The Story of the Stone

9

I had never been to the capital before, but I thought I knew about big cities from my experiences in Peking. That illusion vanished the moment we passed through the Gate of Luminous Virtue. I gaped like any yokel at a raucous beehive where two million people buzzed inside walls that enclosed thirty square miles. There were twenty-five north-south avenues, and every one of them was four hundred eighty feet wide and lined with elm, fruit, and pagoda trees. The avenues rose to a high hill called Dragon Head Plain, and converged to a single road of bluish stone that wound up like a dragon's tail to the vast basilicas of the elite who ruled the empire.

I was awed and silent as we took the Street of the Vermilion Sparrow toward Dragon Head Plain. We passed through the Gate of the Red Bird just as a thousand drums pounded the three hundred beats that heralded the opening of the markets, and I felt dizzy in the atmosphere of a thousand years of greatness as we approached the legendary Brush Forest Academy, where Chinese genius is nurtured. Master Li had been one of the geniuses, and his reaction was slightly less than reverent.

“Fraud, my boy! Fraud and forgery,” he said, waving disgustedly at sacrosanct landmarks. “Paint slapped over dry rot and gilded with lies. Some of the lies are rather pretty, however, and my favorite concerns the little peasant lad who's digging a ditch behind a village schoolhouse.”

Master Li pulled out his flask and drank deeply, which caused outraged comments from distinguished-looking pedestrians. He ignored them.

“The urchin's keen ears catch fragments of lessons drifting from the window,” Master Li said between burps. “One day the schoolmaster absentmindedly falls into the ditch and discovers to his astonishment that the boy has covered the walls with masterful drawings, flawless mathematics, and learned quotations from the ancients.

” ‘Boy, are you not the scrofulous, illiterate, and lice-ridden urchin called Hong Wong?’ the schoolmaster gasps.

” ‘The insignificant name of this worthless one should not blemish the esteemed lips of Your Magnificence!’ the lad wails.

” ‘And is not your father the ulcerous, flatulent, maggot-infested fellow called Hong the Hopeless, who takes pride in the fact that he has failed the examination for village idiot sixteen years in a row?'

“The lad falls to his knees and begins banging his head against the ground. ‘Seventeen!’ he sobs. Well, the schoolmaster grabs the boy by the ear and hauls him into the classroom, of course, and gives him every test he can think of, and word spreads far and wide that the latest Chinese genius has been discovered in a ditch in an insignificant village eight miles from nowhere. You know the rest. Triumph after triumph, the highest awards and degrees, elevation to important office, advisor to emperors and savior of peasants, and eventual deification to become Celestial Patron of scrofulous, illiterate, lice-ridden lads digging ditches behind schoolhouses.”

Master Li spat with lamentable accuracy upon a statue of K'uei-hsing, God of Examinations.

“Now let's take a look at reality,” he said. “Little Hong Wong is indeed taken in hand by the educational establishment and force-fed languages, calligraphy, poetry, painting, dancing, music, chess, etiquette, courtly ritual, philosophy, religion, history, and the classics, following which he's ready to start learning something—mathematics, for example. Agriculture, engineering, economics, medicine, government, and the art of war. He passes his examinations with honors and receives his first official appointment, and then what happens?”

He actually seemed to want an answer, so I shrugged and said, “A superior who inherited the job from an uncle rams a barge pole up his ass.”

“Good boy,” Master Li said approvingly. “Hong Wong has just entered the world of the Neo-Confucians, to whom all innovation is anathema. His brilliant plan for a sanitation system will be rejected out of hand because it has no direct parallel in ancient times. His astronomical observations will be used as evidence in his trial for heresy, because they cannot be confirmed in the oldest texts. His paintings do not slavishly imitate the ancients, and his poetry is not plagiarism, and his essays do not deal with the three hundred thirty-three approved subjects, so all of them will be burned. Hong Wong will be very lucky if he is merely stripped of rank and possessions and kicked out to starve, and if he is truly a genius, he will not be so lucky. Lin Tseh-shu was banished to a corner of Turkestan so distant the sun hasn't reached it yet, or so they say. Su Tung-po was exiled to Hainan, whose principal exports are malaria, jungle rot, and leprosy. Chu Suilang was last seen sinking into a swamp in Vietnam, and when Han Yu stepped off the prison boat in Swatow he was very nearly devoured by crocodiles.”

