The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  He ate some more rice and watched the shadows climb the wall, and he pointed a chopstick at the songbirds.

  “Let’s begin by assuming that Henpecked Ho’s story was factual in the sense of history that over the centuries has been cloaked in the conventional trappings of myth,” said Master Li. “There really was a minor deity called the Princess of Birds, although not necessarily as described in the story, and she really did wear a crown that was decorated with three feathers from the Kings of Birds. We would have to be as blind as neo-Confucians not to guess what happened,” he said. “The Duke of Ch’in went to the Old Man of the Mountain for the Secret of Immortality, and he learned that he must begin by stealing something that belonged to a deity. He tricked and murdered Jade Pearl’s handmaidens, captured her, and stole her crown. Then the Old Man of the Mountain removed his heart, which is why the jovial fellow laughs at axes and fatal dosages of poison. It’s been the same duke all along, of course. The tyrant who burned the books of China has been squatting in the Castle of the Labyrinth ever since, concealed behind the mask of a snarling tiger.”

  My heart was sick as I thought of the duke and his playmates, such as the Hand That No One Sees. He had paid the wisest man in the world for more than heart surgery. The Duke of Ch’in had also bought the secrets of reading minds and controlling the creatures who lurk in the dark bowels of the earth. What chance would we have against a pupil of the Old Man of the Mountain?

  “Jade Pearl had something that was almost as valuable as her crown,” Master Li continued. “She had a godmother. Surely a fellow as greedy as the duke would not miss the fact that the Queen of Ginseng had to be the most valuable plant on the face of the earth, and with Jade Pearl as his captive, he would probably have been able to capture her godmother as well. Now I will make one more assumption. The Great Root of Power is the Queen of Ginseng, and that is why two quests are intertwined.”

  Li Kao gazed thoughtfully up at Heaven.

  “Ox, the Heaven of the Chinese is superior to all other because nothing is absolute except the rule of law. The supreme deity is bound by the rules of the Imperial Book of Etiquette, and if he breaks those rules, he will be promptly replaced. Thus the Heavenly Master of the First Origin gave way to the August Personage of Jade, and the Heavenly Master of the Dawn of Jade of the Golden Door stands ready in the wings to ascend to the throne the moment the August Personage of Jade gets too big for his sandals. When the emperor’s pet goddess lost her crown and failed to return to the Star Shepherd she passed from the protection of Heaven, and the Imperial Book of Etiquette does not allow for excuses. What could the emperor do? Direct intervention would cost him his throne, so if he did anything it would have to be very sneaky indeed.”

  Master Li bent over and laughed until the tears flowed.

  “I can just see his Heavenly Majesty sitting there with that damned nursemaid of a book on his lap!” he chortled. “I can see his eyes scanning the earth, and I can see him sit bolt upright when two splendid fellows named Li Kao and Number Ten Ox set forth to find the Great Root of Power. ‘What’s wrong with trying to help the poor children of the humble village of Ku-fu?’ he says reasonably. ‘After all, things like that are the reason for my existence!’ So Pawnbroker Fang and Ma the Grub pop up to tell us that the duke has the root—and if they uncover a tablet that tells the story of Jade Pearl? ‘Accidents will happen,’ sighs the August Personage of Jade. Fang and Ma pop up again to help us escape from a tower, along with Miser Shen—and if Shen tells us about the Old Man of the Mountain? ‘Accidents will happen,’ sighs the August Personage of Jade. The Bamboo Dragonfly heads straight toward the Cavern of Bells, and after we get a good look at the painting of the Peddler we are reunited with Henpecked Ho, who has deciphered the story of the Princess of Birds. ‘Accidents,’ the emperor sighs, ‘will happen, and after all, I’m only trying to help them find the root that might save the children of Ku-fu.’ So far, so good, but now let’s take a look at something truly sneaky, which should not be difficult to do because we’re sitting on it.”

  I nervously looked around the wall for something truly sneaky, but the only sneaky thing I saw was a lizard stalking a bug.

