The Story of the Stone mlanto-2

by Barry Hughart

  Moon Boy took his cue and bowed gracefully.

  “Not only that, this drooling crotch-scratching clod insists he was tutor to the princes of the Sui Dynasty!” Master Li yelled. “He tells tales of Emperor Yang's debauches that would curl your hair, if you had any, and every time he opens his silly mouth, he substantiates his claim to have been Lord Tsing!”

  (That gave me my cue. Tsing was the name of the dear old assistant abbot in the monastery near my village, who taught the village boys when they finished working in the fields. He was a sweet kindly fellow who suffered from terminal pedantry, and I used to amuse Master Li by imitating him.)

  “Step forward, oaf!” I drooled and scratched my crotch and stepped forward. Master Li looked around and pointed to an ornate bronze bowl. “What decorative motif is that?” he snarled.

  I tried to make my eyes film over, and my jaws creaked like unoiled hinges as they relentlessly spread apart.

  “T'sao-t'ieh, or ‘glutton mask,’ is a distinctive motif of the Shang and early Chou dynasties,” I droned in a dull monotone. “It is an animal face seen from the front, sometimes recognizable and sometimes stylized to resemble a fabulous monster. It is flattened on a side surface or bent around a corner; in either case a flange is likely to split it into symmetrical halves, each having a protruding eyeball. From each side of the face, sometimes in proper proportion and sometimes not, extends a body in perfect symmetry with its opposite, as if the carcass had been cut through along the backbone and the two halves had been folded out like wing attachments to the head. The bodies have serpentine dragon-like qualities, coiling in spirals or geometric twists and turns, and are themselves covered with spiral or geometric designs, sometimes including smaller t'sao-t'ieh. The same glutton mask usually appears many times on a vessel. It is a striking, powerful, and unique design, and what it represents… (pause, slowly count to ten)… is not known.”

  Moon Boy's eyes had glazed, and he was teetering on his feet. The Recorder of Past Existences was slumping at his desk. He jerked his head up when his chin bounced against his inkstone. I picked my nose. Moon Boy woke up and fell at my feet and began kissing my sandals. “Great-great-grand father!” he howled.

  My rheumy eyes creaked toward a vase of gray flowers. My relentless jaws creaked open.

  “The following plants and flowers,” I droned, “each create a mood. The plum flower goes with poetry, the orchid with seclusion, the chrysanthemum with rustic flavor, the lotus with simplicity of heart, the cherry apple with glamour, the peony with success, the banana and bamboo with gentlemanly charm, the begonia with seductive beauty, the pine tree with retirement, the plane tree with absence of worry, the willow with sentimentality, the—”

  “For the love of Buddha, stop!” the Recorder howled.

  “Awe-inspiring, isn't it?” Master Li said. “How can one doubt that this worm was tutor to princes when he can put an entire regiment to sleep in two minutes flat? Failure to remove all memory of previous existences is an extremely grave matter!”

  “I can't understand it,” the Recorder whispered. “Hundreds of such cases have been reported in the past, but we have been very careful during the past few centuries.”

  “It could be fraud,” Master Li pointed out. The Son of Heaven has proposed an infallible test, which is the reason for this visit. We shall simply make this revolting creature stand before Nieh-ching-t'ai, and the truth shall be revealed.”

  “It is strictly illegal for the living to stand before the Mirror of Past Existences!” the Recorder snapped.

  “The gods look the other way when the cause is just and wise,” Master Li said smoothly. “Besides, this preening peacock claims to be the great-great-grandson, and fraud is so often a matter of conspiracy.”

  Moon Boy did a good job of turning pale and trembling, and the Recorder's eyes gleamed. Bureaucrats and courtiers do not love one another, and a few minutes later we were walking down a maze of corridors. A great black door swung open to reveal a dark tunnel at the end of which was a glow of greenish light. As we came closer I realized it was a natural mirror formed by an immense crystal set in the stone wall.

  A sense of sacred awe surrounded the Mirror of Past Existences. I found that I was on my knees, kowtowing, and the others were kowtowing in front of me. We got back to our feet. The marks of two sandals were drawn on the floor in front of the mirror, and Master Li shoved me forward. I placed my feet on the marks and slowly raised my eyes. The green light from the mirror was pulsing like a heartbeat. I could see my own reflection clearly, but there was no reflection of the others. A strange sense of peace had entered my heart. I was not frightened when a soft voice spoke in my ear.

