I feel the tug, sure as I’ve ever felt any tug — Doug’s or Jade’s or Chen’s. This, though, this is like double-Doug, triple-Doug even. This is a whole mountainful of Doug.
Holding out the rattle, which is chattering like a squirrel ‘cause I’m shakin' so bad, I start to turn around in a circle just like the incomparable Inigo Montoya does when to find the Man in Black in one of the classic tomes of Questing. I let the Mountain tug that old rattle and that little Tree branch wherever it wants to. And when it’s done tugging, I open my eyes.
In front of me, across the fields and hills, I see The Mountain. It is bigger, blacker and loomier than anything around it, and it is wearing an aura of light.
Suddenly the road we’re on is a long, glowing silk ribbon and all the turns we will have to make are written on the back of my eyes. A trail of magic leads from here to there. All I gotta do is follow it.
I put the Doug bough next to my heart, wedge the rattle into the handlebars of the Vespa and fire it up. In a heartbeat, the other scooters are purring too. I lead off again, hair and coat tails flapping in the breeze, the others strung out behind me on the gleaming tarmac.
Definitely a Moment.
Music pops into my head: We don’t need another hero; we just need to find the way home. Yeah. Mad Max on Vespas.
This strikes me funny and I laugh, feeling for a little bit like I’m flying above a river of molten glass. Okay, so the glass got potholes, weeds and tar bubbles, but I feel very cool and very electric in spite of this. With Hoot to my one side and Jade to my other and Creepy Lou straggling along right behind like always, I also feel very put back together.
Funny what moonlight, a righteous quest, and lack of sleep will do for a guy.
oOo
By the time we reach the foot of the Mountain, the sky is the color of the Bay. And here, as we pause at the edge of a dead little town to fuel up our Vespas from our reserves, a muy strange thing happens. A green-tea mist comes sneaking up behind and around, and pretty soon we are up to our eyeballs in moist silky stuff.
It is very like a shabu dong, which makes me feel...comfy somehow. But I gotta say that out here on this Mountain, it takes on a whole different personality. The natural shapes of bushes and trees and rocks are a lot spookier than the angles and planes of the stuff people make. For one thing, natural stuff moves when the wind blows. This makes me feel as if there are a thousand ninjas watching from just where I can’t see them. I can’t help but twitch a little as I recall Fresca’s warning about Something being on our trail. Neither, I guess, can Hoot, for when he takes a reckoning of all the gasoline tanks, he makes a defensive suggestion.
“I think we need to consolidate our shit, Taco Face,” he tells me, and then proceeds to expand upon the nature of this consolidation.
In the end, we leave Firescape’s four knighties where the road begins to climb seriously. This, Hoot assures me, will save gas. The knighties have instructions to fire off flares if they see pursuers and are unable to stop same.
This reasoning is sound enough, it’s just that I have a small attachment to affording the magical stuff (and our collective asses) as much protection as possible. Now Hoot is in immensely good shape for a man in his mid-to-late-twenties, but beyond that, our protection amounts to a pregnant lady, a slightly crazy dude with a twitch and a pint-sized merlin with delusions of shaman-hood.
I mention this, but Hoot is derisive.
“A merlin,” he tells me, “is not to be judged by the size of his person, but by the size of his magic.”
I recognize this speech. It’s one of Bags’s favorites.
“You,” he continues as we prepare to ascend, “are letting your natural tendency to self-deprecation influence your confidence level. You got a self-esteem problem, Chickpea. And you gotta lick it right here and now, or you’re not gonna be any use to Pedro or the Mountain, or anybody. So, remember — it’s not your size, it’s the size of the magic. How big’s the magic, Del?”
I look up at the Mountain. It looms like a lumpy pyramid. Even in the fog it’s got one awesome Presence. The road snakes away into the curling fog, the yellow stripe down its middle gleaming in the Vespa light. This bothers me, for some reason I cannot put my finger on, but I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with the size of the magic, which is huge — bigger than me, bigger than Pedro, bigger than Chen even (I hope).
It suddenly hits me and knocks me about off my scooter that I have let the smallness of me limit what I think the magic can do. I have a muy strange and paradoxical revelation, which is that there is such a thing as too small an ego, and that having too small an ego can cause as much trouble as having to big a one.
“The magic,” I say, “is as big as this Mountain.”
For which Hoot slaps me on the back and says, “That’s the spirit!”
“Yeah!” echoes Creepy Lou. “Thaththethpirit!”
We go up. And we go up. And we go up some more.
We are on the northwest slope of the Mountain, so sunrise, which I think is in progress, is having damn little effect on our foggy little world. The purr of Vespa engines sounds, in the fog, like a hundred very happy cats. The wheels turn, but that is the only sign we are really moving.
We have gone some miles when the shifty gloom ahead is lit up as if by an army of flashlights. Suddenly we are facing a spread of headlamps that would do any alien craft proud. The very fog rumbles.
Then It is upon us — a Vehicle such as I have never seen before. A veritable Behemoth. It is yellow and looks like any sensible person’s worst nightmare. It’s roaring like a storm and trembling the ground like a 4.5 roller and worst of all, it is astride the yellow line — there is no place for us to go that will not be in Its way.
This is all happens so suddenly, all we can do is hug the uphill side of the road, with me in the lead and praying like there is no tomorrow, appropriately. I swear I can feel the hot breath of the thing all over us.
In an act of desperation, with the Beast almost upon us, I grab the spirit rattle out of my handlebars and hold it aloft. The Behemoth answers with a blast of light and sound.
I think I can speak for all of us when I say that I have never in my life heard such a sound. It shreds the air and rattles my teeth and makes my eyes water. Every spell and incantation I know flashes before my eyes. None seem appropriate to the occasion.
You ever notice how, in a crisis, time sort of turns itself into pulled taffy? This is happening now, as my spells flash through my head along with various prayers (Remover of Difficulties uppermost) and my whole Universe collapses down into the space between the headlamps of the Beast.
And that’s when a little road opens up just ahead and to my right. I almost don’t see it ‘cause there are tree limbs hanging down, but the trees are Doug firs and as I draw near, they beckon me to the road between them. I hit my brakes once, put down a foot and spin that scooter for all I’m worth. Meanwhile, I pray that everybody else makes the turn too.
I go up the little road some yards and spin back, trying to swallow my heart. I’m barely turned around when they pop out of the fog — poot! poot! poot! — Hoot and Lou and my Jade, like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, only on Vespas.
I go to jelly. “Damn!” I say, and that’s all I can say for the next five minutes or so. In fact, that’s all any of us can say. So, we sit and "damn" each other for a while as the world lightens up around us.
“What,” pants Jade when we are all damned out, “was that?”
“Some kind of alien vehicle...I think,” I pant back.
“Thought it was something else for a moment there,” admits Hoot.
“I thought it was a dragon,” says Lou. “Dragonth live on mountains, don’t they? That's what the Books of Kingdom thay.”
Creepy Lou with a case of nerves is a lot like a leaky faucet. You can’t stop it, so you might as well just get used to it. While the rest of us catch our breath, Lou gives forth a rolling commentary on the mysterious ways of dragons.
This is really okay, ‘cause listening to him has a strangely soothing effect. In the back of my mind, though, I gotta wonder where that thing came from and if there are any more like it at home. It occurs to me, now, why that yellow line was so bothersome. There used to be yellow lines on the streets around the Gam Saan, too. They wore off a long time ago cause no one kept them up. These lines clearly do not suffer from that kind of neglect.
Creepy Lou finally runs down.
A while after, Jade asks, “Anybody catch why the Treasure Islanders were trolling for trespassers when we came through their Tunnel? I mean, it occurs to me to wonder why, if they were so happy to do business with John Makepeace, they were setting traps along his back trail.”
“Precaution,” answers Hoot. “While he was visiting and handing over trinkets for toll, some of his guys got a little high-handed with the village maidens. According to Mushu and Rollerskate, who had it from the doc, Captain Ahab just wanted to make sure the appropriate payment was exacted upon Makepeace’s return.”
