The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  The Celestial Mandarin scratched his nose and shrugged. “How would I know? Kao, are you absolutely positive that the ape man’s gaudy face is real? Not clever actor’s makeup?”

  “It’s real,” Master Li said flatly. “Ox?”

  “Yes, sir, it’s real,” I said. “The moonlight was very bright when we saw him, and so were the lamps in the room, and I could almost see the pores of his skin, and that wasn’t paint or dye.”

  The Celestial Master sat silently for a moment. Then he said wearily, “I can’t concentrate anymore. I’m like an old tree, dying from the top down, and I’ll tell you something: I’ve had the same dream six nights in a row. It starts with my mother, who’s been dead for fifty years, and it ends with me trying to find my father’s shoes. I’m not going to see the leaves turn this year, Kao, and I can’t think clearly enough to make sensible suggestions. What do you plan to do?”

  I could see that the saint’s skin was almost transparent, and even the effort to sit up straight was tiring him, and I felt tears burn my eyes. To dream of the dead and then of shoes is an irrefutable omen of joining the former, because “shoes” and “reunion” are homophones: hsieh.

  “The key to the whole works would seem to be the cages,” Master Li said. “Both cages were held by murdered mandarins, and we can assume they belonged to the smuggling ring. It can’t be an accident that the tunnel entrance was practically at Ma Tuan Lin’s back door, and his note on the back of the rubbing seems to link cages to a business enterprise. A reasonable assumption is that the remaining cages are held by the remaining members, so to find the cages is to find the conspirators, and, I hope, to discover what in hell makes the cages so special. Li the Cat is traveling to Yen-men to confer with the Grand Warden, and I think it would be a good idea for Ox and me to attend the meeting.”

  The tired old head lifted. “How?” the Celestial Master said with a trace of revived vigor. “To get to Yen-men you have to pass through three different bandit territories. There’s always the sea route, but can you afford a couple of accompanying warships for protection against pirates? And once you get there, how do you join the meeting?”

  Master Li grinned. “Li the Cat is indeed taking the long, slow sea route, protected by the Wolf Regiment. If everything goes right Ox and I will leisurely travel overland, enjoying the sights and not losing sleep about bandits.”

  This was news to me, and I leaned forward intently, and Master Li winked at me.

  “You heard Yen Shih, Ox. He’s caught the fever and wants to stay on the case, so far as he understands it, and have you ever heard of a bandit insane enough to interfere with a traveling puppeteer?”

  He was right, of course. Nobody interfered with puppeteers. They brought laughter and joy to everybody, bandit and soldier alike, and they traveled under the protection of more deities than most priests could count. Master Li turned to the Celestial Master and winked.

  “On top of that, Yen Shih’s daughter is a renowned shamanka, young as she is. With the protection of a puppeteer and a shamanka I’d travel into the den of the Transcendent Pig,” he said. “As for spying on the conference, we’ll wait and see what comes up. It all depends, of course, on Yen Shih’s decision, and whether or not his daughter will join us.”

  The saint nodded. “Bring them for a blessing if they wish one,” he said. “Ox, too,” he added with a nod in my direction. “You won’t need one, Kao, because I decided long ago that the August Personage of Jade is reserving your blessing for himself, just as soon as he can stockpile enough lightning bolts.”

  The following morning there were four of us at the Celestial Master’s door, along with the morning star and the first light of the sun. Five, if one counts the gift.

  Yen Shih had listened intently to all Master Li said, and when I told him of the pets wandering around the saint’s house he wondered if one more pet would be an appropriate gift, and after seeing it Master Li was sure it would be welcome indeed. It was a small bright-eyed monkey with greenish silky fur, and I had never seen such a wonderfully intelligent creature. Once taught it could bring designated objects on command, and it had been trained to pluck out three recognizable tunes on the pi-pa (although it was likely to switch abruptly from one to another), and it was a marvelous mimic of human gestures. Yen Shih led it in by the hand, dressed in a small cap and tunic, and when he touched his own forehead and said, “Where are your manners?” the creature bowed quite beautifully to the saint, who was enchanted.

