The Story of the Stone mlanto-2

by Barry Hughart

  The prince smiled at me reassuringly. “As a boy I caught a few and kept them as pets,” he said. “Unsanitary, but no worse than that.”

  He ran a hand through his wild mop of hair, and I sheepishly uncovered mine. I got to my feet and reclaimed my axe and torch and started down again, feeling very foolish. There were four landings. The last flight of stairs ended in the cold room, which was enormous, and Master Li and the prince examined the solid stone floor and walls for some sign of a secret tunnel. I began to cheer up as I watched them. Finally Master Li stepped back and clapped his hands to his hips and glared at me.

  “Why are you standing there like a statue?” he growled. “You should know something about digging tunnels. Find the damn thing.”

  It was childish, but I had to do something to counter the humiliation with the bats. I made a great show of examining the floor. “Aha!” I said. I examined the walls. “Aha!” I said. I stood thoughtfully, posing for a portrait of The Young Genius. “Ssu-ma Ch'ien wrote ‘cold room,’ but not ‘in the cold room,’ ” I said. I made my way back to the stairs and examined them carefully. “Aha!” I said, and I started climbing to the last landing.

  Master Li had a smile on his face as he followed, and I couldn't keep it up.

  “I saw it on the way down,” I explained. “I was thinking about the labor involved in carrying huge chunks of ice up five flights of steep stairs, so I looked and found what I was looking for.”

  I swung my torch to both sidewalls to show old bronze rings set in them. “Pulleys, with center ropes hauling some kind of sleds,” I said. “They're evenly spaced and neatly in line except for here.” I lifted the torch to the right-hand wall and showed an arc in the line of rings that ran almost up to the ceiling. “This made it awkward to get equal leverage on both sides. The only possible reason for it is that the wall isn't solid.”

  “Bravo,” Master Li said, and I felt much better.

  He held my torch and I spat on my hands and swung the pick. It didn't take very long. Soon I had a crack I could work with, and I pried out a stone slab with the steel bar, and the torches almost went out as the flames joined the air rushing into the dark space behind. In a few minutes I had a hole big enough to pass through, and we entered a tunnel carved through stone, sloping downward.

  “Be very careful,” Master Li cautioned. “If this does indeed lead to a tomb, it may have been set with traps for grave robbers.”

  We moved slowly, testing the floor in front of us for pits and nervously examining the ceiling for things that could fall on us. The tunnel sloped even more sharply downward, with many turns. We descended for such a length of time that I was willing to bet we had reached the level of the valley, or even below it, when the tunnel finally leveled out, and then after a hundred feet or so it began to slope upward. We climbed steadily, in total silence except for the sounds we made ourselves. There were no signs of traps. Finally our torchlight reflected back to us from the surface of a brick wall that completely blocked the tunnel. Master Li examined it and found nothing dangerous. My pick and steel bar went to work again, it was a double-thick wall, but no match for steel, and with a crash and a cloud of red brick dust, a large section of it soon collapsed. We coughed and wiped our eyes and held up our torches, and the dust slowly cleared, and we stood rooted to the spot, staring in horror at what lay upon the floor behind the wall.

  No wonder the tunnel had remained a secret. The workmen had never left it. We were staring at skeletons, hundreds and hundreds of them, piled almost to the ceiling. The prince was beyond speech as he gazed at the memento his ancestor had left behind. Master Li's voice was cold and angry.

  “So much for the peasants. The soldiers who herded them here and bricked them up were probably rewarded with a banquet at which nobody survived the second course, and then the poisoners received their own rewards, and so on. It's estimated that Emperor Shun killed eighty thousand men to keep the secret of his tomb, and even then it was discovered and looted inside of a century. Prince, this should put all doubts to rest. Your esteemed ancestor is indeed sleeping somewhere inside here.”

