an with soil and plant samples for analysis, and then get our hands on the greatest sound-master in the empire. In the meantime, you have a problem.”
He waved his wine flask back toward the treasure chambers.
“Technically this stuff is yours. Do you want it?”
The prince shuddered. “Nightmares would finish me in a month if I took a single coin,” he said.
“Nonetheless, if word of the discovery gets out, you'll be visited by every criminal, warlord, and greedy state minister in the empire,” Master Li pointed out.
“Suppose I make a gift of it to the throne?” the prince asked hopefully.
“People tend to impute their own flaws to others,” Master Li said. “The avaricious will never believe that you didn't keep the choicest gems for yourself, and the missing jade suit of your ancestor will be considered absolute proof. Are you particularly fond of torture?”
The prince turned as white as one of the skeletons. “But what can I do with this tomb?” he whispered.
Master Li turned to me. “Ox, can you manage it?” he asked.
I drew myself up proudly. “Venerable Sir, you are talking to a former apprentice of Big Hong the blacksmith,” I said.
He turned back to the prince. “What tomb?” he said.
“What tomb?” I said.
The prince began to regain some color. “What tomb?” he said.
It really wasn't very difficult. The stones and bricks were easily replaced, and there were countless pieces of old iron lying around the estate. I was very proud of my makeshift furnace and bellows, and when I had finished, I doubted that anyone would notice the patch in the iron wall unless he was looking for one.
The difficult part was putting the skeletons in the tunnel back into place, and that was because I kept hearing a mad mummy in a suit of jade creeping up behind me. When I added artistic layers of dust and cobwebs there wasn't a greedy bureaucrat in the empire who would believe that Prince Liu Pao or anyone else had entered the tomb of the Laughing Prince. Then we left for Ch'ang-an.
9
I had never been to the capital before, but I thought I knew about big cities from my experiences in Peking. That illusion vanished the moment we passed through the Gate of Luminous Virtue. I gaped like any yokel at a raucous beehive where two million people buzzed inside walls that enclosed thirty square miles. There were twenty-five north-south avenues, and every one of them was four hundred eighty feet wide and lined with elm, fruit, and pagoda trees. The avenues rose to a high hill called Dragon Head Plain, and converged to a single road of bluish stone that wound up like a dragon's tail to the vast basilicas of the elite who ruled the empire.
I was awed and silent as we took the Street of the Vermilion Sparrow toward Dragon Head Plain. We passed through the Gate of the Red Bird just as a thousand drums pounded the three hundred beats that heralded the opening of the markets, and I felt dizzy in the atmosphere of a thousand years of greatness as we approached the legendary Brush Forest Academy, where Chinese genius is nurtured. Master Li had been one of the geniuses, and his reaction was slightly less than reverent.
“Fraud, my boy! Fraud and forgery,” he said, waving disgustedly at sacrosanct landmarks. “Paint slapped over dry rot and gilded with lies. Some of the lies are rather pretty, however, and my favorite concerns the little peasant lad who's digging a ditch behind a village schoolhouse.”
Master Li pulled out his flask and drank deeply, which caused outraged comments from distinguished-looking pedestrians. He ignored them.
“The urchin's keen ears catch fragments of lessons drifting from the window,” Master Li said between burps. “One day the schoolmaster absentmindedly falls into the ditch and discovers to his astonishment that the boy has covered the walls with masterful drawings, flawless mathematics, and learned quotations from the ancients.
” ‘Boy, are you not the scrofulous, illiterate, and lice-ridden urchin called Hong Wong?’ the schoolmaster gasps.
” ‘The insignificant name of this worthless one should not blemish the esteemed lips of Your Magnificence!’ the lad wails.
” ‘And is not your father the ulcerous, flatulent, maggot-infested fellow called Hong the Hopeless, who takes pride in the fact that he has failed the examination for village idiot sixteen years in a row?'
