The Story of the Stone mlanto-2

by Barry Hughart

  He jigged around the grass some more, and then he stopped and looked closely at me. “Acid indigestion?” he asked.

  It wasn't that, but I couldn't explain what was bothering me. Something was wrong with the night. I doubt that city people would have noticed it, but I am pure country, and my nerves tingled at the tiny hesitation in the chirping of crickets. An owl stopped a hunting call halfway through. There was a tentative sound to the rustling of small night creatures. Something strange and unnatural had entered the Valley of Sorrows, and I realized that I was holding my breath.

  When it came, it was only a small vibration. Then the vibration grew more pronounced, and I saw Master Li look around sharply. Then the sound came. I can't describe it. Nobody could. It was like nothing on earth, yet like everything, and my whole body shuddered with an agonizing sense of loss, but with yearning and hope as well—as though I had once lost something very precious and the memory was returning, and also a hope of finding it again. Can I say that the sound had notes to it? If so, they were as simple and direct as the first three tones of the scale, with the third tone drawn out:

  Kung… shang… chueeeeeeeeeeh…

  That's the best I can do, and it hit me so hard I wept, and I held my heart as though it would break in half.

  “Ox? What's wrong with you?”

  “The sound!” I sobbed. “Master Li, surely you hear the sound!”

  “What sound?”

  Kung… shang… chueeeeeeeeeeh…

  It was beautiful and agonizing and it was calling to me. I knew I had to reach it or die, and I was not alone. The festival was breaking up and people were running through the woods, but others were like Master Li and couldn't hear it at all, and they were shouting, “Come back!” and “Have you gone crazy?” I jumped to my feet. Three little girls ran past us, weeping, instinctively shielding the tiny flames in their lotus leaf lanterns.

  Master Li swore and hopped up on my back and stuck his feet in my pockets. “Stop trembling like a hobbled racehorse and run,” he growled.

  I ran. The moon was so bright that the shadows might have been etched on the ground with a sharp instrument and carefully painted black, and the Great River of Stars was sparkling overhead. For a moment I wondered if the strange sound might come from the heart of a star—surely it was as hard to catch. It was like trying to find a cricket at night in a huge old barn: in front of me, then behind me, then to this side, and then to that. I finally realized I was running around in circles, and that Master Li was hauling back on my neck like on the reins of a runaway horse.

  I came to a stop and stood with my legs spread and my head down, panting. Master Li held his wine flask out, and I managed to drink some of it. I choked and gasped but felt better, and he patted my shoulder soothingly.

  “I can't hear whatever it is, but I know you're going at it the wrong way,” he said soothingly. “Ox, at the risk of sounding like a character from the tales of Granny Shu, I will point out that a noise some people hear and others don't isn't speaking to the ears. It's speaking to the heart, and you have a hole in your heart. All young people do. It's there to catch the wonderful things of the world, and later on it gets filled up by broken things. Forget about your ears. Listen with your heart. Aim the hole at the sound and follow in the direction where it hurts the most.”

  The vibration was coming again, even stronger than before, and I held my breath.

  Kung… shang… chueeeeeeeeeeh…

  I was off and running, but more confidently now. Master Li was right. Run where it aches the most, and forget about the lies of the ears. I was climbing steadily, and now the night was changing as a thick mist began to rise. The distant lights of the village were blotted out, and then the moon and stars, and Master Li began swearing in a gravelly monotone as the damp blinding blanket closed around us. I could barely see a foot ahead, and I was colliding with trees and rocks. All I knew was that I must keep climbing higher and higher.

  I have a vague recollection of sliding down into ravines and climbing back up the other sides. Now the mist was so thick that I could see nothing, and Master Li shouted for me to stop.

  I couldn't. The wonderful agonizing sound had been silent for some time and I had to reach it, before it vanished forever and I kept skidding downward and scrambling upward—I want to explain that clearly, because of the extraordinary thing that happened.

