The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  “Sorry, Ox. The son of a sow moved on me,” Master Li said, glaring disgustedly at the corpse.

  He meant that the fellow should have allowed himself to be murdered cleanly, and shouldn’t have turned so Master Li’s throwing knife would sever his largest jugular vein. Murder was the only term for it. Master Li surely saw from the way the fellow held a knife that he was a raw amateur, and he surely knew that I was going to land on the dolt before he took two steps. The old man looked at me rather contritely, and spread his hands wide and shrugged, and then he accompanied me outside for more thatching. It’s amazing how much blood the human body contains, and we were going to need at least four armloads to mop up the lake on the floor.

  At least we wouldn’t be bothered by guests. They had vanished like figments of dreams, and within half an hour they would have witnesses willing to swear that they had spent the night sacrificing to Chu-Chuan Shen, Patron of Pig Butchers, in West Bridge Temple on the other side of Peking.

  Master Li knelt beside the body. “No idea who he was,” he muttered. “Saw him in the wineshop and he looked vaguely familiar, so I invited him along.”

  There was no identification. The money belt yielded an extraordinary amount of gold, and Master Li examined the fellow’s discolored fingernails and said he had worked with a variety of metallic acids, although he bore no other resemblance to an alchemist. In a concealed pocket was a squeeze tube made from a pig entrail that released tiny puffs of a grayish substance, and Master Li whistled.

  “That’s a small fortune, Ox,” he said. “Powdered Devil’s Umbrella and absolutely pure, so far as I can judge. It may not be the best, but it’s far and away the most expensive as well as addictive of all Ling-chih, and mushrooms like that haven’t grown naturally around Peking for a hundred years.”

  He found nothing else of interest. Ming’s cat and the wind greeted me as I stepped out with the pallid bloodless body draped over my shoulder. The cold air smelled of rain. Small black clouds were skidding across the wind-whipped sky, and stars blinked on and off like a billion fireflies, and the moon looked like the great billowing yellow sail of a ship that was racing across a blue-black ocean toward immense cloud cliffs in the west, where lightning flickered.

  No one saw me slip into the abandoned smugglers’ tunnel that led from the alley and under the city dump to the canal. When I stepped back out the sky was almost completely covered by clouds, and I could barely make out the jetty and the dark water beneath. There were heavy rocks beside the jetty. I tied the other end of a tarred rope around the corpse’s legs, and it slid silently beneath the surface and drifted down to join the others. *

  The incident was closed. By unspoken agreement Master Li and I erased the affair of the dice cheater, and never intended to mention him again. The roof would have to wait until morning. I wearily crawled into my pallet while Master Li huddled over one more wine jar, listening to the rain patter down, sifting like a shower of silver through the holes. A small pool formed at his feet, and the last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was the ancient sage gazing moodily at his image reflected in rainwater that glistened like a mirror in the candlelight.

  I awoke with the awareness that something strange had happened. During the night a weight seemed to have been lifted from me, and while I had an even more powerful sense that something important was about to happen, this time all the omens were good. It was as though Master Li’s moment of rage and murder had been a necessary purgative, although I couldn’t imagine why. He was wincing and groaning under the weight of the morning light, as usual, and I eased his hangover with a compress of hot sliced ginger root. Apparently he hadn’t felt the same purgative effect yet, because he was sore as a boil.

  The morning was drowned in mist and drizzle. Along about the hour of the goat Master Li jumped to his feet and grabbed his coat and rain hat and set out toward the Wineshop of One-Eyed Wong, which was usually a bad sign because he knows very well that the famous bouquet of Wong’s wine comes from crushed cockroaches. I was more sure than ever that something of great importance was heading straight toward the old man, and I happily accompanied him to his private table.

  Master Li sat there looking like ninety pounds of Fire Drug ready to explode, and that is absolutely all I know for certain about the weird affair of Shi tou chi. I didn’t understand anything that followed. All I can do is set down events as I witnessed them, and freely admit that I missed the subtleties that could have told me what was really going on, and what was important and what was not.

