The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  I wanted to describe that scene with a bit of detail in order to explain the noise that hit us on the wall, bouncing back and forth from towers so we got echoes as well: laughter mixed with howls of recognition, and jeers and catcalls. It wasn’t until I had climbed almost to the level of the grand warden’s quarters that we could hear a different sort of sound, and even then it took a while to realize the screams weren’t screams of laughter. Master Li sharply squeezed my shoulder, and I grabbed a pair of balusters and hauled us up so we could peer over the balcony through the tall window into the room where we had eavesdropped on Li the Cat. Just as I did so the grand warden came running right at us, but he didn’t see us. His eyes were glazed with shock and terror, and he was screaming his head off, and I gulped hard when I saw what was following him.

  Second of the sketches of demon-deities the Celestial Master had shown us had been Chu-K’uang, “mad dog,” which had been depicted as a dog with no head, and here it was. The grand warden turned at the last moment and raced back into the room, and as the stalking beast turned to follow I got a close look. The head hadn’t been cut off. Hair grew smoothly over a strong thick neck that ended in nothing. It was as though it had been born with no head, yet I was clearly hearing barking. How could it bark with no head?

  For that matter, how could it bite and chew and rip and rend with no head? When I raised up a bit higher I could see farther into the room, and I was looking at the remains of the grand warden’s bodyguards, who looked as though a tiger had ripped them to pieces. Blood was everywhere, lakes of it, and most of the dead men seemed to have had their throats ripped out. The barking was louder. The headless creature wasn’t chasing the grand warden, I suddenly realized, it was herding the grand warden, and it backed him against long thick curtains at another window, and the curtains pulled apart. I stared at a disembodied dog head, huge, mouth gaping, teeth dripping red, and then the head lunged and the teeth snapped together and the Grand Warden of Goose Gate departed the red dust of earth, very messily.

  Something else was in the room. A dark shape was standing at the far window. It stepped into moonlight as it reached the sill, and it turned and looked right at us. Once more we were gazing at a creature that was half man and half ape, grotesque but unquestionably real, with a silver-gray forehead and bright blue cheeks and a crimson nose and a yellow chin. In its hand was the cage Master Li so badly wanted, and with one smooth movement it was over the windowsill and down the wall and gone.

  A bright flash blinded me. My eyes slowly cleared, and I gazed around and there was no dog’s body, and there was no dog’s head, and howls of laughter were lifting to the sky where a great white crane was slowly flying away across the face of the moon.

  Master Li had me haul him up over the balustrade and then he slipped down from my back and walked into the room, avoiding the blood as much as possible.

  “Sir, the cage is already gone!” I said urgently. It felt strange to shout when I wanted to whisper, but the laughter from the courtyard below made whispering useless. “I can’t possibly catch that creature! It goes down walls as fast as I can run on a flat field, and how can I fly up and catch a crane?”

  “Ox, stop driveling,” he snapped. “I know the cage is gone, but we’re damn well going to get something out of this!”

  He looked this way and that, standing on a dry patch of floor that remained like a narrow island in a sea of thick gooey red, and then he turned and pointed.

  “Get those curtains. Spread them across the floor to the conference table so we won’t leave sandal prints.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I did as I was told, and the old man walked over a path of green damask dragons that looked quite pretty with the crimson background, silver moonbeams, and golden candlelight. At the low jade-patterned table he searched beneath the end where the tea brazier stood, examining every inch of the thick fur rug, and then he picked up some tiny things and grunted in satisfaction.

  “When the bell sound announced a message coming from the cage, the grand warden and Li the Cat jumped like rabbits,” he said. “I was almost sure the warden dropped something, and he did. Praise the gods for sloppy cleaning maids.”

  He had some shavings from that cake of tea and one of the uncompressed leaves, and he put them in a compartment of his money belt. His wrinkles were squeezing so tightly around his eyes that they resembled the pattern on the ball of one’s thumb seen through the lens of a Fire Pearl, and as usual he was considering problems I wouldn’t even see until it was too late to do anything about them.

  “Murder is not easily dismissed if the victim is Grand Warden of Goose Gate,” he said, thinking aloud. “Li the Cat won’t be a problem. The slayings are grotesque and the cage is gone. He knows very well that two other mandarin accomplices have been impossibly murdered and robbed of cages, and his first instinct should be to get the hell out and hurry home and see that nothing weird is taking place with his own cage, or with the other members of the plot. The problem will be the senior members of the grand warden’s staff, who must prove they’re faithful and efficient if they hope for future appointment. They’ll launch an investigation that will hold us here three months, and if we escape before the bodies are found they’ll charge us with murder and send the whole army in pursuit.”

  The wrinkles squeezed tighter, and then relaxed as he came to a decision. He pointed and said, “It will have to be a tiger after all. Get that, and keep your sandals out of the blood.”

  The walls were partially covered with animal skins. One of them was from a large tiger, complete with head and paws, and the old man had me take it down and neatly cut off the paws, and then hang it back up so the mutilation was as unobtrusive as possible.