  I was exhausted. All I could do was crawl, but I sensed something ahead of me. The mist was beginning to lift. I saw a pair of sandals, and then skinny legs, and then a slight torso, and then a huge head with wild hair. Prince Liu Pao was staring down at us as though we were ghosts.

  “Ox? Number Ten Ox? Master Li? How on earth did you…”

  His voice trailed off and he looked wide-eyed at the path behind him.

  “I heard noises and I came outside, and nobody passed me on the path,” the prince whispered.

  The mist was lifting rapidly now, and with a sudden shock I realized why the prince couldn't believe his eyes.

  I have not described the physical setting of his estate in detail. Dragon's Head, for which the valley had originally been named, was a tiny mountain. Ages ago some cataclysm had split it in half: Dragon's Left Horn and Dragon's Right Horn. The estate was at the top of Dragon's Left Horn, and between it and the sister peak was a sheer gorge about forty feet wide and two hundred feet deep. I had begun the climb up the side of Dragon's Right Horn, and since I was now at the estate, I had somehow managed to cross that gorge.

  The prince continued to stare. I crawled back to the gorge and peered down a sheer vertical cliff to jagged rocks far below, and then I slowly raised my eyes up a matching vertical cliff to the place I had come from. It was impossible.

  “Ox,” Master Li whispered in a tiny voice, “you have a wonderful career ahead of you as the human fly in a carnival, but for the love of Buddha, don't do it again when I'm riding on your back.”

  We could hear a few faint shouts from the village far below. The wonderful sound had disappeared, and the prince said he was like Master Li in that he hadn't heard it at all. Just then there was a sound we all heard. The monastery bells began to sound the alarm, and in an instant I was on my feet and running down the path with Master Li on my back while Prince Liu Pao panted along behind us.

  Villagers stood at the monastery gates, afraid to enter. We forced our way through, and the abbot met us and gestured dumbly. I ran to the library. It had been ransacked. Every book and scroll had been pulled from shelves and torn apart, and every desk had been searched and overturned, and the librarian's desk resembled a pile of kindling. Master Li slid down from my back and scanned the wreckage, and then he turned and trotted rapidly out the door and down one of the corridors.

  The cell of the late librarian, Brother Squint-Eyes, was in chaos. The scant furniture had been torn to pieces. Robes had been ripped open at the linings. The pallet was shredded, and pools of congealing blood stained the floor.

  Master Li bent over and dipped a finger in the blood and put it to his lips. “It's only ink,” he said. To be precise, it's ink called Buddha's Eyelashes, and that stuff sticking to the pallet is what's left of Yellow Emperor parchment. After finishing the tracing of the Ssu-ma forgery, Brother Squint-Eyes hid the remaining materials inside his pallet.”

  Master Li turned and trotted rapidly back to the library. Again his eyes moved over the debris, and he walked to a huge pile of papers beside the bent bars in the window where the thieves had entered before. He began tossing scrolls aside, and then he straightened up with an angry face and cold eyes.

  “Well, Ox, if I drop over dead in the next few weeks, it won't be from boredom,” he said sourly.

  “Buddha save us,” the prince whispered, while the abbot and the monks made signs to ward off evil spirits.

  Poor Brother Shang's vigil had not been as lonely as he would have liked. The monk lay on his back among the pile of scrolls, staring at the ceiling. He was as dead as Brother Squint-Eyes, and his bulg
ing eyes and gaping mouth were permanently fixed in an expression of terror and horror beyond belief.

  6

  I have but a confused memory of the next few hours. The abbot sent out groups of terrified monks to interview equally terrified peasants, while Master Li hastened to perform an autopsy. There might be some poison that dissipated inside of a few hours, but all Master Li discovered was that Brother Shang had been in excellent shape and had expired from a heart attack. The monks returned with the news that at least eight peasants had seen mysterious monks in robes of motley who laughed and danced beneath the moon, and who disappeared as though the earth had swallowed them.

