The Story of the Stone mlanto-2

by Barry Hughart

  Master Li took it back and held it up to the torchlight. “The author of Dream of the Red Chamber never saw the stone, but I'm willing to bet he did indeed see one of the Annals of Heaven and Earth, and that it simply said the stone was flawed. It was the flower that was evil, but Tsao Hsueh Chin imputed evil to the stone because of the peculiar reaction of two great men who once possessed it. Ssu-ma Ch'ien never touched the stone with his hands, and he too imputed evil because of the reactions of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. If Ssu-ma had not been under such a strain he might have paid closer attention to the shape of the stone, and reached a different conclusion.”

  Master Li grinned at us and quoted Ssu-ma. ” ‘Smooth flat area rising to round concave bowl shape.’ What does that suggest to you?”

  It suggested nothing at all to me or Moon Boy, but Grief of Dawn's eyes lit up.

  “A place to grind an ink stick and a bowl to dip the brush into. It was a natural ink stone,” she said.

  “Good girl! Natural ink stones are highly prized, and this one was presented first to Lao Tzu and then to Chuang Tzu. I would give almost anything to have been there when the great men first used it,” Master Li said. “Their writing brushes dipped into the well and moved over the flat area, coming into contact with a stone that carried the touch of Heaven, and they gaped with stunned eyes when the calligraphy that flowed from their brushes was that of the gods. They could keep quiet about the stone and claim such genius as their own, and the temptation must have been terrible, and they yelled, ‘Evil!’ and hurled the stone away. Anyone who heard them would assume they were referring to the stone, not the temptation that came with it.”

  He placed the piece of stone into his purse and secured it with a leather thong.

  “This is only one piece. There are two to go,” he said grimly. “When the Laughing Prince rose from the dead he was totally mad and almost totally mindless, and he couldn't possibly have planned rational actions. Somebody else has been doing the thinking, and somewhere down here is the ringleader who has his hands on Prince Liu Pao. Unless…”

  His voice trailed off. We knew what he was thinking, and our faces were white and strained as we methodically moved among the Monks of Mirth. We pulled back cowl after cowl. All we found were white skulls, or recent ones with patches of skin and hair still clinging to them. Moon Boy nearly had a heart attack when both empty eye sockets of a skull suddenly winked at him, but then a frightened bat flew from the hollow skull. Something terrible might have happened to the prince, but at least he wasn't one of the monks.

  We took torches and bent close to the floor. It took nearly an hour to find it, but Moon Boy suddenly whooped happily. A scarlet tassel lay at the entrance of one of the side passages. Again we clutched our weapons and started off, with me in front and Grief of Dawn covering the rear.

  If the prince hadn't managed to leave that trail we would have been hopelessly lost in a matter of minutes. It was a maze inside a labyrinth that was inside another maze, and tunnels branched off in all directions. Everywhere we saw heavy wooden braces holding the ceilings together. We had to move carefully to avoid touching scaffolding, and we found ourselves whispering, as though a loud word could bring the tomb down on our heads. Tomb it was: room after room, some finished and some incomplete, designed for every conceivable function and pleasure. The Laughing Prince had decided to take his whole world with him, and I even expected a polo field until I realized that in his day we had imported the marvelous horses from India (left by the mad Greek invader) but not the game that went with them.

  The scarlet tassels continued to show us the way. Moon Boy whispered that he could hear water, and a few minutes later we stepped into a beautiful cave. From what we could see in torchlight, the stone was blue and green and very beautiful, and a marble floor led to a pool fed by a small trickle of water falling from a ledge nearly forty feet above it. Marble steps led up to jutting rock shelves, and I had a weird vision of a parade of skeletons and mummies climbing up to dive.

  Moon Boy held up a hand. “Something moving,” he whispered. “It's coming this way. Up there,” he whispered, pointing to one of the rock shelves above the pool. Then we all froze like statues, because a high screeching voice began to shriek.

  “Master, O Master, the game nears your bow!