My wife snorts. “Like as if that fishnet was gonna stop a winnebago.”
“Not stop it, maybe,” agrees Hoot, “but it’d surely slow one down.”
“We gotta go through there on the way home” asks Creepy Lou.
“Yeah,” I answer, “we do. But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Then Jade asks, “How far?”
“Huh?” I ask.
“How far to the Place? How do we know we’re there?”
Well. It occurs to me at this auspicious moment that I have not clue one of where "there" is. I been following my nose, I realize, for the smell of Doug is sharp and tangy in the moist air.
“I don’t know how far,” I admit, “but I’ll know when we’re there. They’ll tell me.”
“The Doloreth?” asks Lou awfully.
“And this.” I hoist the rattle and give it a shake.
I can feel everyone’s eyes on me and on it and on magic I don’t even know if they can see. I can see it, bouncing every-which-way, charging the fog with silver light that is not light at all, if you know what I mean. We are caught in a Moment...or at least I am.
When at last I look at them again, Firescape has her eyes closed and Hoot is checking out the scenery. The Moment collapses, just like that.
I look at Creepy Lou. He smiles, scratches his head and says, “Wow.”
Before I can ask why, Hoot says, “You know, this road goes straight up through the trees for quite a bit. Wanna ask your invisible compadres if it’s worth a look?”
I peer in the direction Hoot specifies. The road does just what he says, it goes straight up into the trees and disappears. It don’t look like much, just chewed up tarmac trail covered in leaves and needles. In the middle of it, a sea gull pecks at a fir cone, looking seriously out-of-place up here in the piney woods.
Is this it? I ask Pedro and Doug and all their respective kith and kin in the worlds of tree and spirit. Is this the road to the Sacred Place?
Perhaps there is no such place, says a Voice from a dark corner of my head.
There is a momentary scuffle in my noggin between it and me. I determine to win.
Of course there’s such a place, I tell it (or tell myself, depending). I take a deep sip of the fir-tangy fog and try to picture the Place, and suddenly I see it, clear as if I’d been clobbered on the head by a fairy godmom: an overturned bowl made of branches and patched with mud spills smoke into a clearing in the middle of a grove of trees. I know that, inside, the Place smells of smoke and evergreen and sweat. I been there. I also know that there is not here.
“Let’s go,” I say and lead on up the road. The sea gull squawks at us, all indignant, and flaps away, fir cone and all.
We drive the Vespas as far as we can, then, when the road gets too rough, we walk them and walk them and walk them and walk them.
“When will be there?” asks Firescape.
I want to tell her “soon.” But, the vision has faded and I am tired and cold and sweaty and my throat is on fire. So, this simple question hits me sideways and I realize in this big, chilling, awful Moment that I just don’t know if we’ll ever be there, or if there’s even anywhere to be.
Yeah, sure, I had this epiphany and all. But I have epiphanies every day, and the fact is, I’m not sure how real they are. I mean, it strikes me suddenly that a lot of the stuff that happens to me is a little weird and that I’m the only one who hears the whispers of Douglas firs and dead Indians.
Well, okay, supposedly Lou hears dead Indians, too, but somehow I don’t find this terribly comforting. I’m willing to bet I’m the only one who sees dead Indians, and magical threads and even Chinese Dragon wizards.
And that’s the most awful thought of all: I realize with the suddenness of lightning that I am the only one who has ever seen Master Chen or heard his Voice. Okay, except for Squint, you might say. But Squint is not here for me to consult, ni dong, so that does me squiddle in my present frame of mind.
But the shrine! whimpers my brain. Creepy Lou saw the shrine, and the monk who told me about Chen, and the ninja who told me Chen was sleeping. And someone has to be before he can be asleep.
This is not helping. I seize on the fact that Jade saw the monk, too. My brain wracks itself trying to remember if she heard the monk tell me about Chen and wondering what would happen if I just asked her. Meanwhile, a more collected part of me informs the various uncollected parts that we don’t have time for this.
This is when I have another sort of epiphany: it strikes me that even though I am the only one who has seen Chen or talked to Pedro or heard and understood a Whisperer, these people have followed me up this Mountain as if I knew what the hell I was doing.
