“I only hoped to gain his forgiveness, Master Wong,” Huang Fa apologized.
“There shall be none,” the wizard intoned. He peered down into his lap.
“Is there nothing we can do?” the monk begged. “How will the sorcerer attack?”
“I am an expert in divination,” Master Wong replied. “I am not an expert in all sorceries, but I have traveled the Earth, and I know something of these barbarians. He will send an animal spirit to possess Huang Fa, one that will fill him with animal desires and lead him to ruin.”
“What kind of spirit?” the monk asked.
The wizard shook his head. “I cannot be sure. A fox spirit would fill him with lust, a wolf with a thirst for blood. A boar will turn him into a glutton. An ape spirit would make him act like a fool, but we are far from the land of apes. It will be. an animal close to the sorcerer.”
Master Wong clapped his hands and asked a young boy, his assistant, to bring his “special trunk.” The boy hurried to another pavilion, and returned moments later. Master Wong had Huang Fa lie down; he took a bottle of henna dye and a calligraphy brush and began to write spells of warding upon Huang Fa’s face. As he worked, he explained, “Animal spirits cannot take control of you unless you welcome them in. You can fight them. You must fight them. The spells that I am writing will help. The spirits will seek to enter through an orifice — your nostrils or mouth are the weakest points, and so I will surround them with spells.”
“You told the others that I was damned,” Huang Fa said. “How did you know?”
Master Wong hesitated in his brush stroke. “I cast the yarrow stalks this morning and formed a trigram, then read from the I–Ching.”
Huang Fa was skeptical at this. The I–Ching, or Book of Changes, suggested that all of life is in a flux. Every person’s situation was always about to change, and by casting the yarrow stalks, one could then consult the book and learn direction for the future. But it was not as simple as that. In part, one had to rely upon the abilities of the wizard who did the divination. One had to trust his insights.
“So you learned that I was damned from the I–Ching?”
“I have felt your coming for days,” replied Master Wong. “ ‘A stranger is coming,’ the yarrow stalks foretold, ‘one with blood on his hands and a curse on his soul. He has an enemy more powerful than this storm.’ ”
“You divined all of this?”
The wizard nodded solemnly, then set down his brush and folded his hands. “I could learn little more — except for the hour or your coming.”
“Is there any hope for me?”
Master Wong frowned. “This Battarsaikhan has powers that go far beyond mine. He sent this storm to slow you down — or kill you, and that is no small feat. Yet this I also know: the human heart has a magic of its own, as powerful as any spell. Perhaps if we understood his powers better. ”
Huang Fa’s heart hammered, filling him with hope. “Is there a surer form of divination than the I–Ching?”
Master Wong leaned over Huang Fa and gave an inscrutable expression, as if he might be annoyed. “You are a skeptic? You don’t trust me? I do my own readings twice a day. I would not have survived for a hundred and twelve years without them! If the stalks tell me to eat an apricot today, I eat it. If they tell me to stay out of the rain—”
The monk’s mouth dropped in surprise. “You are a hundred and twelve years old?”
The wizard did not look a day over fifty. He kept a straight face for a moment, and burst out laughing at his own jest. “If you want a surer form of divination,” he suggested to Huang Fa, “we can consult the turtle’s oracle bones.”
This was a form of divination that Huang Fa could trust. The turtle was the most blessed creature under heaven. Because of this, the gods had granted the turtle long life and great wisdom, and it held a special place close to the gods as one of the four holy animals. Indeed, Huang Fa sometimes prayed to turtles, for they could act as intermediaries to the gods.
To consult oracle bones, the wizard merely carved a question into the shell of a turtle that had been ritually sacrificed. Then he would drill small holes in the shell, insert a stick of incense into each hole, and light the incense. When the stick burned down, the heat would weaken the shell, causing it to crack. If the bone cracked inward, toward the center of the shell, then the answer to the question was “yes.” If it cracked toward the outer part of the shell, then the answer was “no.”
This form of divination limited the wizard to asking yes-or-no questions. That was its weakness. But the virtue of this method was that heaven left no ambiguity in the answer.
“Suggest a question,” Master Wong offered, “and I will consult the oracle bones tonight.”
Huang Fa blew his nose. The air was so dusty that the mucus came out black. He felt dirty down to his lungs, in every pore of his skin, to the very core of his soul.
Huang Fa formed his question for the gods: “Can I escape the Sorcerer Battarsaikhan’s curse?”
The wind shrieked outside the tent, drumming at the silk and tugging at the pegs and stays. Inside the pavilion, all was dark and strangely cold. The only light came from eight sticks of incense that rose from holes in the turtle shell. The sweet scent of jasmine curled up from the cherry coals, so that the dusty room bore a cloying air.
Huang Fa lay in a troubled dream, shaking from chills. He dreamt of children crawling stealthily through the storm, faces bared to the wind. They dragged something large and bulky behind them as they crawled, something with hair, though the dim light defeated Huang Fa’s vision.
It is the mare’s head, Huang Fa thought unreasonably, and whimpered in horror.
But the children came on — toddlers with knives in their hands, and young girls in nothing but loin clothes. There were fierce boys with sharpened teeth and eyes that shone with their own inner light, as if stars might burst from them.
They reached the door flap to the pavilion, and crept inside. Huang Fa felt vaguely detached as they neared his bed, dragging their hairy burden, even though he expected them to plunge their daggers into his flesh.
“I meant no harm,” he apologized. “I did not know your need.”
The feral children gave no answer.
A chill swept over him, as if an icy wind blew up from the caverns of hell and rippled up his spine. His muscles felt as rubbery as dead eels.
Now half a dozen children stood above the hairy thing. By the light from the incense, Huang Fa could see an animal hide rolled up and tied into a bundle.
It is the hide from my horse, he thought. They will put it upon me so that I catch the anthrax.
He felt torn between the desire to run or fight, or simply to lie still and accept whatever fate the feral children deemed fit.
Three children uncut the strings that bound the hide and rolled it out, almost celebrating with excitement. Even in the dim light Huang Fa could see that it was not the hide of his fine red mare. This skin was as white as satin, the hair upon it almost as thick as wool.
Four waifs spread the great hide over him with great ceremony, and Huang Fa breathed the luxurious scent of a well-tanned hide. The fur upon it was like heaven, like a banked fire that warmed him through and through.
The children turned to leave; Huang Fa suddenly roused to a sense of danger. His eyes flew open and he stilled his breathing to listen for the sound of stealthy motion.