I decided that Prince Liu Pao had been the most eerily precocious boy in history. Thirteen years old, killing two gardener friends when they opened a coffin for him and found a priceless suit of jade, carefully removing jade plates to gaze at a mummy, and gazing instead at the half-decomposed face of a monster that still breathed, learning to control the creature with sounds from a stone—thirteen going on ninety, with the heart of a hangman.
The hangman’s eyes softened as they slowly moved to Grief of Dawn. He spread his hands helplessly. “I would like you to know that I really did love her,” the prince said quietly. “I was pinned into a corner, and I had to make a difficult decision.”
“It was a decision you made long ago when you first decided to sell your soul for gifts from a stone,” Master Li said matter-of-factly. “Grief of Dawn made exactly the opposite decision—incidentally, Moon Boy, could you bring the soul-sound from this one piece?”
He picked up the piece of stone he had taken from the Laughing Prince and tossed it to Moon Boy, who shook his head and said, “No, not from a flat piece. I’d need two of them.” From the tone of Moon Boy’s voice, I assumed he had decided this was all a bad dream.
Master Li nodded. He got to his feet and walked over to the body of Grief of Dawn and pulled out his knife. Her life had drained away down in the tomb, and there was only a trickle of blood when he removed the ugly wooden shaft from her chest. He probed the wound and washed something in wine and dried it on his tunic. When he tossed it to Moon Boy, I saw that it was a small sharp sliver of stone.
“I was wrong about Grief of Dawn,” Master Li said. “I thought she had been Tou Wan’s maid in a previous incarnation. The truth is that she never left that incarnation. Tou Wan stabbed her with the hairpin. The top broke off inside her heart and kept her alive, and she fled and was hit on the head by soldiers who left her for dead. Again the stone brought her back to life, and the maid wandered into the world without a memory. A cruel and dangerous world for a pretty girl, and she was bleeding and unconscious when old Tai-tai took her in and gave her a home and a new name.”
Master Li squeezed Moon Boy’s shoulder, and walked back and squeezed mine and sat down beside his wine flask.
“Do not mourn Grief of Dawn,” he said quietly. “Remember how she sang in her delirium when she thought she would ease the pain of an old lady she loved? Inside her heart she carried a gift from Heaven that was not rightfully hers. She could have become the most honored and celebrated woman in history, but she would not be party to stealing. I have no idea what her strange wandering life was like, nor how and why she moved from one existence to another without awakening her memory, but I do know that for seven and a half centuries she refused to steal from Heaven, and she is being greeted with the highest honors in Hell where her credit account could buy half the kingdom, and surely she will be allowed to ascend to K’un-lun and sit at the feet of the August Personage of Jade. Which is a good deal more than Prince Liu Pao will be able to do.”
His eyes were cold and contemptuous as they moved across the gorge to the prince.
“He’s already killed five people in order to dip his brush into the well of the stone and steal the touch of Heaven, and then paint pretty pictures and pass them off as his own.” Master Li rinsed his mouth with wine and spat it out. “Fraud and forgery,” he growled. “Paint slapped over dry rot and gilded with lies.”
The prince turned white.
“Is that what you think, old man?” he whispered. “Is that what you really think?” Now he was turning red. “My paintings are private! I do not show them! What sort of fraud is that?”
“Masturbation,” Master Li said. “In your circumstances, that still qualifies as rape.”
“My paintings are for the purpose of learning the paths of universal energy!” the prince shouted furiously. “My loathsome ancestor sought truth in rivers of blood; I seek it in harmless paint, and even the Laughing Prince could claim that his was the proper goal of philosophy! You, on the other hand, waste your time with unimportant puzzles, which is the occupation of a child!”
Master Li raised his flask and drank deeply, and wiped his lips with his beard.
“Oh, I wouldn’t call the puzzle of the stone unimportant,” he said mildly. “I will, however, plead guilty to holding a certain childlike view of the universe.”
The prince’s color was returning to normal. He raised the purse and drank, and leaned back comfortably.
