Where had he picked up an ear? It was neatly severed and there was no trace of blood. Then I remembered Master Li the previous afternoon picking up a half-eaten head in the Lin family cemetery, and I remembered how he had been alone when the rest of us went searching for the body.
“Yes, I took the liberty of acquiring a piece of the ch’ih-mei’s victim,” he said calmly. “Take a look and tell me if you see anything unusual.”
I gingerly took the handkerchief and held the Fire Pearl close to the ear.
“The skin is so smooth it shouldn’t be real, except it is,” I said after a pause. “There’s something filling the pores. It’s like butter, but not quite, and there’s a strange kind of glow to it.” I ventured to touch the thing. “It’s soft and slick, almost like soapstone, and the stuff filling the pores is just a little bit greasy.”
He reclaimed the Fire Pearl and the ear.
“Excellent,” he said. “I saw traces of the substance caught in the monster’s claws when we examined its body beside the chopping block, and the discovery of the victim’s head confirmed my suspicion. The slick stuff is an incredibly expensive compound made principally from rendered goose fat. It’s called Protocol Soap, and it has the peculiar property of causing human skin to acquire a soft glow. The stuff is used almost exclusively by eunuchs and ministers in daily attendance upon the emperor, the idea being to suggest a reflection of the radiance that emanates from the Son of Heaven.”
It took a moment for that to sink in, and then my eyes widened.
“Sir, do you mean that one of the ministers of state has been killed and eaten by a vampire ghoul?” I said in a shocked voice.
“So it would appear,” Master Li said mildly. “Even more extraordinary is the fact that no hint of anything amiss has escaped the pink walls. There isn’t a place on earth more addicted to gossip and rumor than the Forbidden City, but I checked every source I could think of last night and all I could learn was that something is going on and it’s top secret. My boy, it isn’t possible that a state minister can vanish without causing an uproar, and keep in mind the fact that we found not one trace of the victim’s bones or body. Do his colleagues have it? If so, what could cause mandarins to cover up the crime of the century?”
What indeed? A scandal on a scale to shake the empire seemed not impossible, and as we passed into the Imperial City and started up toward the Altar of Earth and Grain a line began running through my brain: “…monsters, mandarins, and murder…monsters, mandarins, and murder….” The priests at the altar bowed in reverence to the dead as our palanquin passed, as did their counterparts at the Supreme Temple of Ancestors (“…monsters, mandarins, and murder…monsters, mandarins, and murder…”), and dignified Confucian clerks touched their caps respectfully. The Imperial City is the walled enclave of bureaucratic basilicas and aristocratic residences surrounding the Forbidden City of the emperor, but those who assume our funerary progress through such rarefied surroundings was solemn and sedate have never rented palanquins in Peking. I think I may have given a misleading impression, so I will correct it.
“Sheee-ut!” screamed Rat-Scurry-Down-the-Street from his front left bearer’s pole. “Why don’t the big heavy kid sit in the middle with the scrawny old bird on his lap? This thing’s as unbalanced as a raft rowed by a rat and a rhinoceros!”
Viper-in-the-Grass had the matching position on the right bearer’s pole.
“Stop squawking, gong-head! You ain’t got the brains to talk and carry at the same time, and when you open your goddamn mouth your shoulders start shaking like tits at a wet nurse convention!”
Chamber Pot Chong and the Worm, at the rear bearer poles, did not approve.
“Eat vinegar, you turds! You think we like having our faces sprayed with spit from a pair of polecats with hoof-and-mouth disease!”
“Ox, from here on we should travel with decorum,” Master Li said.
I stopped the palanquin and jumped out and picked up the front bearers’ pole along with the bearers still attached to it, and slammed them back to earth in a manner designed to loosen teeth.
“Listen to me, ming t’e mao tsei!” (A very useful phrase for visitors to Peking, it means: “You mulberry caterpillar grain-eating grub thieves!”) “One more squawk and I’ll feed your combined remains to a gnat.”
