Barry Hughart - Eight Skilled Gentlemen

“Eh?” said Master Li.

“Burglars you got! Pickpockets you got! Cutthroats and grain thieves and robbers come calling day and night! Drunks and mushroom-heads and whores and pirates and jailbirds and embezzlers—all right, all right, all right—but no big monkeys!” screamed Grandmother Ming.

Master Li was standing very still.

“Would this particular big monkey have a rather gaudy face?” he asked.

“What kind of monkey would come calling on you?” the old lady howled. “No big monkeys with red noses and blue cheeks and yellow chins!”

I dove inside the shack, but the damage was already done. The place had been ransacked, and the mysterious old cage was gone.

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.”