The Story of the Stone mlanto-2

by Barry Hughart

  “Ox, can you get the lid all the way down?”

  I spat on my hands. The lid was so heavy I couldn't stop it after it slid down to the mummy's feet, and it crashed to the floor. Prince Liu Pao stood looking down at the remains of his ancestor, and Master Li beckoned for me to open the other sarcophagus.

  “While we're at it, I want to look for something,” he said.

  The lid was easier to move, and the mummy of Tou Wan, the Laughing Prince's wife, was intact. Master Li reached inside and came up with some jewelry, which he examined closely.

  “Good stuff, but not the best,” he said thoughtfully. “Tou Wan was said to have been a spendthrift of epic proportions, and I doubt that this would have met her standards. One wonders whether their highnesses might not have been buried by a light-fingered steward.”

  He stood there scratching his forehead.

  “Strange,” he muttered. “The Laughing Prince apparently worshipped a stone, and possibly his wife also did, yet the stone wasn't included in either coffin. The faithful steward again?”

  A sound made us turn. The prince was struggling to lift his ancestor's mummy from the coffin. The tarred wrappings made it heavy and awkward. I stepped forward to help, but Master Li held me back. Prince Liu Pao was sweating heavily, but he kept going: through the tomb, through the grotto, and outside to the path. He turned off the path and carried the mummy to a flat jutting rock overlooking the Valley of Sorrows. Every eye must have been lifted there.

  The drums stopped. The prince searched for a heavy rock, and I closed my eyes. I kept them closed while I listened to ancient bones splintering but I opened them too soon and saw the rock descend on the skull and smash it to pieces. A white cloud of crushed and powdered bones drifted down to the valley, followed by the scraps of linen from the wrappings, and then by the stone used for the sacrifice. I have seldom admired anyone as much as I admired Prince Liu Pao. He turned toward us and managed to keep his voice steady.

  “According to Tsao Tsao, my next step on the path to damnation is either to violate my sister or fail to return for my mother's funeral, but I can't remember which comes first,” he said.

  “The mother,” said Master Li, “takes precedence, but I wouldn't be so sure about damnation if I were you. Prince, this time the criminals have made a very bad mistake, and the mummy of your ancestor puts the seal on it. You and I have something interesting to talk about.”

  From below came one last roll of sheepskin drums: “Hurrah for our lord! May he live forever and ever!”

  7

  Before we had seen the living quarters. Now the prince led the way to his studio, and the breath went out of me as I stepped through the door into forty captured sunsets. I was in the presence of genius.

  Paintings and sketches were everywhere, and they were alive. I could swear that real sap was flowing through painted trees, and real dew was dripping from flowers. The most extraordinary thing was the glowing light that seemed to come from inside the paintings, and the prince smiled at the stunned expression on my face.

  “It's just a trick, Ox,” he said modestly. “Its called p'o-mo and it means the technique of applying dark ink over light. The effect is scarcely noticeable when you first put it on, but when it dries, it gives the effect of glowing with inner light—“like focused eyes,” my teacher used to say.”

  “Ah! You studied with Three Incomparables?” Master Li asked.

  “Li Kao, you know everything,” the prince said admiringly “Yes, I was his student for several years, and he was without doubt the most disagreeable man I've ever met.” He graciously included me in the conversation. “His name is Ki K'ai-chih, but he's called Three Incomparables because of his boast that he's incomparable in painting, in genius, and in stupidity. Unquestionably he's the greatest master of p'o-mo in the empire.”

  “He used to be, but you surpassed him long ago,” Master Li muttered. “Prince, this is incredible work, but have you considered the likelihood of disgrace and exile?”

  “Oh, I have no intention of showing my paintings,” the prince said. “This is practice. I'm trying to learn, and I have a long way to go.”

  Being back in his beloved studio had done wonders for him. It was as though the smell of paint had wiped away the recent experiences, and his eyes were shining happily.

