Drakemaster Read online

  DRAKEMASTER

  E. C. Ambrose

  St Andrews, Scotland

  Published by Guardbridge Books,

  St Andrews, Fife, United Kingdom.

  http://guardbridgebooks.co.uk

  Drakemaster.

  © 2022 by EC Ambrose. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, except as permitted by UK copyright law or the author.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental. Some events, such as the Mongol invasion of China and the siege of Kaifeng, and personages, particularly Möngke Khan, were real, but they have been dramitised for this novel.

  Cover art © Keith Demanche.

  ISBN: E-Book: 978-1-911486-70-1; Trade Paperback: 978-1-911486-69-5

  For Sherry Peters,

  who coached me back from the brink.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Year of the Snake, Yin Earth Cycle

  1257 AD

  The king goes hunting

  Dark stars burn

  In the next ten days, catastrophe

  The characters inscribed on the bone were ancient, hard to decipher, and Zhencai had likely misread them. At least this bone did not suggest sacrificing sheep or beheading prisoners to remedy the coming catastrophe. No matter. The ten days the bone referred to had passed a thousand years before: either catastrophe had come, or it had not. He crumbled the brittle bone into the mortar on the floor by his knees, and ground it into powder.

  Four ranks of dead, laquered monks, each in the lotus position, each with his head bowed, filled the tiers before Zhencai. They were dead, he knew, in spite of the abbot’s insistence they had attained a state of sarira: living Buddahood. All the dead monks had narrow faces and thin arms beneath the layers of gold or red lacquer on their stretched skin. Coils of smoke rose from incense sticks in stone burners, and flowers drifted in bowls of water next to the altar. Paintings of the bodhisattvas adorned the crumbling walls, giving signs of blessing, their bellies wrinkled with deprivation, their faces as serene as the dead monks they watched over.

  As a child he viewed the ritual of sarira as a pinnacle of spiritual attainment—the elderly monk entering a higher state, eternally meditating; as a young warrior who knew the satisfaction of physical achievement, he suspected the ritual was vanity. The process stank of geomancy, a worldly magical practice that had no place in the Buddha’s teachings.

  Nonetheless, the sarira tower was a peaceful place to work, especially while the rest of the Cloud Mountain Monastery fretted over what would happen when the Mongols reached the mountains. Fuss, worry, crowds—all things Zhencai became a monk to avoid. Thankfully the sarira tower could only be reached by a very long stair even the most diligent novices hated. Zhencai smiled over his work. Years ago, when he had been the martial master, he made his pupils climb that stair daily. On their knees.

  He ground another scapula from his basket of old bones, all riddled with the cracks and inscriptions of ancient prophecies.

  Zhencai’s own body revealed age spots, aches, the faltering of the flesh, leaving him with a growing understanding of the impermanence the Buddha spoke of. His methodical grinding became a meditation, the work of his muscles grinding away his sense of himself, so that he could maintain a detached awareness of the world.

  A bird had taken a liking to Master Liu’s stiff, pointed hat. Its pecking had damaged the monk’s lacquered coating, a breach that could lead to the rotting of the revered flesh underneath. Zhencai would have to take care of the cracks. He stretched, looking one way over his shoulder, then the other, to relieve the strain in his back.

  Framed by bodhisattva paintings, holes pierced through the one plain wall and soft stains of rust marked a pattern on the floor, showing where an old gearwork had been removed when the monastery claimed this place from the geomancers. The floor remained uneven, as if the device’s removal had weakened the stone. One of the broad slabs by the feet of the lowest rank of sarira tipped slightly upward, a change from his last visit.

  Rising, Zhencai prowled over, prodding the edge of the stone with his toe. He pushed it back into place.

  It groaned and settled with a series of clicks that startled Zhencai into pulling back his foot. The bird launched from the hat of Master Liu who swayed to the side. Scowling, Zhencai stepped up to right the sarira, folding his waxy, supple arms back into place and adjust the brocade over the dead monk’s shoulders.

  Something else shifted behind him, and Zhencai turned, prepared to adjust Master Deng, the next sarira along the rank.

