distinguished young gentlemen, so let's travel to see a friend of mine, and then on to see Tou Wan, the wife of the Laughing Prince.”
I had to admire Moon Boy. He had just discovered that his previous existences broke the world record for wickedness, but he preened himself as though nothing had happened and kept his voice steady.
“At the risk of sounding stupid, why don't we go see the aristocratic assassin himself?” he asked reasonably.
Master Li started off in silence. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “That would be a bit difficult. You see, according to the Register of Souls, the Laughing Prince managed to elude the bailiffs, and he has never arrived in Hell.”
18
Looking back at it, I think it was fortunate that Moon Boy and I were preoccupied with images of a mad mummy creeping up from a tomb to the room where Grief of Dawn lay helpless in bed. It distracted us from the details of Hell, and some of them were very unpleasant. We were approaching the river How Nai-ho, which is the boundary between the First and Second Hells. It is spanned by three bridges: One is gold and is used by visiting gods and their emissaries, one is silver and is used by the virtuous, and the third is a ramshackle bamboo bridge with no handrails that is used by sinners. The sinners scream in terror as they try to cross the river. Inevitably they fall off, and horrible bronze dogs and snakes splash through the water with jaws gaping wide. The water bubbles with blood, but it's merely a foretaste of what is to come, because the mangled bodies wash up on the far bank and are miraculously healed, and laughing demons lead the sinners to places where torment begins in earnest.
Master Li marched toward the gold bridge while Moon Boy bellowed, “Make way for Lord Li of Kao, emissary of the Son of Heaven!” and we proceeded past glaring demons and over the golden span as though we owned it. The Second Hell punishes dishonest male and female intermediaries and ignorant or unscrupulous doctors. The torment is not one of the terrible ones, but the smell is revolting, and Moon Boy and Master Li clapped handkerchiefs to their noses. I was used to barnyards, so I wasn't bothered very much. We made our way down long lines of pits, and finally Master Li stopped at one where a fat fellow with a mournful flabby face was buried in soft manure up to his chin. Even through the reek he could smell living flesh, and his eyes slowly lifted.
“Now, look here, Li Kao, if it's about that land I sold you—”
“Nothing like that,” said Master Li.
“I had no idea there was alkali in the soil! May Heaven judge if I… er… may Heaven judge… er… oh, shit.”
“Well, you should be an expert on the subject,” Master Li said cheerfully. “Actually, the Yama Kings were quite lenient, considering the fact that you sold some of the same land to your own father.”
The fat fellow began to weep, and tears made pale furrows in the brown goo that covered most of his face. “You wouldn't bring that to their attention, would you?” he sobbed. “You can't imagine what the Neo-Confucians are doing to this place! They'd send me to the Eighth Hell, and that's horror beyond belief.”
“You should see what the same fellows are doing to China,” Master Li said gloomily. “The other night I dreamed you had returned as court physician, and I hadn't been so happy in years.”
It was difficult to draw oneself up with dignity under the circumstances, but the fat fellow tried.
“Not all of my patients died,” he said huffily. “Some even managed to walk again, and one or two didn't even need crutches!”
“The ones you treated for colds?”
“Colds or pimples. It is not the physician's fault if a patient is lunatic enough to come in with a case of hangnails,” the fellow said reasonably.
“You were a doctor in a million,” Master Li said warmly. “Who else would have prescribed arsenic oxide for hiccups?”
It worked!”
“No patient is in a position to dispute it,” Master Li said somewhat ambiguously. “Medical expertise is not what I've come to see you about, however. Do you remember the walking trip we took in Tungan? It must have been eighty or ninety years ago, and I've reached the point where my brain resembles the stuff you're buried in. All I can remember is a girl in a scarlet sampan.”
The transformation was amazing. Flab appeared to melt from the fat fellow's face, and I realized that he had once been a lighthearted and rather handsome young man.
“You remember her too?” he said softly. “Li Kao, not a day has passed in which I haven't thought of that girl. Wasn't that a time? She sang ‘Autumn Nights’ and tossed rice cakes into the water and laughed as we dove for them like ducks. By all the gods, I hope she made it to Heaven.”
“Wasn't there a festival?” Master Li asked.
“A wild village one. Masks and drums and monkey-dances, and that big farmer picked you up after you'd blackened his eye and crowned you King of Fleas. We stayed drunk for a week, and they gave us gifts of food and flowers when we left.”
He gazed sadly down at his manure pit. “What a wonderful thing it was to be young,” he whispered.
Master Li told us to keep our eyes peeled for demons while he leaned down and tilted his wine flask at the fellow's lips. It had been a long time between drinks, and he gulped a quart.
“Buddha, that's wonderful stuff! Haining Mountain Dew?”
“The best,” Master Li said. “You were an avid botanist in those days, and I seem to remember that after we left the girl in the sampan we set out cross-country. We passed a temple or a convent, and when we climbed into the hills, you discovered—”
“The Bombay thorn apple!” the fellow cried. “How could I forget it? The find of a lifetime, and I always planned to go back, but somehow the world closed in on me and I never did.”
“Could you find it now?” Master Li asked.
The fellow looked up with sudden intelligence in his eyes. “So that's it. You need a Bombay thorn apple, do you? Dangerous stuff, Li Kao. You always did get involved in the damnedest things, and how you manage to keep alive is one of the great mysteries of the empire.”
Master Li leaned down with the flask again.
“What a pair we are,” the fellow said when he stopped coughing. “I'm damned and you're demented. I may be a sinner, but at least I know it isn't nice to deprive children or lunatics of their toys, and if I wanted the only Bombay thorn apple I've ever seen in China I'd go about two miles past the White Cloud Convent to the point where the hills are closest to the road. I'd turn east and start climbing. Shale followed by granite followed by some kind of black rock, and past the black rock I'd come to a clearing in front of a cliff. Tunnel through the brush, and right against the cliff is another tiny clearing, and in the center is a Bombay thorn apple—unless somebody's cut it down for firewood and massacred his family and neighbors in the process.”
His eyes moved to Moon Boy and me. “Something to do with Beauty and the Beast, eh? Take care, Li Kao. This is the soft area of hell. Later on you'll need a better passport than a state umbrella.”
Master Li bowed and turned to go. “You know, the Yama Kings are stern but just,” he said. “Good intentions can at least partially mitigate bad results, and the Great Wheel waits patiently. Who knows? After a couple of insect and animal incarnations, you might find yourself poling down the Yangtze in a crimson sampan.”
The fellow looked up with desperate hope in his eyes. “You couldn't possibly have sneaked a look at the Register of Souls,” he whispered.
Master Li winked. We started off down the path, and the last I saw of the fellow he was weeping with joy at the thought of being reborn as a sampan singsong girl, and the last I heard of him he was practicing ‘Autumn Nights.'
The torments of the Third and Fourth Hells are also relatively light, and are designed for such sinners as bad bureaucrats, backbiters, forgers, coiners, misers, dishonest tradesmen, and blasphemers. Serious torment begins in the Fifth Hell, where murderers, unbelievers, and the lustful are punished. I will make no attempt to describe the caldrons of boiling oil, the pits of molten lead, the beams of hollow iron, the Hill of Knives, and the Sawmill. Master Li told me that such things are utilized by most cultures with the exception of the Tibetan, and that the Yama Kings