  “Nobody looks closely at such things. The upper classes say, ‘Ah, a tiger skin,’ and leave it at that, and for every servant who says, ‘Didn’t that thing have paws?’ there’ll be two who’ll say, ‘You’re crazy,’” Master Li said confidently.

  He spread curtains until he had a path to the little door that led to the central tower, and he breathed a long sigh of relief to find the door unbarred on the inside and easily opened with a lock pick.

  “Ox, dip those paws in blood and give us the clear tracks of a homicidal feline,” he ordered. “Make it look as though the tiger ripped the curtains down while chasing men around the room, and plant prints over them. Don’t forget bloody prints on the corpses, and work your way backward to this door. I’ll return as fast as possible.”

  So I did as I was told, all the while wondering how on earth he planned to get away with it. Tigers don’t swim moats and climb sheer stone walls and make their way through crowded courtyards and palaces, but I knew better than to say it was impossible. If Master Li thought it could be done, it could be done. I was able to cheer myself up with that thought, but I wouldn’t then have believed how easy it was going to be and what an extraordinary turn of luck would come with it.

  I was just admiring my handiwork when the little door to the central tower opened and there stood Master Li, as I expected, and someone else I most certainly did not expect. The old man had brought the bandit chief’s daughter. She had not been considered well enough to attend a play that might last more than three hours, and her eyes widened as she saw the carnage. Then she hissed and reached into her robe and whipped out a very efficient-looking dagger, and the next thing I knew the point was pressed to my throat.

  “Playmates should not be presumptuous,” she snarled. “I granted you a few minutes in bed, not a claim to be warden of Yen-men!”

  “Lady, great lady, Ox is strong but not this strong,” Master Li said soothingly. “A monster who happens to be a friend of ours lost his temper, not Ox, and we thought it might be a good idea to blame it on a tiger. Pretty paw prints, aren’t they?”

  The point left my throat, but not very far. The widow’s eyes were warily fixed on Master Li.

  “It seemed to me, my lady, that a tiger would be useful in more ways than one,”
Master Li continued. “While treating you I have seen your amulet. You were born in the Year of the Tiger, and the gods are not necessarily subtle when they choose to make their will clear. Very possibly they wish you to wed another and breed heroes.”

  His voice was half shamanistic, half sage adviser, and for some reason the background of hysterical laughter from outside made the words seem weightier, not lighter.

  “Now that you’re all out of husbands,” he said, “you’ll be required to choose either pious Confucian widowhood or priestly dispensation and a second marriage like the first: a business alliance to advance your father’s fortunes. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, if the bride is in a position to pick and choose among prospective grooms. Essential to that happy circumstance will be our clean and unchallenged departure.”

  I knew he had won when she put the dagger away, but I most certainly didn’t expect her next words.

  “I had not expected murder, but I will admit I saw the monster. When it climbed down the wall it came close by my window.” Then she tossed the armload of bamboo on the fire, to coin a phrase. “The moonlight struck the garish face, which is, of course, unmistakable. It is dangerous for you to be a friend of Envy, but not, I think, dishonorable.”

  I might have said something foolish, but Master Li was close enough to kick me in the ankle.

  “Ah, you know him!” he said with pleased surprise. “So few do. Except, of course, for the owners of the cages.”

  She ignored the baited hook and shook her head negatively. “I did not say I knew him. I have seen the ancient painting in my father’s country and had the verses read to me, that’s all. Now I must know more of what you have in mind,” she said firmly.

  So Master Li told her, and then I made gooey red tiger prints down the tower stairs and to various places including a passage known only to the young widow and a few senior ministers, and I suppose the story is now known in villages from here to the Sabine Hills: how a beautiful princess was married against her will and carried off to a loathsome country, and how a magical tiger opened the secret escape passage that led from the bridegroom’s castle (the doors were later found wide open, with bloody paw prints leading out) and massacred the unworthy fellow and all his men, and how the princess awakened to find upon her pillow one half of a marriage contract ripped in a peculiar pattern, with a bloodstained tiger paw on it, and how a great shaman read the yarrow leaves and explained that the princess when a child had been affianced to the Tiger Spirit by the ghost of her grandfather, and how her brief widowhood was ended with the appearance of a prince (whose mighty chest could not be seen because of all the medals) who had been born clutching a piece of parchment ripped in a peculiar pattern, and lo! it was half of a marriage contract stained by a tiger’s paw….

  It doesn’t matter that the lady hasn’t actually chosen the lucky fellow yet (at least I haven’t heard of it), because not even her father dares cross tiger spirits. She has all the time she wishes to closely examine candidates. I hope she enjoys herself, and I think village storytellers, who are free to edit where historians are not, are wise to leave out the tadpoles.

  We had no trouble. The grieving widow took charge of the whole works, bellowing orders right and left, and Neo-Confucians who were outraged at the presumption of a lowly female received white wooden calling cards marked with red tiger paws, and protests ceased. Yen Shih’s wagon rolled freely across the drawbridge the following afternoon, with me on the seat beside the puppeteer. Master Li and Yu Lan followed on mules, laden with gifts, and soon we were back in the land of the bandit chief, following his daughter’s directions.

