The Reply

CHAPTER 6

The pebble hit the bricks, then slid down to the turf at the base of the Wall. Che Lu bent to pick up another one, then paused, her back aching with pain. She straightened, as much as a wizened seventy-eight-year-old woman could, to her full height of four inches over five feet.

“Never works for me,” she muttered as she turned from the crumbling remains of the Great Wall.

“What doesn’t work, Mother-Professor?” her assistant, Ki, asked. He was young, just out of the university, and it was her opinion that he had taken the job more out of desire not to be arrested in Beijing than interest in her work. He used the term her students had used for her for many years. It was a sign of respect for both her age and her status as chief archaeologist at Beijing University.

“The tradition.” She peered at him, her eyes a bright blue and, despite her years, not needing glasses of any sort. “You need to know traditions. They are very important in archaeology. They can guide you to what you look for.”

She waved her hand at the serpentine mound of rubble that extended left and right as far as the eye could see. This portion of the Great Wall was not what was shown on documentaries to the outside world. The fools in Beijing would want the world to believe that the entire fifteen-hundred-mile length was in pristine condition, but this pile of rubble and decaying brick was more the norm, left to the ravages of nature and the needs of generations of peasants who had used the bricks to build their hovels.

“The tradition is that a traveler going through the Great Wall should throw a pebble against the brick. If it bounces back, then the journey will be a good one. If it simply falls to the ground, then it will be not so good.”

“So we will have a not-so-good expedition?” Ki said with a worried smile.

“It has been not so good from the very beginning,” she said. “I don’t see why things should get any better.” She turned from the wall and headed toward the battered American Jeep that she had been using for so many years. A Russian truck, also Korean War vintage, was puffing large clouds of diesel into the air directly behind the Jeep. It held the other five students in her group and their equipment.

Her great expedition, Che Lu thought to herself as she allowed Ki to help her into the passenger seat. He scurried around and got behind the wheel, throwing the ancient transmission into gear. They continued on their way, now paralleling the Wall, heading toward their work site many miles distant in the vastness of the western provinces of China.

Despite the pebble and paucity of people and equipment allotted her, Che Lu was as excited as she had been in many years. She had finally received permission to dig into Qian-Ling, the mountain tomb of the third emperor of the T’ang dynasty. Inside the massive hill that made up the tomb were buried the Emperor Gao-zong and his empress, the only empress ever to rule in China.

She knew it was the confusion of the current turmoil in China, of course, that had gotten her the permission. Some fool in the Antiquities Division of the government had made a mistake and stamped APPROVED on her request after twenty-two years of her resubmitting it every six months. She’d changed the wording on each submission, obscuring in scholastic language the fact that she wanted permission to actually enter the tomb.

She’d known they had to get to Qian-Ling quickly and get to work before someone else at the division discovered the error. There were two things working against her, and both were significant. One was tradition. The Chinese people revered their ancestors and thus their dead. Grave robbing was unknown in the country, and archaeological digging was considered practically the same: defiling the burial place of someone’s ancestors. The second reason was that the present Communist government was walking a very tight rope in how the past was treated. There was fear, foolish fear in Che Lu’s opinion, that there might be desire among the peasants for a return to the old imperial days.

Che Lu understood respect for ancestors. But she thought it was carried a bit too far in China, denying the world, and most particularly the Chinese people, a look into the splendor that had once been the Middle Kingdom. If China was ever going to take its rightful place in the present world order, Che Lu felt it had to acknowledge its power in ancient times and understand how that power had been eroded and destroyed by the ignorant and small-minded people who had ruled.

Che Lu had given much to China, and she wanted to see her country regain some of the stature it had held in ancient times. She had participated in much of the history of modern China, often at the cutting edge. Just twenty-six women had started the Long March with Mao sixty-four years ago. Only six had made it to the end alive, Che Lu being one of them as a young fourteen-year-old girl. Over one hundred thousand men had also been there at the start, less than ten thousand remaining alive when they arrived at Yan’an in Shaanxi Province in December 1935 after walking over six thousand miles.

Such a feat should have assured Che Lu a revered place in Communist China, but such were the shifting vagaries of power and influence that she had long ago fallen out of favor with newer regimes. At least she had been able to get schooling and earn her degree in archaeology before she was put on the blacklist.

