The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  “Short rapid squeezes for a man, long slow ones for a woman,” Devil’s Hand said. “I’ll tell you a secret. I’ve used the Squealbaby on every Slow-Slash for the past ten years, and that’s whether the family’s bribed me or not.”

  “You do beautiful work whether it’s blades, bladders, or both,” Master Li said. “I’m certainly not complaining, but I would like to take a look at the execution order, if you don’t mind.”

  “Mind? Why should I mind? It’s like I said, Kao, the world has gone mad. Everybody’s crazy, and this proves it if nothing else will.”

  He fumbled in another drawer and tossed Master Li an official document, and the sage held it close to the light for a long moment. Then he folded it and handed it back.

  “My friend, I’m about to add to your opinion of the world’s sanity,” Master Li said. “I want to confer with an eminent gentleman, and on the way over I even bothered to compose a document making it official. You can add this to your collection of lunacies.”

  He took a piece of paper from his robe and passed it over, and Devil’s Hand stared at it as he might view a cobra.

  “You can’t be serious!”

  “Ah, but I am.”

  “Kao, you might just as well invite the Black Plague to tea! Or take a swim in boiling oil! I’m a killer, Kao. That’s my job and I’m good at it, but I turn faint and pale when this creature—”

  “Would you mind?” Master Li interrupted, adding a slight official intonation to his voice.

  Devil’s Hand turned and lurched out the door, and I could hear him muttering “Crazy! Whole damn world!” as he stamped away down a hall. Master Li turned to the puppeteer.

  “Yen Shih, I think it might be a good idea for you to try to trace your daughter’s whereabouts and stay with her,” he said quietly. “I don’t quite know what to make of it, but one thing is sure: this affair is entering a rather nasty phase.”

  The puppeteer raised an eyebrow.

  “The execution order for that little maid specified Slow-Slash,” Master Li said. “I know the signature well, and it was authentic. The order was issued by the Celestial Master.”

  I stared at him, stunned and uncomprehending. Yen Shih stood as if frozen in place. Then he took a deep breath and spread his hands wide apart. “The executioner had it right. The whole world’s gone mad,” he said, and he turned and walked rapidly out the door, and as his footsteps faded away I could hear his soft baritone voice fading with them, singing to the sand-scoured sky.

  “Blue raccoons are weeping blood

  As shivering foxes die,

  Owls that live a thousand years

  Are laughing wildly.

  A white dog barking at the moon

  Is the corpses’ chanticleer;

  Upon its grave a gray ghost sings

  The Song of a Cavalier.”

  I walked to the table and picked up one of the jars and swallowed some of the raw alcohol that Devil’s Hand and Master Li called wine, and after I stopped coughing I felt a little better, although not much. The executioner was returning, and by the sound of it he was dragging a prisoner in chains.

  “You’re ten times as crazy as the rest of the world, Kao!” Devil’s Hand shouted.

  “Why? For seeking the company of a splendid fellow who’s as cute as a little lamb and twice as gentle?” Master Li said sweetly.

  The executioner and his prisoner came through the door, and I reeled. The soft squat body, the froglike posture, the saliva spraying from fat flabby lips….

  “Three times as gentle,” said Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu.

  Every historian is faced with a chapter in which he cannot win. If he includes the relevant material he will send his readers screaming into the night, and if he doesn’t include it he isn’t writing history. Thus scholars wrestling with the wars of the Three Kingdoms must grit their teeth and include learned commentaries on the Seven Sacrileges of Tsao Tsao, and I must confront the task of transcribing the words of a horrible hosteler. It was difficult for those first hearing him not to conclude that his speech was simply another weapon in an overstocked arsenal, but no, it simply reflected his second obsession, his first being murder.

  “Ox,” Master Li once told me, “never forget that Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu is half aborigine. Our forefathers stole the fertile fields from his people and chased them into rocky mountains where there was almost no food. Then mineral deposits were discovered, so we chased the survivors into malarial marshes where there was even less food. Hunger became the heritage of aborigines, their birthright, and in a psychological sense Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu was born starving.”

  Today as the hosteler comes closer and closer to deification, even minor editing of his pronouncements is considered to be heresy. If I leave out one adjective I may be ripped to pieces by the howling mob, but I plead special circumstances. When I saw his ghastly face in the executioner’s office everything went fuzzy, and for some time I heard nothing but a loud buzzing sound in my ears, and when the buzzing died down the interview was already underway.

  “…oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, the Yu was built by the Eight Skilled Gentlemen to make music that turned into water, ‘Water of the Setting Sun’ my old grandmother called it, although the name is probably as misleading as ‘Three Fish Lamb Soup,’ which contains no fish. It also contains no lamb. The characters for ‘lamb’ and ‘fish’ when written together mean ‘delicious,’ so the name is actually ‘Three Delicious Soup,’ and it is made from chicken breasts, abalone, ham, bamboo shoots, snow peas, sesame seed oil, chicken stock, and rice wine. I like to serve it followed by Su Tung-po’s carp, which is extremely simple, as befits a creation of genius. You just wash the carp in cold water and stuff it with hearts of cabbage and rub it with salt, and then—”

  “Hostler Tu,” Master Li interjected, “the Eight Skilled Gentlemen carried—”

  “—pan-fry it with onions, and when it’s half cooked you add a few slices of ginger, and finally some bits of orange peel and a little turnip sauce. Su Tung-po also invented Poor Man’s Salad, which goes wonderfully well with the carp: sung cabbage, rape-turnip, wild daikon, and shepherd’s purse. Add a bit of—”

  “Hosteler Tu—”

  “—rice and some boiling water and you can turn it into soup, but you must be careful about the water. The great Chia Ming wrote in his Essential Knowledge for Eating and Drinking that the water for Poor Man’s Soup must be from snow or frost, which had to be swept into the pot with a chicken feather. To use a duck or goose feather was to invite stomach cramps, which he also said could be caused by cooking pork, eels, or mud loaches over a fire made from mulberry wood, and Chia Ming grew quite upset over the subject of spinach.”

  “Hosteler Tu! The Eight Skilled Gentlemen carried cages that they sometimes used for communication, but I think they contained something else that was guarded by eight demon-deities. Do your people say anything about that?” Master Li asked.

  “Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, cages—oh my, yes. The cages held the keys.”

  “Keys to what?”

  “Keys to the music that turned into water, of course, and the guardians were said to be very strange and almost as dangerous as spinach, which Chia Ming said is an alien substance imported from Nepal, a very unpleasant country inhabited by perfidious men, and its character is cold and slippery and eating it weakens the feet and causes stomach chills, and if young dogs or cats eat spinach it will cause their legs to bend so they can’t walk. In that case the dogs can at least be used for k’eng hsien, the canine stew Confucius loved so much he put the recipe in the Book of Rites, but I don’t know what one can do with bent-leg cats.

  “Hosteler—”

  “Unless the cats happen to be nursing mothers. I’ve read that the boy emperor Ching Tsung was devoted to ‘Clear Wind Rice,’ which was made with rice, dragon’s brains, dragon eyeball powder, and cat’s milk, but to tell the truth I think ‘cat’ is a misprint—besides, that could be a dangerous dish if the cat was white, becaus
e white cats climb up on roofs and eat moonbeams, and eating moonbeams can cause people to go mad. Of course, cats are consumed along with everything else in the south, where they even eat giant water b—”

  “Hosteler Tu!” Master Li shouted. “The eight demon-deities who guarded the keys in the cages had a brother, born human, who became a great cavalier. Do your people know anything about him?”

  “Brother? I didn’t know they had a brother who was human. They were very strange, and a brother would probably be like the giant water bugs they eat in the south. They say they taste like lobster but in fact they taste like soft overripe cheese, and they serve them with dried salted earthworms that don’t taste of anything except salt. In southern Hupeh they eat the fried flesh of white-flower pit vipers, and stewed marmots, and in Lingnan the delicacy is baby rats. ‘Honey peepers’ they call them, because the little things are first stuffed with honey and then released upon banquet tables and they crawl around going ‘peep-peep-peep’ and diners pick them up by the tails and pop them into their mouths and eat them raw. The better houses tint the creatures with vegetable dyes to harmonize with the service; emerald baby rats peep-peeping around purple porcelain bowls, for example, from which come faint hiccups.”