  The other piece of news was that one more section of Princes’ Path appeared to be destroyed.

  Master Li tossed his knives down beside the corpse of Brother Shang and said we had better get a few hours sleep. It seemed only minutes before he shook me awake again and handed me a cup of strong tea, and then we set out to meet Prince Liu Pao. He was standing forlornly on Princes’ Path, and once more we gazed at the impossible. Nothing lived in a swath of approximately fifty by one hundred fifty feet. Death had cut cleanly. Flowers bloomed beside withered ones, and sap dripped from healthy trees not ten feet from trees whose sap had been sucked right out of them. Again I thought of a cemetery in a nightmare, but something in the pattern of it caused me to frown and sketch shapes in the air. Both Master Li and the prince watched me with widening eyes, and I blushed.

  “Do that again,” Master Li commanded.

  I repeated the patterns.

  “Li Kao, am I losing my mind?” the prince asked. “I could swear that Number Ten Ox is sketching scholar's shorthand for antique Great Seal script, which hasn't been in common usage for a thousand years.”

  “Ox is capable of the damnedest things,” Master Li muttered. “Right now he's capable of sketching the ancient characters for “Love,” “Strength,” and “Heaven,” and I know perfectly well he doesn't understand a single Great Seal ideograph. Well, boy, are you going to keep us in suspense?”

  I turned bright red. “I had a dream,” I said humbly. “Just before you woke me up. Something in this scene reminded me of it, and it had strange patterns.”

  I had dreamed that I was sitting on the grass near a village very like my own. Somebody had attached a bamboo pole and a black flag to the gears of the grindstone at the water wheel, as we did in my village because the gears kept slipping. Farmers could glance up from the fields and see if the flag was pumping up and down, and if it wasn't, a boy would be sent to get Big Hong, the blacksmith, to reset the gears. As the black flag rose to the apex, it flared out and hovered in the air for a moment before starting back down.

  Children were playing in front of the waterwheel. One little girl was jumping up and down. Her long black hair lifted up into the air and hovered for a moment before settling down to her shoulders.

  In front of the children were butterflies fluttering among some reeds. One was black, and it swooped up, paused, hovered, and then fluttered back down.

  The black flag, black hair, and black butterfly formed a nearly straight line that pointed toward my feet. I looked down and saw a small round orange-colored piece of clay. My hand reached out and closed around it, and something told me to keep watching the pattern: up, pause, down… up, pause, down…

  My fingers tingled. The piece of clay had a heartbeat, and it was the rhythm of the pattern, and an ache filled my heart and tears filled my eyes. Up, pause, down: kung, shang, chueh. I was not hearing the wonderful sound but feeling it in the pulse of a piece of clay, and then I was in my old classroom in the monastery and a bunch of boys were looking at me with eyes like owls and I was desperately trying to explain something very important.

  “Don't you understand?” I said. “The life force of a round piece of orange-colored clay is like a flag and a butterfly and a little girl's hair. Up, pause, down; up, pause, down. The important thing to remember is the pause. Can't you understand that?”

  The boys stared at me solemnly.

  “It's the pause!” I yelled. “It isn't like the heartbeat of a person, and you'll never hear the wonderful sound it makes unless you understand the pause!”

  The old abbot was shuffling toward me. Then he came closer and he wasn't the abbot at all. He was Master Li, and he grabbed my shoulders and shook me and screamed furiously, “Number Ten Ox, you couldn't teach a banana to turn black!”

  Then I woke up.

  “Sir, that's all I can tell you about the dream,” I said. “Something in this scene reminded me of it, and the pattern it took. That tall dead tree, then a space, then lower dead trees, then a space, then bushes…”

  I shrugged and sketched in the air. “And you draw ancient scholar's ideographs for love, strength, and Heaven,” Master Li said thoughtfully. “Are you quite positive that the round piece of clay was colored orange?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  He scratched his nose and chewed thoughtfully on the tip of his mangy beard. “That may bear looking into when we have the time,” he said. “The symbolism is obvious, but it leads to a swamp I'd rather stay away from.”

