This is an unofficial work of fan fiction. Indiana Jones, Short Round, and related characters are the property of Lucasfilm Ltd. This story is shared for entertainment purposes only and no commercial claim is made.
Act Three: The Dragon’s Eye
The monastery had no name that appeared on any map Li had consulted, which was either a coincidence or a policy, and he had learned to treat those two things as interchangeable when it suited him.
It sat in a fold of the hills two days east of Changsha, reachable by a path that had been worn into the hillside over centuries by feet that knew where they were going and saw no reason to announce the fact. The hills here were green in the particular way of Hunan in late spring — a dense, humid green that felt almost aggressive, as though the land was compensating for years of being fought over by insisting, very loudly, on being alive. Terraced fields stepped down the slopes below the path. Birds Li didn’t know the names of moved through the canopy above it. Hartley, who had been struggling since the second hour of the first night’s walking, had stopped complaining somewhere around dawn and entered a state of focused endurance that Li found unexpectedly moving.
Chen set the pace. He moved through the hills with the quiet efficiency of a man who had made this walk before, or walks very like it, in conditions he declined to describe. He and Li had spoken little during the two days — the kind of comfortable functional silence that develops between people who have established mutual respect quickly and have nothing left to prove to each other. They communicated in brief exchanges when the path required decisions, in glances when it required attention, and otherwise left each other alone.
Hartley walked between them and thought, which was what Hartley did when he had nothing else available.
The monastery announced itself first as a smell — incense and woodsmoke and something floral that Li couldn’t identify — and then as a sound, a low intermittent bell that carried through the trees with the particular quality of a sound that had been made in the same place for a very long time and had worn a groove in the air. Then the trees thinned and the outer wall appeared, old stone the color of dried tea, the gate set into it without ornament or announcement.
Li stopped.
He set his pack down and straightened his jacket, which was the equivalent, in the context of everything he was and had been, of preparing to enter a room on its own terms rather than his. Then he went to the gate alone and knocked.
The monk who answered was young — younger than Li, which was itself surprising — with a face that had settled into a stillness that most people took decades to develop. He looked at Li without suspicion and without welcome, the look of someone who reserved both for later in the conversation.
Li spoke to him in Mandarin, formally, using a register that acknowledged the context without performing deference he didn’t feel. He said who he was — not his Oxford credentials, not his connection to Chen, but his actual name, offered plainly, the name he had guarded for years on the streets of Shanghai and released only when it meant something. Wan Li. He said they had come a long way, that they needed shelter and a conversation, and that they came without weapons and without the intention of taking anything that was not given.
The young monk looked at him for a moment. Then he looked past Li at Hartley and Chen on the path, making whatever calculation monks make about the nature of visitors.
He stepped back and opened the gate.
The abbot was a man of perhaps seventy-five who moved through the monastery’s inner courtyard with the unhurried authority of someone who had long since stopped distinguishing between the sacred and the everyday and found the resulting simplification restful. His name was Brother Kongming, and when Chen introduced him he looked at Chen with the expression of someone who had been expecting this visit for some time and was mildly relieved it had finally arrived.
They were given tea and a room with a low table and shown, without fanfare, that the monastery knew how to receive people who arrived through difficult country with urgent purposes. Someone brought a basin of water. Someone else brought food that was plain and sufficient. Hartley sat down with the care of a man whose body had just submitted a formal complaint about the last forty-eight hours, and no one drew attention to this, which was one of the things Li would later remember about the place.
“Chen told me about the disc,” Kongming said, in Mandarin, pouring tea with a steadiness that suggested his hands had stopped being susceptible to urgency sometime in the previous century. “Months ago, when he first contacted me about the rubbing. Before he knew about the soldiers.”
“You’ve been expecting us to need to come quickly,” Li said.
“I’ve been expecting something to happen quickly. Things have been moving quickly for four years. Why would they stop?” He looked at Li over his cup. “You are younger than I expected.”
“People keep saying that.”
Something shifted in the old man’s face. Not quite a smile, but the lineage of one. “The rubbing is in the library. I’ll take you there when you’re ready. But first —” he looked at Hartley, then back at Li, “— your professor needs to eat something before he looks at anything important.”
Li translated this. Hartley, whose Mandarin was not equal to the abbot’s speed, caught enough to look briefly affronted and then began eating.
