The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  Not Number Ten Ox, who couldn’t decipher a single character of ancient scholarly shorthand. I got up and inwardly sneered at the fragments of dialogue that drifted to my ears. They were like children playing games, and we had serious matters to think about.

  “Never seen so many errors of fact in a few brief paragraphs.”

  “Deliberate, perhaps.”

  “Errors as starting points?”

  “Interesting how many errors deal with numbers.”

  “Indeed yes. Here he writes, ‘one-hundred and forty six scales of a dragon.’”

  Even I knew that a dragon has 36 evil scales and 117 good ones, which used to add up to 153 when I was in school. I sniffed contemptuously, and wandered around looking at flowers.

  “Break it down. One, four, and six.”

  “Each error probably has a direct relationship to each mention of T’an, his father’s name.”

  “He was really straining here, wasn’t he? Comparing the marks on a stone to the ‘two hundred fifty-three points of acupuncture.’”

  Didn’t he realize we had two murdered monks on our hands, and that strange sound was driving people out of their minds while Princes’ Path was being destroyed? I decapitated a few dandelions.

  “One…two…three. Got it!” Master Li said happily. “Ox, stop pouting and come over here.”

  Pouting? Me? I walked back with dignity and peered down over Master Li’s shoulder. His finger danced across the fragment.

  “Coded sections begin with mentions of Ssu-ma’s father’s name and run to the next error in fact. The numbers give the spacing between important words, and here is what we have: ‘Down stairs…. Cold room…. Tunnel to construction site…. Stone in sacristy….’”

  He leaned back happily. I stared.

  “That’s all?” I said incredulously.

  “It’s all we need, and all thieves would need, for that matter,” Master Li said complacently. “Unless anyone knows of another place where a stone was kept in a sacristy, Ssu-ma Ch’ien was referring to this estate. He either went or was advising someone to go down the stairs to the cold room, and somewhere there would be a tunnel that led to a construction site and the sacristy of the stone. A cold room is as far beneath the earth as one can put it, and what could be the purpose of a construction site deep under the earth?”

  Master Li reached into his tunic and took out a piece of cloth. I recognized it with something of a shock as being a piece of the wrapping around the mummy of the Laughing Prince.

  “Prince, this has faded, but one can still see that the color was imperial yellow, as it should be for the brother of an emperor,” Master Li said. “However, I seem to recall that Tou Wan preceded him in death by a few months. Wouldn’t your ancestor still have been in mourning for his wife?”

  The prince stared, and turned purple as the implications struck him. They took a good deal longer to strike me.

  “Of course. It should be white. You mean I just crushed the skeleton of a total stranger?”

  “Tsao Tsao built seventy-two decoy tombs,” Master Li said mildly.

  “I’ll be damned if I’ll go through that experience seventy-two times!” the prince yelled.

  “I doubt that will be necessary,” said Master Li. He looked up at me. “Wake up, Ox. The Laughing Prince amassed an incredible fortune which has never been found, and people have been buying fake treasure maps and digging holes in the Valley of Sorrows ever since. Now we have the words of Ssu-ma Ch’ien. Words that thieves would go to any lengths to get their hands on, because what could the Laughing Prince have been secretly constructing deep in the bowels of the earth? Dear boy, we’re probably sitting on top of a tomb that contains enough loot to buy half the empire.”

  “The abandoned wings were paradise for a boy,” the prince said nostalgically. “Think of the hiding places. I once counted a hundred and six rooms filled with things that nobody considered to be valuable. Not valuable to a boy? Chests filled with ancient costumes for masquerades, for example, and love letters bound together with challenges to duels, and portraits of beautiful concubines and sinister distant cousins.”

  We followed him as he confidently stepped around rotting sections of wooden floors and ducked under sagging beams. He stepped into an alcove and began prying boards from a window. Sunlight burst inside and glowed upon a portrait upon the wall.

  “Liu Sheng, better known as the Laughing Prince.”

