The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  Just above the level of the intervening wall was a long balcony in front of apartments on one of the upper floors, and Hyena and Jackal were staggering along it. They were stark naked, and they screamed in unimaginable agony as they tore their hair and rent their flesh. Hog followed, also naked, with a naked girl riding on his back. It was Yu Lan. Hog howled as horribly as the others as he tried to pluck his eyes out, and I realized that the three men were mad. Hopelessly, horribly insane, and the heat waves that rose around them were causing illusions like dreams, and as in a dream I thought I saw glittering fangs in the blurred area of Yu Lan’s lovely head, and terrible claws at her waist, and something scaly and coiling near her legs. The mirage made the beautiful shamanka appear to be laughing with delight as she rode a madman’s back—but Master Li was pounding me, jerking at my arm, and I felt him jump from my back.

  He was diving for the cages. Li the Cat and the soldiers stood transfixed, staring at the balcony while Master Li snatched a cage from beneath a throne and jerked the brush from it. He squinted at the symbols engraved upon the bars, and then touched the figure of a man at an oar with the tip of the brush, twice.

  “Goat, goat, jump the wall,” he chanted, and the brush touched the symbol of a drum, “grab some grass to feed your mother”—the brush touched a scarf and a head—“if she’s not in field or stall”—the brush moved to the blue dragon of the east and the white tiger of the west—“feed it to your hungry brothers”—the brush moved rapidly over a sequence of rowers—“one… two…three…four…five…six…seven…eight!”

  A bright flash blinded me, and when my eyes cleared I was gaping at Tuan hu, a great toadlike creature squatting in the center of the platform. Terrible eyes glared at me, the immense mouth opened.

  “Ox!”

  Master Li was touching the tip of his right forefinger to his left eyebrow, right eyebrow, and the tip of his nose, and I hastened to repeat the sequence I had dreamed of, and the horrible eyes moved away from us. The mouth gaped, a huge tongue flicked out, and streams of burning acid shot over soldiers and mandarins, scorching through flesh and clothing alike.

  “Ox, this is what the cages carry! This is what we need!” Master Li yelled.

  A small compartment had opened in the bottom of the cage, and Master Li slid his fingers between the bars and pulled out something else I knew from dreams: a tiny object shaped like a pitchfork, but with only two prongs. He swiftly stuck it in his money belt and dove for another cage, and at that point we were overcome by a rapid sequence of startling events.

  Mandarins and soldiers shrieked, acid sprayed the platform, and a roaring, howling, furious saint leaped up between writhing bodies. The Celestial Master was quite out of his mind with fury. He ignored the great demon-deity as he charged Master Li with his stone club, smashing to jelly the head of a mandarin that got in the way. I dove for the Celestial Master’s legs just as he tried to decapitate Master Li, and the three of us tumbled over the back edge of the platform and toppled down into the pool beneath the splashing waterfall.

  Fortunately my fall had been slowed by water when my head hit a rock beneath the surface. I wasn’t quite knocked unconscious, but I had no control of my body until the numbness went away, and I could only watch helplessly as the Celestial Master attacked Master Li. The saint had lost his club in the fall, but immensely powerful hands had closed around the sage’s throat and I knew that Master Li had no chance at all. Incessantly lifting waterwheels kept pouring the contents of great buckets into the Golden River, and the water kept pouring and foaming down around us, and something bumped against my legs. It was the body of an officer with a broken back. Then a pair of hands emerged from the spray, reaching around me to grab the hands of the Celestial Master and slowly pry them from Master Li’s neck.

  “In Singapore the Merchants’ Guild offers the remarkably named ‘stone-nine dukes,’ meaning baby groupers,” the clotted gurgling voice of Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu said into my left ear. “It must be recorded that the groupers are steamed in a stew with parrot fish, yellow croakers, and pig-oil butter-cake fish, although certain authorities claim that eating too many stone-nine dukes will cause falling hair, blindness, and bone decay. That, I believe, is a misconception caused by the fact that the written character for the fish is very similar to that for ‘apricot,’ and apricots, of course, will do all those things if eaten to excess.”

