The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  Master Li was regarding me with rather cool eyes.

  “Perhaps the extraordinary references to a stone are worthy of minor mention,” he said wryly.

  The example of Wolf and Fire Girl gave me backbone. “Damn it, it’s genius. Centuries ago the boys who found the cave realized that if they chose as their hero a skeleton with a spearhead inside the crushed rib cage, it would be a hero who had somehow failed. So they pieced together bits and pieces from old heroic stories and—”

  “Produced a tale that I admire, except for the poetry,” said Master Li. “The poetry is abominable. The most admirable thing about the tale is its folk-epic nature, meaning that the words take on a quasi-religious significance. Did anyone notice Deer Ears’ delivery?”

  I hadn’t, but Grief of Dawn had.

  “His head was thrown back and his eyes were closed,” she said. “Once he said ‘which’ and hastily changed it to ‘that.’ He was like my dear old Tai-tai, preserving the exact wording of an ancient story just as her parents and grandparents had preserved it.”

  Master Li gazed at her fondly. “Let me know if you can use some extra adoration between visits from these three gentlemen,” he said. “That’s the point about the references to the stone. Deer Ears came very close to the inscription above the sacristies, and two of the lines were exact: ‘In darkness languishes the precious stone. When will its excellence enchant the world?’”

  Prince Liu Pao threw his hands wide apart.

  “Yes, but what is the stone?” he asked plaintively. “According to the boys’ story, it’s a magical thing that slays evil. But my ancestor kept and worshipped it, which scarcely makes sense unless he was in love with the idea of suicide. According to Ssu-ma and the author of Red Chamber, it’s the embodiment of all evil. According to Ox’s dream, it’s an overpowering life force. Is it good? Is it evil? Is it anything more than a legend? I hate to say this, but much as I enjoyed the story of Wolf, it leads us nowhere.”

  “Prince, I must respectfully disagree,” said Master Li. Somehow he gave me the impression of a conjurer who intended to reach into a two-inch pillbox and pull out a twenty-foot pole. “Remember those mysterious fellows in robes of motley who are somehow able to pop up out of nowhere and disappear the same way? Well, I strongly suspect that the cavern in the story is actually the tomb of the Laughing Prince, which means that the tomb is far larger then we had imagined. With daylight, we’ll put the theory to the test.”

  The sun had just lifted over Dragon’s Right Horn when Master Li led the way down the hill to the bottom of the gorge between the two peaks. I was carrying an armload of tools, and the others had torches.

  “Thousands of peasants labored on the Laughing Prince’s tomb,” Master Li said. “Could he have murdered every one of them? Some details of the tomb were certain to be preserved in the folk memory of the Valley of Sorrows, and one form of preservation may be the fanciful tale of Wolf, who comes to a cave with Fire Girl and climbs up a natural stone chimney. He sticks his head from the hole and discovers he’s at the bottom of a deep gorge. Deer Ears, head back, eyes closed, chants the exact words preserved through the centuries: ‘Across from the hole he saw a good landmark—strange red and emerald-colored rocks in the side of the cliff.’”

  The old man walked over to one of the sheer cliffs.

  “I came down here to try to figure out how Ox had been able to climb down one side and back up the other,” he said. “I didn’t find a climbing path, but I did find this.”

  He bent some thick thistles, and we gazed at strange red and emerald rocks, almost like gemstones, set in the middle of plain granite. “Prince, is there anything like this formation in some other part of the valley?” he asked.

  Without a word the prince began looking for the hole of a natural stone chimney, and the rest of us fanned out and followed his example. An hour paused before Moon Boy shouted. He was about twenty feet up the side of a cliff, at the only place where the slope allowed easy climbing, and he was pointing down at a thick clump of furze. We ran up to him. I chopped through the furze, and a black hole appeared. I had brought a long bamboo pole, and I thrust it down but couldn’t reach bottom. I tossed the pole back to the other tools, and the prince helped me secure a rope ladder. Master Li handed me a torch, and I began climbing down with my knife between my teeth, feeling very much like a pirate.

  The ladder was just long enough. I stepped into a small round cave with a narrow passage leading from it. My torchlight revealed an ancient wooden table and two benches. A natural stone shelf was set in the wall. I closed my eyes tightly and prayed, and then I began swinging the torch slowly around the room.

