The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  He had forgotten that we existed, and we tiptoed out and started down the hill in the rain. Li Kao had been quite serious about trying the Elixir of Life on an elephant. At the bottom of the hill was a poor old beast that was used to haul logs to the sawmill, and its master was not kind. There were cruel goad marks on the elephant’s shoulders, and it was nearly starved. We climbed the fence and Li Kao put one tiny drop of the elixir on the tip of his knife blade.

  “Do you consent?” he asked softly.

  The elephant’s sorrowful eyes were more eloquent than words—for the love of Buddha, they said, release me from this misery and return me to the Great Wheel of Transmigrations.

  “So be it,” said Master Li.

  He gently pressed the blade against an open wound. The elephant looked surprised for an instant. Then it hiccupped, hopped high into the air, landed on its back with a mighty crash, turned blue and peacefully expired.

  We raised reverent eyes to the House of Horrors. “Genius!” we cried, and the thin rain wept softly, and an old, cracked, crazy voice drifted upon the cold wind:

  In front of our window

  Are the banana trees we planted,

  Their green shadows fill the yard.

  Their green shadows fill the yard,

  Their leaves unfold and fold as if

  They wish to bare their feelings.

  Sadly reclining on my pillow

  Deep in the night I listen to the rain,

  Dripping on the leaves.

  Dripping on the leaves—

  That she can’t hear that sound again

  Is breaking my heart.

  I decided that the oceans had been formed from tears and when I thought of the tears that had been shed and the hearts that had been broken to serve the greed of the Duke of Ch’in, I was delighted that we were going after him with mayhem on our minds.

  We caught up with the duke in Tsingtao, where he was staying at the palace of an enormously wealthy woman whose oldest son served as the duke’s provincial governor, and with lavish bribes Li Kao arranged for us to slip past the guards one night. My heart was in my mouth as I grabbed the vines and began to climb, but then the breeze shifted, and an unmistakable fragrance reached my nostrils. I quivered all over.

  “Lotus Cloud!” I panted. “Master Li, my heart will break if I don’t see her!”

  Under the circumstances there was little that he could do except swear and box my ears as I swung rapidly across the vines. When I lifted my head over the windowsill I saw that Lotus Cloud was all alone, but then my joy turned to ashes.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Master Li whispered.

  “I forgot to bring my pearls and jade,” I said miserably.

  Li Kao sighed and fished in his pockets. At first he found only diamonds and emeralds, which didn’t interest Lotus Cloud at all, but finally he came up with a pearl that he had saved because of its rarity: jet black, with one small white flaw in the shape of a star. I would have preferred a ton of the stuff, but it was the symbol that mattered, so I leaned over and rolled the pearl across the floor toward my beloved’s feet. Soon she will see it, I thought. She will look up and grin and yell, “Boopsie!” and all my cares will vanish.

  She looked up all right, but not at me.

  “Fear not, my turtledove!” some lout bellowed. “Your beloved Pooh-Pooh approaches with yet another hundred pounds of pearls and jade!”

  The door crashed open and the provincial governor staggered inside with an armload of loot, which he dumped upon my black pearl. I sighed and sadly climbed back down the vines.

  “Pooh-Pooh?” said Master Li. “Pooh-Pooh? Ox, it may be none of my business, but I must strongly advise you against getting involved with women who call their lovers Boopsie, Woofie, and Pooh-Pooh.”

  “She likes to keep pets,” I explained.

  “So I have noticed,” he said. “Thank Heaven she doesn’t keep all of you in the same kennel. The noise at feeding time would be deafening. And now, if you have no objection, I suggest that we return to the matter of disposing of the duke and getting that ginseng root.”

  I climbed rapidly to the duke’s window and cautiously raised my eyes above the sill. The Duke of Ch’in was all alone in the room, seated upon a stool in front of a desk. Candlelight glinted upon his great golden tiger mask, and the feathers in his cloak shimmered like silver, but his gold mesh gloves lay upon the desk and his surprisingly small hands were bare as he added up on an abacus the amount of treasure that his tax trip had accumulated. Li Kao’s eyes glistened as he looked at the duke’s bare fingers.

