The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  Master Li regarded Yen Shih with ironic eyes, and bowed with almost equal grace.

  “And I am honored to greet the most talented as well as most dangerous of cavaliers,” he said. “It was inexcusable of me not to have seen the face behind the mask from the very first, or nearly.”

  Envy shrugged. “Inexcusable? Surely human nature is excuse enough.” He lifted a piece of the disguise he had discarded and pressed it to the left side of his face, like malleable flesh-colored clay, and again I saw the terrible ravages of smallpox. “No one looks closely at deformity,” he said gently.

  “It was a brave disguise for a cavalier to choose,” Master Li said with ungrudging respect. “It was also brave to travel the world as a puppeteer whose formal social status would be as low as that of a prostitute or an actor. You could have chosen to be the empire’s greatest fencing master, or the most accomplished of imperial advisers. But then, cavaliers are naturally drawn to crafts involving the pulling of strings, and I speak with the authority of having been one of the puppets,” Master Li said with another bow.

  “For a time, Li Kao, for a time,” Envy said. He flicked a wrist in a casual gesture of dismissing a trifle I couldn’t imitate with a thousand years of practice, and the sunrise smile I had seen illuminate a landscape of pock-marks now lit the grotesquely painted face a goddess had given him. “You would have needed supernatural powers to guess at the beginning who I was and what I was after, and when I consider the array of marvels and monsters coming at you from all sides I am awestruck that you could untangle it at all, much less get here in time. An extraordinary performance, and you will forgive me if I begin to wonder who is the manipulator and who is the mannequin.”

  Yen Shih stepped toward Master Li, and smiled when I jumped protectively to the old man’s side.

  “Don’t worry, Ox. If murder were on my mind I would have killed both of you the moment Master Li found the remaining mandarins, which meant he had found the remaining cages that my peculiar siblings still occupied as guardians. Master Li has earned the right to challenge, and I would be a poor cavalier if I did not accept the challenge eagerly. We shall race, he and I,” he said. “The boats await as they awaited three thousand years ago, as do the crews, and it is time to meet them.”

  The figures we walked toward were indistinct in mist that floated low over the twin channels of water and in the smoke from rows of torches. As we grew closer I began to realize that it wasn’t only mist and smoke that blurred the forms and features of the crews. They themselves were like wax dolls placed too close to a stove, partially melted, twisted and squashed down as had been the ancient statues of dying deities around the upper cavern of the Yu. They still carried an aura of awesome strength but they smelled of abandoned tombs, desiccated and dusty, crumbling with age, and I wondered how much longer they could keep their vigil beside antique Dragon Boats.

  Sixteen stepped forward and bowed, eight from each boat, the ones wearing the red bandannas of lead oarsmen.

  “Allow me to introduce those who will set the stroke for the yang boat,” said Envy. “These eight on my left are the four Roving Lights, Yu-kuang, and the four Junior Brothers of the Wasteland, Yeh-cbung, who are wrongfully accused in innumerable ancient accounts of spreading pestilence. They do no such thing. All they do is row, and if pestilence follows their victories it is no concern of theirs.”

  The eight oarsmen bowed again and stepped back into the ranks. Envy waved toward eight figures on the right, who lifted their heads one after another.

  “Your lead strokes, Pa-ling, ‘Eight Ghostly Powers,’ and very great oarsmen of yin are they,” said Envy, who was using the intonation of a chant. “From left to right they are First Doer, Lungs and Stomach, Ancestral Intelligence, Rising and Soaring, Seizer of All, Sharpener and Amputator, Husky Lusty One, and, finally, Extreme and Extraordinary One, who has been accorded the honor of a brief description in Classic of Mountains and Seas. ‘On Shensi mountain dwells a creature that has the shape of a bull, the bristles of a porcupine, and the sound of a howling dog. It eats people.’”

  The oarsmen bowed and stepped back into the ranks. Four other creatures, two from each boat, stepped forward.