I climbed back into the palanquin and we proceeded in seemly silence between the Phoenix Towers and across the moat. Master Li has been out of official favor for years, but he still has the rank and proper credentials and the guards had no orders to stop him, and we passed without difficulty through the Meridian Gate and the Forbidden City opened in front of us.
“Now I need your sharp young eyes,” Master Li said, “if I’m right, one of the senior mandarins made a meal for a vampire ghoul, and for whatever reason his colleagues are doing everything in their power to hush it up. They have to give the fellow a funeral, however, and under the circumstances they can’t possibly deny him a pole.”
I saw what he meant, but I’m not sure it will be clear to uncivilized readers, so I will briefly explain.
All people have two souls. The higher hun soul resides in the liver, and when a person dies a hole is bored in the coffin just above the liver to allow the higher soul to fly in and out when it wishes. The lower po soul resides in the lungs, and under no circumstances must it be allowed out. It is the seat of man’s animal instincts and behavior, and it can easily go bad and wander the earth as an evil spirit. The hun soul must journey back and forth between the liver and the law court of the God of Walls and Ditches in Hell during the forty-nine days in which it is being judged, but when it is away from its familiar body it can easily become disoriented, and it is a great tragedy for a higher soul to get lost. It can panic and settle into a totally inappropriate body and become perverted, and when a higher soul goes bad it really goes bad. That is how creatures like vampire ghouls are formed, and that is why a beacon is erected to help traveling souls find their way home. It’s a tall pole with a bright red flag at the top, placed outside a house where a death has occurred: left of the door for a man, right for a woman. Master Li’s point was that the mandarins couldn’t possibly take the chance that their colleague’s hun soul might get lost and turn into the very kind of monster that had slain him, so they had no choice but to erect a beacon pole.
I kept a lookout for a red pole, and in a way it was a pity. This was my first trip to the Forbidden City and I would have liked to look around and ask Master Li about it, but all I learned that day was that it might better be called the Forbidden Garden. Once we left the central avenue we were in mazes of trees and shrubs and flowers artistically designed to open to delightful or surprising vistas, such as great dragons and phoenixes in ivory bas-relief upon coral walls or exotic birds that appeared to be posing for artists as they settled upon quaint rocks beside turquoise pools. It was one of those bright birds that drew my eyes away from pole searching, and it took a moment to realize that not all the brightness came from feathers.
“There!” I exclaimed.
A tall slim line lifted behind a row of pomegranates, and at the top was a crimson flag. Master Li had the bearers turn at the Golden River and pass through the Gate of United Harmony toward the complex where he had spent twenty wasted years—at least he called them wasted—and we passed the Hall of Literary Glory, the Hall of Proclaimed Intellect, the Hall of Reverence for the Master (which is the second-greatest library in the world, the first being in Ch’ang-an), and there in the great courtyard of the Hall of Literary Profundity stood the soul pole, left of the entrance, and beneath the red banner flew the flag of a senior scholar who was entitled to display all fourteen symbols of academic distinction: wishing pearls, musical stone, good-luck clouds, rhombus, rhinoceros-horn cup, books, pictures, maple, yarrow, banana leaf, tripod, herb of immortality, money, and the silver shoe.
“That flag narrows the list of possible victims considerably,” Master Li said happily. “Has there been any word that
one of the foremost scholars in the empire has breathed his last? No, there has not, and now I’m beginning to think that my suspicion of conspiracy and cover-up is a certainty.”
When we turned through the outer gates we saw a courtyard crammed with palanquins and carriages and sedan chairs like ours, swathed in mourning cloths. A mob of junior mandarins bowed deeply to Master Li’s cap and badges, for he was wearing the whole works, including symbols of imperial office he hadn’t held in sixty years, and the effect was very impressive. He marched up the steps as though he owned the place, and we entered a reception hall that was huge to the point of being grotesque. Several forests had been depopulated of wild animals to provide furs to cover the walls, along with immense tapestries and various hangings. A carpet that seemed to be made of white ermine stretched across an acre of floor to a marble dais, and upon the dais rested a huge coffin.
