The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  ‘“Yes,” she wailed.

  “And after that you listened at another window and learned that the monk had made a copy, and your friend who smells so bad had to deal with that too.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “You were there! You and your friend with the hair and ink spots.” She threw back her head and laughed like a peal of lovely bells. “Your friend’s hair is really very funny. Do you want to see where they carried him?”

  Master Li swallowed more wine and put his flask away. “It might be a nice idea,” he said dryly. “Lead on, Girl of Fire.”

  My head was hurting, and words slipped like sly lizards through cracks in my solid granite brain, darting, stopping motionless, creeping cautiously toward meanings: “You told your friend who smells so bad that a monk from the monastery had a manuscript by somebody named Ssu-ma Ch’ien, and your friend told you….” The girl had said yes, and that her smelly friend had also planned the second burglary and murder, but how could the Laughing Prince have planned anything? He hadn’t been rational! Suddenly I realized that Master Li had led the girl to confirm that the only two people who could have been responsible for the murders of the monks were the Laughing Prince and the girl herself, and the girl had certainly killed the two gardeners.

  But was she rational? She kept her distance as we climbed to the rock shelf, moving like a timid fawn as she turned into one of the side tunnels. Her beautiful voice reached back through the darkness, singing.

  “The boy who dies, dies not in vain.

  The Great Wheel turns, he comes again.

  The girl who grieves and drink of this

  Will be awakened with a kiss.”

  Master Li grunted and flicked a finger downward, and I saw why he was following the girl wherever she led. One more scarlet tassel lay on the tunnel floor. She might be crazy, but she was leading us in the right direction.

  “A touch of lips will open eyes,

  A girl of fire will thus arise,

  Then the sacred arrow flies,

  And the Heart of Evil dies.”

  The sweet notes echoed away into the distance, and the girl’s voice spoke from the darkness ahead. “I don’t remember what that means, but Wolf will tell me when he comes,” she said trustingly.

  We turned and twisted through tunnels, all braced with rickety old wood. Four more scarlet tassels told us we were going in the right direction, and finally the small dim figure ahead of us turned into one more entrance, and her voice drifted back: “They took him in here.”

  When we reached the opening and stepped inside to a small cave, the girl was gone, but I saw another passageway in the far wall. The cave had once been a storeroom, and old metal tool racks lined a wall. Ancient posts lifted to crossbeams that held up the shaky ceiling. One of the posts had cracked, and somebody had tied cords of rope around the split.

  Something was wrong. My gut told me that, not my mind, and I forced my eyes to move slowly around the cave. Suddenly they jerked back. A rope? A rope that had survived seven centuries and wasn’t even frayed? I strode forward so I could see the other side of the thick post. The rope extended to a hole in the wall, and it was lifting and tightening. I swore and swung with my axe, but I was too late. Just before the blade reached it, the rope jerked taut and the flimsy old post snapped right in half.

  Other posts groaned in protest. They bent, and the entire ceiling suddenly dropped two feet. The tortured posts screamed, and then they snapped with deafening sharp cracking sounds. Splinters of wood shot around the cave like vicious spears, and rocks tumbled down, and the entire framework supporting the ceiling began to bulge in the center. I dove forward as the bulge bent toward the floor and got beneath the center beam and heaved upward with all my might. I couldn’t lift it, of course, but it temporarily stayed where it was.

  “Get out!” I yelled.

  I glanced back. My mind refused to believe what my eyes were telling me. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. Surely a shack in Peking would echo with happy laughter, and an old sage would whistle “Hot Ashes” and open another wine jar when his young wife slipped into the shed in back to visit Number Ten Ox, and Moon Boy and the prince would come every few months, and….

  And my heart believed what my eyes said, and turned to ice. Moon Boy was cradling Grief of Dawn in his arms, and this time no medicine on earth would help her. A shaft of splintered wood at least three inches thick had struck her square in the chest like a bolt from a catapult, and she was as dead as Tou Wan. Moon Boy was not going to leave her body to be crushed. He picked her up and carried her back toward the tunnel, and then I saw no more as my eyes blurred with tears. The ceiling sounded as though it was groaning with grief as it pressed down upon me. I couldn’t move or the whole works would collapse.

  Master Li’s hand was on my shoulder. “Is the weight distributed evenly?” he asked.

  “No,” I panted. “It’s tilted forward.”

  Master Li scuttled to the old iron tool racks. Some were very thick and strong, and he began walking one toward me. He got it beneath the beam, and then he wrestled with another one. When they were placed on both sides of me I bent my knees, lowering the center beam as slowly as possible. It was shuddering like a living thing, and it wouldn’t remain in one piece much longer. It touched the tool racks.

  Master Li had moved back to the tunnel opening. I let go, dropped to the floor, pushed back, and did a back flip to the opening. I just made it to the tunnel before the beam snapped in half, and Master Li hopped up on my back and I began to run. The crash of the falling ceiling nearly deafened us. The whole tunnel was shaking and dust billowed and rocks and wood splinters flew. I was running blind, but then I saw a glow of light through the darkness and dust. Moon Boy had the body of Grief of Dawn over his shoulder, and he was waving his torch.

  Once before I had seen Master Li use his incredible memory to find the way back through a labyrinth, and now he did it again. He took the second opening on the right, then the third on the left, then the first on the left, and kept it up without hesitation even though rocks were falling and stones were screaming like tigers as they scraped together. We ran through one more opening and found we were back at the pool. In a minute we were back at the tunnel we had taken before, and then we came to a halt.

  The vibration had shuddered through the entire cavern, and some ceilings were weaker than others. The tunnel that would have taken us back to the Monks of Mirth was completely blocked by a rockslide.

  “Master Li, I can hear water that way!” Moon Boy shouted. “It sounds like the river!”

  Now Moon Boy took the lead, groping through passage after passage, moving ever closer to the sound. At last Master Li and I could hear it too and we stumbled from a hole to the bank of the black river in the huge central cavern. Moon Boy’s torchlight bounced across the water and revealed the features of the first statue we had seen: Yen-wang-yeh, the former First Lord of Hell. We were only a few feet from the stairs that led up to Princes’ Path and safety.

  Master Li hopped down from my back and trotted back into the tunnel we had come from. He told Moon Boy to raise his torch, and he studied the vast structure of scaffolding with the eyes of an engineer. He walked over to the central supporting post near the left-hand wall. There was a crack in the center of it.

  “Ox, can you break this thing?” he asked.

  “It’s old and fragile,” I said. “Sir, it might break, but if a tunnel collapsed here, after the collapse back there, wouldn’t that put a tremendous strain on the entire structure? That crazy girl is still in there, and the prince may still be alive.”

  “Do it,” Master Li commanded.

  “Venerable Sir—”

  I shut my mouth. Master Li was glaring at me, and it was not for Number Ten Ox to contradict the great man. I put my shoulder to the post, but I had underestimated how rotten it was. It snapped at the first pressure, and I very nearly fell and impaled myself on the stump. Master Li hopped up on my back and Moon Boy lifted the body
of Grief of Dawn and we began to run. We could hear nothing but the scream of splintering wood and the thunder of falling rocks, but I saw Moon Boy’s lips opening and closing and his finger frantically pointing up.

  Just ahead of us a huge crack was spreading across the ceiling of the cavern. With an enormous roar, about a hundred tons of rock crashed down and blocked all possible paths to the staircase. The river heaved, and a tidal wave raced back against the current. Master Li was pounding my shoulder and pointing, and I realized our only hope was to get back to the staircase that led up to the formal tomb. Moon Boy was very strong, and he would rather have died than leave Grief of Dawn’s body down there, and he carried her while I carried Master Li as we ran for our lives. The face of the cavern ceiling was spreading into a succession of smiles. Rocks fell like hailstones and the black river turned white with foam. The walls shuddered and the floor bucked like a wild horse, and chunks of shattered wood and clouds of dust burst from every side passage.

  I climbed into an enormous extended hand, and then up and over the torso of the fallen Japanese King of the Dead. We raced on past fallen statues. Gilgamesh still stood in his pride, holding the lion, but Anubis had fallen. Screeching grinding sounds hurt our ears. A huge crack opened in the floor, and Toth and Ament dropped into the pit and disappeared. We just made it past the enormous mummy of Osiris before it toppled over and smashed, and inside my head and heart I was listening to a beloved voice:

  “Faster…faster…. There’s the raven and the river.”

  There was the raven. We panted past it and lunged into the side passageway. The stairs were still intact. The walls appeared to be squeezing together as we bounded up the stairs, and it wasn’t my imagination. The sound was indescribable. We finally reached the marble landing and the doors, and the statues still stood, and Master Li reached out and lifted the jar from the hawk-headed deity. The framework was beginning to twist and the door screeched in protest, but it opened enough for us to squeeze through. The tunnel was choked with dust and fallen rocks, and I had to feel to find a side passage.

  The only passages we knew were the slide and stairs that led back down to the river, which would have been suicide, but if Master Li was right about the hawk symbolism, a number of side passages should lead out to the valley where monks in motley could hunt peasants. Luck was with us. I tripped over a staircase and began to climb, but then I ran smack into the stone wall of a dead end.

  Master Li hopped off my back and began probing the wall, and then the side walls, and he pulled something and a crack of light appeared. I saw a patch of blue and a bright sun and white clouds, and we toppled out upon green grass. Dust was billowing behind us and I managed to shut the door, which was perfectly disguised in the face of a cliff. The thundering sounds faded, but the ground continued to heave beneath our feet. We were on Dragon’s Right Horn, looking across the deep gorge to the matching peak and cliff and the estate of Prince Liu Pao.

  The entire range of hills was shuddering, and muffled roaring sounds came from the bowels of the earth. The tomb of the Laughing Prince was like a cancer eating at the insides, but then the hills took charge. A billion tiny cracks appeared across the Valley of Sorrows as the earth squeezed down and pressed empty spaces together. Caverns and caves and tunnels were crushed out of existence, and great spouts of dust whistled up from holes and spread across the sky. The earth gave one last shudder and then was still.

  Moon Boy straightened Grief of Dawn’s body upon the grass and gently combed her hair with his fingers, and I sat down beside her and wept. Master Li lifted his eyes and watched tiny puffs of dust form a pattern on the matching cliff across the gorge, and then a door burst open and a small figure tumbled out. Dust covered everything. When it cleared I saw a robe of motley, and a cowl that revealed a glimpse of bright red hair. The head turned toward us.

  “Oh!”

  “Somehow I knew you’d make it,” Master Li said.

  The girl sat up and smacked billows of dust from her robe. “I’m so glad you’re safe,” she said in her beautiful off-center voice. “I’m afraid for my friend, though, and his monks, even though I don’t like the monks very much. Did you find your friend with the funny hair?”

  Master Li snorted and reached for his wine flask. His eyes and voice were cold and angry.

  “We will just as soon as you pull that wig from your silly head and take your lips away from the stone. Prince, the time for games has ended. You and I are going to have a serious talk.”

  Moon Boy and I stared. I suppose that the pupils of our eyes were swimming around the whites like drunken dolphins when a red wig lifted and a feather duster mop of black hair appeared. The cowl fell back and Prince Liu Pao winked at us. In his hands was a piece of stone, round and concave like a bowl. “Yang,” he said in a deep masculine voice. He moved his lips to the other side of the stone. “Yin,” he said in the sweet feminine voice of the girl. “Needless to say, the sound from the center is quite extraordinary,” he said cheerfully in his own voice. “I didn’t dare use it underground because of the vibration, which shows how ill-equipped I was to take on the great Master Li. You didn’t hesitate to bring the whole works down, and you very nearly squashed me like a bug.”

  The prince bowed deeply. Master Li grunted and emptied the contents of his purse upon the grass. The lining was waterproof, and he filled it with wine and sealed it. He still had plenty of spring in his right arm, and the purse sailed across the gorge to the prince. They toasted each other politely, and drank thirstily.

  “As a matter of minor curiosity, how old were you when you first discovered the entrance in the gorge?” Master Li asked.

  “Twelve,” the prince replied. “I was thirteen when I learned how to open the doors and enter the burial chamber, and your reconstruction of the tragic affair with the gardeners was so accurate it chilled my blood.” He heaved a melancholy sigh. “I hated to kill them. They were my friends, but as you yourself have pointed out, I was faced with the possibility of having every greedy bureaucrat and bandit in the empire at my doorstep. How could I trust those fellows to keep such a secret?”

  “How indeed?” said Master Li.

  I can’t speak for Moon Boy, but I was convinced I was hallucinating. In fact, I was wondering where and when I had eaten some weird mushrooms.

  “The manuscript of Ssu-ma Ch’ien posed a similar problem,” the prince said. “I thought the secret would last as long as I would, but Brother Squint-Eyes came to me with a sample page. The idiot thought it was genuine. I knew it was forged, but two days later it dawned on me that the idiot was right. It had to be in code, and how could I be sure Brother Squint-Eyes wasn’t playing stupid? For all I knew, he could even have deciphered it, but not yet put two and two together. I had to send my abominable ancestor to deal with him.”

  The prince flushed angrily. “I was being forced to take actions that made me ill,” he said. “You revealed there might be a copy, and I had to try to get it, and that other idiotic monk had to stick his head into the library and commit suicide.”

  The two of them sipped wine and moodily watched butterflies dance through sunlight that was beginning to filter through a golden haze. The breeze carried a faint smell of rain, and black clouds were gathering in the distance. Far below us the Valley of Shadows was wrapped in deep purple shadows.

  “In the tomb I always used the softest possible sound from the stone to control my ancestor,” the prince said. “When I sent him and his merry companions to the monastery he wanted to linger and strangle a few more people. I had to make a loud sound to bring him back, and it was exactly like the emperor and the tangerines. The incredible ch’i of the stone overpowered weaker ones in its path, and when I pulled my ancestor back, I also pulled the life force from parts of Princes’ Path. I was absolutely appalled! In fact, I felt like a character in a fairy tale who waves a magic wand to cure his wife’s one blemish, and does so, except she’s now a flawless yak. What had been so simple was becoming terrifyingly
complex, and the immediate result was that the abbot was so frightened he rushed off to Peking to seek the legendary Li Kao. Even then I was idiotic enough to think you would weary of reaching dead ends and give up.”

  Master Li spat disgustedly. “The legendary Li Kao had better buy a bucket of worms and start practicing his goo-goo-goos,” he said sourly. “It was the sheer simplicity of it that baffled me. If I hadn’t been enchanted by complexity, I might have realized what was going on the moment I saw your studio.”

  “Oh, but you were magnificent!” the prince protested. “I simply couldn’t believe it when you worked through one blind alley after another, knocking walls down if necessary, and you never really went off course. You were moving like doom itself straight toward the truth, and finally I had no choice but to try to kill you.”

  He threw his head back and laughed with all the old warmth and charm.

  “I should have known that a man who would dare a mind trip to Hell would be harder to kill than the Stone Monkey.” He inclined his head in my direction. “You too, Ox. You were a dead man the moment I led you to my unspeakable ancestor, and instead you will most certainly earn a place in the annals of P’u Sung-ling, the Recorder of Things Strange.”

  “Speaking of the Laughing Prince, how did he acquire his happy companions?” Master Li asked.

  “My fault entirely.” The prince grimaced and fined himself a slap on the cheek. “I may have been slightly precocious when I found my ancestor, but I was still a boy. One day I forgot to lock him back inside the burial chamber, and to make matters worse, I went off on a long trip. When I returned I discovered he had taken the opportunity to creep through the moonlight strangling wayfarers, and now he had companions to share his merriment. Ox, I’m deeply indebted to you for finishing him off. I was going to have to do so, but I wasn’t at all sure of how to go about it.”