The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  Climb to your kingdom in the folds of rocky peaks,

  Come with rainbows for hair combs and eyes bright with laughter,

  Resentful with idleness, seeking a dream—

  O Lady of Lakes, Mistress of Mountains, seek me!’”

  The cavalier has never been refused and he isn’t now. Idle, bored, looking for amusement, a being who might send wise men racing for holes to hide in answers the presumptuous mortal:

  In a carriage of lily-magnolia, banner of woven cassia,

  Cloak of rock orchids, sash of asarums

  Trimmed with three-blossomed iris,

  She drives tawny leopards, leads great striped lynxes—

  Thunder rolls and rumbles! Lightning splits the sky!

  “I shall build a soft mountain bower

  For a pretty boy, peach-flushed with pride.

  With walls of iris, and purple stone the chamber,

  Flowering pepper shall make the hall,

  With beams of cassia, wild plum rafters, lily-tree lintel,

  A room of lotus thatched with white flag,

  And melilotus to make a screen.

  Chrysanthemums strewn to make the floor sweet,

  Sweet pollia, deer parsley,

  Autumn orchids with leaves of green and purple stems,

  And a thousand flowers shall fill the courtyard.”

  The cavalier becomes a favorite, as he has always been a favorite wherever he’s been, and finally the goddess allows him to use her chariot to bring the Peaches of Immortality for a banquet. Driving the team of plunging dragons on the homeward journey, he passes Jupiter, around which spins the never-ceasing belt of skulls that measure Time.

  Pearls of the moon seed the cavalier’s headdress,

  His tunic of rainbows brightens the sky;

  Cape woven from comets, a belt of lost stars,

  Shining bright in his scabbard is a shaft of the sun.

  “He dies who dares not!” he cries to the time-star,

  And his sword strikes a skull. “All rot who won’t rise!”

  The cavalier eats of the Peach of the Goddess,

  And wins life as eternal as Heaven, or Hell.

  The cavalier has been blinded by his envy of immortality, and when nature shudders in horror he sees a dance of delight. He has been deafened, and when the chiao-ming bird screeches its warning he hears paeans of joy. He has been maddened, and would take his whip to any mere star that might stand in his path as he calls to the dragons to race faster.

  Alone on the peak of her kingdom

  Stands the Lady of Lakes and Mountains.

  Billowing clouds kneel before her,

  Gray and lowering,

  Smothering silver moonbeams

  While the Lady summons thunder

  To rumble a path for her feet.

  Tiger eyes lift to a streak in the sky;

  Tiger teeth bare, tiger claws scrape,

  Tiger screams reach out to jade dragons

  Bucking in traces, leaping and rearing,

  Tiger laughter greets a small figure

  Turning over and over, through starlight and moonbeams,

  Falling through sky to the mud of the earth.

  The cavalier lands unhurt in a bog and makes his way down a path that takes him to one of the Lady’s shrines. There he finds the fruits of his life with a goddess. In two boxes he finds two babies and two amulets with names on them. The boy is a twisted, shrunken, miserable little thing, and his amulet reads Huai-I, “Malice.” The girl is beautiful but her eyes are frightening, and her amulet reads Fmtj-lo, “Madness.” In a third box the cavalier finds a mirror and a third amulet, which reads Cbi-tu, “Envy.” When he looks in the mirror he sees that the goddess has indeed given a handsome cavalier the face of Envy. He snatches up Malice and Madness and runs wildly into the woods, and his story abruptly ends with a very peculiar verse.

  Blue raccoons are weeping blood

  As shivering foxes die,

  Owls that live a thousand years

  Are laughing wildly.

  A white dog barking at the moon

  Is the corpses’ chanticleer;

  Upon its grave a gray ghost sings

  The Song of a Cavalier.

  We stepped back from the last inscription and looked at each other.

  “Great Buddha, that sounded like a demented nursery rhyme,” Yen Shih said.

  “Either that or Li Ho with a horrible hangover,” said Master Li.

