The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  “Eh?” said Master Li. He walked over and began wiping the perspiration from her forehead. “Darling, what does your mistress want you to get at Chien’s?” he asked gently.

  She wrinkled her nose again. “Rhinoceros hides.”

  “And where is Chien’s?” he asked.

  “Halfway between the canal and Little Ch’ing-hu Lake,” said Grief of Dawn.

  Master Li whistled and paced around the room, and then he returned to her bedside.

  “Darling, does your mistress ever send you to Kang Number Eight’s?” he asked coaxingly.

  Grief of Dawn smiled. “I like Kang Number Eight’s,” she said.

  “Where is it?”

  “On the Street of the Worn Cash-Coin,” she said.

  “What do you buy there?”

  “Hats.”

  “Hats. Yes, of course. And where do you buy your mistress’s painted fans?” Master Li asked.

  “The Coal Bridge.”

  “I suppose she also sends you to buy the famous boiled pork at…. What’s the name of that place?”

  “Wei-the-Big-Knife,” she said.

  “Of course. Do you remember where it is?”

  “Right beside the Cat Bridge,” she replied.

  Master Li took another six laps around the room. When he returned to the bed, he had his hands behind him and the fingers were tightly crossed.

  “Darling, when your mistress plays cards, what kind does she use?” he asked.

  “Peach-blend,” Grief of Dawn said drowsily.

  “And where do her dice come from?”

  “Chuanchu Alley.”

  “And what do you buy from Yao-chih?”

  “Cosmetics.”

  “And where do you get rare herbs?”

  “Fenglai.”

  “What does your mistress get from Chingshan?”

  “Writing brushes.”

  “Of course,” said Master Li. “And what’s-his-name personally blends her ink?”

  “Yes. Li Tinghuei.”

  “And that lovely courtesan makes pink paper for her?”

  “Shieh Tao. Yes, she is lovely,” Grief of Dawn said.

  The fever was returning. Grief of Dawn tossed and turned while Moon Boy and the prince tried to soothe her.

  “Faster…faster…. Where is the passage? Hurry! … More soldiers…. Faster…faster…. Hurry, darling! … There’s the ibis statue….”

  Master Li walked over to the desk and sat down and pulled out his wine flask and swallowed about a quart.

  “Pink paper from the hands of Shieh Tao,” he snarled when he came up for air. “Painted fans from the Coal Bridge and hats from Kang Number Eight’s on the Street of the Worn Cash-Coin. Li Tmghuei personally blends the ink. Moon Boy! Can Grief of Dawn read?”

  “About as well as I do, which is not very well,” he said frankly. “Number Ten Ox reads ten times better than either of us.”

  Master Li swallowed another quart. “I don’t even know what I’m about anymore,” he muttered. “She’d have to be able to read Flying White shorthand.”

  He jumped to his feet and turned to the prince. “Your Highness, that damned fever will kill her unless we get rid of it, and the only medicine I know of that will do the trick requires the seeds of the Bombay thorn apple. Moon Boy and Ox and I are going out to find one, and in the process we will probably get killed.”

  Moon Boy looked at me, and then at Master Li.

  “What shall we pack?” he asked.

  There is no point in dwelling on my emotions regarding Grief of Dawn, but when I lay awake at night I passed the hours by planning for the day when she would be well and Master Li would take her for his wife. The Mings had quite a large shed at the rear of their house. Would they need it now that Great-grandfather was dead? We could buy it, and I knew how to lever it up and move it over to the shack, and I could fix it up as quarters for me and any guest—it was a great comfort to work out every last detail of such things, and eventually I would drift off and dream about it.

  We made one stop before reaching Master Li’s destination. It was at Unicorn Hall, which is a rather sad commentary upon earthly glory. The proud dignitaries of the Han Dynasty had posed for portraits that were intended to be worshipped throughout eternity, but Unicorn Hall is now in ruins. Weeds grow everywhere. Nobody has bothered to repair the roof for a century, and rain pours in. People have taken the doors and the wooden floor, and the only reason any portraits remain is that nobody can find a use for them.

