The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  “Gllgghh!” I said.

  One of the shelves yielded the pigs’ feet, and in a cabinet I found a jar of jellyfish skins. When I started back toward the table Master Li was preparing to remove the top of the corpse’s head with a saw, and Yen Shih was measuring fibula and tibia for ax strokes.

  “You see, Flaccus, there is more to this world than the uncivilized can possibly imagine,” I silently said. “For example—”

  Whack! Whack! Whack!

  “Gllgghh!”

  “Yen Shih, shall we do the brains in a traditional turnip sauce, or would you prefer oyster broth?” Master Li shouted over the sound of the puppeteer’s ax.

  “You know, I rather favor poaching brains in coconut milk, if Ox can find any,” Yen Shih said thoughtfully.

  “Brilliant!” Master Li said admiringly. “Ox, see if they have any coconuts, and do you know why our erudite friend made the suggestion? Once upon a time, so the story goes, the great king of Nam Viet was stabbed by assassins, and he realized he was dying, so he pulled off his head and stuck it on a tree as his final gift to the people. The head turned into the coconut, and because the king was drunk at the time the fluid inside it is the most easily fermentable stuff on earth.”

  “Gllgghh!” I said.

  “I shall again seek your invaluable advice before possibly ruining something,” said Master Li. “Shall we keep the tongue whole, possibly baked inside a crust of walnut paste, or should we slice and sauté it with butter and garlic?”

  “I’m a butter-and-garlic man,” the puppeteer said. “Why don’t we save the walnut paste for broiling the bastard’s balls?”

  “Splendid,” said Master Li.

  “Gllgghh!” I said.

  Whack! Riiiip! Whack! Riiiip!

  “Ox, would you extract the marrow from these?”

  “Gllgghh-gllgghh-gllgghh!” I said.

  “Don’t bother, I’ll do it. How about a casserole of toes and ears?”

  “Maybe with breast meat added,” Master Li said. “Stewed slowly with bean curd, fagara, red peppers, and a lot of mushrooms added at the end.”

  “Sounds marvelous,” said Yen Shih. “We have time to make a few sausages, don’t we?”

  “Oh, certainly. Here, let’s see what his intestines look like.”

  “Gllgghh!” I said.

  “Ox, look for some of that mustard from the south that goes so well with sausages!” Yen Shih called out. “I once knew a fellow named Meng Kuan who claimed he bought mustard of Tan and took it home and forgot about it,” he said to Master Li. “The stuff began to grow, and it sprouted a torso, a head, a tail, and four legs, and Meng Kuan swears it bit him and galloped out the door and he never saw it again.”

  “What was he drinking?”

  “Paint remover, I assume. Speaking of which, is there some way we can disguise the features, yet leave it intact, and serve the grand warden crisp fried face of boyfriend?”

  “Gllgghh!” I said.

  I staggered back with mustard and a coconut. “You see, Flaccus,” I silently said, “there are times when gentlemen must engage in activities which they normally—”

  “Will you look at this fellow’s kidneys and pancreas!”

  “Gorgeous! And the liver!”

  “Eggplant! Ox, we must have eggplant, tomatoes, onions, green peppers, and at least two kinds of squash!”

  I dumped bones into cauldrons and boiled them for the broth, and then I pulverized them into a coarse gray powder that I mixed with meal and molasses to make tiny balls, and leaned from the far window and tossed the balls into the moat and watched fish snap at them. The Snake’s clothing went up in flames. His unburnable possessions were melted beyond recognition before joining the bone balls, and drifted down through the water to the accompaniment of piscine burps and belches. Not a trace of the creature remained, except for the succession of splendid dishes that were carried to the grand warden’s table the following evening at the banquet. I lacked the social status to receive an invitation, of course, and so did Yen Shih, but Master Li and Yu Lan were guests of honor, and it was a great comfort for me to know that Yu Lan never ate meat. Master Li could eat anything, including “Twelve-Treasure Five-Taste Herb-Honeyed Unicorn,” which was served to the grand warden as the dish of distinction. (Yen Shih and Master Li had boiled the Snake’s buttocks in an infusion of hibiscus petals, and I had to admit it gave them a lovely shade of blushing pink.) As I said, I didn’t attend, but I did hear satisfied comments from departing guests, including the assessment of two very exalted prelates.

