‘That’s good. You may pay a visit to your uncle. For a change, we may choose to stay in that well-known temple for a couple of days when we arrive. This must have been an exhausting journey for you too, Yang.’

  ‘What do you have up—’ Yang did not finish the question with the phrase ‘your sleeve’. Judge Dee had long, long sleeves, so to speak. Yang had encountered quite many sudden, surprising changes of plans on Judge Dee’s part.

  ‘Whatever you decide to do, you don’t have to stay at the temple itself, Master,’ Yang continued. ‘It won’t be difficult to find a decent hostel or a cozy inn nearby, where you can relax far more comfortably. After all, you’ve already been worn out by the long, arduous trip, and we won’t arrive at the temple until tomorrow.’

  ‘Like hostels, the Dingguo Temple also provides room and board for its visitors. For men of letters, a short stay in the temple is considered to be more desirable than a hostel, and more fashionable too,’ Judge Dee explained. ‘Well-known poets like Men Haoran and Wang Zhihuan have left behind lines they’ve written on the temple walls. You may not know, but some people come to the temple solely for the purpose of reading and copying the poems.’

  ‘So you are thinking of dashing off several lines of your own poems on the temple wall, like other poets?’

  ‘No, I know better. I’ve not produced a single readable piece for a long time. Any lines of my poetry written on the temple wall would end up being a laughing stock for thousands of years.

  ‘But, far more importantly,’ Judge Dee continued, ‘I’ve heard rumors that other well-known poets have stayed at the temple, including celebrities like Luo Binwang. Hopefully, the monks might be able to tell me a little more about him and his stay. As you know, there’s no telling which details about Luo, no matter how trivial they seem at first, may turn out to be crucial to the investigation into his disappearance.’

  ‘If you insist on staying in the temple,’ Yang said with a touch of resignation, ‘that will be fine with me, Master. But after the flying knife in the fishing girl’s sampan, after the cleaver in Hua’s hut, I insist on staying by your side the whole time you’re there. Things are getting increasingly sinister, and I’m so worried.’

  ‘You’re being overprotective again, Yang, but you may book two adjoining temple rooms if you wish. I don’t think that will be a problem to arrange.’

  Yang helped Judge Dee into the cushion-filled carriage, before mounting the horse with a jump.

  ‘To the temple, then! Sit tight, Master,’ Yang said grumpily, and he cracked his whip overhead.

  The carriage started rolling along the road again, a bit more steadily than before. An invisible cicada started screeching in the woods behind them. It could not be the same cicada that was screeching in Luo’s poem.

  Judge Dee pulled up the curtain absentmindedly. Sitting upright inside the carriage, his back as straight as an aged bamboo pole, he soon felt unbearably suffocated by the heat. Perhaps he truly was getting too old for a difficult, intense investigation like this.

  Luckily, the road was gradually becoming wider, embracing a far-off vista of the verdant mountains after the rain. The white clouds unfurled nonchalantly against the distant horizon. For a moment, the view appeared so enchanting that it seemed as if it was intent on making a profligate offering to a thankless, murderous world.

  Judge Dee spotted a tiny scarlet animal jump out, fleeing along the gravel roadside. Possibly a scarlet fox. Could it have been the same fox he had encountered in another murder investigation? Judge Dee laughed at himself. That was a black fox – or a black fox spirit in surreal, superstitious imagination, and the crown prince had not been exiled out of sight at that time.

  Ironically, people had been calling the empress an evil fox spirit, shamelessly wanton, cunning, shrewd and cruel, with an almost supernatural bewitching power.

  But the present investigation was drastically different, with no supernatural elements. It was simply a missing-person case – on the surface, at least. Luo was still missing, but now three other persons – directly or indirectly related to the investigation – had been brutally murdered.

  The most inscrutable death, and the most unbearable too, had happened the previous night, with Little Swallow’s body lying on the deck of the sampan, next to him. In spite of what Judge Dee had told Mayor Qian about Dee himself having been the murder target, he knew it was not true. The assassin’s knife had been aimed at her.

  And that changed the whole picture of the investigation for Judge Dee.

  But the question of why she had been murdered was breeding, growing into so many related questions.

  Little Swallow had entertained Luo for a couple of nights, but Luo had not told her anything significant about him, not even his real name. As for the poem he’d written for her, and left in her care, it might have been nothing more than a few random lines, dashed off as poetry for the sake of poetry. The feelings he’d expressed could have been conventionally romantic poetic hyperbole. As Judge Dee had explained to Little Swallow, the allusions in the poem were commonly used among Tang dynasty poets.

  Like these other poets, Luo could have simply been carried away while putting down those sentimental lines. But that was all. What was true in the poem was only true for that moment, in that place. Not to mention the ironic fact that Little Swallow was an uneducated girl, unable to read and understand poetry.

