Dragonkeeper4_BloodBrothers - (EPUB全文下载)

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AFTERWORD
I always said there wouldn’t be another book in the Dragonkeeper series. Ping’s story was finished, and I thought she deserved a nice quiet life. But after a while, the urge to get back into the world of dragons overtook me. I realised that as dragons live for up to 3000 years, I had scope for taking up Kai’s story later in his life. I decided I wanted him still to be a young dragon – about four hundred years old. I reached for my Chinese history books to see what dynasty that would put me in, only to discover that there was no dynasty at that time. I had landed myself in the period of Chinese history called the Sixteen Kingdoms, which was a period of chaos and division, a sort of Chinese Dark Ages. This period lasted for over a hundred years. China was divided and redivided into kingdoms of brief duration, often ruled by the so-called barbarian races that had invaded China.
It was a challenging era to research. I have discovered what I can in the limited resources, and imagined the rest. I am as always grateful for the research of historians who have studied the period. Nancy Steinhardt, Albert Dien and Ulrich Theobald were kind enough to respond to my email questions and help me out with the geography of the Luoyang area, and what to call China and India. Howard Wilkinson and Gabrielle Wang explained the art of calligraphy to me, and Steve Clavey helped me describe infected wounds in pre-modern terms.
I’d like to thank my husband John and my daughter Lili for their support (“You always say this one’s worse than the others”). No, really, I couldn’t do it without them. They both read early drafts and made pertinent suggestions. Lili came to my rescue with some crucial plotting brainstorming.
Thanks also to Jess Owen and Suzanne O’Sullivan for their careful and thorough edit. And to Sonia Kretschmar for her fabulous cover illustration and Gayna Murphy for her beautiful design.
Special thanks to Maryann Ballantyne for her calm support, insightful comments and language expertise.
Chapter One
BRUSH AND INK
An oil lamp cast its pool of light on a blank piece of paper. A hand entered the pale circle – a left hand gently holding a brush exactly perpendicular. In the top right-hand corner, the wolf-hair bristles touched the paper, the black ink soaked in. Fingers, wrist and brush moved as one, leaving behind a column of strong, neat characters, each one perfectly formed. The bottom corner of the paper was held down with an irregular piece of gemstone, de ............

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