Senior mandarins were making their way with stately dignity up the carpet to pay their last respects to their colleague. Then somebody noticed Master Li. A sharp intake of breath caused heads to turn, and it was fascinating to see eyes widen in sequence and one elegant robe after another twitch backward as though avoiding contact with leprosy—almost a dance, and Master Li did his part by greeting each flinching fellow with a toothy smile: “Wang Chien, dear friend! How delightful that these unworthy eyes should once more bask in your divine radiance!” And so on. At first nobody else said a word, but then the silence was broken.
“Kao! By all the gods it’s Li Kao! Now why didn’t I think of calling you in on this mess?”
The man who was painfully working his way toward Master Li with the aid of two canes was dried and shriveled and hunched with arthritis, and older than I could have believed possible. I thought Master Li had reached the limit of a human life span, but this gentleman added a good thirty years to the limit. I noticed that his progress was followed by deep bows, and greeted by Master Li with real pleasure.
“Hello, Chang! How are you these days?” he said warmly.
“How am I? Senile of course,” the shriveled antique said. “A few days ago I had a long conversation with my eldest grandson, and I was wondering how he’d suddenly grown so intelligent when I realized he’s been dead for twenty years and I was talking to the parrot. Who’s the big kid with the muscles and the squashed nose?”
Master Li motioned for me to step forward and bow.
“Allow me to present my former client and current assistant, Number Ten Ox,” he said. “Ox, this is the Resplendent Thearch, Supreme Lord of the Eastern Aurora and Grand Subtlety, Bearer of the Cinnabar Scepter of the Highest Mystery of the Great Mystery—or, if you prefer, the Celestial Master.”
I honestly think the only thing that prevented me from bouncing up and down upon the floor was the fact that my body couldn’t decide whether to topple forward or backward. This was none other than Chang Tao-ling, the highest high priest of Taoism, and the only man in the empire universally acknowledged to be a living saint. In my village he was worshipped both by the abbot of our monastery and by my atheistic Uncle Nung, and it was commonly said that a list of his good deeds would cover four of the five sacred mountains, and here I was standing right in front of him. Somehow I managed a jerky bow without falling on my face.
“Kao, you’re just the man we need, and I’m glad somebody had the brains to think of it,” the Celestial Master said. “It was one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in my life, which means it might have been designed for you.”
The Celestial Master was partially deaf and didn’t realize his voice level was just below a shout. Master Li had to speak loudly to make his words clear, and the effect was quite strange: hundreds of people standing stone-faced and silent in a huge vaulted chamber, listening to two voices bounce between walls until their echoes began playing tag above a coffin.
“You say you saw it?” Master Li asked.
“It happened right before my eyes, and if something that horrible has to happen it’s just as well the victim was somebody like Ma Tuan Lin. Awful ass, you know, and a disgrace to scholarship,” the Celestial Master shouted.
From the sudden gleam in Master Li’s eyes I assumed he shared the Celestial Master’s opinion of the late Ma Tuan Lin, but he tried to be diplomatic.
“Oh, I don’t know. Ma had some good qualities when it came to research. It was only his conclusions that were idiotic.”
“Kao, you’re too damn generous!” the Celestial Master shouted. “He was a donkey from the top of his head to the tips of his toes, and his self-esteem was as bloated as was his body. You should have seen them try to squeeze that hunk of lard into the coffin.”
The saint swiveled painfully on his canes and glared at the rows of tight-lipped mandarins.
“Damn fools!” he yelled. “If you’d given Ma’s corpse an enema you could have buried what remained in a walnut shell!”
He turned back to Master Li.
“All right, this is your kind of thing, not mine. You’re in charge, so tell me what you want and I’ll try to help,” he said simply.
“We’ll start with what you saw, but let’s get out of this mausoleum,” Master Li said happily.
I felt a warm glow as the Celestial Master hobbled toward a side door. What a marvelous stroke of luck! Master Li would have been deader than Ma Tuan Lin if eyes could kill, but all the mandarins could do was glare. We took a corridor to a small office at the end, looking out over a small simple garden. It was a worn and battered sort of room, crowded but comfortable, with mementos from the time of my great-great-great-grandfather, and the Celestial Master gave a groan of relief as he let himself down on a cushioned bench and relaxed his grip on the canes. He went straight to the point.
