Barry Hughart - Eight Skilled Gentlemen

“Playmates should not be presumptuous,” she snarled. “I granted you a few minutes in bed, not a claim to be warden of Yen-men!”

“Lady, great lady, Ox is strong but not this strong,” Master Li said soothingly. “A monster who happens to be a friend of ours lost his temper, not Ox, and we thought it might be a good idea to blame it on a tiger. Pretty paw prints, aren’t they?”

The point left my throat, but not very far. The widow’s eyes were warily fixed on Master Li.

“It seemed to me, my lady, that a tiger would be useful in more ways than one,” Master Li continued. “While treating you I have seen your amulet. You were born in the Year of the Tiger, and the gods are not necessarily subtle when they choose to make their will clear. Very possibly they wish you to wed another and breed heroes.”

His voice was half shamanistic half sage adviser, and for some reason the background of hysterical laughter from outside made the words seem weightier, not lighter.

“Now that you’re all out of husbands,” he said, “you’ll be required to choose either pious Confucian widowhood or priestly dispensation and a second marriage like the first: a business alliance to advance your father’s fortunes. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, if the bride is in a position to pick and choose among prospective grooms. Essential to that happy circumstance will be our clean and unchallenged departure.”

I knew he had won when she put the dagger away, but I most certainly didn’t expect her next words.

“I had not expected murder, but I will admit I saw the monster. When it climbed down the wall it came close by my window.” Then she tossed the armload of bamboo on the fire, to coin a phrase. “The moonlight struck the garish face, which is, of course, unmistakable. It is dangerous for you to be a friend of Envy, but not, I think, dishonorable.”

I might have said something foolish, but Master Li was close enough to kick me in the ankle.

“Ah, you know him!” he said with pleased surprise. “So few do. Except, of course, for the owners of the cages.”

She ignored the baited hook and shook her head negatively. “I did not say I knew him. I have seen the ancient painting in my father’s country, and had the verses read to me, that’s all. Now I must know more of what you have in mind,” she said firmly.

So Master Li told her, and then I made gooey red tiger prints down the tower stairs and to various places including a passage known only to the young widow and a few senior ministers, and I suppose the story is now known in villages from here to the Sabine Hills: how a beautiful princess was married against her will and carried off to a loathsome country, and how a magical tiger opened the secret escape passage that led from the bridegroom’s castle (the doors were later found wide open, with bloody paw prints leading out) and massacred the unworthy fellow and all his men, and how the princess awakened to find upon her pillow one half of a marriage contract ripped in a peculiar pattern, with a bloodstained tiger paw on it, and how a great shaman read the yarrow leaves and explained that the princess when a child had been affianced to the Tiger Spirit by the ghost of her grandfather, and how her brief widowhood was ended with the appearance of a prince (whose mighty chest could not be seen because of all the medals) who had been born clutching a piece of parchment ripped in a peculiar pattern, and lo! it was half of a marriage contract stained by a tiger’s paw…

It doesn’t matter that the lady hasn’t actually chosen the lucky fellow yet (at least I haven’t heard of it), because not even her father dares cross tiger spirits. She has all the time she wishes to closely examine candidates. I hope she enjoys herself, and I think village storytellers, who are free to edit where historians are not, are wise to leave out the tadpoles.

We had no trouble. The grieving widow took charge of the whole works, bellowing orders right and left, and Neo-Confucians who were outraged at the presumption of a lowly female received white wooden calling cards marked with red tiger paws, and protests ceased. Yen Shih’s wagon rolled freely across the drawbridge the following afternoon, with me on the seat beside the puppeteer. Master Li and Yu Lan followed on mules, laden with gifts, and soon we were back in the land of the bandit chief, following his daughter’s directions.

The bright sunlight seemed to be swallowed by a long slitlike mouth as we climbed down a narrow ravine. Cicadas were demonstrating why they’re called “scissors grinders,” and lizards with eyes of coral and agate and turquoise practiced push-ups as they watched Yu Lan study the area’s feng-shui (“wind and water”). She was clearly disturbed by the totemistic arrangements of two piles of huge rocks.

“From your description the creature called Envy is strongly masculine, but this place is overpowering in yin influences, not yang,” she said in a puzzled voice. “Instead of being proud and priapic the totems are humble and bent, and seem to have been planned that way, but why would a shrine to an ape man suggest crawling on one’s knees in a female environment?”

Master Li rechecked the map the grand warden’s wife had given him.

“This is the place. Unquestionably,” he said. “Yen Shih?”

The puppeteer smiled and flicked a hand in an eloquent gesture of passing the cup. “My daughter is the expert, and I can offer only an instinctive reaction.” The gesture ended with the forefinger lifted toward the totems. “That doesn’t strike me as being strictly symbolic or strictly representational, but something in between. Like primitive writing, for example.”

Master Li grinned. “My friend, I’m beginning to think our minds move in lockstep,” he said. “I’m guessing it’s a pictograph: specifically, the pictograph of a mourner with bowed head kneeling beside a corpse, representing a word in the earliest Shang dynasty writing known to exist. The word is ‘death.’ Yu Lan?”

“Yes, it could be,” she said. “Many goddesses are linked to the Land of Shadows, which would account for female emphasis in the geomancy. Still, that says nothing about a man with the face of a painted ape.”

What I wanted to know was whether or not the death influence was aimed at us, but I managed to keep my mouth shut. We fanned out and began to search for the landmarks we had been given, mindful of the fact that the grand warden’s widow hadn’t been here for ten years and floods and rockslides could have altered things dramatically. She had been sure about a stretch of cliff marked with a white scar, however, and when I hacked through huge thistles I found myself staring right at it. The livid streak where shale had fallen from reddish rock was supposed to point almost straight to the entrance, and I yelled to the others and got a bigger stick and began beating a path through reeds. Inside ten minutes we found the small round opening in the side of the ravine, just as it had been described, and Yen Shih and I prepared to light the torches we’d brought. Then we discovered we didn’t need them.

About fifteen feet inside the little cave was a natural chimney leading up to sunlight. The place was illuminated like a corridor in a gallery, with wall carvings on both sides. Perhaps a third of the carvings were pictures, but the other two thirds were pictographs, and Master Li was enchanted.

“It’s an early form of the Book of Odes!” he said delightedly. “Very close to the shamanistic sections called Nine Songs, but it tells a tale with a far different emphasis than anything found in later versions.”

As the sage translated the old script a tale began to unfold that was very real in parts. This was the voice of a girl seduced by a god: