Eight Skilled Gentlemen mlanto-3

by Barry Hughart

  They were too occupied with greasy dog meat and greasier jokes to notice much else. Master Li promptly slipped into the cave and began crawling between stacks of packing cases, and Yen Shih and I followed him to the back wall. He changed position several times, scanning the ceiling and angles of the walls to judge the acoustics, and then he whispered to us to gather pebbles and take positions where we could throw them through deep shadows back through the tunnel entrance. At his signal the puppeteer and I pitched pebbles, and the rattling sound made the men jerk their heads up and turn their eyes toward the tunnel.

  Master Li had his hands cupped around his mouth. He’s tried to teach me how to do it many times, but I have no talent for such things, even though I realize ninety percent of it is getting the listener’s attention focused on the place the sound is supposed to come from. The effect was really remarkable. A high quavering voice seemed to drift from the blackness of the tunnel, a voice I remembered well.

  “Give… me… back… my… eeeeears,” wailed the ghostly voice of the murdered clerk.

  The thugs sat frozen, dog legs and haunches half crunched between their teeth. Hyena spat meat onto the table and turned to Hog.

  “That was Cricket, sure as you’re born,” he whispered.

  One of the other thugs jumped to his feet, spilling a wine jar and knocking a platter to the floor.

  “Cricket? Cricket? But you said you’d killed the miserable little bastard!” he squealed.

  “Give… me… back… my… noooooose.”

  Jackal stood up, white-faced, clutching his dagger.

  “That’s Cricket’s ghost,” he said flatly. “The little insect’s come back to haunt us.”

  The other thugs were standing now, looking at each other for support. Only Hog remained seated as before, at the head of the table, gnawing on a bone.

  “Ghost? Your mama raised you better than that,” he sneered. “Don’t you know a dead person’s got to stay in Hell three years before he can return in ghost form?”

  “Then what the hell was that!” Jackal shouted.

  “Give… me… back… my… eeeeeeeeyes.”

  “That’s Cricket. His hun soul got lost,” Hyena whispered. “Can’t you hear? It’s searching for its body, except we cut those parts away.”

  “Why couldn’t you have strangled the bastard!” one of the thugs shouted.

  “Hun soul, hun soul,” Hog sneered. He made a show of dignity as he slowly got to his feet and picked up his crossbow. “Listen, you ignorant turds, the hun soul lives in the liver and we didn’t touch Cricket’s liver. I chopped out the bastard’s lungs, not liver, and it’s the lower soul that lives in the lungs, and if you think I’m scared of the po soul of an insect like Cricket—”

  “Give… me… back… my… luuuuuuuungs.”

  Hyena and Jackal were slinking away, but Hog halted them and rallied the troops.

  “Alive or dead. Cricket don’t have the guts of a sparrow!” he yelled. “Come on, boys, let’s give that turd something to moan about!”

  He charged to the tunnel entrance, scooping up a torch from a bracket on the wall, and after a moment of indecision Hyena and Jackal and the other thugs followed the leader, whooping and cursing to keep their spirits up, whacking the air with daggers. They disappeared down the tunnel shouting, “Show yourself, you coward!” and “I’ll chase your worm-eaten soul halfway to Tibet!” The snap-whang of a crossbow suggested that imagination was providing images to shoot at, and Master Li grunted with satisfaction as he trotted out and started across the cave to the door in the back wall.

  “I’ll be surprised if they don’t keep going until they reach the island, and then they should spend an hour or two hacking holes in underbrush,” he said contentedly.

  The alchemy laboratory seemed unchanged, but Master Li wasn’t interested in it now. He continued back to another door at the rear, and when he opened it we were looking at a long corridor with little alcoves for offices on both sides.

  “Ox, Yen Shih, I knew Ma Tuan Lin and how he worked, so I’ll do the searching,” Master Li said. “Go back to the main cavern and keep watch—not that I expect our friends to return before I’m done.”