  I will confess that I had prayed to find a thirteen-year-old girl with hair of fire, who had been sleeping for seven and a half centuries. I was very disappointed when she wasn’t there. “Come on down!” I yelled.

  Master Li and the prince and Grief of Dawn and Moon Boy joined me. They lit their torches, and now it was bright enough to see that nobody had disturbed the dust on the floor for years. We cautiously made our way down the passage and found ourselves in a much larger cave. This one had been used for target practice, and I was willing to bet that the archer had been a boy or a girl. Arrows were stuck all over, including the ceiling where ancient scaffolding held supporting beams. There was an old desk. To the left of the desk was a long wood table, and to the right was a row of brassbound chests. The chests were empty. Directly in front of the desk was a large metal plate set in the stone floor, and Master Li scratched his nose thoughtfully as he looked at it.

  “This looks like a paymaster’s office,” he said. “Engineers and overseers would stand in front of the desk to receive their wages, and the Laughing Prince was renowned for his playful pranks.”

  He walked behind the desk and searched for something, and then he pulled some kind of lever. I jumped backward. There was a screeching metallic sound, and then the plate split into two halves that dropped down on hinges. Where an overseer might have been standing was nothing but a black hole, and I cautiously knelt at the side and thrust my torch down. The light couldn’t reach far enough to touch bottom. I found a splintered piece of old scaffolding and lit it from the torch and dropped into the pit. It almost went out, but then it flared up again and we caught our breaths.

  It had landed on sharp jutting rocks far below, right between two broken bodies. It took me a moment to realize that they weren’t ancient skeletons like the ones piled in the tunnel. Hair still clung to them, and patches of dried flesh, and their clothes were almost intact.

  “No more than twenty or thirty years ago,” Master Li muttered.

  “Thirty-three,” the prince whispered. His face was white and strained. “I used to play with them. Ah Cheng and Wu Yi, gardeners at the estate. They let me ride the water buffalo and shovel manure and do all sorts of interesting things I wasn’t supposed to, and one day they vanished and we never found them.”

  Master Li tested a bench at the table and sat down in a puff of dust.

  He gazed moodily into the pit. “A stolen manuscript,” he said softly, perhaps to himself. “Two dead monks, a weird sound, trees and plants destroyed—did the murder of two gardeners thirty-three years ago also play a part? Did they find the entrance in the gorge and come down here? If so, what did they see or hear that led to their deaths? If the unpleasant people dressed up in motley were involved back then, it strengthens the theory that some kind of religious cult may be behind this, worshipping the stone of the Laughing Prince and possibly continuing a line that goes back to his original Monks of Mirth.”

  Master Li jumped up. “This is just a preliminary look around,” he said. “The next time we come down here we’d better be heavily armed. Fortunately, the dust will tell us if anyone has used a passage. Let’s do a bit of exploring.”

  There were side passages leading from three walls of the cave. All of them had been heavily braced against rockslides. Scaffolding and posts and cross-beams were everywhere, so o
ld that the wood might snap from a loud sneeze, and we moved very carefully. The first passage ended in a rockslide that had blocked it completely, and so did the second. The third passage was so dangerous that nobody in his right mind would enter it. It was a miracle that the ceiling hadn’t collapsed years ago. In the fourth we reached another dead end of fallen rocks, and so it went in all the passages. Whatever they led to couldn’t be reached from the cave, and if we were going to explore a cavern that might be part of the Laughing Prince’s tomb, we were going to have to find another entrance.

  It was a terrible disappointment. Master Li swore without a pause after the sixth passage, and he was still swearing as we climbed gloomily back up the ladder and blinked in the sunlight. We walked back down to the center of the gorge, and suddenly Moon Boy stopped and held up a warning hand. His ears were incredibly keen.

  “Horses,” he said. “Lots of them, and the sound of wheels. Also jangling weapons. They’re coming right at us, and if it’s your monks in motley, they mean business.”

  We had no place to go and no time to do it in. Galloping horses and a huge chariot dashed into the narrow gorge, and mysterious monks in motley would have been far preferable to the grim-faced people we stared at. King Shih Hu of Chao reined up his horses and regarded us from his great war chariot, and his Golden Girls licked their lovely lips.

