The Story of the Stone mlanto-2

by Barry Hughart

  Wolf notched the arrow and slowly drew it back. His muscles strained to hold the feathers steady beside his right ear. Carefully he lifted the bow to the best elevation for a long shot. The sharp stone tip glittered in torchlight, and the seven bats flapped up into the air, the high shrieking squeals echoed through the cavern.

  “Master, O Master, an arrow is near!

  Shining bright on the tip is the stone that you fear!”

  The glittering eyes of the Laughing Prince swept over the cavern. Icicles seemed to rush into the tunnel. Wolf tried to release the arrow, but his fingers were frozen. His arm was frozen. He felt ice enter his body and crawl toward his heart.

  Fire Girl grabbed the bow and arrow and pulled back with all her might. The icicle eyes shifted and she was frozen. Seven black bats were streaking toward them.

  “Master, O Master, a boy and a girl!

  With a wolf on a ring and fire in each curl!”

  “My thieving niece! Four gold pieces to the man who brings her to me! All right, five!” screamed Brushbeard the Barbarian, leading a platoon of soldiers across the cavern.

  “Bring me my ungrateful little cousin, dead or alive!” howled Ah the Artificer, leading another platoon of soldiers.

  The Laughing Prince shifted his eyes to his Monks of Mirth, and Wolf and Fire Girl fell back as though icy chains had snapped. Now there was no hope of a clear shot, and they turned and ran back down the tunnel. They reached the central cavern just ahead of the soldiers. Arrows whistled past their ears as they dove into the river, and spears probed the water as they swam beneath the black surface to the other side. They climbed out and raced toward a side tunnel, but Brushbeard the Barbarian and his men were right behind them, shouting in triumph.

  Wolf and Fire Girl began counting silently: ten yaks and one, ten yaks and two, ten yaks and three… They leaped as far as they could. Ten yaks and one, ten yaks and two, ten yaks and three… They leaped again, and behind them came terrible screams, and seven black bats flew shrieking through the cavern.

  “Master, O Master, your brave soldiers die!

  In deep hidden pits where sharpened stakes lie!”

  Where was Fire Girl? Wolf stopped and turned back and saw her standing calmly in the center of the tunnel. The sacred arrow was back in her quiver. A plain one was fixed in the bow, and the feathers held steadily beside her ear. A gross figure was moving forward, clinging to the wall and sobbing with terror.

  “Dear Uncle, a gift from my mother,” Fire Girl said softly.

  The arrow whined like a wasp and Brushbeard the Barbarian clutched his throat and tried to pull the shaft out. Blood spurted, and he collapsed to the floor, writhing and gurgling. Fire Girl turned and ran back to Wolf, and they raced on. The tunnel exit was high on the cavern wall, at the top of rock mounds, and soldiers below at the riverbank looked up and pointed and yelled in triumph. Wolf and Fire Girl dodged arrows as they raced along a narrow path, pulling wooden braces from beneath the traps they had set. Seven black bats shrieked toward the ceiling.

  “Master, O Master, to a trap have we rushed!

  Beneath falling boulders your soldiers are crushed!”

  Where was Wolf? Fire Girl stopped and looked around and saw him sliding down the rock slope with his knife between his teeth. Ah the Artificer shrieked in fear and swung his sword. Wolf ducked beneath it. Ah the Artificer screamed and fell, trying to pull the hilt of the knife from his stomach. Blood gushed from his mouth, and he jerked over the floor. Wolf turned and scrambled back up the rocks to Fire Girl, and they raced on. There were no more side passages until they reached their secret tunnel. They were in the open, and seven black bats were flapping above their heads.

  “Master, O Master, the quarry runs here!

  No escape to the front, and none to the rear!”

  A cold wind whistled through the cavern. Wolf and Fire Girl turned and gazed in horror at the spectre of evil incarnate. A great black bat was flying toward them. The wings spanned at least forty feet, and the fangs glittered like huge spears, and a royal crown was on its head, and the eyes were the eyes of the Laughing Prince.

  They had almost reached the wolf statue, and there was one last trap. It had been intended for soldiers who might pursue on a barge, and Wolf dove for a rope and pulled. A great boulder broke free and rolled like thunder down the slope and shot out into the air, and the splash as it hit the river sent up a blinding curtain of spray. Hidden by water, they dashed to the wall and slipped into the tiny entrance, and then followed the maze back to their cave. Behind them they could faintly hear the shrieks of seven black bats.

  “Master, O Master, the quarry has fled!

  We shall search every crack till their bodies lie dead!”

  Fire Girl sat on the floor, exhausted. Her eyes were closed. When she finally opened them, she saw Wolf standing at the chimney looking up at the shaft of sunlight. Sounds of soldiers were coming down the chimney as the army of the Laughing Prince searched outside the cavern as well as in,

  “I'm going to take a look,” he said. His eyes were large and grave as he looked at her. “Wait for me, Fire Girl.”

  He scrambled up the chimney and paused at the top. Then he was gone. Fire Girl closed her eyes again. Then they opened wide.

  “There's the boy!” a soldier shouted from above.

  “Red hair! There's the girl too! They're both outside!” yelled another soldier.

  Fire Girl jumped to her feet. Red hair? A girl up with Wolf? Her eyes fell on the stone shelf between the sleeping pallets, and widened even farther when she saw that the casket on the left was open. She walked over and looked solemnly at the legend above it: “Pull not the scales till all else fails.” The casket was empty, except for a tiny strand of something red.

  On the bottom of the casket was writing, and Fire Girl scratched her head and wrinkled her nose.

  “A boy who dies, dies not in vain;

  The Great Wheel turns, he comes again.”

  Wolf had taken something red to pretend he had red hair, and he was leading the soldiers away from Fire Girl. They would catch him, of course, but she might escape.

  Fire Girl walked to the last casket on the right. The fish scale lid slid down. She reached inside and lifted a small vial of pale liquid. On the bottom of the casket was writing.

  “A girl who grieves and drinks of this,

  Will be awakened with a kiss.”

  Fire Girl walked over and lay down on her pallet. She brushed her hair with her fingers and straightened her tunic. She carefully placed the bow and the arrow with the stone top on the floor beside her, and opened the vial. The liquid smelled fresh and clean, like forest herbs after a rain.

  “Yes, Wolf, I will wait,” she said softly, and she lifted the vial and drank. Her eyes closed, and she slept.

  The Great Wheel turns, a boy will grow,

  His cave is kept for him to know;

  Again the ring of Wolf will glow,

  And the secret passage show.

  A touch of lips will open eyes,

  A girl of fire will thus arise;

  Then the sacred arrow flies,

  And the Heart of Evil dies.

  “The poetry is atrocious, but there's real merit in parts of the tale,” Master Li said as we walked back down the hill in the moonlight.

  “Yes indeed!” the prince said enthusiastically. “I always knew my ancestor had icicle eyes and the soul of a forty-foot bat.”

  “I think it's a glorious story,” said Grief of Dawn.

  “I even liked the poetry,” Moon Boy confessed.

  “It's sheer genius!” I cried. “Any one of those boys could be the reborn Wolf, so they have to spend endless hours looking for omens. Even if they aren't Wolf, they'll be officers in his army, so they have to prove themselves through ordeals—spending the night alone in the Forest of Sobbing Ghosts, for example, or packing Fire Drug into a hole beneath Terrible Tempered Wu's bad luck jar, so when Wu explodes it during the spring festival he'll re
turn to earth somewhere in Tibet. And bats! They'll have to figure out how to handle those bats, and that means secret dark places. Lots and lots of cobwebs and spiders. They'll practice setting nasty traps, and learn spells to ward off the evil eye—I used to think my old gang was special, but the Seven Bloody Bandits of the Dragon Bones Cave shouldn't be allowed to bow to the Sacred and Solemn Order of Wolf.”

  Master Li was regarding me with rather cool eyes.

  “Perhaps the extraordinary references to a stone are worthy of minor mention,” he said wryly.

  The example of Wolf and Fire Girl gave me backbone. “Damn it, it's genius. Centuries ago the boys who found the cave realized that if they chose as their hero a skeleton with a spearhead inside the crushed rib cage, it would be a hero who had somehow failed. So they pieced together bits and pieces from old heroic stories and—”

  “Produced a tale that I admire, except for the poetry,” said Master Li. “The poetry is abominable. The most admirable thing about the tale is its folk-epic nature, meaning that the words take on a quasi-religious significance. Did anyone notice Deer Ears’ delivery?”

  I hadn't, but Grief of Dawn had.

  “His head was thrown back and his eyes were closed,” she said. “Once he said ‘which’ and hastily changed it to ‘that.’ He was like my dear old Tai-tai, preserving the exact wording of an ancient story just as her parents and grandparents had preserved it.”

  Master Li gazed at her fondly. “Let me know if you can use some extra adoration between visits from these three gentlemen,” he said. “That's the point about the references to the stone. Deer Ears came very close to the inscription above the sacristies, and two of the lines were exact: “In darkness languishes the precious stone. When will its excellence enchant the world?”

  Prince Liu Pao threw his hands wide apart.

  “Yes, but what is the stone?” he asked plaintively. “According to the boys’ story, it's a magical thing that slays evil. But my ancestor kept and worshipped it, which scarcely makes sense unless he was in love with the idea of suicide. According to Ssu-ma and the author of Red Chamber, it's the embodiment of all evil. According to Ox's dream, it's an overpowering life force. Is it good? Is it evil? Is it anything more than a legend? I hate to say this, but much as I enjoyed the story of Wolf, it leads us nowhere.”

  “Prince, I must respectfully disagree,” said Master Li. Somehow he gave me the impression of a conjurer who intended to reach into a two-inch pillbox and pull out a twenty-foot pole. “Remember those mysterious fellows in robes of motley who are somehow able to pop up out of nowhere and disappear the same way? Well, I strongly suspect that the cavern in the story is actually the tomb of the Laughing Prince, which means that the tomb is far larger than we had imagined. With daylight, we'll put the theory to the test.”

  15

  The sun had just lifted over Dragon's Right Horn when Master Li led the way down the hill to the bottom of the gorge between the two peaks. I was carrying an armload of tools, and the others had torches.

  “Thousands of peasants labored on the Laughing Prince's tomb,” Master Li said. “Could he have murdered every one of them? Some details of the tomb were certain to be preserved in the folk memory of the Valley of Sorrows, and one form of preservation may be the fanciful tale of Wolf, who comes to a cave with Fire Girl and climbs up a natural stone chimney. He sticks his head from the hole and discovers he's at the bottom of a deep gorge. Dear Ears, head back, eyes closed, chants the exact words preserved through the centuries: “Across from the hole he saw a good landmark—strange red and emerald-colored rocks in the side of the cliff.”

  The old man walked over to one of the sheer cliffs.

  “I came down here to try to figure out how Ox had been able to climb down one side and back up the other,” he said. “I didn't find a climbing path, but I did find this.”

  He bent some thick thistles, and we gazed at strange red and emerald rocks, almost like gemstones, set in the middle of plain granite. “Prince, is there anything like this formation in some other part of the valley?” he asked.

  Without a word the prince began looking for the hole of a natural stone chimney, and the rest of us fanned out and followed his example. An hour passed before Moon Boy shouted. He was about twenty feet up the side of a cliff, at the only place where the slope allowed easy climbing, and he was pointing down at a thick clump of furze. We ran up to him. I chopped through the furze, and a black hole appeared. I had brought a long bamboo pole, and I thrust it down but couldn't reach bottom. I tossed the pole back to the other tools, and the prince helped me secure a rope ladder. Master Li handed me a torch, and I began climbing down with my knife between my teeth, feeling very much like a pirate.

  The ladder was just long enough. I stepped into a small round cave with a narrow passage leading from it. My torchlight revealed an ancient wooden table and two benches. A natural stone shelf was set in the wall. I closed my eyes tightly and prayed, and then I began swinging the torch slowly around the room.

  I will confess that I had prayed to find a thirteen-year-old girl with hair of fire, who had been sleeping for seven and a half centuries. I was very disappointed when she wasn't there.

  “Come on down!” I yelled.

  Master Li and the prince and Grief of Dawn and Moon Boy joined me. They lit their torches, and now it was bright enough to see that nobody had disturbed the dust on the floor for years. We cautiously made our way down the passage and found ourselves in a much larger cave. This one had been used for target practice, and I was willing to bet that the archer had been a boy—or a girl. Arrows were stuck all over, including the ceiling where ancient scaffolding held supporting beams. There was an old desk. To the left of the desk was a long wood table, and to the right was a row of brassbound chests. The chests were empty. Directly in front of the desk was a large metal plate set in the stone floor, and Master Li scratched his nose thoughtfully as he looked at it.

  “This looks like a paymaster's office,” he said. “Engineers and overseers would stand in front of the desk to receive their wages, and the Laughing Prince was renowned for his playful pranks.”

  He walked behind the desk and searched for something, and then he pulled some kind of lever. I jumped backward. There was a screeching metallic sound, and then the plate split into two halves that dropped down on hinges. Where an overseer might have been standing was nothing but a black hole, and I cautiously knelt at the side and thrust my torch down. The light couldn't reach far enough to touch bottom. I found a splintered piece of old scaffolding and lit it from the torch and dropped it into the pit. It almost went out, but then it flared up again and we caught our breaths.

  It had landed on sharp jutting rocks far below, right between two broken bodies. It took me a moment to realize that they weren't ancient skeletons like the ones piled in the tunnel. Hair still clung to them, and patches of dried flesh, and their clothes were almost intact.

  “No more than twenty or thirty years ago,” Master Li muttered.

  “Thirty-three,” the prince whispered. His face was white and strained. “I used to play with them. Ah Cheng and Wu Yi, gardeners at the estate. They let me ride the water buffalo and shovel manure and do all sorts of interesting things I wasn't supposed to, and one day they vanished and we never found them.”

  Master Li tested a bench at the table and sat down in a puff of dust.

  He gazed moodily into the pit. “A stolen manuscript,” he said softly, perhaps to himself. “Two dead monks, a weird sound, trees and plants destroyed—did the murder of two gardeners thirty-three years ago also play a part? Did they find the entrance in the gorge and come down here? If so, what did they see or hear that led to their deaths? If the unpleasant people dressed up in motley were involved back then, it strengthens the theory that some kind of religious cult may be behind this, worshipping the stone of the Laughing Prince and possibly continuing a line that goes back to his original Monks of Mirth.”

  Master Li jumped u
p. “This is just a preliminary look around,” he said. “The next time we come down here we'd better be heavily armed. Fortunately, the dust will tell us if anyone has used a passage. Let's do a bit of exploring.”

  There were side passages leading from three walls of the cave. All of them had been heavily braced against rockslides. Scaffolding and posts and cross beams were everywhere, so old that the wood might snap from a loud sneeze, and we moved very carefully. The first passage ended in a rockslide that had blocked it completely, and so did the second. The third passage was so dangerous that nobody in his right mind would enter it. It was a miracle that the ceiling hadn't collapsed years ago. In the fourth we reached another dead end of fallen rocks, and so it went in all the passages. Whatever they led to couldn't be reached from the cave, and if we were going to explore a cavern that might be part of the Laughing Prince's tomb, we were going to have to find another entrance.

  It was a terrible disappointment. Master Li swore without a pause after the sixth passage, and he was still swearing as we climbed gloomily back up the ladder and blinked in the sunlight. We walked back down to the center of the gorge, and suddenly Moon Boy stopped and held up a warning hand. His ears were incredibly keen.

  “Horses,” he said. “Lots of them, and the sound of wheels. Also jangling weapons. They're coming right at us, and if it's your monks in motley, they mean business.”

  We had no place to go and no time to do it in. Galloping horses and a huge chariot dashed into the narrow gorge, and mysterious monks in motley would have been far preferable to the grim-faced people we stared at. King Shih Hu of Chao reined up his horses and regarded us from his great war chariot, and his Golden Girls licked their lovely lips.