The Jeep hit a pothole in the dirt road and she felt pain shoot up her spine, a fiery red explosion in the back of her head. Ki turned to make an apology and she waved him to remain silent. Young fools. They knew nothing of suffering. The two-vehicle convoy was heading west from Xi’an, the city that had been the first imperial capital in China and the eastern terminus of the Silk Road that had stretched from western China across Central Asia to the Middle East and on to Rome. Che Lu and her associates had arrived there three days earlier and checked in with the local authorities. Things were not much calmer here, a thousand miles away from the turmoil that was brewing in Beijing. The students were growing restless and now the workers were also. The UN disclosure of aliens visiting Earth had seeped its way even into tightly controlled China. Change was in the air all over the globe, and Che Lu feared and hoped that it was coming in China.

She reached into the old straw bag between her legs and pulled out a leather sack. She emptied the contents into the cloth of her skirt that was stretched wide between her legs and looked at the four pieces of bone that lay there. She picked one up and turned it, staring at the marks etched into the white material. The bone was from the hip of some animal, perhaps a deer, triangular in shape, with two long flat sides.

“What are those?” Ki asked.

What did they teach young people at the university? Che Lu wondered. Of course, Ki was a geology major, not archaeology. Most of the students she usually worked with had preferred to remain in Beijing, prepared to participate in whatever happened in the upcoming weeks. That there would be another event like the Tiananmen Square massacre Che Lu had no doubt. She had lived through too many purges and bloodlettings in seventy-eight years to be optimistic that this turmoil would end peacefully. The key issue was would everyone behave like sheep and go back to the status quo after the blood had flowed, like they had in 1989? Che Lu, from listening to her students who politely but firmly declined to come with her, felt this time it would be different.

“They are oracle bones,” she answered.

Ki raised an eyebrow, inviting more information. At least he was curious, she would give him that. “They were used in ancient times by diviners to communicate with ancestors.” She felt the smooth bone under her wrinkled fingers. “In the beginning was not the city, but the word,” she murmured.

“Excuse me?” Ki politely asked.

Che Lu looked up. “Every other developing civilization on Earth was based on the growth of the city. In China, our civilization is based on the written word. In fact, our word for civilization, wenha, means ‘the transforming influence of writing.’” She held one of the bones closer so he could see the marks on it. “The interesting thing about these bones is that no one can read the writing. Most curious. After all, we had writing long before the rest of the world. But this writing, it predates even our own language.”

“Perhaps it is just some form of drawing, Mother-Professor,” Ki ventured. “No, it is writing,” Che Lu said.

“Where did you get those?” Ki asked.

“From an old friend.”

“And are they important?”

Che Lu nodded but didn’t say anything. She didn’t trust anyone else yet, although she knew that there was a call she was going to have to make. She wanted to be clear of the monitored phones in Xi’an, though, before doing that.

“Do they relate to Qian-Ling?” Ki asked.

“They were found near the tomb,” Che Lu acknowledged. She saw a small town approaching. Tracking the single telephone line to a small store, she indicated for Ki to stop there.

She walked inside and greeted the proprietor. She held out a wad of cash, and asked to use the phone to make a most important call. The cash was more than the proprietor saw in a month, and the old man was most happy to oblige this strange woman.

Che Lu dialed on the old rotary device, getting the local operator. Slowly she worked her way through until she had an international operator in Hong Kong who could make the final connection.

Che Lu stood still in the dilapidated store, watching her young charges buy food for the journey, as she listened to the faint echo of a phone ring on the other side of the world. Finally there was a click, and a distant voice spoke in English.

“This is Peter Nabinger. I’m away from my office, but I do check my machine daily. Please leave your name, number, and a short message and I’ll get back to you as quickly as possible.”

There was a beep and Che Lu spoke in hushed English. “My name is Professor Che Lu. I am the head archaeologist with the Imperial Museum in Beijing. I understand you can read the high rune language. I have oracle bones in my possession that I believe are inscribed in that language. They were found near the Imperial Tomb of Gao-zang at Qian-Ling. I am going into that tomb. I believe the tomb may be connected with the Airlia somehow. If you wish to find me, I will be there.”

She put the phone down and turned to her students. “Let us continue on our way.”