The Story of the Stone mlanto-2

by Barry Hughart

  I think I was stunned, because it took some time for me to get my scrambled senses functioning, and then I wondered what was wrong. The noise had gone. The boat was peacefully floating upon placid water. I had the distinct sensation that I was about to be devoured by an enormous mouth, and I sat up and stared at the serene smile of the Great Stone Buddha of Loshan: three hundred sixty feet high, carved in the side of Yellow Buffalo Mountain at the safe end of Wu Gorge. Five Misery Rapids was behind us, and so was the King of Chao, and the only problems were Master Li and Moon Boy.

  They wanted to go back and do it again, but Grief of Dawn and I sat on them until they regained their senses.

  12

  The next few days were rather interesting, although exhausting. I made a few notes, and perhaps I should include a couple of them.

  Wake up, rub eyes, examine bug crawling into left nostril. Grief of Dawn sleeping, Master Li snoring, Moon Boy gone. Get up to gather firewood. Dogs barking, screams of rage in distance. Make tea, get more water for rice. Screams of rage closer, plus beautiful voice singing obscene song:

  “There's a boy across the riiiiiiiiiiver

  With a bottom like a peeeeeeeeeach!”

  Rest of it unprintable. Hear six hawk moths diving at my tea, look around for hawk moths, see Moon Boy doing something with his throat. Screams of rage very close, lynch mob gallops over hill. Leader has pitchfork, drags weeping boy. Moon Boy accepts tea. Leader screams accusations, Moon Boy sips tea. Leader charges with pitchfork. Moon Boy smiles—air turns sulphurous. Smiles wider—hills shimmer with heat waves. Moon Boy tickles leader beneath chin, purrs like cat: “Come here, sugar.” Escorts leader behind large rock, boy stops weeping and starts laughing. Offer tea to lynch mob. Lewd sounds from behind rock, boy can't stop laughing. Offer rice to lynch mob. Leader emerges, adjusting clothing. Refuses tea and rice and drags boy away by ear. Moon Boy saunters from behind rock, whistling. Master Li awakes, regards Moon Boy and departing lynch mob, mutters, “If only I could be ninety again, goes back to sleep.

  Our route back toward Ch'ang-an took us past the village of Moon Boy's birth, at which point I began to suspect that Moon Boy's moral turpitude resembled his art: almost supernatural.

  Road past small temple, priest emerges. Stares at Moon Boy, lifts robe, races toward village: “Lock up the boys! Lock up the men! Lock up the goats and donkeys!” Moon Boy smiles proudly. Enter village, woman emerges from cottage: “My son!” Faints. Father emerges waving horsewhip: “Shame! Scandal! Infamy! Ignominy! Odium! Obliquity!” Father apparently fairly well educated. Priest runs up and sprinkles Moon Boy with holy water, begins beating with rod. Moon Boy tickles beneath chin: “Kitchy-koo.” Priest faints. Mother revives: “Witness, O Heaven, that I was blameless!” Topples back to ground, Moon Boy smiles proudly. Neighbors gather, Moon Boy blows kisses. Father follows from village waving horsewhip: “Agony! Abasement! Depravity! Degradation!” Moon Boy blows kisses. Horses, goats, bulls, donkeys: whinnies, bleats, bellows, brays. Moon Boy blows kisses, Master Li mutters, “Rather an active childhood.” Buy boat, push off into stream. Strange low hoarse sound, Moon Boy doing something with throat. Swans swim up. Great white glowing clouds of swans, canopy of wings lifting over Moon Boy, feathers shining in sunlight. Beautiful. Unreal.

  If I am ever invited to take a ride on one of those tubes of Fire Drug that streaks up into the sky, goes bang! and hurls sparkling comets across the sky, I will bow politely and say, “A thousand pardons, but this humble one has already made the trip.”

  One of Moon Boy's most remarkable attributes was that he was completely without jealousy. When Grief of Dawn felt like climbing into my bedroll, which she did now and then, all Moon Boy did was lift his handsome head to the night sky and sing to the rabbit in the moon, asking for a soft silver blanket of moonbeams for Grief of Dawn and Number Ten Ox. Master Li would cry in mock agony, “Ah, if only I could be ninety again!” (actually, I think he was happy to be free from the tyranny of sexual desire), and it was clear that, for reasons of his own, he was becoming fascinated by the maid without a memory.

  Grief of Dawn was a walking collection of contradictions. She was a simple peasant who spoke the pal hua of the people, like me, but at times she would unconsciously toss in wen li phrases that would have done credit to a courtier. She painted her forehead yellow but refused to pluck and paint her eyebrows: half-patrician, half-peasant. She was shameless enough to walk around with her hair uncovered, yet she was furious when she saw a man in mourning for his mother who carried a staff of oak rather than the appropriate mulberry. She was a prostitute who indignantly refused a fan Moon Boy bought because it was folding, and the symbolism was indecent, and ladies should always carry fixed fans.

  Master Li's eyes lit up. “I haven't heard the fan taboo since I was a tad of six or seven!” he exclaimed.

  “Little Miss Spotless Sandals,” I teased.

  “Everybody should dust his sandals now and then,” she said demurely, and then she stepped behind me and dusted hers with two swift kicks to my rear end. “Turtle Egg!” she yelled.

  Master Li collapsed with laughter. When he recovered he explained that people once believed turtles could conceive through thought alone, which made parentage impossible to establish, so “turtle egg” became a euphemism for bastard. Master Li swore that the insult had last been delivered during the Usurpation of Wang Mang, and he was willing to bet that at some point in her wanderings Grief of Dawn had found work in one of the moldy priories where antiquated old maids preserve ancient sayings and customs they learned from their great-great-grandmothers. Another time Grief of Dawn got mad at Moon Boy and called him “Forgetter of the Eight!” and even Master Li had to pause before connecting it to the corrupt courtiers whom Mencius swore had turned their backs on filial piety, politeness, decorum, integrity, fidelity, fraternal duty, loyalty, and sense of shame: the Eight Rules of Civilization.

  Grief of Dawn was perfectly aware of Master Li's growing interest. She began to regard him with a speculative expression that had a hint of mirth in it, and I wondered if Moon Boy could read her mind, because he picked up the exact same expression. One scorching afternoon we reached a stream and in an instant Moon Boy had stripped and was gliding through the cool water like one of his swans. Grief of Dawn had plenty of secluded places to use if she liked, so Master Li and I undressed and dove in after Moon Boy. There was another splash. Grief of Dawn swam like a seal, and wasn't exactly shy about displaying her supple athlete's body. She stood in a shallow spot, apparently to give Master Li a good view of her lovely firm breasts.

  “Venerable Sir, how many wives have you had?” she asked innocently.

  “Buddha, I started to lose count somewhere back toward the beginning of the Sui Dynasty.”

  “And how many wives do you have now?”

  “Not one,” the old man said complacently. “They kept growing old and dying on me, so when I reached the point where I could no longer enjoy the Play of Clouds and Rain, I decided to settle for selfishness and comfortable clutter, and I haven't had a wife since.”

  “But is that wise?” Grief of Dawn batted her eyes as though the bright sunlight bothered her. (She had beautiful eyelashes.) “Wives are useful for many things, and there are potions and incantations that can do wonders with the Play of Clouds and Rain…”

  I stopped listening and tried to make my clumsy mind come to grips with Grief of Dawn's point of view. The more I thought of it, the more sensible it became. Prostitutes are called “flowers of smoke,” and brothels are “smoke and blossom camps” because worldly pleasures are transitory, and nothing is more transitory than beauty. A whore's hopes can be measured in the distance between two wrinkles, and what could Grief of Dawn look forward to? If she married me, it would mean a farm and children and heartbreak when she was compelled to run off after Moon Boy and resume her restless wanderings. But if she married an ancient sage? Master Li would merely laugh if she ran off, and take the opportunity to smash up the shack wi
th some old-fashioned drinking brawls, and laugh some more when she returned, and when he died she would become a respectable widow with a roof over her head.

  “… then you wash the dragon bones and grind them into a fine powder, and put the powder into tiny silk bags and put the bags into the body cavities of dead cleaned swallows and leave them overnight…”

  Master Li was smiling faintly as he listened to the innocent folk remedy. He began whistling very softly. I felt my face turn red, and Moon Boy had a hard time suppressing laughter, and Grief of Dawn flushed and began stumbling over words. The tune was “Hot Ashes,” and for some peculiar reason the phrase “scraping hot ashes” refers to incest between in-laws—a young wife and her son-in-law, for example—and could it be said that I was something of a substitute son to Master Li? The arrangement that Grief of Dawn had in mind could become rather complicated, and Master Li held up a hand and cut her short.

  “Forget about resurrecting erections,” he said dryly. “At my age the last thing a man wants is one more petrified part. As for the rest of it, I'll think it over, and if I were you, I'd work on a young fellow who wears his peasant propriety like a suit of armor.”

  Grief of Dawn dove beneath the water and popped up in front of me like a dolphin. Her waving hand encompassed Master Li and Moon Boy and the water and the sunlight and the grass and the flowers and everything else we were sharing. “Oh, Ox, what fun we could have, and how happy we could be,” she said pleadingly.

  There was real yearning in her voice, and deep inside me it struck a sympathetic chord. My parents had died when I was nine. That had probably been the age of Moon Boy when he was first disowned, and Master Li hadn't experienced family life for years, and Grief of Dawn couldn't even remember if she had a family, and somehow I found myself thinking of the little shack in the alley in the coming winter, warm in the wind and snow, and I could smell the good food and fresh-scrubbed cleanliness that a young wife would bring, and I could hear the easy jokes and laughter, and I could see Moon Boy suddenly appearing like an exotic tropical bird—besides, if Master Li wasn't worried about who slept where, why should I be?

  Grief of Dawn started a water fight. We said no more about her hope. It was Master Li's decision, and he would let her know in due course.

  We didn't want to be sidetracked by several years in jail. Grief of Dawn made Moon Boy promise to be on his best behavior when we arrived in Ch'ang-an, and Master Li was in high spirits when he entered the Academy of Divination and Alchemic Research to get the report on the soil and plant samples. When he came out he was spitting nails.

  “According to the finest minds in China, there is no trace of acid or poison or any other harmful substance,” he snarled. The only thing wrong with Princes’ Path is that parts of it are stone cold dead, and some oaf has scribbled on the bottom: ‘Extinction through natural decay.’ ”

  Master Li swore without repeating himself all the way down the hill to Serpentine Park, where he said he wanted to try something.

  “I'm reduced to grasping at straws,” he said sourly. “One straw concerns the last meal of the late librarian, Brother Squint-Eyes. I've been assuming that he paid for it with the down payment for Ssu-ma Ch'ien's manuscript, and that his tracing copy was stolen during the crooks’ second visit to the monastery, but there could be another explanation. Let's go to the exhibits.”

  Bored schoolmasters were guiding classes around. Master Li found one with weak watery eyes and a nose covered with crimson veins. Money changed hands, and the delighted schoolmaster dove into the nearest wineshop. Master Li took over the class, and after huddling with the brats he started off toward the Boar Pavilion. The boys, I saw with surprise, were marching behind the old man with the precision of the Imperial Guard. It really was quite impressive—an ancient gentleman of the old school and his beautifully behaved charges—and a crowd began to follow Confucius and sons.

  “The hope of the empire!” exclaimed an emotional matron.

  Master Li lined the boys up and gave the downbeat, and they honored the exhibits of past glories with the most perfect rendition of “Evening Lake Scenes” I have ever heard. The applause was deafening. Vendors were mobbed, and the lads disappeared behind mounds of gooey sweets. Master Li lined them up again and marched off to the Gallery of Beautitude, and there the lads delivered a flawless “Shadows on the Eastern Window.” Then they actually performed obeisances and kowtows.

  “The hope of the empire!” the matron bawled, and a fierce old fellow with a floppy mustache told one and all that he had planned to return his medals to the General Staff in protest against the decline of standards, but now he wasn't so sure about the decline.

  The Temple of Immaculate Illumination was next, and the boys’ performance of “The Twin Pagodas of Orchid Stream” was so superb that every vendor in sight was cleaned out, and candy and crystalized fruit and honey cakes by the ton vanished into the boys’ gaping maws.