“Childlike? No, but very old-fashioned,” he said with a chuckle. “In fact, everything you do is old-fashioned. Who in this day and age would charge all over China, even to the pits of Hell, trusting to the immediacy of experience rather than the trained objectivity of an army of investigators? You appear to take seriously the anthropomorphic folk concepts of gods and goddesses, and your concern for the stone appears to spring from a literal acceptance of fairy tales from the spurious Annals of Heaven and Earth. Li Kao, you are a very great man, but—and I say this with the greatest respect—an antique memorial to long dead concepts and practices and values.”
The prince was laughing as he lifted his stone. I realized that it was attached to a cord around his neck, and the silver cup for his painting brush that had encased and concealed it was slipped down. Master Li leaned over and whispered to me, and I surreptitiously whispered to Moon Boy.
“He says you’re to prepare to bring the soul-sound from the stone. He’ll yell when he wants it.”
Moon Boy’s eyes were glazed and he tried to focus them. His fingers trembled as he lifted the two pieces in his cupped hands.
“Still, there are certain pleasures denied to an antique with a slight flaw in his character,” the prince said. “Such as being able to hear the simple sound of total innocence. To be fair, half the villagers and monks couldn’t hear the stone either. I would think, however, that at this distance, and with the acoustic effect of the cliffs behind us—”
“Now!” Master Li yelled.
Moon Boy’s lips moved to his cupped hands. His throat vibrated rapidly, and my heart leaped as indescribable beauty and yearning and hope and sadness bounced back and forth between the cliffs.
Kung…shang…chueeeeeeeeeeh….
Master Li reeled, but his reaction was as nothing compared to the stone of Prince Liu Pao. It tore loose from the prince’s hands and literally flew toward Moon Boy, and the cord jerked tight around the prince’s neck and pulled him forward.
I am so stupid that it wasn’t until then that I realized what the prince had been planning to do to us. The gorge was only a few feet away, two hundred feet straight down to jagged rocks. Prince Liu Pao teetered at the edge, waving his arms for balance, and then he fell. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them I was looking at a miracle.
The prince was standing upon thin air. He walked across nothingness, intent only upon hauling the stone back and regaining control of it. Then he looked at us and smiled.
“Really, Li Kao, didn’t you think I would expect that?” he said mockingly. “And didn’t you think I would learn something from the stone and my ancestor’s charts and formulas? I hate to brag, but I rather suspect I know more about the energy forces of the universe than any other man alive.”
He pointed to his sandals, resting upon a void.
“That, for example, is a path of energy strong enough to support ten elephants, if the elephants could learn to see and adjust to it. I have, and I sincerely hope you are similarly capable.”
“One of us is,” Master Li said calmly.
“You mean Number Ten Ox?” the prince said. “I agree that no man alive could climb down one side of the gorge and back up the other without the proper gear, and when Ox carried you from one peak to the other, he was crossing as I am now, upon a path of energy.”
Master Li hopped up on my back, and the prince’s smile grew wider.
“That’s why in Hell you imagined him to show in the mirror that he was a firstborn, since walking on air can only result from absolute
awareness or absolute innocence, but has it occurred to you that Ox was blinded by mist? He isn’t now, and innocence cannot bear very much awareness.”
His lips touched the rim of the stone in his hands, and the sound that came from the well was so pure and powerful that I heard not suggestive notes but the actual words from the soul of a stone.
“Come…to…meeeeeeeeee! … Come…to…meeeeeeeeee!”
Moon Boy and I were dragged to the edge. I saw no path of energy. All I saw were rocks rising like shark’s teeth two hundred feet below, and terror shook me like a rag doll. I had no choice. I must obey the call or die, and my foot reached out into nothingness.
Moon Boy teetered on the edge. His throat was vibrating faster than a throat could, and sweat was pouring down his face, and something extraordinary was happening. He was projecting the sound of the stone, but at the same time he was blending another sound into it. It was wind and sunlight and rain and snow and a comfortable snug cottage—it was the song that Grief of Dawn had sung for old Tai-tai, but now she was singing to me. Grief of Dawn was calling me, and I couldn’t imagine how I had missed the path before. There it was, not six feet from the empty space in front of my sandal, and I turned and walked to it. I stepped confidently out into the air, opening my arms to embrace Grief of Dawn, and I was only vaguely aware of the prince’s white terrified face, and the click of the rattan coil inside Master Li’s sleeve and the flash of his knife as it slashed out.