  He stepped past me and began tossing skeletons aside, and I forced myself to move. Piles of white bones rose like mounds of snow beside a road as we slowly cleared a path down the tunnel. After an hour we finally reached the end, and it was a blank brick wall. Three swings of the pick were enough to knock bricks loose, but then I felt a shock that numbed my hands and arms. The pick had struck solid iron. I moved to different positions, knocking bricks away, and discovered that a seamless iron wall ran from one side of the tunnel to the other, and from the top to the bottom.

  “There's probably another brick retaining wall behind this one, and molten iron was poured into the gap,” Master Li said thoughtfully. “Ox, what do you think?”

  I shrugged. “Iron is tough but it will break, and my bar is steel,” I said. “If I can pound four holes in it, I should be able to crack an opening big enough to crawl through.”

  After that my memory of the tunnel is one of noise. The steel bar produced hard harsh sounds that echoed back and forth between the narrow walls and banged against my head and ears and made me sick. I had to stop every now and then and sit with my head down between my legs until my stomach stopped heaving. I had a terrible headache, but I got into the slow steady rhythm of a woodcutter or ditch digger, and cracks like cobwebs appeared beneath the point of the bar. Then small chunks of iron broke loose, and finally the bar plunged through. As Master Li suspected there was another brick wall behind, but that caused no problem. The other holes went more quickly now that I had the feel of it, and in about three hours I was able to crack the iron between two of the holes. Another hour was enough to finish the job. We crawled through the small opening and lifted our torches and looked up at a ceiling gilded with real gold. The floor was marble, and the walls were richly ornamented with silver and bronze. We were in a long hallway lined with side rooms, and we clutched our weapons nervously and stepped into the first one.

  No wonder criminals would do anything to find the place. Chests were piled so high with gold and jewels that the lids couldn't close, and bars of gold and silver were stacked like firewood around the walls. Prince Liu Pao was so furious his torch was shaking like a lantern swinging in a high wind.

  “Four years before my ancestor died there was a famine in this part of the empire,” he said in a high tight voice. “Two hundred thousand people died, but the Laughing Prince said he was unable to help because all his money was tied up in mining equipment and debts.”

  The prince stalked on to the next room, which held huge jars that had probably contained rare oils and perfumes and spices. Other rooms contained weapons that were so covered with costly jewels they were quite useless for warfare, and we stopped and gaped at a huge room that contained the skeletons of forty horses. Apparently the Laughing Prince had intended to ride in style in his next life, and it wasn't only horses he rode. The prince almost approached Master Li's level of swearing as we entered the Hall of Concubines and found forty small skeletons neatly arranged on forty beds.

  “No sign of panic or disarray. Poisoned,” Master Li said grimly. “Timed, no doubt, to breathe their last along with their master.”

  After that we more or less expected to find what we did: skeletons of cooks, courtiers, dancers, actors, acrobats, eunuchs, clerks, accountants—the lunatic lord had taken his entire court with him, or so I assumed. Master Li had reservations.

  “One element is noticeably missing. Where are his Monks of Mirth?” he wondered.

  We had no answer to that. We entered banquet rooms and game rooms and elegant state bedrooms, and we found closets crammed with the remains of costly clothes and pantries stuffed with petrified piles of rich foods. It wasn't so much a tomb as a vast underground palace, and at the center was a huge throne room, which even had a chopping block as part of the entertainment. Behind the throne was a small door, and we entered a round room with a lapis lazuli floor, and wal
ls and ceiling of solid gold. Two sarcophagi lay side by side. The one on the right bore the dragon symbols of an emperor, and the one on the left bore the phoenix symbols of an imperial consort.

  Master Li strode between the coffins to the back wall. There in a niche was a sacristy. The two side panels of the niche were covered with the same mysterious charts and formulas we had seen in the grotto, and the center panel carried the same inscription.

  In darkness languishes the precious stone.

  When will its excellence enchant the world?

  When seeming is taken for being, being becomes seeming.

  When nothing is taken for something, something becomes nothing.

  The stone dispels seeming and nothing,

  And climbs to the Gates of the Great Void.

