Chapter Eighty-Seven: The Imperial Mausoleum

The fat man was a man enough sort. Bitten like that, he did not make a sound. We had no bandages or hemostatic medicine with us, so Zha Wenbin lit a few incense sticks on the spot, gathered a pinch of ash, and pressed it onto the wound on the fat man’s foot. That one touch made the fat man hurt so badly his mouth twisted crooked, and then he tore a strip of cloth from his clothes and bound it tight, which at least managed to stop the bleeding.

“Do you know what bit you?”

The fat man had not seen clearly either; he only knew he had been bitten. “No idea. Anyway, I reckon if I’d been a beat or two slower, the Shi family line would’ve ended with me.”

“The thing in this water is probably fish,” Zha Wenbin said, looking at the winding ditch. “We only need to try once.”

He had a small cloth pouch on him, and inside it was a row of silver needles. Taoists had known medicine since ancient times, and Zha Wenbin had learned much from Master Ma Sufeng. He held the needles over the fire until they reddened, then bent one into a fishhook. He tore a thread from his clothes, broke off a bit of the remaining pancake, baited the hook, and cast it into the water.

At first, after half a minute or so, the water showed no movement at all. The fat man was injured, but his mouth was still busy: “It only eats meat, not dough. How about I cut a little more off my leg?”

“Fine, I’ll do it!”

“Hush…” Zha Wenbin said softly. “There’s a response.”

His hand jerked upward suddenly, but no fish came up. The line snapped cleanly.

Still, that was enough, because the thing had already been drawn to the surface. It was a fish about the size of a palm, and Zha Wenbin saw it clearly.

“Piranha?” I had heard of this kind of fish. They said that if a cow fell into the water and was besieged by them, in a minute there would be nothing left but a skeleton.

The fat man, holding that golden hairpin, said, “There are treasures all over the water below. Damn it, we should’ve thought of that. Using fish to keep tomb robbers out—I’ve never even heard of such a thing. When we get back, I’m getting some fish poison and wiping them out in no time!”

“Enough. Fish poison? Whether we can even get out is still the question.”

Zha Wenbin said, “The fat man was probably stabbed in the foot, and the fish came because they smelled blood. But I think we may have found a way out.”

“Where?” the fat man and I asked in unison.

“In the water!” Zha Wenbin analyzed. “If I were the tomb owner, I would have designed it exactly this way. The water here is brought in from the underground river outside. The fat man also discovered burial goods and coffins in the water when he went in, which proves that someone really was buried here. We’ve searched everywhere we can search, and this place isn’t that big. The only thing beyond our sight is the water. The greatest possibility lies there. In fact, if we can think of a way to block the source of this water, then this anti-theft ditch will naturally lose its purpose.”

The fat man kept shaking his head. “This... Master Zha, we’re not the reincarnation of some flood-taming hero. You want us to control water? Forget it...”

I thought Zha Wenbin’s idea was worth trying. “How do we know unless we try? The entrance to this river is only about two meters wide, and didn’t we bring a trenching shovel?”

“Little Master Xia, this place is all stone. There’s no mud for you to shovel. By the time you block this underground river, we’ll either starve to death or freeze to death.”

Zha Wenbin asked the fat man, “If we can’t block a river two meters wide, what about one half a meter wide?”

“Then it’s barely worth a try.”

“Good, then this is easy. I’ve seen that this place was dug according to the rivers of the Central Plains. On the Chinese map, the course of two rivers ultimately leads east to the sea. Generally speaking, if one were to choose a river to venerate, the Yellow River would certainly be first. So we find the Yellow River here, then find where it enters the sea. If I were the tomb owner, I would definitely design it that way!”

“Then where is his coffin?”

Zha Wenbin said, “I’m thinking about something. What exactly did Zhou Ziyuan come here for back then? The Peach Blossom Spring? I don’t think so. The person who designed his ancestral hall was certainly no ordinary man, and there’s a very good chance he was the same person who designed this tomb. If that’s the case, then what was Zhou Ziyuan’s greatest task when he was sent here?”

“You mean he was sent here to guard the tomb?”

“Very likely. Think about it: the dozens upon dozens of coffins in the Zhou family ancestral hall were all of people with high moral standing and prestige. Yet after death, once these people were sent into the ancestral hall, they had only one fate: to be trapped there forever, never to be reborn.”

He went on, “I had my suspicions long ago. Using a maze of hidden mechanisms to build an ancestral hall in the first place was already a problem. Which generation of descendants would not wish for their ancestors to be properly liberated as soon as possible, yet instead send their forebears in to suffer confinement? There is only one reason: no one knew the truth of that ancestral hall!”

“That Zhou Ziyuan was really something, wasn’t he? He made such a thing and trapped everyone inside to keep him company.”

