Barry Hughart - The Story of the Stone

“A friend of mine—dead for at least sixty years—once told me something interesting about Tou Wan,” Master Li said. “He said that she may have been the only aristocrat to wear a hairpin that had a point fashioned from simple stone, in the style of poor peasants, and yet in all other matters she had been a spendthrift of classic proportions.”

The young lady who gazed from the portrait was very beautiful, although I couldn't tell how much was real and how much was flattery. Her hair was secured by a single long pin, and the tip of it was just visible. Master Li studied it with his nose no more than an inch from the surface.

“That's what he meant,” he muttered. “It's stone, all right, and the artist wouldn't have dared to toss in a sarcastic touch.”

He turned and started back down the path. “Remember the words of Ssu-ma Ch'ien? The second blow of the axe broke a small sliver from the stone of the Laughing Prince, and it appears that a small sliver of stone decorated the hairpin of the Laughing Prince's wife. I'll have to remember to ask her about it.”

We stared at him, but he said no more about it.

Where Grief of Dawn was concerned, Moon Boy was all business. He didn't once slip away in search of pretty boys, and we made good time. In a few days we stopped at the crest of a hill and gazed down at the roof of a small temple, and Master Li said it was our destination.

“The Temple of Liu Ling,” he said. “Ever hear of him?”

We said we hadn't.

“We were quite a group, I suppose, but Ling was miles ahead of any of us,” Master Li said, smiling at ancient memories. “I can see him now in his cart pulled by two deer, followed by a couple of servants. One carried enough wine to kill Liu Ling, and the other carried a spade to bury him on the spot—so much for Confucian ceremony. When I came to call he'd greet me stark naked, and I can still hear him scream, ‘The universe is my dwelling place and my house is my only clothes! Why are you entering into my pants?’ ”

Master Li pointed to the temple. “Ling decided that men listen only to lies, so he founded the Temple of Illusion and arranged for the order to continue after his death. Moon Boy, can illusion of and by itself kill a man?”

Moon Boy shrugged. “My teacher, Lin Tsening, once deafened a bandit by persuading him that he was hearing two monstrous dragons in the next room. There were no dragons. The actual sound was scarcely loud enough to frighten sparrows, but the bandit was still deaf.”

“Ox?”

“Granny Ho once got mad at her son-in-law,” I said. “She put him into some sort of trance, and told him he had fallen downstairs and hurt his left leg. When he woke up he laughed at her, and a day later his left leg turned black and blue and began to swell, and he was so lame he couldn't work for a week.”

“Excellent,” said Master Li. “My young friends, I need to recall something. Years and years ago on a walking trip I saw a Bombay thorn apple, but I've long forgotten where it was. In addition, I need to take a totally fresh look at things I have seen or guessed at, but not fully understood. In short, I need to take a trip into the inner recesses of my mind, and I want to take you with me. Nothing is more dangerous than a voyage inward. If your mind and senses tell you that a spear has plunged into your heart, does it matter whether the spear is real or imaginary?”

I thought about it. “It seems to me that either way, you'd be dead,” I said, and Moon Boy nodded agreement.

“Keep that in mind,” Master Li said grimly. “The Temple of Illusion is Liu Ling's masterpiece, and a great many people who have ridden up to it in carriages have departed in coffins.”

With those cheering words he started down the hill. The temple was small and bare, and a small courtyard led to a plain room where a priest sat behind a desk reading a scroll. He didn't bother to look up when we entered. Master Li slid quite a lot of money across the desk. “One,” he said. He added another pile. “Two.” He added a third pile. Three,” he said. Still the priest didn't look up, but he rang a bell, and another priest entered and led us to a small room that contained only a row of pallets on the floor and a single plaque on the wall.

I was rather surprised. I had expected mysterious music and thick incense and all the other trappings of mumbo jumbo, but apparently the illusions of Liu Ling didn't need any embellishment. The plaque was in simple script I could read, and I studied it with interest.

Chuang Tzu said, “Once I dreamed myself to be a butterfly, floating like petals in the air, happy to be doing as I pleased, no longer aware of myself. But soon enough I woke, and then, frantically clutching myself, Chuang Tzu I was. I wonder: Was Chuang Tzu dreaming himself to be the butterfly, or was the butterfly dreaming itself to be Chuang Tzu? Of course, if you take Chuang Tzu and the butterfly together, there is a difference between them, but is not the difference only the illusion of material form?”

The silent priest reappeared with three cups of wine and three small bowls, and he gestured that we should eat and drink. Master Li ate the stuff in his bowl with the air of a connoisseur. “I don't know what they put in the wine, but this is Devil's Ears, the most powerful of hallucinatory mushrooms,” he said nonchalantly. Then he turned and pointed to the plaque.

“Chuang Tzu once made a meal of Devil's Ears. Then he had a vision that explained all the perplexing problems of mankind, and he wrote it down. When he came to himself he eagerly grabbed the paper and this is what he read. ‘Sheep's Groom couples with bamboo that has not sprouted for a long while and produces Green Peace plants. Green Peace plants produce leopards, and leopards produce horses, and horses produce men. Men in time return to Sheep's Groom.’ Wraps it all up rather neatly, don't you think?”

I choked on my mushroom. Moon Boy managed to eat his, so I followed suit, and then I clapped one hand to the top of my head and the other to my toes and waited for my hands to either spread apart or slam together. Nothing happened, and I began to breathe more easily. The silent priest came back in and gestured for us to follow, and walked through a door into a garden. I gazed with disbelieving eyes at the shadows.

The angle of the sun told me that it was at least the double hour of the horse. It had been early morning when we entered. Somehow nearly four hours had vanished. What had happened to them? Master Li didn't seem to be perturbed. He was trotting toward a small round pool of water in the center of the garden, and there was a happy smile on his face. As I came closer I saw something white at the bottom, and then I realized that a human skull was grinning up at us.

“Ling, dear old friend! My, you're certainly looking splendid today,” Master Li said.

Moon Boy and I very nearly toppled over. There wasn't a breath of wind, yet a tall patch of reeds at the back of the pool suddenly sprang into motion: bending, arching, jabbing, thrusting—it was calligraphy; the reeds were writing in the air.

“Li Kao, you were born to be hung!”

“You mean ‘hanged,’ ” Master Li said sweetly.

“I mean the gallows!”

The reeds began moving so fast I had trouble keeping up, but I gathered that the late Liu Ling was saying that the flaw in Master Li's character couldn't be explained by loathsome percentage alone, and in a previous incarnation Master Li must have been a hyena or a scorpion or even the East Idiot Ruler of South Tsi. The reeds became quite agitated as they reviewed that gentleman's career.

“— and cut off their hands and feet!”

“No, I couldn't have been the East Idiot Ruler of South Tsi,” Master Li said thoughtfully. “I would have cut off their noses as well.”