  The sacristy was empty. Master Li swore angrily and whirled around and gestured for me to open the coffins. I stepped up to the one on the left. The lid was hard to move, but at last it began to slide down the grooves, and the farther it slid, the wider our eyes grew. I stepped back, panting, and we stood in silence and gazed at the burial dress of Tou Wan, the bride of the Laughing Prince.

  She wore a suit that could have fed a million people for a year. It was priceless jade cut into rectangular pieces that were tightly linked together by fine gold wire. There must have been two thousand jade pieces encasing the mummy, but Master Li wasn't interested in jade. He was interested in a stone, and he let loose another volley of oaths when no stone was revealed in the coffin.

  An inscription had been chiseled on the front of Tou Wan's sarcophagus, and Prince Liu Pao translated the old script for me. Apparently it had been written by her grieving husband.

  The sound of her silk skirt has stopped.

  On the marble pavement dust grows.

  Her empty room is cold and still.

  Fallen leaves are piled against the doors.

  How can I bring my aching heart to rest?

  It seemed to me that there was real feeling in that, and the prince shook his head wonderingly. “My ancestor was quite unknowable,” he said. “He wrote this, and then he went out with his Monks of Mirth to capture and torture a few more children.”

  Master Li nodded at the other sarcophagus, and I bent to the lid. As it slowly slid down, our eyes nearly bulged right out of our heads, and when it slid all the way down I stepped back and sat down heavily on the floor. The silence was broken only by the hiss of our torches.

  The coffin was empty. Prince Liu Pao sat down in a heap beside me, and I supposed that both of us were seeing a mummy dressed in jade crawling from a coffin and creeping out to join his merry monks in motley. Master Li glared down at us.

  “Oh, bat shit,” he snarled. “Stop trying to catch flies with your gaping mouths and start using your heads.”

  He sat down on the rim of the coffin and glared around the golden room. He was furious.

  “Ox, what happened to your torch when you punched through the iron and brick?” he asked.

  “Wha… Why, nothing happened,” I said.

  “Precisely. The flame didn't jump toward the hole because there already was fresh air in the tomb,” he said. “That means there's another entrance somewhere, and it's been used recently. We're too late. The thieves have already been here, and that means we have to change our minds about their being thieves.”

  That was too slippery for me, but the prince looked up with sudden interest.

  “They didn't take the gold and jewels, and not even Tou Wan's burial suit,” he said wonderingly.

  “So what did they take?” Master Li asked.

  We remained silent, so he answered his own question.

  “They took a stone,” said Master Li. “All the inscriptions indicate that the Laughing Prince worshipped a stone. When he died he would certainly have arranged for it to be buried with him, so it was taken from the sacristy and—perhaps—placed in his hands, and then the jade suit was fashioned around him. Jade is among the hardest of materials. The stone might be damaged if somebody tried to crack the jade, so whoever it was who beat us to it simply carried the whole damn mummy away. What kind of people would pass up gold and jewels to get their hands on a sacred stone?”

  “A religious order of some sort?” the prince guessed.

  Master Li shrugged. “That's all I can think of at the moment,” he said. “Remember that the Laughing Prince created a quasi-religious order he called the Monks of Mirth, and notice that the Monks of Mirth, alone among his court, did not die along with the prince—at least we haven't seen their skeletons. Suppose he arranged for the order to be perpetuated through the centuries?”

  I finally found my tongue. “Why?” I asked.

  Master Li threw his hands wide apart in exasperation. “How would I know?” he said. “We can assume that he worshipped a stone, although we don't know why. The use of laughter and dancing in place of prayer is not unknown to ancient pre-shamanistic religions, and I can't help but wonder about the constant repetition of the number five in his peculiar formulas. Five is a sacred number to many weird cults, ancient and modern alike. The primitive Yu-Ch'ao, for example, who are said to live in five-sided tree houses and sacrifice to five-headed demons in five-celled temples.”

  Master Li pulled out his wine flask and offered us some, but we declined. He swilled a pint or two and wiped his lips with his beard.

