The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  “How kind of you to carry this humble one on the tour of inspection,” said the Laughing Prince.

  I could not be mistaken. Half of the face was the face of the portrait in the tomb. The other half was also the Laughing Prince but like an effigy molded in wax and placed beside a fire. The flesh had partially decomposed, and his voice was also half-decomposed, thick and slurred and clotted and foul. The other eye popped open and winked at me. Both eyes were totally mad.

  “You shall enjoy yourself in my kingdom,” the Laughing Prince snickered.

  “Dance! Dance! More joy and merriment!” howled the assistant.

  “See how my monks enjoy themselves,” said the Laughing Prince. “What delightful additions you and your friends will make to our company.” Cowls were falling from the faces of capering monks, and I saw that they were corpses. Patches of flesh still stuck to white bones, and empty eye sockets stared in eternal horror.

  “More bats and more bells! Ring more gongs!” the assistant screamed.

  The Laughing Prince had sought godhood, and he had found eternity as chiang shih, the corpse who crawls from the grave and strangles wayfarers and steals their souls. Never in history had anyone escaped the embrace of a rigid corpse.

  “Oh, yes, you and your companions shall enjoy yourselves so much that you will never want to leave,” the Laughing Prince hissed in my ear. “Such joy. Such unending laughter. And you will dance for me forever and ever and ever.”

  “All praise to our Lord of Happiness!” howled the assistant. “All praise to the Stone!”

  “The Stone!” the corpses cried. “All praise to the Stone!”

  I frantically looked back and saw that the assistant was lashing Master Li and Grief of Dawn and Moon Boy with a whip, while corpses crowded in to squeeze their arms tightly against their sides. I looked to the side. I could barely breathe now, and my vision was blurred, but I could make out the destination we seemed to be circling toward. A sacrificial altar stood at one side of the cavern. Beside it was a huge stone basin filled with ceremonial oil, and behind it was a pillar, where sacrificial axes hung on hooks.

  “More bats!” howled the assistant. “More dancing and laughter!”

  Better now than later, I thought, and I knocked over a row of corpses as I made a detour. The bodies of bats crunched beneath my feet as I staggered toward the altar. More bats were shrieking in fear as they collided with the skulls of capering monks, and crawled into empty mouths and eye sockets for shelter. My neck was breaking. Black and red spots danced in front of my eyes. The basin of ceremonial oil suddenly loomed in front of me, and with the last of my strength I lunged forward and carried my body and the corpse’s over the edge and into the oil.

  I came to the surface, gasping, and grabbed the oily arms and shoved upward. Slowly they began to slide. They stopped at my ears, and I reached down with one hand and scooped up more oil, and finally the deadly arms shot up over my head with a loud popping sound. I lurched to the rim of the basin and toppled over it to the ground, and the Laughing Prince stood up in the oil and extended his arms lovingly.

  “Come back, dear boy. We haven’t finished our dance,” he chuckled.

  I crawled to the pillar and hauled myself upright and grabbed one of the sacrificial axes. The rigid corpse was out of the basin and walking toward me, arms extended. Both mad eyes were winking. I let the thing get within range, and then I chopped the legs off at the knees. The Laughing Prince tumbled over backward.

  “The Stone and the Lord of Happiness crave more merriment!” the assistant howled.

  I chopped the hands from the arms, and the arms from the torso, and raised the axe high and brought it down on the decomposing face. The head split apart, and as it did, the eyes winked in sequence.

  “Quite,” said the left half of the mouth.

  “Useless,” said the right half of the mouth.

  I dropped the axe and staggered away and fell. I lay there, gasping for breath and unable to move.

  “Sing the great Hymn of Joy, for our Lord of Happiness prepares the sacrifice!” screamed the assistant.

  I managed to turn my head. The severed hands of the Laughing prince were scuttling toward me like crabs. They crawled up my legs and over my chest, and clamped viciously around my throat.

  “Ha, ha, ha!” laughed the capering corpses. “Ho, ho, ho!”

  I staggered to my feet, futilely wrenching at the strangling hands, and lurched back toward the basin. I ducked my head into the oil and pried the oily fingers free, one by one. I hurled the hands back into the oil and stumbled to the pillar and wrenched a torch free. I hurled it blindly. It almost missed, but it teetered for a moment on the rim and then fell into the basin. I fell on my face, unable to move.

  A pillar of flame shot toward the roof. Two balls of fire crawled over the rim and down to the ground, and all I could do was watch as the flaming hands crawled toward me. They were hissing and popping. Bones were separating. Fingers spurted greasy smoke and fire and detached from the hands and fell off. Black clouds were crawling toward my legs. They stopped and I jerked in pain as hissing stuff spattered my ankles. Then the clouds cleared, and where the hands had been were two piles of smoking charcoal.

  The bells stopped. The gongs stopped. The corpses stood frozen in awkward dancing positions. Only the bats still continued to fly through the torchlight.

  Something moved, and tears welled in my eyes and trickled down my nose as I saw Master Li crawl toward me. He was alive, and so were Grief of Dawn and Moon Boy, and I was alive too, and we weren’t waking up to eternity as merry monks in motley.

  Moon Boy propped my head up, and Master Li took out his flask and poured wine down my throat until I choked and coughed and sat up and spewed alcohol over my tunic. It helped to clear my head, which Master Li patted in grandfatherly fashion. “When traveling, always bring an ox with you,” he said.

  Moon Boy planted a kiss on my left cheek, but it wasn’t Moon Boy I wanted, and I was still so weak that I felt my eyes fill with tears. Grief of Dawn hadn’t bothered to come to me, and I was about to drown in self-pity until I realized that, alone among us, Grief of Dawn had kept her head. She had finally been able to free her bow, and we had no idea what her horrors might be down there, and she was crouched behind the basin of oil sweeping the cavern with a drawn arrow. Nothing stirred except bats. Finally she released the tension of the string and crawled back.

  “Ox,” she said, giving me a kiss, “the boys will have to add you to the story of Wolf. Never before has anyone broken the grip of a chiang shih.”

  The rigid corpse lay in pieces, but could it somehow rise again? I shuddered, and so did Moon Boy, and Grief of Dawn’s hands slid slowly down her body to her shoulders, and she hugged herself protectively.

  “Master Li, I hate and fear that horrible thing, but why am I drawn to it?” she whispered. “It’s almost as I am drawn to Moon Boy, or even to the prince.”

  Moon Boy looked at her with somber eyes and turned to Master Li. “I too feel the attraction,” he said. “When I danced behind that creature, it was only partly because I was forced to. I also wanted to.”

  The old man looked at me. “Ox?”

  I shook my head. “No, sir,” I said. “All I feel is fear and loathing.”

  “It’s the same with me, and I think we’re deficient in sensibility,” he said. He walked over and bent down to the severed torso. His knife glittered in the torchlight. “More than seven centuries ago the Laughing Prince died, and during the forty-nine days while the Bailiffs of Hell waited to ensure there had been no mistake in the Register of Life and Death, the flesh began to decay. The Laughing Prince wore an amulet of stone on a chain around his neck, and the stone sank into his body. Before the bailiffs arrived, the stone had entered his heart and he had arisen from the dead; mad, almost mindless, totally evil—but does that mean the stone was evil? My children, the attraction you feel would make far more sense if the opposite were true.”

  The flesh
was so rotten that he scarcely needed the knife, and he scooped more than cut and came up with a smooth flat piece of stone. He carefully washed it in the oil and dried it on his robe, and I was quite frightened when he walked back with the stone in his bare hands. I suppose I expected his fingernails to grow a foot and coarse black hair to crawl over his flesh, and when he lifted his eyes from the stone I looked for the flow of lunacy. Instead I saw a film of tears, and his voice was soft and gentle.

  “Is the stone evil? Here, Ox, judge for yourself.”

  He handed me the stone. It happened so quickly that I took it without thinking, but then I let out a yelp and would have dropped it if his fingers had not closed around mine.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said quietly.

  The stone was warm. It was living, and I could feel a flow of energy like a heartbeat. A tingle entered my fingers and spread throughout my body. It spread through every nerve like a miraculous tonic, and my weariness vanished, and I had the distinct sensation that at any moment I might begin to bloom like a flower. Master Li gestured for me to pass it around, and I handed it to Grief of Dawn. She began to weep, even while a smile came to her lips, and when Moon Boy received it he turned white as a ghost and pressed it to his chest as though he wanted to join the stone with his body.

  Master Li took it back and held it up to the torchlight. “The author 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 conclusions.”

  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 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 have given 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, rising 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 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 do 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 ceiling 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 t
he 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 were 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 Chi’en, and your friend told you that Ssu-ma had found an entrance to the tomb. Isn’t that how it happened?”