The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  Moon Boy stared at him. So did I, and the old man threw his head back and laughed until tears flowed.

  “What a creation is Moon Boy!” he chortled. “My lad, on the one hand you’re the apotheosis of beauty, irresponsibility, and unbridled sexuality on a rampage, and on the other hand there isn’t an evil, unkind, or even unpleasant bone in your body.” Master Li shook his head wonderingly. “We may be sure that art is involved, for such a combination of excess and innocence is not to be found in nature,” he said. “You couldn’t possibly have perfected guiltless sin without experimenting with the common garden variety, and when Ox and I watched you stand before the Mirror of Past Existences, our subconscious minds played a duet. Buddha, what a series of incarnations! From baseness to depravity to malignancy to monstrosity, culminating in an incarnation as the most dissolute and irresistible slut ever to shake her rear end across the pages of history.”

  Master Li wiped his eyes and winked at me.

  “Come, Ox, surely you recognized her? I thought every boy in China had memorized the more indelicate passages of her biography.”

  I remembered having seen Moon Boy dressed as a girl, and then I realized he had been a girl, and then I turned bright red. Suddenly his incredible beauty made sense, and I recognized the lady in the mirror, all right.

  “Golden Lotus,” Master Li said happily. “Moon Boy once walked the earth as a man-eating seductress so spectacularly immoral that she was elevated to Heaven to become the greatest Patron of Prostitutes in history, and I suspect that the goddess Nu Kua began to think deep thoughts about peculiar combinations of ch’i and shih the moment Golden Lotus began jiggling down the pearly paths, causing havoc among the young gods. Golden Lotus was removed from her post and given a new form. Remember it?”

  I remembered Moon Boy in the mirror, changing and yet not changing, still beautiful but blending with bright colors, lifting his face and arms toward the sun, almost like—

  “A flower,” Master Li said softly. “A beautiful flawed flower named Purple Pearl who was placed in the path of a flawed stone, and the stone brought dew and raindrops to wash the evil from the flower, and the flower fell in love and vowed to repay its debt by shedding every tear in its body. It might take centuries, or even millennia for the time to be right for a flower to be reborn, but the greatest virtue of stone is patience.”

  Moon Boy’s eyes were wide and wondering. Master Li picked up the stone, pieces still pressed together, and placed it in Moon Boy’s hands. Then he took his wine flask and stood up.

  “This will seem very silly, but who cares?” he said. “Clasp the stone tightly, Moon Boy. Close your eyes. Try to imagine a place without water near the River of Spirits, and dryness and wilting, and then a faithful stone flying up with the morning dew of Heaven.”

  Moon Boy closed his eyes and clasped the stone. Master Li waited, and then he tilted the flask and sprinkled drops of Heavenly Nectar over Moon Boy’s head. The effect wasn’t silly at all. Moon Boy trembled all over, and squeezed the stone against his heart, and from his lips came an indescribably beautiful singing sound that gradually resolved itself into words.

  “Love…love…but I have no tears…. Not even as a child could I cry…. How can I cry for a stone? … Love…love…love…but I cannot cry….”

  Master Li motioned for me to follow him.

  “We will leave you for a while,” he said quietly. “A flower that vows to shed tears is making a very serious commitment, and neither gods nor men have the right to influence the decision.”

  He walked away. We went around the peak to the far side of Dragon’s Left Horn, and Master Li sat down on a flat rock and gazed out at the valley. Peasants were scurrying around fearfully, but so far as I could see the damage from the earthquake was limited to fallen thatched roofs and a few collapsed barns. Soft blankets of shadows were sliding over the fields, and the birds were singing their last songs. Master Li tilted the flask and reverently rolled the liquid around his mouth before swallowing.

  “Ox, I think Prince Liu Pao should be a hero,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s better that way, even though it may cause long-term problems for his heirs. We’ll tell the abbot that the prince fell in the final triumphant battle against the forces of evil, and never again will his abominable ancestor threaten the Valley of Sorrows.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “The peasants will want a temple for him, but a shrine should do.”

