The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  She wore a suit that could have fed a million people for a year. It was priceless jade cut into rectangular pieces that were tightly linked together by fine gold wire. There must have been two thousand jade pieces encasing the mummy, but Master Li wasn’t interested in jade. He was interested in a stone, and he let loose another volley of oaths when no stone was revealed in the coffin.

  An inscription had been chiseled on the front of Tou Wan’s sarcophagus, and Prince Liu Pao translated the old script for me. Apparently it had been written by her grieving husband.

  The sound of her silk skirt has stopped.

  On the marble pavement dust grows.

  Her empty room is cold and still.

  Fallen leaves are piled against the doors.

  How can I bring my aching heart to rest?

  It seemed to me that there was real feeling in that, and the prince shook his head wonderingly. “My ancestor was quite unknowable,” he said. “He wrote this, and then he went out with his Monks of Mirth to capture and torture a few more children.”

  Master Li nodded at the other sarcophagus, and I bent to the lid. As it slowly slid down, our eyes nearly bulged right out of our heads, and when it slid all the way down I stepped back and sat down heavily on the floor. The silence was broken only by the hiss of our torches.

  The coffin was empty. Prince Liu Pao sat down in a heap beside me, and I supposed that both of us were seeing a mummy dressed in jade crawling from a coffin and creeping out to join his merry monks in motley. Master Li glared down at us.

  “Oh, bat shit,” he snarled. “Stop trying to catch flies with your gaping mouths and start using your heads.”

  He sat down on the rim of the coffin and glared around the golden room. He was furious.

  “Ox, what happened to your torch when you punched through the iron and brick?” he asked.

  “Wha…. Why, nothing happened,” I said.

  “Precisely. The flame didn’t jump toward the hole because there already was fresh air in the tomb,” he said. “That means there’s another entrance somewhere, and it’s been used recently. We’re too late. The thieves have already been here, and that means we have to change our minds about their being thieves.”

  That was too slippery for me, but the prince looked up with sudden interest.

  “They didn’t take the gold and jewels, and not even Tou Wan’s burial suit,” he said wonderingly.

  “So what did they take?” Master Li asked.

  We remained silent, so he answered his own question.

  “They took a stone,” said Master Li. “All the inscriptions indicate that the Laughing Prince worshipped a stone. When he died he would certainly have arranged for it to be buried with him, so it was taken from the sacristy and—perhaps—placed in his hands, and then the jade suit was fashioned around him. Jade is among the hardest of materials. The stone might be damaged if somebody tried to crack the jade, so whoever it was who beat us to it simply carried the whole damn mummy away. What kind of people would pass up gold and jewels to get their hands on a sacred stone?”

  “A religious order of some sort?” the prince guessed.

  Master Li shrugged. “That’s all I can think of at the moment,” he said. “Remember that the Laughing Prince created a quasi-religious order he called the Monks of Mirth, and notice that the Monks of Mirth, alone among his court, did not die along with the prince—at least we haven’t seen their skeletons. Suppose he arranged for the order to be perpetuated through the centuries?”

  I finally found my tongue. “Why?” I asked.

  Master Li threw his hands wide apart in exasperation. “How would I know?” he said. “We can assume that he worshipped a stone, although we don’t know why. The use of laughter and dancing in place of prayer is not unknown to ancient pre-shamanistic religions, and I can’t help but wonder about the constant repetition of the number five in his peculiar formulas. Five is a sacred number to many weird cults, ancient and modern alike. The primitive Yu-ch’ao, for example, who are said to live in five-sided tree houses and sacrifice to five-headed demons in five-celled temples.”

  Master Li pulled out his wine flask and offered us some, but we declined. He swilled a pint or two and wiped his lips with his beard.

  “Prince, for the moment I’m stymied,” he said frankly. “The idea that we may not be dealing with normal criminals throws everything out of balance. All I know for certain is that we have to get to the bottom of the strange compelling sound and the destruction of Princes’ Path, and that means Ox and I will have to go to Ch’ang-an with soil and plant samples for analysis, and then get our hands on the greatest sound-master in the empire. In the meantime, you have a problem.”

  He waved his wine flask back toward the treasure chambers.

  “Technically this stuff is yours. Do you want it?”

  The prince shuddered. “Nightmares would finish me in a month if I took a single coin,” he said.

  “Nonetheless, if word of the discovery gets out, you’ll be visited by every criminal, warlord, and greedy state minister in the empire,” Master Li pointed out.

  “Suppose I make a gift of it to the throne?” the prince asked hopefully.

  “People tend to impute their own flaws to others,” Master Li said. “The avaricious will never believe that you didn’t keep the choicest gems for yourself, and the missing jade suit of your ancestor will be considered absolute proof. Are you particularly fond of torture?”

  The prince turned as white as one of the skeletons. “But what can I do with this tomb?” he whispered.

  Master Li turned to me. “Ox, can you manage it?” he asked.

  I drew myself up proudly. “Venerable Sir, you are talking to a former apprentice of Big Hong the blacksmith,” I said.

  He turned back to the prince. “What tomb?” he said.

  “What tomb?” I said.

  The prince began to regain some color. “What tomb?” he said.

  It really wasn’t very difficult. The stones and bricks were easily replaced, and there were countless pieces of old iron lying around the estate. I was very proud of my makeshift furnace and bellows, and when I had finished, I doubted that anyone would notice the patch in the iron wall unless he was looking for one.

  The difficult part was putting the skeletons in the tunnel back into place, and that was because I kept hearing a mad mummy in a suit of jade creeping up behind me. When I added artistic layers of dust and cobwebs there wasn’t a greedy bureaucrat in the empire who would believe that Prince Liu Pao or anyone else had entered the tomb of the Laughing Prince. Then we left for Ch’ang-an.

  I had never been to the capital before, but I thought I knew about big cities from my experiences in Peking. That illusion vanished the moment we passed through the Gate of Luminous Virtue. I gaped like any yokel at a raucous beehive where two million people buzzed inside walls that enclosed thirty square miles. There were twenty-five north-south avenues, and every one of them was four hundred eighty feet wide and lined with elm, fruit, and pagoda trees. The avenues rose to a high hill called Dragon Head Plain, and converged to a single road of bluish stone that wound up like a dragon’s tail to the vast basilicas of the elite who ruled the empire.

  I was awed and silent as we took the Street of the Vermilion Sparrow toward Dragon Head Plain. We passed through the Gate of the Red Bird just as a thousand drums pounded the three hundred beats that heralded the opening of the markets, and I felt dizzy in the atmosphere of a thousand years of greatness as we approached the legendary Brush Forest Academy, where Chinese genius is nurtured. Master Li had been one of the geniuses, and his reaction was slightly less than reverent.

  “Fraud, my boy! Fraud and forgery,” he said, waving disgustedly at sacrosanct landmarks. “Paint slapped over dry rot and gilded with lies. Some of the lies are rather pretty, however, and my favorite concerns the little peasant lad who’s digging a ditch behind a village schoolhouse.”

  Master Li pulled out his flask and drank deeply, wh
ich caused outraged comments from distinguished-looking pedestrians. He ignored them.

  “The urchin’s keen ears catch fragments of lessons drifting from the window,” Master Li said between burps. “One day the schoolmaster absentmindedly falls into the ditch and discovers to his astonishment that the boy has covered the walls with masterful drawings, flawless mathematics, and learned quotations from the ancients.

  “‘Boy, are you not the scrofulous, illiterate, and lice-ridden urchin called Hong Wong?’ the schoolmaster gasps.

  “‘The insignificant name of this worthless one should not blemish the esteemed lips of Your Magnificence!’ the lad wails.

  “‘And is not your father the ulcerous, flatulent, maggot-infested fellow called Hong the Hopeless, who takes pride in the fact that he has failed the examination for village idiot sixteen years in a row?’

