The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  “What would you want in return?” Master Li asked.

  “Your influence and writing brush,” she said, and she stood up and began pacing the floor like a man, smacking a fist into the palm of the other hand.

  “Li Kao, impatience is not pleasing to Heaven, but it’s been nearly two thousand years since our guild received celestial signs indicating that our Patron deity had been replaced, and we’re getting impatient. We lost the protection of Golden Lotus, the greatest whore the world has ever known, and not one of the substitute deities we’ve been saddled with could lift a customer’s purse if he was dead drunk and stuck headfirst in a barrel of molasses,” the captain said angrily. “Now nothing is going right! The court keeps us tied up with Secret Service work that pays practically nothing, and there have been eight outbreaks of pox in the last five months, and now the palace eunuchs are trying to divert the emperor’s attention from their activities by starting another morality campaign. Golden Lotus wouldn’t have stood for it!” the captain said passionately. “She’d have marched from star to star across the Great River and demanded an audience with the August Personage of Jade! We need a patron with her kind of guts, not an obsequious blob of suet.”

  She whirled around and swept a delicate porcelain teacup from the table and watched it smash on the floor.

  “Li Kao, I’ll loan you the girl who can control Moon Boy for as long as you need her, and all I ask in return is that you petition the imperial court to make a formal request to Heaven for a new Patron of Prostitutes.”

  “You overestimate my influence at court,” Master Li said wryly.

  “You underestimate my ability at blackmail,” she replied. “The emperor can’t ignore a petition from Master Li, and I’ll see to it that an army of priests and bureaucrats falls in behind you. Besides, our candidate will be one of the emperor’s predecessors, and he wouldn’t want to disturb the dear lady’s ghost.”

  Master Li sat up straight. “You don’t mean Empress Wu?” he said incredulously.

  “Who would be better qualified?” the captain asked. “She bounced from bed to bed all the way to the throne, and why should she fry in Hell when she can do something useful in Heaven?”

  “Dear lady, you’d be asking the Emperor of Heaven to accept as a junior minister a tyrant who poisoned her sister, her niece, and one of her sons!” Master Li exclaimed. “She forced another son to hang himself, had three grandsons and a granddaughter whipped to death, executed two stepsons and had all sixteen of their male progeny decapitated, strangled thirty-six senior ministers, and wiped out three thousand entire families. In addition, she turned out to be one of the cleverest and ablest rulers China ever had, and she acquired the throne so smoothly, her rivals never knew what hit them. The August Personage of Jade will accept letters of office from Empress Wu the moment he accepts mine to be Patron of Teetotalers.”

  The Captain looked at him in silence for a moment, and then extended her hands in a charming gesture of offering a gift.

  “The guild has authorized me to take whatever steps are necessary, and I hereby pass that authorization to you,” she said. “Li Kao, you have been known to occasionally catch the ear of Heaven. If the opportunity arises, you may handle the situation as you think best, keeping in mind that our patron must be tough, smart, quick, remorseless and blessed with the moral principles of a rutting angleworm. It’s a damn shame you yourself happen to be the wrong sex.”

  Master Li stood up and bowed. “Never have I received a greater compliment,” he said sincerely.

  I looked at the gleams in their eyes and groaned inwardly. They were about to begin another game of shuttlecock, but just then the servant reappeared with a young lady in tow. She was small and lithe and pretty, but not pretty enough to make me feel like a pig at a peacock convention, and the captain looked at her fondly.

  “This is Grief of Dawn, who will never make a good whore,” she said. “Her heart is too tender, but fortunately, it’s the only tender spot she has. She’s tough and capable and far too experienced for her years, and you won’t need to worry about traveling with her.”

  She turned to the girl. “This is the notorious Master Li and his assistant, Number Ten Ox. They need Moon Boy. Prying him loose from the King of Chao will be his responsibility, and yours will be keeping Moon Boy in line until he does what must be done.”

  Grief of Dawn bowed. She undid her hair clasp and handed it to Master Li. “Moon Boy and I are as one,” she said simply. “With me he will stay, but with anyone else he will fly away upon the first breeze.”