Great. Now I got guilt on top of a stunning lack of self-confidence. And on top of both, I am suddenly scared spitless. What if there are no Whisperers and no Chen? What if Doug is just a garden variety fir tree?
I’ve had doubts before, ni dong. But they were doubts about me, not about stuff that counted. Not drag-the-earth-out-from under-my-feet doubts. Now it’s like I’m standing in a North Beach undertow with Whisperers inside my head, only these Whisperers are from the Dark Side of Taco Del.
I am having a crisis. Problem is, my Collected Part is right: I don’t have time for a crisis. There are people looking at me, believing in me, waiting for me to do something, to lead them somewhere.
You may lead them straight to hell, says that nasty Voice from the Dark Corner of Taco's brain.
I tell it to shut up, to go away, to friggin' frag itself. Then take a deep, shaky breath. Fir perfume rides in on it and my life flashes before my eyes. I scramble to take inventory. Since it’d take too long to go over it all, I just hit the high points: mi madre y padre, Hoot, Bags, Kaymart, Doug, Jade, the Dolores, Pedro. I see, immediate, that all the high points of my life are people (if you interpret "people" pretty loosely). Then, I see all the connections between them and me and realize that those connections are a lot like the threads that bind the magics together. You can’t see them — not really — but you know they’re there.
A question forms in my head. I look at my friends and my wife — who are still waiting for me to say something — and say, “Do you believe we’re gonna find the Place?”
There’s this truly awful silence, during which Jade’s lovely brow furrows most prodigiously.
“Duh, Del,” she says. “I only asked when we’d get there.”
Well.
“It’s a shortcut,” I say, and head on up.
oOo
Something about walking in silence makes the brain work. This is because this really cool mechanism called autonomic reflexes knows how to put one foot in front of the other over almost any kind of terrain, so the brain, which might otherwise be busy directing footwork, has nothing to do but take in scenery. In a shabu dong, there ain’t much in the way of scenery to take in, so the brain is at loose ends and finds itself something else to do.
In this case, my particular brain starts to work on Chen’s riddle. I fall back beside my inestimable wife and pant, “I am thinking about who Chen is, or at least, who he thinks he is.”
“Sounds like a good think,” she says, not panting much at all anymore.
“He gave me a riddle to solve,” I say. “Wanna hear it?”
She spocks an eyebrow at me. “When’d he have time to give you a riddle?”
“Tonight — I mean last night — in the alley, while all hell was breaking loose and ninjas abounded.”
“He was in the alley?”
“Yeah. You were otherwise engaged, or you might’ve seen him. Squint sure got an eyeful of him,” I add, and try not to make it sound as if I am defending my grasp on reality. “Which is why I ended up with this coat and the spirit rattle. Chen went off after Squint.”
She nods. “Let’s hear the riddle.”
I recite: “I am unity and I am duality. I am one and I am legion. Before the Flood, I sired a nation; after the Flood, the soul of a nation. Because of me, all spirits cried in agony, as the innermost secrets of nature were revealed by my command. Immortals fear me, for I have quested and sought out the elixir of their wealth — and, behold, I shall seize it.”
“Sounds like a bad case of multiple personalities,” says Jade.
“Or past life regression,” offers Hoot from just behind us. “He’s talkin' like he’s been a bunch of people.”
“I’m not sure it’s past lives, exactly,” I say. “He made some crack about being around before the Gam Saan. And then there’s that bit about the wealth of the Immortals.”
“Which’d be immortality,” says Hoot.
“You’d think. So, he’s been legions of people, but right now he’s one. I mean, he can only be one at a time.”
“We hope,” says Jade Berengaria Firescape with some feeling. “’Cause he also says he’s two.”
“Well, then maybe he is talking re-incarnation,” I say. “The body takes a dive, the spirit repeats.”
“But why two?” asks Firescape.
I don’t have an answer for that, so I forge on. “He says, ‘Before the Flood, I sired a nation; after the Flood, the soul of a nation.’”
“As in Noah’s Ark?” asks Lou.
