The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  I walked forward toward my parents but the heat waves were back again, swirling like clouds, and I couldn’t see anything clearly. The laughter was getting shriller and higher. I saw something moving in a circle, and then I realized I wasn’t looking at dancers around a wedding cart, and it wasn’t laughter I was listening to.

  “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!”

  I came through heat waves in time to see the goat break free and run after the other children. The lute that had accompanied them still played. I turned toward the sound and walked through more heat waves. A sudden flashing light blinded me, and when my eyes cleared I saw Yu Lan standing with a cage in her hand. She lifted the other hand in the ritual gesture and I imitated her: left eyebrow, right eyebrow, tip of nose. The shamanka’s fingers opened and I saw another little two-pronged pitchfork. This time she didn’t raise it to her lips. She looked somberly at me and turned and walked toward the low stone wall around a well, and then she pointed to a huge bucket attached to a windlass. Her gestures made it clear that I must take both of us down inside the well.

  The bucket was just big enough. I released the rope and lowered us slowly down into darkness. The windlass was creaking loudly, but the rope was thick and strong. I could see a pattern carved on the walls: frogs circling around and around, head to tail. A terrible odor was lifting from below. It was the reek of rotting flesh, and something down there was growling like muted thunder. I tried to tell Yu Lan we must go back, but she pointed firmly downward.

  I kept lowering the bucket. Yu Lan was looking hard at the walls, straining to see in the faint light from above. Now I could bear a bubbling sound below us, and the air was so hot we might have been in an oven, and again a low murderous growl reached up to us. The stench was almost unbearable.

  Yu Lan touched my shoulder and pointed. I saw a large dark circle on the wall, but I couldn’t reach it. I began rocking, swinging the bucket, hauling back and forth on the rope. We swung in wider and wider arcs. My hands were covered with sweat and I was terrified that the rope might slip through them and send us tumbling down to whatever was waiting below. I held on, though, rocking farther and farther, and finally my left hand could reach out to the circle. It was a hole in the wall. The third time I swung to it I caught a projecting rock, and I was able to haul us right to the edge, Yu Lan lithely swung up and into a narrow tunnel, and I followed her after tying the bucket to the rock.

  The shamanka led the way toward a soft glowing light. It was a chamber that had a floor of moss like a thick soft carpet, and holes high up in the ceiling that let sunlight in. The puppeteer’s daughter smiled at me and lifted her hand to her lips. She blew between the two prongs of the tiny pitchfork and the healing and generating power of yin filled the chamber, mist and pattering raindrops and rainbows, and Yu Lan stepped into the circle of my arms.

  “Peculiarly lascivious,” Master Li said, lingering lovingly on “lascivious.” “The fact that sex is women’s business is recognized in the yin metaphor we use for it, ‘clouds and rain,’ which accounts for the mist and rainbows, but then you wake up—and clean up—and do you really have to turn the color of a ripe tomato and get your tongue entangled in baling twine every time Yu Lan walks past?”

  “I can’t help it,” I said miserably. “I know it’s ridiculous but I can’t help it.”

  “How about jumping like a frightened rabbit every time her father looks your way?”

  “Put yourself in my position!” I yelped.

  “How can I? I haven’t played the cloud-rain game since I was ninety.”

  The sage sauntered off to collect his wine jar, whistling “In Youth Did Beauties Seek My Bed, but an Old Man is a Bedful of Bones,” and I gathered up an armload of rushes to use for towels and rolled over and went back to sleep.

  The terrible drought had showed no signs of slackening by the time we reached Peking. The city was stifling in heat and choking in the acrid red brick dust it’s famous for, and in addition the sky was thick with Yellow Wind, meaning clouds of fine yellow sand blowing in from Mongolian deserts. Usually the sandstorms are over by the fourth moon, but when Yen Shih’s wagon rolled through the gates on the evening of the second day of the fifth moon the wheels scraped furrows through a hard grainy yellow blanket, and the wind against the canvas was making hissing sounds like cats warming up for a fight.

  Master Li arranged for Yen Shih to meet us the following morning on Hortensia Island, and then the puppeteer and his daughter turned the wagon toward their house. I rented a palanquin and proceeded with the sage to the house of the Celestial Master, and we arrived just as drums announced the closing of the gates to the Forbidden City, which was sparkling like a jeweled crown in the light of sunset. We were admitted at once, but at the door to the saint’s study our way was blocked by an old woman who had served the Celestial Master for years.

  “He is not well today,” she said. Her face was worried and tired. “He has great energy, but something is wrong, and I must beg you to come back tomorrow. He usually gets better after he sleeps.”

  The study door was partially ajar and I could hear the Celestial Master inside talking to somebody, using archaic formal language almost like a priestly chant, and from what little I knew about him that wasn’t his style at all.

  “If it continues to feel ill,” the Celestial Master was intoning, grandly and resonantly, “anoint it with clarified fat of the leg of a snow leopard. Give it drink from eggshells of the throstle thrush filled with juice of the custard apple, in which are three pinches of shredded rhinoceros horn. Apply piebald leeches, and if it still succumbs remember that no creature is immortal and you too must die.”

  The door opened. I had a brief glimpse of the saint standing beside his desk, eyes closed, hands out as in a blessing, and then the door closed behind a young servant girl who was carrying a small dog on a silken pillow. The dog was clearly sick, panting weakly, and the girl was so concerned with it she didn’t even see us. She had a plain, simpleminded sort of face, and I would have bet anything she made her own slippers: a pattern of pink chipmunks hopping through yellow flowers.

  “Does your master get like that often?” Master Li asked the old woman.

  “No, Venerable Sir. Only now and then, but then he rests and he’s his old self again.”

  “We’ll call again tomorrow,” Master Li said, and he turned and led the way back outside.

  Riding back in the palanquin was like swimming through a sea of fantastic colors—sandstorms are glorious when it comes to sunsets—and Master Li’s face was changing from gold to vermilion to purple to pink, while deep furrows of worry made black jagged lines across the palette.

  “I fear for my dear old teacher,” he said. “Let’s not forget that he somehow tricked a mandarin who had one of the cages, and used the thing to give a tongue-lashing to the others. Those fellows are dangerous. If his mind wandered off on a side trip when he was dealing with them we could all be in bad trouble, and we’d best get the bastards behind bars as fast as possible.”

  “Sir, don’t you have enough already?” I asked. “We know about the cave, and now you know how they’re counterfeiting Tribute Tea.”

  “We also know that the top man is Li the Cat, and he has enough power to make a cave beneath Coal Hill disappear,” Master Li said grimly. “He can hold up an investigation for six months, during which time every single witness against him, including us, will drop dead from mysterious diseases. No, our next step must be to identify the remaining mandarins of the conspiracy, find the weak link, and force him to testify against the others.”

  He flung his hands apart and gazed up toward the stars.

  “But, damn it, the mandarins’ affairs aren’t important,” he said in a frustrated tone of voice. “It’s those cages, and the creature
s that seem to be associated with them, and a burglar that may or may not be a cavalier transformed into Envy. If only the Celestial Master could regain full mental control! Nobody knows more about the gods and demons of three thousand years ago, and he’d get to the bottom of it if anyone could.”

  We’d reached Heaven’s Bridge at the junction of the Street of Eyes and the Alley of Flies, and Master Li had the palanquin bearers let us out at the Wineshop of One-Eyed Wong. He hired a few slinky people to trace the whereabouts of Ho Chang-yu, the mandarin whose image had appeared in the cage before that of the Celestial Master, and in two hours we learned that the mandarin had journeyed to the imperial palace in Ch’ang-an and wasn’t due back for a day or two. After eating dinner we made our way to the shack in the alley, and this time Grandmother Ming didn’t greet us with screams about big monkeys. Both of us slept soundly, but I would have preferred to sleep fitfully, dreaming of Yu Lan.