  He was right and wrong at the same time. The puppeteer and I were standing in the center of the room looking at packing cases ten or fifteen minutes later, secure in the knowledge that we’d get plenty of warning from the thugs’ voices and footsteps and torchlight, when a sharp clicking sound was followed by the tread of feet, and before we had time to hide a whole new pack of thugs marched out from a doorway we hadn’t seen, concealed in a corner behind cases, and stopped in their tracks and stared at us. They were every bit as nasty as the others, and the leader flushed with anger mixed with blood lust and opened his mouth to yell to his men, and then he gurgled and clutched at his throat and slumped to the floor.

  Yen Shih had whipped up a crossbow left leaning against the table, cocked, aimed, and fired so quickly that I hadn’t had time to move. There weren’t any more bolts for the bow, so the puppeteer hurled it at another thug and grabbed his torch in one hand and his knife in the other. By then I’d snatched my own torch to use as a club, and then the thugs were on us.

  I’m better with a club than a weapon that requires skill, and I bashed and battered quite effectively, but we were outnumbered and I would surely have been killed if it hadn’t been for Yen Shih. The puppeteer was a graceful whirlwind as he hacked a path of death through the center of the pack, and then neatly kicked over a stack of packing cases to block pursuit. A case split open and a thousand small hard cakes of fake Tribute Tea spilled across the floor, and thugs slipped and slid as the puppeteer turned and smashed back through them like the Transcendent Pig on a killing spree, and survivors who howled in fear and jumped away were jumping right into my range. I managed to hurl my torch and drop a man who was about to stab Yen Shih in the back, and his knife flashed through the air to the throat of the man who had his spear poised at my chest, and then it was all over. I couldn’t believe we’d done it, but there lay the bodies, and none of them moved.

  The puppeteer regarded the mess thoughtfully. “We may be in a bit of trouble when we try to hide the bodies and clean up,” he said.

  “Forget it,” a voice replied, and I turned to see Master Li shake his head rather admiringly as he surveyed the carnage. “The important thing is that I’ve found Ma’s papers. We’d raise more questions than we’d answer by hiding bodies, so we’ll leave them as is. Or almost.”

  He swiftly went through pockets and purses and money belts until he had a stack of silver coins, which he poured upon the table, and a pack of cheap marked cards, which he scattered over the coins and down on the floor. My club went into the bloody hand of one corpse. Yen Shih’s lay beside another, and the crossbow was squeezed beneath the body of a third.

  “A trained investigator would find ten things wrong with this pretty picture in ten minutes, but they aren’t likely to call in trained investigators,” the old man said confidently. “The relief guards showed up, found a table with wine and dog meat and decided to take advantage of it, started gambling, somebody got too cute with his cards, and for once in their lives the dolts didn’t miss when they started swinging. Nothing is missing, so why not accept the easiest explanation?”

  I wasn’t about to argue with him, but we still had to get out of there. The tunnel was out of the question. Master Li was standing at the door the relief guards had used, and he obviously didn’t like it.

  “This has to lead up to the basement of a mansion on Coal Hill belonging to one of the mandarins, and it would take magic to get out through the basement and the mansion without being stopped,” he said thoughtfully.

  “Over here!” Yen Shih called.

  The puppeteer had seen what we hadn’t. The remnants of an earthslide could still be seen on the floor beside the west wall, and a patch of light that wasn’t artificial was filtering down through a gap that led up to the ceiling. Yen Shih and I widened th
e gap enough to see that the earthslide had opened a chimney leading up to a patch of blue, and with Master Li on my back I was able to worm my way up to what seemed a very odd closet made from twisted old wood. Light was pouring in through a gap wide enough for Master Li, and then I pretended I was nine years old and forced my clumsy body through, and Yen Shih climbed up and joined us. We had come out on familiar terrain. It was the Lin family cemetery on top of Coal Hill, not far from the grave the vampire ghoul had inhabited, and the “closet” turned out to be the interior of a hollow tree.

  “So! The ch’ih-mei happened to use this tree as a resting place during its night stalks, and the earthslide dumped it down to the cave, from which it was accidentally carted with the dirt to Hortensia Island,” Master Li said happily. He hates loose ends. “No doubt the mandarins decided not to fill in the chimney that had been formed because it could easily be turned into a rather neat emergency exit.”

