oil.
I came to the surface, gasping, and grabbed the oily arms and shoved upward. Slowly they began to slide. They stopped at my ears, and I reached down with one hand and scooped up more oil, and finally the deadly arms shot up over my head with a loud popping sound. I lurched to the rim of the basin and toppled over it to the ground, and the Laughing Prince stood up in the oil and extended his arms lovingly.
“Come back, dear boy. We haven't finished our dance,” he chuckled.
I crawled to the pillar and hauled myself upright and grabbed one of the sacrificial axes. The rigid corpse was out of the basin and walking toward me, arms extended. Both mad eyes were winking. I let the thing get within range, and then I chopped the legs off at the knees. The Laughing Prince tumbled over backward.
“The Stone and the Lord of Happiness crave more merriment!” the assistant howled.
I chopped the hands from the arms, and the arms from the torso, and raised the axe high and brought it down on the decomposing face. The head split apart, and as it did, the eyes winked in sequence.
“Quite,” said the left half of the mouth.
“Useless,” said the right half of the mouth.
I dropped the axe and staggered away and fell. I lay there, gasping for breath and unable to move.
“Sing the great Hymn of Joy, for our Lord of Happiness prepares the sacrifice!” screamed the assistant.
I managed to turn my head. The severed hands of the Laughing Prince were scuttling toward me like crabs. They crawled up my legs and over my chest, and clamped viciously around my throat.
“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed the capering corpses. “Ho, ho, ho!”
I staggered to my feet, futilely wrenching at the strangling hands, and lurched back toward the basin. I ducked my head into the oil and pried the oily fingers free, one by one. I hurled the hands back into the oil and stumbled to the pillar and wrenched a torch free. I hurled it blindly. It almost missed, but it teetered for a moment on the rim and then fell into the basin. I fell on my face, unable to move.
A pillar of flame shot toward the roof. Two balls of fire crawled over the rim and down to the ground, and all I could do was watch as the flaming hands crawled toward me. They were hissing and popping. Bones were separating. Fingers spurted greasy smoke and fire and detached from the hands and fell off. Black clouds were crawling toward my legs. They stopped and I jerked in pain as hissing stuff spattered my ankles. Then the clouds cleared, and where the hands had been were two piles of smoking charcoal.
The bells stopped. The gongs stopped. The corpses stood frozen in awkward dancing positions. Only the bats still continued to fly through the torchlight.
Something moved, and tears welled in my eyes and trickled down my nose as I saw Master Li crawl toward me. He was alive, and so were Grief of Dawn and Moon Boy, and I was alive too, and we weren't waking up to eternity as merry monks in motley.
24
Moon Boy propped my head up, and Master Li took out his flask and poured wine down my throat until I choked and coughed and sat up and spewed alcohol over my tunic. It helped to clear my head, which Master Li patted in grandfatherly fashion. “When traveling, always bring an ox with you,” he said.
Moon Boy planted a kiss on my left cheek, but it wasn't Moon Boy I wanted, and I was still so weak that I felt my eyes fill with tears. Grief of Dawn hadn't bothered to come to me, and I was about to drown in self-pity until I realized that, alone among us, Grief of Dawn had kept her head. She had finally been able to free her bow, and we had no idea what other horrors might be down there, and she was crouched behind the basin of oil sweeping the cavern with a drawn arrow. Nothing stirred except bats. Finally she released the tension of the string and crawled back.
“Ox,” she said, giving me a kiss, “the boys will have to add you to the story of Wolf. Never before has anyone broken the grip of a chiang shin.”
The rigid corpse lay in pieces, but could it somehow rise again? I shuddered, and so did Moon Boy, and Grief of Dawn's hands slid slowly up her body to her shoulders, and she hugged herself protectively.
“Master Li, I hate and fear that horrible thing, but why am I drawn to it?” she whispered. “It's almost as I am drawn to Moon Boy, or even to the prince.”