  Master Deng’s bald head nodded upward, and Zhencai retreated, wondering what process of the dried flesh caused movement after more than a hundred years, or if his pressing on the shifted stone had disturbed the body.

  Then the dead monk shook back the long fabric from his withered hands and wiped at his eyes, blinking them open.

  Zhencai leapt away, hands held lightly before him, balanced on his toes. He felt absurd, preparing to do battle with a dead monk, yet his heart drummed in his chest, suddenly too tight to breathe.

  The dead monk stretched out skeletal hands to drag one of the bronze bowls of water from the side of the altar. Sloshing water and flowers over his brocade and down his robe, Master Deng brought the bowl to his lips and drank a few swallows, waited, drank again. At last, Master Deng’s black eyes swiveled in their gilded sockets, then focused on Zhencai. The sunken flesh of his face worked hard and tiny cracks formed in the lacquer, then a raspy breath parted his lips.

  “What is the year?” Master Deng breathed.

  Master Deng spoke an older dialect, but not so different that he could not be understood. Zhencai wet his own lips and steadied his breathing, “Master, it is the year of the Snake.”

  The dead monk gave a hollow, hard breath, his bald head swinging about. “Where is the device that should have woken me?”

  “Forgive me, Master,” said Zhencai, “but we have no devices here.”

  With a gravelly sound of irritation, Master Deng rose on feeble legs and wobbled. Zhencai, feeling rather wobbly himself, offered himself as a prop. Whatever else the sarira was, he was clearly Zhencai’s elder, and his senior.

  A skeletal hand clutched Zhencai’s shoulder with surprising strength, bony fingers digging in, and with a leathery creak, Master Deng stepped down beside him. When the dead monk straightened, his head crested a little below Zhencai’s own. The dry, black eyes stared at him.

  “Thank you. Your robes suggest you are no senior here, although your age suggests you should be.”

  “I lack spiritual discipline,” Zhencai told him, taking a deep breath to steady himself. “I have been set to learn by your example, Master.”

  “Ha!” When the dead monk cracked out a laugh, flecks of golden paint fell away. “If you seek enlightenment, ask them.” He thrust a finger toward the remaining sarira. “Year of the Snake. That’s good. Which cycle?”

  “The Yin Earth cycle, Master,” Zhencai began, prepared to say more, but Master Deng interrupted.

  “Yin Earth?” The barely visible brows leapt. “Bah. Then I am late. Has it already happened?”

  “I cannot say, Master, perhaps if you—”

  “You’d know! Even if you’d been a hermit here as long as I have, you would know the kind of ruin I’m talking about.” Master Deng pushed off and lurched toward the arch at the front of the pagoda.

  Mountains framed the misty distance where the silver thread of the river embroidered the plains beyond. Towering pines shaded the narrow stairs along the pathway to the monastery below. A few peaks distant, the observatory tower showed pale against the blue of the sky, and
Master Deng squinted in that direction. “Take my device, would you,” he muttered.

  “Please, Master, I have studied in this valley all of my life, but I do not know about your device, or the trouble you mentioned.”

  “Su Sung—at least you will have heard of him? He made the emperor’s clock at Kaifeng, its predictions were meant to counter the decadence of the emperor’s children?”

  Zhencai gave a short nod. “It was dismantled when the capital moved south, after the Jurchen conquest. One hundred sixty years ago, Master.”

  “Dismantled.” The monk ran a hand over his bare scalp, his narrow shoulders sinking. “They dismantled—Buddha’s hand—what wouldn’t they do?” His brows crinkled as if he would weep, but had no tears. “You should have seen it. Four stories high, with figures that played music every hour on tiny drums and clever little flutes. The top story had devices for tracking the stars, bound into a system so the clock moved in perfect time with the heavens.” His hands moved as he spoke, tracing the tower of the clock in the air before him, outlining complex devices and tiny sculptures as if he could pick them up with his thin fingers. “Ah, you should have seen it. It was almost as beautiful as mine.” His eyes tracked a distant cloud with a curious shape, inauspicious and worrisome. “One hundred sixty years.”