  Begin at the beginning, Master Li told me. Proceed through the middle, continue to the end, and then stop. That is what I shall do, and then, perhaps, a kind reader will write and explain it to me.

  * * *

  * The meaning is unclear, although the implication is alarming. It should be remembered that volumes two through five of the complete Memoirs of Number Ten Ox were seized and burned by the Imperial Censors, and while copies are rumored to exist, none have been found. [back]

  One-Eyed Wong and his beloved wife, Fat Fu, have worked very hard to earn the reputation of running the worst wineshop in all China. The notoriety gives them a clientele that is the envy of the empire, and the usual mix was present: Bonzes and Tao-shih swapped filthy stories with burglars and cutthroats, and eminent artists and poets flirted with pretty girls and boys while high government officials played cards with the pimps. All I could see of great scholars was their lacquered gauze caps, because they were on their knees rolling dice with grave robbers. Against one wall is a row of curtained booths for aristocrats, and occasionally a manicured hand would part beaded curtains to give a better view of the lowlife. The antics of the clientele could be quite dramatic, and One-Eyed Wong constantly patrolled the premises with a sand-filled sock swinging in his hand while Fat Fu sent him messages by whistling.

  She knew everybody who was important or dangerous. When Master Li entered, she whistled a few bars of a popular song he had inspired: Fire Chills and Moonlight Burns, Before Li Kao to Virtue Turns.

  As I say, I was waiting for Master Li to explode, and at the same time I was waiting for my premonition to prove itself, and at that moment a pair of curtains parted at an aristocrat’s booth and I said to myself, this is it! The girl who stepped out was one of the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen. Surely she was a princess, and she was coming straight to our table. She wore a honey-colored coat of some exotic material, and a waistcoat trimmed with silver squirrel fur. Her long slit tunic was fashioned from the costliest silk, Ice White, which loses its luster after ten minutes’ exposure to direct sunlight. Her blue cap was trimmed with perfect pearls and her blue slippers were embroidered with gold. Her feet made no sound at all as she drifted toward us like a lovely cloud.

  Then she came close enough for me to see that her beautiful eyes were totally mad. I jumped to my defensive position at Master Li’s left side, leaving his knife hand free, but she paid no attention to us. She flowed past in a subtle mist of perfume. Master Li took note of the tiny flickers of fire deep inside her wide eyes, and the hugely distended pupils.

  “Thunderballed to the gills,” he observed.

  He was referring to hallucinatory mushrooms so dangerous that sale of them has been banned. Fat Fu reached the same conclusion and began whistling “Red Knives,” and One-Eyed Wong moved swiftly. The princess was approaching a table where a bloated bureaucrat who boasted all nine buttons of rank on his hat was laying down the law to admiring underlings, and she smiled so beautifully that it took my breath away. A delicate hand slipped inside her tunic. Wong’s sand-filled sock reached the back of her head just as the point of her dagger reached the bureaucrat’s throat. She descended to the floor as gracefully as a falling leaf, and one of the scholars glanced up from his dice game. “Got her again, Wong,” he said.

  “One of these days I’m going to miss,” One-Eyed Wong said gloomily.

  The bureaucrat gazed down at the lovely body and saw who she was and turned green. “Budd
ha protect me!” he howled, and he charged out the door so hastily that he left his purse on the table, which the underlings grabbed and divided. Wong picked up the princess and took her to the side door, and the last I saw of her she had been collected by a pair of liveried servants and was being carried away in a silken sedan chair. “So much for premonitions,” I said to myself.

  Master Li was turning purple. “What a world we live in,” he said, breathing heavily through his nose. “Ox, that exquisite girl is Lady Hou, who happens to be one of the three finest poets in the empire. In any civilized age she would be honored and decorated and praised to the skies, but ours is the age of the Neo-Confucians.”

  He smashed the table so hard that his wine jar bounced up in the air, and I caught it before the contents could spill on his robe and burn holes in it.