  “The wielders of drum and clapping board, who receive the commands of the scarves and transmit them through their instruments to the rest of the crews,” said Envy. “Beating for yang: Male Elder on the left and Elder Extraordinary One on the right. Beating for yin: Bounding and Rushing on the left and Gliding Sliding One on the right.”

  The four bowed and stepped back. A slim slight figure stepped forward, and my heart did strange things. For a long moment I was sure it was Yu Lan, but then I realized the girl had a slightly blurred face, like all the others, and her eyes were deep and cold and frightening, and where she walked a puddle formed. The awesome man-ape that was Envy, and who I still loved as Yen Shih, turned to me.

  “Number Ten Ox, pay the closest attention,” he said quietly. “In the ancient White Marsh Diagrams is a charmingly innocent entry: ‘The essence of old wells takes the form of a beautiful girl called Kuan, and it likes to sit on rocks and blow a flute, and if you call it by name it will go away.’ This is indeed Kuan, Essence of Old Wells, and you must know two things. The first is that her strength has never been measured and probably can’t be, because wells draw power from earth and water alike. The second is that she has been my faithful companion during my exile on earth. As such she shall use her great strength at the steering oar of the yang boat, and you, as companion of Master Li, shall steer the yin boat, and the role of the one they call goat is a hard and dangerous one. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” I whispered.

  Master Li and Envy walked forward together to the yang boat on the left, and as I helped them light the purifying fire on top of the platform in the center I was struck by the wording of their ancient solstice chant: “The sparks of the suns are burning the sky! The fire of the earth is burning the Five Regions! Flames destroy all that is not auspicious!” Then we crossed a gangplank to the yin boat and repeated the purifying ritual. There were other ceremonies and chants I didn’t recognize and couldn’t understand, and finally Envy returned by himself to the yang boat. The gangplank was pulled in. Master Li was totally relaxed now that the issue was clear-cut, and he regarded his counterpart with speculative eyes.

  “As a matter of purely academic interest, am I correct in assuming that the appearance of that vampire ghoul was no more than a weird coincidence?” he asked.

  “I sincerely hope so since I prefer not to wander into the morass of metaphysical speculation,” Envy replied with equal nonchalance. “I assume the creature fell into a load of earth that was being carried to Hortensia Island, and Ma Tuan Lin accidentally moved the bead on the cage in the proper sequence not long afterward and released the first of my brothers. Monsters worship demon-deities. The ch’ih-mei crawled from the pile and was too late to greet my brother, but at least he found a meal.”

  “And your original involvement?” Master Li asked.

  “I was as ignorant as the ch’ih-mei,” said Envy. “I had no idea the cages had survived until I heard the ‘Pi-fang!’ cry and saw the crane cross the moon. It was a marvelous moment. If one brother survived, and surely that meant the cage he guarded also survived, why not the others? Once long ago, I had nearly accomplished an extraordinary feat, only to be denied by incredibly persistent shamans, and now if I could get my hands on those cages I might use their own tools to complete the job. But how could I get my hands on the cages?”

  “Enter a puppet,” Master Li said sourly.

  “You were a godsend. The great Master Li tracking down mandarins and cages for me!” Envy exclaimed delightedly, without the slightest trace of sarcasm or irony. “I was sure you would discover the mechanisms that enabled puppets to operate with minimum help from Yu Lan while I myself roamed free, but I was also sure you would discover it too late.”

  Master Li had walked up to the captain’s p
ost on the high prow and was arranging his scarves, and on the left I saw Envy doing the same, and with a lump in my throat that nearly choked me I made my way astern to the raised platform and the long handle of the huge steering oar. It was beautifully balanced. So much so that I could lift it easily from the water with downward pressure from my body, but lowering it gently was far more difficult, and when the boat rocked very slightly as the hawser was cast away I was almost knocked off my feet. Sideways movements of the oar were murder, and I hated to think what would happen with up-and-down movements if the boat hit hard waves.

  The twin boats were moving, floating side by side in the two channels, picking up speed even though no rower had touched an oar, and now I could see far enough through the mist to make out a perfectly straight streak of light ahead of us, cutting across our path like the edge of a knife.