  Just after dawn on the third day of the fifth moon, when the Yellow Wind had temporarily ceased and the sky was clear pale blue, fingers of sunlight reached across the water of North Lake and crawled across the stern of our rowboat as we splashed toward Hortensia Island, and I was astonished to see that already the first heat waves were wriggling like transparent lizards on top of the looming crag that housed the Yu. It was going to be another scorcher, but as I tied to the dock my heart lifted. Yen Shih was already there, and he had torches with him as Master Li had requested.

  “It seemed to me that you’d been cheated,” Master Li said cheerfully to the puppeteer. “Ox and I witnessed all the excitement at the grand warden’s palace while you were stuck with a stageful of puppets, so with any luck you’ll get some action today.”

  “How delightful,” Yen Shih said, and it sounded as though he meant it.

  “I should have thought of this before,” the old man said ruefully. “We need a list of the mandarins and other eminent gentlemen connected to the tea ring, and I also need every bit of information I can find about the peculiar cages Ox and I have described. The key may be the man who apparently found the cages, the late Ma Tuan Lin.”

  We were making our way down the path toward the place where that gentleman met his end, and Master Li pointed in the direction of the pavilion.

  “Ox and I discovered all that was of interest in his island retreat, and I’ve had his house and office searched, as well as his country estate. I thought we’d reached a blank wall, but now I’m not so sure. Ever hear of Ma before this mess?”

  “The honor was never mine,” Yen Shih said.

  “You were lucky,” said Master Li. “To know Ma was to invite ulcers. He was one of those scholars blessed with a marvelous memory, one talent—in his case, a gift for languages—and absolutely no brains or judgment whatsoever. His linguistic skills brought him into the Interior Ministry as an expert on our minority populations, and it is no exaggeration to say that Ma Tuan Lin soon became a living legend.”

  Master Li seemed to feel a peculiar admiration for the late mandarin, whose career had been amazingly consistent.

  “His first post was administrator to the Hu Peh. He arrived during a flu epidemic, during which time that remarkably hygienic tribe fashioned and wore gauze masks,” Master Li said. “His official report stated that his subjects were like human beings except they had nothing but blank spaces between nose and chin, their mouths, he surmised, being placed on top of their heads. He was rewarded by promotion to the land of the Kuang Tung, and it was their ghastly luck that he arrived as they were celebrating their Creation Myth. The official report stated that they would require neither arable fields nor fishing rights, since they existed by eating mud.”

  “Sounds like a delightful fellow,” Yen Shih said wryly.

  “He got better,” said Master Li. “Ma Tuan Lin was promoted to oversee the Chiao, which led to the massacre of uncounted bewildered grandmothers when he accepted as literal truth a tale designed to make youngsters behave, and reported that the old ladies of the tribe turned into bats at night and flew around devouring the brains of Chinese children. They promoted him to Hainan, and he arrived on the island during a full moon, and one can imagine what moonlight did to Ma Tuan Lin. His official report stated that the girls were actually mermaids who wept pearls instead of tears, so legions of unsavory gentlemen set sail for Hainan to grab girls and make them cry, and I don’t want to go into the disgusting details.”

  Master Li had come in sight of the pavilion, and he stopped and waved his hand at it.

  “My point is that Ma’s fellow conspirators would scarcely trust a man like that with important documents. My guess is that he was still useful to them, so rather than slit his throat they made sure that he worked on anything connected to the scheme—and that includes the cages—in a place they supervised. His pavilion was right beside the tunnel, giving him ready access to the cave beneath Coal Hill, and that, I’m willing to bet, is where they gave him an office and had somebody search him for sensitive papers before he left.”

  “So we’re going back into the cave, to find and search Ma Tuan Lin’s office?” Yen Shih asked.

  “Precisely.”