  “Fraud, Ox!” he said furiously. “We live in a land so debased that its most valued art forms are fraud and forgery. The Neo-Confucians cannot accept the fact that a mere woman could be so gifted, and they of course, control the Imperial Censors, who control publication. They graciously consented to publish the lady’s poems, and to her amazement she saw the author’s credit: ‘Attributed to Yang Wan-li.’ That is really quite clever. The triplication being that somebody was faking a masculine classical style, and by officially classifying genuine work as fraudulent, they have, in effect, deprived Lady Hou of her identity. She’s been destroying her mind with Thunderballs and slitting Neo-Confucian throats ever since, but there are simply too many of them. They’ll win in the end. Eventually she’ll be convinced that she really doesn’t exist, and is actually a teapot or something in that general price range, and then they’ll lock her up and the head Neo-Confucian will suavely appropriate her poetry as his own.”

  He downed his wine at a gulp, and signaled Fat Fu for some more.

  “My boy,” he said gloomily, “we live in the last days of a once great civilization. Dry rot has set in, so we paint it with lies and gild it with fool’s gold, and one of these days the whole works will blow away in a high wind and where an empire once flourished there’ll be nothing but a bunch of bats flying in and out of a bunghole.”

  He was depressed but I was cheered. I knew with a certainty I couldn’t explain that my premonition had been correct after all, and I had simply focused on the wrong person. I suppose it had to do with the terror in the voice I heard—I couldn’t see who it was, but somebody was working his way through the crowd, and he was chanting the same incomprehensible words over and over again. Even Master Li looked up from his wine jar and took notice.

  “Interesting,” he said, with a faint sign of animation. “One doesn’t often hear ancient Sanskrit. The Great Prayer of the Heart Sutra, to be precise: Gyate, gyate, barag yate, harosogyate, bochi, sowaka! which means ‘Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, what an awakening, hail!’ Nobody can explain why it should be, but the prayer has an extraordinarily soothing effect when one repeats it over and over.”

  Then we saw him, and I was disappointed. I had expected a wild-eyed barbarian, but he was only a bonze. He was small and pale and appeared to be frightened half to death, and he was looking desperately around the room. His eyes fastened upon Master Li like a pair of limpets, and he scuttled up and fell to his knees and began kowtowing energetically.

  “Bl-bl-blpp-blppt,” he said, or something like that.

  “If you stopped trying to bang a hole in the floor with your chin, you might be more comprehensible,” Master Li said, not unkindly. “Why not stand up and try it again?”

  The monk jumped up and bowed as jerkily as a kou-tou beetle. “Have I the honor of addressing the great and mighty Master Li, foremost among the scholars and truth seekers of China?” he squealed.

  Master Li brushed away the compliments with a modest wave of a hand. “My surname is Li and my personal name is Kao, and there is a slight flaw in my character,” he said. “This is my esteemed former client and current assistant, Number Ten Ox. You got a problem?”

  The monk struggled for some semblance of self-control. “Venerable Sir, I am the humble abbot of the insignificant monastery in the Valley of Sorrows. You have heard of our valley?”

  “Who hasn’t?” said Master Li.

  I hadn’t.

  “We have lived in peace for centuries, but now one of my monks has been murdered in a terrible and impossible manner,” the abbot said with a shudder. “Our library has been broken into, and something has happened to trees and plants that must be seen to be believed.”

  He had a fit of trembling, and it took him some time to get more words out.

  “O Master Li, the Laughing Prince has arisen from the grave,” he whispered.

  “Well, he always said he’d return, although he seems to have taken his time about it,” Master Li said calmly. “How long has the aristocratic son of a sow been in his tomb?”

  “Seven hundred and fifty years,” the abbot whispered.

  Master Li poured himself another cup of wine. “Punctuality is not a priority of princes,” he observed. “What makes you think this one has returned to his old playpen?”

