The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox

by Barry Hughart

  Master Li spread water and incense around and lifted his eyes and arms to the west.

  “O Divine White Tiger of the Despoiling Demons of the Five Directions, of the Talismans of Sickness and Ruin of the Year, of the Gate of Mourning and the Funeral Guest and the Spirits of the Dead, of the Celestial Departments and Terrestrial Forests, of the Earth and of Heaven, of the Seventy-two Hou and the Eight Trigrams and the Nine Palaces and the Central Palace Thunder, O Great Lord Tiger who enters houses and carries out great massacres, O Tiger who lies in wait beside the road and behind the well, O Tiger who lurks behind the stove and in the hall, O Tiger who stands beside the bed and behind the door of each dwelling, O Tiger who must enter into all fates, O White Tiger, Great White Tiger, your humble servant the Weasel has grossly insulted you, and we bring you his food! We bring you his wine! We bring you his money! We bring you his blood!”

  Master Li signaled for the wife to rise and make offerings of food, wine, and money after touching each item to the bloodstained paper tiger.

  “O Tiger, eat of the Weasel’s food, and take away with his food the Divine Killer of Ascents and Descents and the Beginning and Ending of All Roads! O Tiger, drink of the Weasel’s wine, and take away with his wine the Large Dead King and the Small Dead King Who Pulls Out the Intestines and Drains the Stomach! O Tiger, take away the Weasel’s money as you take away the Divine Killer One Meets as One Moves the Bed and Replaces the Matting, and the Killer Who Drives In Stakes and Puts Up Enclosures! O Tiger, Great White Tiger, eat of the blood upon this talisman of your sacred image, for it is the blood of your offending servant, and if your anger still demands his death, we offer his body in sacrifice.”

  Master Li pulled straw from the patient’s pallet and swiftly twisted it into a man-shaped doll. He touched the doll all over with the bloodstained tiger image.

  “You that are nothing but a body of straw have been touched by White Tiger Great-Killer-Thunder, and lo! you have become the body of the Weasel,” Master Li chanted.

  He signaled, and the Weasel’s young wife connected twelve red threads to the straw doll and touched the other ends to her husband’s body, and Master Li made hieratic passes as he coaxed the last sickness demons to cross the bridges of the threads from the Weasel into the doll. Then Master Li removed the threads, symbolically cutting each one. He passed the doll three times over the Weasel’s stomach and four times over his back, and finally he raised the doll on high and plunged his knife through it.

  “Behold, Ye Who Are the Beginning of all Endings and the Ending of all Beginnings, he who has offended you is dead! Great White Tiger, Lord of the Universe, your triumph is now complete!” the sage cried.

  The Weasel had been in delirium throughout all this, but the mind is a strange creature. Somehow something got through, and he calmed and breathed much easier, and his fever had almost vanished when we left. Nonetheless, Master Li immediately proceeded to the neighbors to make sure help was ready and waiting when the worst happened. He has great respect for faith healing, but there are limits.

  When we wound back through the labyrinth and out into the Alley of Flies the sage stopped at One-Eyed Wong’s refuse mound, stinking in the heat. It was sunset. Again the Yellow Wind compensated for lack of clouds to form an incredibly gaudy sky, and rainbow colors played through the seams and wrinkles of the old man’s hand as he swatted flies away and reached down and came up with a dead rat, swinging it by the tail. He tossed the thing to me.

  “Any visible cause of death?” he asked.

  I looked it over. “No, sir,” I said.

  He tossed a rotten squash away and swung a second dead rat over to me. “And this?”

  “Not a mark on it,” I said after I examined it.

  He tossed more garbage aside and produced three more dead rats, all unmarked so far as I could tell.

  “Well, what do we have here?” he asked. “Five consecutive coronaries? Five simultaneous suicides? Five adverse reactions to bee stings at the same time in the same alley?”

  He picked up another piece of junk from the pile and looked at it gloomily.

  “How about five early victims of a disease that has the capability to spread very rapidly?” he said. “You know, Ox, we tend to sneer at the medical ignorance of our ancestors. Brilliant in other matters, perhaps, but childlike when it came to science. For example, when they finally got around to devising a written word for ‘plague’ the best they could do was to attach the radical for ‘rat’ to the character for ‘sickness.’ Childlike, wasn’t it?”

