“Shopping, of course. What else? I was looking for souvenirs, and also some things to sell in my own antique shop in Toronto.” I wished I hadn’t said that. It would have been better to let him think I knew nothing about antiques. On the other hand, maybe he knew all about me anyway, and it was just as well I’d been forthcoming on that subject. “I called out, but there was no answer. I didn’t think he’d leave the shop unattended for long, so I waited for him. I was looking at the carpets when I saw the, you know, the hand. Who was he?”
Fang grimaced. “Just a shopkeeper.”
I wanted to chastise him for saying just, being just a shopkeeper myself, but I resisted the temptation. I also declined to ask him if this is what regularly happened to shopkeepers in his town. It didn’t seem politic, and I just wanted to get out of there.
“You don’t know this man?” he went on.
“No. How could I?”
“I’m asking the questions,” he said rather tartly, but then perhaps he recalled my relationship with Dr. Xie. “I apologize for this inconvenience. Please be assured that this does not happen here often. We expect to arrest the killer or killers very soon.”
“I don’t know what you mean by not happening often. Didn’t I read in China Daily that someone else was murdered here a couple of days ago?”
Fang gave me a look that would have frozen the Yellow River solid. “That crime, too, is unusual, and it also will be resolved shortly.” I hoped he was right.
There was some good news. Fang did not take my passport this time, and he had a policeman drive me back to my hotel. The bad news was that Liu David had not returned my call. There was, however, another voice mail awaiting my return. It was a message from a man who sounded as if he had a sock in his mouth and an accent I now recognized as Chinese saying he’d like to book an appointment to measure me for the suit I needed for the funeral. I had no doubts that it was my funeral he had in mind.
Nine
Neither of us said anything about that unnatural incident ever again, nor did I mention it to anyone else, tempting though the prospect of sharing such juicy gossip might be. The next time I saw Lingfei, she looked as she always had. She had covered her mutilated locks with an elaborate wig so no one would be the wiser. Our time together went on as before, she dictating formulas to me, I, in my best hand, recording them. I could not fail to notice, though, that after the failure of her petition, the ingredients for which she sent me were not always the medicinal herbs she’d been working with before, but rather others, more costly, like cinnabar and powdered oyster shells, mica, and pearls. I also recorded detailed processes for formulating something, I knew not what. From time to time our work together was interrupted when the emperor moved his court to the hot springs east of Chang’an where he was spending more and more of his time. While I quite enjoyed the time spent there, Lingfei was impatient to return to her work.
Finally I could contain my curiosity no longer. “What is this you are working on?” I asked in some exasperation, having had to redo, with only the most minor of changes, a formula that I had already written three or four times for her.
She looked at me for some time without speaking. I was afraid I had offended her, and was about to apologize profusely, when she signaled me to be quiet. “Can I trust you, Wu Yuan?” she asked very quietly.
“Why wouldn’t you?” I asked rather rudely. “I have been coming here for more than a year now without fail. I believe my work has been satisfactory, has it not?”
“Indeed it has,” she replied. “But it is not the quality of your work or your punctuality that I am concerned about. It is your ability to hold a confidence. I know only too well the gossip that goes on in the imperial harem, amongst the women, but also amongst the eunuchs, too. I understand firsthand the deceit, the bickering, the plotting and subterfuge that grip the harem. I defy you to tell me that is not so.”
“I cannot,” I said. “I can only promise you that I will not betray your confidence.” I realized even as I .said it, that it was true. Not only that, but I realized in an instant that I loved Lingfei in some way I did not understand. “I… I… would do anything for you.”
That was patently untrue, of course, as I had quite definitely demonstrated when she’d asked me to cut her fingers off. Still, it was unfair of her to ask, as she would have to have known, given the absence of harem gossip, that I had told no one of either her petition or her reaction to its rejection. It is possible these thoughts showed in my face. “Not quite anything,” she said, but at least there was a hint of a smile there. “Come with me.”
She took me to a pavilion across the garden from her palace apartment. The garden was treeless, of course, so as not to provide a means to scale the wall and make good her escape to the arms of the man in the Gold Bird Guard. Her living quarters were a prison, beautiful to be sure, but a prison nonetheless, I now began to realize. Until that moment, I believe I had misjudged the grip of the golden threads that bound all of us to the palace and to the Son of Heaven.
The pavilion was hot, as a fire burned, over which a cauldron rested. The smell offended my delicate nostrils. There were three tables lined with vessels of all shapes and sizes, and tools as well. “This is my life’s work,” she said to me.
“But what is it that you are doing here?” I asked. The unpleasant thought that I was in the presence of a witch crossed my mind. I brushed it aside. This was the lovely Lingfei, quite possibly—no, almost certainly—my sister.
“I seek the elixir of immortality,” she said. “I believe I am very close to perfecting it. I have solved the puzzle of the mysterious yellow, the foundation of the elixir, and am now proceeding to formulate the elixir itself. I have tried the ingredients I know to be necessary in different combinations, and I believe the secret is within my grasp.”
Everything became clear to me, the endless hours writing and rewriting formulations with only the most minute changes, the reworking of the same ingredients over and over, the necessity for the precious ingredients. Still, I was astonished, and felt compelled to remind her that the emperor was inclined to Confucian thought, and might find some of the Taoist arts not to his liking. She pointed out that the Son of Heaven knew the words of Buddha and the Tao as well as that of Confucius, and that while he might favor one, he was not averse to the others.
“Whether you have realized this or not, you have become my apprentice. It is you who have worked and reworked the formulations according to my experiments.”
“But how do you know how to do this?” I asked.
“Do you recall I told you of a Taoist convent to which I was sent when I first left my home? It was there that I was trained to be a concubine, but where I was also apprenticed to an adept at the adjoining monastery. Like you, I did not at first realize that I was being initiated into the mysteries of the elixir. However, I was wrenched from the convent too soon. I knew the ingredients for the elixir, but not in what combination. It is only from an adept that one can learn details like that. The exact formulations are never written down, but passed along orally only to those deemed worthy. I tried to contact the adept with whom I studied, but learned that he joined the Immortals soon after I left him. It was a most encouraging event. He was speaking to his new apprentice when suddenly he disappeared. Only his robes remained. It was cause for much celebration, and he is now venerated. Do not forget your promise to me,” she said. “And I will share the secret of the elixir with you.”