Barry Hughart - Eight Skilled Gentlemen

“Yes, sir,” I said, and I took off like a racehorse.

At the Wineshop of One-Eyed Wong, Master Li recruited some idlers and sent them out to track down each mandarin and eunuch on the list, and then he led the way out the back door to a maze of buildings squeezed together and leaning over each other to form the dead end of the Alley of Flies. Interconnecting passages run every which way, and by the time bailiffs can make their way to somebody’s room he’s probably in Tibet.

“The Weasel is an aborigine,” Master Li said. “I very much doubt he can add much to what we’ve learned from Hosteler Tu, but I’d like to ask. Do you know where he lives?”

I was delighted to provide something. “Keep turning left,” I said. “Believe it or not, you won’t wind up back where you started.”

We turned left, left, left, left, and would have been back at the end of the alley if there hadn’t been a tiny parallel passageway that led up and across and to the right. The Weasel lived on the top floor, but we stopped short when we saw prayers pasted to his door and smelled incense and heard wails of woe. I pushed the door open, and it was obvious that Master Li wasn’t going to be able to ask. The Weasel was in a very bad way, rolling over his pallet in delirium while his young wife tried to do what she could. She was overjoyed to see Master Li.

“Save him. Venerable Sir,” she begged. “If anyone could save him, it would be you. Everyone else fears contagion and has fled, and I don’t know what to do.”

Master Li had me hold the Weasel still. He examined the red eyes, and a dry tongue that had a peculiar yellow fuzz coating it, like fur, and he probed small swollen bulges like boils on the man’s groin and armpits.

“Did he complain of headache and lethargy?”

“Yes, Venerable Sir.”

“Followed by fever, and a peculiar reaction to light?”

“Yes, Venerable Sir! He screamed that light was burning him!”

Master Li straightened up and squared his shoulders. “My dear, I promise nothing,” he said gently. “We must hope and pray, and to that end I’ll need food, wine, some paper money, twelve red threads, and a White Tiger Great-Killer-Thunder.”

I knew it was all up with the Weasel. Master Li resorts to faith healing only when he wants to give the grieving something to do, and now he opened the tiny window that looked out over mazes of rooftops of Peking, and muttered, “One hundred thousand White Tiger Great-Killer-Thunders, and it still may not be enough.”

“Sir?” I said.

“Not enough, Ox. Not if Envy has his way.” Then he shook himself like a dog shedding water, and added, “Hell, I’m probably imagining things. Let’s do what we can.”

That meant cutting a tiger shape from a piece of paper and writing on it, “The Unicorn Is Here!” This invokes the auspicious star that neutralizes baneful influences, and I cut the sick man’s arm to draw enough blood to stain the tiger red. The Weasel’s wife had brought the other things, and the two of us knelt in prayer while Master Li spread his arms above the patient.

“Weasel, having fallen ill on a jen-hsu day you have collided in the north with the Divine Killer with Hair Unbound Who Flies in the Heavens,” the old man intoned as a priestly chant. “In the south you have encountered the Vermilion Bird, and in the east you have met the Five Specters, but it is in the west where danger lies, for there you have angered the Tiger who is the End of Autumn, the Edge of Metal, the White of Mourning, and the End of the Great Mystery.”

Master Li spread water and incense around and lifted his eyes and arms to the west.

“O Divine White Tiger of the Despoiling Demons of the Five Directions, of the Talismans of Sickness and Ruin of the Year, of the Gate of Mourning and the Funeral Guest and the Spirits of the Dead, of the Celestial Departments and Terrestrial Forests, of the Earth and of Heaven, of the Seventy-two Hou and the Eight Trigrams and the Nine Palaces and the Central Palace Thunder, O Great Lord Tiger who enters houses and carries out great massacres, O Tiger who lies in wait beside the road and behind the well, O Tiger who lurks behind the stove and in the hall, O Tiger who stands beside the bed and behind the door of each dwelling, O Tiger who must enter into all fates, O White Tiger, Great White Tiger, your humble servant the Weasel has grossly insulted you, and we bring you his food! We bring you his wine! We bring you his money! We bring you his blood!”

Master Li signaled for the wife to rise and make offerings of food, wine, and money after touching each item to the bloodstained paper tiger.

“O Tiger, eat of the Weasel’s food, and take away with his food the Divine Killer of Ascents and Descents and the Beginning and Ending of All Roads! O Tiger, drink of the Weasel’s wine, and take away with his wine the Large Dead King and the Small Dead King Who Pull Out the Intestines and Drain the Stomach! O Tiger, take away the Weasel’s money as you take away the Divine Killer One Meets as One Moves the Bed and Replaces the Matting, and the Killer Who Drives In Stakes and Puts Up Enclosures! O Tiger, Great White Tiger, eat of the blood upon this talisman of your sacred image, for it is the blood of your offending servant, and if your anger still demands his death, we offer his body in sacrifice.”

Master Li pulled straw from the patient’s pallet and swiftly twisted it into a man-shaped doll. He touched the doll all over with the bloodstained tiger image.

“You that are nothing but a body of straw have been touched by White Tiger Great-Killer-Thunder, and lo! you have become the body of the Weasel,” Master Li chanted.

He signaled, and the Weasel’s young wife connected twelve red threads to the straw doll and touched the other ends to her husband’s body, and Master Li made hieratic passes as he coaxed the last sickness demons to cross the bridges of the threads from the Weasel into the doll. Then Master Li removed the threads, symbolically cutting each one. He passed the doll three times over the Weasel’s stomach and four times over his back, and finally he raised the doll on high and plunged his knife through it.

“Behold, Ye Who Are the Beginning of all Endings and the Ending of all Beginnings, he who has offended you is dead! Great White Tiger, Lord of the Universe, your triumph is now complete!” the sage cried.

The Weasel had been in delirium throughout all this, but the mind is a strange creature. Somehow something got through, and he calmed and breathed much easier, and his fever had almost vanished when we left. Nonetheless, Master Li immediately proceeded to the neighbors to make sure help was ready and waiting when the worst happened. He has great respect for faith healing, but there are limits.

When we wound back through the labyrinth and out into the Alley of Flies the sage stopped at One-Eyed Wong’s refuse mound, stinking in the heat. It was sunset. Again the Yellow Wind compensated for lack of clouds to form an incredibly gaudy sky, and rainbow colors played through the seams and wrinkles of the old man’s hand as he swatted flies away and reached down and came up with a dead rat, swinging it by the tail. He tossed the thing to me.

“Any visible cause of death?” he asked.

I looked it over. “No, sir,” I said.

He tossed a rotten squash away and swung a second dead rat over to me. “And this?”

“Not a mark on it,” I said after I examined it.

He tossed more garbage aside and produced three more dead rats, all unmarked so far as I could tell.

“Well, what do we have here?” he asked. “Five consecutive coronaries? Five simultaneous suicides? Five adverse reactions to bee stings at the same time in the same alley?”