Chapter 51 Of Dreams and Schemes
It was a little after dawn on the morning after his near-drowning, when
Li Chang and his rescuers, Chung-hua and his daughter, stumbled into the
fisherman's house. It had taken all of the pair's strength to help their
newly-crippled friend from the boat to a bench . Li sat there, dripping and
exhausted while Chung-hua looked for a rickhsha to transport them to his simple
home, Li having assured them that he would make good the cost. Once there, they
clumsily maneuvered Li into a room that had once been occupied by Lily's
brother, who no longer lived there.
A short time later Chung-hua dispatched Lily to seek out an apothecary,
in hopes of finding something that would still the terrible pain in Li's
shattered legs.
While they waited for Lily to return, Li considered his situation. Even
though he had only known them for a short time, Li's instincts assured him that
both the fisherman and his daughter were honest and trustworthy. After
cautioning the fisherman never to speak of them, Li carefully wrapped Mai-Lee's
diamonds and pearls in a small cloth bag and secreted it underneath some old
clothes in a small dresser in his humble room.
Lily returned a few minutes later and offered him a cup of green tea into
which she had poured a few grains of the opiate she had obtained from the
apothecary. It did not take long for the drug to take effect, and soon Li's
eyes grew heavy-lidded and he drifted off into a troubled sleep. Exhausted by
his long ordeal and sedated by the drug, Li slept for many hours. Narcotics,
even mild ones, are know to cause strange dreams, and in Li's case his dreams
were macabre to the point of madness...
Grotesque phantoms clad all in black pursued him, no matter how quickly he
ran -- in his dreams, at least, he could still run. When at last he had managed
to escape the pursuing shades and stopped to rest, he woke to find himself lying
in the arms of Ming-tsu on a beautiful deserted beach, under a blood red sky.
But as his lovely mistress pressed the lush curves of her breasts and hips
against him, drawing him into a warm and intimate embrace, he suddenly realized
that the woman of surpassing beauty in his arms was in reality a woman only down
to her trunk; her lower limbs converged mermaid-like into the twisted black tail
of a scorpion.
But still the woman-thing kissed him ardently and drew him ever closer.
Just when his throbbing penis drew near to her font of desire, her ghastly
scorpion's tail curled up between her legs and stung him. Stunned,
semi-paralyzed by the scorpion's sting, Li could only lie on the beach and watch
helplessly as the otherworldly incubus lowered her sensuous red lips to his
maleness and began to suck what he sensed was the manhood, the life essence out
of his body.
The tide came in as she drained him of his seed, a tide whose every wave
forced him to struggle harder and harder for breath. As the tide began to
engulf him, the scorpion-woman metamorphosed once again, this time into a
horrifying two-headed amphibian. The two heads were dragon-like images of the
Brothers Chan, and the sea serpent's twelve lengthy tentacles closed tightly
around him and began to drag him out into a vast forbidding sea.
Soon finding himself underwater, Li struggled desperately to free himself
from the grasp of the sea-monster, and had almost done so, when the ghostly
figure of Wen-chi drifted toward him through the ocean depths with his arms
outstretched beseechingly. Li reached for his father's hand but missed, as the
tentacles tightened around him once more. A few moments later Liu had almost
struggled free again when he saw the pale image of Liu, nude, beautiful,
loving-eyed, swimming toward him, her arms extended to save him. But just when
her life-giving hand was inches from his, the two-headed monster spun him away
from his salvation and dragged his drowning body downward into the dark depths
of the watery abyss.
Li awoke from the nightmare shrieking like a madman and dripping with the
cold sweat of terror. Hearing his cry, Lily came to him, stroked his feverish
face and murmured softly to him, assuring him that he was safe and among
friends. Then she held his head and began to hum a familiar Chinese lullaby. A
lullaby which whose message was that a baby was to a family as a flower was to a
plant -- its crowning glory. As he drifted off to sleep, Li wondered if he
would live to father his own child, and if he did, whether he would be half so
good a father as Wen-chi had been to him.
When he awoke again, Lily brought him tea and set a bowl of rice before
him. He sipped at the tea slowly, and lifted the rice bowl toward his face with
one hand while he worked the chopsticks nervously with the other.
There was a small mirror on a table across the room and he looked into it
in silence while he ate; his face, scarred forever by the Chans' hot iron,
seemed to have aged fifteen or twenty years overnight. There was gray around his
temples that had not been there when he had dined with Luk Yee not so many hours
ago. Li resolved to grow a beard to cover the ghastly scar, and indeed the
sides of his face were never to be clean-shaven again.