“It was the night before last, Kao—morning, actually, around the double hour of the sheep. I couldn’t sleep, as usual, and the moon was bright and you know how warm it’s been. I got up and into a robe and grabbed my canes and made it to the dock and my boat. Rowing’s the only exercise I can handle now. I get practice with the canes,” he said, making cane-shuffling gestures that really were like rowing. “I rowed to Hortensia Island, where I have a special dock and path I can manage. I was taking a walk through the woods, admiring the moon and wishing my mind could still create poetry, when I heard the damnedest scream. Then I saw Ma Tuan Lin running toward me.”
The saint tilted his head so he was looking down the sides of his nose at Master Li, and a faint smile tugged at his lips.
“Here comes the senile part, perhaps. I’m not sure, Kao, I’m just not sure. I can only tell you what I saw or thought I saw. To begin with, Ma was being chased by a little wrinkled man older than you, maybe even older than me, but who was running as lightly as a child, making sharp sounds that sounded like ‘Pi-fang! Pi-fang!’”
“What?” Master Li asked.
The Celestial Master shrugged. “No meaning, just sound. ‘Pi-fang!’ Ma was holding something in his hands that looked like a birdcage, an empty one, and he let loose another scream of terror that made a pair of nesting grouse come shooting up through the darkness with their wings going pop-pop-pop! and they flapped right across my face and made me fall backward into some tall weeds, and that’s probably what saved my life. The little old man didn’t see me as he ran past. He waved his right hand and something started to glow in it, bright red, and then he hurled a ball of fire that struck Ma Tuan Lin square in the back.”
Master Li choked and pounded himself on the chest. “A ball of fire?” he asked when he’d recovered.
“I know, I know. The old boy’s finally had the last bit of his brains turn to butter,” the Celestial Master said wryly. “I’m telling you what I thought I saw. Ma was dead before he hit the ground—I didn’t need an autopsy to tell me that—and the little old man ran past him, leaping lightly as a leaf in a wind, and then there was a bright flash that blinded me. When my eyes cleared there wasn’t any little old man. Ma was lying there with that cage thing sticking up through tall grass beside him, and
his back was smoking, and I looked every which way. No little old man. Then I heard a high distant ‘Pi-fang!’ and I looked up and saw a great white crane flying away across the face of the moon.”
The saint drew a deep breath and spread his hands wide apart. “Think that was crazy? I haven’t even started.”
“I can hardly wait,” said Master Li.
“Kao, beside the pavilion Ma uses on Hortensia Island there’s a big pile of earth from some kind of construction project that was canceled, and it wasn’t until I saw the pile that I realized I was at the pavilion,” the Celestial Master said. “What made me look toward the pile was a small sound coming from it, and I knew I’d lost my mind for certain when a terrible claw came crawling out into the moonlight. Then another claw followed it, and earth fell away and something big heaved up into the moonlight, and when the dirt dropped off it I was looking at the prettiest ch’ih-mei to appear in China in a century or more. A classic vampire ghoul, Kao, and it was looking up at that crane in the sky. Then the crane dwindled to a speck and disappeared, and the ch’ih-mei looked down and saw Ma Tuan Lin. In two strides it had reached him, and I swear it ripped the head right off the body! It lifted the gory trophy and took a big bite, but I didn’t see any more. I was crawling backward, sort of pushing with my canes, hoping the creature’s chewing noises would drown out any sound I made, and I made it safely back into the trees. Then I got to my boat and rowed back and gave the alarm, and that’s all I can tell you.”
Master Li nodded appreciatively.
“To whom did you give the alarm?” he asked.
“The emperor has an officer attached to my household staff. A nursemaid, I suppose, but useful at times.”
“And you told him what had happened?”
“I had to,” the Celestial Master said. “He didn’t believe a word of it, of course.”
“Well, I do.” Master Li grinned and winked. “I didn’t say I believe all of it, but I’ll keep an open mind and who knows? I’ve come to accept some incredible things in my time.”
The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox Page 56