The library was a long room at the back of the monastery, low-ceilinged, lit by narrow windows that admitted the afternoon light at an angle that seemed calculated, though whether by design or accident Li couldn’t determine. The shelves held scrolls and bound texts in a density that suggested centuries of accumulation without any particular plan of disposal. It smelled of old paper and stone and the faint sweetness of the incense that moved through the entire building like a slow tide.
Kongming produced the rubbing from a locked cabinet without ceremony — a large folded paper, darkened at the creases, the ink impression clear and precise beneath Li’s hands as he spread it carefully on the table. Hartley leaned in immediately, his tea forgotten, his exhaustion apparently suspended by the proximity of something that required his full attention.
Li set the disc beside it, lifted from its nesting with the same care he’d handled it since Changsha.
For a long moment there was no sound in the library except their breathing and, distantly, the monastery bell.
Li read the rubbing against the disc inscription, moving between them in the way he’d been trained — not searching for correspondence directly but reading each as its own complete thing first, letting the forms establish themselves, before looking for the place where they reached toward each other. It was the method Hartley had taught him and he had improved on it slightly, in the way that students improve on methods when they understand the principle well enough to adapt it. He didn’t mention this to Hartley.
The disc spoke in the register of Han fu poetry — descriptive, elliptical, building its argument through accumulation rather than statement, in the tradition of classical verse that embedded its real meaning beneath its apparent one like a river beneath ice. It described, in language of extraordinary precision, something that rotated. Something that contained. Something that had been placed within something else, in a location described through the relationship between three landmarks that were themselves described in the verse rather than named.
The rubbing answered it.
Or rather — and this was what stopped Li’s breath for a moment — the rubbing didn’t answer the disc. It completed a question that the disc had been half of. Together they formed a single text that had been divided, deliberately, at its own center point, each half meaningless without the other, both of them describing, when read as one, not a location but a method. A way of reading something that was itself already a text.
He sat back.
“It’s not a map to an object,” he said.
Hartley looked up.
“It’s a map to a reading. A key to something that’s already written — somewhere else, in something else — but that can’t be understood without this.” Li looked at the two pieces, the disc and the rubbing, their inscriptions finally aligned on the table before him. “Someone divided this intentionally. Not to hide the location. To hide the knowledge of how to approach the location. Whoever found the cache without this wouldn’t know what they were looking at.”
Hartley was very still in the way he became very still when something displaced his prior framework entirely and he was building a new one.
Then he leaned over the rubbing and pointed, without touching it, to a sequence of characters in the third register of the text. “Read that construction,” he said quietly. “Against the closing movement of the disc inscription. The orthographic parallel.”
Li read it. Read it again.
“That’s —” He stopped.
“Han chancellery script,” Hartley said. “A very specific sub-variant. Used in the imperial workshops for approximately forty years during the middle Western Han. Not widely documented. Not something you’d find in a standard scholarly reference.” He looked at Li steadily. “I wrote my doctoral thesis on it. There are perhaps five other scholars currently alive who would recognize it on sight.”
Li understood then — completely, with the particular clarity that arrived when separate pieces of a thing suddenly arranged themselves into their actual shape — what Chen had been protecting. Not an artifact. Not a location. A text that could only be unlocked by people who understood both the verse form and the script variant, and that pointed toward something whose nature could not even be grasped without that unlocking.
“What does it point to?” he asked.
Hartley was quiet for a long moment. “Based on the directional verse structure, the landmark relationships, and the specific terminology used for the containing vessel —” He paused. “A library. Hidden during a dynastic collapse. Imperial texts. Things that were supposed to have been destroyed and weren’t.”
The room held what this meant for a moment.
“Things that would matter enormously,” Li said, “to anyone trying to establish the legitimacy of imperial authority over China.”
“Yes.”
“Which means what Fang is actually looking for is not a jade disc.”
“No,” Hartley said. “The disc is merely the door.”
The sound came at dusk — not dramatic, not loud, simply present in a way that wasn’t present before. Li had been half-expecting it for two hours, which was why he was already at the window of the room they’d been given when it arrived: the sound of feet on the path below the monastery wall, too deliberate to be locals, too quiet to be soldiers.
Fang Ruoyang entered the courtyard through the gate that the young monk had failed to secure after the evening prayer — an oversight that Li suspected was not, in fact, an oversight — with four men behind him and the contained purposefulness of someone who had been patient for a long time and had decided that patience had reached its conclusion.
