Bridge of Birds mlanto-1

by Barry Hughart

  He buried his nose in his wine flask again, and burped comfortably.

  “The abbot of the Monastery of Sh'u was truly heroic,” he said. “He had vowed to raise me as his own, and he kept his word, and so well did he pound an education into my head that I eventually did quite well in my chin-shih examination. When I left the monastery, it was not in pursuit of scholarship, however, but in pursuit of an unparalleled career in crime. It was quite a shock for me to discover that crime was so easy that it was boring. I reluctantly turned to scholarship, and by the accident of handing in some good papers I was entombed in the Forest of Culture Academy as a research fellow, and I escaped from that morgue by bribing the court eunuchs to get me an appointment as a military strategist. I managed to lose a few battles in the approved manner, and then I became one of the emperor's wandering persuaders, and then Governor of Yu, and it was in the last occupation that the light finally dawned. I was trying to get enough evidence to hang the loathsome Dog-Meat General of Wusan, but he was so slippery that I couldn't prove a thing. Fortunately the Yellow River was flooding again, and I managed to convince the priests that the only way to appease the river god was through the custom of the ancients. So the Dog-Meat General disappeared beneath the waves tied to a gray horse—I was sorry about the horse, but it was the custom—and I tendered my resignation. Solving crime, I had belatedly discovered, was at least a hundred times more difficult than committing it, so I hung the sign of a half-closed eye above my door and I have never regretted it. I might add that I have also never left a case half-finished.”

  I gulped noisily, and I suppose that the hope in my eyes was shining as brightly as the moon.

  “Why do you think I've been telling you this?” said Master Li. “I have a very good reason to be angry at the Duke of Ch'in, since one of his ancestors killed my parents, and if nothing else, my various careers have uniquely prepared me for the task of stealing ginseng roots.”

  He patted my shoulder.

  “Besides, I'd take you for a great-grandson any day,” he said. “I would never dream of allowing you to go out on your own to be slaughtered. Get some sleep, and we'll leave at dawn.”

  Tears blurred my eyes. Master Li called to the dogs and crawled from the cave, and they gamboled happily around him as he danced down the path toward the monastery, waving his wine flask. The high-pitched four-tone liquid-voweled song of High Mandarin drifted back upon the night breeze.

  Among the flowers, with a flask of wine,

  I drink all alone—no one to share.

  Raising my flask, I welcome the moon,

  And my shadow joins us, making a threesome.

  As I sing, the moon seems to sway back and forth;

  As I dance, my shadow goes flopping about.

  As long as we're sober, we'll enjoy one another,

  And when we get drunk, we'll go our own ways.

  Thus we'll pursue our own avatars,

  And we'll all meet again in the River of Staaaaaaars!

  I wished that I could have seen him when he was ninety. Even now his leaps and capers were magnificent in the moonlight.

  Part Two—THE FLUTE, THE BALL, AND THE BELL

  12. Of Castles and Key Rabbits

  At the suggestion of the abbot I will explain for the benefit of barbarians that my country is Chung-kuo, which can mean Central Country or Middle Kingdom, whichever one prefers. The point is that it is the country in the exact center of the world, and the only country that lies directly beneath Heaven. “China” is a barbarian invention that was coined in awe and honor of the first Duke of Ch'in, who took over the empire in the Year of the Rat 2,447 (221 B.C.). He was a remarkable reformer. Mass murderers are usually reformers, the abbot tells me, although not necessarily the other way around.

  “We are being strangled by our past!” roared the Duke of Ch'in. “We must make a new beginning!”

  What he had in mind was the suppression of every previous philosophy of government and the imposition of one of his own, called Legalism. The abbot says that the famous first sentence of the Book of Legalism is, “Punishment produces force, force produces strength, strength produces awe, awe produces virtue; thus virtue has its origin in punishment,” and that there is little need to read the second sentence.