  An old stag, two young bucks, and a lovely young doe”

  The echoes bounced back and forth between the walls and vibrated into endless passageways. Something moved. A small graceful figure wrapped in a robe of motley was standing on the shelf looking down at us. I stopped breathing when I saw the cowl was pulled back just far enough for the top of the head to be seen above dark shadows. The hair was the color of fire. I heard a clear lilting laugh, and then the pure lovely voice of a girl.

  “I hope I didn't frighten anybody. Who are you?”

  Master Li's eyes were slits so narrow I wondered how he could see anything, and his cool voice was sardonic.

  “Tourists,” he said. “Who are you?”

  The girl shyly plucked at her robe. “My friend calls me Fire Girl,” she said. “Have you seen him?”

  “Possibly,” Master Li said. “Is your friend the happy fellow who cavorts with monks who wear robes like yours?”

  “Yes. He's my friend until my real friend comes, but I haven't seen him for the longest time.” Her pure voice was puzzled. “He promised to come back, I know he did, but I can't remember when it was.”

  Master Li heaved a sigh and reached for his wine flask.

  “His name, no doubt, is Wolf.”

  “Yes!” the girl cried delightedly. “Have you seen him? I've been waiting and waiting and I know we have something important to do, but my head isn't very clear and I can't remember what it is.”

  She had the most beautiful young voice I had ever heard, but there was a strange discordant note behind it. Something was off center, and it came not from the vocal chords but the mind.

  Master Li swallowed some wine, and for once he didn't seem to enjoy the taste. “We also have a friend,” he said. “He has funny hair that sticks out all over, and ink stains on his nose. He may have gone with your other friend, the one with the monks.”

  “Yes, I saw him.” She gestured vaguely behind her. “Back there. Maybe he's sick, because they were carrying him.”

  “Then we'd better go to him with some medicine,” Master Li said reasonably. “Do the monks call your friend the Lord of Laughter?”

  “Yes, but I don't like it when he laughs,” she said gravely. “He smells bad too, but when I woke up I was all alone, and I was alone for the longest time, and I was glad when I found him.”

  “That was when you learned how to open the doors and get into the burial chamber,” Master Li said matter-of-factly. “Was he out of his coffin when you found him?”

  She plucked her robe nervously and was silent for a long time.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “But he wasn't really awake, and it took me the longest time to learn how to wake him up.”

  “With the stone from the sacristy?”

  “Yes, but then he wasn't any fun,” the girl said petulantly. “He wasn't any good at games, and he got nasty unless I made the stone sing and calm him down, and when I asked him to find more friends, he came back with those monks, and they weren't any fun either.”

  “Aren't you forgetting something?” Master Li said coaxingly. “You had two other friends, didn't you? Two men who came down from outside? They carried you up the steps so you could slide, and then you shot a few arrows, and then you went back to the slide, and one day you found out how to get into the burial chamber.”

  She plucked her robe more nervously. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “And your other friend wasn't out of his coffin then, remember?” Master Li said gently. “You had the men lift the lid, didn't you? And you'd already found out about that iron plate in front of the desk, and the men stood there so you could pay them. It must have been hard to pull the lever.”

  Tears we
re trickling through her lovely voice, pearls slowly drifting down through nectar.

  “I didn't want to do it, but they would have told everybody about the room of gold and the suit of jade, and I knew I had to keep it secret. I have to keep everything secret. I can't remember why, but I know it's important, and one day Wolf will come back and remind me of the reason.”

  “Secrets can be very hard to keep,” Master Li said sympathetically. “At night you went into the world above and listened at windows and heard things, and one night you came back to the cavern and told your friend who smells so bad that a monk from the monastery had a manuscript by somebody named Ssu-ma Ch'ien, and your friend told you that Ssu-ma had found an entrance to the tomb. Isn't that how it happened?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “And after that you listened at another window and learned that the monk had made a copy, and your friend who smells so bad had to deal with that too.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “You were there! You and your friend with the hair and ink spots.” She threw back her head and laughed like a peal of lovely bells. “Your friend's hair is really very funny. Do you want to see where they carried him?”

  Master Li swallowed more wine and put his flask away. “That might be a nice idea,” he said dryly. “Lead on, Girl of Fire.”

  My head was hurting, and words slipped like sly lizards through cracks in my solid granite brain, darting, stopping motionless, creeping cautiously toward meanings: “You told your friend who smells so bad that a monk from the monastery had a manuscript by somebody named Ssu-ma Ch'ien, and your friend told you…” The girl had said yes, and that her smelly friend had also planned the second burglary and murder, but how could the Laughing Prince have planned anything? He hadn't been rational! Suddenly I realized that Master Li had led the girl to confirm that the only two people who could have been responsible for the murders of the monks were the Laughing Prince and the girl herself, and the girl had certainly killed the two gardeners.

  But was she rational? She kept her distance as we climbed to the rock shelf, moving like a timid fawn as she turned into one of the side tunnels. Her beautiful voice reached back through the darkness, singing.

  “The boy who dies, dies not in vain;

  The Great Wheel turns, he comes again.

  The girl who grieves and drinks of this,

  Will be awakened with a kiss.”

  Master Li grunted and flicked a finger downward, and I saw why he was following the girl wherever she led. One more scarlet tassel lay on the tunnel floor. She might be crazy, but she was leading us in the right direction.

  “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 sweet notes echoed away into the distance, and the girl's voice spoke from the darkness ahead. “I don't remember what that means, but Wolf will tell me when he comes,” she said trustingly.

  We turned and twisted through tunnels, all braced with rickety old wood. Four more scarlet tassels told us we were going in the right direction, and finally the small dim figure ahead of us turned into one more entrance, and her voice drifted back: “They took him in here.”

  When we reached the opening and stepped inside to a small cave, the girl was gone, but I saw another passageway in the far wall. The cave had once been a storeroom, and old metal tool racks lined a wall. Ancient posts lifted to crossbeams that held up the shaky ceiling. One of the posts had cracked, and somebody had tied coils of rope around the split.

  Something was wrong. My gut told me that, not my mind, and I forced my eyes to move slowly around the cave. Suddenly they jerked back. A rope? A rope that had survived seven centuries and wasn't even frayed? I strode forward so I could see the other side of the thick post. The rope extended to a hole in the wall, and it was lifting and tightening. I swore and swung with my axe, but I was too late. Just before the blade reached it, the rope jerked taut and the flimsy old post snapped right in half.

  Other posts groaned in protest. They bent, and the entire ceiling suddenly dropped two feet. The tortured posts screamed, and then they snapped with deafening sharp cracking sounds. Splinters of wood shot around the cave like vicious spears, and rocks tumbled down, and the entire framework supporting the ceiling began to bulge in the center. I dove forward as the bulge bent toward the floor and got beneath the center beam and heaved upward with all my might. I couldn't lift it, of course, but it temporarily stayed where it was.

  “Get out!” I yelled.

  I glanced back. My mind refused to believe what my eyes were telling me. It couldn't be. It couldn't be. Surely a shack in Peking would echo with happy laughter, and an old sage would whistle “Hot Ashes” and open another wine jar when his young wife slipped into the shed in back to visit Number Ten Ox, and Moon Boy and the prince would come every few months, and…

  And my heart believed what my eyes said, and turned to ice. Moon Boy was cradling Grief of Dawn in his arms, and this time no medicine on earth would help her. A shaft of splintered wood at least three inches thick had struck her square in the chest like a bolt from a catapult, and she was as dead as Tou Wan. Moon Boy was not going to leave her body to be crushed. He picked her up and carried her back toward the tunnel, and then I saw no more as my eyes blurred with tears. The ceiling sounded as though it was groaning with grief as it pressed down upon me. I couldn't move or the whole works would collapse.

  Master Li's hand was on my shoulder. “Is the weight distributed evenly?” he asked.

  “No,” I panted. “It's tilted forward.”