  Master Li examined the clasp and nodded appreciatively. Grief of Dawn politely extended it to me, and I saw the interlocking yin-yang motif of phoenix and dragon. She turned it over to show the interlocking names of Grief of Dawn and Moon Boy, and her hand happened to brush mine. I don’t know if my reaction was visible in Hangchow, but the captain’s eyebrows nearly lifted off her head.

  “Is he always this susceptible?” she asked.

  “Well, I’ve never before seen his ears emit puffs of smoke,” Master Li said judiciously.

  “Get a bucket of water,” the captain said to the servant.

  “No need,” I said in a high strangled voice. “Just choking on a flower petal from the tea.”

  Grief of Dawn’s eyes were startled and wary, but there was a hint of a smile in them. She discreetly moved to the other side of the room. The flower petal excuse fooled nobody, and here I think I should insert a tirade I have heard many times from Master Li. It’s the only way to begin to explain my reaction to Grief of Dawn.

  The great dream of bureaucrats and most aristocrats is to return to the best of all possible worlds: the rigid feudalism so prettily praised by Confucius. The key is the total subjugation of peasants, and some of the methods are very ingenious. One of the best has been the establishment of a dowry system that requires a bride to be accompanied into her new home with a substantial gift of money or land.

  In practical terms it means that peasants who are cursed with an overload of daughters must choose between starvation or infanticide. The girls can’t quite pay their own way in the fields. The parents can’t afford to keep them and can’t marry them off—the only thing left is to drown them at birth, which allows aristocrats to screech, “What inhuman callousness! Who can argue that mere pigs should be allowed to own their pigpens?” Peasant girls who are kept alive soon learn that they are starving their own parents and that marriage is out of the question, and if they are at all pretty, they often run away and become prostitutes in order to send a little money home. This allows bureaucrats to bellow, “Look at the immoral sluts! Who can argue that such swine should have any legal rights at all?” It’s a marvelous system, without a flaw, and those who say that some of the sluts could teach the bureaucrats a few things about morality will be given a fish hook, a knife, a candle, and unlimited time in which to mend their manners in a swamp in Siam.

  When my hand brushed Grief of Dawn’s, I felt calluses. It would take years for the hard lines to soften completely, and from my point of view they were prettier than pearls. That doesn’t explain it completely, of course, but one thing was certain. I was in love.

  Master Li was grinning at me. “Ah, if only I could be ninety again,” he said nostalgically. “Ox, try to keep your paws off the young lady while we’re traveling. Grief of Dawn, hit him over the head with a log every now and then. He will be grateful for the attention.”

  “We have a pact?” said the Captain of Prostitutes.

  “We have a pact,” said Master Li. “I promise nothing, but I shall do my best for Empress Wu, and, should that fail, do everything possible to get you a competent patron. Can you blackmail somebody at the postal service? We’re in something of a hurry.”

  “It shall be done,” said the Captain of Prostitutes.

  The sun was just lifting over Serpentine Park when Master Li and I arrived at the postal service stables. Grief of Dawn was waiting for us. She had chosen clothes that ind
icated experience in serious traveling: boy’s tough trousers, high leather boots, a tunic made to withstand thorns as well as raindrops, and an oiled rain hat. The rest of her clothes and possessions were neatly stored in a pack on her back. Master Li approved, and his approval rating jumped ten points when she walked to her horse and slid the bow from the saddle holster and grimaced at the pull. She went through six or seven different bows before finding one that suited her, and when she swung up to the saddle, I knew she was a far better rider than I was. I’m only comfortable upon a water buffalo. Meanwhile, I was strutting around like a peacock.

  Only somebody with the influence of the Captain of Prostitutes could have arranged it. I had an official cap and tunic emblazoned with imperial dragons, and a message pouch sealed with the emblem of state. Master Li showed me how to fix the butt of the flagpole into the cup beside the stirrup. The gates swung open and I managed a respectable blast on my silver trumpet and we galloped out in a cloud of dust, scattering pedestrians quite satisfactorily. I even made the turn without falling off.

