The Story Of The Stone (3 page)

“Forgery of a forgery,” he muttered. “Someone's made a tracing of this, and recently. The oaf left marks where he pressed down too hard.”

He handed the manuscript back to Master Li. “Tracing is an amateur job,” he said contemptuously. “A freak forgery that can make scholars doubt their sanity is worth a fortune, but a tracing of it couldn't fool an illiterate baby, if the idiot tried to sell it to the wrong man, he'd soon be contemplating the pretty fish swimming around his solid stone sandals.”

I had a sudden queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, but if Master Li was thinking of a dead dice cheater at the bottom of the canal, he gave no sign of it.

“How very interesting,” he said mildly. “Hsiang, the manuscript has apparently been stolen. Any word on the grapevine?”

“Are you serious? Li Kao, if a collector allowed word of something of this quality to get out, he'd have a visit from the emperor's agents inside of a day. There can't be another fraud as good as this in the whole world,” the toad said. “And don't bother looking for the forger. The August Personage of Jade has lifted him to Heaven, and he's now handling the divine correspondence.”

Master Li scratched his forehead and tugged at his beard.

“One last question. I can think of any number of men who would kill to get their hands on the manuscript, but the murder I've been handed appears to have been rather gaudy. Can you think of a man who would use methods suitable for the worst excesses of Chinese opera?”

“One,” the toad said promptly.

“Who?”

“You,” said the toad. He turned to me. “Boy, do you realize that entire cemeteries are dedicated to this antique assassin? How many corpses did he leave behind during that weird fling you had with the birds?”*

*
See
Bridge
of Birds (St Martin's Press, New York, 1984).

“Well, maybe twenty or thirty,” I said. “But that was only because—”

“Begone!” the toad yelled. “Begone, and let an old man die with dignity.”

“Old?” said Master Li. “If my oldest grandson hadn't eaten an untreated blowfish, he'd be about your age.”

“The problem with you is that you refuse to expire from old age,” the toad snarled. Then he quoted Confucius. “ 'A fellow who grows as old as you without dying is simply becoming a nuisance.' ” He turned back to me. “I, on the other hand, shall succumb with serenity, secure in the sanctity of my soul. Boy, just look at the soul shining through my eyes! It's like a goddamned flower!”

It is dangerous to play the quoting game with Master Li. “ 'When I return from trampling flowers, the hooves of my horse are fragrant,' ” he said softly.

The toad turned pale. “Now, look here, Li Kao, there's no need to find offense where none was intended. All I seek is the True Path that will lead me to the Blessed Realm of Purified Semblance.” The thought of his newfound purity emboldened him. “Begone!” he cried. “Begone, you animated accumulation of antiquated bones, and take the sulphurous scent of sin with you.”

He turned and glared back at me.

“Also,” he added, “take this walking derrick.”

Master Li stood up and bowed, and I followed his example, and we turned and walked away over the grass, and a gentle bubbling chorus of goo-goo-goos faded behind us.

The journey to the
Valley
of
Sorrows
was not a long one, and three days later I climbed to a ridge overlooking the valley. It was quite early in the morning. I mopped the dew from a large flat rock, and we sat down and waited for the mist to clear. As it did I realized that the
Valley
of
Sorrows
was like a bowl with a chip in it, the chip being the gap to the south that opened to other valleys in the distance. Winding around and down the sides of the bowl was a lovely path of trees and flowers — too lovely, from my point of view. No peasant in his right mind would waste that much arable land on flowers when something useful could be planted. Conspicuous waste is the boast of wealth and power, and it makes me nervous.

“The peasants are paid not to plant it,” Master Li said, reading my mind. “It's called Princes' Path, and the reason for it lies in a fairly long story.” He swept his hand across the valley. “Rich or poor?” he asked.

I mentally dug my toes into the earth. “Neither,” I said. The soil seems to be good, but there isn't much of it. Too much rock and shale on the hillsides, and the marsh at the west side is salty. The valley probably supports a small population quite well, but there can't be much left over."