  The duke began his reforms by burning every book in the empire, with the exception of certain technical and divinatory works, and since the scholars were burned along with the books, there were vast areas of knowledge that vanished from the face of the earth. He disapproved of certain religions; temples and priests and worshippers went up in flames. He disapproved of frivolous fables; professional storytellers were beheaded, along with vast numbers of bewildered grandmothers. The leading Confucianists were decoyed into a ravine and crushed by falling boulders, and the penalty for possession of one line of the Analects was death by slow dismemberment. The problem with burning and beheading and crushing and dismembering is that it is time-consuming, and the duke's solution was a masterstroke.

  “I shall build a wall!” cried the Duke of Ch'in.

  The Great Wall of China did not begin with the duke, nor did it end with the duke, but it was the duke who first used it for the purpose of murder. Anyone who disagreed with him was marched away to the desolate north, and men died by the millions as they labored on the public-works project that insiders call the Longest Cemetery in the World. More millions died as they built the duke's private residence. The Castle of the Labyrinth covered seventy acres, and it was actually thirty-six separate castles connected by a labyrinth of underground passageways. (The idea was that he would have thirty-six imperial bedrooms to choose from, and assassins would never know where he slept.) Beneath the artificial labyrinth was a real one, running deep through a sheer cliff, and it was said that it was the home of a horrible monster that devoured the screaming victims of the Duke of Ch'in. True or not, the thousands of people who were tossed into it were never seen again.

  The duke produced another masterstroke when he had the finest craftsmen in the empire fashion a great golden mask of a snarling tiger, which he wore on all public occasions. His successors continued to wear it for more than eight hundred years. Did a duke have watery eyes, a weak chin, and facial tics? What his subjects saw was a terrifying mask, “the Tiger of Ch'in,” and the abbot explained that the barbarian rulers of Crete had used the mask of a bull for the same reason.

  Mystery and terror are the bulwarks of tyranny, and for fourteen years China was one vast scream, but then the duke made the mistake of raising taxes to the point where the peasants had to choose between starvation or rebellion. He had confiscated their weapons, but he was not wise enough in the ways of peasants to confiscate their bamboo groves. A sharpened bamboo spear is something to avoid, and when the duke saw several million of them marching in his direction he hastily abandoned the empire and barricaded himself in the Castle of the Labyrinth. There he was invulnerable, and since he still controlled the largest private army in the country it was tacitly agreed that Ch'in would exist as a state within the state.

  Emperors came and emperors went, but the Dukes of Ch'in seemed destined to go on forever, crouched and snarling in the most monstrous monument to raw power known to man.

  The Castle of the Labyrinth lies in ruins now, a great gray mass of shattered slabs and twisted iron scattered across the crest of a cliff overlooking the Yellow Sea. There the tide is the strongest in China, and the tumbled stones shudder with the force of the waves. Vines have covered the splintered steel gates, and lizards with rainbow bellies and turquoise eyes cling to the fragments of walls, and spiders scuttle through the eternal shadows cast by banana and bamboo. The spiders that currently occupy the castle are huge, hairy, and harmless. The previous occupants were equally grotesque but not so harmless, and when I first saw the Castle of the Labyrinth it was standing in all its glory.

  The barge that we traveled on was inching through a dense morning fog toward the junction with the Yellow Sea, and harsh commanding voices se
emed to be shouting right in my ears. The air vibrated with great metallic crashes and the clash of a thousand weapons, and the heavy tread of marching feet. Then the fog began to lift, and my eyes lifted with it up the side of a sheer cliff to the most powerful fortress in the world; vast, moated, turreted, impregnable. I stared in horror at towers that scraped the clouds, and at immense steel gates that glittered like terrible fangs, and at a central drawbridge that could accommodate four squadrons of cavalry riding abreast. The great stone walls were so thick that the men who patrolled on top on horseback looked like ants riding small spiders, and ironshod hooves dislodged rocks that tumbled down the cliff and splashed in the water around the barge. One of them banged upon the roof of the cabin where Li Kao was sleeping off an overdose of wine, and he stumbled out on deck and gazed up, rubbing his eyes.

  “Revolting architecture, isn't it?” he said with a yawn. “The first duke had no aesthetic sense whatsoever. What's the matter, Ox? A slight hangover?”

  “Just a mild headache,” I said in a tiny terrified voice.

  As the fog continued to fade away, I gazed fearfully toward what must surely be the gloomiest and ghastliest city on earth, and I began to question my sanity when I heard the happy songs of fishermen and sniffed a breeze that was fragrant with a billion blossoms. And then the fog lifted completely and I stared in disbelief at a city so lovely that it might have been the setting of a fairy tale.

  “Strange, isn't it?” said Master Li. “Ch'in is beautiful beyond compare, and it is also the safest city in all China. The reason, oddly enough, is greed.”

  He took a morning-after sip of wine and belched contentedly.

  “Every single one of the first duke's successors has lived only for money, and at first their methods of acquiring it were crude but effective,” he explained. “Once a year the reigning duke would choose a village at random, burn it to the ground, and decapitate the inhabitants. Then the duke and his army would set forth upon the annual tax trip. The severed heads led the way, mounted upon pikes, and the eagerness with which peasants lined up to pay taxes was a source of great gratification to the Dukes of Ch'in. Sooner or later an enlightened duke was bound to appear, however, and it is said that the one who has gone down in history as the Good Duke suddenly jumped to his feet during a council with his ministers, shot a hand into the air, and bellowed, ‘Corpses cannot pay taxes!’ This divine revelation produced a change of tactics.”

  Li Kao offered me some wine, but I declined.

  “The Good Duke and his successors continued to murder peasants for fun and profit, and the annual tax trip continues to this day, but the wealthy were allowed to fill the dukes’ coffers as a matter of free choice,” he explained. “The Good Duke simply transformed his gloomy coastal town into the greatest and most expensive pleasure city on earth. Ox, every luxury and vice known to man is available at Ch'in at exorbitant prices, and the cost is more than offset by the fact that the dukes will not tolerate crime, which might divert coins from their own pockets. As a result the rich do not have to hire large private armies of guards, and in Ch'in and in Ch'in alone a wealthy man can lead a carefree existence. So long as a man spends freely, he has nothing to fear from the rulers of the Castle of the Labyrinth, and it is only a slight exaggeration to say that you and I are about to enter Paradise on Earth.”

  I will describe the city later on, but our first task was to find out who might be able to get us into the labyrinth and out again, and we discovered him inside an hour after we docked.

  Every place of business was equipped with an iron chest with the duke's tiger emblem stamped upon it. Half of the coins from every transaction went into the chest and half into the proprietor's cash box, and somebody had to collect the duke's share. The position of Assessor of Ch'in had to rank very high among the most miserable occupations on earth, and the fellow who was stuck with it was universally known as the Key Rabbit—inescapably so, because he was a cringing little man with pink-rimmed eyes and a long pink nose that twitched in permanent terror, and as he pattered through the streets he was festooned with jangling chains of keys.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!” the poor fellow whimpered as he trotted into wineshops and brothels and gambling dens. “O dear, oh dear, oh dear!” he wailed as he trotted back out again.

  He was followed by a platoon of soldiers and two carts, one to hold the loot and the other to hold the massive scrolls that listed every rule and regulation in the duke's domain. Magistrates could impose sentences, but only the Assessor could impose fines, and it was generally agreed that if the Key Rabbit missed a point of law that cost the duke one penny he would shortly be missing his head.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!” he whined as he trotted into the Lucky Gambler Cricket Fighting Arena. He searched through his thousands of keys for the right one, unlocked the chest, counted the coins, checked the records to see if the amount was suspiciously low, conferred with spies to confirm that no cheating had taken place, relocked the chest, and pattered down the street to the next place of business. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!” he whimpered, which was a reasonable comment because if the duke's share was off by a penny, his head would also be off.