  “Ox, Master Li means that our overlords have decreed that all art must follow supposedly classical techniques, which are set down in a manual called “Mustard Seed Garden,”’ he explained. “Rocks, for example, may only be painted using kou strokes for outline, p'o strokes for the tops and sides, ts'un strokes for texture, and ts'a strokes for expression. Any other technique can lead to a trial and exile.”

  Master Li laughed at the expression on my face.

  “It gets worse,” he said. “Ts'un strokes, for example, are broken down into the exact lines suitable for individual rocks: curling cloud strokes, axe cut, split hemp, loose rope, ghost face, skull-like, woodpile, sesame seed, golden blue, jade powder, spear hole, pebbles, and boneless. An artist who uses ghost face for painting granite instead of the officially approved axe cut faces six years in the Mongolian desert.”

  The prince waved around the room. “You are looking at approximately one and a half million years worth of exile,” he said proudly. He was becoming quite animated, and he eagerly tossed aside paintings from a pile on the floor and came up with a simple sketch of a tree. “Laws are liars,” he said. “Look here. Every single law of painting insists that the shih, the movement force, of a tree like this must be concentrated in the principal branch that thrusts so proudly toward Heaven. Except it isn't. I tried it the correct way eight times, and it sat there as lifelessly as a lohan. Finally I said to myself, “Stop trying to think, you idiot! Paint!” So I let my hand take over, and this lovely tree came to life. Do you see why?”

  He covered the proud principal branch, and gradually I saw what he meant. The energy of the tree didn't run that way at all. It spread out and up from the trunk, reached a knot in a branch, doubled back down the trunk, and then lifted up the far side and throbbed with life as it reached for the sky from a tiny insignificant branch that was barely more than a twig.

  “Laws lie, the eyes see only what they have been conditioned to see, and the mind is a refuse pile of other people's ideas,” the prince said. “Only the hand tells the truth. The hand!” he cried passionately. “Trust the hand, and it will never lie to you.”

  Master Li looked at him approvingly. “Prince, that is precisely what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “I'm beginning to suspect that this case is one lie piled on top of another lie, but for the first time we have something to go on. You see, the criminals have told us where to look.”

  The prince showed me where things were, and I busied myself making tea while they moved a table out to the garden. We sat outside and after sipping his tea Master Li said, “We know that thieves broke into the library to steal a manuscript, leading to the death of Brother Squint-Eyes, but why did they enter again last night and cause the death of Brother Shang? There seems to be only one reasonable explanation.” Master Li pulled out the fragment of the Ssu-ma. “This had been traced by Brother Squint-Eyes. When the criminals examined it closely, they saw the markings, and it was the copy they came back for. Thus the books ripped open and robes split at the seams and so forth. But why would they want a badly done copy that had no market value? The answer is that they weren't after the manuscript for its value to dealers, they were after it for its content, and possibly—just possibly—they may have come up empty-handed all the way around.”

  Master Li placed the fragment on the table and tapped it with a fingernail.

  “It was a very brief manuscript,” he said. The odds against this fragment containing what they were after aren't as astronomical as one might think. Perhaps no more than twenty or thirty-to-one, and I've bet on cricket fights with worse odds than that. Prince, did Ssu-ma Ch'ien ever visit your abominable ancestor?”

 
; The prince looked startled. “I really don't know,” he said. After a moment's thought he added, “I'd be mildly surprised if he didn't. Before his fall from grace, he served as the emperor's confidant, and who better to send when a younger brother shows signs of losing his mind?”

  “And is it possible that the younger brother caused Ssu-ma's fall and sentence of castration?” Master Li wondered. “The abbot tells me that among the many uses for the monastery was that of a prison back in the jovial days of the Laughing Prince, and might that explain why the manuscript was found there?”

  “You mean the forgery?” the prince said, scratching his head.

  “An acquaintance of mine, an exceptionally saintly soul at the Eye of Tranquility, has offered an interesting hypothesis,” Master Li explained. The forgery might have been intended to frame Ssu-ma with the charge of filial impiety. I was almost convinced of it, but now, thanks to you, I'm even more convinced of something totally different.”