  It did not take too long for Judge Dee to notice that his blue cotton gown was now drenched with sweat again. The carriage kept trudging on along the treacherous trail. He was growing old, he told himself, pushing open the paper window wider and fastening on his bamboo hat against the glaring light.

  Nine

  ‘History is a set of lies agreed upon.’

  – Napoleon Bonaparte

  ‘All the world’s a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players;

  They have their exits and their entrances;

  And one man in his time plays many parts …’

  – William Shakespeare

  ‘Mother, I have tried to make the far-off echo

  Yield a clue to what is happening to me;

  In the old palace people come and go,

  Seeing only what they want to see.’

  – Qiu Xiaolong

  That night witnessed Judge Dee checking into a small inn to break his journey. It was quite late, and a solitary lantern outside the inn shone feebly against the surrounding darkness. Will-o’-the-wisps were abundantly visible in the rice paddy field nearby.

  Judge Dee lit a medium-sized candle in the cozy inn room, spread a piece of paper out on the table and tried to make a list of possible connections.

  After circling a couple of names with his brush pen, and trying to connect them in his mind, he became lost in thought.

  Waves of frog croaks kept coming over from the field not too far away, irritating him. Eventually, he put down the list with a sigh. The crisscross lines he had drawn on the list of names had led him nowhere. Inexplicably frustrated and worn out, he repeatedly rubbed his temples hard against the onset of a splitting headache.

  Out of the window, he could hardly see anything, just indistinct shapes. To his surprise, despite the lateness of the hour, he could suddenly hear a monk’s chanting of scripture wafting over from some distance, the words barely perceptible. The chanting could not be coming from the Dingguo Temple, Judge Dee knew; Yang had informed him that the temple in question was still far, far away.

  The nighttime chanting continued in a broken rhythm, off and on, along with the night watchman’s melancholy, insistent knocker, which kept beating the time as he walked along the trail outside the inn.

  Judge Dee pushed open the window as wide as it would go and propped it open with a small wooden peg. The night appeared to be quite advanced. The full bright moon seemed to be suspended in the deep-blue sky, as if it were resting on a gigantic black crow’s wing.

  A black crow was commonly thought to be as ominous as a black fox spirit, in those countryside folk tales he had heard of.

  At last, Judge Dee sat back at the table. Then he began grinding a pine-smoke inkstick mechanically on the Duan ink-stone, hoping the pleasant ink smell might somehow help to clear his mind.

  Life consisted of nothing but appearances, seen from one’s own perspective. But was it possible for someone to step out of his own perspective, however briefly?

  After a long while, Judge Dee heaved another sigh. He had spent more than an hour and a half trying to connect the dots into a recognizable picture. Reading and re-reading the poems connected to the case. Reading between the lines and decoding them laboriously. Speculating about the things that could have connected the innocent victims who had fallen in this investigation. Instead of being a simple missing-person case, the investigation was becoming more and more like a complicated, diabolical serial murder case.

  He was finally putting down his brush pen, resting it on the ink-stone, when he was startled by an unexpected spark from the flickering candle. The brush pen rolled out toward the wall, leaving a light ink stain there.

  Writing on the wall!

  Was that another sinister omen? The investigation had been full of foreboding from the very beginning, causing collateral damage every step along the way.

  Alas, who would light a candle for Ning, for Hua or for Little Swallow?

  Judge Dee trimmed down the candle with his fingers, wondering whether he might finally be ready to go to bed, yet aware his mind was still churning.

  He told himself repeatedly that there was another full day waiting for him the next morning.

  Finally, he was just trying to close his eyes when he was galvanized by a new thought.

  He bolted up from the bed and clamped his hand over his mouth, lest he exclaimed out too loud in the thin-walled room, disturbing others in the tranquility of the night.

  Yes, there was something he had overlooked. Something serious, sinister. As an experienced judge, he should have been alert to this possibility much earlier.

  Judge Dee himself had been shadowed all the way – for a much more devilish purpose than he’d first thought. His visits to possible suspects, in his search for clues to Luo’s whereabouts, could have meant more than he’d suspected to those shadows walking beside or behind him. They’d watched him in deadly seriousness, followed him all the way from the very beginning. But instead of simply hoping to glean crucial clues from dogging the footsteps of a celebrated judge like Dee, they had been taking his suspects as their targets.

  He had known, of course, that he was under constant surveillance by Her Majesty. The unexpected appearance of Minister Yuwen at the meal with his poet friends had shown that clearly. But he had thought his shadows were there for one purpose alone: to ensure he carried out the investigation into Luo Binwang’s disappearance with utmost speed and sincerity.

  But what if they had another, secret, mission?

  What if they were there instead to find something of ultimate importance that Luo had left behind?

  What if no one – even the shadows – knew what this item of ultimate importance was, except the empress herself?