“No,” says Firescape. “The Great Flood of China. The Yellow River overflowed its banks bigtime for years, says the history. So, it sounds like he’s saying he was a pretty big deal on both sides of the Flood.”
“Yeah, I’ll say,” snorts Hoot. “You’d have to be a pretty big deal to sire a whole nation.”
“No, no, no!” Firescape bounces a little. “He’s the father of China! Huang-ti, the Yellow Emperor! He was the one who unified China, who made laws and set up trade. Before the Flood.”
“Okay, father of a nation,” says Hoot. “Kinda like Jerry Steinmetz is the father of Embarcadero. But what about the soul of the nation? Did he, like, found a religion or something?”
Firescape shakes her head and tugs at her lower lip. “Not Huang-ti. But he’s somebody else after the Flood, right? Lemme think on this,” she says. “I know this.”
“But what about the crying spirits?” I ask. “What’s that about?”
Firescape waves her hand as if I’m a pesky mosquito. “That’s about Huang-ti, too. Or it’s about his minister, anyway. The legends say this minister made the spirits of all things cry out by revealing their innermost secrets.”
“How’d he do that?” asks Lou.
“Same way we do, I guess,” says my no-nonsense wife. “In books.”
“Did they have books in ancient China?” I ask, then, thunderclap, blinding flash of insight. “He invented writing!”
“Yeah. Huang-ti thought it’d help unify the people, so he commanded that the language be written down. Now if you guys don’t mind, I’d really like to think, okay?” She sweeps us all with an especially pointy look.
We decide unanimously that it’s best to observe silence while Firescape thinks.
During our silence, Lou and Hoot get ahead of me and Firescape — so far ahead we can’t see them any more. But we hear them when my good buddy Creepy Lou yells, “Looky-dooky!” at the top of his lungs.
With a glance at each other, Firescape and I hustle our bikes up the trail as fast as we can.
At the top of the grade, we burst out of the trees and onto the edge of a road. It is a shiny black road with a bright yellow stripe down the middle. I suspect this might even be the same road we were on earlier, just doubled back.
Across the shiny black road from where we have come up are twin pillars made of white stone. Between them is a black wrought-iron gate. A big gate. It’s closed over the smooth, black tarmac and it is what has beckoned to Hoot and Lou.
“Blackhawk,” says Firescape. She is reading from the larger-than-life gold letters on a huge polished boulder. “Is this the place?”
I don’t think this is the place, as it happens, but Hoot and Lou obviously think it’s something, because Lou is bouncing up and down on his Vespa like he’s spring-loaded, and Hoot is standing in front of the closed gate, tinkering with something on the front of it where it meets the left-hand pillar.
Before I can yell out a wherefore, the gate glides open and Lou just up and scooters right on through. Hoot throws a leg over his bike and takes off after him, leaving me and Firescape sitting there, across the road, staring at each other.
Naturally, we mount up and follow.
Inside the gates and around a curve is this little house. Two guys in dark blue unis are leaping all over its itty-bitty patch-o-grass and gesturing up the road in the direction we are going. As we putter by, they commence to yelling. I suspect they are border guards and are excited because we have just invaded their barrio. I feel bad about foregoing protocol, but I figure this is an emergency.
I gotta wonder, though, about their lack of weaponry and knightly aplomb. The thought of Embarcaderan knighties jumping around like toads while their border is penetrated by guys on Vespas sends me into a fit of giggles.
Damn, but I’m tired.
The giggles stop most quickly when I see the kind of place this is. It is a ghetto of castles and palaces, each one with its own Farm. I can’t get a clear look at any of these palaces, ni dong — only a ridge-pole here, a chimney there, a row of windows or pillars. But I can still tell that these are unlike anything we got even up on the Knob. These are like little Camelots, and I gotta wonder if the aliens come from a land of kings and queens with very tiny realms. Maybe these are the homes of John Makepeace’s mysterious and mythical Backers who, according him, are pretty loaded. If this is so, I also gotta wonder how these folks maintain their realms with guards as feckless as those guys in the little guard house.
