“One,” the toad said promptly.
“Who?”
“You,” said the toad. He turned to me. “Boy, do you realize that entire cemeteries are dedicated to this antique assassin? How many corpses did he leave behind during that weird fling you had with the birds?”[2]
“Well, maybe twenty or thirty,” I said. “But that was only because—”
“Begone!” the toad yelled. “Begone, and let an old man die with dignity.”
“Old?” said Master Li. “If my oldest grandson hadn't eaten an untreated blowfish, he'd be about your age.”
“The problem with you is that you refuse to expire from old age,” the toad snarled. Then he quoted Confucius. ” ‘A fellow who grows as old as you without dying is simply becoming a nuisance.’ ” He turned back to me. “I, on the other hand, shall succumb with serenity, secure in the sanctity of my soul. Boy, just look at the soul shining through my eyes! It's like a goddamned flower!”
It is dangerous to play the quoting game with Master Li. ” ‘When I return from trampling flowers, the hooves of my horse are fragrant,’ ” he said softly.
The toad turned pale. “Now, look here, Li Kao, there's no need to find offense where none was intended. All I seek is the True Path that will lead me to the Blessed Realm of Purified Semblance.” The thought of his newfound purity emboldened him. “Begone!” he cried. “Begone, you animated accumulation of antiquated bones, and take the sulphurous scent of sin with you.”
He turned and glared back at me.
“Also,” he added, “take this walking derrick.”
Master Li stood up and bowed, and I followed his example, and we turned and walked away over the grass, and a gentle bubbling chorus of goo-goo-goos faded behind us.
3
The journey to the Valley of Sorrows was not a long one, and three days later I climbed to a ridge overlooking the valley. It was quite early in the morning. I mopped the dew from a large flat rock, and we sat down and waited for the mist to clear. As it did I realized that the Valley of Sorrows was like a bowl with a chip in it, the chip being the gap to the south that opened to other valleys in the distance. Winding around and down the sides of the bowl was a lovely path of trees and flowers—too lovely, from my point of view. No peasant in his right mind would waste that much arable land on flowers when something useful could be planted. Conspicuous waste is the boast of wealth and power, and it makes me nervous.
“The peasants are paid not to plant it,” Master Li said, reading my mind. “It's called Princes’ Path, and the reason for it lies in a fairly long story.” He swept his hand across the valley. “Rich or poor?” he asked.
I mentally dug my toes into the earth. “Neither,” I said. The soil seems to be good, but there isn't much of it. Too much rock and shale on the hillsides, and the marsh at the west side is salty. The valley probably supports a small population quite well, but there can't be much left over.”
“Excellent,” Master Li said. “The first feudal lord of the valley discovered how hard it was to make money from the place and set an admirable precedent by drinking himself to death. His successors followed his esteemed example, and every few years the peasants could look forward to the banquet that accompanied a noble funeral. What do you think their reaction was when a certain Prince Chou turned out to have a cast-iron liver, and lasted thirty years?”
Peasants are the same everywhere, and I said confidently, “They have never forgiven him to this day. They tell their children nasty stories about Callous Chou the Pinchfist Prince, and strangers can tell where he was buried by watching the direction when farmers pee in the fields.”
“Right you are, although Callous Chou stories are rare today,” Master Li said. “Somebody came along to replace him, and he cornered the story market. Ox, one of your most endearing qualities is the ability to keep your mouth shut when you are dying to ask questions, and it's time to answer one of them. Who was the Laughing Prince? Why are the peasants and the monks and even the abbot terrified at the thought that he may have come back from the dead?”
I settled back to listen, and this is a brief summary of what I learned about a gentleman whose merry spirit still haunts me to this day.
Emperor Wu-ti had a younger brother, Prince Liu Sheng, who was something of a problem. He was a brilliant student of Taoist science, but undisciplined, and it was said that his affability was matched only by his laziness. At court his merry jests kept the nobility in stitches, but it was time for him to do something useful. When Prince Chou finally succumbed the emperor sent his feckless sibling to rule as Lord of Dragon Head Valley. (It was not then called the Valley of Sorrows.) The peasants looked forward to such a fun-loving fellow, and in due course the headmen were summoned to the prince's estate.
“My dear friends,” said the prince with an enchanting smile. “My dear, dear friends, I beseech you to plant gourds. Lots and lots of gourds.”
Then he broke into an irresistible little dance step, while he chanted, “Lots and lots and lots and lots, lots and lots and lots and lots… of gourds!”
Well, a prince is entitled to a few peculiarities. The peasants planted lots and lots of gourds, and the question was where Prince Liu Sheng was going to find the pigs to eat them.
As it turned out, he didn't want the gourds for the meat. The dried seeds of the calabash have the peculiar property of burning for a very long time and shedding a brilliant white light, and the prince had brought in experts who had discovered a substantial deposit of salt beneath the marsh at the west end of the valley. By placing calabash seeds inside rhinoceros horn lanterns, Prince Liu Sheng was able to establish the world's first twenty- four-hour-a-day salt mine.
The peasants were chained to enormous horizontal wheels. Overseers whipped them around in circles as they powered drills that bored more than a thousand feet into the soft soil. Bamboo casing was installed, and ropes and windlasses replaced the drills, and buckets lifted the brine to a pipeline that ran clear across the valley to a large patch of shale at the east side. An odorless gas seeped up through the cracks, and it was easily ignited. The brine was dumped upon iron plates and heated, and the salt was extracted and carried away to market. Day and night the whips lashed the peasants around in circles, while Prince Liu Sheng rode through the works on a silken litter with a merry quip and friendly wave for one and all.
Eventually the salt gave out, but the prince had also discovered a narrow but rich vein of iron ore. The male peasants were chained into work gangs that dug endless tunnels, and the female peasants remained chained to the wheels. Now they powered huge bellows at blast furnaces, and in no time at all the Iron Works of Prince Liu Sheng was the talk of the empire. That was when he became known as the Laughing Prince. His sense of humor almost finished him, because he nearly guffawed himself to death as he watched the comical capers of the ladies at the wheel. Their chains were red hot, you see, and for a time “The Dance of the Peasants of Prince Liu” was all the rage at court.
The Laughing Prince called upon his scientific genius, and somehow devised a treatment of acids and other agents that made his iron less brittle than any other. The acid plant was on top of the eastern hills, and the waste trickled down in a steaming path that circled almost the entire bowl of the valley, and sages and scholars gathered to observe the astonishing effect when the waste reached the marsh. The water turned bright yellow. By day it steamed and bubbled, and at night it emitted an eerie violet light, and fish and frogs floated on their backs with horrified dead eyes lifted to the billowing black clouds from the ironworks. By then the trees were all dead, and no birds sang, and the Laughing Prince made some marvelous jokes about the smell. There were some who protested, but protests ceased when the prince opened the books. The profits were enormous.
Then something happened which nobody fully understands to this day. Prince Liu Sheng abruptly lost interest in making money. He returned to his first love, and he had his field of science picked out. He was going to revolutionize medicine.
“I shall strip the veils of ignorance from the healing art, and display the very nerves and tissues!” he
