Barry Hughart - Eight Skilled Gentlemen

I was driving a blue-hooded upper-class donkey cart beneath a bright moon that was occasionally obscured by sand clouds. The Yellow Wind hissed against the canvas, and the metal torch brackets lining the elegant lane on Coal Hill seemed to be passing sand-scrape sounds from one to another like one long vibrating lute string. We came to a halt and the guards at the gate of mandarin Yang Ch’i’s mansion crowded around demanding passwords or engraved invitations, and the silken curtains parted and the head of a six-month-old corpse slid out, inch by inch.

“Good evening,” said Master Li.

The guards were no longer present, although high-pitched notes remained for some time, rending the air, and we proceeded placidly up the drive. At the courtyard another row of guards stood ready for promotion, keen and alert.

“Excuse me. We have been summoned to collect a gentleman, and which one of you is…” I fumbled for a list.

Hands pushed the front handle of a coffin through the blue curtains, followed by the head and face of Master Li.

“Good evening.”

Since there seemed to be nobody in the courtyard we left the cart and proceeded to the mansion, where a butler automatically accepted Master Li’s cape, turned to receive the white wooden calling card, and toppled over backward like a board, bouncing up and down three times with a distinct whang-whang-whang sound. Servants, guards, and various flunkies appeared at every doorway and staircase.

“Hello, the house!” I cried desperately. “My beloved great-great-grandfather has contracted some silly little ailment that ignorant medicasters call vehemently virulent, and we merely seek—”

“Good evening,” said Master Li.

Since nobody seemed to be around to receive us we proceeded through the inner courtyards to a central tower, and entered a huge room beneath a great vaulted dome that consisted almost entirely of windows. The heat outside had been bad enough; here it was awful. What’s more, it was as humid as a southern rain forest, and Master Li explained that Yang Ch’i was an avid horticulturist who specialized in exotic tropical flowers. Beneath the floor was a great vat of water kept constantly bubbling by charcoal fires. Vents released steam through a thousand tiny apertures, and moisture coalesced into droplets that splashed down from the ceiling with tiny pit-pat sounds. The room smelled of manure and decay, but most of all it reeked of the gross pulpy stalks of immense orchids: stickily sweet, rotting inside.

“Yang also prides himself on his knowledge of primitive artifacts, and in that respect his pride is justified,” Master Li said. “He’s one of the few who truly respect the craftsmanship of aborigines, and that’s why the Celestial Master said he kept his cage in a case. Yang Ch’i couldn’t possibly keep such a thing hidden away; it would be the jewel of his collection.”

The avenues between plants were lined with display cases containing everything from a costly jeweled hair comb to a child’s doll carved from cheap teak, and I may have learned something when I noticed that moonlight made materials irrelevant, and if craftsmanship was the criterion the doll was the more valuable. The avenues converged at the center of the dome where a single case stood on a circular patch of floor. Here steam was taking the place of heat waves; outlines blurred, and everything seen from the corners of my eyes seemed to be floating up and down as on billows of the sea. The moon was directly above the dome. As I walked forward I watched it change color and shape seen through differing patches of glass: now round and golden as a fabled peach from Samarkand, now elongated and yellow as a squash—a crab must see the moon like that, I thought, peering up through water as it scuttled over sand and seaweed.

The glass alone must have cost a crown prince’s ransom. Never had I seen so much in one place, and never of such quality.

We reached the center display and gazed down at the case and there it was, an ancient cage like the ones we had seen before. Master Li frowned. “Damn. No brush,” he said, and indeed there wasn’t a brush like the one shown in the rubbing. It was like the one we’d picked up outside Ma Tuan Lin’s pavilion, but this time I noticed the hole at the top through which a brush handle could protrude. I reached forward, but Master Li stopped me.

“Careful.”

He examined everything about the floor, the stand, the display case, the ceiling, and only when he was sure there was no visible trap or alarm mechanism did he reach out and carefully lift the glass cover. Steam billowed around us, hissing, blocking my vision, and when it cleared I saw Master Li nod. I reached out and picked up the cage and pulled it back, and Master Li gently replaced the lid.

“Let’s take a look at it,” he said.

In a far corner was a workbench where a bright lantern glowed, giving clearer illumination than moonlight, and we started toward it. My throat tickled badly and I coughed, and then the old man coughed. The sound seemed to linger inside the dome, moving slowly through the moist air. At the lantern Master Li examined the top of the cage and took note of the symbols of the elements on the bars, symbols the Skilled Gentleman had touched with the brush in the rubbings, and then he turned the cage over and looked at the bottom. He became very still.

“Ox,” he said quietly after a long pause, “do you see this tiny little cross scratched on the rim?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“I put it there.”

“Sir?”

“I put it there, Ox, from force of habit, as an identifying mark on a piece of physical evidence. This is the same cage that we found on the island, and that the ape man stole from the shack,” Master Li said.

I stared blankly at him. Nothing made sense to me, and I was about to ask stupid questions when a flute began to play. The sound was quite shocking in the thick dripping stillness of the greenhouse, and I jumped a foot. In an instant Master Li’s throwing knife was in his hand, and I turned toward the sound and began stalking it, bent low behind great pungent flowers. The music was strange and discordant, almost mindlessly rhythmic, like the monotonous sounds of shamanistic drummers putting an audience in a trance, and it was difficult to pin down: now to the left of me, now to the right. I seemed to be moving with unreal slowness, and as I wormed my way through pulpy orchids beneath the changing moon I began to get the profound impression that I was underwater, like that crab I’d imagined, pushing a path between algae and the limp dangling limbs of drowned men.

I stopped and stared, with my heart trying to get out past my tongue. I’d reached a gap in huge leaves and I was looking at a bright patch of moonlight shining on a stool upon which a small figure sat cross-legged. It was a child. A beautiful child playing a flute, but something was wrong with it, and I heard in my head the faint voice of the Celestial Master.

“The first demon-deity is Fang-liang,” the saint had said. “It resembles a three-year-old child with red eyes, long ears, and beautiful hair, and it kills by forcing its victims to strangle themselves.”

I realized that the tickling sensation inside my throat had been growing stronger, and I tried to cough but all I did was choke, and I whirled and looked back. Master Li had dropped his knife and was staggering in a little circle with his hands clasped around his throat, strangling himself.

I tried to go back to him, and then thought better of it and tried to charge the child with the flute, but all I did was trip and fall. I couldn’t breathe. The itching inside my throat was unbearable and I tried to reach it, clasping my neck tightly with my hands. My vision was dimming and I could barely see that Master Li had gone mad and was trying to climb what looked like a tiny tree rising above orchids, shinnying up like a young boy, and then I couldn’t see that far. I rolled over on my back, clawing helplessly at my throat.