  “He lives for money, so he can die for money,” he whispered.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the most valuable of his diamonds. The moon was very bright. Part of the vines were wild rose, which I had been careful to avoid because of the thorns, and he found a sharp cluster just below the windowsill. Li Kao placed the diamond in the center, and it turned it this way and that until the moonbeams caused it to explode with blue-white brilliance, and then he doused the thorns with the vial of the Elixir of Life.

  I slid back until we were concealed behind vines, and Li Kao began scratching the stone wall with his dagger—a very annoying sound. For some time we heard only the click of the beads as they slid rapidly over the strings of the abacus, but then a table scraped against the floor as it slid back, and heavy footsteps approached the window. I held my breath.

  The terrible tiger mask leaned out and peered down, and the diamond was sparkling like cold fire. The bare fingers hovered like a hawk, and then they pounced. I could clearly see punctures. At a modest estimate the Duke of Ch’in had received enough Elixir of Life to assassinate all of China and half of Korea and Japan, and I waited for him to topple over and turn blue. Instead he lifted the gem to the eye-slits in the mask and turned it appreciatively, and the metal voice that oozed through the mouthpiece held a definite note of pleasure.

  “Cold!” whispered the Duke of Ch’in. “Cold…cold…cold….”

  I was so stunned that I forgot to hold on to the vines, and we plunged forty feet before I managed to grab them again and break our fall. Unfortunately we were then dangling about ten feet above the heads of some soldiers who were leaning against the wall swapping war lies.

  “Wait for a cloud,” Master Li whispered.

  It seemed forever, but eventually a black cloud covered the moon, and I swung over the vines to the nearest window and crawled into a room that was pitch black. The darkness vibrated with heavy snores. Li Kao slipped off my back and tiptoed across the floor and cracked the door open. He closed it hurriedly.

  “Soldiers guarding the halls,” he whispered.

  We started back toward the window and froze. That damned cloud decided to move away from the moon, and we were pinned in bright yellow beams, and the snores stopped suddenly, and a grotesque figure sat up in bed and leveled a gangrened finger.

  “What have you done with that ginseng root?” roared the Ancestress.

  There Are No Accidents in the Great Way of Tao

  Soldiers dragged me across the floor toward the throne upon which sat the Duke of Ch’in, and thrust my face forward so that it practically touched the terrible mask. A hissing sound came from the mouthpiece as the clammy mind crawled over mine, and then the golden tiger jerked back.

  The great and powerful Duke of Ch’in was terrified. Saliva trickled from the mouthpiece, and the gold-meshed gloves trembled upon the arms of the throne, and an acrid stench of fear stung my nostrils.

  “I see the three handmaidens!” the metal voice whispered. “I see the ball and the bell and the flute! I see the Legs and the Arms and the Head of Power!”

  The duke was trembling so hard that his cloak of feathers fluttered as if for flight, but he finally forced himself to lean forward once more. The slimy brain moved fearfully over mine, and then I sensed relief and growing joy.

  “But I do not see the birds, or the feathers, or anything else of importance,” he said wonderi
ngly. “I see only those useless children, and the right quest for the wrong reason. You and your antiquated companion have followed paths that cannot be followed, defeated guardians that cannot be defeated, escaped from places where escape was impossible, and you have not had the slightest idea of what you were really doing, or where you were really going, or why!”

  Now the metal voice held a cruel gloating pleasure.

  “You have managed to annoy me, and you shall discover what it means to annoy the Duke of Ch’in.” The mask moved to the soldiers. “Take the old man and the boy to the torture chambers. They shall die by inches in the Shirts of Iron,” he commanded.

  Only the duke could have ordered such an execution, and I hasten to point out that in every other part of China the Shirts of Iron had long been relegated to museums that displayed the ghastly aberrations of the Dark Ages. Actually they aren’t made from iron at all, but from steel mesh that can be uniformly tightened by means of a neck loop or a screw in back. The shirts are tightened around the victim’s bare torso until flesh bulges through the holes in the mesh, and then the executioner picks up something hard and rough, a rock will do, and slowly scrapes across the shirt until there are no bulges. The flow of blood is carefully stopped, and the next day the shirt is shifted slightly and the process is repeated—and the next day and the next. A competent executioner can keep a victim alive for months, and the only hope the victim has is that he will go stark staring mad fairly early in the game.

