Eight Skilled Gentlemen

5

We stopped at Master Li’s shack in the alley and changed into comfortable clothes and replaced the old cage in the hiding place beneath the pallets, and I boiled some rice and went out and found a vender of the strong fermented fish sauce we both like. We hadn’t slept in thirty hours, but the excitement of the case was keeping us wide awake, and a short time later I was at the oars again, rowing back to Hortensia Island.

I’d never seen the Yu. The island is mandarin territory, and the visit I’ve recounted was my first, but before I can describe the Yu I have to explain it.

The history of China is punctuated by more Great Floods than scholars know what to do with, and one of them a couple of thousand years ago left the Peking Plain covered with thirty feet of mud and silt. The city that was to become Peking was built in many stages on the hardened crust, and geomancers decided that in the process too much attention had been paid to male yang influences and too little to the female yin, and the imbalance must be corrected. The fastest way to strengthen yin is through water, so the North, Central, and South lakes were created by digging down through the crust and filling the holes with water drawn by canals from the Hun and Sha rivers. (Actually the lakes are called “seas,” but that’s confusing, so they’ll be lakes on these pages.) The earth from the lake beds was heaped up and tamped down to form Coal Hill, thus creating the world’s costliest pile of dirt, and while digging the bed for North Lake workmen ran into a mass of nearly solid rock, which was left as it was. Water filled up around it, and eventually it was covered with a layer of earth and planted with pretty pink-and-blue-flowering shrubs imported from the Cannibal Coast (Japan), and thus Hortensia Island was born.

One day when the water had risen to a certain level an extraordinary thing happened. A great burst of sound suddenly arose from North Lake: hauntingly beautiful, but without apparent theme or musical form. It was like the sound of a huge horn except it had a husky hollow undertone as it swooped between huang-chung and ying-chung, the low and high notes of the un-tempered chromatic scale. The eerie sound lasted only a minute or so. Then it died away and wasn’t heard again until six months had passed, at which time excited scholars announced that the sound seemed to be occurring at the precise moment of the winter and summer solstices.

The phenomenon was tracked to a cavern on Hortensia Island, in a crag jutting out over the water’s edge on the southeast side facing the city. The cavern had been notable only for ancient wall carvings and statuary, but now a brilliant young musical student announced that in uncovering the island the workmen had uncovered a cave that was actually a musical instrument devised by aborigines to work as a solstice-sounder, although he had no idea why they wanted such a thing. A hole in the floor of the cavern seemed to lead down through a hundred feet of solid rock to an unreachable lower chamber, and the musical student theorized it was some sort of wind-chest. When the water reached a certain level, and the temperature and humidity—perhaps even the intensity of sunlight—were just right, pressure was created that caused great amounts of air to be sucked inside. The air swooshed up through a network of tiny tunnels in the stone that been thought to be natural but revealed marks of axes and chisels, and exited up through the cavern roof.

“In short, the tunnels out over the lake are mouthpieces for air intake, the lower cave is a wind-chest, and the upper holes are pipes. It’s an organ, except it operates primarily by inhaling rather than exhaling,” said the musical student, but nobody paid him the slightest attention, so he went away and built a miniature model and made enough money to buy a dukedom.

(His organ was the sheng, which has been a standard orchestral instrument ever since. It’s a little hard on the lungs because it works by inhaling, so a totally false legend has grown around it to the effect that no great sheng master has lived past the age of forty. This allows a player to win wild applause and be pelted by bouquets hurled by lovely ladies, who often hurl themselves as well, simply by pausing to cough during a performance and then wiping his lips with a handkerchief daubed with blood-red rouge, and when the other members of the orchestra can bear it no more they toss away their instruments and set upon the bastard with fists, feet, and fangs.)

The cavern became known as the Yu, first in popular reference and then officially, because Yu is a legendary emperor who is said to have invented all the musical instruments Fu-hsi didn’t. It continued to sound the solstices with incredible accuracy, but since nobody knew the point of it the phenomenon had long ago settled into the peculiar atmosphere of Peking, like sweet-sour wells and red brick dust and blowing yellow sand and the Mandarin dialect, and that was how things stood when I tied at a dock in the shadow of the crag that held the famous cavern, looming above us like a giant hand lifting from the water. Master Li led the way up a path that wound through thick shrubbery toward the entrance tunnel. He stopped and pulled reeds aside, and I jumped backward with a sharp yelp.

“Striking, isn’t it?” he said.

“I think the word is ghastly,” I said when I stopped gulping.

It was only an old stone statue, but it had seemed alive when the light first struck it. It depicted a creature that was half man and half lizard, crouched and hissing, with a jagged edge at the open mouth where a long stone tongue had broken off. The face was contorted with rage, and hatred exuded from it as naturally as the odor of fermented fish sauce exuded from me. The old man kept uncovering more of the grotesque statues as we climbed, ten in all, and even the most human of them was ugly beyond belief.