  “Yen Shih, eh? I saw you once, incognito of course, because you were doing Hayseed Hong. I haven’t laughed so hard since Abbot Nu confused one of the newfangled ceremonial vessels with a Sogdian chamber pot and anointed his acolytes with the contents of the latter,” the Celestial Master said happily. “And this is your lovely daughter! My dear, Tao-shihs and shamankas have a great deal in common, to the despair of theologians, and if I’m feeling a bit stronger when you return we must sit down for a long talk.”

  He blessed us and prayed for safety and success, and the old female servant had already learned the list of command gestures and got the little monkey to wave goodbye as we left. I can’t describe our leave-taking in more detail because my mind was concentrated on one overpowering ingredient, and that was the puppeteer’s daughter.

  Her name was Yu Lan. Shamankas learn their craft young, and she had learned from her mother, and I felt very callow and ignorant when I realized that the puppeteer’s daughter—no older than I—was already a fully accredited priestess of the ancient Wu cults, and practitioner of shamanistic mysteries and magic I didn’t dare dream about. She lived in a world far above me even when we shared the same physical area and conditions, but there was nothing unfriendly about her. When capitalized as a personal name Yu Lan means “Magnolia,” but uncapitalized and in a different context yu lan can mean “secretly smiling,” and that is how I came to think of her: silent, graceful, distant as a drifting cloud, but never haughty, never reproving, secretly smiling.

  She worked with everyone else to help her father’s puppet shows, but her own personal work could not be shared. I remember when we reached hills where strange wild people still lived in dark ravines. That night Yu Lan suddenly stood up in the light of our cooking fire and walked to the edge of the shadows where a boy had appeared as if by magic. He had brown skin and high sharp cheekbones and an expressionless face, and he silently extended a stripped branch with notches cut in it. Yu Lan studied the notches and then told the boy to wait, and a few minutes later she was dressed in a robe made from bearskin and carrying a case of various sacred things, and she disappeared with the boy into the night.

  Her father had said nothing. Only when she was gone did Yen Shih remark, “Her mother would sometimes vanish for days on end, but she always found me when she was ready to.” Then he changed the subject.

  She hadn’t gone far, however. Later when we were preparing to go to sleep we heard wailing and chanting from above us on a hilltop, and then a high clear voice exclaimed, “Hik!”

  Master Li yawned and muttered, “The next sound you’ll hear is ‘Phat!’ ”

  “Sir?” I said.

  “Phat!” rang sharply from the hilltop.

  “It’s Tibetan. Didn’t you notice the boy’s Tibetan features? Somebody’s died and they’ve asked Yu Lan to guide the soul safely into the hereafter,” he explained. “She has to start by freeing it from the body, which is done by opening a hole in the top of the head to let it out. Shamans practice on themselves with a piece of straw.”

  “Sir?”

  “Watch.”

  He plucked a piece of straw from his pallet and laid it carefully on top of his head, down flat. “Hik!” he exclaimed, and I stared with bulging eyes as the straw began to tilt and move, as though one end was sliding down into a hole. “Phat!” he cried, and the straw was standing up straight. He made a show of plucking the thing out of the hole in his head, and then tossed it away.

  “Neat trick, isn’t it?” he said. “Y
u Lan now has to guide the soul through wild country populated by demons and beasts, strengthening it by prayers and incantations, and she’ll be at it all night. Go to sleep.”

  He rolled over and soon began to snore, but I stayed up for hours acting like a fool with a piece of straw. I never did learn how it’s done.

  I’m getting ahead of myself, however. I really wanted to write about our very first evening on the road, even though nothing at all happened. We camped on a hill as the sun was setting. Yen Shih’s huge puppeteering wagon was bathed in rosy light, and he and I prepared to fix the canvas awning that served as a dew catcher above our pallets. We were swinging mallets, knocking metal sockets into the ground to hold the bamboo poles that supported the awning, while Master Li chanted the count for the mallets and Yu Lan’s clear pure voice lifted to the crimson clouds, improvising on the scene in the style of Liu Chu:

  “Five

  perching crows

  four

  low clouds

  three

  wild geese

  two

  rows of willows

  one

  flame of setting sun.”

  “Pole!” cried Master Li, and the hand of the puppeteer’s daughter happened to brush mine as she helped the sage set the pole in the socket.

  “Venerable Sir,” I said that night as we lay in our pallets, “is it true that shamankas can’t stand presumptuous males?”

  “Bllppsshh,” he muttered, or something like that.

  I searched for omens in the stars. “Sir, is it also true that an angry shamanka is as dangerous as a tigress with cubs?”

  He rolled over. “You may be right, my boy,” he said drowsily. “Knew a great lusty fellow once. Half rearing stallion, half raging bull. They called him Tong the Tumescent. One day Tong laid his paws on a pretty little shamanka, and she gave him the Eye and spoke words in an unknown tongue.”

  That seemed to be that. Snores arose from Master Li’s pallet, and then I heard a sputtering sound and the old man said between yawns, “Now they call him Yang-wei.”

  The snores resumed, and it took me a moment to connect Tong the Tumescent to Yang-wei, which means “Droopy Penis.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Since Li the Cat was taking the slow sea route we had time to allow Yen Shih to replenish his coffers along the way with puppet shows. I think I mentioned that everyone helped out. Yu Lan played a variety of instruments and sang very beautifully, and Master Li put on magic or fortune-telling or medicine shows, depending on his mood, and I donned a black hood and an evil smile and wrestled the local champions, who had to pay for the privilege and could claim a substantial prize if they won. I’d been tossing people out of rings since I was ten, so I wasn’t worried about losing, and I never hurt anyone. I have too much to tell about important things to spend much time describing those days, even though I’d like to, so I shall settle for three brief sketches. For the first, it was a warm afternoon in the market square of a small town, and the puppeteer and his daughter were inside the tent preparing for the show, and I had finished my wrestling act and was pouring dippers of water over my head, and it was Master’s Li’s turn. He wore a flat hat that looked like a board, with peculiar things on the ends of tassels dangling down, and his robe was covered with symbols representing the 101 diseases and the gods thereof, and he was standing on a platform examining a local dignitary who had a potbelly, a purple nose, and crimson cheeks.

  “The kidneys, my misguided friend, are not to be trifled with,” Master Li said gently, waving a cautionary finger in the fellow’s face. “The season of the kidneys is winter, and their orientation is north, and their element is water; their smell is putrid, their taste is salty, and their color is black; their animal is the tortoise, their mountain is Hang Shan, and their deity is Hsuan-ming; their virtue is wisdom, their emotion is fear, and they make the low moaning sound yu; the emperor of the kidneys is Chuan-hsu, they take the spirit form Hsuan Yen—the two-headed stag commonly called Black Darkness—and of all body parts they are the most unforgiving. What have you been doing to these great and dangerous organs?”

  The old man has sharp bony knuckles rather like chisels, and plenty of snap in his right arm when it comes to short body punches.

  “You have been drowning them in the Shaoshing wine of Chekiang!”

  “Eeaarrgghh!”

  “The Hundred Flowers wine of Chen-chiang!”

  “Eeaarrgghh!”

  “The Orchid Stream wine of Wusih!”

  “Eeaarrgghh!”

  “The Drip-Drop wine of Taming!”

  “Eeaarrgghh!”

  “The Golden Waves wine of Chining!”

  “Eeaarrgghh!”

  “The Grain of Paradise wine of Hunan!”

  “Eeaarrgghh!”

  “The Fragrant Snow wine of Mouchow!”

  “Eeaarrgghh!”

  “The Old Cask wine of Shanyang!”

  “Eeaarrgghh!”

  “The Peppery Yellow wine of Luancheng!”

  “Eeaarrgghh!”

  “The White Double wine of the Liuchiu Islands!”

  “Eeaarrgghh!”

  “The December Snow wine of Kashing!”

  “Eeaarrgghh!”

  “The Top of the Cask wine of Kuangtung!”

  “Eeaarrgghh!”

  “The Spring on Tungting Lake wine of Changsha!”

  “Eeaarrgghh!”

  “And the Double Pepper wine of Chingho!”

  “Eeaarrgghh!”

  The sage stepped to the front of the platform and addressed the audience in solemn tones, while the patient held his wounded parts and moaned pathetically.

  “My friends, consider the wondrous nature of the kidneys, and the beneficence of the deities who have granted them to us,” Master Li intoned. “It is the kidneys that produce bone marrow and give birth to the spleen. The kidneys convert bodily fluid into urine, and give birth to and nourish the hairs. The kidneys are the officers of bodily strength, and thus the top pair are attached to the heart. The kidneys are the officers of intellect, and thus the bottom pair winds through the pelvis and climbs up the spinal cord into the brain. The kidneys store the germinating principle that contains the will, and their song is ‘Somber Darkness,’ and their dance is ‘Engendering Life,’ and when mistreated they become swollen, sensitive, and very, very sore.”

  “Eeaarrgghh!”

  “Fortunately,” said Master Li, opening a large case to display rows of small vials, “the Academy of Imperial Physicians is allowing me to part with a very limited amount of Pao Puh Tsi’s amazing tonic for the kidneys known as Nine Fairies Elixir, and you need scarcely be reminded that this is the very elixir that saved the life of Emperor Wen. The ingredients are cinnabar, flowers of sulphur, olibanum, myrrh, camphor, Dragon’s Blood, sulphate of copper, musk, burnt alum, bear’s gall, yellow lead, centipedes, earthworms, silkworms, plum blossoms, cow bezoar, toad spittle, white jade dust, borax, tree grubs, and snails, and while some may consider the price slightly steep, the wise will consider the alternative.”

  “Eeeeaaaarrrrgggghh!”

  Yen Shih was in charge of the show, not Master Li, and he politely but firmly prevented the old man from shearing the sheep right down to the skin. “After all,” he pointed out, “I have to return year after year, and it is difficult to entertain lynch mobs.”

  I just said that Yen Shih was in charge, and the next sketch requires some expansion on the theme. To begin with, right from our first meeting I had sensed two very powerful elements in the puppeteer’s being. (Leaving out the tragedy of smallpox that disfigured him, the shock must have been unimaginable, because his natural movements and gestures were those of a good-looking youth who had grown into a handsome man.) The first was the light dancing deep inside his eyes when danger threatened, and I suddenly remembered the boy we had called Otter in my village, and his glowing eyes when he prepared to do a pelican dive into the shallow water in the quarry pit, far below at the base of Tor
n Tree Hill—a feat the rest of us didn’t dare daydream about. I often felt that staying too close to the puppeteer would be like staying too close to a fire where a thick piece of bamboo is burning slowly and steadily, meaning that at any moment the flames may reach a large air pocket surrounded by soft sap, and the explosion may send you sailing in a ball of fire through the wall of your cottage. That leads to the next fact about the puppeteer. He was an aristocrat, and I don’t mean that as a figure of speech.

  “From a noble family? Oh yes, or so I assume,” Master Li said when I asked him about it. “He practically reeks of a rarefied upbringing. Confucianism mandates a family’s continued nobility whether they maintain imperial favor or not, and the empire teems with proud younger sons working incognito as fishermen and gamekeepers, so why not puppeteers? Yen Shih may decide to tell us his story someday, and until then we can at least extend the courtesy of keeping our mouths shut.”

  The scene I want to describe is this. We had reached an inn on the outskirts of a town and been held up by rain that turned the roads to mud. Yen Shih had started drinking early in the morning in the large common room, seated by himself at a small table in the corner. He was still drinking, slowly and steadily, in late afternoon, showing no ill effects from the strong wine, but sinking more and more into his own private world. Yu Lan (thank Buddha!) was resting in the wagon. Suddenly the door burst open and a party of noblemen strode in. They were dressed for the hunt and drenched to the skin, and the others deferred fawningly to the leader, who had a flushed petulant face and hot hasty eyes. He yelled for wine and a larger fire, ordered us peasants out, and in almost the same breath he turned to the closest peasant and commanded him to sweep the stinking floor clean enough to receive superior feet. The closest happened to be Yen Shih, who leisurely arose and picked up a broom that was propped against the wall. He surveyed the nobleman with speculative eyes.