  “Like a starting line,” I thought, and as I thought it I felt a powerful series of vibrations: one…two…three…four…five…six…seven…eight….

  The eight tuning forks, yin and yang, were allowing the Yu to perform a song unheard in three thousand years. Great rumbling notes—soft for all their force—were blurring the water and the air as though blending elements together, and then a long, slow, steady throbbing note seemed to evolve and take over. It was perfectly steady, quiet but with unimaginable power. This was the full song of the Yu, weaving music into water that stretched out from the horizontal line perpendicular to the boats and blended both channels into a river fit for a race, and Master Li turned to the puppeteer with wonder in his eyes.

  “Can those remarkable men have created a racing path that also measures the solstice they sought to preserve?” he asked.

  “The course is permanently set as though it was the shadow of a giant gnomon, yes,” Envy said. “I haven’t the slightest idea how they managed it, although I once read that a similar phenomenon was produced by a barbarian called Oenopides of Chios. Needless to say, the gnomon is correct to the precise second of the solstice.”

  Master Li heaved a melancholy sigh.

  “What a pity. The one man in the empire who could have explained it to us, on his better days, can’t be here,” he said. “I can forgive much, but cannot forgive the fate of the Celestial Master.”

  “Li Kao, he was dying! His mind was nearly gone,” Envy protested. “I had to find some way to infuriate Heaven with mankind. Your discovery of a smuggling and counterfeiting ring gave me the idea of using aristocratic greed to resurrect the ghost scheme, but in itself it wouldn’t be enough. However, the August Personage of Jade is hot-tempered, as we all know. I was certain he would remove his protection from earth before the matter had been fully investigated if the Celestial Master were to insult Heaven with human sacrifice in the name of righteousness and religion, which could be done if Malice took over the Celestial Master’s body. As it turned out, my miserable son almost ruined the whole thing.”

  For the first time Envy showed strong emotion, and the garish colors of his face received an additional flush of rage.

  “That idiot boy and his pathetic plot to kill you in the greenhouse,” he said with venom dripping from his voice. “Kill you? You hadn’t yet tracked down the remaining mandarins and their cages! And then he had a little maid murdered because she let a dog die, he said, but the real reason was that he wanted to exult in the power that went with the new body he occupied, and murdering someone was the best use of power he could link of. On top of that he had to amuse himself by playing tag with you around half the Forbidden City, and the most persuasive argument for celibacy I know of is my son Malice!”

  “Yet that would deny you a daughter,” Master Li said quietly. “She is surely compensation enough.”

  “Yes,” Envy said, very softly. “Yes, no man has ever had a lovelier and more dutiful daughter, though few daughters have been born bearing such a curse.”

  The garish face turned in my direction, and I still think I wasn’t wrong to feel honored to receive a nod of his head.

  “I would say that my daughter chose a most inopportune time to seek love, if I didn’t know that such things are not a matter of choice,” he said. “My heart went out to her, poor girl. Fleeing to fragmented passion in the world of dreams—the only medium in which Madness moves more freely than can her mother, and one does not disobey her mother—but even in dreams metamorphosis was sure to seek her out. She wept long and hard, and although she never told what happened I knew she could no longer approach Number Ten Ox in sleep lest her fangs sink into his brain and her claws clasp his heart. Godhood cannot be refused,” Envy said, and his grimace and wry tone of voice suggested he was talking not about Yu Lan when he added, “but it need not be sought.”

  Master Li looked silently at Envy for a long moment.

  “You have known grandeur and debasement to degrees far beyond human comprehension, which leads one to wonder what you hope to gain by tricking Heaven into allowing mass destruction on earth. The gods, you know, will simply blame it on Destiny and go about the delightful business of rebuilding,” Master Li said. “As for the earthly massacre, would you stoop to the level of the legendary king who summoned all the world’s elephants to trample an ant who bit his royal toe?”

  Envy looked at him with a faint smile. The shining straight line was much closer now, and the boats were traveling faster, and the lead oars were spitting on their hands and rewrapping their bandannas. Water slapped the boat, and the handle of the steering oar smacked my ribs.