  He was still looking at the piece of junk in his hands. It was the remains of a cylindrical parchment shade that fit on a revolving rim around an oil lamp. Eight views of a moving horse were drawn on it, each one having the feet in a different position, and when the heat of the wick made the shade turn round and round the effect of movement was amazing.

  “Pacing Horse Lantern,” Master Li muttered. “Pacing…horse…lantern….” Whatever was trying to work up through his mind didn’t quite make it, and he shrugged and tossed the thing back to the mound, “Oh hell. I was talking about rats, and speaking of the creatures, let’s go see what’s been learned about our mandarins.”

  What we learned wasn’t good. Every single one that Wong’s men had been able to trace had gone to hiding in the most unreachable place in Peking: the barracks of the Black Watch. It’s actually inside the walls of the Forbidden City, separated from the sacred confines by another interior wall, through a gate in which the soldiers can charge to the aid of the emperor—or the eunuchs. One reaches the barracks from the Imperial City through a sloping tunnel leading under the moat, and no place is more heavily guarded.

  “Li the Cat is gathering his kittens around him,” Master Li muttered. “Damn it! Something big is scheduled, and soon, and I don’t know quite enough to ask the right questions. Even if I had somebody to ask questions of,” he growled. “Still, two mandarins are unaccounted for, and Wong’s men are out looking. Better get some rest, Ox. It’s going to be a long night.”

  Yen Shih was dressed in black, with a great lord’s winged hat, and a scarlet sash around his waist. His black cloak billowed in the stinging Yellow Wind as he gracefully waved toward a landscape of cracked dry earth baking in heat waves.

  “This puppet play, Ox, requires a proper setting,” Yen Shih said, and his voice was soft and melancholy. “A setting for shrieking phoenixes, shivering hares, toothless tigers, crying mole crickets, half-starved horses, drooling dragons, blind owls, weeping camels, and old aching turtles endlessly dying in dry wells.”

  Yen Shih strode forward into the heat waves. I tried to keep up but he was melting in mirages, and I stopped short with a hard stinging pain in my heart when I saw an old cottage standing forsaken on desolate dead cracked ground. It was my cottage, and this was all that remained of my village, and tears blinded me. Something lived, however. I could hear a sound and I tried to run toward it, groping through sweat and illusions woven from hot rising air. Suddenly I stepped through miasma into clear light and green grass and moving figures.

  “Goat, goat, jump the wall,

  Grab some grass to feed your mother,

  If she’s not in field or stall,

  Feed it to your hungry brothers

  One…two…three…four…five…six…seven…eight!”

  The laughing children ran over a low hill, and I turned eagerly to Yu Lan. The lovely shamanka strummed the bars of a cage, and my eyes blinked shut when light flashed, and when I opened them she was making the ritual gesture. I touched my eyebrows and my nose, and Yu Lan opened her hand to display another of the tiny two-pronged pitchforks.

  As I stepped closer I saw beads of perspiration on her forehead, and I could have sworn there was a look of desperation in her eyes. Yu Lan reached out and took my hand and turned and pulled me rapidly toward the well. Again I lowered us down in the bucket, and again something growled below, and again I smelled the stench of rotting flesh. I swung to the hole and we made
it into the little tunnel, but this time Yu Lan didn’t stop.

  The shamanka took my hand again and began to run. We ran through twisting passages lit by green phosphorescence, and finally we reached a stone shelf and I gazed down into a great cavern. I gasped and jumped back in fear because it was filled with immense coiled serpents, but Yu Lan tugged me forward again and started down stone steps, and then I saw they weren’t serpents but coiled pipes of some sort, connecting at junctions to smaller ones, and then smaller and smaller, and finally eight tiny pipes ran into eight small boxes in two groups, four on the left and four on the right.

  Yu Lan reached down and opened the lid of one of the boxes. There was a small rack inside. Her eyes lifted to mine, and the two-pronged pitchfork lifted to her lips. She gently blew between the tines and placed the pitchfork on the rack, where it fit perfectly. She closed the lid.

  Mist was swirling. Cool refreshing raindrops pattered down, and rainbows were wrapping around us, and I reached out to take the shamanka in my arms. She was smiling at me, her lips parted and her eyes half closed. Then her eyes opened wide and she gasped. Yu Lan jumped backward into the mist, and her voice was filled with pain and loss and fear.

  “No! Please, no!”