  Master Li let me set the pace—to get it out of my system, I suppose—and I exhilarated in the kind of speed that is only possible for those who ride beneath the flag of the gyrfalcon. The horse stations were positioned every few miles, and I would raise the trumpet and blow “alert,” and then “three horses,” and we would ride up to grooms holding fresh horses and swing from one mount to the other without touching the ground, and then be off again as though the fate of the empire depended upon it. That lasted one day. After that we traveled a good deal slower because my rear end was almost as sore as the insides of my thighs. Master Li could still ride with the best of them, and Grief of Dawn might have been born on a horse, and I was grateful to them for not laughing when I hobbled around our camp at night.

  When the route led downstream beside a major river, we would ride our horses onto a postal service barge and let the current do the work. Those were the best times. I had a chance to talk to Grief of Dawn. She was pure peasant, just as I thought, and we learned that she had no memory of her life until she was about eighteen. She had been found by an old lady she called Tai-tai (“great-great”), unconscious and covered with blood, and the old lady had taken her in and treated her as a daughter. It had been early in the morning, so Tai-tai named the girl Grief of Dawn. Master Li examined a deep round indentation in her skull and said that somebody had certainly tried to kill her, and it was a wonder all she had lost was her memory.

  He had no objection to my telling her about the case we were on, so long as I made no mention of the tomb, and she was fascinated to hear about Lady Hou, the Thunderballed princess in One-Eyed Wong’s, because she knew and loved some of her poems. The bargemen always had musical instruments. At night we would play and Grief of Dawn would sing peasant songs so old that not even Master Li knew them, and one night she adapted one of Lady Hou’s poems to our circumstances and sang it for us. I will include it here as a matter of interest for those who may not have encountered the deceptively simple art of Lady Hou.

  “Tonight no wind blows on the river.

  The water is still and dark,

  No waves or ripples.

  All around the barge

  Moonlight floats in air,

  Acres of smooth lustrous jade.

  “Master Li breaks the silence.

  High on wine he lifts his flute,

  Playing into the mist.

  Strange music rises to the stars;

  Apes in the mountains

  Screaming at the moon,

  A stream rushing through a gorge.

  Ox accompanies on his sheepskin drum.

  Head held like a mountain peak,

  Fingers beating like raindrops.

  “A fish breaks the surface of the water

  And leaps ten feet into the air.” *

  When we got to land again we galloped through villages where children with huge dreaming eyes gathered to watch us pass (who hasn’t imagined himself as a legendary hero of the postal service?), and through narrow mountain passes where bandits with hyena faces snarled at the flag of the gyrfalcon and drew back in fear. That may give the impression that imperial control was total, but such was not the case.

  “My children, there are corners of the empire where the emperor is little more than a figurehead, and we’re approaching one of them,” Master Li said. “In the Kingdom of Chao there is only one ruler, and his name is Shih Hu.”

  Master Li threw out his hands in an admiring gesture so wide he nearly fell from his horse.

  “What a man! He’s been on the throne for twenty-eight years without making a major mistake, which approaches the supernatural. He stands six feet seven and weighs more than four hundred pounds, and enemies who assume his bulk is blubber soon decorate pikes on his walls with their severed heads. He’s loved by his people, feared by his rivals, adored by his women, and Grief of Dawn will have something to think about when she sees his bodyguards.”

  He winked at her. “They’re beautiful young women who wear uniforms of sable and carry golden bows,” he explained. “I’d rather go up against a pack of panthers than the Golden Girls. They worship their king, and perhaps he deserves it. Chao is the best-governed state in the civilized world, but you must never forget that the king himself is not civilized. Shih Hu was born a barbarian, and his soul remains barbarian. His violence can be sudden and extreme, and his palace is hard to get into and even harder to get out of.”

  He rode on in silence for a few minutes.

  “So far as I know, the king has only one weakness,” Master Li said thoughtfully. “He avidly collects people with unusual talents, and I rather think he might open his gates to a living legend. Somebody like the world’s greatest master of the Wen-Wu lute.”

  Grief of Dawn and I looked at each other. The Wen-Wu is the hardest instrument in the world to play properly, and we shrugged our shoulders.

  “Venerable Sir, can you play the thing?” I inquired.

  He looked at us in surprise. “What does playing it have to do with being the world’s greatest master?” he said.