  “Why does a living person stand before me?”

  I had no idea what to reply, so I said the first thing that came to my mind.

  “Master Li seeks truth.”

  The green light pulsed silently. Then the voice spoke again. “So be it. Look straight at me, Number Ten Ox.”

  Two columns appeared at the sides of the mirror. One was headed “Virtues,” and the other was headed “Sins.” Then my image dissolved and reformed, and I realized that I was looking at my first existence upon the earth.

  I was a blob of something I couldn't identify, something like a tiny jellyfish. The blob combined with other blobs to form larger jellyfish. Then I became something with tendrils, and then something that crawled, and finally I was delighted to recognize one of my existences: a flatworm. The virtues and sins columns remained empty.

  I was reborn as a fish. Then I became some sort of plant, and then some fungus, and then an insect. I was reborn as a hawk moth, a cockroach, a cow, and a tortoiseshell cat. I was quite proud of myself as I moved up the scale of existences.

  I frowned. I appeared to be backsliding. I became a piece of kelp, a patch of pond scum, six kinds of rock, four trees, and a number of plants. Then I began moving up the scale again: a snapdragon, a black grouse, a gecko, and a bowlegged mongrel with one eye, chewed ears, and a body bearing the scars of a thousand back-alley battles. The virtues and sins columns remained as empty as the minds of the General Staff. I eagerly awaited my first human existence.

  Here it was. I was reforming as a human being. I gaped at the familiar ugly face of Number Ten Ox, and when I felt my body, I watched the reflected hands move in the mirror. The virtues and sins columns disappeared.

  “I'll be damned,” said Master Li.

  “We don't say that down here, but I know what you mean,” The Recorder said. “Extraordinary! This boy is as innocent as an apricot.”

  “Not quite,” Master Li said grimly. “We now know that he was never a tutor to princes, and one wonders about the nature of his accomplice. Peacock, step forward!”

  Moon Boy took my place in front of the mirror. That was what Master Li had wanted from the start, and I admired the neat way he had arranged it.

  “Virtue” and “Sin” columns appeared. Moon Boy's image began to dissolve, and he too became some kind of blob. Again I saw the procession of other blobs and things with tendrils, but then things turned dramatically different. In rapid order Moon Boy became poison ivy, a patch of deadly nightshade, and a clump of red berries I wouldn't have approached with a barge pole. He was moving up the scale at great speed, and he dissolved into a tarantula, a cobra, and a horrible thing with twenty writhing tentacles. The thing dissolved into the image of a sweet little old lady with twinkling eyes.

  The little old lady was bustling about her kitchen adding green and purple powders to a pot. Purple smoke lifted from it, and black liquid boiled over the side, and the sweet little old lady cackled with delight as a kitten lapped at the stuff, turned blue, and dropped over dead. The sins column began to show activity, and apparently the Great Wheel of Incarnations decided to go back and try again.

  The little old lady dissolved into something I couldn't identify, but Master Li muttered that it looked like a case of leprosy. The leprosy dissolved into a misshapen worm, a vulture, a p
oisonous toad, a sow bug, a patch of spleenwort, and then a happy laughing little boy who was torturing a gecko. The sins column went to work again, and Moon Boy's next incarnation was the stuff of legend: Mad Monk Mu of Midnight Marsh.

  The ghoulish monk dissolved into a patch of quicksand as the Great Wheel of Incarnations tried again. The quicksand dissolved into feverish swamp vapor, a series of spiders, a vampire bat, a hyena, and finally into Moon Boy—but Moon Boy dressed as a girl and playing with a cat. I was relieved to see that he wasn't torturing it. Then I slowly realized that Moon Boy was training the cat to scratch the eyes from a rival's baby, and the mirror appeared to shudder as though gathering forces for one final effort.

  Light formed around Moon Boy's beautiful face. The nimbus grew brighter and brighter, shimmering like tongues of fire. Moon Boy was changing and yet not changing, rearranging in a way that was both familiar and strange. His face lifted. His arms rose as though reaching for the sun. Brilliant colors moved around and through him. The sins column had overflowed and was stretching down the wall, and the virtues column remained empty.