“The lad falls to his knees and begins banging his head against the ground. ‘Seventeen!’ he sobs. Well, the schoolmaster grabs the boy by the ear and hauls him into the classroom, of course, and gives him every test he can think of, and word spreads far and wide that the latest Chinese genius has been discovered in a ditch in an insignificant village eight miles from nowhere. You know the rest. Triumph after triumph, the highest awards and degrees, elevation to important office, advisor to emperors and savior of peasants, and eventual deification to become Celestial Patron of scrofulous, illiterate, lice-ridden lads digging ditches behind schoolhouses.”
Master Li spat with lamentable accuracy upon a statue of K'uei-hsing, God of Examinations.
“Now let's take a look at reality,” he said. “Little Hong Wong is indeed taken in hand by the educational establishment and force-fed languages, calligraphy, poetry, painting, dancing, music, chess, etiquette, courtly ritual, philosophy, religion, history, and the classics, following which he's ready to start learning something—mathematics, for example. Agriculture, engineering, economics, medicine, government, and the art of war. He passes his examinations with honors and receives his first official appointment, and then what happens?”
He actually seemed to want an answer, so I shrugged and said, “A superior who inherited the job from an uncle rams a barge pole up his ass.”
“Good boy,” Master Li said approvingly. “Hong Wong has just entered the world of the Neo-Confucians, to whom all innovation is anathema. His brilliant plan for a sanitation system will be rejected out of hand because it has no direct parallel in ancient times. His astronomical observations will be used as evidence in his trial for heresy, because they cannot be confirmed in the oldest texts. His paintings do not slavishly imitate the ancients, and his poetry is not plagiarism, and his essays do not deal with the three hundred thirty-three approved subjects, so all of them will be burned. Hong Wong will be very lucky if he is merely stripped of rank and possessions and kicked out to starve, and if he is truly a genius, he will not be so lucky. Lin Tseh-shu was banished to a corner of Turkestan so distant the sun hasn't reached it yet, or so they say. Su Tung-po was exiled to Hainan, whose principal exports are malaria, jungle rot, and leprosy. Chu Suilang was last seen sinking into a swamp in Vietnam, and when Han Yu stepped off the prison boat in Swatow he was very nearly devoured by crocodiles.”
Wen Ch'ang, God of Literature, received the next stream of saliva.
“Ox, at an early age a Chinese genius gazes at the path that lies ahead and reaches for a wine jar,” Master Li said. “Is it any wonder that our greatest men have lurched rather than walked across the landscape as they hiccuped their way into history?”
“Sir, that's the best autobiography I ever heard!” I said enthusiastically.
Master Li's reputation was still considerable, although tainted with a questionable aroma, and our soil and plant samples were given priority at the Academy of Divination and Alchemic Research. Then he set out again, climbing to Imperial City and the great palaces of the bureaucrats. Again I was overawed as I gazed to the top of the hill and Palace City, where the imperial family lived, and then the Gate of the Cinnabar Phoenix, which led to the Great Luminous Palace of Emperor T'ang T'ai-tsung. Master Li wasn't going that high, however. He turned toward a building that made my blood turn cold: the Gate of the Beautiful Vista, which is the headquarters of the Secret Service and which was surrounded by straw mannequins with the flayed hides of corrupt officials wrapped around them. (The emperor had been busy cleaning house since he took over, and Master Li thoroughly approved of T'ang.) Fortunately Master Li was heading toward a smaller palace next door, and I looked forward to meeting a legendary lady.
The Captain of Prostitutes is the most powerful woman in China, except when an Empress sits upon the throne. Her guild is the heart and soul of espionage, and almost entirely responsible for probing the mysterious minds of barbarians. Couriers constantly gallop from her palace with coded messages for the Bower of Brilliant Companions in Hangchow, or the Sun-Bright Residence in Loyang, or the Pavilion of Increasing Perfection in Peking, and many a powerful official has shared his bed and secrets with a young lady and awakened to find the lady gone,