  “The lad falls to his knees and begins banging his head against the ground. ‘Seventeen!’ he sobs. Well, the schoolmaster grabs the boy by the ear and hauls him into the classroom, of course, and gives him every test he can think of, and word spreads far and wide that the latest Chinese genius has been discovered in a ditch in an insignificant village eight miles from nowhere. You know the rest. Triumph after triumph, the highest awards and degrees, elevation to important office, advisor to emperors and savior of peasants, and eventual deification to become Celestial Patron of scrofulous, illiterate, lice-ridden lads digging ditches behind schoolhouses.”

  Master Li spat with lamentable accuracy upon a statue of K’uei-hsing, God of Examinations.

  “Now let’s take a look at reality,” he said. “Little Hong Wong is indeed taken in hand by the educational establishment and force-fed languages, calligraphy, poetry, painting, dancing, music, chess, etiquette, courtly ritual, philosophy, religion, history, and the classics, following which he’s ready to start learning something—mathematics, for example. Agriculture, engineering, economics, medicine, government, and the art of war. He passes his examinations with honors and receives his first official appointment, and then what happens?”

  He actually seemed to want an answer, so I shrugged and said, “A superior who inherited the job from an uncle rams a barge pole up his ass.”

  “Good boy.” Master Li said approvingly. “Hong Wong has just entered the world of the Neo-Confucians, to whom all innovation is anathema. His brilliant plan for a sanitation system will be rejected out of hand because it has no direct parallel in ancient times. His astronomical observations will be used as evidence in his trial for heresy, because they cannot be confirmed in the oldest texts. His paintings do not slavishly imitate the ancients, and his poetry is not plagiarism, and his essays do not deal with the three hundred thirty-three approved subjects, so all of them will be burned. Hong Wong will be very lucky if he is merely stripped of rank and possessions and kicked out to starve, and if he is truly a genius, he will not be so lucky. Lin Tseh-shu was banished to a corner of Turkistan so distant the sun hasn’t reached it yet, or so they say. Su Tung-po was exiled to Hainan, whose principal exports are malaria, jungle rot, and leprosy. Chu Suilang was last seen sinking into a swamp in Vietnam, and when Han Yu stepped off the prison boat in Swatow he was very nearly devoured by crocodiles.”

  Wen Ch’ang, God of Literature, received the next stream of saliva.

  “Ox, at an early age a Chinese genius gazes at the path that lies ahead and reaches for a wine jar,” Master Li said. “Is it any wonder that our greatest men have lurched rather than walked across the landscape as they hiccupped their way into history?”

  “Sir, that’s the best autobiography I ever heard!” I said enthusiastically.

  Master Li’s reputation was still considerable, although tainted with a questionable aroma, and our soil and plant samples were given priority at the Academy of Divination and Alchemic Research. Then he set out again, climbing to Imperial City and the great palaces of the bureaucrats. Again I was overawed as I gazed to the top of the hill and Palace City, where the imperial family lived, and then the Gate of the Cinnabar Phoenix, which led to the Great Luminous Palace of Emperor Tang T’ai-tung. Master Li wasn’t going that high, however. He turned toward a building that made my blood turn cold: the Gate of the Beautiful Vista, which is the headquarters of the Secret Service and which was surrounded by straw mannequins with the flayed hides of corrupt officials wrapped around them. (The emperor had been busy cleaning house since he took over, and Master Li thoroughly approved of Tang.) Fortunately Master Li was heading toward a smaller palace next door, and I looked forward to meeting a legendary lady.

  The Captain of Prostitutes is the most powerful woman in China, except when an Empress sits upon the throne. Her guild is the heart and soul of espionage, and almost entirely responsible for probing the mysterious minds of barbarians. Couriers constantly gallop from her palace with coded messages for the Bower of Brilliant Companions in Hangchow, or the Sun-Bright Residence in Loyang, or the Pavilion of Increasing Perfection in Peking, and many a powerful official has shared his bed and secrets with a young lady and awakened to find the lady gone, and in her place an official pouch containing the yellow scarf.

  I expected a long wait for an audience, but Master Li presented his business card, and in a matter of minutes we were ushered into the presence of the great lady herself. She was tall and middle-aged and very beautiful, and her voice was an exquisite musical instrument.