  Emperor Wu-ti’s portrait was still intact, and even a flattering artist couldn’t disguise the fact that he looked more like a bull than a man. The Laughing Prince’s portrait was like the one at the estate, with the same strangely unfocused eyes. Master Li wasn’t interested in the prince, however. He had come to take a close look at the prince’s wife, Tou Wan.

  “A friend of mine—dead for at least sixty years—once told me something interesting about Tou Wan,” Master Li said. “He said that she may have been the only aristocrat to wear a hairpin that had a point fashioned from simple stone, in the style of poor peasants, and yet in all other matters she had been a spendthrift of classic proportions.”

  The young lady who gazed from the portrait was very beautiful, although I couldn’t tell how much was real and how much was flattery. Her hair was secured by a single long pin, and the tip of it was just visible. Master Li studied it with his nose no more than an inch from the surface.

  “That’s what he meant,” he muttered. “It’s stone, all right, and the artist wouldn’t have dared to toss in a sarcastic touch.”

  He turned and started back down the path. “Remember the words of Ssu-ma Ch’ien? The second blow of the axe broke a small sliver from the stone of the Laughing Prince, and it appears that a small sliver of stone decorated the hairpin of the Laughing Prince’s wife. I’ll have to remember to ask her about it.”

  We stared at him, but he said no more about it.

  Where Grief of Dawn was concerned, Moon Boy was all business. He didn’t once slip away in search of pretty boys, and we made good time. In a few days we stopped at the crest of a hill and gazed down at the roof of a small temple, and Master Li said it was our destination.

  “The Temple of Liu Ling,” he said. “Ever hear of him?”

  We said we hadn’t.

  “We were quite a group, I suppose, but Ling was miles ahead of any of us,” Master Li said, smiling at ancient memories. “I can see him now in his cart pulled by two deer, followed by a couple of servants. One carried enough wine to kill Liu Ling, and the other carried a spade to bury him on the spot—so much for Confucian ceremony. When I came to call he’d greet me stark naked, and I can still hear him scream, ‘The universe is my dwelling place and my house is my only clothes! Why are you entering into my pants?’”

  Master Li pointed to the temple. “Ling decided that men listen only to lies, so he founded the Temple of Illusion and arranged for the order to continue after his death. Moon Boy, can illusion of and by itself kill a man?”

  Moon Boy shrugged. “My teacher, Lin Tsening, once deafened a bandit by persuading him that he was hearing two monstrous dragons in the next room. There were no dragons. The actual sound was scarcely loud enough to frighten sparrows, but the bandit was still deaf.”

  “Granny Ho once got mad at her son-in-law,” I said. “She put him into some sort of trance, and told him he had fallen downstairs and hurt his left leg. When he woke up he laughed at her, and a day later his left leg turned black and blue and began to swell, and he was so lame he couldn’t work for a week.”

  “Excellent,” said Master Li. “My young friends, I need to recall something. Years and years ago on a walking trip I saw a Bombay thorn apple but I’ve long forgotten where it was. In addition, I need to take a totally fresh look at things I have seen or guessed at, but not fully understood. In short, I need to take a trip into the inner recesses of my mind, and I want to take you with me. Nothing is more dangerous than a voyage inwa
rd. If your mind and senses tell you that a spear has plunged into your heart, does it matter whether the spear is real or imaginary?”

  I thought about it. “It seems to me that either way, you’d be dead,” I said, and Moon Boy nodded agreement.

  “Keep that in mind,” Master Li said grimly. “The Temple of Illusion is Liu Ling’s masterpiece, and a great many people who have ridden up to it in carriages have departed in coffins.”

  With those cheering words he started down the hill. The temple was small and bare, and a small courtyard led to a plain room where a priest sat behind a desk reading a scroll. He didn’t bother to look up when we entered. Master Li slid quite a lot of money across the desk. “One,” he said. He added another pile. “Two.” He added a third pile. “Three,” he said. Still the priest didn’t look up, but he rang a bell, and another priest entered and led us to a small room that contained only a row of pallets on the floor and a single plaque on the wall.