  Something terrible was attacking the shamanka. Mist made it indistinct, but I saw a flash of teeth like fangs in the area of her head, and claws at her waist. A great thick terrible slithering thing was at her legs, and I tried to reach her but I couldn’t. I was running blindly into clouds of mist like heat waves, and everything was twisted and distorted. Yu Lan’s voice reached me from very far away.

  “Ox, the boats! Both boats must race! Both of them! One boat must not race unchallenged!”

  Then the voice was gone, and the shamanka was gone, and the mist was gone, and I was lying on a pallet in the Wineshop of One-Eyed Wong beside Master Li, and bright moonlight was pouring through the window, and the Yellow Wind was hissing like a great scratching cat against the roof tiles of Peking. I rolled over and shook the old man’s shoulder. He awakened in an instant.

  “Sir, I can’t explain it, but something is wrong with Yu Lan,” I said urgently. “I don’t know where she is, but she’s in bad trouble, and unless you have a better idea I’d like to get to her father’s house as fast as possible.”

  He looked at me for a moment. Then he hopped up and prepared to climb on my back. “Why not. We aren’t getting anywhere here,” he snarled.

  Yen Shih’s house was dark and quiet as we turned through the gates. Master Li slid down from my back and hid behind a post with his throwing knife cocked behind his right ear as I stepped forward in moonlight and hammered on the door. All I heard was echoes.

  “Yen Shih!” I shouted. More echoes answered me. “Yu Lan! Hello the house!”

  Something stirred and I jumped back and looked up and saw a curious cat looking down at me from a corner of the roof, and then there was a sudden outburst of sounds, wheels rattling, horses’ hooves pounding like a bamboo grove exploding in a brushfire, and I had to leap out of the way to avoid being crushed as a black carriage pulled by a team of four horses raced into the courtyard from the stables. Ten horsemen served as outriders, black-cloaked, hats pulled low, swords glittering in moonlight, and more men clung to the sides and back of the carriage, holding on very professionally with one hand while the other wielded a short spear. In an instant they had come and gone, racing out the gate and down the street, and Master Li stuck a leg out and tripped me as I ran after them.

  “Ox! You can’t catch them, and you know damn well you can’t follow where they’re going,” he shouted at me, and then he grabbed my arm and held on. “You’d only get killed, and what would that accomplish? All we can do is wait until morning when the gates open to the Forbidden City.”

  He was right, of course. I had recognized the insignia. Those men were of the Black Watch, and their carriage would soon roll down the tunnel and beneath the moat into the barracks where the mandarins had taken shelter, and to try to sneak in at night would be suicide.

  “But, sir…sir….”

  He squeezed my shoulder. He’d seen what I had when wind whipped window curtains aside and moonlight poured in. Four people occupied the carriage. Three, laughing as they rode away with their prize, were Hog and Hyena and Jackal. The fourth was Yu Lan.

  “Come. Her father may have been here, and if so he may need our help,” Master Li said.

  So now we searched for the puppeteer, or his body, but Yen Shih wasn’t in the house. Instead we found a sealed missive that had been left in plain sight on a table in the little entrance hall and it was addressed not to Yen Shih but to Master Li. He opened it. The script was elegant scholar’s shorthand, unintelligible to me, and Master Li read it aloud.

  “Most esteemed Li-tzu, supreme among scholars, unchallenged among seekers after truth, greetings. This unworthy one begs the honor of your company in order to discuss the future of the young lady who has sought to improve her position by entering our humble household. Should your young assistant and the lady’s talented father care to join you they will be more than welcome, and so desirous am I to bask in your glorious light that each hour of darkness will be agony.”

  The old man raised his eyes. “It’s signed by Li the Cat,” he said quietly. “Ox, don’t get overly concerned about ‘each hour of darkness will be agony.’ Eunuchs like to play around with elegant threats, and Yu Lan is not only a shamanka, she’s one of the best I’ve ever encountered. She isn’t defenseless. Now let’s check the stable for her father, and if he isn’t there we’ll get more men from Wong’s to search the city for him.”

  The stable was dark and deserted. The moon was so brilliant that I realized a sand haze must have partially obscured it before, and the wind was causing a branch to move back and forth. The shadow of the branch moved across the shining canvas of the puppeteer’s great wagon and the image looked amazingly like a maid mopping a floor. Back and forth, back and forth.

  “Pacing Horse Lantern,” said Master Li, who was standing very still.