  The puppeteer didn’t say anything, but those little lights were dancing deep inside his eyes. I helped him reopen a hole in the weeds covering the tunnel entrance, and we stopped just inside and lit our torches. So far as I could see the tunnel hadn’t been used since the last time we’d been there, and the evidence was fairly good because white dust still covered the ground in the area where something had been chipped from the wall and we saw no fresh sandal prints. We descended to the path beneath the lake. All I heard was the ominous drip-drop of water trickling from the roof, and the rapid thudding of my heart. The path began to rise toward Coal Hill. As we got close to the cave I heard a sound that resolved itself into laughter, and it was the laughter of men who had triumphed over the problems men are heir to by reverting to bestiality. I can’t describe it. Either one knows that sound or one doesn’t. We extinguished our torches. As we got closer the laughter got louder, and when we peered into the cavern we saw ten men at a table eating a breakfast of roast meat. Dog bones littered the floor at their feet, and dog grease dripped down their jowls, and they roared with mirth as they swapped one stale dirty story after another. The three leaders were all too familiar: Hog, Hyena, and Jackal, who had brutally murdered the little clerk, and I took note of the fact that all the men wore daggers, and there were three crossbows propped against the table beside the leaders.

  They were too occupied with greasy dog meat and greasier jokes to notice much else. Master Li promptly slipped into the cave and began crawling between stacks of packing cases, and Yen Shih and I followed him to the back wall. He changed position several times, scanning the ceiling and angles of the walls to judge the acoustics, and then he whispered to us to gather pebbles and take positions where we could throw them through deep shadows back through the tunnel entrance. At his signal the puppeteer and I pitched pebbles, and the rattling sound made the men jerk their heads up and turn their eyes toward the tunnel.

  Master Li had his hands cupped around his mouth. He’s tried to teach me how to do it many times, but I have no talent for such things, even though I realize ninety percent of it is getting the listener’s attention focused on the place the sound is supposed to come from. The effect was really remarkable. A high quavering voice seemed to drift from the blackness of the tunnel, a voice I remembered well.

  “Give… me…back…my…eeeeears,” wailed the ghostly voice of the murdered clerk.

  The thugs sat frozen, dog legs and haunches half crunched between their teeth. Hyena spat meat onto the table and turned to Hog.

  “That was Cricket, sure as you’re born,” he whispered.

  One of the other thugs jumped to his feet, spilling a wine jar and knocking a platter to the floor.

  “Cricket? Cricket? But you said you’d killed the miserable little bastard!” he squealed.

  “Give… me…back…my…nooooo
ose.”

  Jackal stood up, white-faced, clutching his dagger.

  “That’s Cricket’s ghost,” he said flatly. “The little insect’s come back to haunt us.”

  The other thugs were standing now, looking at each other for support. Only Hog remained seated as before, at the head of the table, gnawing on a bone.

  “Ghost? Your mama raised you better than that,” he sneered. “Don’t you know a dead person’s got to stay in Hell three years before he can return in ghost form?”

  “Then what the hell was that!” Jackal shouted.

  “Give…me…back…my…eeeeeeeeyes.”

  “That’s Cricket. His hun soul got lost,” Hyena whispered. “Can’t you hear? It’s searching for its body, except we cut those parts away.”

  “Why couldn’t you have strangled the bastard!” one of the thugs shouted.

  “Hun soul, hun soul,” Hog sneered. He made a show of dignity as he slowly got to his feet and picked up his crossbow. “Listen, you ignorant turds, the hun soul lives in the liver and we didn’t touch Cricket’s liver. I chopped out the bastard’s lungs, not liver, and it’s the lower soul that lives in the lungs, and if you think I’m scared of the po soul of an insect like Cricket—”

  “Give…me…back…my…luuuuuuuungs.”

  Hyena and Jackal were slinking away, but Hog halted them and rallied the troops.

  “Alive or dead, Cricket don’t have the guts of a sparrow!” he yelled. “Come on, boys, let’s give that turd something to moan about!”

  He charged to the tunnel entrance, scooping up a torch from a bracket on the wall, and after a moment of indecision Hyena and Jackal and the other thugs followed the leader, whooping and cursing to keep their spirits up, whacking the air with daggers. They disappeared down the tunnel shouting, “Show yourself, you coward!” and “I’ll chase your worm-eaten soul halfway to Tibet!” The snap-whang of a crossbow suggested that imagination was providing images to shoot at, and Master Li grunted with satisfaction as he trotted out and started across the cave to the door in the back wall.