“I suspect Zhou Ziyuan was framed too. He was an imperial first-rank official, and a civil servant at that, so his loyalty would certainly not be in doubt. For him to be sent to guard such a tomb, you can imagine the rank of the tomb owner. And the designer of this burial site thought very far ahead. Fat man, what is the highest-grade tomb you’ve handled in Xi’an?”

“The year I came back from the Northeast, I was in a bind. After getting into trouble at home, I ran to Xi’an and became the lowest of the low under Third Master Liu of the Ding family. The highest-grade one I handled was that winter. Supposedly it was a tomb of a Tang general, third rank. The things inside filled three huge baskets.”

“For people like you, if you found a royal relative, or even an imperial tomb, what would that mean?”

The fat man rolled up his sleeve. “You even need to ask? Wait—Master Zha, you’re not saying an emperor is buried here, are you?”

When Zha Wenbin said that, even I felt a shock in my heart. “For a first-rank official to be guarding a tomb, if not an emperor, then at the very least it has to be an empress dowager!”

“No matter who he is, historical records clearly show that Zhou Ziyuan was a Song Dynasty official, and that the Northern Song was moved to the Southern Song. The Southern Song capital was Lin’an, but the Northern Song was in Kaifeng. Our ancestors valued returning to one’s roots above all else. If it were me, I would definitely place the coffin at the location of Kaifeng—right there.” Zha Wenbin pointed to a bend in the river not far away. “Being buried there, near the Yellow River, would be the most reasonable arrangement.”

“But there are fish underwater...” The fat man had clearly already tasted the power of those strange fish. Indeed, with the underwater situation still unknown, even if Zha Wenbin deduced that the coffin of a Southern Song emperor was there, we might still not be able to retrieve it.

Zha Wenbin picked up the trenching shovel the fat man had been carrying. “We need to move quickly. The coffin should be quite large. If we can fill stones at the coffin’s location, we can greatly reduce the amount of work. The rocks here are mostly limestone. If we put our minds to it, it may be possible.”

The fat man struggled to his feet. “Leave this to me. I’ll do the digging, and you two haul the stones.”

I was a little worried. “Can you manage?”

“Better than waiting to die!”

With that, the fat man limped toward the stone wall beside us, while Zha Wenbin went to the position he had estimated and threw small stones into the water to fix the location.

As we kept hurling stones of all sizes into the water, I really felt we had a bit of the Foolish Old Man Removing the Mountains about us. Fortunately, Zha Wenbin’s estimate was accurate. After about three hours, we had built a small seal, but the gaps between the stones still allowed water to flow down from upstream. At that point, Zha Wenbin made a desperate decision: everyone strip off your clothes!

It was winter, and we were all dressed thickly—sweaters, padded coats, long underwear. When the three of us were left with nothing but our underclothes, we stuffed all those garments into the temporary dam, and finally managed to seal it, barely.

Then the water level downstream from the dam began to drop rapidly, and fish started leaping constantly from the surface. By then, twelve full hours had passed since we entered the pit. By the time, outside, dawn should already have broken.

A huge coffin, about three meters long and one and a half meters wide, gradually emerged from the water. Its surface was coated with a thick layer of white silt, the sediment of limestone. The fat man jumped onto the coffin and brushed away the mud with his hand, revealing a sheet of golden relief beneath it. Even I could tell it was the tail of a phoenix...

“We’re really going to hit it big!” the fat man said excitedly, forgetting his own pain. He knocked on the golden coffin, and a dull booming sound came from inside. Immediately he grabbed the trenching shovel and tried to chip off a corner, but Zha Wenbin stopped him. “Don’t do that. If you make a hole, we’ll truly never get out.”

The fat man looked back. The water level on the temporary dam had already begun to rise. The pile of shattered stones we had stacked probably would not hold for long. Downstream, the water level had almost fully appeared, and countless black fish the size of a palm were bouncing back and forth in that ditch. Their mouths were lined with sharp teeth like blades. At that point, even if an elephant had fallen in, it would probably have been gnawed clean.

As for what lay beneath those fish, there was even less need to mention it: countless boxes of all sizes were scattered there, along with some objects wrapped in silt. Some had already been exposed. A lantern beam swept across them, and the entire little ditch glittered with pearls and jewels. The sight was dazzling enough to blind a person.

The fat man and I were both staring fixedly at those things, but we had run into trouble. All those treasures were in the ditch, and the fish were still there. It was like a lion with its jaws open, and a stack of banknotes inside its mouth—do you reach in to take them, or not?

This made the fat man and me anxious beyond measure.

Zha Wenbin seemed completely uninterested in those things. He immediately ran downstream and shouted from there, “Come here. Stop staring at that useless stuff. If we don’t move now, we’ll freeze to death!”

Twenty meters downstream from the dam, a grille appeared. All the water was flowing out from there. It was called a grille, but really it was just a bronze plate, its surface punched through with a field of tiny holes, a little narrower than a finger, somewhat like the heavy manhole covers on modern sewers. When we saw that thing emerge, we knew we might be saved.