  “Centuries ago, a general just happened to dream that he had been summoned to Heaven, and when he returned he discovered that his plans had been altered to place Dragon’s Pillow in this ludicrous position,” said Master Li. “Then a reading of the Trigrams just happened to provide a ghostly watchman named Wan, and a couple of centuries after that some of the local children began playing a game.”

  Master Li finished his rice and pointed a chopstick at me.

  “The Duke of Ch’in very nearly eliminated all trace of the Princess of Birds when he burned the books, destroyed priests and temples and worshippers, and decapitated professional storytellers, but he forgot about a children’s game,” said Master Li. “Ox, there is such a thing as racial memory, which preserves events long after conventional histories have turned to dust. One of the ways in which this memory is expressed is through the games and songs of children, and when the children came to the wall that day, they began to play the Hopping Hide and Seek Game, which happens to be the history of the Duke of Ch’in and the Princess of Birds.”

  I stared at him stupidly.

  “Jade Pearl was a ginseng child, in the sense that her godmother was the Queen of Ginseng,” said Master Li. “How do you capture a ginseng child?”

  “With a red ribbon,” I said.

  “How did the duke disguise himself when he approached her handmaidens?”

  I thought of the painting in the Cavern of Bells. “As a lame peddler who leaned upon a crutch,” I said.

  Li Kao began to imitate the sick boys in the infirmary at the monastery, shaking his shoulders and snatching at the air. Then he imitated the girls, making swooping pulling gestures.

  “The boys are pretending to be lame peddlers who must hop on one leg, although they are not consciously aware of it,” he said. “They are trying to get the girls’ red ribbons, and while the girls are not aware of it, they are ginseng handmaidens who are being killed. The last girl becomes Jade Pearl, but the Princess of Birds cannot be killed because she has eaten the Peach of Immortality. So the boy who takes her red ribbon hides her. He is now the duke, and the other children become the birds of China, blindfolded because the birds cannot see their princess after she has lost her crown. They try to find and rescue her by touch, but there is a time limit. All right, why does the duke count to forty-nine?”

  I am not usually so intelligent, but the answer popped unbidden into my mind.

  “Seven times seven,” I said. “Jade Pearl could escape if she reached the Star Shepherd before the seventh day of the seventh moon. But, Master Li, why couldn’t there be ten or twenty other interpretations of the Hopping Hide and Seek Game?”

  “Ginseng,” he said promptly. “The moment that the children of your village took the tiniest taste of the Great Root their racial memory was stirred, and instinctively they began to play their ginseng game. A slightly stronger taste dredged up a deeper racial memory, and an understanding that had eluded the conscious minds of the children who had first experienced it. The moment that they began to chant a nonsense rhyme, they were able to find the Princess of Birds. Ox, that was no accident when Monkey reached out and touched Fang’s Fawn.”

  Li Kao began a slow rhythmic beat upon the rim of his rice bowl with his chopsticks.

  “The ghost of poor Wan must have been very lonely,” he said. “Ghosts also share racial memories, and when he saw the children play the Hopping Hide and Seek Game he realized that the question that the game asks is ‘Where is the Princess of Birds? Where has the lame peddler taken her?’ Wan knew the answer. He wanted to join the game, but he was determined to play fair—how many times had he listened to the riddle games of children?—and his impromptu effort was so good that I strongly suspect that he had been far more than a simple soldier.

  “Jade plate,

  S
ix, eight.

  Fire that burns hot,

  Night that is not.

  Fire that burns cold,

  First silver, then gold.”

  Master Li tossed the chopsticks into the bowl and winked at me.

  “Ever since the standard was set by Yang Wan-li, what has been the common metaphor for the moon?”

  “A plate of jade,” I said. “Sailing across ten thousand miles of blue-black sky.”

  “In relation to the moon, what can you make of ‘six, eight’?”

  “The sixth day of the eighth moon?” I guessed.

  “Try it the other way around.”

  “The eighth day, the sixth moon—why, that is today!” I exclaimed.