Wen Ch'ang, God of Literature, received the next stream of saliva.

“Ox, at an early age a Chinese genius gazes at the path that lies ahead and reaches for a wine jar,” Master Li said. “Is it any wonder that our greatest men have lurched rather than walked across the landscape as they hiccuped their way into history?”

“Sir, that's the best autobiography I ever heard!” I said enthusiastically.

Master Li's reputation was still considerable, although tainted with a questionable aroma, and our soil and plant samples were given priority at the Academy of Divination and Alchemic Research. Then he set out again, climbing to Imperial City and the great palaces of the bureaucrats. Again I was overawed as I gazed to the top of the hill and Palace City, where the imperial family lived, and then the Gate of the Cinnabar Phoenix, which led to the Great Luminous Palace of Emperor T'ang T'ai-tsung. Master Li wasn't going that high, however. He turned toward a building that made my blood turn cold: the Gate of the Beautiful Vista, which is the headquarters of the Secret Service and which was surrounded by straw mannequins with the flayed hides of corrupt officials wrapped around them. (The emperor had been busy cleaning house since he took over, and Master Li thoroughly approved of T'ang.) Fortunately Master Li was heading toward a smaller palace next door, and I looked forward to meeting a legendary lady.

The Captain of Prostitutes is the most powerful woman in China, except when an Empress sits upon the throne. Her guild is the heart and soul of espionage, and almost entirely responsible for probing the mysterious minds of barbarians. Couriers constantly gallop from her palace with coded messages for the Bower of Brilliant Companions in Hangchow, or the Sun-Bright Residence in Loyang, or the Pavilion of Increasing Perfection in Peking, and many a powerful official has shared his bed and secrets with a young lady and awakened to find the lady gone, and in her place an official pouch containing the yellow scarf.

I expected a long wait for an audience, but Master Li presented his business card, and in a matter of minutes we were ushered into the presence of the great lady herself. She was tall and middle-aged and very beautiful, and her voice was an exquisite musical instrument.

“Most exalted and venerable of sages,” she said, bowing to the floor.

“Most lovely of earthbound goddesses,” Master Li purred, matching her bow.

That sort of thing lasted several minutes, and then we were served tea, and I sat like a turd in a truffle shop while they played the game of social shuttlecock. I have never been able to understand why perfectly sensible people waste time being wittily obscure instead of just saying what they want and going on about their business. The Captain of Prostitutes began the game by strewing a few flower petals over the golden surface of the tea.

“Dear friend, these flowers will die from loneliness, since I appear to be out of butterflies,” she said ruefully.

Master Li caught the shuttlecock in midair.

“Alas! No flower can be complete unless accompanied by butterflies. Just as hills must have springs, and rocks must have moss,” he said.

“What is a stream without cress in it? What are tall trees without creepers? What are men without the mind of Li Kao?” she said musically.

Master Li bowed at the compliment. “Women,” he said, delicately brushing her wrist with a fingertip, “cannot be complete without the expression of a flower, the voice of a bird, the posture of the willow, the bones of jade, the skin of snow, the charm of an autumn lake, the heart of poetry, and the soul of my lovely hostess.”

“Invincible charmer,” she said with a sigh. Her eyes lowered to the old wrinkled finger upon her delicate wrist. “Passion, dear friend, displays but the bottom end of the universe,” she chided.

“Then it is the job of the poet to give it a new dress!” cried Master Li. “Shall I sing of mountains clothed in clouds, or pines dressed in wind, or willows adorned in rain, or terraces attired in moonbeams?”

The captain served more tea and flower petals. “One must be careful in one's attire,” she said. “Sometimes it is too easily removed, and at other times it cannot be removed at all. Green hills are reflected in water which borrows its color from the hills. Good wine produces poetry which borrows its beauty from the wine.”

“And a beautiful woman,” Master Li cooed, “is like a poem in that she is best seen when she is slightly drunk. If a mere man may appropriate a lovely lady's train of thought, pale clouds become multicolored when they reflect the sun, and placid currents become falls when they pass over a cliff. Things acquire the characteristics of associates, and that is why friendship is so valued, and why one's friends must be carefully chosen.”

She caressed his wrinkled hand. “Then I shall choose as my friend an ancient unyielding rock,” she said.

“And if the rock is but a dream?”

“Then I shall be a shadow in the dream,” she said softly.