  I was rather surprised. I had expected mysterious music and thick incense and all the other trappings of mumbo jumbo, but apparently the illusions of Liu Ling didn’t need any embellishment. The plaque was in simple script I could read, and I studied it with interest.

  Butterfly Dreams

  Chuang Tzu said, “Once I dreamed myself to be a butterfly, floating like petals in the air, happy to be doing as I pleased, no longer aware of myself. But soon enough I woke, and then, frantically clutching myself, Chuang Tzu I was. I wonder: Was Chuang Tzu dreaming himself to be the butterfly, or was the butterfly dreaming itself to be Chuang Tzu? Of course, if you take Chuang Tzu and the butterfly together, there is a difference between them, but is not the difference only the illusion of material form?”

  The silent priest reappeared with three cups of wine and three small bowls, and he gestured that we should eat and drink. Master Li ate the stuff in his bowl with the air of a connoisseur. “I don’t know what they put in the wine, but this is Devil’s Ears, the most powerful of hallucinatory mushrooms,” he said nonchalantly. Then he turned and pointed to the plaque.

  “Chuang Tzu once made a meal of Devil’s Ears. Then he had a vision that explained all the perplexing problems of mankind, and he wrote it down. When he came to himself he eagerly grabbed the paper and this is what he read: ‘Sheep’s Groom couples with bamboo that has not sprouted for a long while and produces Green Peace plants. Green Peace plants produce leopards, and leopards produce horses, and horses produce men. Men in time return to Sheep’s Groom.’ Wraps it all up rather neatly, don’t you think?”

  I choked on my mushroom. Moon Boy managed to eat his, so I followed suit, and then I clapped one hand to the top of my head and the other to my toes and waited for my hands to either spread apart or slam together. Nothing happened, and I began to breathe more easily. The silent priest came back in and gestured for us to follow, and walked through a door into a garden. I gazed with disbelieving eyes at the shadows.

  The angle of the sun told me that it was at least the double hour of the horse. It had been early morning when we entered. Somehow nearly four hours had vanished. What had happened to them? Master Li didn’t seem to be perturbed. He was trotting toward a small round pool of water in the center of the garden, and there was a happy smile on his face. As I came closer I saw something white at the bottom, and then I realized that a human skull was grinning up at us.

  “Ling, dear old friend! My, you’re certainly looking splendid today,” Master Li said.

  Moon Boy and I very nearly toppled over. There wasn’t a breath of wind, yet a tall patch of reeds at the back of the pool suddenly sprang into motion: bending, arching, jabbing, thrusting—it was calligraphy; the reeds were writing in the air.

  “Li Kao, you were born to be hung!”

  “You mean ‘hanged,’” Master Li said sweetly.

  “I mean the gallows!”

  The reeds began moving so fast I had trouble keeping up, but I gathered that the late Liu Ling was saying that the flaw in Master Li’s character couldn’t be explained by loathsome percentage alone, and in a previous incarnation Master Li must have been a hyena or a scorpion or even the East Idiot Ruler of South Tsi. The reeds became quite agitated as they reviewed that gentleman’s career.

  “—and cut off their bands and feet!”

  “No, I couldn’t have been the East Idiot Ruler of South Tsi,” Master Li said thoughtfully. “I would have cut off their noses as well.”

  “…burned right down to the ground!”

  “If you must do something, do a thorough job,” Master Li said.

  “…every last man, woman, and child!”

  “Wasteful. Some of the girls must have been pretty. Ling, old friend I hate to be overly critical, but was it wise to surround yourself with nothing but water?” said Master Li.

  He puffed out his flask and splashed wine into the pool, and Moon Boy and I clung together for support. The dark stain of wine had gathered itself into a spinning whirlpool, and the spout was reaching down through the water to the grinning mouth of the skull. The reeds were still. Then one moved.

  “Burp.”

  “This stuff is since your time,” Master Li said. “It’s called Haining Mountain Dew. What do you think of it?”

  The reeds went into action again. “Haining? Those clodhoppers make this excellent wine? I suppose even dung beetles have their talents. Speaking of dung beetles, has Belly Draft finished drinking himself to death?”