  Li Kao and I had been wrapped in so many chains that we couldn’t move a finger, and the soldiers groaned under the weight as they carried us down a seemingly endless flight of stone steps. I counted eleven landings, each one guarded by more soldiers. The air grew thicker and fouler and slimy green water dripped from the black stone walls. Finally we reached the bottommost dungeons. Brassbound doors crashed open, and the panting soldiers carried us into a torture chamber that was decorated with blood and entrails. The executioner did not view us with friendly eyes. He was a fat fellow with a bald gray skull, a bright red nose, four yellow teeth, and a grievance.

  “Work, work, work!” he snarled as he bustled around us with a tape measure. “Do you realize that each Shirt of Iron must be individually tailored for the victim? Do you realize that it takes two full days to make a decent one? Do you realize that the duke has ordered me to finish your shirts in two hours? And then I have to give you your first scraping, and do you realize that a decent job of scraping takes another two hours?”

  He stepped back and leveled an indignant finger.

  “Look at those chains!” he snarled. “Do you realize that it will take another hour just to unlock, unwrap, rewrap, and relock those things? And do you realize that the Ancestress has ordered me to draw and quarter another prisoner? And do you realize that a decent job of drawing and quartering takes another two hours? When am I to rest, I ask you? Is there no pity? Is there no concern for the welfare of the working man?”

  He was not the only one with a grievance.

  “How about us?” the soldiers yelled. “We have to stand guard in this slimy hole until the prisoners die, and if you’re halfway decent at your job, that will take months! And that crud of a master sergeant refused to issue earplugs, and we’ll be stone deaf from the screams inside of a week! Look at those cockroaches! Look at those leeches! Look at that slimy dripping water! There’s fever down here as sure as you’re born, and even if we live to return to our wives, what good will it do us? The duke made us wrap these poor bastards in so many chains that they can’t move, and carry them down eleven flights of stairs, and quadruple hernias have made eunuchs of us all!”

  It appeared to be a day of grievances.

  “Woe!” somebody howled as feet pattered down the stairs. “Woe! Woe! Woe!” wailed the Key Rabbit as he trotted into the torture chamber. “The duke has ordered me to be present at the torture of my dearest friend and the most generous protector that my dear wife has ever had, and to make a full report of their sufferings! Good evening, Lord Li of Kao. Good evening, Lord Lu of Yu. It is delightful to see you again, but how can the duke to this to me?”

  The little fellow posed dramatically, one forearm across his brow and the other hand outflung.

  “I become violently ill in butcher shops!” he howled. “I faint when I cut my finger! Crimson sunsets make me dive beneath my bed! Bloodhounds drive me into screaming fits! I once threw up all over a very distinguished nobleman who introduced me to his blood brother! I disgraced myself at a state banquet when I was informed that I was eating blood pudding! And now I must witness the bloodiest execution ever invented by man! Woe!” wailed the Key Rabbit. “Woe! Woe! Woe!”

  “Damn it, get out of the way and let a man work,” the executioner snarled.

  He began to bang furiously on strips of steel mesh, and the soldiers panted and groaned as they carried us into an adjoining dungeon and dumped us upon the floor. They staggered out, clutching their hernias, and slammed the door, and we stared at the fellow who was to be drawn and quartered. He was attached to the wall with a leg chain, and he was eating a bowl of rice.

  “What are you doing here?” Master Li asked.

  “At the moment I am eating my last supper,” said Henpecked Ho. “Good evening, Li Kao. Good evening, Number Ten Ox. It is a great pleasure to see you again, although one rather regrets the circumstances. May I offer you some rice? They have even given me a small jar of wine. Quite decent of them, don’t you think?”

  “Wine, by all means,” said Li Kao.

