Light formed around Moon Boy’s beautiful face. The nimbus grew brighter and brighter, shimmering like tongues of fire. Moon Boy was changing and yet not changing, rearranging in a way that was both familiar and strong. His face lifted. His arms rose as though reaching for the sun. Brilliant colors moved around and through him. The sins column had overflowed and was stretching down the wall, and the virtues column remained empty.
Suddenly the columns disappeared. The image disappeared.
Words formed in the mirror. “Judgment is beyond the jurisdiction of lower courts, and is reserved for the Supreme Deity.” Then the words vanished and Moon Boy was staring back at his own image.
“Heaven preserve us,” the Recorder whispered.
“Incredible,” Master Li said. “We must thank the gods that this fellow is not under our jurisdiction! The Son of Heaven will assign temporal punishment to him and his oafish accomplice, but I had best glance at the Register of Souls to ensure that an earthly sentence will not conflict with a divine one.”
I doubt that the Recorder of Past Existences would normally have allowed such a thing, but he was a shaken man. He meekly allowed Master Li to spend a minute in the room where the register was kept, and then he hastily escorted us back through the maze, opened a door, shoved us outside to a courtyard, and slammed the door behind us.
Master Li doubled over with laughter. “What a pair you are!” he chortled. “It’s an honor to travel with such distinguished young gentlemen, so let’s travel to see a friend of mine, and then on to see Tou Wan, the wife of the Laughing Prince.”
I had to admire Moon Boy. He had just discovered that his previous existences broke the world record for wickedness, but he preened himself as though nothing had happened and kept his voice steady.
“At the risk of sounding stupid, why don’t we go see the bureaucratic assassin himself?” he asked reasonably.
Master Li started off in silence. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “That would be a bit difficult. You see, according to the Register of Souls, the Laughing Prince managed to elude the bailiffs, and he has never arrived in Hell.”
Looking back at it, I think it was fortunate that Moon Boy and I were preoccupied with images of a mad mummy creeping up from a tomb to the room where Grief of Dawn lay helpless in bed. It distracted us from the details of Hell, and some of them were very unpleasant. We were approaching the river How Nai-ho, which is the boundary between the First and Second Hells. It is spanned by three bridges: One is gold and is used by visiting gods and their emissaries, one is silver and is used by the virtuous, and the third is a ramshackle bamboo bridge with no handrails that is used by sinners. The sinners scream in terror as they try to cross the river. Inevitably they fall off, and horrible bronze dogs and snakes splash through the water with jaws gaping wide. The water bubbles with blood, but it’s merely a foretaste of what is to come, because the mangled bodies wash up on the far bank and are miraculously healed, and laughing demons lead the sinners to places where torment begins in earnest.
Master Li marched toward the gold bridge while Moon Boy bellowed, “Make way for Lord Li of Kao, emissary of the Son of Heaven!” and we proceeded past glaring demons and over the golden span as though we owned it. The Second Hell punishes dishonest male and female intermediaries and ignorant or unscrupulous doctors. The torment is not one of the terrible ones, but the smell is revolting, and Moon Boy and Master Li clapped handkerchiefs to their noses. I was used to barnyards, so I wasn’t bothered very much. We made our way down long lines of pits, and finally Master Li stopped at one where a fat fellow with a mournful flabby face was buried in soft manure up to his chin. Even through the reek he could smell living flesh, and his eyes slowly lifted.
“Now, look here, Li Kao, if it’s about that land I sold you!”
“Nothing like that,” said Master Li.
“I had no idea there was alkali in the soil! May Heaven judge if I…er…may Heaven judge…er…oh, shit.”
“Well, you should be an expert on the subject,” Master Li said cheerfully. “Actually, the Yama Kings were quite lenient, considering the fact that you sold some of the same land to your own father.”
The fat fellow began to weep, and tears made pale furrows in the brown goo that covered most of his face. “You wouldn’t bring that to their attention, would you?” he sobbed. “You can’t imagine what the Neo-Confucians are doing to this place! They’d send me to the Eighth Hell, and that’s horror beyond belief.”