  As the sun set over the Castle of the Labyrinth the Key Rabbit pattered up the path to the duke's treasure chambers, where clerks counted the coins, and then as often as not he would be forced to spend the night recounting the loot to make sure that the clerks hadn't pocketed a penny. Who had to accompany the Duke of Ch'in on the annual tax trip and determine how much was owed by each village? The Key Rabbit, of course, and it was common knowledge that if he failed to squeeze the final grain of rice from the peasants he would fail to keep his head.

  That should have been enough grief for anyone, but not for the Key Rabbit. In a moment of raving insanity, he had married.

  “Don't misunderstand me,” said the old lady who was filling our ears with the gossip of the town. “Lotus Cloud is a dear, sweet country girl with the kindest heart in the world, but she was not prepared for the seductions of city life, and she has fallen victim to insatiable greed. Her husband, who has not one penny to call his own, cannot even relax when his wife takes a wealthy lover, because she is sure to bankrupt the fellow in a week. The Key Rabbit has decided that he committed some horrible crime in a previous incarnation, and he is being punished by marriage to the most expensive woman in the whole world.”

  For once my ignorant mind was keeping pace with that of Li Kao.

  “The key to the labyrinth is the Key Rabbit, and the key to the Key Rabbit is his wife,” said Master Li as we strolled away. “I'd do it myself if I were ninety, but it appears that Lotus Cloud will be your department. You may console yourself with the thought that the most expensive woman in the world is likely to be the most beautiful.”

  “Master Li, I shall do my duty,” I said bravely.

  “Yes indeed,” he sighed. “Ox, you aren't going to make much of an impression upon a walking case of insatiable greed with what's left of Miser Shen's gold coins. We must get our hands on a fortune.”

  13. The Art of Porcupine Cookery

  Li Kao led the way to the customs shed, and an hour later he found what he wanted. Everything that was shipped in or out of the port of Ch'in was heavily taxed, and an enormously fat merchant was paying an export tax that amounted to an emperor's ransom. A small army of guards—a rare sight in Ch'in—was positioned around four rectangular wooden cases, and since it would be several hours before his ship sailed, the merchant waddled away to enjoy a light lunch.

  “Ox, follow that fellow and come back and tell me what he eats,” said Master Li.

  “What he eats?”

  “What he eats.”

  When I returned I was rather shaken. “Master Li, you won't believe this, but that merchant began with four large tureens of pimento and dumpling soup,” I said. “Then he devoured three bowls of mussel stew, a pound of pickled mallows, two pounds of steamed snails, three servings of soft-shelled crabs, two plates
of sweetmeats, ten honey cakes, and a watermelon. The proprietor wondered whether the esteemed guest might care for six or seven quarts of peaches in heavy syrup, but the merchant explained that he was on a diet and would be forced to settle for a gallon of green tea flavored with pine kernels.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He's having a steam bath and a massage, while two waiters from the restaurant stand ready with a stomach pump.”

  “Splendid,” Master Li said happily. “Come along, Ox. We have to find the most unscrupulous alchemist in town and procure a jar of the Elixir of Eighty Evil Essences, and then we have to buy a coffin.”

  When the merchant waddled back from the massage parlor a truly pathetic sight met his eyes. I was draped over a coffin, sobbing my heart out, while Li Kao wailed and tore his hair.

  “Woe!” I howled.

  “The bride of my beloved great-grandson is dead!” howled Master Li.

  “Speak to me, my beloved!” I screamed, pounding the coffin lid.

  “Ten million maledictions upon the chef who persuaded me to serve porcupine at my great-grandson's wedding feast!” shrieked Master Li.

  The merchant was at his side in an instant.

  “Porcupine? Did you say porcupine?”

  “Porcupine,” Master Li sobbed.