The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox
Page 40
“…then you wash the dragon bones and grind them into a fine powder, and put the powder into tiny silk bags and put the bags into the body cavities of dead cleaned swallows and leave them overnight…”
Master Li was smiling faintly as he listened to the innocent folk remedy. He began whistling very softly. I felt my face turn red, and Moon Boy had a hard time suppressing laughter, and Grief of Dawn flushed and began stumbling over words. The tune was “Hot Ashes,” and for some peculiar reason the phrase “scraping hot ashes” refers to incest between in-laws—a young wife and her son-in-law, for example—and could it be said that I was something of a substitute son to Master Li? The arrangement that Grief of Dawn had in mind could become rather complicated, and Master Li held up a hand and cut her short.
“Forget about resurrecting erections,” he said dryly. “At my age the last thing a man wants is one more petrified part. As for the rest of it, I’ll think it over, and if I were you, I’d work on a young fellow who wears his peasant propriety like a suit of armor.”
Grief of Dawn dove beneath the water and popped up in front of me like a dolphin. Her waving hand encompassed Master Li and Moon Boy and the water and the sunlight and the grass and the flowers and everything else we were sharing. “Oh, Ox, what fun we could have, and how happy we could be,” she said pleadingly.
There was real yearning in her voice, and deep inside me it struck a sympathetic chord. My parents had died when I was nine. That had probably been the age of Moon Boy when he was first disowned, and Master Li hadn’t experienced family life for years, and Grief of Dawn couldn’t even remember if she had a family, and somehow I found myself thinking of the little shack in the alley in the coming winter, warm in the wind and snow, and I could smell the good food and fresh-scrubbed cleanliness that a young wife would bring, and I could hear the easy jokes and laughter, and I could see Moon Boy suddenly appearing like an exotic tropical bird—besides, if Master Li wasn’t worried about who slept where, why should I be?
Grief of Dawn started a water fight. We said no more about her hope. It was Master Li’s decision, and he would let her know in due course.
We didn’t want to be sidetracked by several years in jail. Grief of Dawn made Moon Boy promise to be on his best behavior when we arrived in Ch’ang-an, and Masier Li was in high spirits when he entered the Academy of Divination and Alchemic Research to get the report on the soil and plant samples. When he came out he was spitting nails.
“According to the finest minds in China, there is no trace of acid or poison or any other harmful substance,” he snarled. “The only thing wrong with Princes’ Path is that parts of it are stone-cold dead, and some oaf has scribbled on the bottom: ‘Extinction through natural decay.’”
Master Li swore without repeating himself all the way down the hill to Serpentine Park, where he said he wanted to try something.
“I’m reduced to grasping at straws,” he said sourly. “One straw concerns the last meal of the late librarian, Brother Squint-Eyes. I’ve been assuming that he paid for it with the down payment for Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s manuscript, and that his tracing copy was stolen during the crooks’ second visit to the monastery, but there could be another explanation. Let’s go to the exhibits.”
Bored schoolmasters were guiding classes around. Master Li found one with weak watery eyes and a nose covered with crimson veins, money changed hands, and the delighted schoolmaster dove into the nearest wineshop. Master Li took over the class, and after huddling with the brats he started off toward the Boar Pavilion. The boys, I saw with surprise, were marching behind the old man with the precision of the Imperial Guard. It really was quite impressive—an ancient gentleman of the old school and his beautifully behaved charges—and a crowd began to follow Confucius and sons.
“The hope of the empire!” exclaimed an emotional matron.
Master Li lined the boys up and gave the downbeat, and they honored the exhibits of past glories with the most perfect rendition of “Evening Lake Scenes” I have ever heard. The applause was deafening. Vendors were mobbed, and the lads disappeared behind mounds of gooey sweets. Master Li lined them up again and marched off to the Gallery of Beatitude, and there the lads delivered a flawless “Shadows on the Eastern Window.” Then they actually performed obeisances and kowtows.