  “It is indeed. We’ve begun with the moon, so what about the fire that burns hot?”

  “The sun?” I said.

  “And the night that is not?”

  I scratched my head. “An eclipse?”

  “It could be, but I don’t recall any eclipse of the sun on the eighth day of the sixth month. Try something simpler.”

  “Sunset,” I said. “The sun has gone but the light remains.”

  “Excellent,” said Master Li. “So in their game the children were asking, ‘Where is the Princess of Birds?’ and Wan told them that if they looked from his watchtower when the sun sank below the horizon on the eighth day of the sixth moon, they would see where the lame peddler had taken Jade Pearl. Specifically, they would see something that looked like cold fire, and that first burned silver and then burned gold. In a few minutes,” said Master Li, “that is precisely what we are going to look for.”

  I felt myself flush, and I said, almost angrily.

  “Master Li, we are trying to find the Great Root of Power for the children of Ku-fu! We are not trying to find a little goddess for the Emperor of Heaven!”

  “Dear boy, don’t you think the emperor realizes that? Be patient for a few minutes more,” Master Li said soothingly.

  The sun slowly sank behind distant mountain peaks, and the clouds began to glow with the colors of sunset. I saw nothing like cold fire. The light began to fade, and I could see faint stars, and still I saw nothing. It was almost dark, and to tell the truth, I had no faith at all in Master Li’s analysis of the nonsense rhyme.

  Suddenly the concealed sun sank to an invisible gap in the western mountain range. A brilliant shaft of light shot like an arrow across the valley to the eastern mountains. At no other time in no other day of the year would the angle have been perfect, but now a small circular spot that was concealed among peaks began to glow like cold fire. It shimmered like silver, and then it faded to dull gold, and then it vanished.

  Master Li motioned for me to get down on my knees and clasp my hands together.

  “Well done, Wan!” he cried. “You have fulfilled the mission for which you were chosen by the Emperor of Heaven, and surely your spirit will be allowed to ascend to the stars. There you will find many children who will ask you to join their games, and the goddess Nu Kua will be delighted to have such a sentinel to help her guard the Celestial Walls.”

  We performed the three obeisances and the nine kowtows and then we got to our feet. Li Kao grinned at me.

  “Ox, what do you think that we’re being sent to find?”

  I stared at him. “Isn’t that the place where the peddler took the Princess of Birds?” I asked.

  “He undoubtedly took her there, perhaps to find the city where her godmother lived, but it would be quite useless for us to search for Jade Pearl,” Master Li said patiently. “If the Duke of Ch’in had a brain in his head, he would also take her to the Old Man of the Mountain. She couldn’t be killed, but she could be transformed, and the Princess of Birds might now be a raindrop hidden in a thunderstorm, or a petal in a field of flowers, or one special grain of sand among a billion on the beach. No, you and I and the August Personage of Jade are engaged in mutual back-scratching because there is one thing upon the face of the earth that we can use to force the duke to hand over the Great Root of Power, and it can also force him to hand over Jade Pearl: I will bet you anything you like that the Emperor of Heaven will see to it that we can’t get one without the other.”

  He stretched and yawned and scratched his scraggly beard.

  “Let’s get some sleep. In the morning we’ll go after the sick slimy heart of the Duke of Ch’in,” said Master Li.

  The Lake of the Dead

  We left at dawn, and by the fourth day we reached the foothills. When we began to climb the mountains we left summer behind, and the green trees and fragrant flowers and rippling streams were replaced by the most depressing landscape that I had ever seen.

  A strange chill gripped that mountainside. It was dead and stale, as though a monstrous iceberg had been scooped up and deposited upon a peak, where it had lain lifeless and unmelting for a thousand years. Sometimes we went for an hour without seeing a squirrel or hearing the song of a bird, and on the third day of the climb all signs of life vanished. We looked in vain for so much as an ant on the ground or an eagle in the sky.