  He had insisted upon translating every word of text before continuing to the artifact the bandit chief’s daughter had told us about. Now we squeezed through a narrow gap and turned sharply left to another chamber lit by a shaft of sunlight, and the usually imperturbable Yu Lan gasped, and I yelped.

  We were looking at our burglar, painted upon a wall uncounted centuries ago, and still clear in most details. Around the ape man’s neck was the amulet “Envy,” and in his arms were the terrible children Malice and Madness. The head was bowed, and in a moment I learned why this place was sacred to yin and not yang. Master Li took my torch and lit it and swung it around to the black shadowed area opposite the transformed cavalier, and my liver turned to ice. Nobody moved or spoke. We were looking at a painting twice as large as that of Envy, and I have seen few things more frightening in my life.

  “Envy had to be the most daring cavalier in history,” Master Li said in an awed tone of voice. “This is Hsi Wang Mu, the great and terrible Lady-Queen of the West, as she was in her glory before we Chinese tried to domesticate her and ease her safely into the pantheon. No wonder the death totems stand outside. The lady is Patron of Pestilence, and her servants are the Ravens of Destruction.”

  Yu Lan was already on her knees performing the obeisances and kowtows, and Master Li joined her, and Yen Shih and I weren’t far behind. We arose in silence, chilled by the image that looked back at us from the wall. The goddess was beautiful except for the fact that tiger teeth protruded from her mouth, and her hands ended in tiger claws, and her lower body reflected the water origin of all goddesses by ending in something like a dragon’s tail, huge and scaly and shining and coiling. Her eyes had no knowledge of time, and no knowledge of weakness, and no knowledge of pity, and I thought I might almost be close to understanding the famous line by the great poet Master Li had mentioned, Li Ho: “If Heaven had feelings, Heaven too would grow old.”

  Master Li broke the spell by turning back to the transformed cavalier.

  “Either he’s still wandering around after three thousand years or Ox and I have seen the greatest impersonator in the world,” he said. “One wonders what’s happened to his charming children, and what he’s trying to accomplish.”

  Yen Shih’s eyes were burning as he looked at the painting. Burning with bitterness? I couldn’t tell, but in his position I might be. Here was a once handsome cavalier given the face of a painted ape, and Yen Shih himself had surely been handsome before smallpox made him grotesque, and the Patron of Pestilence had mutilated both. Just as I was thinking that, the puppeteer reminded me he was an aristocrat, and aristocrats don’t waste time with self-pity. A sudden sunrise smile brought beauty to a landscape of pockmarks.

  “I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find this delightful!” he said cheerfully. “Whenever I feel sorry for myself I can think of this happy fellow, and when nasty brats like Malice or Madness creep toward me I can put an arm around Yu Lan.” His smile faded. “Speaking of which, this cannot be easy for her,” he said softly. “As priestess of Wu she is servant to the Lady-Queen, and all the lady’s servants live in terror of their mistress.”

  I hadn’t realized that Yu Lan hadn’t risen with the rest of us. She was still on her knees before the goddess, white-faced and still, and the puppeteer gently lifted his daughter and put an arm around her, and led her back out of the cave and into the sunlight.

  Heat waves were twisting and distorting things, making it hard to get my bearings. I saw a lake beside our cottage and I knew it couldn’t
be real, and I squeezed my eyes tightly closed and opened them again, and the lake was gone but the cottage seemed to be floating three feet up in the air, shimmering and dissolving at the bottom.

  “What are we going to do, Number Ten Ox?” said my mother.

  My father was silent as usual, speaking through the tired slump of his body. I tried to remember: do about what? Something was wrong, I knew that, just as I knew that both my parents had been dead for years, but what was wrong?

  My father had one of the cages in his hand. Then I realized it wasn’t an ancient cage but a modern one, a simple bamboo birdcage, and it was filled with swallows, and he was standing on the bank of the river that runs past my village. Now I knew what was wrong. I looked up at the sky and saw there were no clouds, and I stepped up beside my father and looked down at the river.