“The hope of the empire!” the matron bawled, and a fierce old fellow with a floppy mustache told one and all that he had planned to return his medals to the General Staff in protest against the decline of standards, but now he wasn’t so sure about the decline.
The Temple of Immaculate Illumination was next, and the boys’ performance of “The Twin Pagodas of Orchid Stream” was so superb that every vendor in sight was cleaned out, and candy and crystallized fruit and honey cakes by the ton vanished into the boy’s gaping maws.
“The hope of the empire!” cried Moon Boy and Grief of Dawn, beating the matron to it, and the fierce old gentleman with the medals vowed to move Heaven and earth to get his great-grandsons enrolled with Master Li.
The most sacred of all exhibits is the Confucian Stones (a row of stones engraved with all two hundred thousand characters of the master’s writings). A low railing surrounds them, and the rule is, look but don’t touch. Master Li lined up the little angels for a tribute worthy of the Ultimate, and the rendition of “The Tower of Floating Blue-Green” brought tears to every eye, including mine.
“The hope of the empire!” I bellowed, along with Moon Boy, Grief of Dawn, the matron, and the gentleman with the medals.
The vendors were cleaned out within minutes. The boys, I noticed, were beginning to turn green. They turned as one and groped for support, which happened to be a low rail, and leaned over it and began heaving their cherubic little guts out. All over the sacred Confucian Stones.
“One million miseries!” howled Master Li.
A gentleman of the old school is prepared for any emergency, however, and Master Li swiftly joined forces with the fierce old fellow with the medals to recruit a bucket brigade to dump cleansing water over the stones. Thoroughness is also a mark of the old school, and Master Li would not rest until he extracted some large sheets of paper from his tunic and pressed them down firmly over every indentation of the sacred text. Fortunately he also happened to be carrying a huge blue sponge, and he rubbed it over the surface so vigorously that the outside of the paper turned blue. When he lifted the sheets, the stones were nearly dry, and as good as new.
The audience, meanwhile, explained to the furious guards that it was all their fault for stuffing the little angels with goo, and the matron and the bemedaled gentleman took up a collection to pay the fine. There wasn’t a dry eye as Master Li marched the lads away, and behind us I heard a chorus bawling, “The hope of the empire!”
Master Li led the boys into a secluded glade. “All right, brats, let it out,” he said.
The boys collapsed on the grass, rolling around and pummeling each other and howling with laughter. “Please, sir, may we see?” one of them asked when he had regained his breath.
Master Li took out the pieces of paper. The ink from the sponge had settled in nicely, and the imprints were perfect. Genuine rubbings of the Confucian Stones are hard to come by. The boys begged to stay with Master Li and continue their lives of crime, but he advised them to remain in school and study hard so they could mastermind the mobs when they descended into depravity. Then he returned them to the schoolmaster and took the schoolmaster’s place in the wineshop.
He ordered the stuff he had been named for, kao-liang, which is a terrible wine but a wonderful paint remover, and began using it to remove the peaks from every that was accompanied by in the rubbings and replace them with flat lines: . Then he left the wineshop and we started up the Street of the Vermilion Sparrow to Dragon Head Plain.
“Brother Squint-Eye’s forgery of the Ssu-ma was a crude tracing of a coded manuscript that contained the name of the historian’s own father, and to a collector the monk’s copy would have looke
d like the most obvious and inept fraud in history,” he explained. “If the foolish monk brought it to Ch’ang-an and tried to sell it, it’s a wonder he wasn’t decapitated on the spot. There is, however, one place that might have bought the thing, and perhaps some pitying person told him where to go.”
The Pavilion of the Blessings of Heaven is the greatest library in the world, and in addition to its collection of original manuscripts, it maintains a collection of forgeries. Both can be instructive to scholars, and some woefully inept forgeries are kept for pure entertainment value. Master Li made his way to the office of Liu Hsiang, the head librarian.
“Greetings, Hsiang,” he said cheerfully.