  “Most exalted and venerable of sages,” she said, bowing to the floor.

  “Most lovely of earthbound goddesses,” Master Li purred, matching her bow.

  That sort of thing lasted several minutes, and then we were served tea, and I sat like a turd in a truffle shop while they played the game of social shuttlecock. I have never been able to understand why perfectly sensible people waste time being wittily obscure instead of just saying what they want and going on about their business. The Captain of Prostitutes began the game by strewing a few flower petals over the golden surface of the tea.

  “Dear friend, these flowers will die from loneliness, since I appear to be out of butterflies,” she said ruefully.

  Master Li caught the shuttlecock in midair.

  “Alas! No flower can be complete unless accompanied by butterflies. Just as hills must have springs, and rocks must have moss,” he said.

  “What is a stream without cress in it? What are tall trees without creepers? What are men without the mind of Li Kao?” she said musically.

  Master Li bowed at the compliment. “Women,” he said, delicately brushing her wrist with a fingertip, “cannot be complete without the expression of a flower, the voice of a bird, the posture of the willow, the bones of jade, the skin of snow, the charm of an autumn lake, the heart of poetry, and the soul of my lovely hostess.”

  “Invincible charmer,” she said with a sigh. Her eyes lowered to the old wrinkled finger upon her delicate wrist. “Passion, dear friend, displays but the bottom end of the universe,” she chided.

  “Then it is the job of the poet to give it a new dress!” cried Master Li. “Shall I sing of mountains clothed in clouds, or pines dressed in wind, or willows adorned in rain, or terraces attired in moonbeams?”

  The captain served more tea and flower petals. “One must be careful in one’s attire,” she said. “Sometimes it is too easily removed, and at other times it cannot be removed at all. Green hills are reflected in water which borrows its color from the hills. Good wine produces poetry which borrows its beauty from the wine.”

  “And a beautiful woman,” Master Li cooed, “is like a poem in that she is best seen when one is slightly drunk. If a mere man may appropriate a lovely lady’s train of thought, pale clouds become multicolored when they reflect the sun, and placid currents become falls when they pass over a cliff. Things acquire the characteristics of associates, and that is why friendship is so valued, and why one’s friends must be carefully chosen.”

  She caressed his wrinkled hand. “Then I shall choose as my friend an ancient unyielding rock,�
�� she said.

  “And if the rock is but a dream?”

  “Then I shall be a shadow in the dream.” she said softly.

  Master Li swallowed his tea and leaned back and did some mental addition. “Ten points each?”

  The Captain Of Prostitutes fined herself a slap on a cheek. “No, I misquoted,” she said. “Chang Chou wrote that passion ‘holds up’ the bottom end of the universe, and I said ‘displays.’ Eight points at most.”

  “That means I only owe you sixty-six,” Master Li said.

  “Sixty-seven,” she said firmly. “Well, Kao, what can I do for you?”

  “Direct me to a sound-master,” he said. “I hear that you play host to the best when he’s in town.”

  She nodded. “Moon Boy,” she said matter-of-factly, “Ever hear of him?”

  “No, but I’m told he’s a phenomenon the likes of which are seen once in a thousand years,” Master Li said.

  “Frankly, I doubt that there has ever been a sound-master to match Moon Boy,” she said. “How badly do you need him?”

  “Very badly. I’ve run up against something that has me baffled.”

  She leaned back and regarded him with narrowed eyes. “Moon Boy isn’t here at the moment,” she said. “Nobody in his right mind would accept an invitation to perform for the King of Chao, but Moon Boy went off with a song on his lips.”

  Master Li whistled. The captain was all business now. “The king isn’t the problem. You can handle that twelve-chinned wonder if anyone can, but handling Moon Boy is another matter.”

  “I’ve heard he’s a bit difficult to control,” Master Li murmured.

  “Multiply what you’ve heard by a thousand,” she said. “However, I can loan you the one person in the world who can lead him around like a little lamb.”

  She rang a bell and whispered to the servant who appeared, and he trotted away.