  The river was dry. I was staring at hard cracked earth and dying weeds and a few lizards, so how could my father offer swallows and pray for rain? Every year swallows turn into oysters and back again (the exact date is listed in the Imperial Almanac), and oysters are the favorite food of lung dragons, but the dragons who control water had either fled or tunneled deep underground, and I knew without asking that the wells had run dry.

  “What are we going to do, Number Ten Ox?” my mother said again.

  Behind me someone was weeping softly, and I turned and saw Auntie Hua holding an armload of paper boats. I knew it must be the fifth day of the fifth moon, Dragon Boat day, when real boats race and paper boats called chu would carry away the pestilence that comes with hot weather, but if there was no water how could the boats sail? Uncle Nung stood beside the old lady, twisting his hands together, his face taut with fear, and I thought I heard the bells from the monastery on the hill sounding the alarm, so I began to run toward them. Heat waves lifted around me like a dense cloud. The sound was changing, growing higher and shriller not from the mouths of bells, but from the mouths of excited children.

  The heat waves blew away and I was looking at something that hadn’t dried up, a patch of green grass upon which children played. There were seven children with linked hands dancing in a circle around an eighth child, and all eight were extraordinarily ugly: squat stunted bodies that supported grotesquely large heads; features badly out of proportion. Someone was accompanying on a lute as they sang a nonsense game song, high and shrill.

  “Goat, goat, jump the wall,

  Grab some grass to feed your mother;

  If she’s not in field or stall,

  Feed it to your hungry brothers.

  One…two…three…four…five…six…seven…eight!”

  At the count of eight the child in the center jerked up a handful of grass and charged, low and mean, and I decided it was a variation of Hog on a Hill, which is not for the timid. The children forming the wall seemed to be limited to kicking, butting, and smothering with massed bodies, but the goat was free to use hands and teeth and anything else he could think of, and it was a grand melee. Eventually the goat broke through and the other children raced away, shrieking with laughter. When the goat gave chase I assumed the child he caught would become the next goat, but I lost interest in them when I saw the musician who had accompanied their song.

  Yu Lan was carrying one of the ancient cages, strumming the bars like strings, and a bright flash made me stop and blink, and when my eyes cleared the beautiful shamanka lifted her right hand and touched her left eyebrow, her right eyebrow, and the tip of her nose—one flowing movement—and then nodded to me, and I realized I was to mimic her. I made the same ritualistic gesture. Yu Lan smiled, her hand lifted, and she opened the clenched fingers as though showing me a treasure: a tiny metal object something like a pitchfork, but it had only two prongs.

  I found myself walking up to her, very close. Slowly she lifted the little thing to her lips and blew between the tines and a cool breeze reached out to me. Lovely soft mist closed around both of us, a tiny drizzle pattered down, rainbows formed, the scent of wet grass and earth and flowers was strong enough to walk on. The generating yin influences were so powerful that I had no choice but to reach out to Yu Lan, gently wrap my arms around her, whisper her name; the puppeteer’s daughter stood very still, and then lifted her lips to mine.

  “This is horribly humiliating,” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Master Li said. “You have an extra pair of trousers and there’s much to be said for wet dreams. Most men meet a far better class of women that way, and the financial savings are immense. Besides, you have such good dreams. Are you positive you’ve never heard that children’s song before?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ve heard songs like it all my life, but not that one.”

  “Your ear is a good one,” he said matter-of-factly. “Most people inventing fight songs for children use words about fighting. Real rhymes don’t mention the subject at all, and stick to things like goats, grass, mothers, and brothers. Were you aware of the fact that those children looked amazingly like the statues of aboriginal gods you saw on Hortensia Island, outside the Yu?”

  I hadn’t been aware of it, but now I realized he was right, although I couldn’t see why my sleeping mind would turn contorted statues into cavorting children.

  “It’s scarcely a mystery why your dream began with drought, but something I can’t quite put my finger on intrigues me,” he said. “Let me know if you go courting in dreamland again.”

