Barry Hughart - The Story of the Stone

“Forget about resurrecting erections,” he said dryly. “At my age the last thing a man wants is one more petrified part. As for the rest of it, I'll think it over, and if I were you, I'd work on a young fellow who wears his peasant propriety like a suit of armor.”

Grief of Dawn dove beneath the water and popped up in front of me like a dolphin. Her waving hand encompassed Master Li and Moon Boy and the water and the sunlight and the grass and the flowers and everything else we were sharing. “Oh, Ox, what fun we could have, and how happy we could be,” she said pleadingly.

There was real yearning in her voice, and deep inside me it struck a sympathetic chord. My parents had died when I was nine. That had probably been the age of Moon Boy when he was first disowned, and Master Li hadn't experienced family life for years, and Grief of Dawn couldn't even remember if she had a family, and somehow I found myself thinking of the little shack in the alley in the coming winter, warm in the wind and snow, and I could smell the good food and fresh-scrubbed cleanliness that a young wife would bring, and I could hear the easy jokes and laughter, and I could see Moon Boy suddenly appearing like an exotic tropical bird—besides, if Master Li wasn't worried about who slept where, why should I be?

Grief of Dawn started a water fight. We said no more about her hope. It was Master Li's decision, and he would let her know in due course.

We didn't want to be sidetracked by several years in jail. Grief of Dawn made Moon Boy promise to be on his best behavior when we arrived in Ch'ang-an, and Master Li was in high spirits when he entered the Academy of Divination and Alchemic Research to get the report on the soil and plant samples. When he came out he was spitting nails.

“According to the finest minds in China, there is no trace of acid or poison or any other harmful substance,” he snarled. The only thing wrong with Princes’ Path is that parts of it are stone cold dead, and some oaf has scribbled on the bottom: ‘Extinction through natural decay.’ ”

Master Li swore without repeating himself all the way down the hill to Serpentine Park, where he said he wanted to try something.

“I'm reduced to grasping at straws,” he said sourly. “One straw concerns the last meal of the late librarian, Brother Squint-Eyes. I've been assuming that he paid for it with the down payment for Ssu-ma Ch'ien's manuscript, and that his tracing copy was stolen during the crooks’ second visit to the monastery, but there could be another explanation. Let's go to the exhibits.”

Bored schoolmasters were guiding classes around. Master Li found one with weak watery eyes and a nose covered with crimson veins. Money changed hands, and the delighted schoolmaster dove into the nearest wineshop. Master Li took over the class, and after huddling with the brats he started off toward the Boar Pavilion. The boys, I saw with surprise, were marching behind the old man with the precision of the Imperial Guard. It really was quite impressive—an ancient gentleman of the old school and his beautifully behaved charges—and a crowd began to follow Confucius and sons.

“The hope of the empire!” exclaimed an emotional matron.

Master Li lined the boys up and gave the downbeat, and they honored the exhibits of past glories with the most perfect rendition of “Evening Lake Scenes” I have ever heard. The applause was deafening. Vendors were mobbed, and the lads disappeared behind mounds of gooey sweets. Master Li lined them up again and marched off to the Gallery of Beautitude, and there the lads delivered a flawless “Shadows on the Eastern Window.” Then they actually performed obeisances and kowtows.

“The hope of the empire!” the matron bawled, and a fierce old fellow with a floppy mustache told one and all that he had planned to return his medals to the General Staff in protest against the decline of standards, but now he wasn't so sure about the decline.

The Temple of Immaculate Illumination was next, and the boys’ performance of “The Twin Pagodas of Orchid Stream” was so superb that every vendor in sight was cleaned out, and candy and crystalized fruit and honey cakes by the ton vanished into the boys’ gaping maws.

“The hope of the empire!” cried Moon Boy and Grief of Dawn, beating the matron to it, and the fierce old gentleman with the medals vowed to move Heaven and earth to get his great-grandsons enrolled with Master Li.

The most sacred of all exhibits is the Confucian Stones (a row of stones engraved with all two hundred thousand characters of the master's writings). A low railing surrounds them, and the rule is, look but don't touch. Master Li lined up the little angels for a tribute worthy of the Ultimate, and the rendition of “The Tower of Floating Blue-Green” brought tears to every eye, including mine.

“The hope of the empire!” I bellowed, along with Moon Boy, Grief of Dawn, the matron, and the gentleman with the medals.

The vendors were cleaned out within minutes. The boys, I noticed, were beginning to turn green. They turned as one and groped for support, which happened to be a low rail, and leaned over it and began heaving their cherubic little guts out. All over the sacred Confucian Stones.

“One million miseries!” howled Master Li.

A gentleman of the old school is prepared for any emergency, however, and Master Li swiftly joined forces with the fierce old fellow with the medals to recruit a bucket brigade to dump cleansing water over the stones. Thoroughness is also a mark of the old school, and Master Li would not rest until he extracted some large sheets of paper from his tunic and pressed them down firmly over every indentation of the sacred text. Fortunately he also happened to be carrying a huge blue sponge, and he rubbed it over the surface so vigorously that the outside of the paper turned blue. When he lifted the sheets, the stones were nearly dry, and as good as new.

The audience, meanwhile, explained to the furious guards that it was all their fault for stuffing the little angels with goo, and the matron and the bemedaled gentleman took up a collection to pay the fine. There wasn't a dry eye as Master Li marched the lads away, and behind us I heard a chorus bawling, “The hope of the empire!”

Master Li led the boys into a secluded glade. “All right, brats, let it out,” he said.

The boys collapsed on the grass, rolling around and pummeling each other and howling with laughter. “Please, sir, may we see?” one of them asked when he had regained his breath.

Master Li took out the pieces of paper. The ink from the sponge had settled in nicely, and the imprints were perfect. Genuine rubbings of the Confucian Stones are hard to come by. The boys begged to stay with Master Li and continue their lives of crime, but he advised them to remain in school and study hard so they could mastermind the mobs when they descended into depravity. Then he returned them to the schoolmaster and took the schoolmaster's place in the wineshop.

He ordered the stuff he had been named for, kao-liang, which is a terrible wine but a wonderful paint remover, and began using it to remove the peaks from every that was accompanied by in the rubbings and replace them with flat lines:. Then he left the wineshop and we started up the Street of the Vermilion Sparrow to Dragon Head Plain.

“Brother Squint-Eye's forgery of the Ssu-ma was a crude tracing of a coded manuscript that contained the name of the historian's own father, and to a collector the monk's copy would have looked like the most obvious and inept fraud in history,” he explained. “If the foolish monk brought it to Ch'ang-an and tried to sell it, it's a wonder he wasn't decapitated on the spot. There is, however, one place that might have bought the thing, and perhaps some pitying person told him where to go.”