“Excellent,” Master Li said. “The first feudal lord of the valley discovered how hard it was to make money from the place and set an admirable precedent by drinking himself to death. His successors followed his esteemed example, and every few years the peasants could look forward to the banquet that accompanied a noble funeral. What do you think their reaction was when a certain Prince Chou turned out to have a cast-iron liver, and lasted thirty years?”

Peasants are the same everywhere, and I said confidently, “They have never forgiven him to this day. They tell their children nasty stories about Callous Chou the Pinchfist Prince, and strangers can tell where he was buried by watching the direction when farmers pee in the fields.”

“Right you are, although Callous Chou stories are rare today,” Master Li said. “Somebody came along to replace him, and he cornered the story market. Ox, one of your most endearing qualities is the ability to keep your mouth shut when you are dying to ask questions, and it's time to answer one of them. Who was the Laughing Prince? Why are the peasants and the monks and even the abbot terrified at the thought that he may have come back from the dead?”

I settled back to listen, and this is a brief summary of what I learned about a gentleman whose merry spirit still haunts me to this day.

Emperor Wu-ti had a younger brother, Prince Liu Sheng, who was something of a problem. He was a brilliant student of Taoist science, but undisciplined, and it was said that his affability was matched only by his laziness. At court his merry jests kept the nobility in stitches, but it was time for him to do something useful. When Prince Chou finally succumbed the emperor sent his feckless sibling to rule as Lord of Dragon Head Valley. (It was not then called the
Valley
of
Sorrows
.) The peasants looked forward to such a fun-loving fellow, and in due course the headmen were summoned to the prince's estate.

“My dear friends,” said the prince with an enchanting smile. “My dear, dear friends, I beseech you to plant gourds. Lots and lots of gourds.”

Then he broke into an irresistible little dance step, while he chanted, “Lots and lots and lots and lots, lots and lots and lots and lots . . . of gourds!”

Well, a prince is entitled to a few peculiarities. The peasants planted lots and lots of gourds, and the question was where Prince Liu Sheng was going to find the pigs to eat them.

As it turned out, he didn't want the gourds for the meat. The dried seeds of the calabash have the peculiar property of burning for a very long time and shedding a brilliant white light, and the prince had brought in experts who had discovered a substantial deposit of salt beneath the marsh at the west end of the valley. By placing calabash seeds inside rhinoceros horn lanterns, Prince Liu Sheng was able to establish the world's first twenty-four-hour-a-day salt mine.

The peasants were chained to enormous horizontal wheels. Overseers whipped them around in circles as they powered drills that bored more than a thousand feet into the soft soil. Bamboo casing was installed, and ropes and windlasses replaced the drills, and buckets lifted the brine to a pipeline that ran clear across the valley to a large patch of shale at the east side. An odorless gas seeped up through the cracks, and it was easily ignited. The brine was dumped upon iron plates and heated, and the salt was extracted and carried away to market. Day and night the whips lashed the peasants around in circles, while Prince Liu Sheng rode through the works on a silken litter with a merry quip and friendly wave for one and all.

Eventually the salt gave out, but the prince had also discovered a narrow but rich vein of iron ore. The male peasants were chained into work gangs that dug endless tunnels, and the female peasants remained chained to the wheels. Now they powered huge bellows at blast furnaces, and in no time at all the Iron Works of Prince Liu Sheng was the talk of the empire. That was when he became known as the Laughing Prince. His sense of humor almost finished him, because he nearly guffawed himself to death as he watched the comical capers of the ladies at the wheel. Their chains were red hot, you see, and for a time “The Dance of the Peasants of Prince Liu” was all the rage at court.

The Laughing Prince called upon his scientific genius, and somehow devised a treatment of acids and other agents that made his iron less brittle than any other. The acid plant was on top of the eastern hills, and the waste trickled down in a steaming path that circled almost the entire bowl of the valley, and sages and scholars gathered to observe the astonishing effect when the waste reached the marsh. The water turned bright yellow. By day it steamed and bubbled, and at night it emitted an eerie violet light, and fish and frogs floated on their backs with horrified dead eyes lifted to the billowing black clouds from the ironworks. By then the trees were all dead, and no birds sang, and the Laughing Prince made some marvelous jokes about the smell. There were some who protested, but protests ceased when the prince opened the books. The profits were enormous.