Master Li swallowed his tea and leaned back and did some mental addition. “Ten points each?”

The Captain of Prostitutes fined herself a slap on a cheek. “No, I misquoted,” she said. “Chang Chou wrote that passion ‘holds up’ the bottom end of the universe, and I said ‘displays.’ Eight points at most.”

“That means I only owe you sixty-six,” Master Li said.

“Sixty-seven,” she said firmly. “Well, Kao, what can I do for you?”

“Direct me to a sound-master,” he said. “I hear that you play host to the best when he's in town.”

She nodded. “Moon Boy,” she said matter-of-factly. “Ever hear him?”

“No, but I'm told he's a phenomenon the likes of which are seen once in a thousand years,” Master Li said.

“Frankly, I doubt that there has ever been a sound-master to match Moon Boy,” she said. “How badly do you need him?”

“Very badly. I've run up against something that has me baffled.”

She leaned back and regarded him with narrowed eyes. “Moon Boy isn't here at the moment,” she said. “Nobody in his right mind would accept an invitation to perform for the King of Chao, but Moon Boy went off with a song on his lips.”

Master Li whistled. The captain was all business now. “The king isn't the problem. You can handle that twelve-chinned wonder if anyone can, but handling Moon Boy is another matter.”

“I've heard he's a bit difficult to control,” Master Li murmured.

“Multiply what you've heard by a thousand,” she said. “However, I can loan you the one person in the world who can lead him around like a little lamb.”

She rang a bell and whispered to the servant who appeared, and he trotted away.

“What would you want in return?” Master Li asked.

“Your influence and writing brush,” she said, and she stood up and began pacing the floor like a man, smacking a fist into the palm of the other hand.

“Li Kao, impatience is not pleasing to Heaven, but it's been nearly two thousand years since our guild received celestial signs indicating that our patron deity had been replaced, and we're getting impatient. We lost the protection of Golden Lotus, the greatest whore the world has ever known, and not one of the substitute deities we've been saddled with could lift a customer's purse if he was dead drunk and stuck headfirst in a barrel of molasses,” the captain said angrily. “Now nothing is going right! The court keeps us tied up with Secret Service work that pays practically nothing, and there have been eight outbreaks of pox in the last five months, and now the palace eunuchs are trying to divert the emperor's attention from their activities by starting another morality campaign. Golden Lotus wouldn't have stood for it!” the captain said passionately. “She'd have marched from star to star across the Great River and demanded an audience with the August Personage of Jade! We need a patron with her kind of guts, not an obsequious blob of suet.”

She whirled around and swept a delicate porcelain teacup from the table and watched it smash on the floor.

“Li Kao, I'll loan you the girl who can control Moon Boy for as long as you need her, and all I ask in return is that you petition the imperial court to make a formal request to Heaven for a new Patron of Prostitutes.”

“You overestimate my influence at court,” Master Li said wryly.

“You underestimate my ability at blackmail,” she replied. “The emperor can't ignore a petition from Master Li, and I'll see to it that an army of priests and bureaucrats falls in behind you. Besides, our candidate will be one of the emperor's predecessors, and he wouldn't want to disturb the dear lady's ghost.”

Master Li sat up straight. “You don't mean Empress Wu?” he said incredulously.

“Who would be better qualified?” the captain asked. “She bounced from bed to bed all the way to the throne, and why should she fry in Hell when she can do something useful in Heaven?”

“Dear lady, you'd be asking the Emperor of Heaven to accept as a junior minister a tyrant who poisoned her sister, her niece, and one of her sons!” Master Li exclaimed. “She forced another son to hang himself, had three grandsons and a granddaughter whipped to death, executed two stepsons and had all sixteen of their male progeny decapitated, strangled thirty-six senior ministers, and wiped out three thousand entire families. In addition, she turned out to be one of the cleverest and ablest rulers China ever had, and she acquired the throne so smoothly, her rivals never knew what hit them. The August Personage of Jade will accept letters of office from Empress Wu the moment he accepts mine to be Patron of Teetotalers.”

The captain looked at him in silence for a moment, and then extended her hands in a charming gesture of offering a gift.

“The guild has authorized me to take whatever steps are necessary, and I hereby pass that authorization to you,” she said. “Li Kao, you have been known to occasionally catch the ear of Heaven. If the opportunity arises, you may handle the situation as you think best, keeping in mind that our patron must be tough, smart, quick, remorseless, and blessed with the moral principles of a rutting angleworm. It's a damn shame you yourself happen to be the wrong sex.”

