Eight Skilled Gentlemen

7

Before, we had seen the Celestial Master at his office, but now Master Li took me to the saint’s house just at daybreak, saying that the old boy awoke with the morning star. An old female servant let us in. She knew Master Li well, and led us without question through a simple bare house where tame deer were playing with dogs they had been raised with, and pet parakeets jabbered at cats, and a huge old owl opened sleepy eyes and said “Who?” We stepped outside again at the back into the most famous private garden in the empire. I could see the water of North Lake glinting through gaps in shrubbery in the first rays of the sun, and the little dock and special ramp that allowed the Celestial Master to hobble down to his boat. The garden itself can’t really be described, although countless writers have attempted it. The problem is that it’s so simple. I counted three small fishponds, a pile of rocks, ten trees so old that even small branches had beards of moss or creepers, one small patch of lawn where a statue of Lao-tse stood, innumerable shaggy shrubs, and flowers beyond counting. That was all, and none of it explains the sense of timelessness that wraps like a blanket around every visitor, the suggestion of continuity without beginning or end. Perhaps the closest anyone has come is Yuan Mei in his popular song “The Master’s Garden,” and even he admits failure except for the opening lines:

The Celestial Master was finishing the last of his morning tea when we approached, seated at a table made from a small millstone. “Hello, Kao!” he said cheerfully, but I had the sense that he was forcing his air of cheer through a curtain of immense weariness. “A bright good morning to you, Number Ten Ox. Any more grotesque murders?”

“One, but while it was extremely nasty I can’t really call it grotesque,” Master Li said, and then he went on to explain what we had seen, step by step, pausing to go back over points when he felt the ancient saint’s attention was slipping.

“Li the Cat, eh?” the Celestial Master said at the end. “That’s bad news, Kao. He’s powerful and he’s slippery, and I very much doubt that you can convict him on a murder charge.”

“That’s what I told our puppeteering friend,” Master Li said sourly. “I think our only hope is to find out exactly what their smuggling racket involves, nail them on that, and then put pressure on underlings to implicate the mandarins in murder, true or not, and squeeze the mandarins into involving the powerful eunuch. Messy and probably illegal, but I don’t know what else we can do.”

“Keep it legal, Kao,” the Celestial Master said gently.

“Yes, sir,” Master Li said like a schoolboy, and like a schoolboy he had the fingers of his left hand crossed behind his back. “To tell the truth, it isn’t eunuchs and mandarins and their rackets and murders that interests me, because I’ll bet anything you like that their involvement in really important matters is peripheral, if it exists at all. Old friend and teacher, what can you make out of the reappearance of ancient cages that may have belonged to the Eight Skilled Gentlemen? The simultaneous appearance of minor demon-deities of a destroyed religion? And what about that damned ape-faced creature who may be helping to murder mandarins, and is certainly stealing cages, including mine?”

The Celestial Mandarin scratched his nose and shrugged. “How would I know? Kao, are you absolutely positive that the ape man’s gaudy face is real? Not clever actor’s makeup?”

“It’s real,” Master Li said flatly. “Ox?”

“Yes, sir, it’s real,” I said. “The moonlight was very bright when we saw him, and so were the lamps in the room, and I could almost see the pores of his skin, and that wasn’t paint or dye.”

The Celestial Master sat silently for a moment. Then he said wearily, “I can’t concentrate anymore. I’m like an old tree, dying from the top down, and I’ll tell you something: I’ve had the same dream six nights in a row. It starts with my mother, who’s been dead for fifty years, and it ends with me trying to find my father’s shoes. I’m not going to see the leaves turn this year, Kao, and I can’t think clearly enough to make sensible suggestions. What do you plan to do?”

I could see that the saint’s skin was almost transparent, and even the effort to sit up straight was tiring him, and I felt tears burn my eyes. To dream of the dead and then of shoes is an irrefutable omen of joining the former, because “shoes” and “reunion” are homophones: hsieh.

