The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  One evening the children of Ku-fu were beginning one of the games that had originated somewhere back toward the beginning of time, and suddenly they stopped short. A hollow, bodiless voice—one boy later said that it might have been echoing through two hundred miles of bamboo pipe—drifted down to them from the Eye of the Dragon. So strange were the words that every one of the children remembered them perfectly, even though they took to their heels as soon as their hearts resumed beating.

  Was it possible that poor Wan, the most important of all sentinels on the most important of all watchtowers was sending a message to China through the children of the humble village of Ku-fu? If so, it was a very strange message indeed, and sages and scholars struggled for centuries to wrest some meaning from it.

  If my illustrious readers would care to take a crack at it, I will wish them the very best of luck.

  Jade plate,

  Six, eight.

  Fire that burns hot,

  Night that is not.

  Fire that burns cold,

  First silver, then gold.

  The Plague

  My story begins with the silk harvest in the Year of the Tiger 3,337 (A.D. 639), when the prospects for a record crop had never seemed better.

  The eggs that Ma the Grub handed out were quite beautiful, jet black and glowing with health, and the leaves on the mulberry trees were so thick that the groves resembled tapestries woven from deep green brocade, and youngsters raced around singing, “Mulberry leaves so shiny and right, children all clap hands at the sight!” Our village crackled with excitement. Girls carried straw baskets up the hill to the monastery, and the bonzes lined them with yellow paper upon which they had drawn pictures of Lady Horsehead, and the abbot blessed the baskets and burned incense to the patron of sericulture. Bamboo racks and trays were taken to the river and vigorously scrubbed. Wildflowers were picked and crushed, lamp wicks cut into tiny pieces, and the oldest members of each family smeared cloves of garlic with moist earth and placed them against the walls of the cottages. If the garlic produced many sprouts it would mean bountiful harvest, and never in living memory had anyone seen so many sprouts. The women slept with the sheets of silkworm eggs pressed against their bare flesh, in order to hasten the hatching process through body heat, and the old ones tossed handfuls of rice into pots that bubbled over charcoal fires. When the steam lifted straight up, without a quiver, they yelled, “Now!”

  The women brushed the eggs into the baskets with goose feathers. Then they sprinkled the crushed wildflowers and pieces of lamp wicks on top and placed the baskets upon the bamboo racks. The goose feathers were carefully pinned to the sides of the baskets, and charcoal fires were lit beneath the racks. (The significance of wildflowers, lamp wicks, and goose feathers has been lost in antiquity, but we would never dream of changing the custom.) The families knelt to pray to Lady Horsehead, and in every cottage the eggs hatched right on schedule.

  The Dark Ladies wriggled lazily, enjoying the heat of the fires, but they were not lazy for long. Unless one has seen them, it is quite impossible to imagine how much silkworms can—must—eat, and their only food is mulberry leaves. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the chewing sounds of ravenous silkworms are enough to waken hibernating bears, but sleep would be out of the question anyway. It takes thirty days, more or less, for silkworms to prepare to spin, and there are but three brief periods when they aren’t eating: the Short Sleep, the Second Sleep, and the Big Sleep. After the Big Sleep silkworms will die if an hour passes without food and we worked day and night stripping leaves from trees and carrying them to the cottages in basket brigades. The children were given regular rest periods, of course, but during the thirty days the rest of us were lucky to get sixty hours of sleep.

  The old ones tended the fires, because silkworms must have steady heat, and the children who were too young to work in basket brigades were turned out to fend for themselves. In grove after grove we stripped the trees to the bare branches, and then we stumbled in exhaustion to the mulberry grove that belonged to Pawnbroker Fang. That cost us more IOUs, but they were the finest trees in the village. Gradually the silkworms changed color, from black to green, and from green to white, and then translucent, and the oldest family members erected bamboo screens in front of the racks, because silkworms are shy when they begin to spin and must have privacy.