  Perhaps the shadows were tasked with both surveilling his investigation into Luo Binwang and retrieving this mysterious unknown item, Judge Dee thought. But at the same time, this parallel investigation must have far more importance to Her Majesty, because the way Dee’s shadows were investigating their own case was categorically different to his. As in the Chinese proverb, they did the ultimate job by pulling up the weeds by their roots. That was why whenever a suspect was approached by Judge Dee, they hurried over, searched around frantically and then murdered the suspect in cold blood …

  For what?

  For something even more crucial than the judge had been aware of. It was more than a diabolical attempt to find Luo and get him out of the way forever. Rather, it was to get rid of something of unimaginable importance that had been in Luo’s possession – and was now possibly in the possession of one of the victims.

  Judge Dee was unexpectedly reminded of an ancient proverb – from as early as the Spring and Autumn period: ‘You are guilty simply because of the precious jade you have in your possession.’

  To put it another way, this invaluable possession could be the cause of all of Luo’s current troubles. Whatever the cost, certain people lurking in the background wanted to take this item into their own possession – through murderous conspiracy, by hook or by crook, by knife or by cleaver.

  The current era was a time, Judge Dee knew, when emperors or empresses were absolutely powerful, absolutely corrupt, yet supposedly endowed with a divine mandate, so people would obey their orders, no matter how cruel.

  This theory – that the murders were being carried out in a desperate attempt to find something dangerous that Luo had left behind – was particularly evident in Little Swallow’s case. It accounted for the second thrust of the flying knife, attached with hooks and a long line, which had been thrown out for the very purpose of retrieving the parchment in her hand.

  Judge Dee drew several quick conclusions about the murder that had happened in the sampan, trying not to remember Little Swallow bleeding, breathing her last breath, her once-vibrant body growing as cold as ice.

  His first conclusion was that the knives could not have been thrown from afar. It had been near dusk, with poor visibility. They were on the river, at a distance from the bank. So, more likely than not, the knives had indeed been thrown from the black-topped sampan nearby, as Judge Dee had suspected.

  His second conclusion was that, as the two knives had flown at Little Swallow in such quick succession, there must have been at least two assassins in that other boat.

  And his third conclusion: whatever they had tried to snatch from the fishing girl, it must be of extreme political significance. It would have taken a lot to have such an assassination planned and executed on the very day Judge Dee had arrived at the Shu River.

  So the stakes concerning what Luo had possessed must be unimaginably high – regardless of whether the item was still carried by Luo himself or by somebody else connected with him, who was possibly concealing it on his behalf.

  But, Judge Dee reflected, the item so violently retrieved from Little Swallow’s body had been a poem, nothing more.

  Why had the assassins, lurking in the darkness, considered a love poem composed by Luo Binwang to be so dangerous to their master that they had to retrieve it? The assassins must have seen clearly it was just a piece of paper, and yet they still threw the knife with hooks and a line for the second time. It was because they could not read what was written on the paper at a distance.

  Judge Dee could come to no more conclusions. Not for the moment. But what was the next step he should take? He cudgeled his brains, yet to no avail.

  Perhaps it was just like another old Chinese saying. Judge Dee had no option but to wade across the river simply by stepping on one stone after another – however slippery and hardly visible beneath the surface of the darksome, treacherous water those stones might be.

  Ten

  ‘Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’

  – Immanuel Kant

  ‘Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

  Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

  Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

  And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

  Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

  But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

  Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

  Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.’

  – Wilfred Owen

  ‘The world is the totality of facts, not of things.’

  – Ludwig Wittgenstein

  It was almost noon the next day.

  Yang looked over his shoulder toward Judge Dee, who was once again sitting straight-backed in the carriage.

  ‘Look, Master. Once we’ve turned around the corner, we soon shall see the Dingguo Temple. You have to take a much-needed break when we arrive. Last night, I saw that the candle in your room at the inn was still lit almost till dawn.’

  ‘As always, you worry too much about me, Yang,’ Judge Dee replied. ‘It will be quiet and peaceful in the temple. The atmosphere there is supposed to contribute to rest, to self-cultivation and to poetic inspiration. And it may prove helpful to my contemplation over the cases too.’

  Yang did not make any immediate response to his master’s argument, having had more than enough metaphysical talk over the last several days from his pedantic master. He thought he could have guessed something about Judge Dee’s dramatic metamorphosis into a poetry-addicted bookworm. If anything, it probably served as a cover for the ongoing investigation as well.

  A couple of small apricot-colored banners streaming in a breeze by the roadside soon came into view, indicating that the Dingguo Temple was located in the vicinity.

  As the carriage rattled round another corner of the road, Judge Dee thought he could hear a bell – or a couple of them – striking, reverberating in the air, presumably coming over from the ancient temple in question.

  ‘So many temples in this area. A poem from the contemporary poet Du Mu is crossing my mind again,’ Judge Dee said to Yang, with a wan smile.

  Among the four hundred and eighty temples left

  behind from the earlier dynasties,

  how many of them in the south are mantled

  in the mist and the rain at this moment?

  ‘Yes, those bells must be ringing from the Dingguo Temple, Master.’