  That tree would never be disturbed by gardeners, and I shuddered as I looked at it: twisted, crouching, powerful, malevolent—as sick and dangerous as the dread dead trees on the Hill of Kites and Crows, and it would remain untouched until a wind finally blew it over.

  16

  As duly appointed investigator of anything concerning the death of Ma Tuan Lin, Master Li had every right to be at the cemetery where the monster had lived. He sauntered down the hill quite openly and as he did so he reached into his robe and took out a stack of papers. They were rubbings he had taken from the late mandarin’s desk in the cave, and they were so superb that Master Li was willing to bet Ma had destroyed the frieze on the tunnel wall so no one else could share his treasure. Not even Ma was so stupid he couldn’t figure out how the cages were used in communication.

  Even I could see it. To begin with, we were once again looking at the same hooded figures that had been carved on the walls of the Yu, the Eight Skilled Gentlemen. These were the sharpest impressions yet, and one detail was visible that hadn’t been before. Each cage they carried contained an object like a writing brush, with the handle sticking up through a hole in the center of the junction of bars at the top, and one sequence was practically a lesson for the slow-witted. (1) One of the gentlemen lifted the brush from his cage. (2) He was shown touching the brush to symbols of the five elements depicted upon the bars. (3) His image appeared inside the cage. (4) Wavy lines symbolized crossing water and distance. (5) A second gentleman was depicted looking at a duplicate image of the first one in his own cage.

  “Even Pea-head Chou in my village could understand this!” I exclaimed.

  “Pay attention,” Master Li said sharply. “Ma’s discovery of cage communication led him to conclude he’d found what really mattered, and perhaps he had, but that’s as far as he went, and any scholar worthy of the name would realize he had in his hands the only known record of an event still honored in bastard form today, the Dragon Boat Race of the fifth day of the fifth moon.” He grimaced violently and shook his head as though trying to rattle meanings from molasses. “Meaning the day after tomorrow,” he said. “Supposedly the race honors the great statesman and poet Ch’u Yuan, who drowned himself as a protest against corrupt government, but in fact the race was being run a thousand years before Ch’u was born—if not two thousand. The frieze Ma found and destroyed was clearly a pictorial account of the original event that inspired the race of the dragon boats, although it would take the Celestial Master in his best days to wring the full truth from it.”

  Seldom have I seen the old man so frustrated. As his right forefinger danced over the rubbings he quickly and surely interpreted ancient symbols and placed them in the context of a story, yet his hand chops and roars of profanity testified to lessons he might have learned at the Celestial Master’s knee uncounted years ago; lessons that the saint might not now be able to repeat. He started with something other than pictographs, however. One rubbing was of ancient writing at the very beginning of the frieze, and the old man pointed to the brief inscription.

  “The story is clearly a solstice myth, based to some extent upon historical events, and this written title was added by a scholar or priest perhaps a thousand years after the actual carving.” He turned and winked at Yen Shih. “A bit gaudy, but rather prettily descriptive, don’t you think?”

  The puppeteer glanced up sharply. Knowledge of ancient scripts was the province of the privileged, and never before had Master Li directly alluded to Yen Shih’s upper-class origins. Then the puppeteer shrugged, and translated the symbols for my benefit.

  “ ‘Sky-flame Death Birds Ghost Boat Rain Race,’ and the only language other than Chinese given to fashioning poetic lines from strings of unmodified nouns,” Yen Shin continued in a marvelous imitation of a pompous scholar’s lecture voice, “is barbaric Latin.”

  Master Li took over, and this is the sketchy outline of the solstice story he was able to decipher from ancient symbols and images.

  Long ago, before writing had evolved to record events, invading barbarians who were to become the Chinese battled aboriginal settlers of the Central Kingdom for earthly supremacy, and at the same time a battle was waged in Heaven between gods of the old people and those of the new. Somehow the earthly combatants managed to infuriate both celestial sides. As a result the gods who normally controlled the physical operation of earth rode off to Heavenly battlefields and left men to manage as best they could, and in no time the world was in chaos. It was clear that men must establish harmonious accord with the powers of nature if they were to survive, and to this end the warring kings finally united and humbly petitioned the greatest of wizards and shamans, Pa Neng Chih Shih, to come from the corners of civilization and take charge.

