little guts out. All over the sacred Confucian Stones.
“One million miseries!” howled Master Li.
A gentleman of the old school is prepared for any emergency, however, and Master Li swiftly joined forces with the fierce old fellow with the medals to recruit a bucket brigade to dump cleansing water over the stones. Thoroughness is also a mark of the old school, and Master Li would not rest until he extracted some large sheets of paper from his tunic and pressed them down firmly over every indentation of the sacred text. Fortunately he also happened to be carrying a huge blue sponge, and he rubbed it over the surface so vigorously that the outside of the paper turned blue. When he lifted the sheets, the stones were nearly dry, and as good as new.
The audience, meanwhile, explained to the furious guards that it was all their fault for stuffing the little angels with goo, and the matron and the bemedaled gentleman took up a collection to pay the fine. There wasn't a dry eye as Master Li marched the lads away, and behind us I heard a chorus bawling, “The hope of the empire!”
Master Li led the boys into a secluded glade. “All right, brats, let it out,” he said.
The boys collapsed on the grass, rolling around and pummeling each other and howling with laughter. “Please, sir, may we see?” one of them asked when he had regained his breath.
Master Li took out the pieces of paper. The ink from the sponge had settled in nicely, and the imprints were perfect. Genuine rubbings of the Confucian Stones are hard to come by. The boys begged to stay with Master Li and continue their lives of crime, but he advised them to remain in school and study hard so they could mastermind the mobs when they descended into depravity. Then he returned them to the schoolmaster and took the schoolmaster's place in the wineshop.
He ordered the stuff he had been named for, kao-liang, which is a terrible wine but a wonderful paint remover, and began using it to remove the peaks from every that was accompanied by in the rubbings and replace them with flat lines:. Then he left the wineshop and we started up the Street of the Vermilion Sparrow to Dragon Head Plain.
“Brother Squint-Eye's forgery of the Ssu-ma was a crude tracing of a coded manuscript that contained the name of the historian's own father, and to a collector the monk's copy would have looked like the most obvious and inept fraud in history,” he explained. “If the foolish monk brought it to Ch'ang-an and tried to sell it, it's a wonder he wasn't decapitated on the spot. There is, however, one place that might have bought the thing, and perhaps some pitying person told him where to go.”
The Pavilion of the Blessings of Heaven is the greatest library in the world, and in addition to its collection of original manuscripts, it maintains a collection of forgeries. Both can be instructive to scholars, and some woefully inept forgeries are kept for pure entertainment value. Master Li made his way to the office of Liu Hsiang, the head librarian.
“Greetings, Hsiang,” he said cheerfully.
“Lock up the manuscripts! Lock up the silver and incense burners! Lock up your wives and check your rings and purses!” the librarian screamed. “Hello, Kao, What brings you back to civilization?” he continued in a normal tone of voice.
“Shopping trip. My study lacks something, and I've decided I need a fake to hang on the wall.”
“You know very well that our collection is not for sale,” the librarian said primly.
“Who said anything about selling? I'm talking about trading,” Master Li said, and he took out the rubbings and tossed them on the desk.
“Think of the labor that went into that thing,” he said with a chuckle.
“Who bothers to fake rubbings?” the librarian said skeptically. He glanced at them and then looked more closely, and after a few moments he began making small-strangled sounds. I realized he was laughing. The librarian staggered to his feet and embraced Master Li, and the two old men clung together whooping and gasping with mirth. Moon Boy and Grief of Dawn and I pounded them on the back until they calmed down.
“Hilarious, isn't it?” Master Li said, wiping his eyes. “Think of the months it took the idiot to do this.”
“Months? Say he did ten characters a day… That's seven years!” the librarian chortled.
Master Li waved us over to the desk. “My children, do you see the joke?” he asked.
We scratched our heads. “They look like genuine rubbings of the Confucian Stones to me,” I said.
“Look at this character here—and here and here. Do you know what it means?”
“Yes, sir,” Moon Boy said.
The librarian broke in. “Ah, but in the days of Confucius it wasn't written like that!” he exclaimed happily. “See the flat lines on top? In the old days it wasn't a flat line but a peak, like a rooftop—he swiftly, sketched—“so the idiotic forger was saying that Confucius—”
Moon Boy's face lit up. “Confucius couldn't—”
Grief of Dawn's face lit up. “Confucius couldn't even—”
“Confucius couldn't even write ‘ancestor'!” I howled.
The three of us clung together, whooping and hollering, and the librarian and Master Li very kindly pounded our backs until we regained control.
“Kao, this is truly a treasure of incompetence, and if you have something reasonable in mind, we might make a deal,” the librarian said.
Master Li scratched the tip of his nose. “Well, I'm rather in the mood for mangled history. Anything new?”
“Not on this level. It isn't every day that—wait! How about a truly pathetic Ssu-ma Ch'ien?”
“Sounds promising,” Master Li said casually.
The librarian rang a bell for his assistant. “Not long ago an idiotic monk showed up with the most inept Ssu- ma I've seen in years, and a tracing at that.”
“Do tell,” said Master Li.
It was as simple as that. A few minutes later we walked out of the Blessings of Heaven Pavilion, and Master Li had Brother Squint-Eyes’ traced copy in his hands.
13
We found a pleasant little park and bought grasshopper pies and plum juice with vinegar from one of the vendors, and sat down on the grass beneath a pagoda tree. Master Li had already scanned Brother Squint-Eyes’ forgery. He had also taken a detour through one of the scroll depositories, and he reached into his tunic and extracted an ancient scroll that was sealed with the stamp “Restricted Shelves: Authorized Staff Only.” He placed the scroll, the forged manuscript, and the report on the soil and plant samples beside him on the grass, and concentrated on his grasshopper pie. Then he included all of us in a wave of his finger.
“Tell me the story of the emperor and the tangerines,” he commanded.
We stared at him.
“Sir?” I said weakly.
“You heard me.”
We looked at each other, and finally Moon Boy shrugged. “Long ago there was an emperor named Li Ling- chi,” he said. “He was good. He was very good. In fact, he was so good that birds flew around his head singing songs of praise, and butterflies danced before him.”
“He was so good that fish and frogs jumped from ponds to receive his blessing,” said Grief of Dawn. “He was so good that on feast days a few of the gods always flew down from Heaven to have tea with him. Tea and tangerines, because his only weakness was a fondness for tangerines. His people were delighted that he wasn't fond of the things that usually entertain emperors, such as wars and massacres.”
“Li Ling-chi got better and better,” I said. “He became so good that he couldn't bear the sight of evil, so he had his craftsmen make him a headdress with a veil of two hundred eighty-eight jewels, and he couldn't bear to hear evil, so they added jeweled earflaps. That way he only saw pretty shining things and he only heard tinkle- tinkle-tinkle, except on feast days, when he took off his headdress to have tea with the gods.”
“Tea and tangerines, except one day there were no tangerines,” Moon Boy said “The emperor was outraged. ‘How can I have tea without tangerines?’ he cried. ‘O Son of Heaven,’ said the chamberlain, ‘it is winter, and in