“You should see what the same fellows are doing to China,” Master Li said gloomily. “The other night I dreamed you had returned as court physician, and I hadn’t been so happy in years.”
It was difficult to draw oneself up with dignity under the circumstances, but the fat fellow tried.
“Not all of my patients died,’” he said huffily. “Some even managed to walk again, and one or two didn’t even need crutches!”
“The ones you treated for colds?”
“Colds or pimples. It is not the physician’s fault if a patient is lunatic enough to come in with a case of hangnails,” the fellow said reasonably.
“You were a doctor in a million,” Master Li said warmly. “Who else would have prescribed arsenic oxide for hiccups?”
“It worked!”
“No patient is in a position to dispute it,” Master Li said somewhat ambiguously. “Medical expertise is not what I’ve come to see you about, however. Do you remember the walking trip we took in Tungan? It must have been eighty or ninety years ago, and I’ve reached the point where my brain resembles the stuff you’re buried in. All I can remember is a girl in a scarlet sampan.”
The transformation was amazing. Flab appeared to melt from the fat fellow’s face, and I realized that he had once been a lighthearted and rather handsome young man.
“You remember her too?” he said softly. “Li Kao, not a day has passed in which I haven’t thought of that girl. Wasn’t that a time? She sang ‘Autumn Nights’ and tossed rice cakes into the water and laughed as we dove for them like ducks. By all the gods, I hope she made it to Heaven.”
“Wasn’t there a festival?” Master Li asked.
“A wild village one. Masks and drums and monkey-dances, and that big farmer picked you up after you’d blackened his eye and crowned you King of Fleas. We stayed drunk for a week, and they gave us gifts of food and flowers when we left.”
He gazed sadly down at his manure pit. “What a wonderful thing it was to be young,” he whispered.
Master Li told us to keep our eyes peeled for demons while he leaned down and tilted his wine flask at the fellow’s lips. It had been a long time between, and he gulped a quart.
“Buddha, that’s wonderful stuff! Haining Mountain Dew?”
“The best,” Master Li said. “You were an avid botanist in those days, and I seem to remember that after we left the girl in the sampan we set out cross-country. We passed a temple or a convent, and when we climbed into the hills, you discovered—”
“The Bombay thorn apple!” the fellow cried. “How could I forget it? The find of a lifetime, and I always planned to go back, but somehow the world closed in on me and I never did.”
“Could you find it now?” Master Li asked.
The fellow looked up with sudden intelligence in his eyes. “So that’s it. You need a Bombay thorn apple, do you? Dangerous stuff, Li Kao. You always did get involved in the damnedest things, and how you manage to keep alive is one of the great mysteries of the empire.” Master Li leaned down with the flask again.
“What a pair we are,” the fellow said when he stopped coughing. “I’m damned and you’re demented. I may be a sinner, but at least I know it isn’t nice to deprive children or lunatics of their toys, and if I wanted the only Bombay thorn apple I’ve ever seen in China I’d go about two miles past the White Cloud Convent to the point where the hills are closest to the road. I’d turn east and start climbing. Shale followed by granite followed by some kind of black rock, and past
the black rock I’d come to a clearing in front of a cliff. Tunnel through the brush, and right against the cliff another tiny clearing, and in the center is a Bombay thorn apple—unless somebody’s cut it down for firewood and massacred his family and neighbors in the process.”
His eyes moved to Moon Boy and me. “Something to do with Beauty and the Beast, eh? Take care, Li Kao. This is the soft area of hell. Later on you’ll need a better passport than a state umbrella.”
After Li bowed and turned to go. “You know, the Yama Kings are stern but just,” he said. “Good intentions can at least partially mitigate bad results, and the Great Wheel waits patiently. Who knows? After a couple insect and animal incarnations, you might find yourself poling down the Yangtze in a crimson sampan.” The fellow looked up with desperate hope in his eyes. “You couldn’t possibly have sneaked a look at the Register of Souls.” he whispered.
Master Li winked. We started off down the path, and the last I saw of the fellow he was weeping with joy at the thought of being reborn as a sampan singsong girl, and the last I heard of him he was practicing “Autumn Nights.”