  “He’s still working at it,” said Master Li. “I tell his landlords that his liver is constructed from some kind of crystallized carbon but they keep throwing him out because of the danger of spontaneous combustion.”

  He poured more wine into the pool and had some himself. The reeds went waving again.

  “Who’s the raving beauty and the carnival wrestler?”

  “This is my esteemed former client and current assistant, Number Ten Ox,” Master Li said. “This is Moon Boy, the world’s foremost authority on sounds and bottoms like peaches.”

  We stepped forward and bowed to the skull. The reeds moved.

  “Moon Boy makes me wish I still had a bottom, but why bring young heroes to an old quack lying at the bottom of a pool?”

  Master Li took another sip of wine. “For one thing, I want Moon Boy to look into a mirror,” he said casually.

  Was it my imagination or were the reeds moving warily?

  “What kind of mirror did you have in mind?”

  “The only one that matters,” Master Li said.

  “Take care, Li Kao!”

  “Others have made the trip,” Master Li said. “I even hear that the emperor came to you for a passport, and he’s still in one piece.”

  The reeds were quite agitated. “Tang needed both divine intervention and an enormous bribe to get out! Can you count on that kind of help? I can open the door, but once inside, you’d be on your own, and have the boys consented to such a journey?”

  Master Li glanced at us. I bowed to the skull. “Illustrious Sir, where Master Li goes, I go,” I said.

  “Most Noble Sage, the life of a girl named Grief of Dawn is involved, and I will go where I must,” Moon Boy said.

  The reeds were still, and when they moved, it was reluctantly.

  “So be it. Li Kao, give my love to Queen Feiyen if you see her—gods, her breath was like an orchid!—and thank Li Po for leaving me his loaded dice.”

  The water in the pool began to revolve. It swirled faster and faster, moving in concentric circles toward the center, and my eyes were drawn to the skull. A strange light was shining in the empty eye sockets, beckoning to me, and it seemed that the skull was growing larger and larger. White bones appeared to fill the sky, and the light pulled me forward, and I found myself walking through a huge eye socket. Master Li and Moon Boy walked through the other one, and we were standing on a rocky ledge high on a mountain. Cold wind whistled around my ears, and in the distance an eagle screamed.

  “Marvelous effects,” said Master Li.


  In front of us, set in the rock, was a bronze door. Master Li pushed it open and we walked through to a landing and placed our feet upon the first step of a long winding staircase that would take us down to Hell.

  Barbarian readers, no matter how illustrious, will have but a rudimentary concept of Hell. This not their fault but the fault of ignorant priests and sages who cling to two incredible fallacies: that Hell is reserved for the damned, and that the world is flat.

  The world is a cube measuring 233,575 paces across. The center of the cube is occupied by the Kingdom of Hell, and it is the judging place for all mortals, saint and sinner alike. That is why people on the wrong sides of the cube don’t fall off: We are all drawn toward our ultimate destination so no matter where one stands, Hell is always “down” and Heaven is always “up,” and that’s all there is to it.

  The kingdom is enormous. There are one hundred thirty-five lesser Hells and ten principal ones: one for judgment by the God of Walls and Ditches, one for the Great Wheel of Transmigrations, and eight for the punishment of sinners. The lesser Hells contain people waiting to be judged, other people awaiting transportation to the Land of Extreme Felicity in the West, where they will sit at the feet of Buddha, extremely blessed people who await transportation to K’un-lun Mountain, where they will sit at the feet of the August Personage of Jade, and so many others that I will not try to list them.

  It is strictly illegal for the living to enter Hell, with rare exceptions involving official delegations from the Emperor of China. Outside of Emperor T’ang, I knew of only two others who had illegally entered Hell and managed to return. One was Chou the Rogue, who was a crook so audacious that he once blackmailed the sun, and the other was Crazy Ch’i, who has become a demigod and has many temples dedicated to him. I would back Master Li against either of them, which is why I wasn’t totally paralyzed with fear as we descended to the Land of Shadows. Master Li, however, had a few doubts.