He was exactly as Li had constructed him from the glimpse in Hong Kong and the description Chen had provided: a man in his forties who wore his education and his compromise with equal elegance, who had decided at some point that the most practical relationship with power was the one that served it rather than the one that resisted it, and who had not looked back.
He looked around the courtyard with the proprietary attention of someone taking inventory. Then he looked at Li.
“The disc,” he said, in Mandarin. Calm. Almost conversational.
Behind Fang, his four men stood with the quality of stillness that suggested they had made certain preparations. Li assessed them with the rapid peripheral attention he’d been developing since childhood — two experienced, two less so, the less experienced ones watching the experienced ones for cues, which meant the nervous energy in the group was triangulated through a single point. He filed this.
“Mr. Fang,” Li said. “You’ve come a long way.”
“So have you.” Fang’s eyes moved to Hartley, dismissing him in the way Li had anticipated — the reflexive subordination of the British academic to the threat assessment, the assumption that the older Western man was the authority and the young Chinese man was the accessory. “I’d like the disc and whatever documents you’ve found here. Then you may leave.”
Hartley began to say something in English. Li put a hand up, briefly, without looking at him, and Hartley stopped. This was a new development in their relationship, and both of them knew it.
“There’s a problem with that arrangement,” Li said to Fang.
“Tell me.”
“The disc alone is not what you need. You know this, or you would have taken it in Changsha.” Li watched Fang’s face. The slight tightening around the eyes confirmed it. “You need the complete text. The disc and the companion rubbing. And you need someone who can read the script variant, which is not a common skill.”
“I have scholars available.”
“You have scholars who can read standard Han chancellery script. This is something more specific.” Li kept his voice even. “What I’m offering you is this: the disc is in that room. The rubbing is in that room. Between Professor Hartley and myself, we have the expertise to provide you with a full translation of the combined text.” He paused. “If you want the key, you need us to turn it.”
Fang studied him. The courtyard held its breath.
“And your condition?”
“We walk out. All three of us. Tonight. The translation in exchange for safe passage.”
It was not, strictly speaking, what Li intended to offer. It was what Fang needed to hear while Li determined whether the thing he’d actually arranged — during the two hours since he’d heard feet on the path — had had time to take effect.
He looked, without appearing to look, at the young monk standing in the shadow of the library doorway. The monk met his eyes briefly and then looked away. Li had spoken to him during the afternoon, in the language of plain mutual interest — these men would not be good for this place, and this place had other friends in the hills it could reach before nightfall if it chose to.
Whether it had chosen was the question.
Fang was speaking, negotiating the terms of an agreement he intended to honor only far enough to serve his immediate purpose, when the monastery gate opened again.
Not dramatically. Not with force. Simply opened, and through it came six men in Nationalist uniforms — not many, but enough — led by a man that Chen, standing at Li’s shoulder, recognized as a local commander who had been, for three years, the quiet recipient of Chen’s careful intelligence about Japanese troop movements in the province.
Fang turned.
His four men looked at the six soldiers and then at Fang, performing the arithmetic of the situation with the speed that self-preservation encourages.
The two experienced men were first to understand what the arithmetic produced. One of them said something to Fang, quietly, and then set down what he’d been holding.
Fang stood very still for a moment — the stillness of a man who has been patient for a long time, encountering the limit of what patience can accomplish — and then something moved through his expression that was almost, but not quite, like the face of a person accepting an outcome they had known was possible.
He looked at Li.
“You made the contact before we arrived,” he said. Not an accusation. An assessment. The tone of a professional recognizing a professional.
“I made it when I heard you on the path,” Li said. “I needed two hours. I had two hours.”
A long beat.
Then Fang walked to the gate, and his men went with him, and the Nationalist soldiers let them pass — because the soldiers were there to protect the monastery and its contents, not to arrest a man who had committed no provable crime in their jurisdiction, and because Li had asked for exactly that and nothing more when he’d spoken to the monk that afternoon.
He watched Fang go.
He didn’t let himself feel relieved. Relief was a response to a conclusion, and Fang was not a conclusion — he was a postponement, which was the best you could accomplish against a man like that in a single evening.
Chen appeared at his elbow. “You let him go.”
“Stopping him would have cost something not worth paying tonight.” Li watched the gate close. “He knows what the disc points to now. He’ll look for another way.”
“Then this isn’t finished.”
“No.”