The sound of Grief of Dawn had turned. Now she was behind me, calling me back, and I turned around like a sleepwalker and stepped back over a path of swirling energy that was as smooth as a carpet. Master Li rode on my back, chuckling, and he laughed out loud when my sandals came down on rock and grass. Moon Boy collapsed, gasping and rubbing his throat, and Master Li hopped off.
The sounds had gone. I came back to reality and whirled around and stared at Prince Liu Pao, who was still standing upon thin air in the center of the gorge. He no longer wore the stone, and the warmth and charm was gone, and all I saw was a sly and selfish little man who looked like a terrified monkey.
“Really, Prince, there’s no need to be frightened. Did you think I was going to slit your silly throat?” Master Li detached the stone from the cord he had cut from the prince’s neck. Why do people take me for a crude assassin?” he asked plaintively. “I’m not crude at all.”
The torch that Moon Boy had carried from the tomb lay on the grass. It still burned. Master Li pointed to it, and then across the gorge.
“Ox, can you put this thing through that window?”
I had a lot of pent-up emotion, and I released some of it. The torch tumbled over and over as it sailed across the gorge and plunged down through the window of the prince’s studio. I thought it had gone out, but it hadn’t. Oil and turpentine catch easily, and flames sprang up.
“Nothing to worry about, Prince,” Master Li said reassuringly. “To cherish perfection is to commit creative suicide, and every true artist knows that a masterpiece is an accident that should be burned. Besides, your pretty pictures aren’t to revel in but learn from, and you’ve already learned.”
He reclaimed his flask and helped himself to another pint. “Not that I entirely approve of the goal,” he said. “One of the previous possessors of the stone was Chuang Tzu. He had a disciple who spent seven years studying universal energy and then demonstrated his wisdom by walking across the surface of a river and back again, and Chuang Tzu broke into tears. ‘Oh, my boy!’ he sobbed. ‘My poor, poor, boy! You spent seven years of your life learning to do that, and all the while old Meng has been running a ferry not two miles from here, and he only charges two copper coins.’”
Master Li replaced his flask.
“Besides, levitation can be positively unhealthy when one is accustomed to the support of a stone,” he added.
The studio was blazing. Prince Liu Pao was weeping, and he turned and ran toward his paintings with outstretched arms. Suddenly he yelped in fear and stopped. I saw that his feet were slowly spreading apart as though the path was splitting into two paths, and he turned uncertainly this way and that. His white strained face turned back to me.
“Ox! Which way? Which is the solid path?”
“Prince, I can’t see it anymore!” I shouted. “All I see is empty air!”
His legs were spreading wider. At any moment he would fall, and he squealed and jumped to the left. His feet came down on a solid line of energy and he began to run. He made two steps but not the third, and sometimes in dreams I still see a screaming feather duster turn over and over as Prince Liu Pao falls into the gorge, and I hear mocking echoes from the walls of the cliffs, and then I hear the sickening sound of a body splattering upon rocks far below.
Master Li walked to the edge and peered down. “Pity,” he said. “He had real talent. Just the man for decorating dinner invitations.”
The bottom of the gorge was leaping up at me, and I sat with my head between my knees until my stomach stopped heaving. Moon Boy was sitting beside Grief of Dawn with her limp hand held in his. Master Li turned from the gorge shaking his head in disgust, but not at the prince.
“When somebody performs my autopsy, he’ll open the skull and pull out a turnip that’s been masquerading as a brain,” he said sourly. “I still can’t begin to come to grips with this weird case.”
I stared at him. Even Moon Boy raised his eyes from Grief of Dawn.
Master Li shrugged. “We’d have to be mindless as millipedes not to guess that the human involvement has been almost incidental. What matters is a stone.”
He began pacing back and forth with his hands clasped behind his back. He stopped and glared up at Heaven. “How the hell do you expect idiotic human beings to understand?” he shouted impiously, and then he resumed pacing.