Just as he would never be clean-shaven again, he sensed that the pain which
ravaged his shattered legs would never totally leave him in this life. It would
be a chronic, grinding pain which, over time, would play a role in transforming
Li Chang from the flawed but optimistic young idealist he had been three days
earlier into quite another kind of man.
Just then Lily re-entered the little room, bringing with her a richly
scented bouquet of flowers that she had just picked for his room. She helped
Li, still faintly shivering from the hours he had spent in the cold waters of
the bay, up into a simple wooden chair near the fire and placed a blanket over
him.
As Li thanked her for her care, his eyes welled with tears and his heart
ached with pain as his thoughts turned to that other gentle creature who had
brought the sweet scent of springtime to her every encounter. Liu, whose love
he had had, but never known. He thought, too, of his venerable 'father',
Wen-chi, who so richly deserved a more peaceful passing to the next world than
the one which the fates had chosen for him.
And then Li Chang, having nothing else to do, fought off the pain in his
limbs and began to review his circumstances. In his immobile condition, he was
unable to go to Luk Yee -- if indeed the Chans had not seized his friend as
well. And it would be unfair and dangerous to Chung-hua and Lily to summon Luk
Yee to their home, in the event that Luk was being watched. The less the old
fisherman and his daughter knew about his dealings with the Scorpions the safer
they were.
Li reached out and stirred the fire in the tiny fireplace in his room. He
sat and stared into the fireplace for a long time thinking and brooding.
Lily came back into the room two hours later to find Li still staring into
the fireplace silently, concentrating intensely. She sat and watched his
motionless figure for a long time, until his eyes suddenly brightened and he
nodded quickly to himself as if he had come to an important decision.
Then he glanced up, and saw the pretty young woman standing in the shadows
watching him. "Forgive me," he smiled. "I did not see you there."
"Sir, so rapt was your concentration that I do not think you would have
noticed a water buffalo standing in your doorway," Lily responded with a gentle
smile.
"Perhaps not, Lily, perhaps not, " Li responded softly as he turned in the
direction of the young maiden who stood against the door. Lily's slim but
shapely figure was hardly reminiscent of a water buffalo. She wore the simple
tunic and trousers of a working-class woman, but she wore them with poise and
dignity and a pleasing sense of self-worth.
Lily was only of average height, but her long legs gave her the impression
of being slightly taller. Her oval eyes had both the softness emblematic of
kindness, and the sparkle which betokens a vivacious nature. Her black hair
hung down in long braids. She had been unconsciously toying with one of her
braids and when Li had startled her by speaking, she had let the braid fall.
The dark plait of hair had accidentally come to rest across the lovely contour
of her right breast, a nicely curved cone which pressed subtly, but insistently,
against the thin silk of her maroon-colored tunic.
"Forgive me, Lily, for ignoring you. I must have appeared to be in a
trance, I suppose. But it was time well spent." Li stroked the side of his face
thoughtfully, and then grimaced as another wave of pain shot through his legs.
"My honored father was the wisest man I have ever known. I am faced with a very
difficult task and I have been trying to seek inspiration from him."
Lily nodded encouragingly, her dark eyes dancing in the firelight.
"Wen-chi -- that was my adopted father's name -- often quoted Confucius.
In fact, although he would never have boasted of it, I believe that he had
committed all of the Master's Analects to memory. But of all of the ancient
sage's wise sayings, do you know which of his thoughts lingers with me tonight?"
"Which one is that, sir?" Lily's face was both intelligent and beautiful
in the flickering firelight.
"The Master said: 'Where there's a will, that is lightly done'."
Lily nodded affirmatively. "It is true. Do you not think so?"
"Yes -- that is indeed the first step. But in my situation I fear that I
must draw not only on the wisdom of The Master, but also on the genius of his
great contemporary."
"Who would that be, sir?"
"Do you know of Sun Tzu, Lily?
"I think I have heard the name, sir. But that is all."
"He was the greatest general of his time. Perhaps of all time. He once
defeated Ch'u's army of two hundred thousand men, with a force of only thirty
thousand. So celebrated was his victory that the king, Ho Lu, asked him to put
his knowledge of strategy and tactics into a book that his other generals might
study.
Sun Tzu did as the king wished. And his book, "The Art of War", is
still read by generals and statesmen in every corner of the globe, twenty-three
centuries later."
"He must have been a brilliant general indeed, sir."
"Yes, perhaps the most brilliant of all. Can you guess, Lily, what Sun Tzu
called the opening chapter of "The Art of War"?
"No sir," Lily blushed, "I'm sorry, but I could not guess."
"He called that first chapter, 'Laying Plans' ". And Li Chang turned
slowly back toward the fire, and stared into it with the intense concentration
of a general planning a difficult and dangerous campaign, one whose outcome was
greatly in doubt.