  “Prince, for the moment I'm stymied,” he said frankly. “The idea that we may not be dealing with normal criminals throws everything out of balance. All I know for certain is that we have to get to the bottom of the strange compelling sound and the destruction of Princes’ Path, and that means Ox and I will have to go to Ch'ang-an with soil and plant samples for analysis, and then get our hands on the greatest sound-master in the empire. In the meantime, you have a problem.”

  He waved his wine flask back toward the treasure chambers.

  “Technically this stuff is yours. Do you want it?”

  The prince shuddered. “Nightmares would finish me in a month if I took a single coin,” he said.

  “Nonetheless, if word of the discovery gets out, you'll be visited by every criminal, warlord, and greedy state minister in the empire,” Master Li pointed out.

  “Suppose I make a gift of it to the throne?” the prince asked hopefully.

  “People tend to impute their own flaws to others,” Master Li said. “The avaricious will never believe that you didn't keep the choicest gems for yourself, and the missing jade suit of your ancestor will be considered absolute proof. Are you particularly fond of torture?”

  The prince turned as white as one of the skeletons. “But what can I do with this tomb?” he whispered.

  Master Li turned to me. “Ox, can you manage it?” he asked.

  I drew myself up proudly. “Venerable Sir, you are talking to a former apprentice of Big Hong the blacksmith,” I said.

  He turned back to the prince. “What tomb?” he said.

  “What tomb?” I said.

  The prince began to regain some color. “What tomb?” he said.

  It really wasn't very difficult. The stones and bricks were easily replaced, and there were countless pieces of old iron lying around the estate. I was very proud of my makeshift furnace and bellows, and when I had finished, I doubted that anyone would notice the patch in the iron wall unless he was looking for one.

  The difficult part was putting the skeletons in the tunnel back into place, and that was because I kept hearing a mad mummy in a suit of jade creeping up behind me. When I added artistic layers of dust and cobwebs there wasn't a greedy bureaucrat in the empire who would believe that Prince Liu Pao or anyone else had entered the tomb of the Laughing Prince. Then we left for Ch'ang-an.

  9

  I had never been to the capital before, but I thought I knew about big cities from my experiences in Peking. That illusion vanished the moment we passed through the Gate of Luminous Virtue. I gaped like any yokel at a raucous beehive where two million people buzzed inside wal
ls that enclosed thirty square miles. There were twenty-five north-south avenues, and every one of them was four hundred eighty feet wide and lined with elm, fruit, and pagoda trees. The avenues rose to a high hill called Dragon Head Plain, and converged to a single road of bluish stone that wound up like a dragon's tail to the vast basilicas of the elite who ruled the empire.

  I was awed and silent as we took the Street of the Vermilion Sparrow toward Dragon Head Plain. We passed through the Gate of the Red Bird just as a thousand drums pounded the three hundred beats that heralded the opening of the markets, and I felt dizzy in the atmosphere of a thousand years of greatness as we approached the legendary Brush Forest Academy, where Chinese genius is nurtured. Master Li had been one of the geniuses, and his reaction was slightly less than reverent.

  “Fraud, my boy! Fraud and forgery,” he said, waving disgustedly at sacrosanct landmarks. “Paint slapped over dry rot and gilded with lies. Some of the lies are rather pretty, however, and my favorite concerns the little peasant lad who's digging a ditch behind a village schoolhouse.”

  Master Li pulled out his flask and drank deeply, which caused outraged comments from distinguished-looking pedestrians. He ignored them.

  “The urchin's keen ears catch fragments of lessons drifting from the window,” Master Li said between burps. “One day the schoolmaster absentmindedly falls into the ditch and discovers to his astonishment that the boy has covered the walls with masterful drawings, flawless mathematics, and learned quotations from the ancients.

  ” ‘Boy, are you not the scrofulous, illiterate, and lice-ridden urchin called Hong Wong?’ the schoolmaster gasps.

  ” ‘The insignificant name of this worthless one should not blemish the esteemed lips of Your Magnificence!’ the lad wails.

  ” ‘And is not your father the ulcerous, flatulent, maggot-infested fellow called Hong the Hopeless, who takes pride in the fact that he has failed the examination for village idiot sixteen years in a row?'