  The deafening feeding noises dropped to a roar, and then to a sound like distant surf, and then to a whisper. The silence that finally settled over our village seemed eerily unreal. There was nothing more to be done except to keep the fires going, and if fortune favored us we would pull the screens away in three days and see fields of snow: the white cocoons called Silkworm Blossoms, massed upon the racks and waiting to be reeled into spindles in continuous strands more than a thousand feet long.

  Some of us made it to our beds, but others simply dropped in their tracks.

  I awoke on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, which happened to be my nineteenth birthday, to the sound of a soft pattering rain. The clouds were beginning to lift. Slanting rays of sunlight slid through silver raindrops, and a soft mist drifted across the fields like smoke. In the distance I could see the hazy outline of Dragon’s Pillow, and nearby on the riverbank some boys were teasing Fang’s Fawn, who was riding a water buffalo. I decided that the boys were following her around because the rain had plastered her tunic around small shapely breasts that the pretty little girl didn’t have a month ago, and Fawn was enjoying the attention immensely. Bells were ringing from the monastery upon the hill.

  I stretched lazily in bed, savoring the smells of tea and porridge from Auntie Hua’s kitchen, and then I jerked upright. The boys at the riverbank were staring wide-eyed at Fang’s Fawn, who had turned pale as death. She clutched her throat and gave a sharp cry of pain and toppled from the water buffalo to the grass.

  I was out the door in an instant. Fawn’s eyes were wide and staring, but she didn’t see me while I tested her pulse, which was faint and erratic. Perspiration glistened on her forehead. I told the boys to run for her father, and then I picked her up and raced up the hill to the monastery.

  The abbot was also our doctor, professionally trained at Hanlin Academy, but he was clearly puzzled by Fawn’s sickness. Her vital signs had dropped so low that he had to hold a mirror to her lips to find a trace of condensation, and when he took a pin and pricked her flesh at various pain points there was no reaction. Her eyes were still wide and unseeing. Suddenly the pretty little girl sat up and screamed. The sound was shocking in the hush of the monastery. Her hands clawed the air, fending off something that wasn’t there, and she jerked convulsively. Then she fell back upon the bed and her eyes closed. Her body grew limp, and once more her vital signs dropped to almost nothing.

  “Demons!” I whispered.

  “I sincerely hope so,” the abbot said grimly, and I later learned that he had begun to suspect rabies, and that he would prefer to confront the most hideous demons from the most horrible corners of Hell.

  There had been noises swelling up in the village below the hill, a confusion of sounds, and now we began to hear curses from the men and wails and lamentations from the women. The abbot looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I was out the door and down the hill in a flash, and after that things got so confusing that I have difficulty sorting them out in my mind.

  It began with Auntie Hua. She had been tending the fire at the silkworm rack in her cottage and she had smelled something that worried her. When she cautiously peered through a crack in the screen she had not seen a field of snow, but a black rotting mass of pulp. Her agonized wails brought the neighbors, who raced back to their own cottages, and as howls arose from every corner of the village it became apparent that for the first time in living memory our silk harvest had been a total failure. That was merely the beginning.

  Big Hong the blacksmith ran from his house with wide frightened eyes, carrying his small son in his arms. Little Hong’s eyes were wide and unseeing, and he
screamed and clawed the air. The blacksmith was followed by Wang the wineseller, whose small daughter was screaming and clawing the air. More and more parents dashed out with children in their arms, and a frantic mob raced up the hill toward the monastery.

  It was not rabies. It was a plague.

  I stared in disbelief at two tiny girls who were standing in a doorway with their thumbs in their mouths. Mother Ho’s great-granddaughters were so sickly that the abbot had worked night and day to keep them alive, yet they were completely untouched by the plague. I ran past them into their cottage. Mother Ho was ninety-two and sinking fast, and my heart was in my mouth as I approached her bed and drew back the covers. I received a stinging slap on my nose.

  “Who do you think you are? The Imperial Prick?” the old lady yelled.