  “Who are you, Master?” Zhencai asked. Certainly he was not a former abbot as Zhencai had been told when he first entered the sarira temple.

  The monk’s lips showed darkly through the broken mask of golden paint. “Forty years a monk, fifty, is it? You might at least have read the scrolls, novice.”

  Zhencai rejected the sting. “I might, Master, if they had not been taken to the city, to be studied by the scholars there.”

  “Decadent indeed,” Master Deng snorted. “A monastery without any scrolls. A fifty-year novice with no knowledge of the past—and Su Sung’s greatest achievement taken to bits by tiny minds. For a moment, I thought the Mandate of Heaven had already brought ruin upon you all. I thought I was too late, novice. Now I see that I am nearly right on time.” Master Deng gave a sharp bow and strode away, his steps shaky, but his back as stiff as a warrior’s lance. He made for a narrow ledge that led to a hermit’s chamber on the other side of the peak.

  Zhencai watched his hobbling progress, his awe returning as the sarira monk’s prayer beads clinked and his sandals slapped between the bushes toward the ancient way. Swinging back, Zhencai stared at the empty place among the dead masters, then ran his gaze over those remaining, no longer certain they were dead—no longer certain of anything. He was about to follow the old man to see where the Buddha’s hand might lead him, when, from the monastery far below, the great bronze bell rang out, long before dinner. It rang with urgency, and Zhencai’s heart fell. Catastrophe, the old bone said—and here it was: the Mongols had found them at last.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Hurry up!” barked Wang Lin Yo, the Cathayan overseer, as Dailus and the other slaves trudged barefoot up the narrow path muddied by the hundred soldiers who had already passed that way. A few bodies, monks and Mongols both, scattered the slope below, dead in the fighting or from the fall. Dailus’s stomach churned, but he scanned the area anyhow, looking for a way to escape. The mountainous terrain meant fewer people, which would work in his favor, if he knew anything of how to survive in the wild, but still… If he stopped looking, he might miss the chance when it came.

  Ahead, the path turned between two peaks shaggy with pines, mist still lurking beneath them. From the mist rose a white wall pierced by a round gate and topped with a narrow edge of those brown, half-loaf tiles Cathayans preferred. Above the wall rose the rooftop of the heathen temple, a dizzying pile of square roofs with upswept corners, each embellished with a series of creatures, like the gargoyles on the new cathedral back home, but gilded and gleaming in the early light.

  The next man stumbled into him, and Dailus muttered an apology as he trotted to catch up, cradling his wrist so the weight of his slave bracelet didn’t send him off-balance into the chasm. No escape now, not with so many slaves and soldiers about.

  Bloody trails marked the courtyard beyond the arch and a few soldiers still worked there, pushing the bodies into heaps at either side, the golden-yellow robes of the dead streaked crimson. The Tatars plucked arrows from the corpses, wasting nothing.

  “Here!” Wang Lin Yo pointed his thick arm toward a smaller building. “We need this taken down and broken up. It’s too big to carry or drag, not down that path.”

  The crew of eighteen men, Dailus included, bowed and turned, wiping mud from their scarred hands. Each took one of the hammers Wang Lin Yo had carried up rather than risk a slave with a tool of his own. The overseer had been a slave himself before his advancement, so he knew what they’d be thinking. Dailus hefted the hammer in both hands, his bracelet wearing a groove into his forearm. A few blows from a hammer like that, and slave bracelets could disappear into the mud, and slaves themselves could disappear into the countryside, lost among their countrymen.

  Except for Dailus. He stood head and shoulders taller than most, even if his pale skin hadn’t marked him out. Tatars said Cathayans used the same word for “stranger” as for “ghost,” pointing to him when they explained. Pale as a fish belly, pale as old bones, as a newborn’s rump. Then they laughed and laughed and Yusen, his master, could pretend himself a man for having captured the pale giant and hauling him here. No, even without his bracelet, Dailus stood out too much to hope for freedom by running away. He would have to look harder for escape—or work harder on behalf of the khan, as Wang Lin Yo had, earning higher status and less supervision.