  We had been hearing the faint sound of falling water, and we finally reached the source. A meager waterfall was trickling down one side of a chaotic cliff, and when we climbed to the top we saw that the cliff was part of a gigantic rockslide that had blocked the narrow mouth of a valley many centuries ago. In the distance we could see another waterfall trickling down a higher cliff, and the entire valley in between had become a vast lake. It was the coldest, grayest, most unappetizing body of water that I had ever seen, and I knew in my bones that it was evil. Li Kao sat down and made some rapid calculations.

  “Ox, this lake is the right size, the right shape, and at the correct angle,” he said. “This is what we saw that first burned silver and then burned gold, and it very much looks as though we’ll have to find out what’s on the bottom of it.”

  It turned out to be more difficult than he expected. We made a raft and paddled to the center of lake, but when we tried to reach bottom with a stone tied to a rope of vines we went down two hundred feet without touching anything. For practical purposes the lake had no bottom at all and Master Li turned bright red while he scorched the air with the Sixty Sequential Sacrileges with which he had won the all-China Freestyle Blasphemy Competition in Hangchow three years in a row. Finally he decided to climb the cliff at the other end of the lake and look at the problem from a different perspective.

  It was a hard climb and very dangerous. The cliff was mostly shale that was held together by clay, and when we reached the top we found that the ground was soft and porous except for the path where the stream ran along a bed of solid rock. Master Li teetered at the cliff’s edge and gazed down nearly five hundred feet to the gold-gray lake glinting dully in the sunlight.

  “Why, it’s a matter of elementary hydraulic engineering!” he exclaimed. “We can’t reach bottom, so we’ll bring the bottom up to us. The first order of business is to get hold of a lot of strong backs.”

  We had to go a long way down the other side of the mountain before we reached a village, and the village wanted no part of a job that required getting close to the lake. They called it the Lake of the Dead, and swore that not even a fish could live in the water.

  “Once a year, at midnight on the fifth day of the fifth month, a ghostly caravan approaches the Lake of the Dead,” an old woman said in a quavering whisper. “Once in my grandmother’s time some foolish men crept out to spy upon that evil process, and they were found with their bellies slit open and their guts ripped out! Since then we lock the doors in our village and hide beneath the beds on the fifth day of the fifth moon.”

  Master Li glanced at me and I knew what he was thinking. That should be the time when the Duke of Ch’in completed the final leg of his tax trip and started home again, and his route should pass the cold mountain and the Lake of the Dead.

  It wasn’t easy to persuade them, but we could offer more money than they could hope to earn in twenty lifetimes, and at las
t the men gathered picks and shovels and fearfully followed us back to the cliff. They worked like demons in order to get out of there as fast as possible. We began by digging a trench from the bank of the stream to a deep ravine, and then we ran connecting trenches to other ravines until we had a ditch that ran from one end of the cliff to the other. We felled trees and made a dam. It wasn’t easy to persuade the stream to move to a new home, but eventually the water roared angrily from its bed of rock and began snarling through the porous earth at the bottoms of the ravines. We gave the men bonuses, but they barely paused to thank us before taking to their heels. Master Li and I moved to the other side of the lake and pitched a tent. We had no idea how long it would take, and we passed the time by making divers’ equipment: air tanks from the bladders of wild pigs, and breathing tubes from the intestines. We fashioned bamboo spears, and made loops in our belts for the rocks that would give us extra weight. It happened far faster than either of us thought possible.

  I was looking out across the smooth cold surface of the lake toward the cliff that was shimmering in the moonlight, and Li Kao was at a table writing down songs in the light of a lantern. Suddenly the lantern began to move. We stared in astonishment as it slid all the way down the table and crashed to the earthen floor, and then the floor started to buck beneath us like a wild horse. We ran from the tent and gazed at the cliff, and there was a rumbling, grinding sort of sound, and the cliff moved in the moonlight. Not even Master Li had expected something so spectacular, but the stream had tunneled so deeply into the spongy earth that almost half of the mountain leaned out, hovered in the air, and then plunged five hundred feet straight down into the Lake of the Dead.