The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  “Gad, the resemblance is remarkable,” he drawled. “Would Your Magnificence perchance be related to radiant Lord Yu Yen?”

  The sheer audacity of a worm daring to address a tiger left the lord speechless. Besides, Yu Yen means “Fish Eyes.”

  “No? How odd. I could have sworn you were brothers,” Yen Shih said. “Masters of the hunt, legends in war—Lord Yu Yen, for example, having heroically won high rank, medals, and military command upon the field of primogeniture, was granted the honor of accompanying the Son of Heaven upon a bandit-hunting expedition, and as fate would have it he was granted an early opportunity of displaying his worth when his men encountered a band of marauding Miao-chia.”

  The nobleman had finally grasped the incredible fact that this low creature was addressing him in familiar language, and he uttered a roar of rage and pulled his sword from the scabbard. I started forward, but Master Li grabbed my shoulder and held me back. Yen Shih was casually balancing the broom on his right forefinger and seemed to be unaware of the shining sharp steel that glittered coldly in the afternoon sunlight.

  “What a hero he was,” the puppeteer said admiringly. “‘Send forth your champion!’ cried valiant Lord Yu Yen. ‘He against me! Man to man and hand to hand!’ It was seemly said, but one regrets to report that the rabble to which it was addressed was disgustingly drunk.”

  “That’s the Miao-chia,” said Master Li.

  The nobleman screamed with rage and lunged with a swipe that was meant to remove the puppeteer’s head, but Yen Shih casually flicked the handle of the broom and sent the blade flying harmlessly aside so that it chopped a candle in half and knocked a tin bowl from a table.

  “Indeed yes,” the puppeteer said sadly. “The swine clung together, laughing and giggling in drunken disarray, pointing greasy fingers at Lord Yen Yu. Then they sent their cook.”

  The nobleman screamed and swung again, and the broom handle sharply rapped his wrist. Yen Shih appeared not to see the fellow dive to the floor and scramble to pick up his sword.

  “The cook was a rather large woman,” he said mournfully. “Fat mottled arms and the evil eye. ‘I’ll not fight a female!’ roared gallant Lord Yu Yen, and the bitch grabbed his lustrous locks and jerked his head forward and bit off his noble nose.”

  “That’s the Miao-chia,” said Master Li.

  The nobleman tried a thrust to the heart. The parry spun him around, and then a small amount of blood sprayed into the air as the broom handle rapped his nose.

  “Lord Yu Yen,” said Yen Shih, “decided to unsheathe his sword—a bit late, some might say—and the harridan treated his fingers most foully in the process of taking it from him. Then she hacked off his aristocratic arms at the elbows.”

  “That’s the Miao-chia,” said Master Li.

  The nobleman’s savage swipe swung him around in a circle when Yen Shih leaned back. The blade swished harmlessly through the air and then the broom handle flicked out and the nobleman yelped and grabbed both elbows, and his sword again hit the floor.

  “Valiant Lord Yu Yen was somewhat handicapped, but still undaunted!” the puppeteer said proudly. “He stepped forward and attempted quite a savage kick, and might even have essayed another had not the hag chopped off both legs at the noble knees.”

  “That’s the Miao-chia,” said Master Li.

  The nobleman straightened up and tried to fend off the broom handle with his sword, and then he hopped around the floor clutching both aching knees.

  “What a champion was Lord Yu Yen!” Yen Shih said emotionally. “He magnificently managed to wriggle forward on his stomach and inflict a very painful bite upon the lady’s left ankle, and would surely have wounded the right one as well were it not for the slattern’s total disregard for the rules of civilized warfare, which became apparent during the process by which she removed his lordship’s teeth.”

  “That’s the Miao-chia,” said Master Li.

  The nobleman wasn’t a complete idiot. When the broom handle pointed at his head he jumped four feet backward, raising his left arm protectively in front of his mouth.

  Yen Shih wiped a tear from his eye. “Although deprived of teeth, legs, arms, and nose, gallant Lord Yu Yen was still magnificent in battle. He went on the offensive with some genuinely harsh language, and was even contemplating spitting when the hussy made such action academic. I regret to report that details of her subsequent behavior are quite unsuitable for circulation in any country other than Tibet.”

  “That,” said Master Li, “is the Miao-chia.”

  The nobleman raised his sword again, and then paused to think it over.

  “We scoured the field of battle, searching for a piece of our hero large enough to place in a sacristy at the Military Academy, from which valiant Lord Yu Yen could inspire generations yet unborn. Alas! All that remained was a greasy spot on the grass,” Yen Shih said mournfully. Then his eyes lit up. “But wait! Possibly a twin would suffice, and all we need is a piece!”

  His teeth bared in a small tight smile, and he twitched the broom back and forth like a cobra’s head as he stepped forward, and the nobleman uttered a small shrill shriek and ran out the door and disappeared, leaving his sword behind him.

  The minor noblemen of the hunting party had remained absolutely still throughout this. The puppeteer turned and looked them over, and then he growled. That’s all. Just the low snarling growl of a bear about to lose its temper, and in less than five seconds there wasn’t a nobleman to be seen. I was paralyzed, but Master Li was not.

  “Ox, pack up. We’re leaving fast,” he said. Then he turned to the puppeteer, and his voice was sharp and hard. “Pretty, but self-indulgent. I sincerely hope you wouldn’t have done that yesterday, and we had better be where I assume we are.”

  Yen Shih’s eyes slowly changed as the dancing, leaping light died down. He took a deep breath and bowed his head in apology that seemed to be half mock and half real.

  “You’re right, of course, and I’m not quite enough of an idiot to have done that yesterday,” he said. “We’re at the border of bandit country, and inside of two hours no nobleman would dare follow us with his private army.”

  Master Li grunted, and the affair was never mentioned again, but I would be less than truthful if I didn’t admit that when I gathered firewood I spent part of the time swinging a stick in my hand, fencing imaginary noblemen.

  The third scene is not so tidy and not so triumphant, and I wouldn’t describe it at all were it not for the fact that it turned out to be important.

  We had no trouble at all going through bandit territory, just as Master Li had predicted. Everybody welcomes a puppeteer, and in addition there is superstitious awe in outlaws where magic-makers are concerned, and that includes beautiful young shamankas. I soon learned not to worry about Yu Lan, and certainly her father never showed that he did. On the fifth day through the bandits’ domain (which officially doesn’t exist) we ran straight into one of those coincidences that people who know nothing about life insist happen only in books. The guest of honor at the camp of the bandit chief we were to perform for turned out to be the man we were traveling to see, the Grand Warden of Goose Gate (Yen-men).

  We soon learned he had every reason to be there, because he had recently wed the bandit chief’s daughter, which showed intelligence, according to Master Li, and we also learned that the bride, who was back at Yen-men, was suffering from a mysterious illness that no physician had been able to cure. We were able to split up and enter the camp as two separate groups traveling together for companionship: Yen Shih and Number Ten Ox as puppeteer and assistant, Master Li and Yu Lan as shaman and shamanka who specialized in healing. They had no trouble impressing the grand warden, and it was arranged that they should try their hands at treating his young wife.

  The scene I want to describe is very humiliating. I had to warm up the audience without the help of Master Li and Yu Lan, so I pretended to be on the verge of defeat a couple of times, and then pretended I was losing both
temper and judgment when I doubled the wager, and the crowd got quite excited. The noise drew distinguished visitors. I looked up to see the Grand Warden of Yen-men sneering at me, with a party of noblemen and one fellow dressed as a commoner.

  “Professional wrestler, eh?” the warden said jovially. “Bill yourself as Muck-Muck the Mule, or some such, eh? Buddha, look at all those bulging things! Muck-Muck the Muscle-bound Mule, eh?”

  His entourage treated that as the apex of humor, but I happened to notice that the warden’s shifty little eyes didn’t laugh when his mouth did, and there was something cowardly and cruel in his voice when he volunteered to provide a friend of his as my next opponent. The friend turned out to be the commoner, and a minute later I reached two decisions. The first was that the commoner’s familiar manner suggested a relationship with the grand warden that was far more than friendly, and the second was that he wasn’t human.

  He was a good deal shorter than I was, but I guessed he was actually heavier. His head seemed to be rammed down on his shoulders without benefit of neck. I’ve been told I look like that too, but this creature also had little in the way of discernible shoulders, waist, hips, or thighs. The bastard was all of a piece, one solid tube of sinuous muscle from his jaw to his knees, and then tapering only slightly from his knees to his feet. As he stripped to his loincloth a bee landed on his left shoulder, and instead of brushing it away he simply shuddered his flesh donkey-style, the entire hide twitching effortlessly, under total muscular control.

  “Number Ten Ox,” I said silently, “you are in bad, bad trouble.”

  The creature stood surveying me with glittering, expressionless eyes, and when a smooth ripple of muscles sent him gliding to the challenger’s place in the ring I dubbed him the Snake. The warden had claimed the judge’s flag as a prerogative of rank. He suddenly dropped it to catch me off guard, but that’s exactly what I’d expected him to do and I was ready. I decided there wasn’t any point looking for weakness in a snake, so I was airborne the moment the flag started down, twisting in midair to aim a vicious leg whip at the reptile’s ankles. He hadn’t expected it. He simply dropped a hand and slapped my extended foot so hard that I spun around like a cordless kite and crashed to earth in a cloud of dust. I managed a backflip and landed crouched in a defensive position, but he wasn’t bothering to attack me. He was waiting for me to come and entertain him again, and this time he was so contemptuous he didn’t try to stop me when I went for a waist hold. That’s when I discovered the slick shine of his flesh wasn’t an optical illusion. My hands slipped helplessly over oil, and with another effortless donkey shudder he’d sent me spinning harmlessly away.

  What kind of creature walks around covered with oil? I didn’t get a chance to think it over. The Snake stepped forward and the next thing I knew I was sailing up toward the clouds, and then I was looking at them upside down, and then I returned to earth with a crash that knocked the breath from my body. He could have finished me then and there, of course, but he was gliding snakelike around the ring as he bowed to the applause of the warden and his entourage. I used the opportunity to dig up handfuls of dirt, and I lunged when his back was turned and managed to smear the stuff around his waist. Now my hands had dirt to cling to, and before it became oily mud I got a full grip and heaved, harder than I ever had in my life, and I managed to get full extension. The Snake was poised in the air above my head as I strutted around the ring, and then I tossed him down at the warden’s feet with everything I had.

  I sometimes wonder how I’ve survived this long with a couple of plover’s eggs masquerading as brains. There I was bowing to the bandits, swollen like a blowfish in my conceit, but since when do you incapacitate a reptile by tossing it to the ground? You annoy it, that’s what you do, and when I was able to think again I had a dim impression of having been struck by a cyclone. I flew this way and bounced that way and flipped over and over, and then I was lying flat on my back and the Snake was seated comfortably behind me. He had my arms pulled backward and pinned, and his legs were wrapped around my neck, and slowly, very slowly, he was squeezing them as a constrictor tightens coils around its dinner.

  The Grand Warden of Goose Gate was leaning over me, watching. His tongue flicked out and licked his lips, and he was making little snickering sounds as he waited for me to perform a song for him. It was to be the drumming of my heels against the ground as breath left me, faster and faster and then slower and slower, and then silence. I couldn’t hear anything except a muffled gong sound in my ears, but suddenly the pressure lessened and allowed me to breathe a little, and I realized the warden had looked away and up, and then I saw a beautiful and terrible figure looming above me. It was Yu Lan, and she had wrapped the aura of her priesthood around her like shining armor, and her eyes flashed with anger.

  “Would you arouse the sickness demons that are attacking the body of your wife?” she said to the warden, snapping each word like the crack of a whip. “You have asked aid of the Mysteries of Wu, and taken vows of purity until a cure is accomplished, and now you dare to kill?” Her hair was actually rising like cat’s fur, and if I hadn’t been in my current position I would have cringed like a whipped dog. “Know you not that you run the risk of angering the Three Corpses and Nine Worms inside your own body, and of visiting upon yourself the very Death Spirit you incite? Release him, and pray to the gods for their forgiveness.”

  She made a commanding gesture. The Snake looked to the warden for guidance, and the warden looked at the Snake—very much the gaze of bedmates—and then the warden nodded. The pressure relaxed completely and my arms were freed. I managed to sit up and massage my neck, and the warden and the Snake and the entourage strode away. Yu Lan also turned and walked off through ranks of bandits who nervously jumped aside to let her pass.

  Master Li had arrived when Yu Lan did, and in case awe and moral superiority needed some support he’d taken a crossbow from a bandit and had the Snake in the notched sights. Now he bent over and examined my bruises.

  “Nothing broken,” he said cheerfully. “The only thing damaged is your pride, and I wouldn’t lose sleep over that if I were you. That fellow simply isn’t human.”

  “Soivnzd,” I wheezed, which is as close as I could come to “So I’ve noticed.”

  So the stage was set for our arrival in Yen-men, with Master Li and Yu Lan invited to enter the palace walls to treat the grand warden’s sick bride, and Yen Shih automatically welcomed as a puppeteer, with me as assistant, and also arriving would be Li the Cat, and waiting for us would be the Snake, and I had a powerful premonition that the combination was going to be interesting.

  The palace at Yen-men was a great gloomy place complete with a drawbridge and a moat, built to withstand sieges during the wars of the Three Kingdoms many centuries ago. I was interested to see that Master Li and Yu Lan looked the place over, came to some sort of unspoken agreement, and arranged to see the grand warden’s sick wife immediately. When they emerged from the bedchamber Master Li said “Parasites?” and Yu Lan said, “Almost certainly.” Then they closely questioned the lady’s maids, following which they examined some ornamental ponds that were scattered here and there in the gardens. They prepared a vial of some odorous liquid and made sure that the sick woman drank it, and Master Li said, “That should do it.”

  “You mean that’s all?” I asked.

  Yu Lan looked at me with a faint smile tugging at her lovely lips, and Master Li laughed.

  “Ox, in terms of conventional medicine the answer would be yes,” he said. “In shamanistic terms we’ve barely begun, and I think you’ll find the next two steps to the cure to be rather interesting.”

  That turned out to be an understatement, although I was disappointed at first when it seemed that I was excluded. They huddled with Yu Lan’s father. Yen Shih rapidly wrote out a detailed script of some sort, adding a few suggestions of his own, and they announced that the warden’s wife was being attacked by exceptionally vicious demons who were trying to ste
al her higher soul, and they set sunrise the following morning as the time for the decisive battle with the Agents of Darkness. I was told to collect a bag of rice and a sack of bees (I had no idea what they were for) and to ride out into the hills and gather huge amounts of poppies. Yen Shih let me help him fix various puppeteering equipment in the grand warden’s audience chamber, but after that all I was allowed to do was play the drums and I was forced to admit they were right. I would have lost my head and done something foolish if I’d been in a more responsible position, and in my defense I will offer the following description.

  The Doctors and the Demons

  SCENE: The palace audience chamber at dawn; curtained, almost airless, heavily shadowed. Torches flank a table placed upon a dais at the end of the room, with heavy hangings on three sides. Incense burners send thick fragrant smoke into the air, and the smell of poppies is overpowering. A bat wobbles erratically through the air and collides with a burner, flaps upside down around the room, and lands on the floor—under the impression it is the ceiling—and clings to a chair leg, giggling. A drum begins a slow monotonous beat, and a parade of dignitaries led by the Grand Warden of Goose Gate enters Silence, except for the drum. Coughing and shuffling of feet. More silence. More coughing and shuffling. The drum slows: da-dum, da-dum, da-dum… dum…dum…dum…. Dead silence, then the grand warden and the dignitaries leap three feet into the air.

  VOICE FROM NOWHERE: Bring…the…afflicted…to…me….

  Dignitaries leap aside to form a path as the grand warden’s wife is carried in on a silken litter. She is a young woman, not bad-looking, powerfully built, with a commanding presence but clearly ill. The litter is carried up the steps to the dais and placed upon the table facing the audience. The carriers bow and back away through the side curtain. Silence.