The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  “I can’t wait for the palate of a connoisseur to evaluate this batch,” Li the Cat said unctuously. “To my taste it’s an improvement of fifty percent at least, but I don’t pretend to be an expert.”

  “Neither do I. I’m just facile with experts’ clichés,” the grand warden said with a mock bow, and they both laughed heartily.

  Li the Cat opened his money belt and extracted a small round object that seemed to have the imperial seal stamped on it. It was pale green with light purple shadings, and apparently as hard as a hunk of wood. Master Li’s fingers dug into my shoulder.

  “Ox, that’s Tribute Tea,” he whispered. “How in hell did that slimy eunuch qualify for Tribute Tea?”

  The question was rhetorical, of course, so I said nothing. The eunuch shaved thin pieces from the little hard cake with a silver knife, and the grand warden used a silver pestle to powder the shavings in a silver mortar. With great ceremony they passed the powder three times through a silver sieve, and then poured equal amounts into two wide, shallow chien saucers. The water in the pot (actually it’s not a pot but a “soup bottle”) was boiling, and the grand warden carefully poured it into the chiens. They briskly stirred with bamboo whisks. At first the liquid was white, then it turned bluish gray, and then bluish gold, and the aroma that reached my nostrils was the delicious subtle scent of tea of the very highest quality. They bowed to each other and raised the saucers to their lips and sipped, and then the warden grimaced and spat the stuff into the fire.

  “It still tastes like camel piss,” he said petulantly.

  “Well, I didn’t claim perfection, and it really does taste better,” the eunuch protested. “Try another sip, and don’t expect miracles.”

  The grand warden cautiously tried again, and this time kept it down.

  “All right, it is a bit better,” he said grudgingly. “It still wouldn’t fool a baby, however.”

  “Who’s in the business of fooling babies? We’re fooling barbarians,” the eunuch said with a chuckle. “Look at the uncompressed leaves and tell me there’s something wrong with them!”

  He extended some tiny things from his money belt, which the warden viewed admiringly.

  “Buddha, that’s marvelous. You used the same batch?”

  “Exactly, and some of the worst of it at that. We have the technique down perfectly, and I’m now guaranteeing a success rate of ninety-five percent. How are things going at your end?” Li the Cat asked,

  “Four more barbarian kings have expressed strong interest, two of them are certain customers,” the grand warden said briskly. “The real market would be Rome, of course, but sea routes are very risky and every caravan runs the risk of capture by aspiring princes, who might send the stuff back to China as tribute. Can you imagine?”

  Li the Cat shuddered. “Don’t even think about such things,” he said. “Any change in the basic sales tale?”

  The grand warden shrugged. “Why change it? We have to explain how we got the merchandise, and the story of bandits capturing caravans and then discovering the cargo was intended for the emperor can’t really be improved upon. My recent marriage into a bandit clan provides authenticity, and it’s easy to explain that my illustrious father-in-law can’t dispose of his loot inside the boundaries of civilization, and has to turn to me for outside markets. Let’s not gild something that’s glowing.”

  That was when matters changed dramatically. The warden had taken out a large map and they were starting to discuss routes and new markets when a high and shrill, but rather pretty sound, rang through the room. It was like the rapid tinkling of a small silver bell, and instantly both men were on their feet. The warden ran to the west wall and pulled aside a calligraphy scroll stretched on a bamboo frame, and behind it was the door of a safe. Then his back covered the view and I couldn’t tell how he opened it, but when he turned again I had to suppress a loud exclamation. In his hands was an ancient cage, precisely like the other two, and the sound seemed to come from it. The warden trotted back to the table and set the cage down. Then I could see a tiny flickering light glowing in the center, pulsing to the bell sound, but the warden’s shoulder blocked my view and I couldn’t see what he was doing as he reached out to the front of the cage. The ringing of the bell stopped abruptly. The little glowing light expanded until it filled the cage, and then my eyes nearly popped from their sockets. Human features were forming inside the bars, and they resolved themselves into the face of a senior mandarin I had seen at the funeral of Ma Tuan Lin! Master Li’s fingers were digging into my shoulder like knives, and wrinkles had screwed up so tightly around his eyes I wondered how he could see. Then the mouth of the mandarin opened, and we heard his voice as though he were right there in the room.

