Wang the wineseller, whose small daughter was screaming and clawing the air. More and more parents dashed out with children in their arms, and a frantic mob raced up the hill toward the monastery.
It was not rabies. It was a plague.
I stared in disbelief at two tiny girls who were standing in a doorway with their thumbs in their mouths. Mother Ho's great-granddaughters were so sickly that the abbot had worked night and day to keep them alive, yet they were completely untouched by the plague. I ran past them into their cottage. Mother Ho was ninety-two and sinking fast, and my heart was in my mouth as I approached her bed and drew back the covers. I received a stinging slap on my nose.
“Who do you think you are? The Imperial Prick?” the old lady yelled.
(She meant Emperor Wu-ti. After his death his lecherous ghost kept hopping into his concubines’ beds, and in desperation they had recruited new brides from all over, and it was not until the total reached 503 that the exhausted spectre finally gave up and crawled back into its tomb.)
I ran back out and turned into cottage after cottage, where tiny children stared at me and cried, or laughed and wanted to play, and the old ones who wept beside the racks of rotting silkworms were otherwise as healthy as horses. Then I ran back up the hill and told the abbot what I had seen, and when we made a list the truth was indisputable, and it was also unbelievable.
Not one child under the age of eight and not one person over the age of thirteen had been affected by the plague, but every child—every single one—between the ages of eight and thirteen had screamed and blindly clawed the air, and now lay as still as death in the infirmary that the abbot had set up in the bonzes’ common room. The weeping parents looked to the abbot for a cure, but he spread his arms and cried out in despair:
“First tell me how a plague can learn how to count!”
Auntie Hua had always been the decisive one in our family. She took me aside. “Ox, the abbot is right,” she said hoarsely. “We need a wise man who can tell us how a plague can learn to count, and I have heard that there are such men in Peking, and that they live on the Street of Eyes. I have also heard that they charge dearly for their services.”
“Auntie, it will take a week to squeeze money out of Pawnbroker Fang, even though Fawn is one of the victims,” I said.
She nodded, and then she reached into her dress and pulled out a worn leather purse. When she dumped the contents into my hands I stared at more money than I had ever seen in my life: hundreds of copper coins, strung upon a green cord.
“Five thousand copper cash, and you are never to tell your uncle about this. Not ever!” the old lady said fiercely. “Run to Peking. Go to the Street of Eyes and bring a wise man back to our village.”
I had heard that Auntie Hua had been a rather wild beauty in her youth and I briefly wondered whether she might have reason to sacrifice to P'an Chin-lien, the patron of fallen women, but I had no time for such speculations because I was off and running like the wind.
I share my birthday with the moon, and Peking was a madhouse when I arrived. Trying to shove through the mobs that had turned out for the Moon Festival was like one of those nightmares in which one struggles through quicksand. The din was incredible, and I forced my way through the streets with the wild eyes and aching ears of a colt at a blacksmiths’ convention, and I was quite terrified when I finally reached the street that I was looking for. It was an elegant avenue that was lined on both sides with very expensive houses, and above each door was the sign of a wide unblinking eye.
“The truth revealed,” those eyes seemed to be saying. “We see everything.”
I felt the first stirrings of hope, and I banged at the nearest door. It was opened by a haughty eunuch who was attired in clothes that I had previously associated with royalty, and he ran his eyes from my bamboo hat to my shabby sandals, clapped a perfumed handkerchief to his nose, and ordered me to state my business. The eunuch didn't blink an eye when I said that I wanted his master to explain how a plague could learn to count, but when I said that I was prepared to pay as much as five thousand copper cash he turned pale, leaned weakly against the wall, and groped for smelling salts.
“Five thousand copper cash?” he whispered. “Boy, my master charges fifty pieces of silver to find a lost dog!”
The door slammed in my face, and when I tried the next house I exited through the air, pitched by six husky footmen while a bejeweled lackey shook his fist and screamed, “You dare to offer five thousand copper cash to the former chief investigator for the Son of Heaven himself? Back to your mud hovel, you insolent peasant!”
In house after house the result was the same, except that I exited in a more dignified manner—my fists were clenched and there was a glint in my eyes, and I am not exactly small—and I decided that I was going to have to hit a wise man over the head, stuff him in a bag, and carry him back to Ku-fu whether he liked it or not. Then I received a sign from Heaven. I had reached the end of the avenue and was starting to go back up the other side, and suddenly a shaft of brilliant sunlight shot through the clouds and darted like an arrow into a narrow winding alley. It sparkled upon the sign of an eye, but this eye was not wide open. It was half-shut.
“Part of the truth revealed,” the eye seemed to be saying. “Some things I see, but some I don't.”
If that was the message it was the first sensible thing that I had seen in Peking, and I turned and started down the alley.
3. A Sage with a Slight Flaw in His Character
The sign was old and shabby, and it hung above the open door of a sagging bamboo shack. When I timidly stepped inside I saw smashed furniture and a mass of shattered crockery, and the reek of sour wine made my head reel. The sole inhabitant was snoring upon a filthy mattress.
He was old almost beyond belief. He could not have weighed more than ninety pounds, and his frail bones would have been more suitable for a large bird. Drunken flies were staggering through pools of spilled wine, and crawling giddily up the ancient gentleman's bald skull, and tumbling down the wrinkled seams of a face that might have been a relief map of all China, and becoming entangled in a wispy white beard. Small bubbles formed and burst upon the old man's lips, and his breath was foul.
I sighed and turned to go, and then I stopped dead in my tracks and caught my breath.
Once an eminent visitor to our monastery had displayed the gold diploma that was awarded to the scholar who had won third place in the imperial chin-shih examination, and in school-books I had seen illustrations of the silver diploma that was awarded to second place, but never did I dream that I would be privileged to see the flower. The real thing, not a picture of it. There it was, casually tacked to a post not two feet from my eyes, and I reverently blew away the dust to read that seventy-eight years ago a certain Li Kao had been awarded first place among all the scholars in China, and had received an appointment as a full research fellow in the Forest of Culture Academy.
I turned from the picture of the rose and gazed with wide eyes at the ancient gentleman upon the mattress. Could this be the great Li Kao, whose brain had caused the empire to bow at his feet? Who had been elevated to the highest rank of mandarin, and whose mighty head was now being used as a pillow for drunken flies? I stood there, rooted in wonder, while the wrinkles began to heave like the waves of a gray and storm-tossed sea. Two red-rimmed eyes appeared, and a long spotted tongue slid out and painfully licked parched lips.
“Wine!” he wheezed.
I searched for an unbroken jar, but there wasn't one. “Venerable Sir, I fear that all the wine is gone,” I said politely.
His eyes creaked toward a shabby purse that lay in a puddle. “Money!” he wheezed.
I picked up the purse and opened it. “Venerable Sir, I fear that the money is gone too,” I said.
His eyeballs rolled up toward the top of his head, and I decided to change the subject.
“Have I the honor of addressing the great Li Kao, foremost among the scholars of China? I have a problem to place before such a man, but all that I can afford to pay is five thousand copper cash,” I said sadly.
A hand like a claw slid from the sleeve of his robe. “Give!” he wheezed.
I placed the string of coins in his hand, and his fingers closed around it, taking possession. Then the fingers opened.