  * * *

  * Officially attributed to Yang Wan-li. [back]

  The great banquet hall of King Shih Hu was hushed and expectant. Minutes passed. Then the doors flew open and flunkies in sumptuous attire marched inside and blew mighty blasts on trumpets. They were followed by a parade of priests chanting hymns in praise of a master whose genius had surely been bestowed by the hand of Heaven itself. Then an army of acolytes pranced prettily through the doors, strewing rose petals hither and yon. Then came two senior apprentices: a fabulously wealthy young man who had abandoned all worldly goods to sit at the feet of the master, and a princess of the royal blood who had abandoned a throne. The princess carried a small ivory stool, and the young man carried a simple unadorned lute upon a silken pillow.

  Priests and acolytes continued their hymns. Minutes passed slowly. Just when the suspense had become unbearable, there was a soft shuffle of sandals, and several distinguished guests swooned when the world’s greatest master of the Wen-Wu lute tottered through the doors.

  He was at least a thousand years old and semi-divine. A thick beard whiter than snow fell down and brushed his ankles, and his enormous white eyebrows lifted like the fierce tufts of a horned owl. His coarse peasant robe was woven from the cheapest cloth, and his sandals had been patched at least fifty times. Green leaves still sprouted from his freshly cut oak staff. Disdain for worldly matters was written all over him, and he was matted with mud from a hillside where he had slept beneath the stars.

  The great man slowly shuffled across the floor to the ivory stool, and the princess reverently lowered him to a sitting position. The young man knelt and placed the lute upon the master’s lap. For what appeared to be an eternity the saint gazed down, silently communing with the instrument, and then his head slowly lifted. Piercing black eyes burned holes through the audience. A wrinkled finger lifted, and the wrinkled voice that emerged
from the beard was like the drone of a pedagogical bee, yet vibrant with authority.

  “The Wen-Wu lute,” the great man said, “was invented by Fu-hsi, who saw a meteor land in a tung tree. Soon afterward a phoenix landed beside the meteor, and when the meteor fizzled out with a melodic hiss and the phoenix flew away with a contrapuntal cry, Fu-hsi realized that he had been granted a sign from Heaven. He felled the tree, which was precisely thirty-three feet long, and cut it into three eleven-foot pieces. These pieces he soaked in running water for seventy-three days, one fifth of a year. He tapped the top piece, but the pitch was too high. He tapped the bottom piece, but the pitch was too low. He tapped the middle piece, and the pitch was just right.”

  One of the banqueters sneezed, and the master raised a white eyebrow. Flunkies, priests, acolytes, and apprentices descended upon the wretch and pitched him out the door. After two minutes of glowering silence, the master condescended to continue.

  “Fu-hsi commissioned Liu Tzu-ch’i, the greatest artisan in China, to fashion the middle piece into a musical instrument. It was precisely thirty-six inches long, corresponding to the three hundred sixty degrees of a circle, four inches wide at the rear end, corresponding to the four seasons, eight inches wide at the front end, corresponding to the eight festivals, and its uniform height of two inches corresponded to yin and yang, the generative forces of the universe. Twelve stops were intended to correspond to the twelve moons of the year, but Fu-hsi later added a thirteenth stop to account for leap year.”

  One of the banqueters coughed, and the master raised the other eyebrow. Flunkies, priests, acolytes, and apprentices descended upon the wretch and pitched him out a window. It was three minutes before the ancient demigod condescended to continue.

  “The five original strings,” he wheezed, searing the cowering assembly with flaming eyes, “corresponded to the five elements: metal, wood, water, earth, and fire; the five temperaments: quietude, nervousness, strength, hardness, and wisdom; and the five musical tones: kung, shang, chueh, cheng, and yu. When King Wen of Chou was imprisoned at Chiangli, his son, Prince Pai-yi-k’ao, was so grieved that he added a sixth string to express his sorrow. This is called the Wen string, and it produces a low melancholy sound. When King Wu launched a military campaign against King Cheo, he was so pleased at going to war that he added a seventh string to express his joy. This is called the Wu string, and it produces a high heroic sound. Thus the lute of seven strings is called the Wen-Wu lute, and in the hands of a performer of talent it can tame the most ferocious beast. In the hands of a performer of genius it can start or stop a war. In the hands of a performer such as myself it can raise the dead.”