Undercover - In China - Book 7

Part 47 - Grandpa's got a boat

I broke a seal and pulled off the end cap. Inside were a dozen strips of wood with Chinese characters on them. 'Fortune strips,' Chen Ling said.

Licia laughed. 'This doesn't look like a message from Magistrate Yin Jia to Kongming. 'I think this one is predicting my future. It says, "You will go on a long, boring adventure with friends."'

 'Licia,' Miguel joked, 'you are reading it upside down. It really says it will be a quick exciting trip with enemies.' 

 I took the stick, turned it right-side up. 'You will meet new friends who will help you overcome great obstacles and save China.'

Miguel examined another stick. 'But you must depend upon your own skills. I guess that means no secret maps and no magical interventions of any kind.' 

 'What about a cloak of invisibility?' I laughed. 'That would come in useful.'

 'No,' Miguel peered at the strip intently. 'There's definitely no cloak of invisibility. We're on our own.' 

 Grandpa held one of the strips close to his face and squinted. 

 Licia said, 'Granpa Chen says they don't look like they will predict anyone's future.' 

 She gave Grandpa a small piece of paper and told him to hold it close to his eye and look through the tiny hole. Grandpa did as Licia suggested and then sat back with an exclamation. Licia said, 'He is amazed to see much better through the hole? I told him it was just a pin hole in a piece of paper. It magnifies like a lens.'

Licia arrange the strips vertically on the table. 'How do you know which way is up?' asked Miguel.

'How do you know if the Roman alphabet is upside down?' Licia asked irritably. 'You just learn it that way. Now let me concentrate while I arrange them in numerical order.'

'Those are numbers?' Miguel asked.

'We read from top to bottom and right to left,' Licia said. This horizontal dash is a one, two horizontal dashes is two and three horizontal dashes means three. The rest are a bit more complicated. The character for ten looks like a plus sign. Two plus signs means twenty.'

Licia lined up numbers on each strip to form an irregular chevron pattern and looked at them puzzled. 'Reading down each strip, it's poetry but it doesn't make sense.' Grandpa Chen leaned over and repositioned three strips. 'That's it!' Licia exclaimed. 'Reading across, there are three lines that make sense. '400 000 Northerners. Half men sick. Many dead. Sickness spreading. No - something - soon.'

'Can you read those two characters?' she asked Grandpa Chen before repeating it in Mandarin Chinese. She passed two of the sticks to Grandpa who squinted at them through the hole in Licia scrap of paper.

 'He says, zhan zheng means battle. It is easy to read through this hole.'

I said, 'How do you know the numbers are part of the message and not stick numbers.'

'Because one character in Chinese, "wan," means ten thousand.  So, 100,000 is written with just two characters "shi wan" or ten, ten-thousands,' explained Licia.

'Then, this means Cho Cho does not have a million men,' I exclaimed. 'He has only 400,000 and half of them are sick so they are not ready for battle. We've got to get this message to Kongming somehow. But, how?'

 'We could take the carriage to the Black Forest,' Miguel suggested, 'and then find a way to cross the river to find Kongming.'

 'You're not thinking,' Licia pointed out. 'The Black Forest will be full of Cho Cho's men.'

Miguel looked at Licia, Chen Ling and me and laid his right hand flat on the table. 'But we are all in this together, eh?' Licia and I each put our hands over Miguel's. Chen Ling looked puzzled until Licia explained. 

We repeated the gesture with our left hands but she put her right hand on top and then we swept them over our heads. 'Together! Forever!' we chanted raggedly. 

 'But, how are we going to find Kongming?' I asked. 

 'We are on the Long River (Yangste),' Miguel said. 'I could sail there, if I had a boat.'

'Grandpa's got a boat,' Chen Ling said. 

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