  The silk was still intact, although faded with age, and the color was very good. The man who gazed from the portrait was quite handsome. I judged him to be in his early thirties. His forehead was high and broad and serene, and his thin nose had a proud hook to it, and his mouth was firm and well formed. His eyes were quite strange in that they appeared to be clear but somehow they didn’t focus. It was as though the Laughing Prince was not gazing out at the viewer but at something in front of the viewer—a ghost, perhaps, or some strange vision that only he could see. His hands were small and so gracefully formed that they were almost feminine. I could see no trace of madness, yet something in the assurance of the pose suggested an inner arrogance that was capable of almost anything. His dress was clearly symbolic of something but I didn’t know what. Master Li did.

  “Great Buddha, if his imperial brother saw him dressed like this, the yellow scarf would have been on its way inside of an hour,” Master Li said. “The son of a sow thought he ranked above the emperor. In fact, he thought he ranked above most of the gods.”

  He explained the ornaments to me.

  “Upper garment: sun, moon, stars, mountain, dragon, and the flowery fowl. Lower garment: temple cup, aquatic grass, flames, rice, hatchet, and symbol of distinction. Only the emperor of China is allowed to wear all twelve ornaments, and the Laughing Prince added a thirteenth: the peacock eye, which symbolizes the Second Lord of Heaven. One assumes he was preparing to place his throne beside the August Personage of Jade.”

  Now the strange unfocused eyes took on a different aspect, and I decided I was looking at a man who had found the world not to his liking and stepped outside it—like Pea-Head Chou in my valley, who joined the roosters every morning and commanded the sun to rise.

  When the prince led us away I found that I was tiptoeing, and the painted eyes appeared to be following me. The prince made his way to a brassbound door and unlocked it with an ancient key that was as big as his forearm. “As I said, this place was paradise for a boy,” he remarked.

  Paradise indeed. Inside was the old armory, and some of the axes were so huge they could only have had a ceremonial function. A thousand weapons hung in racks along the walls, and we found some that were better than anything modern. I chose a small axe and a short sword, and the prince selected a spear and a dagger, and Master Li stuck a row of knives into his belt. The next door took us outside into an inner courtyard, and in a tool shed I found a modern steel pick and bar. In the center of the courtyard was a stone building that housed an abandoned well, and a flight of steps that led down to deep basements.

  “The old cold room is at the bottom,” the prince said. “I doubt that anyone has been down there since I played at being a hero locked in a terrible dungeon.”

  Master Li searched for any signs of recent entrance, and his eyes gleamed when he saw layers of untouched dust. I had brought some torches, and we lit them. The prince started forward, but I jumped ahead of him. “A thousand pardons, Your Highness, but this is what I’m here for,” I said politely. I started down the stairs, clutching my axe. The prince, I decided, had been a very brave little boy, and I couldn’t suppress a small shudder as I cut through thick cobwebs that hung like blankets, and dozens of spiders scuttled over my hands and arms.

  Then I was assaulted by a hundred demons—no, bats—no, white bats—and I let out a yelp and dove to the stairs and covered my head with my hands. When I dared to peek I saw that Master Li was standing calmly behind me, regarding me with a mixture of exasperation and amusement.

  “Number Ten Ox, there
is not one word of truth to peasant legends about white bats,” he said wryly. “They aren’t even albino. They suffer from a parasitical skin disease, like the so-called white elephants of India, and they do not live a thousand years, and their black blood is not an Elixir of Life, and if you touch them, your hair will not fall out.”

  The prince smiled at me reassuringly. “As a boy I caught a few and kept them as pets,” he said. “Unsanitary, but no worse than that.”

  He ran a hand through his wild mop of hair, and I sheepishly uncovered mine. I got to my feet and reclaimed my axe and torch and started down again, feeling very foolish. There were four landings. The last flight of stairs ended in the cold room, which was enormous, and Master Li and the prince examined the solid stone floor and walls for some sign of a secret tunnel. I began to cheer up as I watched them. Finally Master Li stepped back and clapped his hands to his hips and glared at me.

  “Why are you standing there like a statue?” he growled. “You should know something about digging tunnels. Find the damn thing.”

  It was childish, but I had to do something to counter the humiliation with the bats. I made a great show of examining the floor. “Aha!” I said. I examined the walls. “Aha!” I said. I stood thoughtfully, posing for a portrait of The Young Genius. “Ssu-ma Ch’ien wrote ‘cold room,’ but not ‘in the cold room,’” I said. I made my way back to the stairs and examined them carefully. “Aha!” I said, and I started climbing to the last landing.

  Li had a smile on his face as he followed, and I couldn’t keep it up.

  “I saw it on the way down,” I explained. “I was thinking about the labor involved in carrying huge chunks of ice up five flights of steep stairs, so I looked and found what I was looking for.”

  I swung my torch to both side walls to show old bronze rings set in them. “Pulleys, with center ropes hauling some kind of sleds,” I said. “They’re evenly spaced and neatly in line except for here.” I lifted the torch to the right-hand wall and showed an arc in the line of rings that ran almost up to the ceiling. “This made it awkward to get equal leverage on both sides. The only possible reason for it is that the wall isn’t solid.”

  “Bravo,” Master Li said, and I felt much better.

  He held my torch and I spat on my hands and swung the pick. It didn’t take very long. Soon I had a crack I could work with, and I pried out a stone slab with the steel bar, and the torches almost went out as the flames joined the air rushing into the dark space behind. In a few minutes I had a hole big enough to pass through, and we entered a tunnel carved through stone, sloping downward.

  “Be very careful,” Master Li cautioned. “If this does indeed lead to a tomb, it may have been set with traps for grave robbers.”

  We moved slowly, testing the floor in front of us for pits and nervously examining the ceiling for things that could fall on us. The tunnel sloped even more sharply downward, with many turns. We descended for such a length of time that I was willing to bet we had reached the level of the valley, or even below it, when the tunnel finally leveled out, and then after a hundred feet or so it began to slope upward. We climbed steadily, in total silence except for the sounds we made ourselves. There were no signs of traps. Finally our torchlight reflected back to us from the surface of a brick wall that completely blocked the tunnel. Master Li examined it and found nothing dangerous. My pick and steel bar went to work again. It was a double-thick wall, but no match for steel, and with a crash and a cloud of red brick dust, a large section of it soon collapsed. We coughed and wiped our eyes and held up our torches, and the dust slowly cleared, and we stood rooted to the spot, staring in horror at what lay upon the floor behind the wall.

  No wonder the tunnel had remained a secret. The workmen had never left it. We were staring at skeletons, hundreds and hundreds of them, piled almost to the ceiling. The prince was beyond speech as he gazed at the memento his ancestor had left behind. Master Li’s voice was cold and angry.

  “So much for the peasants. The soldiers who herded them here and bricked them up were probably rewarded with a banquet at which nobody survived the second course, and then the poisoners received their own rewards, and so on. It’s estimated that Emperor Shun killed eighty thousand men to keep the secret of his tomb, and even then it was discovered and looted inside of a century. Prince, this should put all doubts to rest. Your esteemed ancestor is indeed sleeping somewhere inside here.”

  He stepped past me and began tossing skeletons aside, and I forced myself to move. Piles of white bones rose like mounds of snow beside a road as we slowly cleared a path down the tunnel. After an hour we finally reached the end, and it was a blank brick wall. Three swings of the pick were enough to knock bricks loose, but then I felt a shock that numbed my hands and arms. The pick had struck solid iron. I moved to different positions, knocking bricks away, and discovered that a seamless iron wall ran from one side of the tunnel to the other, and from the top to the bottom.