The torments of the Third and Fourth Hells are also relatively light, and are designed for such sinners as bad bureaucrats, backbiters, forgers, coiners, misers, dishonest tradesmen, and blasphemers. Serious torment begins in the Fifth Hell, where murderers, unbelievers, and the lustful are punished. I will make no attempt to describe the cauldrons of boiling oil, the pits of molten lead, the beams of hollow iron, the Hill of Knives, and the Sawmill. Master Li told me that such things are used by most cultures with the exception of the Tibetan, and that the Yama Kings had no intention of instituting the unspeakable atrocities of the Tibetan World of Darkness.
According to the Register of Souls, Tou Wan had been damned not for murder and torture but for wanton carnality, and the Fifth Hell provides such sinners with beds in which to cool down. We marched down rows of beds formed from sheets of ice to which sinners were held by frozen iron chains, and naked bodies shuddered unceasingly and the air was loud with the sound of cracking joints. We came to the wife of the Laughing Prince in the fiftieth row.
I was not prepared for her youth and beauty. Like the others, she shuddered and jerked in her chains, but she made not a whimper and her eyes were open instead of being fastened shut by eyelids thick with frozen tears. Master Li bowed deeply.
“Princess, I hope you will forgive the intrusion,” he said. “We had hoped to interview your noble husband, but he appears to be unavailable.”
Her lips parted with the sound of cracking ice. “Unavailable?”
“Somehow he managed to dodge the bailiffs. Do you have any idea how he managed it?”
She managed an ironic laugh, and I decided she was the toughest person I had ever met. “They should have searched for his soul inside the stone,” she said.
“The stone!” Master Li exclaimed. “Wherever we go, we keep running into references to that stone. Would you be kind enough to enlighten me on the subject?”
Tou Wan’s voice was as cold as the ice she lay on. “Guess, if you like. If you guess right, I may answer one or two questions.”
“I shall guess that the stone was broken into three pieces, and the largest piece was placed in a sacristy, and the second largest was used by your husband as an amulet, and the last sliver became the tip of your hairpin,” said Master Li.
“You guess well, old man,” the princess said. “Ssu-ma Ch’ien broke it, the meddling fool, and he wasn’t even half right about it. He called it the Stone of Evil, and his mistake cost him his balls. What would you call the stone, old man?”
Master Li looked thoughtfully at her. “I would not call it evil and I would not call it good,” he said slowly. “I would call it a concentrated life force that in the hands of a saint could heal all wounds, but in the hands of your husband could wound all heals, if you will forgive the sophistry.”
“Better and better, old man,” Tou Wan said. Her eyes closed. Ice began to form over her lips. I thought she had ended the interview, but then her body shuddered and jerked, and the ice over her mouth cracked.
“It was not his, it was never his, it was mine…. A lover gave it to me…. Lovers always gave things to me…. I was ten when I let a boy think he had seduced me; he gave me his mother’s rings…. A pretty boy, so easy to train, like a dog…. Lie down! Sit up! … His father came for the rings and I trained him too…. Roll over! Beg! … I led him around on a leash that only women could see; how they hated me, the sluts…. He made me his number seven wife, and I persuaded him and his pretty son to go to a war where they were sure to be killed…. Hsu was the lawyer and Kung-sun was the magistrate…. Lie down! Sit up! Roll over! Beg! … I threw the other wives out into the street, and then Yi Shou the merchant with his jewels and carriages, Governor Kuo with his houses and land, wriggling like good little dogs begging to be petted…. I could not train Prince Liu Sheng, but he gave me a crown…. It was his steward who gave me the stone…. The stone…. Holding it against my skin, feeling the pulse…. My husband stole it from me and it drove him mad, madder than I believed possible…. The Little Tour, the Big Tour, one thousand seconds, the Embryonic Pearl, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! … Ssu-ma broke the stone, and all I had was the sliver for my hairpin…. That maid, always looking at it, always wanting it, trying to steal it…. I stabbed her, but she ran away with my stone…. My maid and that concubine with the ring of Upuaut my husband gave her…. The soldiers killed them, but they could not find the stone…. It was mine, all of it was mine…. My husband refused to give me a second piece…. He laughed and showed me a tender poem for my coffin, and then he made me drink poison…. Mad monks in motley dancing and laughing around my bed…. Cold…. Colder…. Mist, sounds of water, bailiffs pulling me into a gray world, Yama Kings, freezing, freezing, freezing….”
Tou Wan’s eyes opened. She looked at me. “Peasant boy, you would have made a good little dog.” Her eyes were deep and wondering as they moved to Moon Boy. “You I would have worshipped.” Her eyes moved to Master Li.
“You I could neither have worshipped nor broken and trained,” said the princess. “Old man, I fear you. Go away.”
Master Li bowed, and Moon Boy and I followed his example. Tou Wan’s eyes closed and her mouth shut with a sound like the click of a lock. I raised the state umbrella and we marched on down the path.
“What an extraordinary young woman,” Master Li said admiringly. “The phrase ‘tougher than Tou Wan’ must enter the language, and we should try to do something about her bed of ice.”
We walked across a long gray plain that led to the great gray walls of the Sixth Hell. Gray grass bent beneath a cold gray breeze, and the gray sky seemed to press down upon us.
“Master Li, I don’t understand about the stone,” I said. “Isn’t it evil? Ssu-ma thought so, and he wrote that the author of Dream of the Red Chamber had been quoting from the Annals of Heaven and Earth.”
Master Li walked on in silence for some time. Then he said, “Ox, we can’t be sure that the legendary annals were actually involved, but we do know that both Ssu-ma and Tsao Hsueh Chin accepted as proof the reactions of two great men who possessed the stone. Both Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu cried, ‘Evil!’ and hurled it away, but did they really mean that the stone was evil? Could they have meant something else? There’s at least one other possibility, and it has to do with the shape of the stone.”
The shape? I tried to recall the words of Ssu-ma. “Flat smooth area rising to round concave bowl shape.” What did that have to do with evil?
“But Tou Wan said that it drove her husband mad,” Moon Boy pointed out. “Doesn’t that imply the stone was evil?”
“No,” Master Li said flatly. “Her words make it perfectly clear. The inner power of the stone tempted the Laughing Prince to use it in the ridiculously dangerous discipline called Taoist Ideal Breathing. The goal is personal immortality, which is always an invitation to disaster. You lie on your back with your tongue press
ed against the roof of your mouth to catch brain dew, which is what Taoists call saliva. Normally you press the middle finger of each hand against the opposite palm, but I suspect that the Laughing Prince pressed his fingers against the ch’i pulse of the stone. You suck in air and hold it for thirty seconds, and then purify it by releasing drops of brain dew and send it through your chest and heart. That’s called the Little Tour. Every lunar month you increase the time you hold your breath by five seconds, and when you can do so for one hundred fifty seconds, you’re ready for the Big Tour.”
“Holding your breath for two and a half minutes can be dangerous,” Moon Boy pointed out.
“You get dizzy and disoriented,” I said. “If you keep it up, you might damage your brain.”
“You might indeed,” said Master Li. “That’s only the beginning. The Big Tour is to send purified air through your chest, heart, abdomen, liver, kidneys, and sexual organs, and every lunar month you continue to hold your breath five seconds longer. When you reach one thousand seconds you will supposedly produce inside your body something called the Embryonic Pearl, which is a divine Elixir of Life.”
“Of life? You’d be dead!” I exclaimed.
“Not necessarily. The body is capable of amazing things,” said Master Li. “The problem is the brain. It must have a steady supply of fresh air, and the Laughing Prince went mad.”
I saw the Laughing Prince clutching the stone, holding his breath longer and longer, holding it until the physicians shook their heads and ordered the Cloud Gong to sound the death knell; I saw a mad prince wrapped in darkness, clutching the stone and holding his breath as the centuries passed; I saw his eyes open, and the lid of his coffin lifting up, and a lunatic encased in jade stalking from his tomb; I saw a shadow in the moonlight, and Grief of Dawn on her sickbed—
“Ox, this is your department,” Master Li said.
The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox Page 46