  “The Eight Skilled Gentlemen began by ordering the kings to build something,” Master Li said. “See the large square? That means ‘earth’ or ‘of the earth.’ It has a squiggle carved inside to indicate it’s hollow—a cave, for example—and these little lines sticking through the top—”

  “Pipes!” I exclaimed. “They had the kings build them the musical instrument of the Yu!”

  “I sincerely hope so, since it’s a lovely idea,” Master Li said in a gentle voice. “They also commissioned two marvelous boats, one yang and one ying, and to seal a pact—this isn’t clear to me, but it seems to have been a covenant to bind men and nature in harmonious accord—the Eight Skilled Gentlemen ran the most spectacular boat race in history.”

  With the most deadly stakes, it seemed. Somehow the Yu was used to form a path of magical water to race on, and the air above the boats was filled with flames, indicating the sky was so hot it was catching fire, as in the days before Archer Yi shot down nine of the ten suns. Obviously the yang influence was grotesquely strong, and when nature is unbalanced disease moves in, and the terrible Ravens of Pestilence wheeled above the boats. Water boiled beneath the Eight Skilled Gentlemen, waves threatened to capsize them, hideous monsters reached out from the banks and sea serpents threatened from below. The yang boat was shown moving ahead, and the death birds of disease swooped down—

  “And just when it gets really exciting we lose the thread,” Master Li said disgustedly.

  The stone hadn’t escaped time’s ravages where the last panels were. It had worn so that ink from the rubbing gathered in little puddles, smearing and distorting, and in some sections there was nothing but a ridge here and a gouge there to suggest what might have been carved. Then, at the very end, the soft worn area gave way to firmer stone and the frieze became visible again.

  “Yin has won after all,” Master Li said. “See the slanting lines? Rain is falling, the generating force and symbol of renewal, and the boat has reached some sort of dock crowded with kuei, ghosts. What’s happening isn’t clear. The flames of the sky have been extinguished and the death birds of disease are fleeing, so one must assume that ghosts have joined forces with the Eight Skilled Gentlemen and tilted the balance. After all, the unknown commentator called the crafts ‘ghost boats.’ If only the Celestial Master can regain
his wits for a few hours!” the old man cried passionately. “He’s capable of tying this to the demon-deities connected with the cages, and maybe even to their brother Envy, and above all he might be able to tell us why portions of a solstice tale three thousand years old are popping up today, and why certain monsters aren’t myths, and, in short, what in hell is going on.”

  “Good luck,” said the puppeteer.

  Yen Shih was delighted with the “interesting morning,” as he phrased it, and placed himself at Master Li’s service day or night, but for the moment he excused himself to attend to some work at home. He was being tactful. Master Li’s next stop would be to give a full report to the Celestial Master, and there might be details he wouldn’t want the puppeteer to know about, so Yen Shih simply bowed out before anyone got embarrassed. Master Li insisted upon hiring a palanquin for the puppeteer, and we took another one, and not long afterward we entered the Forbidden City and went straight to the Celestial Master’s office. He wasn’t in, but he had left a note for Master Li in a sealed pouch, and Master Li took it back to the palanquin and opened it as we started back toward the Meridian Gate.

  Kao,

  I’m tired and stupid and senile. I confronted a mandarin who had to know about that cave in Coal Hill. I got him to produce his cage and explain they’re for communication. Then I used it to do some shouting, but then my mind stopped functioning. All I could think of was to hit the bastard over the head with the thing. I’ll have to leave more constructive approaches to you. I’ve tracked a cage to Yang Ch’i. He keeps it in a case in that damned greenhouse of his, and you can handle the guards if anyone can. I’ll send word when my brains are up to something tougher than pre-chewed baby food.

  Chang

  “How do I look?”

  “Sir… Sir…”

  “Ox, not over my robe!”

  “Sorry,” I managed to say between retches.