  Carrying his begrudged hammer, Dailus followed the others, unable to avoid the blood that marked the stones, up to the steps of the little open structure. At one end, two ropes suspended a thick log, a man’s body sprawled beneath it, his head missing. Swallowing bile, Dailus fought the urge to cross himself.

  Four groups of slender pillars supported another peaked roof, sheltering a bell. Dailus froze at the sight of it. Tall as a man, half as broad as it was tall, the huge bronze bell hung a few feet from the ground. Mad, heathen figures marked the surface all over with lines of writing in between and all manner of decorations to frame them: flames and orbs, filigreed bats and writhing, wingless dragons. The bell… he flashed his glance back to the hanging log. A man standing on the steps could swing that log and strike this extraordinary thing! What might it sound like? He imagined the shape of the sound moving through him, deep and resonant, echoing in the valley, lingering in the bronze.

  Wang Lin Yo’s hand smacked the back of Dailus’s head. “Get to work! Or do you want another pounding, Fishbelly?”

  Dailus bowed quickly.

  “Add that body to the stack.” The man jabbed his finger at the corpse, then he swung about to study the bell. “Tang! Climb up there and loosen that coupling. Let’s break this thing—the khan needs his firedrakes when we get to Kaifeng.”

  The imagined peal of the bell vanished into Dailus’s clenched, always-empty stomach. He tucked the hammer through his belt and moved toward the corpse, ducking the log to wrap his arms under the dead monk’s shoulders. The other slaves grumbled and gestured about how to reach the coupling in question. Among them, Jian Ho, the closest thing Dailus had to a friend, stood silent as if in mourning for the bell. In a matter of hours, it would be broken into shards, ready to haul away and melt down so the khan could get his firedrakes. The shadow of the log hung over Dailus and his burden, and his heart raced. He could do it, as if by accident, slipping in the blood, stumbling and righting himself, exactly as they expected of a great oaf like him. Did he want another pounding? No—his face and stomach still ached from the last one. But to think of the bell dying without singing once more…

  Dailus gathered the dead monk and hauled him upward. A few scant inches too far and he backed into the log, leaning into it as if he didn’t expect it to move, then lurching away, slipping down the steps. The crew laughed
as he dropped the monk. He caught hold of the log, strained for a moment as if to stop it, pulling it back from the bell, and pushed as he let go, his bloody hands slipping, flung wide, ridiculous. And then, sublime.

  The log struck hard and the bell rang, a single brilliant note that seized him low in the gut and quivered through his body. His bare feet felt the sound in the stone steps beneath him, every tiny hair of his skin tingling with it.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said—in threes, to show he really meant it—as he dropped to his knees and smacked his forehead into the mud at Wang Lin Yo’s feet. The overseer kicked him back again with a growl.

  “Monkey! Can’t even be trusted to drag out the dead. Why Yusen thought to take a lump like you is beyond the sages.” He snorted, but Dailus repeated his apologies, twice more, and the overseer merely pointed at the body.

  Jian Ho caught Dailus’s eye with the flash of a smile, as if he knew exactly what had happened, then both men got to work. Jian Ho had been a sculptor before his capture. No doubt he admired the images on the bell just as much as Dailus admired the thing itself. The vast temple bell still rang in Dailus’s ears—in his entire body, if truth be told—when the khan arrived. A few captains in their furs and leathers galloped in first, then Möngke Khan himself, the horsetail dangling from his peaked helmet the only sign of his Tatar origins. Below that, the khan was all Cathay silks and brocades the Holy Roman Emperor himself would envy. Powerfully built, the khan bestrode his horse as if it were his throne, sword and bow hanging ready at his sides. Dailus dropped his gaze and took up his burden, dragging the headless monk, trusting his hunched posture would allow him to escape notice.

  Instead of moving on toward the temple, the khan swung down from his horse and stomped closer. Dailus dropped the corpse and fell once more to his throbbing knees, bowing his head.

  “These aren’t geomancers!” The khan shouted. “Where’s Batzorig?” He prodded the body with his foot, smearing a little blood on his fancy boot as someone hurried to fetch the general.