Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

She heard someone shout, ‘Cut!’, and then the third assistant listened intently to a garble of instructions coming over the walkie, before relaying them in Chinese to a cluster of production runners in the square below, who began rounding up the extras. She waved Margaret on, and Margaret walked up the steps to the stele pavilion. From here she could watch the activities in the square below as well as the crew resetting at the diamond wall. Months of preparation, she reflected, dozens of people, hours of filming, all to put a few minutes on screen. She was not sure she would have the patience to survive in a business like this.

When Margaret got back to the control truck Chuck was more animated than she had seen him all morning. A tall, lanky man, with a shock of prematurely grey hair, he seemed to have folded himself over the control console and was talking rapidly into his walkie-talkie. ‘We get one shot at the master, guys,’ he was saying. ‘We get it right, or we spend the rest of the day setting it up again.’ He had lit a cigarette, the first she had seen him smoking. He waved it at her apologetically when he saw her. ‘Sorry about this,’ he said. ‘I only smoke when extremely stressed. So if you ever see me with a cigarette in my hand you know I’m about to implode. Design have been setting this up for days. It’s cost an arm and a leg, and I don’t want to have to reshoot.’

‘What’s the scene?’ Margaret asked.

‘It’s the moment when they remove the first bricks from the diamond wall and open the tomb. Special effects are great.’ He paused. ‘I hope.’ Then he grinned and puffed some more at his cigarette. ‘I’ve got three cameras on it, so it had better be good.’

Margaret saw that two other monitors, which had previously been black, now showed the pictures being fed from the other two cameras. The master shot was set wide and showed the ladder leading up to the top of the inverted V. Dozens of extras dressed as peasants in blue cotton Mao suits were gathered around the foot of it. The actor playing Hu Bo stood at the top of it, a trowel-like implement in his hand, ready to start digging out the bricks.

Another camera had been set somewhere higher up the wall, giving a view from above Hu Bo, down to the upturned peasant faces. The third camera was set low, among the legs of the gathering at the foot of the ladder. In the background Margaret could see camera and crew. She said to Chuck, ‘Are we meant to see them?’

Chuck laughed. ‘They’re supposed to be the film crew that shot the real opening of the tomb. That’s how we know exactly what it was like. We’re going to intercut our stuff with some of the original footage.’

It was another forty-five minutes before they were ready to go for a take. Hu Bo and the peasant Wang Qifa had run through their lines several times, going through the actions of removing the first brick without actually doing so. Sound recordist, camera operators, lighting director, all seemed happy to go for it.

‘OK, Dave,’ Chuck said. ‘When you’re ready …’

Dave, a burly young man with long red hair beneath his baseball cap, gave a thumbs-up to camera and ducked out of shot. Then Margaret heard him on foldback. ‘OK everyone, quiet please. Roll VT. Very still. And … action!’

Wang Qifa, clutching a trowel, climbed the ladder to join Hu Bo. ‘ What are you doing? ’ Hu Bo asked.

‘ I thought we might remove the first bricks together ,’ Wang Qifa replied.

‘ Ah, but there might be hidden weapons ,’ Hu Bo replied. ‘ And chickens’ blood is not always foolproof. You’d better wait at the foot of the ladder and I’ll hand down the bricks. That way only one of us will get killed. ’

That was enough to send Wang Qifa back down the ladder. It was deathly silent as Hu began scraping with his trowel to remove the first brick. The overhead camera caught, in close up, the concentration on his upturned face. The brick slowly came loose and, using both hands, he pushed and pulled it from side to side until finally it came free of the wall. There was a loud pop and a sucking sound like the rushing of air. A voice shouted, ‘ Poisonous gas! ’ And almost immediately a thick black mist came belching out of the opening, accompanied by a noise like the growling of an animal.

Hu put his hand to his mouth, dropping the brick, and slid down the ladder, choking and coughing. The peasants had all thrown themselves to the ground as the mist descended and engulfed them. The air was filled with the sound of choking.

Then Margaret saw, on the third monitor, a figure emerging from the mist, incongruous in white shirt and jeans. On some signal she couldn’t see, the coughing stopped and the set became quiet. Michael addressed himself to the camera in an eerie silence while still walking towards it, the black mist billowing around his legs. ‘But it wasn’t poison gas. It was simply an accumulation of rotten organic materials released by the inrush of air after nearly three hundred and forty years of decay. Vile and unpleasant, but not toxic. And if there were hidden weapons within, they were still to be encountered.’

‘Cut!’ Chuck shouted. ‘Brilliant! Check it. Sound, do you need a wild track?’

A voice came back from somewhere. ‘Yeah. Lots more coughing and choking.’

‘OK, we’ll do it after we’ve checked tape. Dave, kisses all round. Tell Design I owe them a very large drink.’

*

It was cold in the Underground Palace, and damp, and Margaret shivered. Michael put his jacket over her shoulders, covering her thin cotton blouse. And she wasn’t sure whether it was the cold or his touch that raised goosebumps on her forearms. She shrugged the thought aside and looked around the vast chambers with their arched roofs and shook her head in amazement. ‘I had no idea this would be so big.’

‘Built from giant stone blocks, each one hand-cut and polished,’ Michael said. ‘The cost of building the tomb nearly bankrupted the country.’

‘And there were no hidden weapons after all?’ Margaret was disappointed.

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Well, isn’t that a bit of a cheat? Building your audience up to think there were?’

‘No,’ Michael said earnestly. ‘I want the audience to experience the same sense of the unknown, of hidden dangers, as Hu Bo and the others. So the tomb wasn’t booby-trapped, but they weren’t to know that. And then once they were inside they had other problems. They couldn’t open the huge marble doors to any of these chambers, including the door to the central vault.’

Margaret looked at the doors. They were massive studded affairs that must each have weighed several tons.

‘They were locked, apparently from the inside,’ Michael said.

‘You mean people locked them and then stayed in here to die?’ Margaret was shocked.

Michael smiled. ‘For a while they thought that might be the case. Then Hu discovered the secret of a hook-shaped key that could be slipped between the doors to move a stone buttress on the other side, and one by one they managed to open all the doors. To find the chambers empty.’

‘Empty?’ Margaret was surprised. ‘So the emperor wasn’t buried here after all?’

‘For a time they thought perhaps the tomb had already been robbed. They found three white marble thrones, one for the emperor and one for each of his empresses. There were various sacrificial objects, but no coffins. Until,’ he said, ‘they opened the very last chamber at the far end.’ And he led her past the marble thrones to the end chamber. ‘And there, on a raised dais, each on its own golden well, sat the coffins of the emperor and his two empresses, surrounded by twenty-six red lacquered wooden chests.’