small hushed voice.
Confucian temples have no priests or formal worship, but they have a regular congregation of makers of bells. That's because of the pien-chung, a row of sixteen stone bells hanging in a wooden rack. The bells have no clappers and are struck by wooden beams swinging on ropes, and to most people the sound is dull and uninteresting, but bell makers view them differently. On the wooden frame is the inscription “When the bell speaks, the stone answers,” because a perfectly tuned metal bell will produce a matching echo from a similar stone bell, and it's the most accurate tuning device known.
A Confucian temple wasn't far away. Moon Boy ran his hands lovingly over the stone bells. He was in his professional element, and he was all business.
“The ancients separated musical instruments into categories corresponding to the trigrams of Fu Hsi,” he said, and for a mad moment I thought I was going to hear another lecture on the Wen-Wu lute. “Each instrument is defined by four qualities: the material it's made from, the cardinal point of its greatest strength, the season it suggests, and the related sound phenomenon.”
He began fashioning a framework from pieces of bamboo.
“The mouth organ is classified as gourd, northeast, winter/spring, and the sound of thunder. The zither is silk, south, summer, and the sound of fire. All instruments were easily classified until they came to the sonorous stone, and then the ancients became entangled in an argument that lasted nearly six centuries. They easily provided stone, northwest, and autumn/winter. The problem was the related sound phenomenon, and their final decision is still fiercely debated. It won't be easy, but I'll try to show you why they chose as they did.”
He lifted two of the stone bells to the bamboo frame and arranged them so the mouths were almost touching. He took two of the striking beams and swung them over so the ends were almost touching the sides of the bells.
“Ox has tried to describe the strange sound in Princes’ Path to me,” he said. “Now Master Li has spoken of a stone that might have been touched by Heaven, and which might be possessed of an overpowering ch'i. All I know is that stone produces two different sounds, and most people have only heard the sound from the surface. The other sound comes from the soul.”
He began to tap the beams against the bells, very lightly and rapidly. A dull stone sound filled the temple. His hands moved faster and faster. A vibration made my stomach feel queasy. Moon Boy's hands were blurs and the vibration became a humming sound that made the temple shake. His head bent down and his mouth almost touched the narrow crack between the two bells. Moon Boy's throat began to vibrate like a lark's. I realized that he was somehow pitching his voice into the two bell mouths simultaneously, but all I heard was the hum. Sweat was pouring down Moon Boy's face. His throat vibrated faster and faster. “When the bell speaks, the stone answers,” and the stones were beginning to answer. It was a nearly inaudible echo beneath the vibrating hum, gradually growing louder. Then the echo broke through, and my heart nearly broke loose from its moorings.
Kung… shang… chueeeeeeeeeeh…
Master Li had not been able to hear the sound on Princes’ Path, but now he looked as though somebody had smacked him with a barge pole. Grief of Dawn was weeping. “That's it!” I cried. “The sound I heard was a thousand times as pure and strong, but that's it!”
Kung… shang… chueeeeeeeeeeeh…
Moon boy stepped back, drenched in perspiration.
“The ancients,” he said, panting, “decided that the related phenomenon of the soul-sound of stone was nothing less than the Voice of Heaven.”
“Well, well, well,” said Master Li.
All the way back to the Valley of Sorrows Master Li kept it up. “Well, well, well… Well, well, well… Well, well, well…”
I hadn't seen him so happy in months.
Prince Liu Pao was delighted to see us. At first I was delighted to see him too, but then Master Li introduced Grief of Dawn. The prince jumped a foot into the air and his complexion switched back and forth from pink to white and the conversation went something like this.
“Would you care for tea?”
“No, thank you, Your Highness,” said Grief of Dawn.
“Wine, perhaps?”
“No, thank you, Your Highness,” said Grief of Dawn.
“Cakes? Fruit?”
“No, thank you, Your Highness,” said Grief of Dawn.
“How about a few swans?” the prince said hopefully. “Cash? Lambs? Silk?”
Since those were the classic wedding gifts, I decided I was in trouble. The prince's reaction to Moon Boy was almost as strong, and within minutes the three of them were so close that I began to think deep thoughts about Grief of Dawn's belief that part of the soul she shared with Moon Boy had been lost on the Great Wheel of Transmigrations. Had the wandering soul settled inside Prince Liu Pao? I asked Master Li about it, but he only grunted noncommittally.
He had something else to think about. Now all his attention was focused upon the mysterious stone of the Laughing Prince, and he settled down in the library at the monastery and began poring over ancient records in search of any mention of an unusual stone. He asked the prince to do the same with family papers, and I was sent out to see what I could find in peasant tales and legends.
It was something to keep my mind off the prince and Grief of Dawn. The stone stories of the old women in the village were the same ones I had heard all my life, so I tried a different kind of folk tale. Blacksmiths are surrounded by boys as flowers are surrounded by bees, so I decided to lend the village smith a hand. After I had lifted the anvil a few times and bent a few iron bars in my hands I had all the boys I needed, and within two days I was able to race into the library at the monastery.
“A stone! A magical stone!” I shouted. Master Li looked up from the scrolls and blinked at me. “It's a boys’ story, and very ancient,” I said excitedly. “So far I've only heard a vague description, but I know it deals with a hero who sneaks into a secret cavern and finds a magical stone. Know what he's trying to do with it?” I said rhetorically. “Kill the Laughing Prince, that's what.”
Master Li leaned back and pressed the tips of his fingers together. “Well, well, well,” he said.
14
Adult visitors were rarely allowed to attend meetings of the Sacred and Solemn Order of Wolf, but Prince Liu Pao was not the normal kind of visitor. The moon was very bright. I listened for a treble owl hoot and replied with two cat yowls, and a boy slipped from the shadows and led us through a maze of thick brush to the side of a low cliff. The prince and Master Li and Moon Boy and Grief of Dawn and I got down on our knees and crawled through an opening, and when we stood up we were inside a small cave. Thirteen boys, eleven to fourteen years old, greeted us formally. The occasion was the induction of the thirteenth, Little Skinhead, into the elite boys’ gang of the Valley of Sorrows, and we would be allowed to stay until they got to matters like codes and passwords.
A single torch burned at the back of the cave. Lying on the floor beneath it was the skeleton of a boy who had been about the same age as the members of the gang. It was a very ancient skeleton, and the boy's death had been dramatic. The rib cage was crushed, and inside it lay the iron head of an old spear. We followed the gang's example and bowed to the bones.
The leader was called Deer Ears. “We bow to Wolf, as have our fathers and grandfathers before us,” Deer Ears formally announced. “We gather in his honor, and our distinguished guests will be allowed to add one detail to his story.”
The boys sat in a semicircle facing the skeleton. We sat just behind them, and Deer Ears picked up an ancient ring from the skeleton's separated finger bones. He handed it politely to the prince, who examined it and passed it around. The ring was black iron, and engraved on the front was the head of a wolf. Master Li studied the inside of the ring with interest. There were faint lines and markings that made no sense to me. We handed the ring