  “The hope of the empire!” cried Moon Boy and Grief of Dawn, beating the matron to it, and the fierce old gentleman with the medals vowed to move Heaven and earth to get his great-grandsons enrolled with Master Li.

  The most sacred of all exhibits is the Confucian Stones (a row of stones engraved with all two hundred thousand characters of the master's writings). A low railing surrounds them, and the rule is, look but don't touch. Master Li lined up the little angels for a tribute worthy of the Ultimate, and the rendition of “The Tower of Floating Blue-Green” brought tears to every eye, including mine.

  “The hope of the empire!” I bellowed, along with Moon Boy, Grief of Dawn, the matron, and the gentleman with the medals.

  The vendors were cleaned out within minutes. The boys, I noticed, were beginning to turn green. They turned as one and groped for support, which happened to be a low rail, and leaned over it and began heaving their cherubic little guts out. All over the sacred Confucian Stones.

  “One million miseries!” howled Master Li.

  A gentleman of the old school is prepared for any emergency, however, and Master Li swiftly joined forces with the fierce old fellow with the medals to recruit a bucket brigade to dump cleansing water over the stones. Thoroughness is also a mark of the old school, and Master Li would not rest until he extracted some large sheets of paper from his tunic and pressed them down firmly over every indentation of the sacred text. Fortunately he also happened to be carrying a huge blue sponge, and he rubbed it over the surface so vigorously that the outside of the paper turned blue. When he lifted the sheets, the stones were nearly dry, and as good as new.

  The audience, meanwhile, explained to the furious guards that it was all their fault for stuffing the little angels with goo, and the matron and the bemedaled gentleman took up a collection to pay the fine. There wasn't a dry eye as Master Li marched the lads away, and behind us I heard a chorus bawling, “The hope of the empire!”

  Master Li led the boys into a secluded glade. “All right, brats, let it out,” he said.

  The boys collapsed on the grass, rolling around and pummeling each other and howling with laughter. “Please, sir, may we see?” one of them asked when he had regained his breath.

  Master Li took out the pieces of paper. The ink from the sponge had settled in nicely, and the imprints were perfect. Genuine rubbings of the Confucian Stones are hard to come by. The boys begged to stay with Master Li and continue their lives of crime, but he advised them to remain in school and study hard so they could mastermind the mobs when they descended into depravity. Then he returned them to the schoolmaster and took the schoolmaster's place in the wineshop.

  He ordered the stuff he had been named for, kao-liang, which is a terrible wine but a wonderful paint remover, and began using it to remove the peaks from every that was accompanied by in the rubbings and replace them with flat lines:. Then he left the wineshop and we started up the Street of the Vermilion Sparrow to Dragon Head Plain.

  “Brother Squint-Eye's forgery of the Ssu-ma was a crude tracing of a coded man
uscript that contained the name of the historian's own father, and to a collector the monk's copy would have looked like the most obvious and inept fraud in history,” he explained. “If the foolish monk brought it to Ch'ang-an and tried to sell it, it's a wonder he wasn't decapitated on the spot. There is, however, one place that might have bought the thing, and perhaps some pitying person told him where to go.”

  The Pavilion of the Blessings of Heaven is the greatest library in the world, and in addition to its collection of original manuscripts, it maintains a collection of forgeries. Both can be instructive to scholars, and some woefully inept forgeries are kept for pure entertainment value. Master Li made his way to the office of Liu Hsiang, the head librarian.

  “Greetings, Hsiang,” he said cheerfully.

  “Lock up the manuscripts! Lock up the silver and incense burners! Lock up your wives and check your rings and purses!” the librarian screamed. “Hello, Kao, What brings you back to civilization?” he continued in a normal tone of voice.

  “Shopping trip. My study lacks something, and I've decided I need a fake to hang on the wall.”

  “You know very well that our collection is not for sale,” the librarian said primly.

  “Who said anything about selling? I'm talking about trading,” Master Li said, and he took out the rubbings and tossed them on the desk.

  “Think of the labor that went into that thing,” he said with a chuckle.