The Story Of The Stone (6 page)

The cell of the late librarian, Brother Squint-Eyes, was in chaos. The scant furniture had been torn to pieces. Robes had been ripped open at the linings. The pallet was shredded, and pools of congealing blood stained the floor.

Master Li bent over and dipped a finger in the blood and put it to his lips. “It's only ink,” he said. To be precise, it's ink called Buddha's Eyelashes, and that stuff sticking to the pallet is what's left of Yellow Emperor parchment. After finishing the tracing of the Ssu-ma forgery, Brother Squint-Eyes hid the remaining materials inside his pallet."

Master Li turned and trotted rapidly back to the library. Again his eyes moved over the debris, and he walked to a huge pile of papers beside the bent bars in the window where the thieves had entered before. He began tossing scrolls aside, and then he straightened up with an angry face and cold eyes.

“Well, Ox, if I drop over dead in the next few weeks, it won't be from boredom,” he said sourly.

“Buddha save us,” the prince whispered, while the abbot and the monks made signs to ward off evil spirits.

Poor Brother Shang's vigil had not been as lonely as he would have liked. The monk lay on his back among the pile of scrolls, staring at the ceiling. He was as dead as Brother Squint-Eyes, and his bulging eyes and gaping mouth were permanently fixed in an expression of terror and horror beyond belief.

I have but a confused memory of the next few hours. The abbot sent out groups of terrified monks to interview equally terrified peasants, while Master Li hastened to perform an autopsy. There might be some poison that dissipated inside of a few hours, but all Master Li discovered was that Brother Shang had been in excellent shape and had expired from a heart attack. The monks returned with the news that at least eight peasants had seen mysterious monks in robes of motley who laughed and danced beneath the moon, and who disappeared as though the earth had swallowed them.

The other piece of news was that one more section of Princes' Path appeared to be destroyed.

Master Li tossed his knives down beside the corpse of Brother Shang and said we had better get a few hours sleep. It seemed only minutes before he shook me awake again and handed me a cup of strong tea, and then we set out to meet Prince Liu Pao. He was standing forlornly on Princes' Path, and once more we gazed at the impossible. Nothing lived in a swath of approximately fifty by one hundred fifty feet. Death had cut cleanly. Flowers bloomed beside withered ones, and sap dripped from healthy trees not ten feet from trees whose sap had been sucked right out of them. Again I thought of a cemetery in a nightmare, but something in the pattern of it caused me to frown and sketch shapes in the air. Both Master Li and the prince watched me with widening eyes, and I blushed.

“Do that again,” Master Li commanded.

I repeated the patterns.

“Li Kao, am I losing my mind?” the prince asked. “I could swear that Number Ten Ox is sketching scholar's shorthand for antique Great Seal script, which hasn't been in common usage for a thousand years.”

“Ox is capable of the damnedest things,” Master Li muttered. “Right now he's capable of sketching the ancient characters for ”Love,“ ”Strength,“ and ”Heaven,“ and I know perfectly well he doesn't understand a single Great Seal ideograph. Well, boy, are you going to keep us in suspense?”

I turned bright red. “I had a dream,” I said humbly. “Just before you woke me up. Something in this scene reminded me of it, and it had strange patterns.”

I had dreamed that I was sitting on the grass near a village very like my own. Somebody had attached a bamboo pole and a black flag to the gears of the grindstone at the water wheel, as we did in my village because the gears kept slipping. Farmers could glance up from the fields and see if the flag was pumping up and down, and if it wasn't, a boy would be sent to get Big Hong, the blacksmith, to reset the gears. As the black flag rose to the apex, it flared out and hovered in the air for a moment before starting back down.

Children were playing in front of the waterwheel. One little girl was jumping up and down. Her long black hair lifted up into the air and hovered for a moment before settling down to her shoulders.

In front of the children were butterflies fluttering among some reeds. One was black, and it swooped up, paused, hovered, and then fluttered back down.

The black flag, black hair, and black butterfly formed a nearly straight line that pointed toward my feet. I looked down and saw a small round orange-colored piece of clay. My hand reached out and closed around it, and something told me to keep watching the pattern: up, pause, down . . . up, pause, down . . .