  The bright sunlight seemed to be swallowed by a long slitlike mouth as we climbed down a narrow ravine. Cicadas were demonstrating why they’re called “scissors grinders,” and lizards with eyes of coral and agate and turquoise practiced push-ups as they watched Yu Lan study the area’s feng-shui (“wind and water”). She was clearly disturbed by the totemistic arrangements of two piles of huge rocks.

  “From your description the creature called Envy is strongly masculine, but this place is overpowering in yin influences, not yang,” she said in a puzzled voice. “Instead of being proud and priapic the totems are humble and bent, and seem to have been planned that way, but why would a shrine to an ape man suggest crawling on one’s knees in a female environment?”

  Master Li rechecked the map the grand warden’s wife had given him.

  “This is the place. Unquestionably,” he said. “Yen Shih?”

  The puppeteer smiled and flicked a hand in an eloquent gesture of passing the cup. “My daughter is the expert, and I can offer only an instinctive reaction.” The gesture ended with the forefinger lifted toward the totems. “That doesn’t strike me as being strictly symbolic or strictly representational, but something in between. Like primitive writing, for example.”

  Master Li grinned. “My friend, I’m beginning to think our minds move in lockstep,” he said. “I’m guessing it’s a pictograph; specifically, the pictograph of a mourner with bowed head kneeling beside a corpse, representing a word in the earliest Shang dynasty writing known to exist. The word is ‘death.’ Yu Lan?”

  “Yes, it could be,” she said. “Many goddesses are linked to the Land of Shadows, which would account for female emphasis in the geomancy. Still, that says nothing about a man with the face of a painted ape.”

  What I wanted to know was whether or not the death influence was aimed at us, but I managed to keep my mouth shut. We fanned out and began to search for the landmarks we had been given, mindful of the fact that the grand warden’s widow hadn’t been here for ten years and floods and rockslides could have altered things dramatically. She had been sure about a stretch of cliff marked with a white scar, however, and when I hacked through huge thistles I found myself staring right at it. The livid streak where shale had fallen from reddish rock was supposed to point almost straight to the entrance, and I yelled to the others and got a bigger stick and began beating a path through reeds. Inside ten minutes we found the small round opening in the side of the ravine, just as it had been described, and Yen Shih and I prepared to light the torches we’d brought. Then we discovered we didn’t need them.

  About fifteen feet inside the little cave was a natural chimney leading up to sunlight. The place was illuminated like a corridor in a gallery with wall carvings on both sides. Perhaps a third of the carvings were pictures, but the other two thirds were pictographs, and Master Li was enchanted.

  “It’s an early form of the Book of Odes!” he said delightedly. “Very close to the shamanistic sections called Nine Songs, but it tells a tale with a far different emphasis than anything found in later versions.”

  As the sage translated the old script a tale began to unfold that was very real in parts. This was the voice of a girl seduced by a god:

  “His spirit came like a dense cloud descending,

  Lit by a voice of blazing radiance:

  ‘Beauty is destined to find its mate,

  For who so fair should be without lovers?’

  He came thus with sweet words, with no words he left,

  Flying aloft, riding pure vapor, leaving below

  A soiled skirt abandoned in billowing folds.

  ‘Speedily, Lord, will I go with you!

  Let me follow over K’ung-sang Mountain!

  Let me see the teeming people of the Nine Lands!’

  But my lord is riding the whirlwind, with cloud banners flying.

  ‘I will wash your limbs in the Pool of Heaven!

  I will dry your hair on the bank of Sunlight!

  I will gather sweet flowers to weave wreaths for the one I love!’

  Wildly I shout my song to the wind

  And stand where I am, slowly twisting a spray of cassia.”

  The pictorial carvings had not fared so well as the crisply incised old script. Time had done its work, but enough remained to show the children born to the sad singer. If children they could be call
ed, because they were the demon-deities described by the Celestial Master.

  I caught my breath and instinctively stepped backward as I saw a little old man hurling fire, a murderous dancing master, and a disembodied dog head. But the subject of the verses wasn’t eight monstrous children but the ninth one, the boy born human, whose only godlike attribute was his beauty. Master Li’s eyes were sparkling as the verses followed the boy’s growth and triumphs until as a young man he had become companion to a king. No hero could stand against the brave cavalier, no woman could resist him. He rode one day upon K’un-lun Mountain, where a great goddess was said to dwell, and this is his voice:

  “Bamboo fragrance fills this lonely place,

  Long-haired grass weeps dew.

  Tall trees form a winding tunnel

  To curtain the sun with red roses

  Whose thorns catch at clouds.

  Drunken reeds dance in the pool’s mirror,

  Sporting with sky shadows;

  Dragon’s eggs bubble and break upon the water—

  Or is it fish spitting pearls?—

  And in the depths the Lady lies on her sea-green pillow.

  ‘Lady, don your coat of fig leaves and rabbit-floss girdle,