  (She meant Emperor Wu-ti. After his death his lecherous ghost kept hopping into his concubines’ beds, and in desperation they had recruited new brides from all over, and it was not until the total reached 503 that the exhausted spectre finally gave up and crawled back into its tomb.)

  I ran back out and turned into cottage after cottage where tiny children stared at me and cried, or laughed and wanted to play, and the old ones who wept beside the racks of rotting silkworms were otherwise as healthy as horses. Then I ran back up the hill and told the abbot what I had seen, and when we made a list the truth was indisputable, and it was also unbelievable.

  Not one child under the age of eight and not one person over the age of thirteen had been affected by the plague, but every child—every single one—between the ages of eight and thirteen had screamed and blindly clawed the air, and now lay as still as death in the infirmary that the abbot had set up in the bonzes’ common room. The weeping parents looked to the abbot for a cure, but he spread his arms and cried out in despair:

  “First tell me how a plague can learn how to count!”

  Auntie Hua had always been the decisive one in the family. She took me aside. “Ox, the abbot is right,” she said hoarsely. “We need a wise man who can tell us how a plague can learn to count, and I have heard that there are such men in Peking, and that they live on the Street of Eyes. I have also heard that they charge dearly for their services.”

  “Auntie, it will take a week to squeeze money out of Pawnbroker Fang, even though Fawn is one of the victims,” I said.

  She nodded, and then she reached into her dress and pulled out a worn leather purse. When she dumped the contents into my hands I stared at more money than I had ever seen in my life: hundreds of copper coins, strung upon a green cord.

  “Five thousand copper cash, and you are never to tell your uncle about his. Not ever!” the old lady said fiercely. “Run to Peking. Go to the Street of Eyes and bring a wise man back to our village.”

  I had heard that Auntie Hua had been a rather wild beauty in her youth and I briefly wondered whether she might have reason to sacrifice to P’an Chin-lien, the patron of fallen women, but I had no time for such speculations because I was off and running like the wind.

  I share my birthday with the moon, and Peking was a madhouse when I arrived. Trying to shove through the mob that had turned out for the Moon Festival was like one of those nightmares in which one struggles through quicksand. The din was incredible, and I forced my way through the streets with the wild eyes and aching ears of a colt at a blacksmith’s convention, and I was quite terrified when I finally reached the street that I was looking for. It was an elegant avenue that was lined on both sides with very expensive houses, and above each door was the sign of a wide unblinking eye.

  “The truth revealed,” those eyes seemed to be saying. “We see everything.”

  I felt the first stirrings of hope, and I banged at the nearest door. It was opened by a haughty eunuch who was attired in clothes that I had previously associated with royalty, and he ran his eyes from my bamboo hat to my shabby sandals, clapped a perfumed handkerchief to his nose, and ordered me to state my business. The eunuch didn’t blink an eye when I said that I wanted his master to explain how a plague could learn to count, but when I said that I was prepared to pay as much as five thousand copper cash he turned pale, leaned weakly against the wall, and groped for smelling salts.

  “Five thousand copper cash?” he whispered. “Boy, my master charges fifty pieces of silver to find a lost dog!”

  The door slammed in my face, and when I tried the next house I exited through the air, pitched by six husky footmen while a bejeweled lackey shook his fist and screamed, “You dare to offer five thousand copper cash to the former chief investigator for the Son of Heaven himself? Back to your mud hovel, you insolent peasant!”

  In house after house the result was the same, except that I exited in a more dignified manner—my fists were clenched and there was a glint in my eyes, and I am not exactly small—and I decided that I was going to have to hit a wise man over the head, stuff him in a bag, and carry him back to Ku-fu whether he liked it or not. Then I received a sign from Heaven. I had reached the end of the avenue and was starting to go back up the other side and suddenly a shaft of brilliant sunlight shot through the clouds and darted like an arrow into a narrow winding alley. It sparkled upon the sign of an eye, but this eye was not wide open. It was half-shut.

  “Part of the truth revealed,” the eye seemed to be saying. “Some things I see, but some I don’t.”

  If that was the message it was the first sensible thing that I had seen in Peking, and I turned and started down the alley.

  A Sage with a Slight Flaw in His Character

  The sign was old and shabby and it hung above the open door of a sagging bamboo shack. When I timidly stepped inside I saw smashed furniture and a mass of shattered crockery, and the reek of sour wine made my head reel. The sole inhabitant was snoring upon a filthy mattress.

  He was old almost beyond belief. He could not have weighed more than ninety pounds, and his frail bones would have been more suitable for a large bird. Drunken flies were staggering through pools of spilled wine, and crawling giddily up the ancient gentleman’s bald skull, and tumbling down the wrinkled seams of a face that might have been a relief map of all China, and becoming entangled in a wispy white beard. Small bubbles formed and burst upon the old man’s lips, and his breath was foul.

  I sighed and turned to go, and then I stopped dead in my tracks and caught my breath.

  Once an eminent visitor to our monastery had displayed the gold diploma that was awarded to the scholar who had won third place in the Imperial chin-shih examination, and in schoolbooks I had seen illustrations of the silver diploma that was awarded to second place, but never did I dream that I would be privileged to see the flower. The real thing, not a picture of it. There it was, casually tacked to a post not two feet from my eyes, and I reverently blew away the dust to read that seventy-eight years ago a certain Li Kao had been awarded first place among all the scholars in China, and had received an appointment as a full research fellow in the Forest of Culture Academy.

  I turned from the picture of the rose and gazed with wide eyes at the ancient gentleman upon the mattress. Could this be the great Li Kao, whose brain had caused the empire to bow at his feet? Who had been elevated to the highest rank of mandarin, and whose mighty head was now being used as a pillow for drunken flies? I stood there, rooted in wonder, while the wrinkles began to heave like the waves of a gray and storm-tossed sea. Two red-rimmed eyes appeared, and a long spotted tongue slid out and painfully licked parched lips.

  “Wine!” he wheezed.

  I searched for an unbroken jar, but there wasn’t one. “Venerable Sir, I fear that all the wine is gone,” I said politely.

  His eyes creaked toward a shabby purse that lay in a puddle. “Money!” he wheezed.

  I picked up the purse and opened it. “Venerable Sir, I fear that the money is gone too,” I said.

  His eyeballs rolled up toward the top of his head, and I decided to change the subject.

  “Have I the honor of addressing the great Li Kao, forem
ost among the scholars of China? I have a problem to place before such a man, but all that I can afford to pay is five thousand copper cash,” I said sadly.

  A hand like a claw slid from the sleeve of his robe. “Give!” he wheezed.

  I placed the string of coins in his hand, and his fingers closed around it, taking possession. Then the fingers opened.

  “Take this five thousand copper cash,” he said, enunciating with a painful effort, “and return as soon as possible with all the wine that you can buy.”

  “At once, Venerable Sir,” I sighed.

  Having performed similar chores for Uncle Nung more times than I cared to count I judged it wiser to buy some food as well, and when I returned I had two small jars of wine, two small bowls of congee, and a valuable lesson in the buying power of copper coins. I propped the old man’s head up and poured wine down his throat until he had revived enough to grab the jar and finish the rest of it at a gulp, and long practice enabled me to slip a bowl of congee into his fingers and get it to his lips before he realized that it wasn’t wine. Two spots of color had appeared in his cheeks when he finished it, and after the second jar of wine he willingly attacked the second bowl of congee.

  “Who you?” he said between slurps.

  “My surname is Lu and my personal name is Yu, but I am not to be confused with the eminent author of The Classic of Tea. Everyone calls me Number Ten Ox,” I said.

  “My surname is Li and my personal name is Kao, and there is a slight flaw in my character,” he said matter-of-factly. “You got a problem?”

  I told him the whole story, and I was weeping at the end. He listened with interest, and had me go over it again, and then he pitched the empty bowl over his shoulder so that it smashed upon the rest of the crockery. When he hopped up from his mattress I was astonished to see that he was is spry as a goat.