“The ancients gave up trying to understand,” Master Li muttered. “After a couple of thousand years of watching fire transform solid pieces of wood into insubstantial heat and light, they produced the First Law of Taoist science: There is no such thing as a solid object. Five centuries later they produced the Second Law: All matter consists of bundles of pure energy called ch’i, the life force, and shih, the motion force. Another five centuries passed, and with the Third Law they threw up their hands and quit.”
He stopped pacing and grinned at us.
“Believe it or not, there’s a point to this,” he said. “Ox and our late friend gave a marvelous demonstration of the First and Second Laws by adjusting their ch’i and shih to that of seemingly empty air and taking a walk, and Ox’s dream about an orange-colored piece of clay unconsciously echoed the Third Law: All energy is controlled by adherence to classical patterns.”
Master Li resumed pacing.
“Ox dreamed that the clay had a pulse that followed an unusual pattern. The Third Law states that the humblest piece of clay must adjust its ch’i and shih to that of the perfect piece of clay, and the energy of stars must follow the patterns of the perfect star. Every plant, animal, insect, drop of water, mote of dust—everything in the universe has a classical model to guide it, and those perfect patterns are the building blocks in the barrier against anarchy called the Wall of Heaven. That’s when the ancients said to hell with it and stopped. You see, the next step required understanding the nature of universal energy as a whole, and such a thing is completely past the capabilities of the human mind.”
Master Li stopped and shook a finger at us for emphasis.
“This can be said. Nothing in all existence is more important than maintaining the Wall of Heaven. Nothing! The forces are so awesome that should the barrier fail and energy run amok, the universe itself wouldn’t last a second. The task of maintaining the Wall is that of the goddess Nu Kua, and what the goddess wants, the goddess gets. For unfathomable reasons she wanted a stone that had a flaw in it, and then when she couldn’t repair the flaw, she dropped it in our laps.”
Master Li sat down between Moon Boy and me and took Moon Boy’s pieces of the st
one. He carefully fit them together with the piece from the prince and held the stone up to the light.
“There’s the flaw. See? A tiny vein of gold ran through it. Gold is pretty stuff, but terrible for a stone. Particularly when you’re building a wall.”
I hadn’t noticed it when the pieces were apart, but now I saw the faint yellow lines at the edges of the cracks.
“According to one of the Annals of Heaven and Earth, assuming it existed, the goddess finally had to reject the stone, but not until contact with her hand had given it a soul,” Master Li muttered. “Two great philosophers later used it for an ink stone, and the touch of Heaven produced divine calligraphy. Prince Liu Pao used it to steal from the gods in order to paint pretty pictures, and I wonder….”
He let the sentence die a natural death while he swiftly bound the stone together with the cord he had cut from the prince’s neck. He opened his wine flask and dipped the stone inside. After a minute he lifted the stone back out and removed the cord and placed the stone upon the grass. He lifted the flask to his lips, and I saw a slow sensual shudder spread throughout his body, and when he raised his head, his eyes were shining with reverence.
“Jade Emperor, if this is what you serve in heaven, preserve me long enough to become a saint,” he whispered.
Moon Boy and I took small sips. I have no words for it. The raw alcohol of Haining Mountain Dew had become the Nectar of the Gods, and to describe it I’d have to steal from mystical accounts of divine revelations.
“Talk about temptation!” Master Li exclaimed. “I could start making this stuff by the lakeful and be deified on the spot!”
The taste had the greatest effect upon Moon Boy, who turned pale as death and began rocking back and forth with powerful emotion. I thought he was going to weep until I realized he never did. Moon Boy did not cry, not even when Grief of Dawn lay dead. Master Li was looking speculatively at him.
“You know, it’s quite possible that I’m making the same mistake twice,” he said thoughtfully. “I didn’t see the obvious about the prince because it was too simple, and now I may be straining to understand something that doesn’t require understanding. Perhaps all we need to know is that the goddess Nu Kua is blowing on the dice for one last desperate roll, and all we can do is pray they come up with a pair of Blind Queens. After all, we must assume that the stone is one of the most important objects in all the universe. Why else would she go to the trouble of Moon Boy?”
The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox Page 53