“The key to the whole works would seem to be the cages,” Master Li said. “Both cages were held by murdered mandarins, and we can assume they belonged to the smuggling ring. It can’t be an accident that the tunnel entrance was practically at Ma Tuan Lin’s back door, and his note on the back of the rubbing seems to link cages to a business enterprise. A reasonable assumption is that the remaining cages are held by the remaining members, so to find the cages is to find the conspirators, and, I hope, to discover what in hell makes the cages so special. Li the Cat is traveling to Yen-men to confer with the Grand Warden, and I think it would be a good idea for Ox and me to attend the meeting.”

The tired old head lifted. “How?” the Celestial Master said with a trace of revived vigor. “To get to Yen-men you have to pass through three different bandit territories. There’s always the sea route, but can you afford a couple of accompanying warships for protection against pirates? And once you get there, how do you join the meeting?”

Master Li grinned. “Li the Cat is indeed taking the long, slow sea route, protected by the Wolf Regiment. If everything goes right Ox and I will leisurely travel overland, enjoying the sights and not losing sleep about bandits.”

This was news to me, and I leaned forward intently, and Master Li winked at me.

“You heard Yen Shih, Ox. He’s caught the fever and wants to stay on the case, so far as he understands it, and have you ever heard of a bandit insane enough to interfere with a traveling puppeteer?”

He was right, of course. Nobody interfered with puppeteers. They brought laughter and joy to everybody, bandit and soldier alike, and they traveled under the protection of more deities than most priests could count. Master Li turned to the Celestial Master and winked.

“On top of that, Yen Shih’s daughter is a renowned shamanka, young as she is. With the protection of a puppeteer and a shamanka I’d travel into the den of the Transcendent Pig,” he said. “As for spying on the conference, we’ll wait and see what comes up. It all depends, of course, on Yen Shih’s decision, and whether or not his daughter will join us.”

The saint nodded. “Bring them for a blessing if they wish one,” he said. “Ox, too,” he added with a nod in my direction. “You won’t need one, Kao, because I decided long ago that the August Personage of Jade is reserving your blessing for himself, just as soon as he can stockpile enough lightning bolts.”

The following morning there were four of us at the Celestial Master’s door, along with the morning star and the first light of the sun. Five, if one counts the gift.

Yen Shih had listened intently to all Master Li said, and when I told him of the pets wandering around the saint’s house he wondered if one more pet would be an appropriate gift, and after seeing it Master Li was sure it would be welcome indeed. It was a small bright-eyed monkey with greenish silky fur, and I had never seen such a wonderfully intelligent creature. Once taught it could bring designated objects on command, and it had been trained to pluck out three recognizable tunes on the pi-pa (although it was likely to switch abruptly from one to another), and it was a marvelous mimic of human gestures. Yen Shih led it in by the hand, dressed in a small cap and tunic, and when he touched his own forehead and said “Where are your manners?” the creature bowed quite beautifully to the saint, who was enchanted.

“Yen Shih, eh? I saw you once, incognito of course, because you were doing Hayseed Hong. I haven’t laughed so hard since Abbot Nu confused one of the newfangled ceremonial vessels with a Sogdian chamber pot and anointed his acolytes with the contents of the latter,” the Celestial Master said happily. “And this is your lovely daughter! My dear, Tao-shihs and shamankas have a great deal in common, to the despair of theologians, and if I’m feeling a bit stronger when you return we must sit down for a long talk.”

He blessed us and prayed for safety and success, and the old female servant had already learned the list of command gestures and got the little monkey to wave goodbye as we left. I can’t describe our leave-taking in more detail because my mind was concentrated on one overpowering ingredient, and that was the puppeteer’s daughter.

Her name was Yu Lan. Shamankas learn their craft young, and she had learned from her mother, and I felt very callow and ignorant when I realized that the puppeteer’s daughter—no older than I—was already a fully accredited priestess of the ancient Wu cults, and practitioner of shamanistic mysteries and magic I didn’t dare dream about. She lived in a world far above me even when we shared the same physical area and conditions, but there was nothing unfriendly about her. When capitalized as a personal name Yu Lan means “Magnolia,” but uncapitalized and in a different context yu lan can mean “secretly smiling,” and that is how I came to think of her: silent, graceful, distant as a drifting cloud, but never haughty, never reproving, secretly smiling.