My fingers tingled. The piece of clay had a heartbeat, and it was the rhythm of the pattern, and an ache filled my heart and tears filled my eyes. Up, pause, down: kung, shang, chueh. I was not hearing the wonderful sound but feeling it in the pulse of a piece of clay, and then I was in my old classroom in the monastery and a bunch of boys were looking at me with eyes like owls and I was desperately trying to explain something very important.

“Don't you understand?” I said. “The life force of a round piece of orange-colored clay is like a flag and a butterfly and a little girl's hair. Up, pause, down; up, pause, down. The important thing to remember is the pause. Can't you understand that?”

The boys stared at me solemnly.

“It's the pause!” I yelled. “It isn't like the heartbeat of a person, and you'll never hear the wonderful sound it makes unless you understand the pause!”

The old abbot was shuffling toward me. Then he came closer and he wasn't the abbot at all. He was Master Li, and he grabbed my shoulders and shook me and screamed furiously, “Number Ten Ox, you couldn't teach a banana to turn black!”

Then I woke up.

“Sir, that's all I can tell you about the dream,” I said. “Something in this scene reminded me of it, and the pattern it took. That tall dead tree, then a space, then lower dead trees, then a space, then bushes . . .”

I shrugged and sketched in the air. “And you draw ancient scholar's ideographs for love, strength, and Heaven,” Master Li said thoughtfully. “Are you quite positive that the round piece of clay was colored orange?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He scratched his nose and chewed thoughtfully on the tip of his mangy beard. “That may bear looking into when we have the time,” he said. “The symbolism is obvious, but it leads to a swamp I'd rather stay away from.”

Master Li started looking for traces of mysterious monks in motley, and I started gathering more plant and soil samples, and just then the drums began. Sheepskin drums, hundreds of them, pounding softly but methodically from all over the Valley of Sorrows. The prince looked at Master Li with raised eyebrows, but Master Li jerked his head in my direction. “When it comes to the ways of peasants, ask the expert,” he said.

I flushed again. “Your Highness, they're going to blackmail you,” I said meekly.

“Eh?”

“Blackmail isn't quite right, but I don't know the proper word,” I said. “They're going to start a work song. It's older than time, and it's used by peasants when they want the lord of the valley to do something.”

“What lord of what valley?” the prince said angrily.

Master Li kindly stepped in to help me. “The peasants think your ancestor is behind this, and so far as they're concerned, you're lord of the valley whether you like it or not. The headmen are preparing the chant that details the peasants' duties to the lord, and thus implies the lord's duties to the peasants. Ox, how many verses are there?”

“Over four hundred,” I said. “When they get to the end, they'll start all over again, and they can keep it up for a year if need be.”

I didn't add that in their place I'd do the same thing myself. Confucius thought so highly of the blackmail song that he put part of it in the Book of Odes, and it's really very effective when the drums go boom, boom, boom.

"In the fifth moon we gather wild plums and cherries,

In the sixth moon we boil mallow and beans,

In the seventh moon we dry the dates,

In the eighth moon we take the rice,

To make with it the spring wine,

So our lord may be granted long life.

In the sixth moon we pick the melons,

In the seventh moon we cut the gourds,

In the eighth moon we take the seeding hemp,

We gather bitter herbs; we cut ailanto for firewood,

That our lord may eat."

The chanting is without emotion except for the last line of every third verse, and after a few months of it the subject begins to cringe when each third verse starts. It's hard for a lord to justify chopping off insolent heads; it's just a work song.

Boom, boom, boom:

"In the eighth moon we make ready the stackyards,

In the ninth moon we bring in the harvest;

Millet for wine, millet for cooking, the early and the late,

Paddy and hemp, beans and wheat.

My lord, the harvesting is over.

We begin work on your houses;

In the morning we gather thatch reeds,

In the evening we twist ropes,

We work quickly on the rook,

For soon we will sow the lord's many grains."

“How can they do this to me?” the prince said plaintively. They know very well that my family hasn't collected a copper coin or grain of rice for centuries."

Boom, boom, boom:

"In the days of the first we cut ice with tingling blows;

In the days of the second we bring it to the cold shed.

In the days of the third, very early,

We offer pigs and garlic, that our lord may eat.

In the tenth moon are shrewd frosts;

We clear the stackyards,

With twin pitchers we hold the village feast,

Killing for it a spring lamb.

Up we go to our lord's hall,

Raise the drinking cups of buffalo horn:

Hurrah for our lord! May he live forever and ever!"

“They'll keep that up for a year?” the prince said. “I think I know what they want, but I'd prefer to have it explained to me.”

“You and you alone have the right to dispose of your ancestor in the old way,” Master Li said gently. “By the old way they mean pre-Confucian.”

“Which is punishable by torment in the Eighth Hell!” the prince said angrily.

“Yes, according to our Neo-Confucian overlords, who also impose upon rivals the sacred duty of retiring from public life for three years upon the death of a father, and then they poison the father,” Master Li said sardonically.

Prince Liu Pao was made from tough stuff. He turned without another word and began marching up Dragon's Left Horn toward his estate. He turned off the path and took a shortcut to the grotto. The horror of the Medical Research Center seemed even worse with the muffled sounds of drums and chanting in the distance. The prince opened the door to the tomb and marched inside to the sarcophagus of his ancestor.

“Ox, can you get the lid all the way down?”

I spat on my hands. The lid was so heavy I couldn't stop it after it slid down to the mummy's feet, and it crashed to the floor. Prince Liu Pao stood looking down at the remains of his ancestor, and Master Li beckoned for me to open the other sarcophagus.

“While we're at it, I want to look for something,” he said.

The lid was easier to move, and the mummy of Tou Wan, the Laughing Prince's wife, was intact. Master Li reached inside and came up with some jewelry, which he examined closely.

“Good stuff, but not the best,” he said thoughtfully. “Tou Wan was said to have been a spendthrift of epic proportions, and I doubt that this would have met her standards. One wonders whether their highnesses might not have been buried by a light-fingered steward.”

He stood there scratching his forehead.

“Strange,” he muttered. “The Laughing Prince apparently worshipped a stone, and possibly his wife also did, yet the stone wasn't included in either coffin. The faithful steward again?”

A sound made us turn. The prince was struggling to lift his ancestor's mummy from the coffin. The tarred wrappings made it heavy and awkward. I stepped forward to help, but Master Li held me back. Prince Liu Pao was sweating heavily, but he kept going: through the tomb, through the grotto, and outside to the path. He turned off the path and carried the mummy to a flat jutting rock overlooking the Valley of Sorrows. Every eye must have been lifted there.

The drums stopped. The prince searched for a heavy rock, and I closed my eyes. I kept them closed while I listened to ancient bones splintering but I opened them too soon and saw the rock descend on the skull and smash it to pieces. A white cloud of crushed and powdered bones drifted down to the valley, followed by the scraps of linen from the wrappings, and then by the stone used for the sacrifice. I have seldom admired anyone as much as I admired Prince Liu Pao. He turned toward us and managed to keep his voice steady.

“According to Tsao Tsao, my next step on the path to damnation is either to violate my sister or fail to return for my mother's funeral, but I can't remember which comes first,” he said.

“The mother,” said Master Li, “takes precedence, but I wouldn't be so sure about damnation if I were you. Prince, this time the criminals have made a very bad mistake, and the mummy of your ancestor puts the seal on it. You and I have something interesting to talk about.”

From below came one last roll of sheepskin drums: “Hurrah for our lord! May he live forever and ever!”

Before we had seen the living quarters. Now the prince led the way to his studio, and the breath went out of me as I stepped through the door into forty captured sunsets. I was in the presence of genius.

Paintings and sketches were everywhere, and they were alive. I could swear that real sap was flowing through painted trees, and real dew was dripping from flowers. The most extraordinary thing was the glowing light that seemed to come from inside the paintings, and the prince smiled at the stunned expression on my face.

“It's just a trick, Ox,” he said modestly. “Its called p'o-mo and it means the technique of applying dark ink over light. The effect is scarcely noticeable when you first put it on, but when it dries, it gives the effect of glowing with inner light — ”like focused eyes,“ my teacher used to say.”

“Ah! You studied with Three Incomparables?” Master Li asked.

“Li Kao, you know everything,” the prince said admiringly “Yes, I was his student for several years, and he was without doubt the most disagreeable man I've ever met.” He graciously included me in the conversation. “His name is Ki K'ai-chih, but he's called Three Incomparables because of his boast that he's incomparable in painting, in genius, and in stupidity. Unquestionably he's the greatest master of p'o-mo in the empire.”

“He used to be, but you surpassed him long ago,” Master Li muttered. “Prince, this is incredible work, but have you considered the likelihood of disgrace and exile?”

“Oh, I have no intention of showing my paintings,” the prince said. “This is practice. I'm trying to learn, and I have a long way to go.”

Being back in his beloved studio had done wonders for him. It was as though the smell of paint had wiped away the recent experiences, and his eyes were shining happily.

“Ox, Master Li means that our overlords have decreed that all art must follow supposedly classical techniques, which are set down in a manual called ”Mustard Seed Garden,“' he explained. ”Rocks, for example, may only be painted using kou strokes for outline, p'o strokes for the tops and sides, ts'un strokes for texture, and ts'a strokes for expression. Any other technique can lead to a trial and exile."

Master Li laughed at the expression on my face.

“It gets worse,” he said. “Ts'un strokes, for example, are broken down into the exact lines suitable for individual rocks: curling cloud strokes, axe cut, split hemp, loose rope, ghost face, skull-like, woodpile, sesame seed, golden blue, jade powder, spear hole, pebbles, and boneless. An artist who uses ghost face for painting granite instead of the officially approved axe cut faces six years in the Mongolian desert.”

The prince waved around the room. “You are looking at approximately one and a half million years worth of exile,” he said proudly. He was becoming quite animated, and he eagerly tossed aside paintings from a pile on the floor and came up with a simple sketch of a tree. “Laws are liars,” he said. “Look here. Every single law of painting insists that the shih, the movement force, of a tree like this must be concentrated in the principal branch that thrusts so proudly toward Heaven. Except it isn't. I tried it the correct way eight times, and it sat there as lifelessly as a lohan. Finally I said to myself, ”Stop trying to think, you idiot! Paint!“ So I let my hand take over, and this lovely tree came to life. Do you see why?”

He covered the proud principal branch, and gradually I saw what he meant. The energy of the tree didn't run that way at all. It spread out and up from the trunk, reached a knot in a branch, doubled back down the trunk, and then lifted up the far side and throbbed with life as it reached for the sky from a tiny insignificant branch that was barely more than a twig.

“Laws lie, the eyes see only what they have been conditioned to see, and the mind is a refuse pile of other people's ideas,” the prince said. “Only the hand tells the truth. The hand!” he cried passionately. “Trust the hand, and it will never lie to you.”

Master Li looked at him approvingly. “Prince, that is precisely what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “I'm beginning to suspect that this case is one lie piled on top of another lie, but for the first time we have something to go on. You see, the criminals have told us where to look.”

The prince showed me where things were, and I busied myself making tea while they moved a table out to the garden. We sat outside and after sipping his tea Master Li said, “We know that thieves broke into the library to steal a manuscript, leading to the death of Brother Squint-Eyes, but why did they enter again last night and cause the death of Brother Shang? There seems to be only one reasonable explanation.” Master Li pulled out the fragment of the Ssu-ma. “This had been traced by Brother Squint-Eyes. When the criminals examined it closely, they saw the markings, and it was the copy they came back for. Thus the books ripped open and robes split at the seams and so forth. But why would they want a badly done copy that had no market value? The answer is that they weren't after the manuscript for its value to dealers, they were after it for its content, and possibly — just possibly — they may have come up empty-handed all the way around.”

Master Li placed the fragment on the table and tapped it with a fingernail.

“It was a very brief manuscript,” he said. The odds against this fragment containing what they were after aren't as astronomical as one might think. Perhaps no more than twenty or thirty-to-one, and I've bet on cricket fights with worse odds than that. Prince, did Ssu-ma Ch'ien ever visit your abominable ancestor?"

The prince looked startled. “I really don't know,” he said. After a moment's thought he added, “I'd be mildly surprised if he didn't. Before his fall from grace, he served as the emperor's confidant, and who better to send when a younger brother shows signs of losing his mind?”

“And is it possible that the younger brother caused Ssu-ma's fall and sentence of castration?” Master Li wondered. “The abbot tells me that among the many uses for the monastery was that of a prison back in the jovial days of the Laughing Prince, and might that explain why the manuscript was found there?”

“You mean the forgery?” the prince said, scratching his head.

“An acquaintance of mine, an exceptionally saintly soul at the Eye of Tranquility, has offered an interesting hypothesis,” Master Li explained. The forgery might have been intended to frame Ssu-ma with the charge of filial impiety. I was almost convinced of it, but now, thanks to you, I'm even more convinced of something totally different."

Master Li pointed back inside the studio at the prince's glorious paintings. “The hand. Trust only the hand!” he cried. “That very idea has been gnawing at the back of my mind for days. When I looked at the fragment and saw references to Ssu-ma's father, I said, ”Fraud!“ but when I looked only at the calligraphy, I said, ”Ssu-ma!“ You did the same thing. The hand is unmistakable, and I am now going to conclude that this isn't the world's greatest forgery for the simple reason that it isn't a forgery at all. Ssu-ma Ch'ien set down his father's name in order to cry out to scholars, ”Look! Look closely! Something is wrong!“ Meaning that he had concealed his real message in some kind of code, and you and I are going to entertain ourselves by seeing who can be the first to break it.”

Not Number Ten Ox, who couldn't decipher a single character of ancient scholarly shorthand. I got up and inwardly sneered at the fragments of dialogue that drifted to my ears. They were like children playing games, and we had serious matters to think about.

“Never seen so many errors of fact in a few brief paragraphs.”

“Deliberate, perhaps?”

“Errors as starting points?” “Interesting how many errors deal with numbers.” “Indeed yes. Here he writes, 'one hundred and forty-six scales of a dragon.' ”

Even I knew that a dragon has 36 evil scales and 117 good ones, which used to add up to 153 when I was in school. I sniffed contemptuously, and wandered around looking at flowers.

“Better break it down. One, four, and six.”

“Each error probably has a direct relationship to each mention of T'an, his father's name.”

“He was really straining here, wasn't he? Comparing the marks on a stone to the 'two hundred fifty-three points of acupuncture.' ”

Didn't they realize we had two murdered monks on our hands, and that a strange sound was driving people out of their minds while Princes' Path was being destroyed? I decapitated a few dandelions.

“One . . . two . . . three. Got it!” Master Li said happily. “Ox, stop pouting and come over here.”

Pouting? Me? I walked back with dignity and peered down over Master Li's shoulder. His finger danced across the fragment.

“Coded sections begin with mentions of Ssu-ma's father's name and run to the next error in fact. The numbers give the spacing between important words, and here is what we have: 'Down stairs . . . Cold room . . . Tunnel to construction site . . . Stone in sacristy . . .' ” He leaned back happily. I stared.

“That's all?” I said incredulously.

“It's all we need, and all thieves would need, for that matter,” Master Li said complacently. “Unless anyone knows of another place where a stone was kept in a sacristy, Ssu-ma Ch'ien was referring to this estate. He either went or was advising someone to go down the stairs to the cold room, and somewhere there would be a tunnel that led to a construction site and the sacristy of the stone. A cold room is as far beneath the earth as one can put it, and what could be the purpose of a construction site deep under the earth?”

Master Li reached into his tunic and took out a piece of cloth. I recognized it with something of a shock as being a piece of the wrapping around the mummy of the Laughing Prince. .

“Prince, this has faded, but one can still see that the color was imperial yellow, as it should be for the brother of an emperor,” Master Li said. “However, I seem to recall that Tou Wan preceded him in death by a few months. Wouldn't your ancestor still have been in mourning for his wife?”

The prince stared, and turned purple as the implications struck him. They took a good deal longer to strike me.

“Of course. It should be white. You mean I just crushed the skeleton of a total stranger?”

“Tsao Tsao built seventy-two decoy tombs,” Master Li said mildly.

“I'm damned if I'll go through that experience seventy-two times!”
the prince yelled.

“I doubt that will be necessary,” said Master Li. He looked up at me. “Wake up, Ox. The Laughing Prince amassed an incredible fortune, which has never been found, and people have been buying fake treasure maps and digging holes in the Valley of Sorrows ever since. Now we have the words of Ssu-ma Ch'ien. Words that thieves would go to any lengths to get their hands on, because what could the Laughing Prince have been secretly constructing deep in the bowels of the earth? Dear boy, we're probably sitting on top of a tomb that contains enough loot to buy half the empire.”