  Then he ran forward and jumped up into the wagon. I followed, searching for Yen Shih, but Master Li was looking for something else. He had clambered up on the walkway above the stage and was examining the maze of gears and wires and wheels. Puppets dangled below, swinging slowly as the wind reached them, and I realized that the Hayseed Hong set was still in place. Suddenly Master Li spun a wheel and set a pendulum swinging, and I stared as a door in the set swung open. Out came two crooks carrying a pig, followed by Hayseed Hong, followed by the magistrate’s wife, followed by the occupants of a bedchamber who had no clothes on and whose eyes were like saucers. Master Li started another pendulum and the magistrate puppet sprang to life, bending to a keyhole, reeling back in horror with a forearm covering his eyes while behind him the mad procession moved in and out of another bedchamber. It was quite eerie to see puppets move to the moan of wind rather than howls of laughter. They continued to move for some time after the sage climbed down, and then once more they dangled limply on wires, slowly swinging to and fro.

  Master Li took a deep breath. “Well, Ox, you always knew you’d come to a terrible end if you continued to assist me,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. I was so miserable with fear for Yu Lan that I really didn’t care one way or another, but I went through the motions. “Which terrible end did you have in mind?” I asked.

  “That’s up to Li the Cat,” he replied. “I’ve just realized we have no choice but to try swan dives into boiling oil, so we’re going to accept his kind invitation. The moment the gates to the Forbidden City open we’re going to pay him a call, and if you can sleep during the hours until then you’ll be immortalized by P’u Sung-ling, Recorder of Things Strange.”

  The morning of the double fifth is traditionally one of the busiest times of the year. Before dawn on the fifth day of the fifth moon the streets of Peking were already crowded with people, and I knew some of them.

  Mrs. Wu of the b
akery was standing in line at the shop of the Persian alchemist to buy arsenic, sulphur, and cinnabar mixed into an insect repellent lotion, and her next stop would be a public scribe’s booth to buy a paper stencil of the written word “king.” Then she would hurry home and apply the stencil and lotion to her sleeping children to give each one the mark on his forehead. It resembles the wrinkles on the forehead of a tiger. Even sickness and bad luck run away from tigers, and it’s most effective for children early on the fifth day of the fifth moon.

  Old P’i-pao-ku, “Leatherbag Bone,” was Mrs. Wu’s grandmother, and she was waiting at the confectioner’s to get hard sugar decorations of the five poisonous insects (centipede, scorpion, lizard, toad, snake) to spread over the top of her wu tu po po cake, which she would purposely make as inedible as possible without being actually deadly. Every family member eats a slice on the fifth day of the fifth moon, and sickness demons stare at people capable of eating stuff like that and go elsewhere.

  Feng Erh, “Phoenix,” was the chandler’s concubine, and she was waiting for the first finger of sunlight to reach a patch of grass she had staked out in a park. She would pluck a hundred blades and put them in a jar and walk straight home without looking left, right, or back. Boiling water would be added to the jar to make Hundred Grass Lotion that the whole family would use as a cure-all until the next double fifth.

  Ko Sheng-erh never had any luck. His name means “Left Over from a Dog,” and he had idiotically gone up on his roof to fix some thatching three days ago, and he was waiting for a down-at-heels shaman to open shop and chant “Grow, grow, grow!” at his head, not that it would do any good, because everyone knows that working on a roof during the fifth moon will cause you to go bald.

  T’ien-chi, “Field Chicken,” was a God Boy, meaning a male prostitute, who wasn’t getting any younger and he was waiting with his best friend, Lan-chu, “Lazy Pig,” an ageing courtesan. They had been saving for years, and they were disguised in beggars’ rags as they clutched sacks of gold and waited at the door of Szu Kui, “Dead Ghost,” a mysterious magus three times arisen from the grave, who would sell them pieces of polished cedar wood, hollowed out and filled on the fifth day of the fifth moon with twenty-four beneficial and eight poisonous ingredients, and if they used the logs as pillows for one hundred consecutive nights the lines on their faces would smooth out, and after four years their youth would be completely restored. The ingredients are a closely guarded secret, but Master Li once told me they included cassia, ginseng, dry ginger, magnolia, broomrape, angelica, plumeless thistle, kikio root, Chinese pepper, japonica, aconite seeds and root, slough grass, and cockscomb.