Moon Boy looked at her with somber eyes and turned to Master Li. “I too feel the attraction,” he said. “When I danced behind that creature, it was only partly because I was forced to. I also wanted to.”
The old man looked at me. “Ox?”
I shook my head. “No, sir,” I said. “All I feel is fear and loathing.”
“It's the same with me, and I think we're deficient in sensibility,” he said. He walked over and bent down to the severed torso. His knife glittered in the torchlight. “More than seven centuries ago the Laughing Prince died, and during the forty-nine days while the Bailiffs of Hell waited to ensure there had been no mistake in the Register of Life and Death, the flesh began to decay. The Laughing Prince wore an amulet of stone on a chain around his neck, and the stone sank into his body. Before the bailiffs arrived, the stone had entered his heart and he had arisen from the dead; mad, almost mindless, totally evil—but does that mean the stone was evil? My children, the attraction you feel would make far more sense if the opposite were true.”
The flesh was so rotten that he scarcely needed the knife, and he scooped more than cut and came up with a smooth flat piece of stone. He carefully washed it in the oil and dried it on his robe, and I was quite frightened when he walked back with the stone in his bare hands. I suppose I expected his fingernails to grow a foot and coarse black hair to crawl over his flesh, and when he lifted his eyes from the stone I looked for the glow of lunacy. Instead I saw a film of tears, and his voice was soft and gentle. “Is the stone evil? Here, Ox, judge for yourself.” He handed me the stone. It happened so quickly that I took it without thinking, but then I let out a yelp and would have dropped it if his fingers had not closed around mine. “Don't be afraid,” he said quietly.
The stone was warm. It was living, and I could feel a flow of energy like a heartbeat. A tingle entered my fingers and spread throughout my body. It spread through every nerve like a miraculous tonic, and my weariness vanished, and I had the distinct sensation that at any moment I might begin to bloom like a flower. Master Li gestured for me to pass it around, and I handed it to Grief of Dawn. She began to weep, even while a smile came to her lips, and when Moon Boy received it he turned white as a ghost and pressed it to his chest as though he wanted to join the stone with his body.
Master Li took it back and held it up to the torchlight. “The author of Dream of the Red Chamber never saw the stone, but I'm willing to bet he did indeed see one of the Annals of Heaven and Earth, and that it simply said the stone was flawed. It was the flower that was evil, but Tsao Hsueh Chin imputed evil to the stone because of the peculiar reaction of two great men who once possessed it. Ssu-ma Ch'ien never touched the stone with his hands, and he too imputed evil because of the reactions of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. If Ssu-ma had not been under such a strain he might have paid closer attention to the shape of the stone, and reached a different conclusion.”
Master Li grinned at us and quoted Ssu-ma. ” ‘Smooth flat area rising to round concave bowl shape.’ What does that suggest to you?”
It suggested nothing at all to me or Moon Boy, but Grief of Dawn's eyes lit up.
“A place to grind an ink stick and a bowl to dip the brush into. It was a natural ink stone,” she said.
“Good girl! Natural ink stones are highly prized, and this one was presented first to Lao Tzu and then to Chuang Tzu. I would give almost anything to have been there when the great men first used it,” Master Li said. “Their writing brushes dipped into the well and moved over the flat area, coming into contact with a stone that carried the touch of Heaven, and they gaped with stunned eyes when the calligraphy that flowed from their brushes was that of the gods. They could keep quiet about the stone and claim such genius as their own, and the temptation must have been terrible, and they yelled, ‘Evil!’ and hurled the stone away. Anyone who heard them would assume they were referring to the stone, not the temptation that came with it.”
He placed the piece of stone into his purse and secured it with a leather thong.
“This is only one piece. There are two to go,” he said grimly. “When the Laughing Prince rose from the dead he was totally mad and almost totally mindless, and he couldn't possibly have planned rational actions. Somebody else has been doing the thinking, and somewhere down here is the ringleader who has his hands on Prince Liu Pao.
