Barry Hughart - The Story of the Stone

Master Li was regarding me with rather cool eyes.

“Perhaps the extraordinary references to a stone are worthy of minor mention,” he said wryly.

The example of Wolf and Fire Girl gave me backbone. “Damn it, it's genius. Centuries ago the boys who found the cave realized that if they chose as their hero a skeleton with a spearhead inside the crushed rib cage, it would be a hero who had somehow failed. So they pieced together bits and pieces from old heroic stories and—”

“Produced a tale that I admire, except for the poetry,” said Master Li. “The poetry is abominable. The most admirable thing about the tale is its folk-epic nature, meaning that the words take on a quasi-religious significance. Did anyone notice Deer Ears’ delivery?”

I hadn't, but Grief of Dawn had.

“His head was thrown back and his eyes were closed,” she said. “Once he said ‘which’ and hastily changed it to ‘that.’ He was like my dear old Tai-tai, preserving the exact wording of an ancient story just as her parents and grandparents had preserved it.”

Master Li gazed at her fondly. “Let me know if you can use some extra adoration between visits from these three gentlemen,” he said. “That's the point about the references to the stone. Deer Ears came very close to the inscription above the sacristies, and two of the lines were exact: “In darkness languishes the precious stone. When will its excellence enchant the world?”

Prince Liu Pao threw his hands wide apart.

“Yes, but what is the stone?” he asked plaintively. “According to the boys’ story, it's a magical thing that slays evil. But my ancestor kept and worshipped it, which scarcely makes sense unless he was in love with the idea of suicide. According to Ssu-ma and the author of Red Chamber, it's the embodiment of all evil. According to Ox's dream, it's an overpowering life force. Is it good? Is it evil? Is it anything more than a legend? I hate to say this, but much as I enjoyed the story of Wolf, it leads us nowhere.”

“Prince, I must respectfully disagree,” said Master Li. Somehow he gave me the impression of a conjurer who intended to reach into a two-inch pillbox and pull out a twenty-foot pole. “Remember those mysterious fellows in robes of motley who are somehow able to pop up out of nowhere and disappear the same way? Well, I strongly suspect that the cavern in the story is actually the tomb of the Laughing Prince, which means that the tomb is far larger than we had imagined. With daylight, we'll put the theory to the test.”

The sun had just lifted over Dragon's Right Horn when Master Li led the way down the hill to the bottom of the gorge between the two peaks. I was carrying an armload of tools, and the others had torches.

“Thousands of peasants labored on the Laughing Prince's tomb,” Master Li said. “Could he have murdered every one of them? Some details of the tomb were certain to be preserved in the folk memory of the Valley of Sorrows, and one form of preservation may be the fanciful tale of Wolf, who comes to a cave with Fire Girl and climbs up a natural stone chimney. He sticks his head from the hole and discovers he's at the bottom of a deep gorge. Dear Ears, head back, eyes closed, chants the exact words preserved through the centuries: “Across from the hole he saw a good landmark—strange red and emerald-colored rocks in the side of the cliff.”

The old man walked over to one of the sheer cliffs.

“I came down here to try to figure out how Ox had been able to climb down one side and back up the other,” he said. “I didn't find a climbing path, but I did find this.”

He bent some thick thistles, and we gazed at strange red and emerald rocks, almost like gemstones, set in the middle of plain granite. “Prince, is there anything like this formation in some other part of the valley?” he asked.

Without a word the prince began looking for the hole of a natural stone chimney, and the rest of us fanned out and followed his example. An hour passed before Moon Boy shouted. He was about twenty feet up the side of a cliff, at the only place where the slope allowed easy climbing, and he was pointing down at a thick clump of furze. We ran up to him. I chopped through the furze, and a black hole appeared. I had brought a long bamboo pole, and I thrust it down but couldn't reach bottom. I tossed the pole back to the other tools, and the prince helped me secure a rope ladder. Master Li handed me a torch, and I began climbing down with my knife between my teeth, feeling very much like a pirate.

The ladder was just long enough. I stepped into a small round cave with a narrow passage leading from it. My torchlight revealed an ancient wooden table and two benches. A natural stone shelf was set in the wall. I closed my eyes tightly and prayed, and then I began swinging the torch slowly around the room.

I will confess that I had prayed to find a thirteen-year-old girl with hair of fire, who had been sleeping for seven and a half centuries. I was very disappointed when she wasn't there.

“Come on down!” I yelled.

Master Li and the prince and Grief of Dawn and Moon Boy joined me. They lit their torches, and now it was bright enough to see that nobody had disturbed the dust on the floor for years. We cautiously made our way down the passage and found ourselves in a much larger cave. This one had been used for target practice, and I was willing to bet that the archer had been a boy—or a girl. Arrows were stuck all over, including the ceiling where ancient scaffolding held supporting beams. There was an old desk. To the left of the desk was a long wood table, and to the right was a row of brassbound chests. The chests were empty. Directly in front of the desk was a large metal plate set in the stone floor, and Master Li scratched his nose thoughtfully as he looked at it.

“This looks like a paymaster's office,” he said. “Engineers and overseers would stand in front of the desk to receive their wages, and the Laughing Prince was renowned for his playful pranks.”

He walked behind the desk and searched for something, and then he pulled some kind of lever. I jumped backward. There was a screeching metallic sound, and then the plate split into two halves that dropped down on hinges. Where an overseer might have been standing was nothing but a black hole, and I cautiously knelt at the side and thrust my torch down. The light couldn't reach far enough to touch bottom. I found a splintered piece of old scaffolding and lit it from the torch and dropped it into the pit. It almost went out, but then it flared up again and we caught our breaths.

It had landed on sharp jutting rocks far below, right between two broken bodies. It took me a moment to realize that they weren't ancient skeletons like the ones piled in the tunnel. Hair still clung to them, and patches of dried flesh, and their clothes were almost intact.

“No more than twenty or thirty years ago,” Master Li muttered.

“Thirty-three,” the prince whispered. His face was white and strained. “I used to play with them. Ah Cheng and Wu Yi, gardeners at the estate. They let me ride the water buffalo and shovel manure and do all sorts of interesting things I wasn't supposed to, and one day they vanished and we never found them.”

Master Li tested a bench at the table and sat down in a puff of dust.

He gazed moodily into the pit. “A stolen manuscript,” he said softly, perhaps to himself. “Two dead monks, a weird sound, trees and plants destroyed—did the murder of two gardeners thirty-three years ago also play a part? Did they find the entrance in the gorge and come down here? If so, what did they see or hear that led to their deaths? If the unpleasant people dressed up in motley were involved back then, it strengthens the theory that some kind of religious cult may be behind this, worshipping the stone of the Laughing Prince and possibly continuing a line that goes back to his original Monks of Mirth.”