“Great Buddha, that fellow couldn't possibly have been working alone. He must be the representative for a consortium of the richest companies in China!” Master Li gasped.
I didn't know what he was talking about. Li Kao jerked the canvas cover aside and scooped up a strange object from a pile—we later discovered that there were 270 of them—and began attaching pins to it. The iron practically jumped to the surface, and the next pin stuck to the end of the first one.
“Ten pins,” he prayed. “If it will hold ten pins! Seven… eight… nine… ten… eleven… twelve… thirteen… fourteen… fifteen… sixteen… seventeen…”
The eighteenth pin fell to the ground, and Li Kao turned to me with wonder in his eyes.
“Number Ten Ox, barbarian merchants and navies will sell their very souls for Chinese magnetic compasses that are pure enough to hold ten inch-long pins attached end to end, and we have hundreds that are pure enough to hold seventeen! My boy, I have made some hauls in my day, but this is ridiculous,” he said gravely. “You and I have just become the two wealthiest men in all China.”
14. Lotus Cloud
The first order of business was to establish our credentials as gentlemen of vast wealth and generosity, and I have a blurred memory of flowers and gongs and incense and silver bells, boat races and dice games and cricket fights, brawls and banquets and tangles of luscious bare limbs. We sailed upon brightly painted brothel barges that floated over azure lakes—and docked at artificial emerald islands where pallid priests with flabby faces and twitching hands sold the strangest things in peculiar pagodas—and we rode through the streets in a palanquin so huge that it was carried by sixty swearing servants. Naked dancing girls were draped around us, and we scooped handfuls of silver coins from a brass-bound chest and hurled them to the adoring mobs that followed our every step.
“Buy clean clothes!” we yelled. “Sweeten your foul breaths with decent wine! Get rid of your loathsome lice! Bathe!”
“Long Live Lord Li of Kao!” the mobs howled. “Long live Lord Lu of Yu!”
I have probably given the impression that I had forgotten the importance of our quest. Such was not the case. Every night I dreamed of the children of Ku-fu, and I began to be tortured by guilt, and it was with immense relief that I heard Master Li say that our status was well enough established and it was time to make our move. He decided that the fastest way to get to the Key Rabbit would be to burn our palace to the ground, since it was rented from the Duke of Ch'in at a ruinous rate, and I was roasting a goose over the embers when the little fellow pattered up.
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!” he wailed. “Regulation 226, paragraph D, subsection B: palaces, rented, accidental destruction thereof—”
“Willful. I found the view boring,” Master Li yawned.
“Subsection C: palaces, rented, willful destruction thereof. Full value plus fifty percent, plus firefighting costs, plus wreckage-removal costs, plus triple the normal fine for disturbing the peace, plus fifty percent of the total for defaming the view provided by the duke, plus—”
“Stop babbling, you idiot, and give me the grand total!” Master Li roared.
I thought that the little fellow was going to die. He rolled his pink-rimmed eyes toward Heaven and screamed: “Nineteen thousand seven hundred and sixty-two pieces of gold!”
Li Kao shrugged and pointed toward a long row of chests. “Take one of the blue ones,” he said indifferently. “Actually the blue ones each contain twenty thousand pieces of gold, but Lord Li of Kao and Lord Lu of Yu can scarcely be bothered with change.”
The Key Rabbit toppled over backward. It took a few minutes to revive him, but he grasped the possibilities instantly.
“Alas!” he panted. “Lord Li of Kao and Lord Lu of Yu have no place in which to spend the night, and while my humble abode is scarcely suitable… You see, I will probably have to stay in the castle all night counting the duke's money, and my dear wife will be all alone and unprotected. Women require protection, among other things.”
He fell to his knees and began kissing the tips of our sandals. “Such as pearls!” he wailed. “Jade!” he howled.
“May we offer you some roast goose?” Master Li said not unkindly. “It is Lord Lu of Yu's own recipe, marinated twenty-four hours in the lees of fine wine, with honey and crushed apricots. Lord Lu of Yu, incidentally, is a disciple of Chang Chou, who said that he preferred his own cooking, but other people's wives.”
“Joy!” shrieked the Key Rabbit.
That night I prepared to meet the most expensive woman in the world. The moon was playing tag with fingers of clouds, and the breeze was warm and fragrant with flowers, and crickets chirped in the shadows of the Key Rabbit's garden. The path of pearls and jade that I had strewn upon the grass sparkled like a reflection of the Great River of Stars, and I found it difficult to breathe as I watched a young woman trot toward rne, exclaiming with wonder as she picked up each glittering bauble. Then she got close enough so I could see her clearly.
“Number Ten Ox,” I said to myself, “you have been robbed!”
She wasn't even pretty. Lotus Cloud was pure peasant, with big feet, short thick legs, large square hands, and a plain flat face. She stopped short and examined me with her head cocked at an angle, and she looked for all the world like a country girl who was trying to decide whether or not to buy a pet at a fair. I could almost hear her think, Yes, I'll take this cute thing home with me. And then she grinned.
I cannot describe that grin. It was as though all the hope and joy and love and laughter that there was in the whole world had gathered into a fist that reached out and belted me in the heart, and the next thing I knew I was on my knees with my arms wrapped around her legs and my head pressed against her thighs.
“My surname is Lu and my personal name is Yu, but I am not to be confused with the eminent author of The Classic of Tea, and everyone calls me Number Ten Ox,” I moaned.
She laughed softly, and her fingers played with my hair.
“I shall call you Boopsie,” she said.
The measure of my enchantment may be judged from the fact that I enjoyed being called Boopsie. In fact, I felt like wagging my tail whenever Lotus Cloud came into view.
“Key Rabbit,” I said a couple of days later, “your beloved wife is not witty, and she is not wise, and she cannot read or write, and she has no social graces whatsoever, and she isn't even pretty, and I worship the very ground that she walks on.”
“That,” sighed the Key Rabbit, “is what all her protectors say.”
“Master Li, have I lost my mind?” I asked.
“Well, beauty is a ridiculously overrated commodity,” he said. “Over the past eighty or ninety years I have known a great many beautiful women, and they've all been the same. A beauty is forced to lie late in her bed in the morning in order to gather strength for another mighty battle with nature. Then, after being bathed and toweled by her maids, she loosens her hair in the Cascade of Teasing Willows style, paints her eyebrows in the Distant Mountain Range style, anoints herself with Nine Bends of the River Diving-Water Perfume, applies rouge, mascara, and eye shadow, covers the whole works with two inches of the Powder of the Nonchalant Approach, squeezes into a plum-blossom-patterned tunic with matching skirt and stockings, adds four or five pounds of jewelry, looks into the mirror for any visible sign of humanity and is relieved to fine none, checks to make sure that her makeup has hardened into an immovable mask, sprinkles herself with the Hundred Ingredients Perfume of the Heavenly Spirits who Descended in the Rain Shower, and minces with tiny steps toward the new day, which, like any other day, consists of gossip and giggles.”
“That's part of it!” I cried. “Lotus Cloud hops out of bed and plunges her head into a pail of cold water, bellows “Aaarrrggghh!” runs a comb through her hair, and looks around to see if there's anyone handy who feels like making love. If such is the case, she hops back into bed. If not, she jumps into whatever clothes are lying around and leaps out the door—or window, it doesn't matter—to see what wonders the new day will bring, and since she views the world with the delighted eyes of a child, the day is bound to be marvelous.”
“That,” sighed the Key Rabbit, “is what all her protectors say. How I wish that I could afford my dear wife
