Barry Hughart - Eight Skilled Gentlemen

The following morning there were four of us at the Celestial Master’s door, along with the morning star and the first light of the sun. Five, if one counts the gift.

Yen Shih had listened intently to all Master Li said, and when I told him of the pets wandering around the saint’s house he wondered if one more pet would be an appropriate gift, and after seeing it Master Li was sure it would be welcome indeed. It was a small bright-eyed monkey with greenish silky fur, and I had never seen such a wonderfully intelligent creature. Once taught it could bring designated objects on command, and it had been trained to pluck out three recognizable tunes on the pi-pa (although it was likely to switch abruptly from one to another), and it was a marvelous mimic of human gestures. Yen Shih led it in by the hand, dressed in a small cap and tunic, and when he touched his own forehead and said “Where are your manners?” the creature bowed quite beautifully to the saint, who was enchanted.

“Yen Shih, eh? I saw you once, incognito of course, because you were doing Hayseed Hong. I haven’t laughed so hard since Abbot Nu confused one of the newfangled ceremonial vessels with a Sogdian chamber pot and anointed his acolytes with the contents of the latter,” the Celestial Master said happily. “And this is your lovely daughter! My dear, Tao-shihs and shamankas have a great deal in common, to the despair of theologians, and if I’m feeling a bit stronger when you return we must sit down for a long talk.”

He blessed us and prayed for safety and success, and the old female servant had already learned the list of command gestures and got the little monkey to wave goodbye as we left. I can’t describe our leave-taking in more detail because my mind was concentrated on one overpowering ingredient, and that was the puppeteer’s daughter.

Her name was Yu Lan. Shamankas learn their craft young, and she had learned from her mother, and I felt very callow and ignorant when I realized that the puppeteer’s daughter—no older than I—was already a fully accredited priestess of the ancient Wu cults, and practitioner of shamanistic mysteries and magic I didn’t dare dream about. She lived in a world far above me even when we shared the same physical area and conditions, but there was nothing unfriendly about her. When capitalized as a personal name Yu Lan means “Magnolia,” but uncapitalized and in a different context yu lan can mean “secretly smiling,” and that is how I came to think of her: silent, graceful, distant as a drifting cloud, but never haughty, never reproving, secretly smiling.

She worked with everyone else to help her father’s puppet shows, but her own personal work could not be shared. I remember when we reached hills where strange wild people still lived in dark ravines. That night Yu Lan suddenly stood up in the light of our cooking fire and walked to the edge of the shadows where a boy had appeared as if by magic. He had brown skin and high sharp cheekbones and an expressionless face, and he silently extended a stripped branch with notches cut in it. Yu Lan studied the notches and then told the boy to wait, and a few minutes later she was dressed in a robe made from bearskin and carrying a case of various sacred things, and she disappeared with the boy into the night.

Her father had said nothing. Only when she was gone did Yen Shih remark, “Her mother would sometimes vanish for days on end, but she always found me when she was ready to.” Then he changed the subject.

She hadn’t gone far, however. Later when we were preparing to go to sleep we heard wailing and chanting from above us on a hilltop, and then a high clear voice exclaimed, “Hik!”

Master Li yawned and muttered, “The next sound you’ll hear is ‘Phat.’ “

“Sir?” I said.

“Phat!” rang sharply from the hilltop.

“It’s Tibetan. Didn’t you notice the boy’s Tibetan features? Somebody’s died and they’ve asked Yu Lan to guide the soul safely into the hereafter,” he explained. “She has to start by freeing it from the body, which is done by opening a hole in the top of the head to let it out. Shamans practice on themselves with a piece of straw.”

“Sir?”

“Watch.”

He plucked a piece of straw from his pallet and laid it carefully on top of his head, down flat. “Hik!” he exclaimed, and I stared with bulging eyes as the straw began to tilt and move, as though one end was sliding down into a hole. “Phat!” he cried, and the straw was standing up straight. He made a show of plucking the thing out of the hole in his head, and then tossed it away.

“Neat trick, isn’t it?” he said. “Yu Lan now has to guide the soul through wild country populated by demons and beasts, strengthening it by prayers and incantations, and she’ll be at it all night. Go to sleep.”

He rolled over and soon began to snore, but I stayed up for hours acting like a fool with a piece of straw. I never did learn how it’s done.

I’m getting ahead of myself, however. I really wanted to write about our very first evening on the road, even though nothing at all happened. We camped on a hill as the sun was setting. Yen Shih’s huge puppeteering wagon was bathed in rosy light, and he and I prepared to fix the canvas awning that served as a dew catcher above our pallets. We were swinging mallets, knocking metal sockets into the ground to hold the bamboo poles that supported the awning, while Master Li chanted the count for the mallets and Yu Lan’s clear pure voice lifted to the crimson clouds, improvising on the scene in the style of Liu Chu:

“Five perching crows four low clouds three wild geese two rows of willows one flame of setting sun.”

“Pole!” cried Master Li, and the hand of the puppeteer’s daughter happened to brush mine as she helped the sage set the pole in the socket.

“Venerable Sir,” I said that night as we lay in our pallets, “is it true that shamankas can’t stand presumptuous males?”

“Bllppsshh,” he muttered, or something like that.

I searched for omens in the stars. “Sir, is it also true that an angry shamanka is as dangerous as a tigress with cubs?”

He rolled over. “You may be right, my boy,” he said drowsily. “Knew a great lusty fellow once. Half rearing stallion, half raging bull. They called him Tong the Tumescent. One day Tong laid his paws on a pretty little shamanka, and she gave him the Eye and spoke words in an unknown tongue.”

That seemed to be that. Snores arose from Master Li’s pallet, and then I heard a sputtering sound and the old man said between yawns, “Now they call him Yang-wei.”

The snores resumed, and it took me a moment to connect Tong the Tumescent to Yang-wei, which means “Droopy Penis.”

“Oh,” I said.

Since Li the Cat was taking the slow sea route we had time to allow Yen Shih to replenish his coffers along the way with puppet shows. I think I mentioned that everyone helped out. Yu Lan played a variety of instruments and sang very beautifully, and Master Li put on magic or fortune-telling or medicine shows, depending on his mood, and I donned a black hood and an evil smile and wrestled the local champions, who had to pay for the privilege and could claim a substantial prize if they won. I’d been tossing people out of rings since I was ten, so I wasn’t worried about losing, and I never hurt anyone. I have too much to tell about important things to spend much time describing those days, even though I’d like to, so I shall settle for three brief sketches. For the first, it was a warm afternoon in the market square of a small town, and the puppeteer and his daughter were inside the tent preparing for the show, and I had finished my wrestling act and was pouring dippers of water over my head, and it was Master’s Li’s turn. He wore a flat hat that looked like a board, with peculiar things on the ends of tassels dangling down, and his robe was covered with symbols representing the 101 diseases and the gods thereof, and he was standing on a platform examining a local dignitary who had a potbelly, a purple nose, and crimson cheeks.