  “He has been seen. I myself have seen him dancing and laughing in the moonlight with his murderous companions, and when we found the body of poor Brother Squint-Eyes, the expression on his face bore witness to the presence of the Laughing Prince. We found this clutched in his hand, and a search of the library revealed that the manuscript had been stolen.”

  The abbot timidly offered a fragment of ancient parchment. Master Li gazed at it casually, and then he froze. Not a muscle twitched in his face, but my heart skipped a beat. I knew what it meant when his body was as still as a boulder and his eyes were almost hidden by wrinkles that could have formed a relief map of all China.

  “Anything else?” Master Li asked calmly.

  The little monk was close to fainting. He was being squeezed by a memory that made his eyes bulge from his head, and his voice was strangled.

  “There was a sound,” he whispered. “I cannot describe that sound. It turned half the monks to jelly, yet the other half couldn’t hear it at all. Those who heard were forced to follow the sound. We had no will of our own. It led us to a scene of destruction that cannot be described in words. It was a sound that seemed to come from Heaven yet had the effect of the worst fires of Hell, and I knew at once that I must come to the greatest resolver of riddles in all the empire.”

  Master Li turned the fragment over and examined the back of it. “What do you know about the stolen manuscript?” he asked.

  The abbot blushed. “I am no scholar. I couldn’t read a word of it,” he said humbly. “Brother Squint-Eyes, the murdered monk, was our librarian, and he said it was ancient but not valuable. A curiosity that was probably intended to be a footnote to a history.”

  “How large was it?”

  The abbot formed the shape of a scroll with his hands, about a foot high and a fifth of an inch thick.

  “What has happened to the body of Brother Squint-Eyes?”

  “There is some ice left in our cold room, so I had the body placed upon it,” the abbot said. “Venerable Sir, ours is a poor order, but you will have heard of Prince Liu Pao. I have written him, and he is on his way, and I assure you he will pay whatever—”

  Master Li held up a hand. “That may not be necessary,” he said. “Suppose I were to offer my services, including all expenses, in return for this fragment of the manuscript?”

  “Done!” the abbot cried.

  The thought of having Master Li take over did wonders, and the little fellow was instantly twenty years younger. It was settled in a matter of minutes. The abbot had to return to his monastery at once, and Master Li promised to set forth toward the Valley of Sorrows the following day.

  The abbot got a bad nosebleed from banging his chin against the floor as he crawled backward from the table, but his face was joyful when he hopped up and ran out to bring the good news to his monks. Master Li watched him go like a fond grandfathe
r.

  “Well, Ox, what do you make of this?” he said.

  He meant the fragment, and he knew very well I couldn’t make anything of it. I can read only the simplest script, and this was scholar’s shorthand, and ancient shorthand at that. I answered by shrugging my shoulders.

  “It’s a forgery,” Master Li said happily. His eyes were almost reverent as he gazed at it. “That’s the understatement of the millennium. It’s a forgery so great it should have a temple built around it and be worshipped with prayers and gongs and incense, and the monk who discovered it has been murdered, which is precisely as it should be, artistically speaking. Blessings on that ice!” Master Li exclaimed. “If this is any guide, the left lung of Brother Squint-Eyes is sure to be packed with yak manure, and his right lung will contain volcanic ash, and the sheared pigtails of novice nuns will be wrapped around his lower intestine, and engraved upon his liver will be the Seven Sacrileges of Tsao Tsao. My boy, we’re going to perform the most delightful autopsy in history.”

  I wasn’t sure that any autopsy could be delightful, but I didn’t care. The old fire had returned to Master Li’s eyes, and I felt like a warhorse who was being called back to battle. In fact, I very nearly whinnied and pawed the floor.

  The rain had almost stopped and the sky was clearing rapidly. It was going to be a beautiful afternoon with enough clouds left over for a glorious sunset, and I reveled in fresh air after inhaling the reek of raw alcohol in Wong’s. The rain had left the streets slippery, so I carried the old man on my back as we came back up the Alley of Flies, as I always do when the going is difficult. His tiny feet fit comfortably into my tunic pockets, and he weighs no more than a schoolboy.