  “A bit rich for my taste, but quite well done,” said the High Priest of Yen-men, and his Confucian counterpart put the seal on it.

  “Singularly succulent comestibles.”

  “Gllgghh!” I said.

  Master Li pleaded exhaustion, as did Yu Lan, and both excused themselves before the banquet ended in boring speeches. Yu Lan slipped away and put on boy’s clothes for quick movement and blackened her face and hands with soot. She was preparing to help her father, and Master Li and I were perched on a small parapet on the castle wall looking down at the courtyard and the grand warden’s chair in front of Yen Shih’s wagon. The grand warden had not been able to pay proper attention to his food, Master Li told me, since he kept getting reports from search parties scouring the castle for the Snake, and it shouldn’t be long before he’d get anxious enough to lead a party himself. That, said the sage, would give us our chance.

  “Ox, we must get our hands on the warden’s cage,” Master Li said urgently. “Those incredible things can apparently project images and sounds across half of China, perhaps even farther, and if we can figure out how they work we may be able to contact the Celestial Master in time to prevent him from getting his throat cut.”

  “Would they dare?” I said in a shocked voice.

  “From the excited words of the mandarin whose face first appeared, it’s almost certain that the Celestial Master is playing some sort of game to lead them into indiscretion, but I doubt that he grasps the danger,” he said grimly. “Mandarins in danger of losing money will do anything, and in this case they’re also threatened with losing their hides.”

  I thought of people like Li the Cat and his servants Hog and Hyena and Jackal closing like rabid rats around the saintly old gentleman, and I shivered.

  “Venerable Sir, have you ever heard of anything like those amazing cages?” I asked.

  He chewed his scraggly beard thoughtfully.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “Su O in his Tu Yang Tsa Pien describes the Mirror of the Immortals he saw in the country of Lin. He said it was a crystal used by physicians, and when a patient stood in front of it he became transparent, so the physician could examine the internal organs or find cracks in bones. Su O is not the most reliable of witnesses, of course, but in this case his story has been confirmed by a reputable source, the Hsi Ching Tsa Chi, which repeats the description with the additional information that the crystal is four feet wide and five feet nine inches tall. Su O also asserts there are smaller portable versions called Discerning Pearls, and that’s as close to the cages as I can get. It seems to me that the operating principle of the one shouldn’t be much different from that of the other, although I could be totally wrong.”

  I said we were looking down at the courtyard and Yen Shih’s wagon, in front of which the banqueters were gathered, but I haven’t yet described the wagon in detail. It was huge, and one whole side could be lowered to form a stage with sliding extensions to make it even larger. The canvas top also extended, and a loft ran from one end of the stage to the other. There Yen Shih practiced a craft that approached magic. The loft was a maze of wires and strings and gears and wheels and pulleys and pendulums, and the puppeteer leaped and bounded across bamboo rafters with the agility of a cat as one hand spun this and pulled that, and the other hand manipulated a tangle of wires so fine they were nearly invisible, and below on the stage the lead puppet soared in the leaps and whirls of the Dragon Dance while
an entire chorus of puppets pirouetted in the background. (It is literally true that a deranged duke once had Yen Shih arrested for devising a puppet so lifelike it seduced Lady Wu, and only the intercession of the duke’s mother prevented a great scandal.) A battery of bamboo tubes led down to various parts of the stage, through which the puppeteer projected the voices of the characters. In complicated plays Yu Lan would help out from below, hidden behind a screen, providing female and children’s voices and manipulating scenery. Backdrops were painted on canvas panels that could be revolved to give four different views, and Yu Lan could do wonderful things with lanterns.

  Master Li told me quite seriously that Yen Shih was the greatest puppeteer he had ever seen, and possibly the greatest who ever lived. I mention this in a fit of self-pity. This was the climax of the evening, and Yen Shih was to perform his masterpiece, and I was going to miss it.

  A clash of cymbals brought a great cheer from the audience, and the curtains of the brightly lit stage pulled apart to reveal a famous set: the combined house and yamen of Magistrate Po on the left and the town brothel, Mother Hsien’s House of Joy, on the right. An even louder cheer greeted the first two puppets, Fu-mo(straight man) and Fu-ching (comic) who would warm up the audience before joining the play as major characters. They traditionally swap fast lines that satirize local dignitaries and lampoon current scandals, uttering howls of mock outrage at each sally and bashing each other over the head with pig bladders. Much of the dialogue that drifted up to us meant nothing to me, but roars of laughter from the audience indicated that Yen Shih had done his homework. Then Fu-mo and Fu-ching began establishing their own characters, bemoaning the fact that suspicious householders were resorting to locks and barred doors and fierce guard dogs, and gamekeepers were making poaching a dangerous occupation, and there were practically no purses to pick, and it had been a month since an easily fleeced simpleton had come to town. While this was going on I was trying to put a spell on the grand warden. “Stay, stay,” I said silently. “Watch all of it before you start searching.” Yu Lan was strumming the pi-pa chords, and tears filled my eyes when I heard the first lines of the most famous song in the civilized world, sung in a peasant accent so pure it practically reeked of mud and manure.

  “I be a farmer, and damn proud of it,

  For soft city slickers I don’t give a shit.

  Don’t want to hear no opera star a-squawkin’ through a role,

  When I can listen to the toads back at my water hole!”

  The voice was followed by the singer, and I actually began to cry when I saw the puppet. It was a rustic so close to the simple soil that he was barely one step up from a water buffalo. Every inflection, every slap of a sandal, every scratch at hair lice, every coarse gesture was so perfect that for a moment I could have sworn I was back in my beloved village, and homesickness swept over me like heavy surf. He carried the pig he was taking to market, and Fu-mo and Fu-ching were so stunned by this gift of the gods that they toppled over backward.

  The incredibly complex plot of Hayseed Hong deals with the peasant’s efforts to regain his pig from the two crooks, and in the process Yen Shih would use every puppet he had. I was settling back happily to watch when Master Li jabbed my ribs.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  The grand warden, curse him, had left his chair and collected his bodyguards and was striding toward us, and I could do nothing but bend over so Master Li could climb on my back, and then I had to move around the corner of the parapet and lose sight of the greatest of all puppet plays performed by the greatest of puppeteers. Life can be very unfair.

  The grand warden and his search party pounded down corridors and through rooms and closets while we followed their progress on the balconies outside. The damn place had more chambers than an anthill and it was slow going, but we had to be absolutely sure that we would be undisturbed when we went for the cage. The maddening thing from my point of view was that we kept crossing balconies with views of the wagon below. I would see scraps of action, as when Fu-mo and Fu-ching bought Hayseed Hong’s prize pig with a rare priceless diamond from the frozen north (Hayseed Hong, from the south, had never before seen a piece of ice), and then I had to move, and when I again got a glimpse of the stage the country bumpkin was on his way home and had decided to take out his diamond and admire it.

  “Sheeeeeee-ut! The son of a bitch done pissed in my pocket and run away!”

  Then I had to move away again, missing the part where the crooks greet the returning peasant with drugged wine and make off with all his clothes, and I just got a glimpse of Hayseed Hong as he toppled through a window into the bedchamber of the wife of Magistrate Po.

  “Help! I am assaulted by a naked fiend!”

  Magistrate Po, at another window, was admiring the moon in suitably Neo-Confucian fashion.

  “Will you be quiet, woman? The superior man does not perceive lewd sounds or indecent spectacles.”

  Then I was out of sight and sound again, and around another tower, and then back to the glow of stage light.

  “I am assaulted by a naked fiend who is not entirely bad-looking!”

  “Woman, I must have quiet! The ears of the superior man are undefiled by unpleasant sounds, just as his kidneys and liver are purged of laziness and negligence, falsehood and depravity.”

  The grand warden had vanished, and I had to crawl through a window and tiptoe down hallways until we found him again. Then I had to race back and dive out to another balcony before his men could see us.

  “I am assaulted by a naked fiend who is not entirely bad-looking and who appears to be hung like a horse!”

  “Silence, woman! The superior man listens only to the correct chants, accompanied by flute and zither, so that the splendor of his complete virtue shall make the four seasons revolve in harmony and establish the right order of all things.”

  That was when one of those accidents that cause people to tie rocks around their necks and jump into wells occurred. The grand warden had disappeared again, and again I climbed through a window after him. When we spotted him he was just leading his men into the reception room, and Master Li grunted happily when he saw him open the door behind his thronelike chair and lead his men up the stairs. Now all we had to do was climb up outside his private quarters and wait for him to come in through the door that led from the central tower. Once he left we’d know he was through searching the areas we wanted. Master Li would have time to get that safe open, and if the cage wasn’t there we’d be almost sure to find it in the conference room in the tower. I climbed out a side window to a small parapet divided by a large clay drainpipe, and eased around the drainpipe and started toward another window, and I just managed to jump back into dark shadows beside the pipe when a soldier stuck his head out and leaned his elbows on the sill. He wasn’t looking in my direction, but I couldn’t move an inch so long as he stayed there.

  “Of all the goddamn luck,” he growled.

  “Why complain? It’s the kind of luck we always have, damn it to hell,” a second voice snarled, and another soldier stuck his head out beside the first.

  “You’d think that once, just once, we’d get guard duty on the good side,” the first one said. “Can you imagine? Here we are looking at the moon, and what are the guys on duty on the other side looking at? Hayseed Hong, that’s what, and we can’t even hear it.”

  “So what? We’ll hear about it, won’t we? Over and over, everybody saying it was the greatest goddamn thing ever.” The second soldier spat disgustedly, and then reached into his tunic. “Here. We deserve it.”

  I groaned inwardly. He had a goatskin wine flask in his hand, and it was a fair-sized one, and if they decided to keep on leaning on that windowsill in the moonlight….

  They did, and there we stayed, and it seemed as though hours passed. The moon was moving in the wrong direction, and the shadow from the drainpipe was getting narrower and narrower, and when I looked down I found I couldn’t get my sandals out of a small streak of pea
rl-white light. A few more minutes and Master Li was going to be faced with a very hard decision, because the only sure way to deal with the soldiers if they saw us would be to kill them. Fortunately he didn’t have to do anything drastic. Relief made his voice tremble when they finally pitched the flask away and walked back through the room to the corridor.

  “Let’s go,” he whispered. “If the safe has a simple lock we may still have time.”

  I hurried as fast as I could, and when I got back around to the south side a gale of laughter nearly knocked me off the wall. Looking down, I could see the wagon clearly, and the stage, and I realized we’d arrived toward the end of the first half of the play. Hayseed Hong is quite long and is broken into two parts with an intermission to allow the puppeteer to rest. The end of part one may well be the most famous scene in theater, and there isn’t one line of dialogue even though it takes up a third of the first half.

  The scene has shifted to Mother Hsien’s House of Joy, where Fu-mo and Fu-ching have taken the stolen pig. Magistrate Po, who has run out of Confucian clichés long enough to grasp that something is going on with his wife, has arrived to search for her. She is pursuing Hayseed Hong, who is pursuing his pig, and the action takes place in a long corridor lined with doors on both sides.

  Magistrate Po bends and peers through a keyhole. He recoils in horror, forearm across brow, other hand outflung, and as he does so another door opens behind him and Fu-mo and Fu-ching dash out carrying the pig. They race across the corridor and dive through the opposite door, and Magistrate Po bends to the next keyhole. From the room the crooks just left comes Hayseed Hong, pursued by the magistrate’s wife, followed by a customer who happens to be a pious bonze and is accompanied by a lovely young lady known as the Little Lost Chicken. Nobody has any clothes on, and the last two stand staring in the corridor with eyes like saucers while Hayseed and the lady dive through the opposite door. Magistrate Po recoils from his keyhole, forearm covering shocked eyes, and behind him a door opens and out they come, the crooks, the pig, Hayseed, and the magistrate’s wife, followed by a pious Tao-shih and a young lady expeditiously named P’o-shen (“To Be Deflowered”) who have no clothes on and whose eyes are like saucers. Customers and ladies remain in the hall while the magistrate bends to keyholes, and doors open and close, and people race back and forth, and gradually the corridor of Mother Hsien’s House of Joy fills with every pompous, preaching, self-righteous type of gentleman in the empire, all of whom have no clothes on (except for identifying caps or hats), and all of whom will eventually join the chase for Hayseed Hong’s pig.