Barry Hughart - Eight Skilled Gentlemen

Along the way Master Li acquired alchemist’s drugs and equipment and a bale of horrible cheap tea and began experimenting with techniques that might turn contemptible ta-cha into choo-cha perfect enough to please an emperor, and one night when we’d pitched camp he cried, “Gather around, my children, and I will show thee a miracle!”

Yen Shih placed a grate over the cooking fire as Master Li directed, and Yu Lan got out the largest frying pan. The tea leaves Master Li piled on a table were really awful, large and coarse and ragged, and the smell was equally unappetizing. Master Li heated the pan, tossed tea leaves in it, and added small amounts of yellow powder.

“Tamarind,” he said. “It’s from the fruit of a large tree with astringent seeds rich in tartaric acid and potash, and it costs a fortune. However, only minuscule amounts are necessary. The name is Arabic and means ‘Indian date,’ which is odd because the tree is neither Arabic nor Indian, and must be imported all the way from Egypt.”

He had Yu Lan toss the leaves and tamarind powder in the hot pan while he poured stuff from two jars into a mortar.

“Prussiate of iron and sulphate of lime,” he said. “See the prussiate change color?”

The blue was turning lighter as he blended the elements with a pestle, with subtle hints of green and purple. Meanwhile, the leaves in Yu Lan’s pan were blending with tamarind and changing from ugly black to lovely yellowish orange. When the blue color was very pale Master Li dumped his mixture into the pan and took over from Yu Lan, stirring and shaking vigorously, and something very dramatic began to happen.

“I’ll be damned!” Yen Shih exclaimed.

Those miserable leaves were turning green, just like real hyson. What’s more, the smell that rose from the pan was beginning to be delicious, and then I stared at the most amazing thing of all. Real before-the-rains, the finest early-spring tea leaves, are very delicate and must be carefully rolled and twisted by hand, and these leaves were doing that by themselves! The coarse shapes became graceful as the leaves rolled and tightened, the frayed edges vanished, and we were looking at perfect tea of the highest possible quality. Fit for an emperor, which was precisely the point.

“In appearance and smell it’s perfect Tribute Tea,” Master Li said happily. “Actually the only flaw is that it’s too perfect: uniformly bluish green, whereas the real thing would have faint yellowish imperfections. For purposes of transport it would be molded into little cakes and stamped with the imperial seal, like the stuff the mandarins are selling to gullible barbarians, and they can turn it out by the ton. I would estimate the profit margin at ten thousand percent. What a lovely racket!”

The taste was another matter. We boiled a pot of water and tried it and promptly spat it out. It was awful, and Master Li said the mandarins had to be adding a certain percentage of decent tea to make it drinkable.

The steam from my saucer swirled upward, distorting images, and I thought Yen Shih was glaring angrily at me, but I blew steam until his ravaged face was clear and all he was doing was grimacing at the tea taste. Yu Lan began putting things away: silent, graceful, distant as a drifting cloud, secretly smiling.

Heat waves were twisting my village as though it were made from soft wax, and laughter was rising on all sides—harsh laughter, hard laughter, forced laughter—and I looked through a gap between cottages and saw the abbot of our monastery gazing toward something. His eyes were pitying and his face was sad. I ran forward until I could see the central lane, and there was my mother laughing and my father trying to. Everybody was trying to. A wedding procession was just ahead, and my heart sank to my sandals. “Laughing at the Dog” is the last resort in time of drought. If sending swallows to water dragons and putting the statues of our Place Gods out in the hot sun doesn’t work the only thing left is to fit out a bridal procession complete with flower-decorated cart and gongs and bells and drums, except the bride is a dog. A bitch dressed in a girl’s wedding dress, and everybody points and laughs and makes a lot of noise, and maybe that will cause the Little Boy of the Clouds to look down at the silly sight and laugh until he cries, and his tears are rain.

I walked forward toward my parents but the heat waves were back again, swirling like clouds, and I couldn’t see anything clearly. The laughter was getting shriller and higher. I saw something moving in a circle, and then I realized I wasn’t looking at dancers around a wedding cart, and it wasn’t laughter I was listening to.

I came through heat waves in time to see the goat break free and run after the other children. The lute that had accompanied them still played. I turned toward the sound and walked through more heat waves. A sudden flashing light blinded me, and when my eyes cleared I saw Yu Lan standing with a cage in her hand. She lifted the other hand in the ritual gesture and I imitated her: left eyebrow, right eyebrow, tip of nose. The shamanka’s fingers opened and I saw another little two-pronged pitchfork. This time she didn’t raise it to her lips. She looked somberly at me and turned and walked toward the low stone wall around a well, and then she pointed to a huge bucket attached to a windlass. Her gestures made it clear that I must take both of us down inside the well.

The bucket was just big enough. I released the rope and lowered us slowly down into darkness. The windlass was creaking loudly, but the rope was thick and strong. I could see a pattern carved on the walls: frogs circling around and around, head to tail. A terrible odor was lifting from below. It was the reek of rotting flesh, and something down there was growling like muted thunder. I tried to tell Yu Lan we must go back, but she pointed firmly downward.

I kept lowering the bucket. Yu Lan was looking hard at the walls, straining to see in the faint light from above. Now I could hear a bubbling sound below us, and the air was so hot we might have been in an oven, and again a low murderous growl reached up to us. The stench was almost unbearable.

Yu Lan touched my shoulder and pointed. I saw a large dark circle on the wall, but I couldn’t reach it. I began rocking, swinging the bucket, hauling back and forth on the rope. We swung in wider and wider arcs. My hands were covered with sweat and I was terrified that the rope might slip through them and send us tumbling down to whatever was waiting below. I held on, though, rocking farther and farther, and finally my left hand could reach out to the circle. It was a hole in the wall. The third time I swung to it I caught a projecting rock, and I was able to haul us right to the edge. Yu Lan lithely swung up and into a narrow tunnel, and I followed her after tying the bucket to the rock.

The shamanka led the way toward a soft glowing light. It was a chamber that had a floor of moss like a thick soft carpet, and holes high up in the ceiling that let sunlight in. The puppeteer’s daughter smiled at me and lifted her hand to her lips. She blew between the two prongs of the tiny pitchfork and the healing and generating power of yin filled the chamber, mist and pattering raindrops and rainbows, and Yu Lan stepped into the circle of my arms.

“Peculiarly lascivious,” Master Li said, lingering lovingly on “lascivious.” “The fact that sex is women’s business is recognized in the yin metaphor we use for it, ‘clouds and rain,’ which accounts for the mist and rainbows, but then you wake up—and clean up—and do you really have to turn the color of a ripe tomato and get your tongue entangled in baling twine every time Yu Lan walks past?”