  “Hosteler Tu—”

  “The hiccups are made by soft-shell crabs floating in rice wine flavored with rock salt, black Szechuan peppercorns, and anise, and the crabs are far too drunk to mind when diners scoop them from the bowls and eat them raw. Like the rats. On the opposite end of the scale are elephants, of course, and the elephant feet of the south are among the great delicacies of the world, providing one steers clear of the bile. Elephants store their bile in their feet and it moves from foot to foot with the changing of the seasons, and a bileless foot is stuffed with dates and baked in a sweet-sour mixture of vinegar and honey. The only thing they won’t eat in the south is—”

  “Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu!” roared Master Li. “How about a creature that’s half man and half ape, and has a silver-gray forehead, blue cheeks, a crimson nose, a yellow chin, and is sometimes called Envy?”

  “Envy, oh yes, oh yes. Envy caused it, of course. Somehow he got the gods to turn their backs on earth, and he had the sun ready to set the sky on fire, and he had the birds of pestilence ready to strike, because of the solstice, you see. If the solstice didn’t take place and the sun got hotter and hotter—but that was where the Eight Skilled Gentlemen took over, and when they finished with Envy he was as harmless as a lamb, which is what they won’t eat in the south. I think it’s a misunderstanding involving lamb liver, which can be poisonous if eaten with pork. Just as common ginger can be poisonous if eaten with either hare or horse meat, not that horse meat needs help to be poisonous. Emperor Ching swore that horse kidneys were deadly, and Emperor Wu-ti told Luan Ta, the court necromancer, that Ta’s predecessor had expired from eating horse liver. Still, a horse’s heart when dried and powdered and added to wine will restore memory, and sleeping with a horse skull for a pillow will cure insomnia—”

  “Hosteler—”

  “—and another use for horses leads us back to lamb. In barbarian Rome lambs grow from the earth like turnips, and when they’re ready to sprout the farmers build a fence around them to keep out predators. The baby lambs are still tied to the earth by their umbilical cords and to cut them is dangerous, so the farmers get horses and have them run around and around the fence.”

  “Hosteler—”

  “The lambs get alarmed and break the umbilical cords themselves and wander off in search of grass and water, and when I get a lamb I like to save pieces of shank meat for ‘Eight Exquisite Lion Head,’ which doesn’t contain any lion, of course: lamb, lichees, mussels, pork, sausage, ham, shrimp, and sea cucumbers. The name is ridiculous because ‘lion head’ in culinary terms is simply a large sausage, and I think the error was on the part of a tipsy scribe who heard shi-zi, ‘lion,’ when a chef really said li-zi, ‘lichee,’ as in the case of the fish stew called—”

  “Hosteler Tu!” screamed Master Li.

  And now I must confess I blanked everything out. I saw the hosteler’s horrible mouth opening and closing, but all I heard was a chirping sound like a small cricket inside my skull, and I don’t think I was alone. The Chief Executioner of Peking was sitting at his desk with a silly smile on his face and glazed eyes, apparently listening to birdies chirp in the woods, and he was not pleased when Master Li finally dragged him from his reverie.

  Master Li had learned nothing else of value. He huddled with Devil’s Hand and discussed something I didn’t overhear, eliciting more cries of “You’re crazy!” and “The world has gone mad!” and finally we prepared to leave. Devil’s Hand dragged the prisoner away in a rattle of chains, and there was something oddly pathetic in the hosteler’s last words to Master Li.

  “Wait! It’s very important! I wanted to tell you that the best lotus roots are those from Nanking ponds! Get the red horned nuts from Ta-pan Bridge! Jujubes should be from Yao-fang Gate and cherries from Ling-ku Temple! You must try the sea horses of Kwantung served with Lan-ling wine flavored with saffron, and pork glazed with honey and cooked with cedar wood in the style of—”

  The iron door slammed behind them, and that, I prayed, was the last I would ever see or hear of Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu.