  Master Li was able to breathe again, and with breath came the ability to free his knife, and he plunged it into the Celestial Master’s chest and ripped a great slash. Then he withdrew the blade and repeated the blow, slashing diagonally across the first wound. There was no blood. Not a drop. Then as I gaped in horror I saw two small greenish paws reach out from the cavity and spread ribs apart, and a monkey’s head thrust out from the saint’s chest. Eyes of hate glared at us. It chattered and spat at Master Li, and then it climbed from the empty shell that was the Celestial Master and splashed through the water to the cliff, and in an instant it was gone, swinging up and away before I’d fully realized where I’d seen it before: a charming little gift monkey bowing to the Celestial Master and being led into the house by an enchanted old servant.

  The sage was kneeling in the pool, cradling the body of his old friend and teacher, weeping. I looked up to see Li the Cat staring from the platform, and then the eunuch turned to beckon soldiers. I dove and grabbed the cage from Master Li and jerked the brush from the hole in the top.

  “Goat, goat,” I panted, “climb the wall…grab some grass to give your mother…if she’s not in field or stall…give it to your hungry brothers…one…two…three…four…five…six…seven…eight!”

  I blinked in the flash and hastened to make the propitiating gesture, and above me Li the Cat and the soldiers screamed in terror and dove for safety. My eyes cleared and I was gazing at the terrible but somehow touching Wei Serpent, with its two human heads and its silly hats and its little purple jacket. It was huge, though, and fangs protruded from the mouths of the heads, and great coils slithered and glistened. A panting sound behind me was followed by the body of Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu, who painfully shoved himself toward the demon-deity with his arms outstretched. The hosteler’s eyes were glazed in ecstasy, and his voice rang with reverence.

  “O fabled Savory Serpent of Serendip, ye shall be bathed in wine and honey warmed by babies’ breath! Ye shall be poached in the truffled milk of nursing sea serpents! Ye shall be basted in broth of pearls dissolved in unicorn tears! Ye shall be worshipped! Ye shall be adored!”

  Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu spread his arms as wide as possible and wrapped them around the snake in a loving embrace, and the Wei Serpent’s coils closed around the hosteler, and for a moment the two of them were still and rapt. Then a flash blinded me, and when my vision cleared a great white crane was skirting a whirlwind, flying away across the bloated surface of the blood-red sun. *

  “Ox!”

  I tore my eyes from a flying crane to see Master Li scrambling for another cage. I dropped the cage I was still clutching, squawked like a goose, dove back on top of it, and reached inside and pulled out the little two-pronged pitchfork. Then I leaped for another cage and found myself battling the last two mandarins and Li the Cat. The problem was they had three or four soldiers with them and I was pinned between two overturned thronelike chairs as I tried to fend them off with a pike I grabbed from a dead soldier.

  The toadlike demon-deity was still spitting acid but it took care not to scorch friends, meaning those who made the proper gesture, so at least I had no problem there. As I tried to keep somebody’s spear from becoming my second backbone I heard “…four…five…six…seven…eight!” This time I closed my eyes before the flash, and I opened them to make the propitiating gesture and see the only female sibling, Nu Pa, who seemed to be a low cloud no more than two feet tall. Then endless arms of fog reached out, and out, and out, and immense hands made of swirling marsh mist opened and fingers touched howling soldiers and screeching eunuchs, and
horrible black blisters spread over their faces and bodies and they ran around clawing at the spots, and then they fell and went into convulsions and died.

  A black blistered eunuch had rolled screaming between the feet of the men surrounding me. That allowed me to snatch the brush from the last of the cages. “Goat, goat, jump the wall, grab some grass to give your mother, if she’s not in field or stall, give it to your hungry brothers: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight!” I closed my eyes tightly, gestured, and opened them to see the end of Li the Cat.

  Ch’i is one of the strangest of the demon-deities. Its odor is musty, its color is the grayish white of mourning, its sound is a faint sighing moan, and its form is the winding cloth of a corpse. The limp cloth slid over the platform like a snake and reached a pair of legs and began wrapping around them. Li the Cat stopped shrieking at me and looked down. He hacked with his sword and succeeded only in slicing his left thigh. He yelled and dropped the blade and grabbed with both hands. The cloth was unresisting. It fell away if pulled properly, but it began winding once more as soon as it was released. Now the other end was sliding up the eunuch’s back, and a curl of gray-white, musty, moaning burial cloth wrapped around his chest, pinning his arms to his sides. The eunuch was screaming, one shriek after another, and his eyes were bulging in horror. The ends were wrapping faster now, climbing his knees, waist, chest, shoulders, and then they wound around Li the Cat’s neck and up over his chin. The crystal vial containing the parts he’d had severed to advance his position in life was shoved up in front of his face, and the cloth wound around and around, and his screams stopped and his horrified eyes disappeared. Only his forehead, glistening with Protocol Soap, and the top of his head remained, and then they too vanished beneath burial cloth. A gray-white cocoon toppled over and wriggled on the platform, and the last I saw of the eunuch he was still wriggling, but slower.

  I grabbed the last little pitchfork. Master Li had a running start and he landed high on my back and shouted in my ear, “The well! Get to the well!” I jumped down to the courtyard and vaulted over writhing bodies and jumped back up to the stone platform around the well, and Master Li slid from my back. Acid and marsh pestilence were still seeking victims, and the shrieks were so loud he had to lean close and yell.

  “Ox, look down inside the well at the walls and tell me what you see!”

  I dropped to my stomach and craned over the edge as far as I could, and my eyes spread even wider than they were already. I got back up and shouted, “The frogs! There’s a pattern of frogs around the inside, just like in my dream!”

  “We have to go down! Fast!” he yelled.

  Unlike my dream, there was no windlass and bucket. I turned and saw that the guards had fled, but the lead chain linking the prisoners had been looped over a post and they couldn’t move. The key ring lay upon the marble pavement, so I unlocked the prisoners and let them run for their lives and then I hauled the chains to the well, linked them together, and attached one end to an iron post that might at one time have held a windlass.

  It was a lot harder than lowering a bucket, but in one sense it was a great improvement over my dreams. There wasn’t any horrible stench of rotting flesh—although there would be when the sacrificial victims began to stink—and there wasn’t any frightening growl from below.

  “There!”

  The light from above was just good enough for us to make out a circular spot on the wall. I started the chain swinging, wider and wider, kicking off from the back wall, and finally my foot found a toehold inside the hole. We made it over the edge into a small low tunnel, and I found a rock to wrap the end of the chain around in case we had to come back. Then we started down a narrow passageway that was partly illuminated by greenish phosphorescence.

  A vibration was making small pebbles fall from the stone ceiling. It shook harder and harder, and then air rushed at us and hit like a physical blow. A great sound was forming, turning my bones to jelly, and it resolved itself into a musical note that quite literally hurled me against a wall. Even as I was being battered I recognized it. It was the mysterious sound that had announced the solstice ever since a great musical instrument had been built by Eight Skilled Gentlemen, and quite frankly I had completely forgotten that the solstice was today. I realized with horror that we must be actually inside the Yu. This tunnel was one of the pipes, and the sound so far had been merely warming up, a throat clearing, and what would happen if the full sound reached us when we were trapped in a tiny tunnel?

  “It’s Envy! He’s installed the first yang key!” Master Li shouted. “Hurry, Ox, hurry!”

  So I hurried with the old man on my back, even though I had no idea what lay in front. If a pit opened in the path we were dead. All I could do was run ahead as fast as I could, almost blindly, and when the second blast of sound came it spun me around like a top.

  “There will be two more! Hurry! Hurry!” Master Li yelled.

  The next two musical notes were worse because we were closer to the source, but my fear that my eardrums would burst was unfounded. I had been racing downhill, but now the path leveled. The phosphorescence grew brighter, which was a blessing because I was able to see and stop in time, and I panted to a halt at the edge of a cliff overlooking a cavern and there they were: great coiling shapes that weren’t serpents but pipes, connecting to smaller pipes and still smaller ones. I found steps and ran down, and at last we reached eight tiny pipes leading into eight small boxes in two rows, four on each side.

  Master Li hopped down. “Left is yang, and all male boxes should be filled,” he muttered. He tried to open the lids on the left but they had virtually melded with the grooves. “Yin waits,” he said, and he reached to the right and the first lid opened easily.

  Inside was a little rack like in my dreams, and I could also see a hole in the bottom leading down through solid rock, probably to the wind-chest below. Master Li had taken out his two little pitchfork things and I gave him my two.

  “Some kind of tuning forks, but designed to do something very unusual with sound waves,” he said. “One would like to be able to talk to the Eight Skilled Gentlemen and ask a few questions.”

  He placed the first tuning fork in the rack, where it fit perfectly, and closed the lid, which sealed itself tightly in place. The old man repeated the performance with the remaining three forks and boxes, and then turned and walked rapidly into the shadows. When I trotted up beside him I saw the gates. There were two pairs of immense iron gates side by side. The ones on the left stood open and the ones on the right were closed, and Master Li walked to the closed gates on the female side. A great vibration was beginning, and then the first of the yin notes blasted against us. I held Master Li to keep him from being blown away, and as the sound faded the great gates swung slowly open.

  We walked through, and then I stopped in my tracks and stared. We were walking on a path of stone between two wide channels. The channel to the left was filled with water, but what water! It seemed to be made of vibrating translucent air with rainbow colors woven through it, and Master Li exclaimed in delight as he saw it.

  “Remember Hosteler Tu, Ox? The Yu was built by the Eight Skilled Gentlemen to make music that turned into water. Well, here it is, and here comes some more.”

  The channel on the right had been dry, but now the vibrations of the Yu seemed to be coalescing into visible form, and a shining rainbow path of water appeared.

  “Hurry.”

  We ran forward to a second pair of gates, open on the left, closed on the right (“Locks?” I wondered. “Like in a very strange canal?”), and the sound from the second tuning key caused great gates to swing open, and music-water formed on the right to match that on the left. Gates opened twice more, and water formed in front of us, and the fourth and last shining path of water reached ahead to a dock that matched the dock on the left, and there waited two great Dragon Boats, different only in that the yang symbol marked the one on the left and the yin symbol marked the one on the right.r />
  They were each at least a hundred and fifty feet long, but so slim that only a narrow passageway ran between seats for single oarsmen on each side. On the platforms in the center waited drum and clapping boards, and lying on the high prows were the green-and-white scarves used to send commands. Each immense steering oar was forty feet long, and I noticed that the prow of each boat had the traditional dragon-head shape, but with a long tapering horn thrusting straight out from the center of the forehead.

  The crews were waiting on the docks, standing at attention, eighty-eight oarsmen per boat, and I could distinguish the red bandannas around the foreheads of the “brothers,” the lead oarsmen. I saw other figures I couldn’t identify, and then as we came close a gentleman in a simple white robe stepped forward and bowed. In this setting the blue cheeks and crimson nose and silver forehead and yellow chin seemed entirely appropriate, and his voice was clear and resonant.

  “Believe it or not, Li Kao, I prayed that you would perform the impossible and come to honor the solstice with me today,” said Envy.

  Despite the claims of my critics I am not a total idiot. I was not surprised—saddened, yes, even agonized at certain implications—but not at all surprised that the voice of Envy was the voice of a puppeteer.

  * * *

  * Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu was never seen again. Three months later the magistrate in charge of digging up bodies in the hosteler’s basement discovered the 214 notebooks of recipes, culinary comments, and aesthetic essays that were to form the backbone of the second-greatest cuisine the world has ever known. Within a year a powerful lobby had formed to press for proper recognition, and in record time all charges against a mad innkeeper disappeared from the ledgers. Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu was elevated to the pantheon, where his godly form is that of a prominent star in the Hyades asterism, and in many parts of China he is still worshipped as Tu K’ang, Patron of Chefs and Restaurateurs. [back]