Barry Hughart - Eight Skilled Gentlemen

Master Li broke the spell by turning back to the transformed cavalier.

“Either he’s still wandering around after three thousand years or Ox and I have seen the greatest impersonator in the world,” he said. “One wonders what’s happened to his charming children, and what he’s trying to accomplish.”

Yen Shih’s eyes were burning as he looked at the painting. Burning with bitterness? I couldn’t tell, but in his position I might be. Here was a once handsome cavalier given the face of a painted ape, and Yen Shih himself had surely been handsome before smallpox made him grotesque, and the Patron of Pestilence had mutilated both. Just as I was thinking that, the puppeteer reminded me he was an aristocrat, and aristocrats don’t waste time with self-pity. A sudden sunrise smile brought beauty to a landscape of pockmarks.

“I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find this delightful!” he said cheerfully. “Whenever I feel sorry for myself I can think of this happy fellow, and when nasty brats like Malice or Madness creep toward me I can put an arm around Yu Lan.” His smile faded. “Speaking of which, this cannot be easy for her,” he said softly. “As priestess of Wu she is servant to the Lady-Queen, and all the lady’s servants live in terror of their mistress.”

I hadn’t realized that Yu Lan hadn’t risen with the rest of us. She was still on her knees before the goddess, white-faced and still, and the puppeteer gently lifted his daughter and put an arm around her, and led her back out of the cave and into the sunlight.

Heat waves were twisting and distorting things, making it hard to get my bearings. I saw a lake beside our cottage and I knew it couldn’t be real, and I squeezed my eyes tightly closed and opened them again, and the lake was gone but the cottage seemed to be floating three feet up in the air, shimmering and dissolving at the bottom.

“What are we going to do. Number Ten Ox?” said my mother.

My father was silent as usual, speaking through the tired slump of his body. I tried to remember: do about what? Something was wrong, I knew that, just as I knew that both my parents had been dead for years, but what was wrong?

My father had one of the cages in his hand. Then I realized it wasn’t an ancient cage but a modern one, a simple bamboo birdcage, and it was filled with swallows, and he was standing on the bank of the river that runs past my village. Now I knew what was wrong. I looked up at the sky and saw there were no clouds, and I stepped up beside my father and looked down at the river.

The river was dry. I was staring at hard cracked earth and dying weeds and a few lizards, so how could my father offer swallows and pray for rain? Every year swallows turn into oysters and back again (the exact date is listed in the Imperial Almanac), and oysters are the favorite food of lung dragons, but the dragons who control water had either fled or tunneled deep underground, and I knew without asking that the wells had run dry.

“What are we going to do, Number Ten Ox?” my mother said again.

Behind me someone was weeping softly, and I turned and saw Auntie Hua holding an armload of paper boats. I knew it must be the fifth day of the fifth moon, Dragon Boat day, when real boats race and paper boats called chu yi carry away the pestilence that comes with hot weather, but if there was no water how could the boats sail? Uncle Nung stood beside the old lady, twisting his hands together, his face taut with fear, and I thought I heard the bells from the monastery on the hill sounding the alarm, so I began to run toward them. Heat waves lifted around me like a dense cloud. The sound was changing, growing higher and shriller; not from the mouths of bells, but from the mouths of excited children.

The heat waves blew away and I was looking at something that hadn’t dried up, a patch of green grass upon which children played. There were seven children with linked hands dancing in a circle around an eighth child, and all eight were extraordinarily ugly: squat stunted bodies that supported grotesquely large heads; features badly out of proportion. Someone was accompanying on a lute as they sang a nonsense game song, high and shrill.

At the count of eight the child in the center jerked up a handful of grass and charged, low and mean, and I decided it was a variation of Hog on a Hill, which is not for the timid. The children forming the wall seemed to be limited to kicking, butting, and smothering with massed bodies, but the goat was free to use hands and teeth and anything else he could think of, and it was a grand melee. Eventually the goat broke through and the other children raced away, shrieking with laughter. When the goat gave chase I assumed the child he caught would become the next goat, but I lost interest in them when I saw the musician who had accompanied their song.

Yu Lan was carrying one of the ancient cages, strumming the bars like strings, and a bright flash made me stop and blink, and when my eyes cleared the beautiful shamanka lifted her right hand and touched her left eyebrow, her right eyebrow, and the tip of her nose—one flowing movement—and then nodded to me, and I realized I was to mimic her. I made the same ritualistic gesture. Yu Lan smiled, her hand lifted, and she opened the clenched fingers as though showing me a treasure: a tiny metal object something like a pitchfork, but it had only two prongs.

I found myself walking up to her, very close. Slowly she lifted the little thing to her lips and blew between the tines and a cool breeze reached out to me. Lovely soft mist closed around both of us, a tiny drizzle pattered down, rainbows formed, the scent of wet grass and earth and flowers was strong enough to walk on. The generating yin influences were so powerful that I had no choice but to reach out to Yu Lan, gently wrap my arms around her, whisper her name; the puppeteer’s daughter stood very still, and then lifted her lips to mine.

“This is horribly humiliating,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Master Li said. “You have an extra pair of trousers and there’s much to be said for wet dreams. Most men meet a far better class of women that way, and the financial savings are immense. Besides, you have such good dreams. Are you positive you’ve never heard that children’s song before?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ve heard songs like it all my life, but not that one.”

“Your ear is a good one,” he said matter-of-factly. “Most people inventing fight songs for children use words about fighting. Real rhymes don’t mention the subject at all, and stick to things like goats, grass, mothers, and brothers. Were you aware of the fact that those children looked amazingly like the statues of aboriginal gods you saw on Hortensia Island, outside the Yu?”

I hadn’t been aware of it, but now I realized he was right, although I couldn’t see why my sleeping mind would turn contorted statues into cavorting children.

“It’s scarcely a mystery why your dream began with drought, but something I can’t quite put my finger on intrigues me,” he said. “Let me know if you go courting in dreamland again.”

What he meant about my dreams beginning with drought was that we were traveling through one. Everywhere we looked we saw peasants deepening wells and trying to save every drop from drying streams. Not a cloud touched the sky, and the heat was oppressive, and bonzes and Tao-shihs worked day and night at rain prayers and charms. When Yu Lan was summoned at night it was almost always to work a rain ceremony. We heard from travelers that conditions were similar where they came from, and if anything it got drier and hotter the closer we came to Peking.