  Suddenly the columns disappeared. The image disappeared. Words formed in the mirror. “Judgment is beyond the jurisdiction of lower courts, and is reserved for the Supreme Deity.” Then the words vanished and Moon Boy was staring back at his own image.

  “Heaven preserve us,” the Recorder whispered.

  “Incredible,” Master Li said. “We must thank the gods that this fellow is not under our jurisdiction! The Son of Heaven will assign temporal punishment to him and his oafish accomplice, but I had best glance at the Register of Souls to ensure that an earthly sentence will not conflict with a divine one.”

  I doubt that the Recorder of Past Existences would normally have allowed such a thing, but he was a shaken man. He meekly allowed Master Li to spend a minute in the room where the register was kept, and then he hastily escorted us back through the maze, opened a door, shoved us outside to a courtyard, and slammed the door behind us.

  Master Li doubled over with laughter. “What a pair you are!” he chortled. “It's an honor to travel with such distinguished young gentlemen, so let's travel to see a friend of mine, and then on to see Tou Wan, the wife of the Laughing Prince.”

  I had to admire Moon Boy. He had just discovered that his previous existences broke the world record for wickedness, but he preened himself as though nothing had happened and kept his voice steady.

  “At the risk of sounding stupid, why don't we go see the aristocratic assassin himself?” he asked reasonably.

  Master Li started off in silence. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “That would be a bit difficult. You see, according to the Register of Souls, the Laughing Prince managed to elude the bailiffs, and he has never arrived in Hell.”

  18

  Looking back at it, I think it was fortunate that Moon Boy and I were preoccupied with images of a mad mummy creeping up from a tomb to the room where Grief of Dawn lay helpless in bed. It distracted us from the details of Hell, and some of them were very unpleasant. We were approaching the river How Nai-ho, which is the boundary between the First and Second Hells. It is spanned by three bridges: One is gold and is used by visiting gods and their emissaries, one is silver and is used by the virtuous, and the third is a ramshackle bamboo bridge with no handrails that is used by sinners. The sinners scream in terror as they try to cross the river. Inevitably they fall off, and horrible bronze dogs and snakes splash through the water with jaws gaping wide. The water bubbles with blood, but it's merely a foretaste of what is to come, because the mangled bodies wash up on the far bank and are miraculously healed, and laughing demons lead the sinners to places where torment begins in earnest.

  Master Li marched toward the gold bridge while Moon Boy bellowed, “Make way for Lord Li of Kao, emissary of the Son of Heaven!” and we proceeded past glaring demons and over the golden span as though we owned it. The Second Hell punishes dishonest male and female intermediaries and ignorant or unscrupulous doctors. The torment is not one of the terrible ones, but the smell is revolting, and Moon Boy and Master Li clapped handkerchiefs to their noses. I was used to barnyards, so I wasn't bothered very much. We made our way down long lines of pits, and finally Master Li stopped at one where a fat fellow with a mournful flabby face was buried in soft manure up to his chin. Even through the reek he could smell living flesh, and his eyes slowly lifted.

  “Now, look here, Li Kao, if it's about that land I sold you—”

  “Nothing like that,” said Master Li.

  “I had no idea there was alkali in the soil! May Heaven judge if I… er… may Heaven judge… er… oh, shit.”

  “Well, you should be an expert on the subject,” Master Li said cheerfully. “Actually, the Yama Kings were quite lenient, considering the fact that you sold some of the same land to your own father.”

  The fat fellow began to weep, and tears made pale furrows in the brown goo that covered most of his face. “You wouldn't bring that to their attention, would you?” he sobbed. “You can't imagine what the Neo-Confucians are doing to this place! They'd send me to the Eighth Hell, and that's horror beyond belief.”

  “You should see what the same fellows are doing to China,” Master Li said gloomily. “The other night I dreamed you had returned as court physician, and I hadn't been so happy in years.”

  It was difficult to draw oneself up with dignity under the circumstances, but the fat fellow tried.

  “Not all of my patients died,” he said huffily. “Some even managed to walk again, and one or two didn't even need crutches!”

  “The ones you treated for colds?”

  “Colds or pimples. It is not the physician's fault if a patient is lunatic enough to come in with a case of hangnails,” the fellow said reasonably.