  “We regret that we will be denied the enlightenment of your wisdom Li Kao,” the king said softly. “A man who can so easily spirit special people from our castle is worth listening to, but our chariot will hold only Moon Boy and Grief of Dawn.”

  I thought, he’s going to kill us. To his way of thinking we’re common thieves who have stolen valuable things from his treasury, and he’s going to kill us. I decided I had better fall on my knees and do some abject kowtowing, and I had better do it fast.

  “Surely Your Majesty does not claim ownership of people?” Master Li said, in the tone of a gentleman opening an interesting line of conversation. “Moon Boy and Grief of Dawn are not even your subjects, and perhaps they would prefer to make their own decision.”

  I was on my knees banging my chin against the bamboo pole, the far end of which was gradually sliding toward a rake I had brought with the other tools. Only two more feet, I thought, and I tried another six kowtows.

  “Neo-Confucians, of course, would argue that since Grief of Dawn and Moon Boy come from peasant stock, they should have no legal rights whatsoever,” Master Li said judiciously. “Your Majesty is far too intelligent to be neo anything, and far too just to arbitrarily decide destinies without first hearing the wishes of the people involved.”

  “It is, Li Kao, the ability of a ruler to be arbitrary that determines his hold upon his throne,” said Shih Hu.

  A faint and oddly sad smile was on his lips. His eyes moved to the Golden Girls, who were fixing arrows to their bowstrings. I banged my chin one more time. The pole moved forward, and the handle of the rake slid into the hollow end. The rake was directly in front of the lead chariot horses. I grabbed the pole, lunged forward, and whipped it up. The rake plunged into the tender belly of a horse, and it reared and whinnied and pawed the air. I got the next horse. The plunging horses were in the Golden Girls’ line of fire, and I felt Master Li’s hand grab my belt, and I dove forward and crawled between the hooves until I was beneath the chariot. Master Li fell back out of the way. I tried to take the weight on my shoulders and legs as I heaved upward. My spine made nasty cracking noises, but I was trying to lift the chariot from one side, and the great bulk of the king helped to unbalance it. With a crash it toppled over, and the horses fell in a tangle of kicking legs, and I crawled between them while the Golden Girls maneuvered for a clear shot. It was a matter of getting a royal hostage before the girls got me, and Shih Hu was waiting for me. He even managed to keep his natural dignity as he sat on the ground like a great Buddha, and his dagger was in his hand, and he was smiling.

  I heard the sharp click of the coil of rattan inside Master Li’s sleeve as it shot the throwing knife from the sheath up to his hand, and a whine was almost simultaneous with the click as the blade shot past my ear. The king swore as the blade sank into his hand, and his dagger fell to the ground. I was on him in an instant, with an arm around his throat and his dagger pressed to the back of his neck.

  The Golden Girls growled like panthers. They maneuvered their horses with perfect discipline, edging around and behind me. The king was paying no more attention to me than to a mildly annoying mosquito. He casually pulled Master Li’s knife from the palm of his hand and tossed it away, and then, with one sweep of a massive arm, he sent me flying ten feet backward. He didn’t look at me at all. The arrows drew back, pointed at my heart.

  “Stop,” the king said. Authority rumbled beneath the quiet tone, and the arrows lowered. He lumbered to his feet and walked over and knelt beside Moon Boy, who was holding Grief of Dawn in his arms. The shaft of an arrow protruded from her chest.

  The golden shaft was aimed right at her heart, and with a shock that paralyzed emotion, I realized that Grief of Dawn was dead.

  “Who could have done this?” the king whispered. “None of my girls shoots wildly.” His huge head lifted. The Golden Girls bowed before his gaze, all but the captain. Her eagle eyes were defiant, but it was like trying to stare down the sun. Her eyes fell and her lips quivered. A tear slid down her cheek.

  “Meng Chang, were you in so much pain?” the king said gently. “You should have come to us, my child. Jealousy is a terrible emotion. It transforms pinpricks into great gaping wounds, but there was no need for jealousy. That we loved Grief of Dawn did not mean we loved you less.”