  Master Li started looking for traces of mysterious monks in motley, and I started gathering more plant and soil samples, and just then the drums began. Sheepskin drums, hundreds of them, pounding softly but methodically from all over the Valley of Sorrows. The prince looked at Master Li with raised eyebrows, but Master Li jerked his head in my direction. “When it comes to the ways of peasants, ask the expert,” he said.

  I flushed again. “Your Highness, they're going to blackmail you,” I said meekly.

  “Eh?”

  “Blackmail isn't quite right, but I don't know the proper word,” I said. “They're going to start a work song. It's older than time, and it's used by peasants when they want the lord of the valley to do something.”

  “What lord of what valley?” the prince said angrily.

  Master Li kindly stepped in to help me. “The peasants think your ancestor is behind this, and so far as they're concerned, you're lord of the valley whether you like it or not. The headmen are preparing the chant that details the peasants’ duties to the lord, and thus implies the lord's duties to the peasants. Ox, how many verses are there?”

  “Over four hundred,” I said. “When they get to the end, they'll start all over again, and they can keep it up for a year if need be.”

  I didn't add that in their place I'd do the same thing myself. Confucius thought so highly of the blackmail song that he put part of it in the Book of Odes, and it's really very effective when the drums go boom, boom, boom.

  “In the fifth moon we gather wild plums and cherries,

  In the sixth moon we boil mallow and beans,

  In the seventh moon we dry the dates,

  In the eighth moon we take the rice,

  To make with it the spring wine,

  So our lord may be granted long life.

  In the sixth moon we pick the melons,

  In the seventh moon we cut the gourds,

  In the eighth moon we take the seeding hemp,

  We gather bitter herbs; we cut ailanto for firewood,

  That our lord may eat.”

  The chanting is without emotion except for the last line of every third verse, and after a few months of it the subject begins to cringe when each third verse starts. It's hard for a lord to justify chopping off insolent heads; it's just a work song.

  Boom, boom, boom:

  “In the eighth moon we make ready the stackyards,

  In the ninth moon we bring in the harvest;

  Millet for wine, millet for cooking, the early and the late,

  Paddy and hemp, beans and wheat.

  My lord, the harvesting is over.

  We begin work on your houses;

  In the morning we gather thatch reeds,

  In the evening we twist ropes,

  We work quickly on the rook,

  For soon we will sow the lord's many grains.”


  “How can they do this to me?” the prince said plaintively. They know very well that my family hasn't collected a copper coin or grain of rice for centuries.”

  Boom, boom, boom:

  “In the days of the first we cut ice with tingling blows;

  In the days of the second we bring it to the cold shed.

  In the days of the third, very early,

  We offer pigs and garlic, that our lord may eat.

  In the tenth moon are shrewd frosts;

  We clear the stackyards,

  With twin pitchers we hold the village feast,

  Killing for it a spring lamb.

  Up we go to our lord's hall,

  Raise the drinking cups of buffalo horn:

  Hurrah for our lord! May he live forever and ever!”

  “They'll keep that up for a year?” the prince said. “I think I know what they want, but I'd prefer to have it explained to me.”

  “You and you alone have the right to dispose of your ancestor in the old way,” Master Li said gently. “By the old way they mean pre-Confucian.”

  “Which is punishable by torment in the Eighth Hell!” the prince said angrily.

  “Yes, according to our Neo-Confucian overlords, who also impose upon rivals the sacred duty of retiring from public life for three years upon the death of a father, and then they poison the father,” Master Li said sardonically.

  Prince Liu Pao was made from tough stuff. He turned without another word and began marching up Dragon's Left Horn toward his estate. He turned off the path and took a shortcut to the grotto. The horror of the Medical Research Center seemed even worse with the muffled sounds of drums and chanting in the distance. The prince opened the door to the tomb and marched inside to the sarcophagus of his ancestor.