Master Li stood up and bowed. “Never have I received a greater compliment,” he said sincerely.

I looked at the gleams in their eyes and groaned inwardly. They were about to begin another game of shuttlecock, but just then the servant reappeared with a young lady in tow. She was small and lithe and pretty, but not pretty enough to make me feel like a pig at a peacock convention, and the captain looked at her fondly.

“This is Grief of Dawn, who will never make a good whore,” she said. “Her heart is too tender, but fortunately, it's the only tender spot she has. She's tough and capable and far too experienced for her years, and you won't need to worry about traveling with her.”

She turned to the girl “This is the notorious Master Li and his assistant, Number Ten Ox. They need Moon Boy. Prying him loose from the King of Chao will be his responsibility, and yours will be keeping Moon Boy in line until he does what must be done.”

Grief of Dawn bowed. She undid her hair clasp and handed it to Master Li. “Moon Boy and I are as one,” she said simply. “With me he will stay, but with anyone else he will fly away upon the first breeze.”

Master Li examined the clasp and nodded appreciatively. Grief of Dawn politely extended it to me, and I saw the interlocking yin-yang motif of phoenix and dragon. She turned it over to show the interlocking names of Grief of Dawn and Moon Boy, and her hand happened to brush mine. I don't know if my reaction was visible in Hangchow, but the captain's eyebrows nearly lifted off her head.

“Is he always this susceptible?” she asked.

“Well, I've never before seen his ears emit puffs of smoke,” Master Li said judiciously.

“Get a bucket of water,” the captain said to the servant.

“No need,” I said in a high strangled voice. “Just choking on a flower petal from the tea.”

Grief of Dawn's eyes were startled and wary, but there was a hint of a smile in them. She discreetly moved to the other side of the room. The flower petal excuse fooled nobody, and here I think I should insert a tirade I have heard many times from Master Li. It's the only way to begin to explain my reaction to Grief of Dawn.

The great dream of bureaucrats and most aristocrats is to return to the best of all possible worlds: the rigid feudalism so prettily praised by Confucius. The key is the total subjugation of peasants, and some of the methods are very ingenious. One of the best has been the establishment of a dowry system that requires a bride to be accompanied into her new home with a substantial gift of money or land.

In practical terms it means that peasants who are cursed with an overload of daughters must choose between starvation or infanticide. The girls can't quite pay their own way in the fields. The parents can't afford to keep them and can't marry them off—the only thing left is to drown them at birth, which allows aristocrats to screech, “What inhuman callousness! Who can argue that mere pigs should be allowed to own their pigpens?” Peasant girls who are kept alive soon learn that they are starving their own parents and that marriage is out of the question, and if they are at all pretty, they often run away and become prostitutes in order to send a little money home. This allows bureaucrats to bellow, “Look at the immoral sluts! Who can argue that such swine should have any legal rights at all?” It's a marvelous system, without a flaw, and those who say that some of the sluts could teach the bureaucrats a few things about morality will be given a fishhook, a knife, a candle, and unlimited time in which to mend their manners in a swamp in Siam.

When my hand brushed Grief of Dawn's, I felt calluses. It would take years for the hard lines to soften completely, and from my point of view they were prettier than pearls. That doesn't explain it completely, of course, but one thing was certain. I was in love.

Master Li was grinning at me. “Ah, if only I could be ninety again,” he said nostalgically. “Ox, try to keep your paws off the young lady while we're traveling. Grief of Dawn, hit him over the head with a log every now and then. He will be grateful for the attention.”

“We have a pact?” said the Captain of Prostitutes.

“We have a pact,” said Master Li. “I promise nothing, but I shall do my best for Empress Wu, and, should that fail, do everything possible to get you a competent patron. Can you blackmail somebody at the postal service? We're in something of a hurry.”

“It shall be done,” said the Captain of Prostitutes.

The sun was just lifting over Serpentine Park when Master Li and I arrived at the postal service stables. Grief of Dawn was waiting for us. She had chosen clothes that indicated experience in serious traveling: boy's tough trousers, high leather boots, a tunic made to withstand thorns as well as raindrops, and an oiled rain hat. The rest of her clothes and possessions were neatly stored in a pack on her back. Master Li approved, and his approval rating jumped ten points when she walked to her horse and slid the bow from the saddle holster and grimaced at the pull. She went through six or seven different bows before finding one that suited her, and when she swung up to the saddle, I knew she was a far better rider than I was. I'm only comfortable upon a water buffalo. Meanwhile, I was strutting around like a peacock.

