The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  “Chop-chop!” yelled Henpecked Ho. “Chop-chop-chop-chop-chop!”

  He had no right to be alive. Blood spurted from twenty wounds with every step that he took, but he kept right on taking them. “Save me!” The Ancestress howled, and then her five hundred pounds flattened three more soldiers who might have saved her. It was over in a few minutes.

  The Ancestress ran around in circles and squashed everything in front of her, and Henpecked Ho swung his axe and whacked everything in sight, and Li Kao slipped through the carnage slitting throats, and I flailed with my sword. Toward the end it became rather messy, because we were slipping and sliding upon pieces of the Ancestress, and there was a lot of Ancestress to go around. Then we staggered away from the last fallen soldier and knelt beside Henpecked Ho.

  He lay on his back with his axe still clutched in his hands. His life was draining away in red rivulets, and his face was ashen, and his eyes strained to focus on us.

  “Did I get her?” he whispered.

  “Ho, you chopped that monster into a hundred pieces,” Master Li said proudly.

  “I am so happy,” the gentle scholar whispered. “Now my ancestors will not be ashamed to greet me when I arrive in Hell to be judged.”

  “Bright Star will be waiting for you,” I said.

  “Oh no, that would be far too much to ask,” he said seriously. “The most that I dare ask of the Yama Kings is that I may be born as a beautiful flower, so that sometime, somewhere, a dancing girl might choose to pluck me and wear me in her hair.”

  I blinked through my tears, and he patted my hand. “Do not weep for me, Number Ten Ox. I have grown so weary of this life, and I long to return to the Great Wheel of Transmigrations.” His voice was very faint, and I leaned down to hear his last words. “Immortality is only for the gods,” he whispered. “I wonder how they can stand it.”

  His eyes closed, and the axe fell to the floor, and the soul of Henpecked Ho took leave of his body.

  We carried him outside to the garden. It was cold and overcast, and a tiny silver rain pattered down as I dug the grave. We gently placed the body into the hole and I recovered it with earth, and then we knelt and clasped our hands.

  “Henpecked Ho, great is your joy,” said Master Li. “Now your soul has been released from the prison of your body, and you are being greeted with great honors in Hell. You have rid the world of a woman who was an abomination to men and gods alike, and surely the Yama Kings will allow you to see Bright Star again. When it is time for you to be reborn, your wish will be granted, and you will become a beautiful flower that a dancing girl will wear in her hair.”

  “Henpecked Ho,” I sniffled through my tears, “I will miss you, but I know that we will meet again. Master Li will be a three-toed sloth, and Miser Shen will be a tree, and you will be a flower, and I will be a cloud, and some day we will come together in a beautiful garden. Probably very soon,” I added.

  We said the prayers and sacrificed, and Li Kao stood up and stretched wearily.

  “Immortality is only for the gods, I wonder how they can stand it,” he said thoughtfully. “Ox, the last words of Henpecked Ho may be significant in more ways than one.”

  Master Li stood lost in thought for a moment. Then he said:

  “If I were to try to count the incredible coincidences of our quest on my fingers, I would wind up with ten badly sprained digits, and I am far too old to believe in coincidences. We are being led toward something, and I strongly suspect that Henpecked Ho has also supplied the question that we must ask before we continue the quest. Only the wisest man in the world could answer it, and can it be a coincidence that we happen to know where to find the wisest man in the world?”

  I stared at him stupidly.

  “Miser Shen,” he explained. “Ox, it was no accident that Miser Shen told us that when he was trying to bring his little girl back to life, he learned that the wisest man in the world lives in a cave at the end of Bear’s Path, high in the Omei Mountains.”

  “Are we going to the Omei Mountains?” I asked.

  “We are indeed, and we will begin by looting this palace. The Old Man of the Mountain,” said Master Li, “does not sell his secrets cheaply.”

  Rain still fell, but one corner of the sky was turning blue, and as a final tribute to Henpecked Ho I shoveled the largest pieces of the Ancestress into a wheelbarrow and trundled them to the kennels and fed them to the dogs. In the distance a rainbow formed.

  Three Kinds of Wisdom

  Should you decide to travel to the end of Bear’s Path, high in the Omei Mountains, you will eventually reach a small level clearing in front of a cliff. In front of the black gaping mouth of a cave you will see a stone pillar, upon which hangs a copper gong and an iron hammer, and carved upon the pillar is a message:

  HERE LIVES THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN.

  RING AND STATE YOUR BUSINESS.

  HIS SECRETS ARE NOT SOLD CHEAPLY.

  IT IS PERILOUS TO WASTE HIS TIME.

  I hope that you will carefully consider the last sentence. The wisest man in the world is not to be trifled with, not even by those who are so distinguished as are my readers, and I myself have no intention of ever again traveling to the end of Bear’s Path. I am only Number Ten Ox, who had no business being there in the first place, but it is said that the great leaders of men have been making that journey for three thousand years and will be doing so three thousand years from now, and that one only has to look at the state of the world to prove it.

  The panting mules who hauled our cartload of treasures were nearly exhausted when they plodded around the last bend in the path and arrived at the clearing in front of the cave. Li Kao read the message on the pillar, and then he lifted a goatskin flask and swallowed some wine.

  “Admirable conciseness,” he said, nodding at the inscription. “Not one wasted word.” Then he picked up the iron hammer and rang the gong. And when the echoes died away he took a deep breath and yelled, “Old Man of the Mountain, come forth! I have come to purchase the Secret of Immortality!”

  The echoes shouted immortality, immortality, immortality, and then they faded away into silence. For many minutes we listened to the tiny sounds of small animals and the sighing wind, and the distant scream of an eagle, and finally we heard one faint slap of shuffling sandals. A voice that sounded like gravel scraping across iron drifted from the blackness of the cave.

  “Why does everyone ask for immortality? I have so many other secrets to sell. Beautiful secrets, beastly secrets, happy secrets, horrible secrets, lovely secrets, lunatic secrets, laughing secrets, loathsome secrets….”

  The man who shuffled from the cave and blinked in the bright sunlight looked like the oldest and ugliest monkey in the world. Pieces of filthy straw were tangled in his matted hair, and his beard and robe were stained with spilled food. His seamed and pitted face was even older than Li Kao’s, but his eyes were jet black and so piercing that I caught my breath and instinctively stepped backward. He dismissed me as unimportant, and looked with interest at Li Kao.

  “A sage, I perceive, with a slight flaw in his character,” he said with a little snicker. “Surely a sage can think of a more interesting secret to buy from the Old Man of the Mountain? I can teach you how to turn your friends into flowers and your enemies into cockroaches. I can teach you how to transform yourself or anything else into whatever you like, or how to steal the spirits of the dead and make them your slaves, or how to control the creatures that lurk in the black bowels of the earth. I can teach you how to remove varicose veins or cure pimples, yet you come to me for the Secret of Immortality, which is so simple that it is scarcely a secret at all.”

  “I will give all I have for that one secret,” said Master Li, and he brushed away the straw that covered the pile of loot in the cart. The Old Man of the Mountain plunged his hands into the treasure.

  “Cold!” he said delighted. “It has been years since I touched treasure as cold as this! In fact, this treasure is so cold that I will tell
you the secret at once instead of toying with you as is my usual custom.”

  Li Kao bowed and offered the wine flask, and the Old Man of the Mountain drank and wiped his lips with his beard.

  “You know the seamless robes of the gods? The jade girdles and golden crowns? Any of those items will do,” he said. “Simply wait until the New Year, when the gods descend to earth to make their tour of inspection, and steal a robe or a crown. So long as you possess it, you will never age, but I would advise you to hurry. I myself was well past two hundred when I stole a jade girdle, and not even the Old Man of the Mountain has learned the secret of restoring youth.”

  Master Li threw back his head and laughed.

  “Do you take me for an idiot? What use is it never to age when you can be extinguished in an instant by the bite of a mosquito or a slip upon the stairs? Immortality is a meaningless word unless invulnerability goes with it. Old Man of the Mountain, I am beginning to suspect that you are a fraud.”

  The Old Man of the Mountain winked at him, and passed the wine flask.

  “You would goad me into indiscretion, my friend with the flaw in his character? Do you think that I cannot sense that in your pocket you carry a business card with the sign of a half-closed eye? Or that I would not wonder what an old fox is doing traveling with a young chicken?” He turned and crooked a finger at me. “Boy, come here,” he commanded.

  The jet-black eyes burned a hole in my heart and I had no will of my own. I found myself walking toward him like a mechanical toy, and his eyes looked into my mind. What the Duke of Ch’in had done was but a feeble imitation of the Old Man of the Mountain.

  “Well, I’ll be the Stone Monkey!” he exclaimed. “There are those three handmaidens, and the flute and the ball and the bell, and the feathers and the crown too, although dimly perceived. So you hope to steal the Great Root of Power, do you? Boy, you are nothing but a walking corpse.”

  He sniggered and released my mind, and I staggered backward and nearly fell.

  “Let the chicken go ahead and get killed,” he said softly to Li Kao. “He couldn’t tell a turd from a turnip, but you appear to have some common sense. Go steal something that belongs to a god, and then return with ten times this much treasure, and if it is as cold as this stuff I will sell you the Secret of Invulnerability, which, as you have correctly pointed out, gives meaning to the word immortality.”

  Li Kao tilted the wine flask, and passed it back to the Old Man of the Mountain.

  “But is there such a secret?” he wondered. “Anything with a heart can be killed, and though there are hundreds of peasant stories about men without hearts, I have always considered them to be allegorical fables. Quite sophisticated fables, at times, but depicting character rather than actual physiology.”

  “Not one in a hundred of such stories is true, but when you hear one that is you may be sure that the wisest man in the world is involved, for I alone have found the secret,” said the Old Man of the Mountain. “You doubt it, my slightly flawed friend? Marvel at the man who rivals the gods!”

  When he opened his robe I nearly fainted, because there was a hole where his heart had been. I could look right through it and see the stone pillar behind, shining in the sunlight, and the gong and the hammer, and the black gaping mouth of the cave.

  “Fantastic,” Master Li said admiringly. “You are truly the wisest man in the world, and a dolt like myself must bow before your genius.”

  The Old Man of the Mountain simpered with pleasure and passed the wine flask, and Li Kao bowed and drank thirstily.

  “It would seem to me that your heart must still be beating somewhere,” Master Li said thoughtfully. “Would it be safe to transform it into a pebble or a snowflake? A heart that is transformed is no longer a heart. A simplistic statement, but perhaps intuitively true.”

  “Almost entirely true,” the Old Man of the Mountain said approvingly. “A heart cannot be transformed into a snowflake without killing it unless the entire person is transformed into a snowflake. But a heart can be hidden. Of course the value of that depends upon how well it has been hidden, and you cannot believe the stupidity of some of the pupils that I’ve had. Why, one of those dolts was so mindless that he hid his heart inside the body of a lizard that was inside a cage that was on top of the head of a serpent that was on top of a tree that was guarded by lions, tigers, and scorpions! Another cretin, and may Buddha strike me if I lie, concealed his heart inside an egg that was inside a duck that was inside a basket that was inside a chest that was on an island that was in the middle of an uncharted ocean. Needless to say, both of those numbskulls were destroyed by the first half-witted heroes who came along.”

  He took the flask and drank deeply, and passed it back again.

  “Now you would not be so stupid,” he said. “Try to find treasure that is as cold as this stuff—a man who has no heart likes things cold, and there is nothing colder than treasure—and when you return, I will remove your heart and you will hide it well. So long as it beats, you cannot be wiled, and nothing is worse than death.”

  I suddenly realized that Li Kao was controlling himself with an immense effort. He was clenching and unclenching his hands, and he could no longer keep a trace of revulsion from creeping into his voice.

  “Some things are far worse than death,” said Master Li.

  The Old Man of the Mountain stiffened. I drew back in fear as I saw his eyes burn with cold fire.

  “My secrets are not sold cheaply,” he said softly.

  The Old Man of the Mountain stamped his foot, and a great crack appeared in the earth, and our poor mules brayed in terror as they plunged down into blackness with the cartload of treasure; he waved his hand, and the crack closed as though it had never been.

  “It is perilous to waste my time,” he whispered.