Chen absorbed this. Then, with the philosophical compression of a man who had been managing unfinished problems for four years: “At least the monastery is still standing.”
They left before dawn — Li, Hartley, Chen, the disc wrapped in its careful nesting, the rubbing folded and placed inside Hartley’s jacket against his chest, where the professor carried it with the particular posture of a man aware that he is transporting something irreplaceable. The Nationalist soldiers had gone. The monks were at their morning prayers. Brother Kongming stood at the gate and saw them out with the equanimity of someone who had watched many departures and had no expectation that any of them were the last.
At the gate Li stopped and turned back.
“The disc,” he said to Kongming. “It should come back here when this is over. Not to Oxford. Not to a museum.”
Kongming looked at him with the expression Li had been collecting from older men since the age of nine — the look of someone revising a prior assessment upward, carefully, without announcing that there had been a prior assessment.
“When this is over,” the old man said, “bring it yourself.”
Li inclined his head. Then he turned and followed Hartley and Chen down the path, into the early light that was doing what early light does in the Hunan hills — arriving slowly, without drama, turning the world from grey to green by degrees too gradual to observe directly, until suddenly it was simply there.
Hartley spoke first, an hour down the path, in the tone of a man who has been composing something since before dawn and has finally found the right opening.
“The second disc,” he said. “The Dragon’s Eye. The one that actually completes the cache’s location rather than merely explaining how to approach it.”
“Chen has a theory about where it is,” Li said.
“I know. He told me last night.” Hartley was quiet for a moment. “He said you already knew.”
“I suspected. The verse structure suggested a twin object kept at a significant distnace from the first. A safety precaution.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t know for certain until I read the combined text.” Li glanced at him. “Then the situation required other attention.”
Hartley walked in silence for a moment. Around them the hills were doing their insistent, vigorous green. A bird called from somewhere above the path. The world was entirely indifferent to what had happened in a monastery courtyard the previous evening, which Li found, as always, clarifying rather than discouraging.
“Li,” Hartley said.
“Professor.”
“I want to be clear about something.” Hartley chose his words with the care he brought to his written work — each one placed deliberately, nothing wasted. “What you did last night. The contact you made, the time you calculated, the manner in which you handled Fang.” A pause. “I was not useful to you in that courtyard.”
“You were extremely useful to me in the library.”
“That is true. But they are different rooms.” Hartley looked at him. “I want you to know that I understand the difference. And that I am — adjusting, is I think the right word — my understanding of what this partnership is.”
Li thought about this for a moment.
“In Oxford,” he said, “you are the senior partner. In the field, it depends on the field.”
“Yes,” Hartley said. “That’s exactly right.”
They walked on in silence for a moment. Then Hartley said: “The library. The cache. We’re not going after it.”
It wasn’t a question, quite. But it wanted an answer.
“No,” Li said.
“Why?”
Li considered the hills, the path, the river appearing below them by degrees. “Because finding something isn’t the same thing as being ready to disturb it.”
Hartley received this without argument. He was quiet for long enough that the bird called again from somewhere above the path, and the light moved another increment toward full morning.
“The disc goes back to the monastery,” he said finally.
“Yes.”
“And the rubbing?”
“Chen will know where it belongs.”
Hartley nodded once, slowly, the nod of a man closing a door he had opened with considerable effort and finding, somewhat to his own surprise, that closing it felt correct.
They walked on. The path descended toward the river valley where a boat would be waiting, arranged through one of Chen’s contacts the previous afternoon along with everything else Li had arranged quietly in the hours before Fang arrived. Below them, the ribbon of the Xiang was just becoming visible between the hills, silver in the early light.
Li walked and did not think about Fang, or the second disc, or what a hidden Han imperial library would mean if it was ever found and who would claim authority over it. He would think about all of those things later, in the right order, when there was space for them.
He thought instead about a letter in his pack — a letter he had not opened since Oxford but carried with him the way he carried the Yankees cap: not because he needed to read it, but because some things you kept close not for the information they contained but for what they represented. A man who had looked at a kid on a street in Shanghai and decided, against all available evidence, that what he saw was worth something.
He thought about that for exactly as long as it was useful.
Then the path turned, the river appeared fully below them, and there was a boat at the bank, and Chen was already moving toward it, and the day was beginning its work.
Li followed.
End of Short Round and the Dragon’s Eye
The Confusing Middle 