Then something happened which nobody fully understands to this day. Prince Liu Sheng abruptly lost interest in making money. He returned to his first love, and he had his field of science picked out. He was going to revolutionize medicine.

“I shall strip the veils of ignorance from the healing art, and display the very nerves and tissues!” he proclaimed.

The assembled sages and scholars were appalled when the prince explained some of his proposed experiments, but their protests abruptly ceased when he pointed out that he would need lots and lots of subjects. “Lots and lots and lots and lots,” he chanted, breaking into his little dance step, “lots and lots and lots and lots . . . of subjects!” The sages and scholars danced right along with him.

Close to his estate was a grotto. He transformed it into his Medical Research Center, and sages who came to observe the experiments either applauded and praised — and then staggered outside to vomit — or protested, and became subjects for the next experiments. Nobody argued about the prince's expertise. Unquestionably he was the world's greatest expert on the effects of stretching, compressing, slicing, dousing in acids, burning, breaking, twisting — seldom if ever has the human body been so carefully studied. People who enjoy such pastimes need never be lonely. The Laughing Prince gathered like-minded fellows around him. He called them his Monks of Mirth, and he dressed them in robes made from clown's motley, and they danced and laughed beneath the moon as they capered through the valley with a brigade of soldiers to gather peasants for more experiments.

The Laughing Prince was hopelessly, homicidally mad. Some say that his imperial brother finally had enough and sent the yellow scarf, which is the imperial command to commit suicide. Others deny it. At any rate, the prince fell ill. He tossed and turned in a delirium of fever, screaming and swearing, and in his lucid moments he gazed out the window at the ruins of the valley and swore to return from the grave to finish the job.

He died. He was placed in his tomb.

“Seven hundred and fifty years later, capering monks in motley have been seen in the
Valley
of
Sorrows
,” Master Li said. “Brother Squint-Eyes has been murdered, and it appears that part of the valley has been destroyed in a way that is worthy of the Laughing Prince.”

“Whoof,” I said.

“Whoof indeed, although in such cases the poetic promise almost always turns out to be pathetically prosaic,” Master Li said, rather sadly. “Let's go see what the body of Brother Squint-Eyes can tell us.”

The monastery was very old, and quite large for such a small valley. The abbot had his monks lined up like an honor guard, and he was disappointed when Master Li declined a tour of inspection. Master Li also declined to begin with the scene of the crime, stating that it was unwise to come to a corpse with one's mind crammed with preconceptions, and we were led down a long winding flight of steps to the lowest basement and the cold room.

Lanterns were hung all over. The room was very bright, which meant that the shadows were very dark, and the play of light and shadow over the body on the block of ice highlighted the head. I stopped short and caught my breath. Never in my life had I seen such terror on a human face. The bulging eyes and gaping mouth were permanently fixed in the expression of one whose last view has been of the most horrible pit in Hell.

Master Li said that the expression was interesting, in that three or four drugs could have caused it, but none of them was common to
China
. He rolled up his sleeves and opened his case, and the blades glinted like icicles in the cold musty chamber. The abbot appeared to be on the verge of fainting, as did his four assistants, who hovered on the staircase. I myself will never get used to it, and I had to force my eyes to watch. The minutes passed like molasses dripping in winter. After ten minutes Master Li straightened up, and the murderous expression on his face was not entirely a trick of shadows.

“Bat shit,” he said.

He bent back over the cadaver, and his knives moved angrily.

“No yak manure, no volcanic ash, no nuns' pigtails, and no Tsao Tsao,” he muttered. “Nothing but another corpse.”

He went back to work, and various pieces of Brother Squint-Eyes landed on the ice beside the body.