Maybe, I reason, this is what happens when dudes become knighties. I mean, women are much better suited to this function as they got finely tuned protective instincts, are truly crafty, and are not overly impressed with hardware. It’s a rare jake who can handle the power invested in a knightie without getting a little jinked up by it. This is why most Embarcaderan knighties are women and why we have such a well-disciplined police force.
My giggles are long gone when Firescape cries out and comes to a stop. I see right off what has caught her eye — in front of a righteously Tudorian castle worthy of the Arthur, hisself, our missing compadres are confronted by two golf carts topped with flashing lights. They are painted like black-and-whites — an Old World police vehicle which I have seen in videos — but in form they are, well, golf-carts, just like the ones Felicidad uses out on the Presidio to tool around and about his fields.
Hoot is talking to one of these Peace Officers — a female, to my relief — and gesturing about, while Creepy Lou bounces up and down and twitches extravagantly.
These knighties have weaponry, I note, which is presently sheathed. Not for long. The alien knightie sees us and draws her weapon, after which Firescape whips out her magic AK and Hoot waves his arms and shouts.
“Outta here!” I yell, spin my Vespa and give it full throttle. I hear no shots. Firescape and I buzz back out the way we came in, past the border guards. They are no longer leaping, toad-like, but shake their fists at us as we putter by.
“Damn kids!” one of them cries.
Behind us, I hear something that sounds a lot like John M’s singing demons only tinny. I am galvanized. Unfortunately, this galvanization is not communicated to my Vespa. At what seems a crawl, we escape through the gates and swing uphill — which I immediately think is a tactical error. Fear does a wild tap dance through my veins.
But the song of the demons stops at the Blackhawk gates. The little black-and-whites do not come out, and their officers seem to think chasing us is less effective than simply closing the gates behind us.
Neon. Still, as they might change their minds, and as I have a quest to get on with, when I see a little dirt track running almost straight uphill, I go there. Hoot, I know from experience, can take care of himself. I’m gonna trust he can take care of Creepy Lou right along with.
The track I’ve chosen is narrow and made of hard-packed earth, and I know before we’ve gone 50 feet or so that the Vespas won’t make it. I also know, without knowing how I know, that this is The Way.
I stop my scooter. Firescape pulls up on my tail. There’s not enough room for us to ride side-by-side.
“These scooters aren’t going to make it,” I tell her.
“Okay,” she says and glances back down the hill. “I guess we can back them down to the road.”
“No. This is The Way, Jade.”
She gives me her LOOK. “Okay, so we leave them and hike it.”
“I hike it,” I say. “You...stay and — “
“And what — guard the friggin' Vespas?”
“Well, yeah....”
“Like someone’s gonna steal ‘em?”
“Jade....“
“No sale, Taco Face. You really do got a chickpea brain if you think, for one molecule of time, I’m gonna sit here like a lump while you go off questing without me.”
“Jade, you’re pregnant,” I remind her.
She rolls her eyes, granting me a moment of respite from being glared to a cinder.
“So you keep reminding me. Look here, husband: nobody on this planet knows I’m pregnant more than me. And the fact of the matter is that I’ll be in better physical shape when I’m nine months ripe than you’ll ever be, ‘cause you don’t eat right and you don’t sleep enough and you’re always doin' dangerous shit like pokin' your loco nose into the affairs of wizards. I hate it when you do shit like that and then try to leave me eating dust in your tracks. There is no way in this wide woolly forest that you are gonna go any further up this Mountain without me. You got that?”
Yeah, I got that. And it simultaneously warms the cockles of my heart (whatever the hell those are in a ventricle context) and scares real tears out of me. I nod and salt water trickles down my cheek.
“Oh, jeez-Louise,” says General Firescape, and grabs my face between her able hands and kisses me.
Thus inspired, I lead the way up the narrow trail...which somehow manages to get narrower as we climb. It twists around a lot, too, running almost level in one direction, then doubling back the other way for a while. The trees thicken until they form an awning overhead. I wish Doug could be here to see this. Not, ni dong, that I regret not having to drag his pot all over this Mountain, but you know what I mean.
