Barry Hughart - Eight Skilled Gentlemen

“We have to go down! Fast!” he yelled.

Unlike my dream, there was no windlass and bucket. I turned and saw that the guards had fled, but the lead chain linking the prisoners had been looped over a post and they couldn’t move. The key ring lay upon the marble pavement, so I unlocked the prisoners and let them run for their lives and then I hauled the chains to the well, linked them together, and attached one end to an iron post that might at one time have held a windlass.

It was a lot harder than lowering a bucket, but in one sense it was a great improvement over my dreams. There wasn’t any horrible stench of rotting flesh—although there would be when the sacrificial victims began to stink—and there wasn’t any frightening growl from below.

“There!”

The light from above was just good enough for us to make out a circular spot on the wall. I started the chain swinging, wider and wider, kicking off from the back wall, and finally my foot found a toehold inside the hole. We made it over the edge into a small low tunnel, and I found a rock to wrap the end of the chain around in case we had to come back. Then we started down a narrow passageway that was partly illuminated by greenish phosphorescence.

A vibration was making small pebbles fall from the stone ceiling. It shook harder and harder, and then air rushed at us and hit like a physical blow. A great sound was forming, turning my bones to jelly, and it resolved itself into a musical note that quite literally hurled me against a wall. Even as I was being battered I recognized it. It was the mysterious sound that had announced the solstice ever since a great musical instrument had been built by Eight Skilled Gentlemen, and quite frankly I had completely forgotten that the solstice was today. I realized with horror that we must be actually inside the Yu. This tunnel was one of the pipes, and the sound so far had been merely warming up, a throat clearing, and what would happen if the full sound reached us when we were trapped in a tiny tunnel?

“It’s Envy! He’s installed the first yang key!” Master Li shouted. “Hurry, Ox, hurry!”

So I hurried with the old man on my back, even though I had no idea what lay in front. If a pit opened in the path we were dead. All I could do was run ahead as fast as I could, almost blindly, and when the second blast of sound came it spun me around like a top.

“There will be two more! Hurry! Hurry!” Master Li yelled.

The next two musical notes were worse because we were closer to the source, but my fear that my eardrums would burst was unfounded. I had been racing downhill, but now the path leveled. The phosphorescence grew brighter, which was a blessing because I was able to see and stop in time, and I panted to a halt at the edge of a cliff overlooking a cavern and there they were: great coiling shapes that weren’t serpents but pipes, connecting to smaller pipes and still smaller ones. I found steps and ran down, and at last we reached eight tiny pipes leading into eight small boxes in two rows, four on each side.

Master Li hopped down. “Left is yang, and all male boxes should be filled,” he muttered. He tried to open the lids on the left but they had virtually melded with the grooves. “Yin waits,” he said, and he reached to the right and the first lid opened easily.

Inside was a little rack like in my dreams, and I could also see a hole in the bottom leading down through solid rock, probably to the wind-chest below. Master Li had taken out his two little pitchfork things and I gave him my two.

“Some kind of tuning forks, but designed to do something very unusual with sound waves,” he said. “One would like to be able to talk to the Eight Skilled Gentlemen and ask a few questions.”

He placed the first tuning fork in the rack, where it fit perfectly, and closed the lid, which sealed itself tightly in place. The old man repeated the performance with the remaining three forks and boxes, and then turned and walked rapidly into the shadows. When I trotted up beside him I saw the gates. There were two pairs of immense iron gates side by side. The ones on the left stood open and the ones on the right were closed, and Master Li walked to the closed gates on the female side. A great vibration was beginning, and then the first of the yin notes blasted against us. I held Master Li to keep him from being blown away, and as the sound faded the great gates swung slowly open.

We walked through, and then I stopped in my tracks and stared. We were walking on a path of stone between two wide channels. The channel to the left was filled with water, but what water! It seemed to be made of vibrating translucent air with rainbow colors woven through it, and Master Li exclaimed in delight as he saw it.

“Remember Hosteler Tu, Ox? ‘The Yu was built by the Eight Skilled Gentlemen to make music that turned into water.’ Well, here it is, and here comes some more.”

The channel on the right had been dry, but now the vibrations of the Yu seemed to be coalescing into visible form, and a shining rainbow path of water appeared.

“Hurry.”

We ran forward to a second pair of gates, open on the left, closed on the right (“Locks?” I wondered. “Like in a very strange canal?”), and the sound from the second tuning key caused great gates to swing open, and music-water formed on the right to match that on the left. Gates opened twice more, and water formed in front of us, and the fourth and last shining path of water reached ahead to a dock that matched the dock on the left, and there waited two great Dragon Boats, different only in that the yang symbol marked the one on the left and the yin symbol marked the one on the right.

They were each at least a hundred and fifty feet long, but so slim that only a narrow passageway ran between seats for single oarsmen on each side. On the platforms in the center waited drum and clapping boards, and lying on the high prows were the green-and-white scarves used to send commands. Each immense steering oar was forty feet long, and I noticed that the prow of each boat had the traditional dragon-head shape, but with a long tapering horn thrusting straight out from the center of the forehead.

The crews were waiting on the docks, standing at attention, eighty-eight oarsmen per boat, and I could distinguish the red bandanas around the foreheads of the “brothers,” the lead oarsmen. I saw other figures I couldn’t identify, and then as we came close a gentleman in a simple white robe stepped forward and bowed. In this setting the blue cheeks and crimson nose and silver forehead and yellow chin seemed entirely appropriate, and his voice was clear and resonant.

“Believe it or not, Li Kao, I prayed that you would perform the impossible and come to honor the solstice with me today,” said Envy.

Despite the claims of my critics I am not a total idiot. I was not surprised—saddened, yes, even agonized at certain implications—but not at all surprised that the voice of Envy was the voice of a puppeteer.

Master Li regarded Yen Shih with ironic eyes, and bowed with almost equal grace.

“And I am honored to greet the most talented as well as most dangerous of cavaliers,” he said. “It was inexcusable of me not to have seen the face behind the mask from the very first, or nearly.”

Envy shrugged. “Inexcusable? Surely human nature is excuse enough.” He lifted a piece of the disguise he had discarded and pressed it to the left side of his face, like malleable flesh-colored clay, and again I saw the terrible ravages of smallpox. “No one looks closely at deformity,” he said gently.

“It was a brave disguise for a cavalier to choose,” Master Li said with ungrudging respect. “It was also brave to travel the world as a puppeteer whose formal social status would be as low as that of a prostitute or an actor. You could have chosen to be the empire’s greatest fencing master, or the most accomplished of imperial advisers. But then, cavaliers are naturally drawn to crafts involving the pulling of strings, and I speak with the authority of having been one of the puppets,” Master Li said with another bow.