“Our departed friend was recently in a large city,” Master Li said matter-of-factly. “His death occurred not more than four hours after his return.”

The abbot stepped nervously backward, as though fearing witchcraft. “Brother Squint-Eyes went to Ch'ang-an,” he whispered. “He died within a few hours of his return.”

“He had also been playing fast and loose with his vows,” Master Li remarked. “I would rather like to know how he could afford thousand-year eggs.”

“No monk can afford thousand-year eggs,” the abbot said flatly.

“This one did. At least three of them.”

“Eggs can last a thousand years?” I asked skeptically.

“Fraud, Ox! Fraud and forgery,” Master Li said disgustedly. “Paint slapped over the rot of reality and gilded with lies. They're simply duck eggs that have been treated with lime. The lime works through the shells and slowly cooks the contents, and after eight or ten weeks the treated egg is billed as being a thousand years old and is sold for a ridiculous price to a credulous member of the newly rich. Delicious, actually. Certain barbarian tribes grow a fruit that tastes quite like it. It's called avocado.” He deposited some revolting stuff in a bucket on the floor. “Constipation is a godsend to a medical examiner,” he said. “Abbot, you might also consider the fact that in addition to the eggs, Brother Squint-Eyes regaled himself in Ch'ang-an — it had to be a large city to get the eggs — with carp and clam soup, lobster in bean curd sauce, pickled ducks' feet smothered with black tree fungus, steamed shoats with garlic, sweetmeats, candied fruits, and spiced honey cakes. I estimate the cost of his last meal at three catties of silver.”

The abbot reeled. “Check the books!” he screamed to his monks. “Take an inventory of the candleholders and incense burners! See if there have been any reports of highway robbery!”

“While you're at it, somebody find out if Brother Squint-Eyes ordered an unusual amount of ink for the library,” Master Li said. “The type called Buddha's Eyelashes. Also parchment of the type called Yellow Emperor.”

The monks galloped up the stairs, and the abbot lifted his robe and wiped his forehead with it. Master Li displayed another gory object.

“Ox, you should learn a lot more about physical sciences,” he said. “This thing is the spleen. It isn't a very good spleen; functional, but not completely reliable, which is unfortunate because the spleen is the seat of good faith.”

He detached another unpleasant object and waved it around.

“The same applies to the heart, the seat of propriety; the lungs, the seat of righteousness; and the kidneys, the seat of wisdom. The only first-rate organ Brother Squint-Eyes possessed was his liver, which is the seat of love, and I would suspect that the late librarian led a somewhat tortured existence. It's damned dangerous to walk around overflowing with love when you're deficient in wisdom, righteousness, and propriety.”

“That was Brother Squint-Eyes,” the abbot sighed. “He was something of a specialist in abject confessions.”

I closed my eyes tightly, education or no education. Sawing sounds echoed from the stone walls. When I opened them Master Li had removed the top of the corpse's skull and was fishing out the contents.

“You know,” he said conversationally, "in the days of my youth I once visited the court of Muncha Khan, who had just destroyed another enemy army and was celebrating with a banquet. It was held on the field of battle, and servants casually dropped priceless rugs over corpses so we could sit on them. Muncha's tree was trundled out — I never did learn the symbolism of it — and a couple of fellows with pumps were concealed inside. The tree was silver, with jeweled leaves, and four silver lions at the base held their jaws over four silver basins, and at a signal the lions' mouths began spurting mare's milk. Four jeweled serpents wound up toward the top of the tree, and two of them began spouting carcasmos, which is fermented milk that can take your head off. The other two spouted bal, fermented honey, and when we were nicely drunk the chefs rolled out the main course. Turned out to be the brains of the slaughtered soldiers. They were delicious. I cornered one of the chefs because one never knows when a good recipe may come in handy, and he told me it was simplicity itself. You just grab somebody and chop off the top of his head and pull out the brains and wash them in salt water. Then rub them with garlic, pan fry them briefly, stuff them into rolled cabbage leaves, and steam them for two minutes with onions, ginger, and a touch of turnip sauce.