  Master Li was beginning to warm to the subject. “Make that two shrines,” he said enthusiastically. “We’ll say he wished to be cleft in half, from top to bottom, and each half buried in one of the destroyed areas of Princes’ Path to fertilize new plants.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “He’ll be the Holy Half-Princes of the Valley of Sorrows, each half turning the seeing side to the peasants’ good deeds and the blind side to their bad, and the legend of what will happen when danger threatens and the two halves are reunited should be very interesting. I hope the cave of Wolf survived, because the boys should get to work on it at once.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “His last words were that he longed to lie in his graves and listen to the innocent laughter of children and the blissful bleating of little lambs and the—”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Master Li admitted. “Peasants will go only so far. You’d better handle that part of it.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “His last words were instructions to his heirs to repair the damage from the earthquake and give the monastery a new roof.”

  “Good boy,” Master Li said.

  “And fix the dike at the intersection of paths between the monastery, village, and estate. One torrential rain and the melons will wind up in Soochow.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “Anything else and the peasants will expect the prince’s heirs to repair their sandals and empty the chamber pots.”

  We sat in silence. Master Li’s wrinkles seemed to be older than the seams and cracks in the hills across from us, and his mood was turning melancholy.

  “You know, the prince was right,” he said. “I’m almost the last advocate of the old way of doing things. Perhaps it’s just as well. If one leaves out the Neo-Confucians, there’s much to be said for the modern style. Still, I hope you keep filling your notebooks as a record of an archaic approach to problems. There’s a good deal of fun to be found in the old way, and a good deal of beauty, and the practitioners seldom expired from ennui.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  He looked at me gravely, and then he nodded. We got up and started back. I tried to prepare for it, but still it was like a blow to the pit of my stomach, and tears blurred my eyes.

  “Oh, Moon Boy,” I sniffled.

  He always did things neatly. Master Li’s knife had been carefully cleaned, and he had built a small dam of earth so the blood from his slit wrist would build up around and over the stone without staining the grass unnecessarily. Moon Boy had placed Grief of Dawn’s hand over his, with the stone beneath them, and Master Li walked up and gently lifted the hands and picked up the stone. He washed it in the wine it had produced and dried it on his tunic and held it up to the light.

  “Oh, Ox, what a beautiful piece of work,” he whispered.

  A stone had once washed evil from a flower. Now the flower had shed the tears it had saved up to wash the flaw from the stone, and there wasn’t a trace of a crack or a sign of soft gold. The three pieces were one, and it was as solid as a stone can be.

  Master Li turned and raised his head toward Heaven and drew in great lungfuls of air. I covered my ears, but still the high harsh eagle screams that burst from the old man’s throat hurt my eardrums. The screams lifted one after another, shooting to the crimson clouds, and the echoes bounced back and forth between the peaks.

  He dropped to his knees. I followed his example. “It is Li Kao,” he said simply. “I pray to be all
owed to address the goddess Nu Kua.”

  We knelt there in silence while clouds began to cover the sky. I suppose it was my imagination, but I began to sense something else that stretched from horizon to horizon: a vast maternal presence.

  “Goddess,” Master Li said politely, “forgive me for beginning with a minor matter, but I have sworn a vow. The current Patron of Prostitutes is an incompetent disgrace, and the whores of China wish her to be replaced. Since the great Golden Lotus is scarcely available, they have nominated Empress Wu.”

  The air was growing sulphurous. Thunder rumbled.

  “Well, perhaps it might not be a good idea to let a woman like that run around loose,” Master Li hastily conceded. “I have been authorized to select a substitute, and I humbly nominate Tou Wan, wife of the late Laughing Prince. It is true that she attempted to murder her maid, but I have yet to meet a lady of quality who has not had the same urge now and then. So far as I know she took no part in her husband’s massacres and tortures, and as for her qualifications, she was immoral, lecherous, seductive, avaricious, blessed with a heart of the purest granite, and as tough as a person can get without infringing upon the supernatural. She was intelligent and brooked no nonsense, and would surely be a first-class manager. I cannot imagine a better representative of prostitutes, and should she cause trouble, it would only be necessary to send her a cool drink with lots and lots of ice in it. May I be so bold as to hope that a formal petition would receive favorable omens?”

  The smell of sulphur faded away and the thunder died down. Master Li bowed again.

  “Goddess, the world of men is a world of incomprehension,” he said softly. “Our senses are woefully limited. Our brains are but tiny candles flickering in an infinity of darkness. Our only wisdom is to admit that we cannot understand, and since we cannot understand we must do the best we can with faith, which is our only talent. The greatest act of faith we are capable of is that of loving another more than we love ourselves, and occasionally we can be quite good at it.”

  He reached out and placed the stone upon the grass.

  “We thank you for hoping that the one tiny talent of man might achieve what other forces could not,” he said. “We thank you for sending us a flawed stone that would call across the centuries to a flawed flower. We thank you for sending us the flower that would answer the call, and come with the greatest gift love is capable of. We thank you for bringing the pieces together, and we pray that a stone and a flower will finally be granted the acceptance of Heaven.”

  He bowed flat to the ground. So did I, but I peeked, and Master Li did too.

  A slanting sunbeam slid through the clouds and glided across the grass to the stone. I had the feeling that it was probing and testing as it moved over the surface. Then everything stood still. The birds stopped singing and the insects stopped buzzing and the animals stopped rustling. Even the breeze stopped blowing while the stone slowly lifted from the grass and came to a halt about four feet up in the air.

  I heard a humming sound. A light was glowing inside the stone, and a vibration made my head spin. The inner light began to pulse faster and faster and the stone began to shake. The hum was now a muted roar of incredible power, and a halo of light began to spin around the stone. Another halo crossed it, and another and another. The stone was glowing with blinding light, and the halos formed a dizzying pattern of interlocking rings, and I knew with absolute certainty that the full ch’i and shih of a simple stone was powerful enough to reduce the Valley of Sorrow to a tiny pile of ashes.

  The vibration still accompanied the roar, and the stone still shook. The roar increased and the stone threatened to shake itself to pieces.

  Moon Boy was turning transparent, shimmering and melting and fading into nothingness, and something was appearing upon the shuddering surface of the stone. Colors deepened, buds lifted and opened, and we gazed at a lovely flower. The roar of power stopped vibrating and the stone stopped shaking, but then the power level lifted again—unbelievable force!—and the shaking and vibrating reappeared.

  Now Grief of Dawn turned transparent. Her body melted like mist, and only the bent grass testified to the fact that it had lain there, and something else was appearing upon the stone. A slim graceful green creeper moved around the circumference, wrapping a stone and a flower in an eternal embrace, and the roar stopped vibrating and the stone stopped shaking.

  Again the roar of awesome power grew stronger and stronger. The spinning halos were now seamless, and nothing could withstand the force as the energy level approached the infinite—nothing—yet the stone remained absolutely steady and resolute, and I lost my fear that it would burst. Then the blinding light faded, and the roar faded, and the halos spun slower, and the stone began climbing to the clouds, picking up speed, streaking like a tiny comet toward the Great River of Stars and the goddess Nu Kua and the Wall of Heaven. The distant twinkle of light faded away and was gone.

  Master Li stood up and stretched. “How would I know?” he said, answering the expression on my face. “I’m no more capable of understanding the universe than the ancients were, and I applaud their good sense in leaving Heavenly matters to the gods. All I know is that certain things seem to work and certain things don’t.”

  He turned and gazed across the gorge.

  “Well, Prince, fraud may rule the world, but classicism still packs a wallop when one removes the neo from it,” he said to the embers of the studio. “Classical truths still apply, and classical values still define the limits, and classical standards still hold the universe together.”

  He turned to me. “Come on, Ox. Let’s find a place where they still know how to get classically drunk.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  I bent over and he hopped nimbly up on my back. I turned and began loping down the path toward the monastery, and then on to Peking, and Heaven’s Bridge, and the Alley of Flies, and the Wineshop of One-Eyed Wong.

  For Derk Bodde, Göran Aijmer,

  and all the other pioneers

  who almost got it right

  I have no intention of setting down the disgusting details concerning Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu. I will only say that I was half dead by the time we caught him, and Master Li had been so sorely pressed that he actually volunteered to serve as imperial witness to the execution. This was unprecedented because the old man hates to dress up in formal First Rank attire, even though he’s still entitled to wear it, and he cannot tolerate the noise.

  Executions in Peking are public occasions, held at the Vegetable Market that forms the western boundary of Heaven’s Bridge, the criminal area of the city. A large audience always attends, and this particular Execution Day was certain to draw a larger and louder crowd than ever because Devil’s Hand was going for the record. “Devil’s Hand” is a generic name passed from one Chief Executioner of Peking to the other, and several centuries ago the executioner managed 1,070 consecutive clean decapitations without needing a second swipe of his great sword. Our current Devil’s Hand had 1,044 consecutive clean kills, and since thirty condemned criminals were scheduled for execution the old record could fail before the day was done.

  It was the first day of the fourth moon in the Year of the Horse 3338 (a.d. 640) and every gambler in the city was packed into the square, besieging the bookmakers’ booths, and Master Li said he hadn’t seen so much money tossed around since Emperor Yang bet the city of Soochow on a cricket fight. (The bookmakers were facing ruin since they had originally offered astronomical odds against the record being broken. I had a small wager myself, but against Devil’s Hand. The pressure on him was tremendous and would get worse with every falling head, and all it would take to miss would be a bite of a bug or a slip in a puddle of blood and anyone who thinks it’s easy to hit a stationary target in the exact same spot again and again with a heavy blade is advised to try chopping down a tree.) That meant every pickpocket and confidence man in Peking was on hand, and with the audience in an unusually festive mood it was to be expected tha
t every vender who could cram his wares into the square would do so, and the result was the shattering of uncounted eardrums. Like this:

  “Sha la jen la!”

  “Hao! Hao! Hao!”

  “Hao tao!”

  “Boinngg-boinngg-boinngg-boinngg-boingg!”

  “My purse! Where is my silver necklace!”

  Meaning Devil’s Hand roared the ritual, “I’ve got my man!” and the mob howled, “Good! Good! Good!” and connoisseurs spread credit where it was due by screaming “Good sword!” and a dealer in household sundries crept up behind me and took aim at my left ear and unleashed the traditional sound that advertised his wares: wooden balls at the ends of strings smacking viciously against brass gongs. The last agonized wail speaks for itself, and it was really very interesting to look down from my vantage point and see the victim being divested of his valuables by Fu-po the Ferret.

  I was seated beside Master Li on the dignitaries’ platform, sweating in the uncomfortable junior nobleman’s uniform he makes me wear on such occasions and which will land me in boiling oil one of these days since I am scarcely entitled to the badges of rank. Master Li was letting an underling handle the honors until it came time for Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu to receive the sword, and was passing the time by catching up on his correspondence. He leaned over and yelled in my ear, trying to shout above the ghastly din.

  “Something for you, Ox!”

  He was waving a missive that seemed to consist of tracks made by a chicken after gobbling fermented mash.

  “A literate barbarian!” Master Li yelled. “Fellow named Quintus Flaccus the Fourth, writing from a place called the Sabine Hills! Somehow or other he got his hands on one of your memoirs!” He swiftly scanned the chicken tracks. “Usual critical comments!” he yelled. “Clotted construction, inept imagery, mangled metaphors, and so on!”