“Lock up the manuscripts! Lock up the silver and incense burners! Lock up your wives and check your rings and purses!” the librarian screamed. “Hello, Kao. What brings you back to civilization?” he continued in a normal tone of voice.
“Shopping trip. My study lacks something, and I’ve decided I need a fake to hang on the wall.”
“You know very well that our collection is not for sale,” the librarian said primly.
“Who said anything about selling? I’m talking about trading,” Master Li said, and he took out the rubbings and tossed them on the desk. “Think of the labor that went into that thing,” he said with a chuckle.
“Who bothers to fake rubbings?” the librarian said skeptically. He glanced at them and then looked more closely, and after a few moments he began making small strangled sounds. I realized he was laughing. The librarian staggered to his feet and embraced Master Li, and the two old men clung together whooping and gasping with mirth. Moon Boy and Grief of Dawn and I pounded them on the back until they calmed down.
“Hilarious, isn’t it?” Master Li said, wiping his eyes. “Think of the months it took the idiot to do this.”
“Months? Say he did ten characters a day…. That’s seven years!” the librarian chortled.
Master Li waved us over to the desk. “My children, do you see the joke?” he asked.
We scratched our heads. “They look like genuine rubbings of the Confucian Stones to me,” I said.
“Look at this character here—and here and here. Do you know what it means?”
“Yes, sir,” Moon Boy said.
The librarian broke in. “Ah, but in the days of Confucius it wasn’t written like that!” he exclaimed happily. “See the flat lines on top? In the old days it wasn’t a flat line but a peak, like a rooftop”—he swiftly sketched —“so the idiotic forger was saying that Confucius—”
Moon Boy’s face lit up. “Confucius couldn’t—”
Grief of Dawn’s face lit up. “Confucius couldn’t even—”
“Confucius couldn’t even write ‘ancestor’!” I howled.
The three of us clung together, whooping and hollering, and the librarian and Master Li very kindly pounded our backs until we regained control.
“Kao, this is truly a treasure of incompetence, and if you have something reasonable in mind, we might make a deal,” the librarian said.
Master Li scratched the tip of his nose. “Well, I’m rather in the mood for mangled history. Anything new?”
“Not on this level. It isn’t every day that—wait! How about a truly pathetic Ssu-ma Ch’ien?”
“Sounds promising,” Master Li said casually.
The librarian rang a bell for his assistant. “Not long ago an idiotic monk showed up with the most inept Ssu-ma I’ve seen in years and a tracing at that.”
“Do tell,” said Master Li.
It was as simple as that. A few minutes later we walked out of the Blessings of Heaven Pavilion, and Master Li had Brother Squint Eyes’ traced copy in his hands.
We found a pleasant little park and bought grasshopper pies and plum juice with vinegar from one of the vendors, and sat down on the grass beneath a pagoda tree. Master Li had already scanned Brother Squint-Eyes’ forgery. He had also taken a detour through one of the scroll depositories, and he reached into his tunic and extracted an ancient scroll that was sealed with the stamp “Restricted Shelves: Authorized Staff Only.” He placed the scroll, the forged manuscript, and the report on the sod and plant samples beside him on the grass, and concentrated on his grasshopper pie. Then he included all of us in a wave of his finger.
“Tell me the story of the emperor and the tangerines,” he commanded.
We stared at him.
“Sir?” I said weakly.
“You heard me.”
We looked at each other, and finally Moon Boy shrugged. “Long ago there was an emperor named Li Ling-chi,” he said. “He was good. He was very good. In fact, he was so good that birds flew around his head singing songs of praise, and butterflies danced before him.”
“He was so good that fish and frogs jumped from ponds to receive his blessing,” said Grief of Dawn. “He was so good that on feast days a few of the gods always flew down from Heaven to have tea with him. Tea and tangerines, because his only weakness was a fondness for tangerines. His people were delighted that he wasn’t fond of the things that usually entertain emperors, such as wars and massacres.”