  Master Li scuttled to the old iron tool racks. Some were very thick and strong, and he began walking one toward me. He got it beneath the beam, and then he wrestled with another one. When they were placed on both sides of me I bent my knees, lowering the center beam as slowly as possible. It was shuddering like a living thing, and it wouldn't remain in one piece much longer. It touched the tool racks.

  Master Li had moved back to the tunnel opening. I let go, dropped to the floor, pushed back, and did a back flip to the opening. I just made it to the tunnel before the beam snapped in half, and Master Li hopped up on my back and I began to run. The crash of the falling ceiling nearly deafened us. The whole tunnel was shaking and dust billowed and rocks and wood splinters flew. I was running blind, but then I saw a glow of light through the darkness and dust. Moon Boy had the body of Grief of Dawn over his shoulder, and he was waving his torch.

  Once before I had seen Master Li use his incredible memory to find the way back through a labyrinth, and now he did it again. He took the second opening on the right, then the third on the left, then the first on the left, and kept it up without hesitation even though rocks were falling and stones were screaming like tigers as they scraped together. We ran through one more opening and found we were back at the pool. In a minute we were back at the tunnel we had taken before, and then we carne to a halt.

  The vibration had shuddered through the entire cavern, and some ceilings were weaker than others. The tunnel that would have taken us back to the Monks of Mirth was completely blocked by a rockslide.

  “Master Li, I can hear water that way!” Moon Boy shouted. “It sounds like the river!”

  Now Moon Boy took the lead, groping through passage after passage, moving ever closer to the sound. At last Master Li and I could hear it too, and we stumbled from a hole to the bank of the black river in the huge central cavern. Moon Boy's torchlight bounced across the water and revealed the features of the first statue we had seen: Yen-wang-yeh, the former First Lord of Hell. We were only a few feet from the stairs that led up to Princes’ Path and safety.

  Master Li hopped down from my back and trotted back into the tunnel we had come from. He told Moon Boy to raise his torch, and he studied the vast structure of scaffolding with the eyes of an engineer. He walked over to the central supporting post near the left-hand wall There was a crack in the ce
nter of it.

  “Ox, can you break this thing?” he asked.

  “It's old and fragile,” I said. “Sir, it might break, but if a tunnel collapsed here, after the collapse back there, wouldn't that put a tremendous strain on the entire structure? That crazy girl is still in there, and the prince may still be alive.”

  “Do it,” Master Li commanded.

  “Venerable Sir—”

  I shut my mouth. Master Li was glaring at me, and it was not for Number Ten Ox to contradict the great man. I put my shoulder to the post, but I had underestimated how rotten it was. It snapped at the first pressure, and I very nearly fell and impaled myself on the stump. Master Li hopped up on my back and Moon Boy lifted the body of Grief of Dawn and we began to run. We could hear nothing but the scream of splintering wood and the thunder of falling rocks, but I saw Moon Boy's lips opening and closing and his finger frantically pointing up.

  Just ahead of us a huge crack was spreading across the ceiling of the cavern. With an enormous roar, about a hundred tons of rock crashed down and blocked all possible paths to the staircase. The river heaved, and a tidal wave raced back against the current. Master Li was pounding my shoulder and pointing, and I realized our only hope was to get back to the staircase that led up to the formal tomb. Moon Boy was very strong, and he would rather have died than leave Grief of Dawn's body down there, and he carried her while I carried Master Li as we ran for our lives. The face of the cavern ceiling was spreading into a succession of wide smiles. Rocks fell like hailstones and the black river turned white with foam. The walls shuddered and the floor bucked like a wild horse, and chunks of shattered wood and clouds of dust burst from every side passage.

  I climbed into an enormous extended hand, and then up and over the torso of the fallen Japanese King of the Dead. We raced on past fallen statues. Gilgamesh still stood in his pride, holding the lion, but Anubis had fallen. Screeching grinding sounds hurt our ears. A huge crack opened in the floor, and Toth and Ament dropped into the pit and disappeared. We just made it past the enormous mummy of Osiris before it toppled over and smashed, and inside my head and heart I was listening to a beloved voice: