“The gods who guard the Heavenly Gates!” the champion roared. “The thirty-six thunder gods who guard Heaven itself, and the twenty-eight principal stars of the zodiac, and the gods for subjugating evil spirits, and the god king of Flying Heaven, and the god of the great long life of Buddha, and the gods of Tien Kan and To Tze, and the great sages of the Trigrams, and the gate gods, and the kitchen gods, and the godly generals in charge of the month and the week and the day and the hour!”
“Worms!” cried the venders. “Take pity upon poor helpless worms, most unfairly condemned to cruel death upon hooks!”
“The gods of the nine rivers!” the saint shrieked. “The gods of the five mountains and the four corners! I pray to the gods in charge of wells and springs and ditches and creeks and hills and woods and lakes and rivers and the twelve river sources! I pray to the local patron gods! Chuang huangs and their inferiors! The gods of minor local officials! The gods of trees and lumber! The spiritual officers and soldiers under the command of priests! The spirits in charge of protecting the taboos, commands, scriptures, and right way of religion!”
“Gentlemen, think of your poor old white-haired grandmothers who may have been reborn as worms!” an enterprising vender shouted.
“Boy!” Master Li yelled, and to my astonishment he bought a bucket of worms.
“I pray to the gods of the four seasons and eight festivals!” screamed His Holiness, “I pray to—”
Master Li reached up and pried the gaping jaws even wider apart and dumped the contents of his bucket inside. Silence descended upon the Eye of Tranquility. The toad was holding the forgery no more than an inch from his eyeballs.
“Forgery of a forgery,” he muttered. “Someone's made a tracing of this, and recently. The oaf left marks where he pressed down too hard.”
He handed the manuscript back to Master Li. “Tracing is an amateur job,” he said contemptuously. “A freak forgery that can make scholars doubt their sanity is worth a fortune, but a tracing of it couldn't fool an illiterate baby, if the idiot tried to sell it to the wrong man, he'd soon be contemplating the pretty fish swimming around his solid stone sandals.”
I had a sudden queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, but if Master Li was thinking of a dead dice cheater at the bottom of the canal, he gave no sign of it.
“How very interesting,” he said mildly. “Hsiang, the manuscript has apparently been stolen. Any word on the grapevine?”
“Are you serious? Li Kao, if a collector allowed word of something of this quality to get out, he'd have a visit from the emperor's agents inside of a day. There can't be another fraud as good as this in the whole world,” the toad said. “And don't bother looking for the forger. The August Personage of Jade has lifted him to Heaven, and he's now handling the divine correspondence.”
Master Li scratched his forehead and tugged at his beard.
“One last question. I can think of any number of men who would kill to get their hands on the manuscript, but the murder I've been handed appears to have been rather gaudy. Can you think of a man who would use methods suitable for the worst excesses of Chinese opera?”
“One,” the toad said promptly.
“Who?”
“You,” said the toad. He turned to me. “Boy, do you realize that entire cemeteries are dedicated to this antique assassin? How many corpses did he leave behind during that weird fling you had with the birds?”[2]
“Well, maybe twenty or thirty,” I said. “But that was only because—”
“Begone!” the toad yelled. “Begone, and let an old man die with dignity.”
“Old?” said Master Li. “If my oldest grandson hadn't eaten an untreated blowfish, he'd be about your age.”
“The problem with you is that you refuse to expire from old age,” the toad snarled. Then he quoted Confucius. ” ‘A fellow who grows as old as you without dying is simply becoming a nuisance.’ ” He turned back to me. “I, on the other hand, shall succumb with serenity, secure in the sanctity of my soul. Boy, just look at the soul shining through my eyes! It's like a goddamned flower!”
It is dangerous to play the quoting game with Master Li. ” ‘When I return from trampling flowers, the hooves of my horse are fragrant,’ ” he said softly.
The toad turned pale. “Now, look here, Li Kao, there's no need to find offense where none was intended. All I seek is the True Path that will lead me to the Blessed Realm of Purified Semblance.” The thought of his newfound purity emboldened him. “Begone!” he cried. “Begone, you animated accumulation of antiquated bones, and take the sulphurous scent of sin with you.”
He turned and glared back at me.
“Also,” he added, “take this walking derrick.”
Master Li stood up and bowed, and I followed his example, and we turned and walked away over the grass, and a gentle bubbling chorus of goo-goo-goos faded behind us.
3
The journey to the Valley of Sorrows was not a long one, and three days later I climbed to a ridge overlooking the valley. It was quite early in the morning. I mopped the dew from a large flat rock, and we sat down and waited for the mist to clear. As it did I realized that the Valley of Sorrows was like a bowl with a chip in it, the chip being the gap to the south that opened to other valleys in the distance. Winding around and down the sides of the bowl was a lovely path of trees and flowers—too lovely, from my point of view. No peasant in his right mind would waste that much arable land on flowers when something useful could be planted. Conspicuous waste is the boast of wealth and power, and it makes me nervous.
“The peasants are paid not to plant it,” Master Li said, reading my mind. “It's called Princes’ Path, and the reason for it lies in a fairly long story.” He swept his hand across the valley. “Rich or poor?” he asked.
I mentally dug my toes into the earth. “Neither,” I said. The soil seems to be good, but there isn't much of it. Too much rock and shale on the hillsides, and the marsh at the west side is salty. The valley probably supports a small population quite well, but there can't be much left over.”
“Excellent,” Master Li said. “The first feudal lord of the valley discovered how hard it was to make money from the place and set an admirable precedent by drinking himself to death. His successors followed his esteemed example, and every few years the peasants could look forward to the banquet that accompanied a noble funeral. What do you think their reaction was when a certain Prince Chou turned out to have a cast-iron liver, and lasted thirty years?”
Peasants are the same everywhere, and I said confidently, “They have never forgiven him to this day. They tell their children nasty stories about Callous Chou the Pinchfist Prince, and strangers can tell where he was buried by watching the direction when farmers pee in the fields.”
“Right you are, although Callous Chou stories are rare today,” Master Li said. “Somebody came along to replace him, and he cornered the story market. Ox, one of your most endearing qualities is the ability to keep your mouth shut when you are dying to ask questions, and it's time to answer one of them. Who was the Laughing Prince? Why are the peasants and the monks and even the abbot terrified at the thought that he may have come back from the dead?”
I settled back to listen, and this is a brief summary of what I learned about a gentleman whose merry spirit still haunts me to this day.
Emperor Wu-ti had a younger brother, Prince Liu Sheng, who was something of a problem. He was a brilliant student of Taoist science, but undisciplined, and it was said that his affability was matched only by his laziness. At court his merry jests kept the nobility in stitches, but it was time for him to do something useful. When Prince Chou finally succumbed the emperor sent his feckless sibling to rule as Lord of Dragon Head Valley. (It was not then called the Valley of Sorrows.) The peasants looked forward to such a fun-loving fellow, and in due course the headmen were summoned to the prince's estate.