“Oddly enough, Ox, there are art lovers who consider these to be very beautiful,” Master Li said. “Whether those who created them thought they were beautiful or ugly cannot be determined, but the terms really aren’t relevant. These are carvings of minor gods, demon-deities, and unless we and the Celestial Master have been taken in by extraordinary illusions we’ve seen creatures that may be of the same breed.”

I thought of the one-legged chimes player and the ape-faced burglar and the Celestial Master’s little man hurling fire, not to mention a lowly monster like a vampire ghoul. “Sir, can such creatures really be beautiful?” I asked.

“Beautiful and terrible,” he said. “Our distant forefathers swept across this land exterminating a people and a culture, seizing and reshaping whatever interested them. Theologians will tell you that simultaneously an invasion was taking place in Heaven, with old gods being ruthlessly overthrown and new gods taking their place, while the most dangerous and powerful of the old deities were placated by titles and duties and honors and absorption into the pantheon.”

I had nowhere near enough knowledge or experience to feel the same excitement that was making Master Li look forty years younger, but something of his intensity was being transmitted to me.

“Ox, here on Hortensia Island and in a few other scattered places the last of the great artists of an expiring race took up their chisels one more time. One assumes they were starving, since famine was the principal weapon our ancestors used,” Master Li said sadly. “One assumes they were half mad, and they honored their gods by carving deities in death agonies. You’re looking at an unparalleled psychological self-portrait of an exhausted race, teetering upon the edge of extinction, but don’t you see the wonder of our recent experiences? Some of the old gods were sure to survive. They’re stirring, my boy! They’re awakening from their long sleep, yawning and stretching, and you and I are right in the middle of it! Damn it, Ox, I feel like a boy whose been bemoaning the fact that he was born too late for the age of giants, and then one day he hears a snore that rocks the sky, and it’s accompanied by an earthquake that knocks down his house, and he discovers that the valley his village is sitting in bears a very strong resemblance to an immense navel.”

There was power mixed with the twisted pain of these stone idols, I had to admit it—still, my conservative peasant taste has definite limits. I pointed ahead through a gap in the bushes.

“Venerable Sir, look at that,” I said.

A hideous head was just visible, rising above leaves. It was as though a sculptor had molded a man’s face in soft clay, and then reached out and cruelly dug his fingers into the surface, poking and twisting.

“Isn’t it possible that the artists carved at least a few evil creatures along with the gods?” I asked. “I can’t for the life of me see how anyone could find beauty in that.”

The hideous head gazed back at me. Then the mouth opened, and a resonant baritone voice said, “Be it known, boy, that legions of lovely ladies have praised these features.”

“Yik!” I said, or something like that as I leaped backward into a tangle of rose thorns.

“Ha!” said Master Li, who seemed to be enjoying this.

Unless I was going crazy there was a twinkle of amusement in the eyes of the grotesque face, and bushes parted and a middle-aged strongly built man stepped to the path. He made a superbly graceful gesture that was like an exaggerated shrug, and added, “Of course, that was before the God of Beauty went quite mad with jealousy, so I shall forgive your impertinence.”

For the first time I saw a smile I was to see often, as warm and brilliant as the sun rising, and it was accompanied by a bow so superb that no opera star could have matched it.

“This humble one is called Yen Shih, and his insignificant occupation is to manipulate mannequins upon a stage, and he is honored to recognize and greet the legendary Master Li, foremost among truth-seekers of China.”

He turned to me.

“You would be Number Ten Ox, and you really shouldn’t feel as uncomfortable as you look at the moment.” The extraordinary man offered a wink that absolved me of guilt once and for all. “I told my daughter just the other day that when I die she can spare the expense of a funeral by propping my corpse beside these statues, since nobody will notice the difference.”

The God of Beauty had been jealous indeed. What I had taken to be an artist’s depiction of torment was in reality the ravages of smallpox, and rarely have I seen such destruction to a human face. It was a miracle that his eyesight remained, and as for his craft—who hadn’t heard of Yen Shih, greatest of puppeteers?

Master Li’s bow wasn’t quite so graceful, but it was very good.

“The honor is mine, for Yen Shih is said to be puppeteer to the gods on temporary vacation from Heaven, and Yen Shih’s daughter has also earned the jealousy of mere mortals.” Master Li dropped the artificial air and accent of formal speech and switched to the people’s vernacular. “I’ve seen you perform three or four times. If you got any better you’d be accused of witchcraft, speaking of which I’ve heard your daughter is absolutely the best.”

Master Li turned to me. “No, she isn’t a witch,” he said with a laugh. “She’s a female shaman, a shamanka, who specializes in the old rituals, and nothing but good is said about her.” He turned back to the puppeteer. “Ox has never seen the Yu, so I’m taking him inside for a look,” he added casually.

That was a subtle way of inviting information without demanding it. Yen Shih might be famous and respected, but as a puppeteer his social rank was precisely at the bottom. He had absolutely no right to set foot upon aristocratic premises like Hortensia Island—even less right than I would have if I hadn’t been with Master Li—but on the other hand he wasn’t being pressed to explain his presence. He decided to do so voluntarily.