  The fourth day of the fifth moon began with a bang of fire-crackers. A great many bangs, as a matter of fact. It was the Feast of Poisonous Insects that warms things up for the great Dragon Boat Race of the double fifth, and usually it’s a merry affair, but not this time. The heat wave hadn’t broken and rain still hadn’t fallen, and everybody knows that when there is no fluctuation in weather for an extended period of time an unhealthy atmosphere is created in which sickness spreads like swarms of locusts, and great plagues begin their incubation cycles, and horrible omens tend to appear: flesh and frogs falling from Heaven, for example, or hens turning into roosters.

  Children enjoyed themselves, of course. They’d been laboriously embroidering tigers on their slippers for months, and their mothers dressed them in black-and-yellow-striped tiger tunics, and they shrieked with delight as they hopped around the streets stamping imaginary scorpions and centipedes and spiders, or battled clowns dressed as toads and snakes and lizards with long leaves of ch’ang-p’u grass, shaped like the blades of swords. The parents dutifully set off firecrackers and daubed everybody’s ears and noses with streaks of sulphur as a precaution against poisonous bites, but their eyes were worried and their faces were drawn as they watched heat waves again lift from the streets. The temples were crowded with grandparents praying to Kuan-yin, Goddess of Mercy.

  Tempers were rubbed raw. A bloody battle erupted at the Dynastic Gate when a herd of sheep with red-painted tails, meaning they were being led to sacrifice at the Altar of Heaven, somehow got entangled with camels on their way to the caravan loading area at the other end of the city, and nobody could go anywhere for two hours. The Mongol herders were forced by custom to wear heavy sheepskin robes caked with grease, and the Turkish camel drivers were bound to their thick grimy robes and huge felt-lined boots, and everybody was melting, furious at the world, and spoiling for a fight. I mention the incident because Master Li and I got trapped in the middle of it when we set out early that morning for the Celestial Master’s house, and we had to abandon the palanquin and hack our way through the mobs and eventually hire another one, and when we finally reached the house we were told by a soldier guarding the gate that the saint had indeed returned, late at night, but had already left for the Forbidden City.

  I didn’t know what to think, and Master Li had withdrawn into his own thoughts the moment we left the executioner’s office the previous night, and he was still uncommunicative.

  We entered the Forbidden City without incident, and instead of going straight to the Celestial Master’s office the sage made a stop at the Bureau of Import. When he came back out a short time later the look on his face suggested that at least one thought sequence had
paid off.

  “Ox,” he said as he climbed back into the palanquin, “I should have done this earlier, but things kept happening to distract me. Do you remember the drugs I used to turn cheap bohea into Tribute Tea?”

  I turned red. “No, sir,” I said.

  “Prussiate of iron, sulphate of lime, and powder from the fruit of the tamarind tree,” he said patiently. “That last item is rare. Very little is imported, and one must be licensed to buy it. One legacy of late unlamented Legalism is the requirement that companies requesting such licenses must list the names of all corporate officers. Secrecy can still be maintained because such lists are filed by the company name. An investigator has to have the name before he can ask for the file, and some of the names are quite ingenious. Suppose you were one of a group of mandarins involved in a counterfeit tea racket. Suppose you were able to communicate with each other because of old cages, and suppose the use of the cages was explained by a rubbing of an ancient frieze, and suppose you didn’t want people asking for your file. What would you call your company?”

  He knew very well I couldn’t answer that. He let me stew in confusion for a moment, and then he took out a piece of paper upon which a clerk had obligingly copied a list of company officers beneath the corporate name Master Li had specified: Sky-flame Death Birds Ghost Boat Rain Race Tea Company, Ltd.

  “This is the bunch?” I asked admiringly.

  “Exactly. Every bastard involved, including Li the Cat and two other eunuchs of ministerial rank,” Master Li said. “Now, if only….”

  He let the sentence die a natural death. He meant “If only the Celestial Master is sane and in one piece and able to help,” and worry returned, and he was silent the rest of the way to the Hall of Literary Profundity. There we were told that we had just missed the Celestial Master, who had hobbled out for his morning walk, but we would surely find him on the lawn leading to the Palaces of the Young Princes. Master Li dismissed the palanquin and set out on foot, and both of us stopped in our tracks and let out long sighs when we reached the lawn. Ahead of us, painfully pushing his canes toward Nine Dragon Screen, was the unmistakable form of the Celestial Master, unchanged from the last time we’d seen him.