Only somebody with the influence of the Captain of Prostitutes could have arranged it. I had an official cap and tunic emblazoned with imperial dragons, and a message pouch sealed with the emblem of state. Master Li showed me how to fix the butt of the flagpole into the cup beside the stirrup. The gates swung open and I managed a respectable blast on my silver trumpet and we galloped out in a cloud of dust, scattering pedestrians quite satisfactorily. I even made the turn without falling off.

Master Li let me set the pace—to get it out of my system, I suppose—and I exhilarated in the kind of speed that is only possible for those who ride beneath the flag of the gyrfalcon. The horse stations were positioned every few miles, and I would raise the trumpet and blow “alert,” and then “three horses,” and we would ride up to grooms holding fresh horses and swing from one mount to the other without touching the ground, and then be off again as though the fate of the empire depended upon it. That lasted one day. After that we traveled a good deal slower because my rear end was almost as sore as the insides of my thighs. Master Li could still ride with the best of them, and Grief of Dawn might have been born on a horse, and I was grateful to them for not laughing when I hobbled around our camp at night.

When the route led downstream beside a major river, we would ride our horses onto a postal service barge and let the current do the work. Those were the best times. I had a chance to talk to Grief of Dawn. She was pure peasant, just as I thought, and we learned that she had no memory of her life until she was about eighteen. She had been found by an old lady she called Tai-tai (“great-great”), unconscious and covered with blood, and the old lady had taken her in and treated her as a daughter. It had been early in the morning, so Tai-tai named the girl Grief of Dawn. Master Li examined a deep round indentation in her skull and said that somebody had certainly tried to kill her, and it was a wonder all she had lost was her memory.

He had no objection to my telling her about the case we were on, so long as I made no mention of the tomb, and she was fascinated to hear about Lady Hou, the Thunderballed princess in One-Eyed Wong's, because she knew and loved some of her poems. The bargeman always had musical instruments. At night we would play and Grief of Dawn would sing peasant songs so old that not even Master Li knew them, and one night she adapted one of Lady Hou's poems to our circumstances and sang it for us. I will include it here as a matter of interest for those who may not have encountered the deceptively simple art of Lady Hou.

When we got to land again we galloped through villages where children with huge dreaming eyes gathered to watch us pass (who hasn't imagined himself as a legendary hero of the postal service?), and through narrow mountain passes where bandits with hyena faces snarled at the flag of the gyrfalcon and drew back in fear. That may give the impression that imperial control was total, but such was not the case.

“My children, there are corners of the empire where the emperor is little more than a figurehead, and we're approaching one of them,” Master Li said. “In the Kingdom of Chao there is only one ruler, and his name is Shih Hu.”

Master Li threw out his hands in an admiring gesture so wide he nearly fell from his horse.

“What a man! He's been on the throne for twenty-eight years without making a major mistake, which approaches the supernatural. He stands six feet seven and weighs more than four hundred pounds, and enemies who assume his bulk is blubber soon decorate pikes on his walls with their severed heads. He's loved by his people, feared by his rivals, adored by his women, and Grief of Dawn will have something to think about when she sees his bodyguards.”

He winked at her. “They're beautiful young women who wear uniforms of sable and carry golden bows,” he explained. “I'd rather go up against a pack of panthers than the Golden Girls. They worship their king, and perhaps he deserves it. Chao is the best-governed state in the civilized world, but you must never forget that the king himself is not civilized. Shih Hu was born a barbarian, and his soul remains barbarian. His violence can be sudden and extreme, and his palace is hard to get into and even harder to get out of.”

He rode on in silence for a few minutes.

“So far as I know, the king has only one weakness,” Master Li said thoughtfully. “He avidly collects people with unusual talents, and I rather think he might open his gates to a living legend. Somebody like the world's greatest master of the Wen-Wu lute.”

Grief of Dawn and I looked at each other. The Wen-Wu is the hardest instrument in the world to play properly, and we shrugged our shoulders.

“Venerable Sir, can you play the thing?” I inquired.

He looked at us in surprise. “What does playing it have to do with being the world's greatest master?” he said.