  The wisest man in the world lifted a finger to his lips and blew. The light was blacked out by a dense cloud, and wind howled, and we were scooped up and sent flying into the air, whirling around and around inside a black funnel that was thick with dirt and broken branches and small screaming animals. The cyclone whirled down the mountainside, and I tried to shield Li Kao’s frail body with my own as branches buffeted me and shrieking wind deafened me. Down and down and around and around, and then the earth leaped up at us and we landed with a crash that separated me from my senses.

  When I regained consciousness I saw that we had landed in soft shrubbery, but if we had been blown another ten feet we would have sailed over the side of a steep cliff. Far below I could see a river shining in the sunset, and a boy standing motionless upon the bank, and a village half-hidden by trees. Birds swooped high and low in the chilly wind that sighed down from snow-capped peaks, and somewhere a woodcutter was singing a slow sad song.

  Li Kao had bandaged the bump on my head. He was sitting cross-legged at the edge of the cliff, cradling his wine flask. When I gazed up at the distant mountain peaks, I seemed to hear faint laughter that was like pebbles rattling in an iron pan.

  “Master Li, forgive my impertinence, but if the pursuit of wisdom leads to the Old Man of the Mountain I cannot help but think that men would be better off if they stayed stupid,” I said.

  “Ah, but there is more than one kind of wisdom,” said Master Li. “There is wisdom to take, and there is wisdom to give, and there is the wisdom of Heaven that is inscrutable to man.” He tilted his flask to his lips. “In this case, Heaven is becoming scrutable,” he said when he came up for air.

  To my astonishment I saw that Master Li was happy as a small boy with a large puppy.

  “Henpecked Ho gave us a third of the solution to this weird quest, and now the Old Man of the Mountain has made it two-thirds,” he said with satisfaction. He pointed down to the riverbank, where the boy had been joined by his friends. “What are those children doing?”

  I gazed down and shrugged. “Playing games,” I said.

  “Children’s games!” Master Li chortled happily. “Rituals, riddles, and nonsense rhymes!
” Then, to my astonishment, he jumped to his feet, waved his wine flask toward Heaven, and bellowed, “August Personage of Jade, you have the guts of a first-class burglar!”

  I nervously awaited a bolt of lightning, but none came.

  “Come along, Ox, we must hurry back toward your village to collect the third piece of the puzzle,” said Master Li, and he started down the mountainside at a trot.

  The Old Man of the Mountain had blown us to the very edge of civilization, and we found ourselves trudging through a very strange landscape. Flat cracked earth stretched toward distant mountains with fantastic shapes, like deformed mushrooms, and a cold wind sighed across twelve hundred miles of empty steppes. Once in a while we would reach a desolate plain where endless mounds of dirt were laid out with almost geometric precision, and on top of each mound a gopher stood on its hind legs and watched us pass with bright wondering eyes. Once an enormous army of rats raced toward us, but when they swept around and past us I saw that they were not rats but roots, the famous rolling roots of the peng plant, which were being blown by the wind toward some unimaginable destiny at the outer edge of the world.

  Gradually the bare mountains acquired scattered trees, and we reached valleys that had touches of green, and finally the landscape turned into the one I knew so well. Then we climbed a hill and I saw the outline of Dragon’s Pillow, hazy in the distance, and I was greatly relieved when Master Li said that it was our destination. I could not have borne the eyes of the parents if we went on to Ku-fu with no ginseng for the children.

  We reached the wall as soft purple shadows were creeping like cats across the green valley, and the birds began to sing the last songs of the day while we climbed the ancient stones to the Eye of the Dragon. Li Kao sat down upon the floor of the watchtower and uncovered a bowl of rice that he had bought in the last village. For a few moments he ate in silence, and then he said:

  “Ox, mysteries cease to be mysteries when they are viewed from the proper angle. In this case we must find the proper angle by recalling a comment that was made by the Duke of Ch’in not once but twice. ‘You seek the right root, but for the wrong reason.’ Doesn’t that suggest that we might have unwittingly wandered into a completely different quest when we started after the Great Root of Power? We can assume that the duke thought that we might be trying to do something else, and the idea scared him half to death. What sort of a quest could terrify a tyrant as mighty as the Duke of Ch’in?”