  Master Li had knelt beside Grief of Dawn. His head jerked up in astonishment. “I don’t believe it, but she’s still breathing,” he said.

  My heart jumped like a speckled trout.

  “If she survives this, she’ll last until Mount Yun-t’ai falls on her,” Master Li muttered.

  His hand moved to the arrow shaft as though to pull it out. “No,” the king said sharply. For the first time he was looking at me, and for the first time I realized that one of the girls’ arrows had hit the fleshy part of my left thigh. The point was sticking out in the air. It was wide and flaring, and to pull an arrowhead like that back through the body is to kill the wounded person.

  I snapped the head from my arrow and drew out the shaft and tossed it away, and then I ran up to Grief of Dawn and snapped off the feathered end of the arrow in her chest. I held my breath as Master Li slowly pushed the shaft down. My hand was beneath Grief of Dawn’s back, and finally I felt the point bulge against the flesh. The head broke through, and I pulled the arrow completely out.

  Grief of Dawn still breathed. Master Li neatly bandaged the wound. I thought Grief of Dawn was making muffled sobbing sounds, but then I realized they were coming from Meng Chang, the Captain of Bodyguards. Grief of Dawn tried to open her eyes, but couldn’t.

  “Tai-tai, are you ill?” she whispered. “Shall I sing to you, Tai-tai? Sometimes the pain gets better if I sing.”

  What happened next left all of us stunned and shaken. We had heard Grief of Dawn sing many times, but never as she sang then. She was singing to soothe the pain of the old lady who had taken her in and given her a home and a name, and what came from her lips and her heart was a miracle.

  I can’t describe it, other than to say it was like Moon Boy’s sound magic mixed into the glorious glowing paintings of Prince Liu Pao. There were no words.

  I heard pure notes climbing into the sky, brushing clouds aside, shooting past the moon, joining and singing with the brilliant glows of the stars in the Great River, and then lifting to Heaven itself to dance among the gods. The last note hovered, subtly changing pitch and color, and then began to descend to earth. The pure voice drifted among the wonders to be found in the raindrops and rippling streams of spring, and the soft drowsy sounds of summer, and the crisp clean noises of fall. Wind howled and snow fell, but Grief of Dawn was singin
g of a steaming kettle and boiling pot in a safe snug cottage where an old woman lay warm in her bed. The notes drifted down lower and softer, dissolving into whispering lullaby sounds, and then the last note sank into silence.

  “I’m sorry, Tai-tai,” Grief of Dawn whispered. “I can sing no more. It hurts to sing like that. It’s beautiful but it’s wrong, like stealing.”

  Her head fell back. Her heart was still beating, but she was unconscious.

  We looked at each other in silence. Then the King of Chao got to his feet and walked back to his chariot. His huge hands separated the pawing horses and brought them to their feet, and he calmed them with pats and soft words. The Golden Girls parted to let him pass to the captain.

  Meng Chang was dead. She lay on her face with her hands beneath her and the point of her sword thrusting out through her back. The king pulled the sword out and stopped the blood with his cloak. He picked her up and climbed into his carriage and sat on his couch with the girl’s body on his lap. The Golden Girls opened a small chest and took out a white cloth of mourning and draped it over the king’s head, and one of them took the reins. King Shih Hu and his Golden Girls rode away without a backward glance, and I never saw them again.

  Grief of Dawn was tougher than the Kehsi steel of Hsingchou. Master Li was able to avert infection by making poultices from nasty-looking tree mold, and she clung ferociously to life, but fever made her hallucinate, and I decided that perhaps she was mixing the story of Wolf into something from her own life. In her private closed world she was running with somebody, and it was a desperate race.

  “Faster…must run faster,” she panted. “Where is the turn? … Past the goat statue…. There’s the raven and the river…. Faster…. Faster…. This way! Hurry! …Soldiers… Hide until they pass… Now run! Run!”

  She didn’t always hallucinate about running for her life, and I remember the startled expression on Master Li’s face when she moved restlessly in her bed and said, “Please, Mistress, must I go to Chien’s?” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “It smells so bad, and the bargemen make rude jokes about ladies, and that old man with one leg always tries to pinch me.”