“I come here often just before the seasonal sacrifices. The purpose is to steal something,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’ve offered to buy the stuff time and time again but I always get turned down, and I would be honored to have witnesses to my crime.”

“The honor shall be ours,” Master Li said graciously.

So there were three of us as we continued up the path. Master Li was perfectly content to let Yen Shih take the lead, and the puppeteer pulled weeds aside and ducked low and stepped into the opening of a natural rock tunnel. Inside the entrance was a barrel holding a stack of torches and Yen Shih and I each lit one, and then we followed the tunnel on and up into the heart of the famous Yu.

I really don’t know what I was expecting. I do know that I was disappointed. There was practically nothing to see. It was only a cavern of stone worn smooth by water, with a small round hole in the center of the floor and a maze of little tunnels leading up and out through the roof. Even the ancient altar was no more than a large stone blackened by fires of thousands of years ago, and I have to admit that I found the modern touches more interesting than the ancient ones. The modern part was simply the stack of crates holding ceremonial material for the rites of the next moon, since the Yu cavern was traditionally used for such purposes, and Yen Shih walked over to one of the crates and lifted the lid and smiled down at the contents.

“What thief could resist it?” he asked.

I stared at the stuff. “Clay?” I said.

“Very special clay,” said the puppeteer. “It comes from the bank of a river near Canton, and it’s used to blend with incense and form fragrant figures of sacrificial animals. I’ve been trying without success to buy it, because it’s perfect for modeling puppets I’ll eventually carve in permanent form.”

I watched with awe as his fingers swiftly kneaded a ball of the clay. A marvelously funny laughing face appeared, a merry woman, and then with a flick of fingers it became the sorrowful image of a weeping old man.

“I don’t need much, but it’s fragile stuff and several times a year I have to steal a bit more of it,” Yen Shih said with a shrug, and then he neatly wrapped some clay inside a piece of oilskin and tied it around his waist beneath his tunic.

“I’ll see if I can get you a permit,” was Master Li’s only comment. Then he changed the subject. “Let’s show Ox the wall carvings. A friend of ours has an interesting theory concerning who they’re meant to represent, although he hasn’t the slightest idea what they’re supposed to be doing.”

Again Yen Shih led the way with his torch, and I must honestly report that again I was disappointed. The famous frieze was in a long side tunnel that tapered to a tiny hole looking out over the lake, and at first I didn’t see anything at all. It was only when Master Li had me hold my torch close to the wall that the figures appeared, and even then I could barely make them out.

Eight hooded men were seen over and over, apparently performing different stages of some sort of ritual. The stone was worn almost smooth, and no details were visible. Each of the shamans—if that’s what they were—seemed to be carrying something, but no trace of the objects remained. So far as I could see they could have been doing anything from sowing a field to celebrating a marriage, and the few surviving symbols above them that Master Li identified as birds of some sort didn’t mean anything either.

“It’s a real pity there isn’t a clearer record,” Master Li said regretfully. “One would expect to find more carvings of the eight figures, but so far as I know none have come to light.”

I realized that Yen Shih was standing very still with his eyes fixed on Master Li’s face. I could see he was weighing various factors, and then he came to a decision.

“I haven’t been totally truthful. I come to the island to steal something else as well, and I think you may be interested in looking at it,” he said.

We followed the puppeteer back into the sunlight. He turned left and began to climb a small winding trail to the top of the crag and the row of astronomical instruments that were used to confirm predictions of eclipses in the annual imperial calendar.

“Incredible waste,” Yen Shih said, pointing at the huge metal base the instruments rested on, glinting dully in the sun. “That’s partially high-grade bronze and partially Dragon’s Sinew, meaning an alloy of a small amount of copper, twice as much antimony, and a great deal of tin. It costs a fortune, relatively speaking, and I need a lot of it to make nearly invisible wires for my puppets. Fortunately, I could keep digging this stuff out for several centuries.”

A long flat rock lay beside the platform, and when Yen Shih lifted it I saw a deep hole, big enough to slide into. He did so, taking the torch he still carried, and when he climbed back up the torch was still below, illuminating a small cave.

“There isn’t space for two, but you may find my Dragon’s Sinew mine rather interesting,” he said cryptically.

Master Li went first, and I heard a sudden sharp exclamation, and then his voice lifted happily. “Yen Shih, everything I have is yours!”

Some minutes later he had me lift him out, and then I squeezed down through the hole myself. The torch was stuck in a crevice, burning brightly, and the first thing I saw was the puppeteer’s “mine.” The workmen had poured Dragon’s Sinew with lavish abandon, leaving large congealed pools of the stuff, and Yen Shih had been very neatly chipping away at the edges. As I followed the glinting path of the metal I saw it run into a shelf of solid rock.

“I’ll be the Stone Monkey!” I yelped, and I heard Master Li laugh up above.

Yen Shih had led us to his private gallery as well as his private mine. “Eight! I’ve found all eight!” Ma Tuan Lin had written before a monster burned a hole in his back, and here carved in stone were the eight hooded shamans of three thousand years ago, and the details had not worn away. They were carrying eight cages precisely like the one concealed beneath Master Li’s pallet.