  Henpecked Ho’s leg chain was just long enough for him to reach us and pour wine down our throats. They really were treating him with consideration because it was a very expensive wine: Wu-fan, which is jet black and so sweet that it tastes like molasses flavored with engraving acid.

  “Have you really been sentenced to be drawn and quartered?” I asked.

  “It’s a very distressing story.” He sighed. “Do you remember that I had spent sixteen years trying to decipher fragments of clay tablets?”

  “A very ancient ginseng fairy tale,” said Master Li.

  “Precisely, and do you remember that those grave robbers dug up a very large clay tablet? Well, it turned out to be the key to the whole thing. I could scarcely believe how quickly the pieces fell into place, and the story that emerged was so interesting that I could scarcely wait to see what came next. Then one day I entered my workshop and discovered that every clay fragment was gone, and I ran around weeping and tearing my hair until my dear wife told me to stop making a fool of myself. The Ancestress had remarked that fiddling with clay tablets was a frivolous hobby for a grown man, so my dear wife had ordered the servants to dump the tablets into the river, where, of course, they dissolved into mud.”

  “I would have slit her miserable throat,” Master Li growled.

  “Indeed you would have, and I thought about you a great deal,” said Henpecked Ho. “You had advised me to use an axe, so I stole an axe and went after my dear wife.”

  “Did you get her?” I asked.

  “I chopped her into pieces, and then I chopped her seven fat sisters to pieces. It was delightful,” said Henpecked Ho. “Then I came here to try to chop the Ancestress to pieces, but her soldiers caught me first. Oh well, I suppose that one can’t have everything.”

  “Ho, you did splendidly!” Master Li said.

  “Do you really think so? Some people might consider my behavior rather gross,” Henpecked Ho said dubiously. “I was maddened beyond endurance because now I will never know how the story came out, and it concerned two delightful deities that I had never heard of, even though I am familiar with the entire Heavenly Pantheon.”

  Li Kao thoughtfully chewed a wisp of his scraggly beard, which was about all the movement that he could manage.

  “Ho, as a matter of rather academic curiosity, have you ever encountered a deity called the Peddler? He wears a robe covered with Heavenly or supernatural symbols, he leans upon a crutch, and he carries a flute and a bal
l and a bell.”

  “The Peddler is not one of the six hundred named gods, but our knowledge of the Pantheon is incomplete,” Ho said thoughtfully. “It must be remembered that the first Duke of Ch’in destroyed the temples and priests and worshippers of any cult that annoyed him, and knowledge of many minor deities disappeared from the face of the earth. The Peddler might have been among them, and I am morally certain that the two delightful deities in the story on the tablet also suffered the duke’s displeasure. After all, peasants treasure ginseng fairy tales, and they would never willingly abandon a story about the handsomest god in Heaven and the most beautiful girl in the world and a crown and three feathers and—”

  “What!” Master Li yelped.

  “Er…and a crown and three feathers.”

  “And three faithless handmaidens?”

  “Well, I don’t know about faithless, but three handmaidens were indeed briefly mentioned. Their names were—”

  “Ho, let’s hear it in sequence,” said Master Li. “Your unmatched memory has surely retained every word, and I cannot imagine a better way to pass the time before being tortured to death than to listen to a fairy tale.”

  “Would you really like to hear it?” Henpecked Ho said eagerly. “I had so hoped to be able to share it with somebody, and perhaps my years of labor won’t have been wasted after all. Even in half-completed form it’s a very good story.”

  One of my clearest memories of the whole baffling affair is that of lying upon a dungeon floor, wrapped in chains from my neck to my toes, listening to the gentle voice of Henpecked Ho while the executioner banged upon our Shirts of Iron in the next room.

  It was, as Henpecked Ho promised, quite a good story.

  “Long ago there was a little girl who lived in a little village with her loving parents. Her name was Jade Pearl. One day the village was raided y bandits, and Jade Pearl was picked up and carried off by a bandit who thought that he might be able to sell her, and several days later they reached a beautiful city, but the bandits were recognized and had to run away, and in the confusion Jade Pearl managed to escape.