  Master Li pointed back inside the studio at the prince's glorious paintings. “The hand. Trust only the hand!” he cried. “That very idea has been gnawing at the back of my mind for days. When I looked at the fragment and saw references to Ssu-ma's father, I said, “Fraud!” but when I looked only at the calligraphy, I said, “Ssu-ma!” You did the same thing. The hand is unmistakable, and I am now going to conclude that this isn't the world's greatest forgery for the simple reason that it isn't a forgery at all. Ssu-ma Ch'ien set down his father's name in order to cry out to scholars, “Look! Look closely! Something is wrong!” Meaning that he had concealed his real message in some kind of code, and you and I are going to entertain ourselves by seeing who can be the first to break it.”

  Not Number Ten Ox, who couldn't decipher a single character of ancient scholarly shorthand. I got up and inwardly sneered at the fragments of dialogue that drifted to my ears. They were like children playing games, and we had serious matters to think about.

  “Never seen so many errors of fact in a few brief paragraphs.”

  “Deliberate, perhaps?”

  “Errors as starting points?” “Interesting how many errors deal with numbers.” “Indeed yes. Here he writes, ‘one hundred and forty-six scales of a dragon.’ ”

  Even I knew that a dragon has 36 evil scales and 117 good ones, which used to add up to 153 when I was in school. I sniffed contemptuously, and wandered around looking at flowers.

  “Better break it down. One, four, and six.”

  “Each error probably has a direct relationship to each mention of T'an, his father's name.”

  “He was really straining here, wasn't he? Comparing the marks on a stone to the ‘two hundred fifty-three points of acupuncture.’ ”

  Didn't they realize we had two murdered monks on our hands, and that a strange sound was driving people out of their minds while Princes’ Path was being destroyed? I decapitated a few dandelions.

  “One… two… three. Got it!” Master Li said happily. “Ox, stop pouting and come over here.”

  Pouting? Me? I walked back with dignity and peered down over Master Li's shoulder. His finger danced across the fragment.

  “Coded sections begin with mentions of Ssu-ma's father's name and run to the next error in fact. The numbers give the spacing between important words, and here is what we have: ‘Down stairs… Cold room… Tunnel to construction site… Stone in sacristy…’ ” He leaned back happily. I stared.

  “That's all?” I said incredulously.

  “It's all we need, and all thieves would need, for that matter,” Master Li said complacently. “Unless anyone knows of another place where a stone was kept in a sacristy, Ssu-ma Ch'ien was referring to this estate. He either went or was advising someone to go down the stairs to the cold room, and somewhere there would be a tunnel that led to a construction site and the sacristy of the stone. A cold room is as far beneath the earth as one can put it, and what could be the purpose of a construction site deep under the earth?”

  Master Li reached into his tunic and took out a piece of cloth. I recognized it with something of a shock as being a piece of the wrapping around the mummy of the Laughing Prince.

  “Prince, this has faded, but one can still see that the color was imperial yellow, as it should be for the brother of an emperor,” Master Li said. “However, I seem to recall that Tou Wan preceded him in death by a few months. Wouldn't your ancestor still have been in mourning for his wife?”

  The prince stared, and turned purple as the implications struck him. They took a good deal longer to strike me.

  “Of course. It should be white. You mean I just crushed the skeleton of a total stranger?”

  “Tsao Tsao built seventy-two decoy tombs,” Master Li said mildly.

  “I'm damned if I'll go through that experience seventy-two times!” the prince yelled.

  “I doubt that will be necessary,” said Master Li. He looked up at me. “Wake up, Ox. The Laughing Prince amassed an incredible fortune, which has never been found, and people have been buying fake treasure maps and digging holes in the Valley of Sorrows ever since. Now we have the words of Ssu-ma Ch'ien. Words that thieves would go to any lengths to get their hands on, because what could the Laughing Prince have been secretly constructing deep in the bowels of the earth? Dear boy, we're probably sitting on top of a tomb that contains enough loot to buy half the empire.”

