Barry Hughart - The Story of the Stone

“I can't hear whatever it is, but I know you're going at it the wrong way,” he said soothingly. “Ox, at the risk of sounding like a character from the tales of Granny Shu, I will point out that a noise some people hear and others don't isn't speaking to the ears. It's speaking to the heart, and you have a hole in your heart. All young people do. It's there to catch the wonderful things of the world, and later on it gets filled up by broken things. Forget about your ears. Listen with your heart. Aim the hole at the sound and follow in the direction where it hurts the most.”

The vibration was coming again, even stronger than before, and I held my breath.

Kung… shang… chueeeeeeeeeeh…

I was off and running, but more confidently now. Master Li was right. Run where it aches the most, and forget about the lies of the ears. I was climbing steadily, and now the night was changing as a thick mist began to rise. The distant lights of the village were blotted out, and then the moon and stars, and Master Li began swearing in a gravelly monotone as the damp blinding blanket closed around us. I could barely see a foot ahead, and I was colliding with trees and rocks. All I knew was that I must keep climbing higher and higher.

I have a vague recollection of sliding down into ravines and climbing back up the other sides. Now the mist was so thick that I could see nothing, and Master Li shouted for me to stop.

I couldn't. The wonderful agonizing sound had been silent for some time and I had to reach it, before it vanished forever and I kept skidding downward and scrambling upward—I want to explain that clearly, because of the extraordinary thing that happened.

I was exhausted. All I could do was crawl, but I sensed something ahead of me. The mist was beginning to lift. I saw a pair of sandals, and then skinny legs, and then a slight torso, and then a huge head with wild hair. Prince Liu Pao was staring down at us as though we were ghosts.

“Ox? Number Ten Ox? Master Li? How on earth did you…”

His voice trailed off and he looked wide-eyed at the path behind him.

“I heard noises and I came outside, and nobody passed me on the path,” the prince whispered.

The mist was lifting rapidly now, and with a sudden shock I realized why the prince couldn't believe his eyes.

I have not described the physical setting of his estate in detail. Dragon's Head, for which the valley had originally been named, was a tiny mountain. Ages ago some cataclysm had split it in half: Dragon's Left Horn and Dragon's Right Horn. The estate was at the top of Dragon's Left Horn, and between it and the sister peak was a sheer gorge about forty feet wide and two hundred feet deep. I had begun the climb up the side of Dragon's Right Horn, and since I was now at the estate, I had somehow managed to cross that gorge.

The prince continued to stare. I crawled back to the gorge and peered down a sheer vertical cliff to jagged rocks far below, and then I slowly raised my eyes up a matching vertical cliff to the place I had come from. It was impossible.

“Ox,” Master Li whispered in a tiny voice, “you have a wonderful career ahead of you as the human fly in a carnival, but for the love of Buddha, don't do it again when I'm riding on your back.”

We could hear a few faint shouts from the village far below. The wonderful sound had disappeared, and the prince said he was like Master Li in that he hadn't heard it at all. Just then there was a sound we all heard. The monastery bells began to sound the alarm, and in an instant I was on my feet and running down the path with Master Li on my back while Prince Liu Pao panted along behind us.

Villagers stood at the monastery gates, afraid to enter. We forced our way through, and the abbot met us and gestured dumbly. I ran to the library. It had been ransacked. Every book and scroll had been pulled from shelves and torn apart, and every desk had been searched and overturned, and the librarian's desk resembled a pile of kindling. Master Li slid down from my back and scanned the wreckage, and then he turned and trotted rapidly out the door and down one of the corridors.

The cell of the late librarian, Brother Squint-Eyes, was in chaos. The scant furniture had been torn to pieces. Robes had been ripped open at the linings. The pallet was shredded, and pools of congealing blood stained the floor.

Master Li bent over and dipped a finger in the blood and put it to his lips. “It's only ink,” he said. To be precise, it's ink called Buddha's Eyelashes, and that stuff sticking to the pallet is what's left of Yellow Emperor parchment. After finishing the tracing of the Ssu-ma forgery, Brother Squint-Eyes hid the remaining materials inside his pallet.”

Master Li turned and trotted rapidly back to the library. Again his eyes moved over the debris, and he walked to a huge pile of papers beside the bent bars in the window where the thieves had entered before. He began tossing scrolls aside, and then he straightened up with an angry face and cold eyes.

“Well, Ox, if I drop over dead in the next few weeks, it won't be from boredom,” he said sourly.

“Buddha save us,” the prince whispered, while the abbot and the monks made signs to ward off evil spirits.

Poor Brother Shang's vigil had not been as lonely as he would have liked. The monk lay on his back among the pile of scrolls, staring at the ceiling. He was as dead as Brother Squint-Eyes, and his bulging eyes and gaping mouth were permanently fixed in an expression of terror and horror beyond belief.

I have but a confused memory of the next few hours. The abbot sent out groups of terrified monks to interview equally terrified peasants, while Master Li hastened to perform an autopsy. There might be some poison that dissipated inside of a few hours, but all Master Li discovered was that Brother Shang had been in excellent shape and had expired from a heart attack. The monks returned with the news that at least eight peasants had seen mysterious monks in robes of motley who laughed and danced beneath the moon, and who disappeared as though the earth had swallowed them.

The other piece of news was that one more section of Princes’ Path appeared to be destroyed.

Master Li tossed his knives down beside the corpse of Brother Shang and said we had better get a few hours sleep. It seemed only minutes before he shook me awake again and handed me a cup of strong tea, and then we set out to meet Prince Liu Pao. He was standing forlornly on Princes’ Path, and once more we gazed at the impossible. Nothing lived in a swath of approximately fifty by one hundred fifty feet. Death had cut cleanly. Flowers bloomed beside withered ones, and sap dripped from healthy trees not ten feet from trees whose sap had been sucked right out of them. Again I thought of a cemetery in a nightmare, but something in the pattern of it caused me to frown and sketch shapes in the air. Both Master Li and the prince watched me with widening eyes, and I blushed.

“Do that again,” Master Li commanded.

I repeated the patterns.

“Li Kao, am I losing my mind?” the prince asked. “I could swear that Number Ten Ox is sketching scholar's shorthand for antique Great Seal script, which hasn't been in common usage for a thousand years.”

“Ox is capable of the damnedest things,” Master Li muttered. “Right now he's capable of sketching the ancient characters for “Love,” “Strength,” and “Heaven,” and I know perfectly well he doesn't understand a single Great Seal ideograph. Well, boy, are you going to keep us in suspense?”

I turned bright red. “I had a dream,” I said humbly. “Just before you woke me up. Something in this scene reminded me of it, and it had strange patterns.”

I had dreamed that I was sitting on the grass near a village very like my own. Somebody had attached a bamboo pole and a black flag to the gears of the grindstone at the water wheel, as we did in my village because the gears kept slipping. Farmers could glance up from the fields and see if the flag was pumping up and down, and if it wasn't, a boy would be sent to get Big Hong, the blacksmith, to reset the gears. As the black flag rose to the apex, it flared out and hovered in the air for a moment before starting back down.