  “There’s probably another brick retaining wall behind this one, and molten iron was poured into the gap,” Master Li said thoughtfully. “Ox, do you think?”

  I shrugged. “Iron is tough but it will break, and my bar is steel,” I said. “If I can pound four holes in it, I should be able to crack an opening big enough to crawl through.”

  After that my memory of the tunnel is one of noise. The steel bar produced hard harsh sounds that echoed back and forth between the narrow walls and banged against my head and ears and made me sick. I had to stop every now and then and sit with my head down between my legs until my stomach stopped heaving. I had a terrible headache, but I got into the slow steady rhythm of a woodcutter or ditchdigger, and cracks like cobwebs appeared beneath the point of the bar. Then small chunks of iron broke loose, and finally the bar plunged through. As Master Li suspected there was another brick wall behind, but that caused no problem. The other holes went more quickly now that I had the feel of it, and in about three hours I was able to crack the iron between two of the holes. Another hour was enough to finish the job. We crawled through the small opening and lifted our torches and looked up at a ceiling gilded with real gold. The floor was marble, and the walls were richly ornamented with silver and bronze. We were in a long hallway lined with side rooms, and we clutched our weapons nervously and stepped into the first one.

  No wonder criminals would do anything to find the place. Chests were piled so high with gold and jewels that the lids couldn’t close, and bars of gold and silver were stacked like firewood around the walls. Prince Liu Pao was so furious his torch was shaking like a lantern swinging in a high wind.

  “Four years before my ancestor died there was a famine in this part of the empire,” he said in a high tight voice. “Two hundred thousand people died, but the Laughing Prince said he was unable to help because all his money was tied up in mining equipment and debts.”

  The prince stalked on to the next room, which held huge jars that had probably contained rare oils and perfumes and spices. Other rooms contained weapons that were so covered with costly jewels they were quite useless for warfare, and we stopped and gaped at a huge room that contained the skeletons of forty horses. Apparently the Laughing Prince had intended to ride in style in his next life, and it wasn’t only horses he rode. The prince almost approached Master Li’s level of swearing as we entered the Hall of Concubines and found forty small skeletons neatly arranged on forty beds.

  “No sign of panic or disarray. Poisoned,” Master Li said grimly. “Timed, no doubt, to breathe their last along with their master.”

  After that we more or less expected to find what we did: skeletons of cooks, courtiers, dancers, actors, acrobats, eunuchs, clerks, accountants—the lunatic lord had taken his entire court with him, or so I assumed. Master Li had reservations.

  “One element is noticeably missing. Where are his Monks of Mirth?” he wondered.

  We had no answer to that. We entered banquet rooms and game rooms and elegant state bedrooms, and we found closets cramme
d with the remains of costly clothes and pantries stuffed with petrified piles of rich foods. It wasn’t so much a tomb as a vast underground palace, and at the center was a huge throne room, which even had a chopping block as part of the entertainment. Behind the throne was a small door, and we entered a round room with a lapis lazuli floor, and walls and ceiling of solid gold. Two sarcophagi lay side by side. The one on the right bore the dragon symbols of an emperor, and the one on the left bore the phoenix symbols of an imperial consort.

  Master Li strode between the coffins to the back wall. There in a niche was a sacristy. The two side panels of the niche were covered with the same mysterious charts and formulas we had seen in the grotto, and the center panel carried the same inscription.

  In darkness languishes the precious stone.

  When will its excellence enchant the world?

  When seeming is taken for being, being becomes seeming.

  When nothing is taken for something, something becomes nothing.

  The stone dispels seeming and nothing,

  And climbs to the Gates of the Great Void.

  The sacristy was empty. Master Li swore angrily and whirled around and gestured for me to open the coffins. I stepped up to the one on the left. The lid was hard to move, but at last it began to slide down the grooves, and the further it slid, the wider our eyes grew. I stepped back, panting, and we stood in silence and gazed at the burial dress of Tou Wan, the bride of the Laughing Prince.