  “Esteemed colleagues, an incredible development has taken place! Incredible!” he said so excitedly he was spraying spittle, and he made a visible effort to calm down. “All our hopes and dreams, the ultimate goals we have aspired to but despaired of attaining, may be in our grasp! I would never be believed should I explain it myself, and I am honored, I am awed, I am exalted to bring you the message from the source. Further introduction would be gross impertinence.”

  His image wavered and dissolved like a cloud breaking apart, and then the pieces began to re-form, and I smothered a yelp as an unmistakable face filled the cage. It was the Celestial Master.

  “So you’re the colleagues of this creature, eh?” the saint said softly. His face flushed and his voice raised to a roar. “You doltish donkeys! You emasculated earwigs! You idiotic apes whose sole talent is to make dinners of your own defecation! Stick the turd-stained tips of your fingers into your ears and dig out the dung beetles, because I am about to demonstrate the error of your half-witted ways!”

  The grand warden was transfixed, but unfortunately Li the Cat was not. He was clawing at the warden’s arm and pointing urgently at the door, and the warden grasped the simple fact that palaces breed eavesdroppers the way granaries breed rats, and he picked up the cage and ran with the eunuch to the south wall. They opened a small door and dove through, and the Celestial Master’s furious roars abruptly stopped when the door slammed shut.

  Master Li supplied corrosive words of his own as he bolted from behind the screen and ran to the door. It wouldn’t budge, and when I bent down and peered through a tiny crack I could see that lock picks wouldn’t be of any use. There was a heavy bar rammed through slots on the other side, and the only thing that would help would be a battering ram.

  “We have to hear what the Celestial Master is up to,” Master Li said grimly. “He’s been too long away from the grimy affairs of the world, and he doesn’t really understand how dangerous it is to try to trick men who stand to suffer the Thousand Cuts if they’re caught. Ox, go back out the window.”

  He jumped up on my back and I vaulted out over the balcony and down the wall until we reached the level of the formal reception hall, which was really like a throne room with the grand warden’s high gilded chair raised on a small dais that extended from the central tower. I haven’t mentioned that the castle was constructed in the style called Pine Tree, with a stone tower in the center supporting floor beams that arched like branches to the outer walls.

  “Ox, the passage they took seemed to lead in toward the tower, and almost all Pine Tree palaces use the tower for secret conference rooms, as well as the central source of light and air,” the sage said.

  He had me climb inside and race to the dais and pull tapestries aside on the wall behind the warden’s chair. I found what he expected behind the third tapestry: a small lacquered door that opened to reveal a staircase winding up inside the circular walls. I took the steps two at a time, trusting that the Celestial Master would still be roaring loud enough to drown out the sound of sandals clattering over stone, but when we reached the level of the warden’s office we found not one secret room, but two, and to reach the second we had to pass through the first. I sensed disaster the moment Master Li slipped down from my back and o
pened a gold-embossed door. He pointed ahead at a second gold-embossed door across from us and whispered, “If my orientation is right, they should be in there.” I thought I could hear a faint voice that might belong to the Celestial Master, but I was more interested in the territory we would have to cross to reach it.

  We had stepped upon an ermine carpet about four inches thick. The walls of the room were covered with velvet, and the centerpiece was an immense bed draped in satin, and all over the place were flattering portraits of the same creature. They were portraits of the Snake, and I was not in a mood to compliment the warden on his cleverness at placing both conference room and catamite within easy reach of his office. I gulped noisily and tried to pretend I was invisible as I tiptoed over that carpet behind Master Li, but it didn’t do me any good.

  I stepped past a dragon screen and was instantly hit by a flying tree trunk, or something that felt like it. I think I may have still been sailing through the air when the Snake picked up Master Li and neatly stuffed him down inside an immense malachite urn. The velvet on the wall cushioned the crash as I hit it, and I picked myself up from ermine and dove toward a reptile who was making happy hissing sounds. Since I was being kind enough to lead with my head he kicked my chin from his left sandal to his right sandal and back to the left again, rather like playing with a child’s bouncing ball, and as I hit the carpet I saw a strange rictus tug at his face. The Snake was smiling at good little Number Ten Ox who had come to entertain him by dying very slowly. The chop of the side of his hand was almost friendly, not hard enough to snap my neck in half. I managed to roll over and kick feebly, and it was clearer than ever that the Snake was playing with me when he let me regain my feet.

  Behind him a wrinkled old hand had lifted from the mouth of the urn, holding a throwing knife. Master Li could move his arm only a few inches, so a throw was out of the question, but he could try to give it to me. The problem was getting past the Snake to reach it. All I could do was charge and pray, and I almost managed to lift him and spin him around. Unfortunately I was making him angry, and he hissed at me and stopped playing. The Snake’s arms whipped up inside mine and broke my grip effortlessly, and then it was his turn. He wrapped me in a constrictor’s embrace, squeezing with power that would turn my bones to jelly and while I still had breath I gasped, “Throw! Throw!”

  I’d hoped for a distraction, and I got it. Master Li flipped the knife as well as he could, and it made one slow revolution in the air before it reached the Snake’s back. It must have felt like the bite of an ant. He glanced behind him and saw the extended hand, and he was not pleased. Hissing rather loudly, he tried to get his balance to aim a full-force kick and see which would break into more pieces, the urn or the old man, and in the process he lessened pressure on me. I jerked back with everything I had and broke free, and then I grabbed his waist and almost snapped my spine as I lifted. His feet were clear of the carpet. I only had enough strength for one desperate move, and all I could do was try to bring his spine down on the sharp edge of a large marble table. I gave it all I had, but it wasn’t enough. I knew I’d missed the moment I started the downward toss, and his back missed the edge and landed on the smooth flat surface. His cold reptilian eyes were staring straight at me, and there was no force left in my arm as I tried to chop his neck. The eyes didn’t even bother to blink. My legs were numb, and I helplessly held to him as I began sliding backward, and the eyes moved with me, cold, hard, without any emotion whatsoever, and then I fell to the floor and the Snake fell beside me.

  He was lying on his side with his motionless reptile eyes still fixed on mine, and I finally realized I was staring at a minor miracle. Master Li’s knife had stuck to him by no more than a fold of cloth and a tiny pinch of flesh, flopping harmlessly back and forth, but somehow it had flopped into exactly the right position as he descended to the tabletop. It had been driven into his back right up to the top of the handle, directly into his heart, and the Snake was stone-cold dead.

  Master Li’s eyes were incredulous as I peered down into the urn. “You’re alive?”

  “Sir,” I said, “does any deity owe us a favor? If not, we’ll have to go into bankruptcy buying incense for the pantheon.”

  I got him out without smashing the urn and he was able to hobble around quite well after I massaged his legs. He looked at the body of the Snake and shook his head wonderingly when I told what had happened, and then he pointed out a nasty aspect I hadn’t got around to considering.

  “There’s no way this wound in the back can be made to look like an accident,” he said. “We’re faced with unpleasant complications no matter what, but the first step is a necessity. We have to make the corpse disappear.”

  I opened my mouth one or two times to make suggestions and then closed it again. The grand warden was going to pull apart the castle stone by stone, if need be, dig up every inch of dirt, drain the moat, and send divers down the wells, and when Master Li said we had to make the Snake disappear he meant disappear.

  “Step one is to get him out of this revolting love nest, and that, at least, is easy,” the old man said decisively.

  I made two trips back down the stairs and then down the outer wall to the garden, one carrying Master Li and the other carrying the Snake. The corpse fit into a large wheelbarrow (an invention I have explained to barbarians in a previous memoir) and some burlap from manure sacks covered it. Then Master Li sprawled comfortably on top and I wheeled him out and past the guards while he hiccupped and waved his wine flask and sang bawdy songs, and the captain of the guards did no more than bow. After a battle like the one the old shaman had put on to save the grand warden’s wife he was supposed to get stinking drunk, and nobody dreamed of interfering. I wheeled him to the puppeteer’s wagon and left the wheelbarrow outside with the covered corpse still in it, certain that nobody was going to get close to the old man’s conveyance. Nothing is more dangerous than a drunken shaman. Yen Shih greeted us inside, which had very little space despite the size of the wagon because every inch was filled with puppeteering gear.

  “We have a problem,” said Master Li.

  Yen Shih raised an eyebrow.

  “There’s a corpse in that wheelbarrow,” said Master Li.

  Yen Shih raised the other eyebrow.

  “The corpse is that of the snakelike creature who damn near killed Ox, and we have to assume the grand warden will search every drop of water and mote of dust until he finds the son of a serpent,” said Master Li.

  Yen Shih nodded.

  “I have precisely two ideas at the moment,” Master Li said. “The first is to disguise the corpse as one of your larger mannequins.”

  Yen Shih pointed out at the moon and made revolving motions, indicating time passing, and then held his nose, indicating a bad smell.

  “The second is to find some way to explain how a tiger managed to get past the moat and walls and eat the bastard,” said Master Li.

  Yen Shih shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands apart—how?

  “We shall think,” Master Li said, and his wrinkles contracted while Yen Shih gazed up at the canvas roof and hummed. Then he stopped humming.

  “Tomorrow,” the puppeteer said slowly, “the Grand Warden of Goose Gate has scheduled a great feast in honor of his wife’s recovery.”

  “At which a tiger will eat the Snake?” said Master Li.

  “At which the Grand Warden of Goose Gate will eat the Snake,” said Yen Shih.

  I thought that was weak humor, but Master Li didn’t. In fact, he was regarding the puppeteer with vast admiration.

  “My friend, you’re a genius!” he cried.

  “But he isn’t being serious,” I said. Then I looked at Yen Shih, and back to Master Li, and back to Yen Shih. “Are you?” I asked weakly.

  I don’t want to describe what happened next but I have no choice if I am to provide honest accounts of the cases of Master Li, so I will include a detail that will make me look even more foolish than usual. Throughout the next hor
rible hours my mind insisted upon clinging to a totally irrelevant image. An image I had acquired in the very first scene with which I began this narrative, and I haven’t the slightest idea why it popped back up to lodge like a barnacle on my brain, but there it was. I kept seeing a despicable barbarian with a face of stone and eyes like icicles, squatting in squalor and scratching for lice in a place called the Sabine Hills, dipping his brush in viper venom to send his idiotic criticism all the way to China.

  “All right, Flaccus,” I said silently as I wheeled a huge load of fresh vegetables to the castle kitchens, “what would you have me do? Pretend there isn’t a corpse beneath the turnips, because corpses are excessively melodramatic? Bah, friend Flaccus! Bah! Bah! Bah!”

  A great castle always has a small separate kitchen for the preparation of ceremonial dishes to be offered to ghosts or gods, and it was to be expected that a shaman would wish to offer to the gods who had aided him and invite his esteemed host to share the feast. Master Li had no difficulty commandeering the place, and in a few minutes he and Yen Shih had the corpse stretched out on the kitchen table and were cutting the clothes away. To tell the truth, I still didn’t truly believe this was happening.

  “Ox, would you see if they have any pigs’ feet jelly?” the puppeteer asked. He turned to Master Li. “It seems to me that the thighs might best be marinated in a broth of pigs’ feet mixed with honey and the lees of wine, and then baked inside a crust formed of the marinade thickened with peanut paste.”

  “A connoisseur!” said Master Li.

  “Gllgghh!” I said.

  “Ox, while you’re at it, see if they have any pickled jellyfish skins!” Master Li called after me as I lurched into the larder. “I’ve discovered they go marvelously with bears’ paws,” he continued to Yen Shih. “Bears’ paws taste to me like sixty percent glue, so jellyfish skins might be a good accompaniment to glutinous parts, like the soles of this bastard’s feet, and perhaps the spermatic cords.”