  8

  “These abandoned wings were paradise for a boy,” the prince said nostalgically. “Think of the hiding places. I once counted a hundred and six rooms filled with things that nobody considered to be valuable. Not valuable to a boy? Chests filled with ancient costumes for masquerades, for example, and love letters bound together with challenges to duels, and portraits of beautiful concubines and sinister distant cousins.”

  We followed him as he confidently stepped around rotting sections of wooden floors and ducked under sagging beams He stepped into an alcove and began prying boards from a window. Sunlight burst inside and glowed upon a portrait upon the wall.

  “Liu Sheng, better known as the Laughing Prince.” The silk was still intact, although faded with age, and the color was very good. The man who gazed from the portrait was quite handsome. I judged him to be in his early thirties. His forehead was high and broad and serene, and his thin nose had a proud hook to it, and his mouth was firm and well formed. His eyes were quite strange in that they appeared to be clear but somehow they didn't focus. It was as though the Laughing Prince was not gazing out at the viewer but at something in front of the viewer—a ghost, perhaps, or some strange vision that only he could see. His hands were small and so gracefully formed that they were almost feminine. I could see no trace of madness, yet something in the assurance of the pose suggested an inner arrogance that was capable of almost anything. His dress was clearly symbolic of something, but I didn't know what. Master Li did.

  “Great Buddha, if his imperial brother saw him dressed like this, the yellow scarf would have been on its way inside of an hour,” Master Li said. The son of a sow thought he ranked above the emperor. In fact, he thought he ranked above most of the gods.”

  He explained the ornaments to me.

  “Upper garment: sun, moon, stars, mountain, dragon, and the flowery fowl. Lower garment: temple cup, aquatic grass, flames, rice, hatchet, and symbol of distinction. Only the emperor of China is allowed to wear all twelve ornaments, and the Laughing Prince added a thirteenth: the peacock eye, which symbolizes the Second Lord of Heaven. One assumes he was preparing to place his throne beside the August Personage of Jade.”

  Now the strange unfocused eyes took on a different aspect, and I decided I was looking at a man who had found the world not to his liking and stepped outside it—like Pea-Head Chou in my village, who joined the roosters every morning and commanded the sun to rise.

  When the prince led us away I found that I was tiptoeing, and the painted eyes appeared to be following me. The prince made his way to a brassbound door and unlocked it with an ancient key that was as big a
s his forearm. “As I said, this place was paradise for a boy,” he remarked.

  Paradise indeed. Inside was the old armory, and some of the axes were so huge they could only have had a ceremonial function. A thousand weapons hung in racks along the walls, and we found some that were better than anything modern. I chose a small axe and a short sword, and the prince selected a spear and a dagger, and Master Li stuck a row of knives into his belt. The next door took us outside into an inner courtyard, and in a tool shed I found a modern steel pick and bar. In the center of the courtyard was a stone building that housed an abandoned well, and a flight of steps led down to deep basements.

  “The old cold room is at the bottom,” the prince said. “I doubt that anyone has been down there since I played at being a hero locked in a terrible dungeon.”

  Master Li searched for any signs of recent entrance, and his eyes gleamed when he saw layers of untouched dust. I had brought some torches, and we lit them. The prince started forward, but I jumped ahead of him. “A thousand pardons, Your Highness, but this is what I'm here for,” I said politely. I started down the stairs, clutching my axe. The prince, I decided, had been a very brave little boy, and I couldn't suppress a small shudder as I cut through thick cobwebs that hung like blankets, and dozens of spiders scuttled over my hands and arms.

  Then I was assaulted by a hundred demons—no, bats—no, white bats—and I let out a yelp and dove to the stairs and covered my head with my hands. When I dared to peek I saw that Master Li was standing calmly behind me, regarding me with a mixture of exasperation and amusement.

  “Number Ten Ox, there is not one word of truth to peasant legends about white bats,” he said wryly. “They aren't even albino. They suffer from a parasitical skin disease, like the so-called white elephants of India, and they do not live a thousand years, and their black blood is not an Elixir of Life, and if you touch them, your hair will not fall out.”