“Li Ling-chi got better and better,” I said. “He became so good that he couldn’t bear the sight of evil, so he had his craftsmen make him a headdress with a veil of two hundred eighty-eight jewels, and he couldn’t bear to hear evil, so they added jeweled earflaps. That way he only saw pretty shining things and he only heard tinkle-tinkle-tinkle, except on feast days, when he took off his headdress to have tea with the gods.”
“Tea and tangerines, except one day there were no tangerines,” Moon Boy said. “The emperor was outraged. ‘How can I have tea without tangerines?’ he cried. ‘O Son of Heaven,’ said the chamberlain, ‘it is winter, and in winter tangerines do not grow in your gardens.’ The emperor was not to be fooled. ‘I had tangerines last winter!’ he yelled. ‘O Son of Heaven,’ said the chamberlain, ‘last winter the roads were clear, but this winter there have been heavy snowstorms. Produce from the south, where tangerines still grow, cannot reach the capital.’ The emperor turned purple. ‘You mean to tell me that my subjects in the south are gorging themselves on tangerines when their emperor can’t have any? We’ll see about that!’ he shouted.”
“Emperor Li Ling-chi jumped up on top of his throne,” said Grief of Dawn. “He had become so good that when he waved his hands to the south, all the green growing things tore loose from the earth and flew north to be blessed, and in no time tangerines were growing in the capital in the middle of winter. The gods who were coming to tea cried in horror, ‘Stop! Stop!’ But the emperor still had his headdress on, and all he heard was tinkle-tinkle-tinkle. They sent comets and apparitions and omens, but all he saw was pretty shining jewels. Meanwhile there was no food in the south, and the peasants began to starve, and bodies piled up in ditches just as if there had been wars and massacres.”
“The August Personage of Jade gazed down from his throne,” I said. “His roar of rage shook all the tangerines from the emperor’s trees, and he flew down from Heaven and made Li Ling-chi eat every piece of the fallen fruit, and the emperor swelled up like the Transcendent Pig. Then the August Personage of Jade waved his hand and all the green growing things flew back south where they belonged, and he picked up the emperor and hurled him into the sky. But the emperor was lopsided because of all those tangerines, so he curved, and that’s why we still see him to this day.”
“Every seventy-five years,” said Moon Boy, “peasants can gaze up at the sky and see a bright comet curving back toward earth. The orange color is all those tangerines inside the emperor, and the sparkling tail is his jeweled veil and earflaps, and if you listen very, very closely, you will hear the sound of an emperor with a tummyache.”
“Waa! Waa! Waa!” we chanted in unison. “Ling-chi cries, candle dies, little children close their eyes—so!”
We sat there feeling like fools. Master Li polished off a few more grasshoppers and took a swig of wine from his flask.
He tossed the last of his grasshoppers to some fish in a pond and picked up the stolen scroll.
“Believe it or not, there’s a point to this, but be patient,” he said. “Am I correct in assuming that every one of you gave up on Dream of the Red Chamber after the first two paragraphs?”
Grief of Dawn and Moon Boy and I turned red. The problem with ‘“the crown jewel of Chinese literature” is that it has two thousand pages and an equal number of characters, and the hero is an effeminate ass who should have either been spanked or decapitated, both ends being equally objectionable.
“No matter,” Master Li said. “The book has been revised countless times, by Kao Ngoh and lesser talents, and the later versions bear little resemblance to the original. This happens to be the original, and it contains a rather peculiar story. Listen carefully.”
He opened the scroll and searched for the place and began to read one of the strangest and most unsatisfactorily incomplete fairy tales I have ever heard.
“‘Of the 36,501 stones selected by the goddess Nu Kua for the Wall of Heaven, there was one she was forced to reject because of a serious flaw. The flaw was an evil one. Contact with the goddess had enabled the stone to acquire a soul, but its soul was evil. The stone had also learned to move around at will, and it wandered through Heaven causing much malicious harm, and at last the emperor was forced to intervene.