  “Li Kao, you already know that I act as I do because I must,” Envy said.

  His eyes turned to me, and in them was a strange light I couldn’t decipher, almost, but not quite, like the moon-glow eyes of Kuan, who stood across from me at the handle of her steering oar, riding easily with the movement of the boat, thinking the slow deep thoughts of wells.

  “Number Ten Ox,” Envy said quietly, “once there was a great king who gazed down from a tall tower upon a gardener who sang as he worked, and the king cried, ‘Ah, to have a life of no cares! If only I could be that gardener.’ And the voice of the August Personage of Jade reached out from Heaven and said, ‘It shall be so,’ and lo, the king was a gardener singing in the sun. In time the sun grew hot and the gardener stopped singing, and a fine dark cloud brought coolness and then drifted away, and it was hot again and much work remained, and the gardener cried, ‘Ah, to carry coolness wherever I go and have no cares! If only I could be that cloud.’ And the voice of the August Personage reached out from Heaven and said, ‘It shall be so,’ and lo, the gardener was a cloud drifting across the sky. And the wind blew and the sky grew cold, and the cloud would have liked to go behind the shelter of a hill, but it could only go where the wind took it, and no matter how hard it tried to go this way the wind took it that way, and above the cloud was the bright sun. ‘Ah, to fly through wind and be warm and have no cares! If only I could be the sun,’ cried the cloud, and the voice of the August Personage of Jade reached out from Heaven and said, ‘It shall be so,’ and lo, he was the sun. It was very grand to be the sun, and he delighted in the work of sending down rays to warm some things and burn others, but it was like wearing a suit made of fire and he began to bake like bread. Above him the cool stars that were gods were sparkling in safety and serenity and the sun cried, ‘Ah, to be divine and free from care! If only I could be a god.’ And the voice of the August Personage of Jade reached out from Heaven and said, ‘It shall be so,’ and lo, he was a god, and he was beginning his third century of combat with the Stone Monkey, which had just transformed itself into a monster a hundred thousand feet tall and was wielding a trident made from the triple peaks of Mount Hua, and when he wasn’t dodging blows he could see the peaceful green earth down below him, and the god cried, ‘Ah, if only I could be a man who was safe and secure and had no cares!’ And the voice of the August Personage of Jade reached out from Heaven and said, ‘It shall be so.’ And lo, he was a king who was gazing down from a tall tower upon a gardener who sang as he worked.�
�

  Envy lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug and turned away, but not before I realized there was no amusement in his parable. The light in his eyes did not carry the clean coldness of deep water, like the eyes of Kuan, but the cruel coldness of hatred, because Envy could never rest, never relax, never enjoy, never gain what he wished and never cease wishing, never satisfy the terrible hunger that wracked his mind and body. He was a great nobleman condemned to envy not only clouds, the sun, and the gods but even mindless gardeners as humble as Number Ten Ox, and for that insult the Number Ten Ox’s of the world were going to die.

  The starting line was very close. Master Li lifted his left hand and the white tip of the green silk scarf snapped back, and the great twisted figure of Bounding and Rushing extended his cloth-wrapped sticks over the taut surface of the huge tympan atop the center platform and began a quiet steady drumroll. Across the rainbow water Male Elder was doing the same in the yang boat. One hundred and seventy-six oars slid out on the four sides of the two boats and hovered above the surface. A dark straight shadow touched the tips of the horns that extended straight out from the dragon-head prows, and slid backward to touch the pilot posts against which the captains braced themselves, and Envy and Master Li flicked out their right scarves. Gliding Sliding One raised his clapping boards and made a sharp crashing noise, as did Elder Extraordinary One across from us, and each team of eighty-eight oars dipped into the water with long, smooth strokes. The boat seemed to jump forward beneath my feet. The clapping boards and drums worked steadily and unhurriedly as they set the beat: crash, rat-tat-tat, crash, rat-tat-tat, crash….