It occurs to me, even as I have this wistful thought, that he is here, only I have got him tucked away in a sack. I open the amulet bag and take the Doug branchlet out, carefully straightening the little firry fingers. Then, in a fit of inspiration, I guess, I decide to tie the branch to the spirit rattle.
I go through my pockets in search of something to do this with. Nothing. Next I try to yank out a handful of my hair. This does not work and it hurts like hell.
“What’re you doing?” my wife wants to know.
“I need a knife,” I say. “You got a knife?”
“Does Hismajesty have an ego?”
I use the knife to cut off a hank of hair, then hand back the knife and start braiding. As I walk and braid, I start thinking about Chen’s riddle again, as we never did finish deciphering it.
“So, he thinks he’s Huang-ti.”
“Once upon a time,” says Firescape, following my thought as if we’ve been chewin' on this without hiatus.
“So is it re-incarnation or something else?”
“Re-incarnation," she says. "Gotta be. Look, it’s like this — he wants to be immortal, right? Which means he isn’t yet. And he’s sure not going to get there like a normal Immortal by becoming perfect. But he’s looking for a shortcut — the elixir of the Immortals’ wealth.”
“But what’s that got to do with the soul of the nation? Maybe he thinks he was Confucius...or Buddha even.”
“No, that’s not it,” says Firescape, and I can tell by the sound of her voice that her mind’s caught on something. “It’s Lao-tzu.”
Okay, I know Lao-tzu founded Taoism — the religion, not the philosophy. But I wonder why Lao-tzu and not Confucius? Then it hits me. “Lao-tzu is supposed to have never died, but only disappeared!”
She pokes my shoulder. “Not only that, but he was supposed to have known the secret of eternal life. And get this — for some reason the histories aren’t real clear on, Huang-ti and Lao-tzu got combined into someone called Huang-Lao. And the formula for the elixir of eternal life is called the Learning of Huang-Lao. Which the second Emperor Huang-ti sent his minister, Fu-Hsen, to search for across the sea.”
This part of the story I remember. “I studied that. They say he took hundreds of children with him. I guess he was hoping to start a whole race of Immortals.”
“Yeah,” says Firescape in her best ghost story voice, “and neither he nor any of the children were ever seen again.”
“That’s his name, then — Huang-Lao.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what the riddle’s about. Chen’s challenging me to figure out his real and secret name.”
“That must be it,” says Firescape. “I mean, that’s his quest, isn’t it? Beating death?”
Damn. I feel pretty good all of a sudden. Not such a chickpea brain after all, I guess. Although, I have to admit, my well-studied wife did most of the actual thinking.
So, Chen thinks combining magics is gonna be a shortcut to the realm of the Immortals. Oh, and he by-the-wayly wants to get rid of Hismajesty and become Emperor of all he surveys. From the way Pedro’s gone on about him, I gotta believe his plans include turning all of us into mindless, black hole drones like his monks and ninjas.
I stow my new knowledge and the Name, finish tying the rattle and Doug branch together, and concentrate on the trail. This is becoming necessary, for though the Sun is rising higher in the sky, we are beset by fog again. Not just any fog, mind you, but a shabu dong the like of which I have only seen in one place.
I duck under a tree limb and find I am gazing up a long, wide clearing bordered by a stream on one side and a jagged line of boulders on the other. The ground is lumpy with random humps of moss-covered rock. The fog creeps in and around the clearing like cats checking out the alley behind a Gee Gah butcher shop.
I have been here before. I know this as surely as I know that I have not been here before. I raise the hand that holds the rattle and the place begins to morph.
First, a shadow seems to sweep over the clearing and the shabu dong waxes restless. It also begins to gleam like powdered silver, and before my eyes the whole clearing starts making with this eerie light. The grass glows green, the trees brass, the rocks gold.
I move forward, rattle held high, and that’s when I see it. It grows out of the fog where one of the mossy rock piles was. It is a muddle of tree branch and pine thatch and rock and mud, and a ghostly banner of smoke flies from its crown. And I know that the insides of this upside-down bowl are gonna be hauntingly familiar.