The Story of the Stone

25

Moon Boy and I stared. I suppose that the pupils of our eyes were swimming around the whites like drunken dolphins when a red wig lifted and a feather duster mop of black hair appeared. The cowl fell back and Prince Liu Pao winked at us. In his hands was a piece of stone, round and concave like a bowl. “Yang,” he said in a deep masculine voice. He moved his lips to the other side of the stone. “Yin,” he said in the sweet feminine voice of the girl. “Needless to say, the sound from the center is quite extraordinary,” he said cheerfully in his own voice. “I didn't dare use it underground because of the vibration, which shows how ill-equipped I was to take on the great Master Li. You didn't hesitate to bring the whole works down, and you very nearly squashed me like a bug.”

The prince bowed deeply. Master Li grunted and emptied the contents of his purse upon the grass. The lining was waterproof, and he filled it with wine and sealed it. He still had plenty of spring in his right arm, and the purse sailed across the gorge to the prince. They toasted each other politely, and drank thirstily.

“As a matter of minor curiosity, how old were you when you first discovered the entrance in the gorge?” Master Li asked.

“Twelve,” the prince replied. “I was thirteen when I learned how to open the doors and enter the burial chamber, and your reconstruction of the tragic affair with the gardeners was so accurate it chilled my blood.” He heaved a melancholy sigh. “I hated to kill them. They were my friends, but as you yourself have pointed out, I was faced with the possibility of having every greedy bureaucrat and bandit in the empire at my doorstep. How could I trust those fellows to keep such a secret?”

“How indeed?” said Master Li.

I can't speak for Moon Boy, but I was convinced I was hallucinating, in fact, I was wondering where and when I had eaten some weird mushrooms.

“The manuscript of Ssu-ma Ch'ien posed a similar problem,” the prince said. “I thought the secret would last as long as I would, but Brother Squint-Eyes came to me with a sample page. The idiot thought it was genuine. I knew it was forged, but two days later it dawned on me that the idiot was right. It had to be in code, and how could I be sure Brother Squint-Eyes wasn't playing stupid? For all I knew, he could even have deciphered it, but not yet put two and two together. I had to send my abominable ancestor to deal with him.”

The prince flushed angrily. “I was being forced to take actions that made me ill,” he said. “You revealed there might be a copy, and I had to try to get it, and that other idiotic monk had to stick his head into the library and commit suicide.”

The two of them sipped wine and moodily watched butterflies dance through sunlight that was beginning to filter through a golden haze. The breeze carried a faint smell of rain, and black clouds were gathering in the distance. Far below us the Valley of Shadows was wrapped in deep purple shadows.

“In the tomb I always used the softest possible sound from the stone to control my ancestor,” the prince said. “When I sent him and his merry companions to the monastery he wanted to linger and strangle a few more people. I had to make a loud sound to bring him back, and it was exactly like the emperor and the tangerines. The incredible ch'i of the stone overpowered weaker ones in its path, and when I pulled my ancestor back, I also pulled the life force from parts of Princes’ Path. I was absolutely appalled! in fact, I felt like a character in a fairy tale who waves a magic wand to cure his wife's one blemish, and does so, except she's now a flawless yak. What had been so simple was becoming terrifyingly complex, and the immediate result was that the abbot was so frightened he rushed off to Peking to seek the legendary Li Kao. Even then I was idiotic enough to think you would weary of reaching dead ends and give up.”

Master Li spat disgustedly. “The legendary Li Kao had better buy a bucket of worms and start practicing his goo-goo-goos,” he said sourly. “It was the sheer simplicity of it that baffled me. If I hadn't been enchanted by complexity, I might have realized what was going on the moment I saw your studio.”

“Oh, but you were magnificent!” the prince protested. “I simply couldn't believe it when you worked through one blind alley after another, knocking walls down if necessary, and you never really went off course. You were moving like doom itself straight toward the truth, and finally I had no choice but to try to kill you.”

He threw his head back and laughed with all the old warmth and charm.

“I should have known that a man who would dare a mind trip to Hell would be harder to kill than the Stone Monkey.” He inclined his head in my direction. “You too, Ox. You were a dead man the moment I led you to my unspeakable ancestor, and instead you will most certainly earn a place in the annals of P'u Sung-ling, the Recorder of Things Strange.”

“Speaking of the Laughing Prince, how did he acquire his happy companions?” Master Li asked.

“My fault entirely.” The prince grimaced and fined himself a slap on the cheek. “I may have been slightly precocious when I found my ancestor, but I was still a boy. One day I forgot to lock him back inside the burial chamber, and to make matters worse, I went off on a long trip. When I returned I discovered he had taken the opportunity to creep through the moonlight strangling wayfarers, and now he had companions to share his merriment. Ox, I'm deeply indebted to you for finishing him off. I was going to have to do so, but I wasn't at all sure of how to go about it.”

I decided that Prince Liu Pao had been the most eerily precocious boy in history. Thirteen years old, killing two gardener friends when they opened a coffin for him and found a priceless suit of jade, carefully removing jade plates to gaze at a mummy, and gazing instead at the half-decomposed face of a monster that still breathed, learning to control the creature with sounds from a stone—thirteen going on ninety, with the heart of a hangman.

The hangman's eyes softened as they slowly moved to Grief of Dawn. He spread his hands helplessly. “I would like you to know that I really did love her,” the prince said quietly. “I was pinned into a corner, and I had to make a difficult decision.”

“It was a decision you made long ago when you first decided to sell your soul for gifts from a stone,” Master Li said matter-of-factly. “Grief of Dawn made exactly the opposite decision—incidentally, Moon Boy, could you bring the soul-sound from this one piece?”

He picked up the piece of stone he had taken from the Laughing Prince and tossed it to Moon Boy, who shook his head and said, “No, not from a flat piece. I'd need two of them.” From the tone of Moon Boy's voice, I assumed he had decided this was all a bad dream.

Master Li nodded. He got to his feet and walked over to the body of Grief of Dawn and pulled out his knife. Her life had drained away down in the tomb, and there was only a trickle of blood when he removed the ugly wooden shaft from her chest. He probed the wound and washed something in wine and dried it on his tunic. When he tossed it to Moon Boy, I saw that it was a small sharp sliver of stone.

“I was wrong about Grief of Dawn,” Master Li said. “I thought she had been Tou Wan's maid in a previous incarnation. The truth is that she never left that incarnation. Tou Wan stabbed her with the hairpin. The tip broke off inside her heart and kept her alive, and she fled and was hit on the head by soldiers who left her for dead. Again the stone brought her back to life, and the maid wandered into the world without a memory. A cruel and dangerous world for a pretty girl, and she was bleeding and unconscious when old Tai-tai took her in and gave her a home and a new name.”

Master Li squeezed Moon Boy's shoulder, and walked back and squeezed mine and sat down beside his wine flask.

“Do not mourn Grief of Dawn,” he said quietly. “Remember how she sang in her delirium when she thought she would ease the pain of an old lady she loved? Inside her heart she carried a gift from Heaven that was not rightfully hers. She could have become the most honored and celebrated woman in history, but she would not be party to stealing. I have no idea what her strange wandering life was like, nor how and why she moved from one existence to another without awakening her memory, but I do know that for seven and a half centuries she refused to steal from Heaven, and she is being greeted with the highest honors in Hell where her credit account could buy half the kingdom, and surely she will be allowed to ascend to K'un-lun and sit at the feet of the August Personage of Jade. Which is a good deal more than Prince Liu Pao will be able to do.”

His eyes were cold and contemptuous as they moved across the gorge to the prince.

“He's already killed five people in order to dip his brush into the well of the stone and steal the touch of Heaven, and then paint pretty pictures and pass them off as his own.” Master Li rinsed his mouth with wine and spat it out. “Fraud and forgery,” he growled. “Paint slapped over dry rot and gilded with lies.”

The prince turned white.

“Is that what you think, old man?” he whispered. “Is that what you really think?” Now he was turning red. “My paintings are private! I do not show them! What sort of fraud is that?”

“Masturbation,” Master Li said. “In your circumstances, that still qualifies as rape.”

“My paintings are for the purpose of learning the paths of universal energy!” the prince shouted furiously. “My loathsome ancestor sought truth in rivers of blood; I seek it in harmless paint, and even the Laughing Prince could claim that his was the proper goal of philosophy! You, on the other hand, waste your time with unimportant puzzles, which is the occupation of a child!”

Master Li raised his flask and drank deeply, and wiped his lips with his beard.

“Oh, I wouldn't call the puzzle of the stone unimportant,” he said mildly. “I will, however, plead guilty to holding a certain childlike view of the universe.”

The prince's color was returning to normal. He raised the purse and drank, and leaned back comfortably.

“Childlike? No, but very old-fashioned,” he said with a chuckle. “In fact, everything you do is old-fashioned. Who in this day and age would charge all over China, even to the pits of Hell, trusting to the immediacy of experience rather than the trained objectivity of an army of investigators? You appear to take seriously the anthropomorphic folk concepts of gods and goddesses, and your concern for the stone appears to spring from a literal acceptance of fairy tales from the spurious Annals of Heaven and Earth. Li Kao, you are a very great man, but—and I say this with the greatest respect—an antique memorial to long dead concepts and practices and values.”

The prince was laughing as he lifted his stone. I realized that it was attached to a cord around his neck, and the silver cup for his painting brush that had encased and concealed it was slipped down. Master Li leaned over and whispered to me, and I surreptitiously whispered to Moon Boy.

“He says you're to prepare to bring the soul-sound from the stone. He'll yell when he wants it.”

Moon Boy's eyes were glazed and he tried to focus them. His fingers trembled as he lifted the two pieces in his cupped hands.

“Still, there are certain pleasures denied to an antique with a slight flaw in his character,” the prince said. “Such as being able to hear the simple sound of total innocence. To be fair, half the villagers and monks couldn't hear the stone either. I would think, however, that at this distance, and with the acoustic effect of the cliffs behind us—”

“Now!” Master Li yelled.

Moon Boy's lips moved to his cupped hands. His throat vibrated rapidly, and my heart leaped as indescribable beauty and yearning and hope and sadness bounced back and forth between the cliffs.

Kung… shang… chueeeeeeeeeeh…

Master Li reeled, but his reaction was as nothing compared to the stone of Prince Liu Pao. It tore loose from the prince's hands and literally flew toward Moon Boy, and the cord jerked tight around the prince's neck and pulled him forward.

I am so stupid that it wasn't until then that I realized what the prince had been planning to do to us. The gorge was only a few feet away, two hundred feet straight down to jagged rocks. Prince Liu Pao teetered at the edge, waving his arms for balance, and then he fell. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them I was looking at a miracle.

The prince was standing upon thin air. He walked across nothingness, intent only upon hauling the stone back and regaining control of it. Then he looked at us and smiled.

“Really, Li Kao, didn't you think I would expect that?” he said mockingly. “And didn't you think I would learn something from the stone and my ancestor's charts and formulas? I hate to brag, but I rather suspect I know more about the energy forces of the universe than any other man alive.”

He pointed to his sandals, resting upon a void.

“That, for example, is a path of energy strong enough to support ten elephants, if the elephants could learn to see and adjust to it. I have, and I sincerely hope you are similarly capable.”

“One of us is,” Master Li said calmly.

“You mean Number Ten Ox?” the prince said. “I agree that no man alive could climb down one side of the gorge and back up the other without the proper gear, and when Ox carried you from one peak to the other, he was crossing as I am now, upon a path of energy.”

Master Li hopped up on my back, and the prince's smile grew wider.

“That's why in Hell you imagined him to show in the mirror that he was a firstborn, since walking on air can only result from absolute awareness or absolute innocence, but has it occurred to you that Ox was blinded by mist? He isn't now, and innocence cannot bear very much awareness.”

His lips touched the rim of the stone in his hands, and the sound that came from the well was so pure and powerful that I heard not suggestive notes but the actual words from the soul of a stone.

“Come… to… meeeeeeeeee!… Come… to… meeeeeeeeee!”

Moon Boy and I were dragged to the edge. I saw no path of energy. All I saw were rocks rising like shark's teeth two hundred feet below, and terror shook me like a rag doll. I had no choice. I must obey the call or die, and my foot reached out into nothingness.

Moon Boy teetered on the edge. His throat was vibrating faster than a throat could, and sweat was pouring down his face, and something extraordinary was happening. He was projecting the sound of the stone, but at the same time he was blending another sound into it. It was wind and sunlight and rain and snow and a comfortable snug cottage—it was the song that Grief of Dawn had sung for old Tai-tai, but now she was singing to me. Grief of Dawn was calling me, and I couldn't imagine how I had missed the path before. There it was, not six feet from the empty space in front of my sandal, and I turned and walked to it. I stepped confidently out into the air, opening my arms to embrace Grief of Dawn, and I was only vaguely aware of the prince's white terrified face, and the click of the rattan coil inside Master Li's sleeve and the flash of his knife as it slashed out.

The sound of Grief of Dawn had turned. Now she was behind me, calling me back, and I turned around like a sleepwalker and stepped back over a path of swirling energy that was as smooth as a carpet. Master Li rode on my back, chuckling, and he laughed out loud when my sandals came down on rock and grass. Moon Boy collapsed, gasping and rubbing his throat, and Master Li hopped off.

The sounds had gone. I came back to reality and whirled around and stared at Prince Liu Pao, who was still standing upon thin air in the center of the gorge. He no longer wore the stone, and the warmth and charm was gone, and all I saw was a sly and selfish little man who looked like a terrified monkey.

“Really, Prince, there's no need to be frightened. Did you think I was going to slit your silly throat?” Master Li detached the stone from the cord he had cut from the prince's neck. Why do people take me for a crude assassin?” he asked plaintively. “I'm not crude at all.”

The torch that Moon Boy had carried from the tomb lay on the grass. It still burned. Master Li pointed to it, and then across the gorge.

“Ox, can you put this thing through that window?”

I had a lot of pent-up emotion, and I released some of it. The torch tumbled over and over as it sailed across the gorge and plunged down through the window of the prince's studio. I thought it had gone out, but it hadn't. Oil and turpentine catch easily, and flames sprang up.

“Nothing to worry about, Prince,” Master Li said reassuringly. “To cherish perfection is to commit creative suicide, and every true artist knows that a masterpiece is an accident that should be burned. Besides, your pretty pictures aren't to revel in but learn from, and you've already learned.”

He reclaimed his flask and helped himself to another pint. “Not that I entirely approve of the goal,” he said. “One of the previous possessors of the stone was Chuang Tzu. He had a disciple who spent seven years studying universal energy and then demonstrated his wisdom by walking across the surface of a river and back again, and Chuang Tzu broke into tears. ‘Oh, my boy!’ he sobbed. ‘My poor, poor, boy! You spent seven years of your life learning to do that, and all the while old Meng has been running a ferry not two miles from here, and he only charges two copper coins.’ ”

Master Li replaced his flask.

“Besides, levitation can be positively unhealthy when one is accustomed to the support of a stone,” he added.

The studio was blazing. Prince Liu Pao was weeping, and he turned and ran toward his paintings with outstretched arms. Suddenly he yelped in fear and stopped. I saw that his feet were slowly spreading apart as though the path was splitting into two paths, and he turned uncertainly this way and that. His white strained face turned back to me.

“Ox! Which way? Which is the solid path?”

“Prince, I can't see it anymore!” I shouted. “All I see is empty air!”

His legs were spreading wider. At any moment he would fall, and he squealed and jumped to the left. His feet came down on a solid line of energy and he began to run. He made two steps but not the third, and sometimes in dreams I still see a screaming feather duster turn over and over as Prince Liu Pao falls into the gorge, and I hear mocking echoes from the walls of the cliffs, and then I hear the sickening sound of a body splattering upon rocks far below.

Master Li walked to the edge and peered down. “Pity,” he said. “He had real talent. Just the man for decorating dinner invitations.”