  What he meant about my dreams beginning with drought was that we were traveling through one. Everywhere we looked we saw peasants deepening wells and trying to save every drop from drying streams. Not a cloud touched the sky, and the heat was oppressive, and bonzes and Tao-shihs worked day and night at rain prayers and charms. When Yu Lan was summoned at night it was almost always to work a rain ceremony. We heard from travelers that conditions were similar where they came from, and if anything it got drier and hotter the closer we came to Peking.

  Along the way Master Li acquired alchemists’ drugs and equipment and a bale of horrible cheap tea and began experimenting with techniques that might turn contemptible ta-cha into choo-cha perfect enough to please an emperor, and one night when we’d pitched camp he cried, “Gather around, my children, and I will show thee a miracle!”

  Yen Shih placed a grate over the cooking fire as Master Li directed and Yu Lan got out the largest frying pan. The tea leaves Master Li piled on a table were really awful, large and coarse and ragged, and the smell was equally unappetizing. Master Li heated the pan, tossed tea leaves in it, and added small amounts of yellow powder.

  “Tamarind,” he said. “It’s from the fruit of a large tree with astringent seeds rich in tartaric acid and potash, and it costs a fortune. However only minuscule amounts are necessary. The name is Arabic and means ‘Indian date,’ which is odd because the tree is neither Arabic nor Indian and must be imported all the way from Egypt.”

  He had Yu Lan toss the leaves and tamarind powder in the hot pan while he poured stuff from two jars into a mortar.

  “Prussiate of iron and sulphate of lime,” he said. “See the prussiate change color?”

  The blue was turning lighter as he blended the elements with a pestle, with subtle hints of green and purple. Meanwhile, the leaves in Yu Lan’s pan were blending with tamarind and changing from ugly black to lovely yellowish orange. When the blue color was very pale Master Li dumped his mixture into the pan and took over from Yu Lan, stirring and shaking vigorously, and something very dramatic began to happen.

  “I’ll be damned!” Yen Shih exclaimed.

  Those miserable leaves were turning green, just like real hyson. What’s more, the smell that rose from the pan was beginning to be delicious, and then I stared at the most amazing thing of all. Real before-the-rains, the finest early-spring tea leaves, are very delicate and must be carefully rolled and twisted by hand, and these leaves were doing that by themselves! The coarse shapes became graceful as the leaves rolled and tightened, the frayed edges vanished, and we were looking at perfe
ct tea of the highest possible quality. Fit for an emperor, which was precisely the point.

  “In appearance and smell it’s perfect Tribute Tea,” Master Li said happily. “Actually the only flaw is that it’s too perfect: uniformly bluish green, whereas the real thing would have faint yellowish imperfections. For purposes of transport it would be molded into little cakes and stamped with the imperial seal, like the stuff the mandarins are selling to gullible barbarians, and they can turn it out by the ton. I would estimate the profit margin at ten thousand percent. What a lovely racket!”

  The taste was another matter. We boiled a pot of water and tried it and promptly spat it out. It was awful, and Master Li said the mandarins had to be adding a certain percentage of decent tea to make it drinkable.

  The steam from my saucer swirled upward, distorting images, and I thought Yen Shih was glaring angrily at me, but I blew steam until his ravaged face was clear and all he was doing was grimacing at the tea taste. Yu Lan began putting things away: silent, graceful, distant as a drifting cloud, secretly smiling.

  Heat waves were twisting my village as though it were made from soft wax, and laughter was rising on all sides—harsh laughter, hard laughter, forced laughter—and I looked through a gap between cottages and saw the abbot of our monastery gazing toward something. His eyes were pitying and his face was sad. I ran forward until I could see the central lane, and there was my mother laughing and my father trying to. Everybody was trying to. A wedding procession was just ahead, and my heart sank to my sandals. “Laughing at the Dog” is the last resort in time of drought. If sending swallows to water dragons and putting the statues of our Place Gods out in the hot sun doesn’t work the only thing left is to fit out a bridal procession complete with flower-decorated cart and gongs and bells and drums, except the bride is a dog. A bitch dressed in a girl’s wedding dress, and everybody points and laughs and makes a lot of noise, and maybe that will cause the Little Boy of the Clouds to look down at the silly sight and laugh until he cries, and his tears are rain.