  “You were a doctor in a million,” Master Li said warmly. “Who else would have prescribed arsenic oxide for hiccups?”

  It worked!”

  “No patient is in a position to dispute it,” Master Li said somewhat ambiguously. “Medical expertise is not what I've come to see you about, however. Do you remember the walking trip we took in Tungan? It must have been eighty or ninety years ago, and I've reached the point where my brain resembles the stuff you're buried in. All I can remember is a girl in a scarlet sampan.”

  The transformation was amazing. Flab appeared to melt from the fat fellow's face, and I realized that he had once been a lighthearted and rather handsome young man.

  “You remember her too?” he said softly. “Li Kao, not a day has passed in which I haven't thought of that girl. Wasn't that a time? She sang ‘Autumn Nights’ and tossed rice cakes into the water and laughed as we dove for them like ducks. By all the gods, I hope she made it to Heaven.”

  “Wasn't there a festival?” Master Li asked.

  “A wild village one. Masks and drums and monkey-dances, and that big farmer picked you up after you'd blackened his eye and crowned you King of Fleas. We stayed drunk for a week, and they gave us gifts of food and flowers when we left.”

  He gazed sadly down at his manure pit. “What a wonderful thing it was to be young,” he whispered.

  Master Li told us to keep our eyes peeled for demons while he leaned down and tilted his wine flask at the fellow's lips. It had been a long time between drinks, and he gulped a quart.

  “Buddha, that's wonderful stuff! Haining Mountain Dew?”

  “The best,” Master Li said. “You were an avid botanist in those days, and I seem to remember that after we left the girl in the sampan we set out cross-country. We passed a temple or a convent, and when we climbed into the hills, you discovered—”

  “The Bombay thorn apple!” the fellow cried. “How could I forget it? The find of a lifetime, and I always planned to go back, but somehow the world closed in on me and I never did.”

  “Could you find it now?” Master Li asked.

  The fellow looked up with sudden intelligence in his eyes. “So that's it. You need a Bombay thorn a
pple, do you? Dangerous stuff, Li Kao. You always did get involved in the damnedest things, and how you manage to keep alive is one of the great mysteries of the empire.”

  Master Li leaned down with the flask again.

  “What a pair we are,” the fellow said when he stopped coughing. “I'm damned and you're demented. I may be a sinner, but at least I know it isn't nice to deprive children or lunatics of their toys, and if I wanted the only Bombay thorn apple I've ever seen in China I'd go about two miles past the White Cloud Convent to the point where the hills are closest to the road. I'd turn east and start climbing. Shale followed by granite followed by some kind of black rock, and past the black rock I'd come to a clearing in front of a cliff. Tunnel through the brush, and right against the cliff is another tiny clearing, and in the center is a Bombay thorn apple—unless somebody's cut it down for firewood and massacred his family and neighbors in the process.”

  His eyes moved to Moon Boy and me. “Something to do with Beauty and the Beast, eh? Take care, Li Kao. This is the soft area of hell. Later on you'll need a better passport than a state umbrella.”

  Master Li bowed and turned to go. “You know, the Yama Kings are stern but just,” he said. “Good intentions can at least partially mitigate bad results, and the Great Wheel waits patiently. Who knows? After a couple of insect and animal incarnations, you might find yourself poling down the Yangtze in a crimson sampan.”

  The fellow looked up with desperate hope in his eyes. “You couldn't possibly have sneaked a look at the Register of Souls,” he whispered.

  Master Li winked. We started off down the path, and the last I saw of the fellow he was weeping with joy at the thought of being reborn as a sampan singsong girl, and the last I heard of him he was practicing ‘Autumn Nights.'

  The torments of the Third and Fourth Hells are also relatively light, and are designed for such sinners as bad bureaucrats, backbiters, forgers, coiners, misers, dishonest tradesmen, and blasphemers. Serious torment begins in the Fifth Hell, where murderers, unbelievers, and the lustful are punished. I will make no attempt to describe the caldrons of boiling oil, the pits of molten lead, the beams of hollow iron, the Hill of Knives, and the Sawmill. Master Li told me that such things are utilized by most cultures with the exception of the Tibetan, and that the Yama Kings had no intention of instituting the unspeakable atrocities of the Tibetan World of Darkness.