She worked with everyone else to help her father’s puppet shows, but her own personal work could not be shared. I remember when we reached hills where strange wild people still lived in dark ravines. That night Yu Lan suddenly stood up in the light of our cooking fire and walked to the edge of the shadows where a boy had appeared as if by magic. He had brown skin and high sharp cheekbones and an expressionless face, and he silently extended a stripped branch with notches cut in it. Yu Lan studied the notches and then told the boy to wait, and a few minutes later she was dressed in a robe made from bearskin and carrying a case of various sacred things, and she disappeared with the boy into the night.

Her father had said nothing. Only when she was gone did Yen Shih remark, “Her mother would sometimes vanish for days on end, but she always found me when she was ready to.” Then he changed the subject.

She hadn’t gone far, however. Later when we were preparing to go to sleep we heard wailing and chanting from above us on a hilltop, and then a high clear voice exclaimed, “Hik!”

Master Li yawned and muttered, “The next sound you’ll hear is ‘Phat.’ “

“Sir?” I said.

“Phat!” rang sharply from the hilltop.

“It’s Tibetan. Didn’t you notice the boy’s Tibetan features? Somebody’s died and they’ve asked Yu Lan to guide the soul safely into the hereafter,” he explained. “She has to start by freeing it from the body, which is done by opening a hole in the top of the head to let it out. Shamans practice on themselves with a piece of straw.”

“Sir?”

“Watch.”

He plucked a piece of straw from his pallet and laid it carefully on top of his head, down flat. “Hik!” he exclaimed, and I stared with bulging eyes as the straw began to tilt and move, as though one end was sliding down into a hole. “Phat!” he cried, and the straw was standing up straight. He made a show of plucking the thing out of the hole in his head, and then tossed it away.

“Neat trick, isn’t it?” he said. “Yu Lan now has to guide the soul through wild country populated by demons and beasts, strengthening it by prayers and incantations, and she’ll be at it all night. Go to sleep.”

He rolled over and soon began to snore, but I stayed up for hours acting like a fool with a piece of straw. I never did learn how it’s done.

I’m getting ahead of myself, however. I really wanted to write about our very first evening on the road, even though nothing at all happened. We camped on a hill as the sun was setting. Yen Shih’s huge puppeteering wagon was bathed in rosy light, and he and I prepared to fix the canvas awning that served as a dew catcher above our pallets. We were swinging mallets, knocking metal sockets into the ground to hold the bamboo poles that supported the awning, while Master Li chanted the count for the mallets and Yu Lan’s clear pure voice lifted to the crimson clouds, improvising on the scene in the style of Liu Chu:

“Five perching crows four low clouds three wild geese two rows of willows one flame of setting sun.”

“Pole!” cried Master Li, and the hand of the puppeteer’s daughter happened to brush mine as she helped the sage set the pole in the socket.

“Venerable Sir,” I said that night as we lay in our pallets, “is it true that shamankas can’t stand presumptuous males?”

“Bllppsshh,” he muttered, or something like that.

I searched for omens in the stars. “Sir, is it also true that an angry shamanka is as dangerous as a tigress with cubs?”

He rolled over. “You may be right, my boy,” he said drowsily. “Knew a great lusty fellow once. Half rearing stallion, half raging bull. They called him Tong the Tumescent. One day Tong laid his paws on a pretty little shamanka, and she gave him the Eye and spoke words in an unknown tongue.”

That seemed to be that. Snores arose from Master Li’s pallet, and then I heard a sputtering sound and the old man said between yawns, “Now they call him Yang-wei.”

The snores resumed, and it took me a moment to connect Tong the Tumescent to Yang-wei, which means “Droopy Penis.”

“Oh,” I said.