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Hulan left them clucking at the loudmouth’s wickedness. She was unsure of what to do next. She wandered down the hill to the pit wher
e Catherine Miller and Annabel Quinby labored. Hulan spent the next three hours scraping at the ground and making small talk as the rain cascaded down around them.
She did as instructed but kept most of her attention on the way Catherine and Annabel interacted. Annabel was more senior, but when Catherine uncovered a shard of pottery, their conversation seemed to be between equals. The piece turned out to be just a couple of centimeters in diameter, but the ancient artist’s design could still be read. Catherine told Hulan that these designs were one of the things that archaeologists and linguists looked for when trying to make the link between artistic patterns and the pictographs that composed the earliest archaic characters of what eventually became the Chinese written language.
This conversation reminded Hulan of something Stuart had said out at the dam site, and she brought it up now. “Your father told me that Brian found some pieces here with motifs that were different from those typically used by the Ba,” Hulan said. “What did he mean by that?”
“The Ba had very distinctive works of art,” Catherine explained. “They made weapons and common articles like pitchers and bowls that suggest a highly developed artistic, though warlike, culture. The Ba’s axes were of particular interest to Brian. They were made from jade or bronze, but they were similar in shape and style to the musical chimes found at Yellow River sites. This made Brian think that the Ba hadn’t developed their ax organically. He thought the shape had been transported—and its original use changed—from a musical instrument of the Yellow River peoples to a weapon.”
Annabel, who’d been listening to the exchange, looked up and added, “But how did that transformation happen, Inspector? Even today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we’re secluded within this gorge. So how did the Ba come to interact with the other more established cultures on the Yellow River? Why did the Ba need to be so warlike, and how did their artistry develop?”
“Your Four Mysteries,” Hulan said. As on her first day here, Hulan had picked up something sticky on her hands. It had to be some property in the soil. She thrust her hands out into the rain, rinsed them off, and wiped them on her pants.
“Two of them anyway,” Annabel responded. “Mystery One: How did the Three Gorges, which actually insulate through their geography, become a cultural watershed? And Mystery Three: What caused certain artistic styles to take hold here and continue for millennia? Brian was profoundly interested in those questions, which is why it’s all the more distressing that he chose to take artifacts from the site rather than let us study them in context.”
“What context, Annabel?” Catherine asked. “You know Brian’s pieces didn’t come from here.”
“You’re right as always, my dear,” the older woman admitted.
Hulan was thoroughly confused. “I thought you said that the ax Brian found was a Ba artifact.”
The two women looked at her as though she were an imbecile.
“Absolutely not! It looked like a Yellow River chime,” Catherine explained.
“The jade bis weren’t Ba artifacts either,” Annabel added. “The Ba didn’t have an emperor in residence who would have needed to commune with Heaven.”
“Most important,” Catherine picked up, “this is a subsurface site. Now consider the ruyi. How long do you think a dried mushroom would last under the soil before it deteriorated?”
Lunch under the large canopy—which had been moved yet again up the hillside—came as a reprieve. The meal was much the same as on the first day—rice, noodles, and a chicken dish. The conversation also bore a striking resemblance to the one Hulan and David had heard that day. As she had back then, Hulan tried to listen for anything that would help her solve the murders of Brian and Lily. But she didn’t see what that could be as the five vultures babbled on to Michael Quon about the patriotic benefits of the dam, a sentiment Catherine tried to shoot down by pointing out that the Chinese already had the Great Wall. Despite his obvious glee at being addressed by the beautiful foreigner, Li Guo felt compelled to correct her: “The Great Wall has always been a bad symbol. Since the days of the evil Qinshihuangdi, it has been a concrete example of our foreign policy—keep outsiders out.”
Dr. Quinby agreed, adding, “It has also symbolized China’s inability to compromise, its isolation from the outside world, and its assertion of superiority.”
“But, Annabel, you can’t believe that the dam is a good replacement.” This came from old Dr. Strong.
“Ancient China has been my vocation and my avocation,” she admitted, “but I would willingly sacrifice a few relics to change world perceptions.”
The other archaeologists nearly fell off their benches. “You can’t mean it, Doctor,” the professor from Heidelberg blustered, reeling from the betrayal of her words.
“I expect more from you, Professor Schmidt!” Annabel retorted. “Your treatise on the symbolism of the Great Wall is still the academic standard.”
Zai had sent Hulan here in part for her ability to see through political code, and she felt something trying to come together in her mind, but her speculations were disturbed when she sensed Li Guo’s dark eyes boring into her. “For the future,” he said, “we will have the dam to remind us of the Confucian ideal of a sage emperor who serves the people.”
Yes, that helped. She almost had it….
“You forget one thing.” It was the first time Michael had spoken, and it completely disrupted Hulan’s train of thought. “The dam, too, is a false symbol. You mustn’t be deceived into thinking that your government isn’t using it for its own corrupt ends. You block the river, you destroy your history and your heritage.”
“You’re a foreigner,” the vulture said to the Chinese American. “You don’t know our country.”
Michael held up his hands in the universal sign of surrender. “I’m only saying that an edifice can’t represent a country’s soul.”
“Matters of soul are a privilege, Dr. Quon,” Li Guo retorted, but his eyes still hadn’t left Hulan’s. “China needs to think about global identity. Brian understood this.”
Catherine brought them all back to safer territory by asking if anyone had been able to phone out, which led to a discussion of the weather and how it would affect their work, which led to the Four Mysteries, which led back to the dam, which would eventually circle back to a discussion of nationalism. No wonder Brian had taken to eating his lunch elsewhere.
As the group slowly broke up and the teams returned to their pits, Hulan decided to retrace Brian’s final movements one more time. Just as she reached the upper path, she spotted Angela, protected by a plastic poncho, kneeling in the mud near a cluster of dead bushes with her backpack at her side.
Angela looked up, and Hulan saw something in the young American’s face she hadn’t seen before. Suspicion or caution, Hulan couldn’t tell which. But before either of them could speak, Michael Quon’s voice came floating over Hulan’s left shoulder. “She’s looking for mushrooms,” he said. “She’s been doing that since she got here. Find anything interesting?”
