sad about these creatures as well as terrible. They seem ancient to us, but they had to be among the last recognized by the aborigines, and gods—even minor demons like these—of a dying race are often creatures of pathos. You must ask Master Li about it sometime.”
Master Li had finished. He folded the papers neatly and put them in his money belt and reclaimed the cage.
“I’ve told all I know. Do you have anything else?” he asked.
“If I did I’ve forgotten it,” the Celestial Master said. “What’s next for you?”
“Ox and I are going to pay our respects to Eight Skilled Gentlemen,” he said. “Meaning I’m going back to Hortensia Island, and I want to show Ox the Yu. After that—well, I have a theory worth testing. I’ll report when I have anything worth talking about.”
The effort to maintain mental clarity had been exhausting. The Celestial Master managed only a wink and a wave as we bowed our way backward and then out the door, but Master Li was as full of energy as he’d been in a year.
“Ha!” he exclaimed as we walked out into the sunlight. “What a delightful development! I take back everything I said about white whales turning into minnows. What kind of case did I originally predict this would be?”
I thought about it.
“The spout reaches toward the stars, and the wake rocks offshore islands as it swims toward us, circumnavigating sacred seas with the awesome authority of an iceberg.”
“Slightly over-alliterative, but not bad,” said Master Li.
5
We stopped at Master Li’s shack in the alley and changed into comfortable clothes and replaced the old cage in the hiding place beneath the pallets, and I boiled some rice and went out and found a vender of the strong fermented fish sauce we both like. We hadn’t slept in thirty hours, but the excitement of the case was keeping us wide awake, and a short time later I was at the oars again, rowing back to Hortensia Island.
I’d never seen the Yu. The island is mandarin territory, and the visit I’ve recounted was my first, but before I can describe the Yu I have to explain it.
The history of China is punctuated by more Great Floods than scholars know what to do with, and one of them a couple of thousand years ago left the Peking Plain covered with thirty feet of mud and silt. The city that was to become Peking was built in many stages on the hardened crust, and geomancers decided that in the process too much attention had been paid to male yang influences and too little to the female yin, and the imbalance must be corrected. The fastest way to strengthen yin is through water, so the North, Central, and South lakes were created by digging down through the crust and filling the holes with water drawn by canals from the Hun and Sha rivers. (Actually the lakes are called “seas,” but that’s confusing, so they’ll be lakes on these pages.) The earth from the lake beds was heaped up and tamped down to form Coal Hill, thus creating the world’s costliest pile of dirt, and while digging the bed for North Lake workmen ran into a mass of nearly solid rock, which was left as it was. Water filled up around it, and eventually it was covered with a layer of earth and planted with pretty pink-and-blue-flowering shrubs imported from the Cannibal Coast (Japan), and thus Hortensia Island was born.
One day when the water had risen to a certain level an extraordinary thing happened. A great burst of sound suddenly arose from North Lake: hauntingly beautiful, but without apparent theme or musical form. It was like the sound of a huge horn except it had a husky hollow undertone as it swooped between huang-chung and ying-chung, the low and high notes of the un-tempered chromatic scale. The eerie sound lasted only a minute or so. Then it died away and wasn’t heard again until six months had passed, at which time excited scholars announced that the sound seemed to be occurring at the precise moment of the winter and summer solstices.
The phenomenon was tracked to a cavern on Hortensia Island, in a crag jutting out over the water’s edge on the southeast side facing the city. The cavern had been notable only for ancient wall carvings and statuary, but now a brilliant young musical student announced that in uncovering the island the workmen had uncovered a cave that was actually a musical instrument devised by aborigines to work as a solstice-sounder, although he had no idea why they wanted such a thing. A hole in the floor of the cavern seemed to lead down through a hundred feet of solid rock to an unreachable lower chamber, and the musical student theorized it was some sort of wind-chest. When the water reached a certain level, and the temperature and humidity—perhaps even the intensity of sunlight—were just right, pressure was created that caused great amounts of air to be sucked inside. The air swooshed up through a network of tiny tunnels in the stone that been thought to be natural but revealed marks of axes and chisels, and exited up through the cavern roof.
“In short, the tunnels out over the lake are mouthpieces for air intake, the lower cave is a wind-chest, and the upper holes are pipes. It’s an organ, except it operates primarily by inhaling rather than exhaling,” said the musical student, but nobody paid him the slightest attention, so he went away and built a miniature model and made enough money to buy a dukedom.
(His organ was the sheng, which has been a standard orchestral instrument ever since. It’s a little hard on the lungs because it works by inhaling, so a totally false legend has grown around it to the effect that no great sheng master has lived past the age of forty. This allows a player to win wild applause and be pelted by bouquets hurled by lovely ladies, who often hurl themselves as well, simply by pausing to cough during a performance and then wiping his lips with a handkerchief daubed with blood-red rouge, and when the other members of the orchestra can bear it no more they toss away their instruments and set upon the bastard with fists, feet, and fangs.)
The cavern became known as the Yu, first in popular reference and then officially, because Yu is a legendary emperor who is said to have invented all the musical instruments Fu-hsi didn’t. It continued to sound the solstices with incredible accuracy, but since nobody knew the point of it the phenomenon had long ago settled into the peculiar atmosphere of Peking, like sweet-sour wells and red brick dust and blowing yellow sand and the Mandarin dialect, and that was how things stood when I tied at a dock in the shadow of the crag that held the famous cavern, looming above us like a giant hand lifting from the water. Master Li led the way up a path that wound through thick shrubbery toward the entrance tunnel. He stopped and pulled reeds aside, and I jumped backward with a sharp yelp.
“Striking, isn’t it?” he said.
“I think the word is ghastly,” I said when I stopped gulping.
It was only an old stone statue, but it had seemed alive when the light first struck it. It depicted a creature that was half man and half lizard, crouched and hissing, with a jagged edge at the open mouth where a long stone tongue had broken off. The face was contorted with rage, and hatred exuded from it as naturally as the odor of fermented fish sauce exuded from me. The old man kept uncovering more of the grotesque statues as we climbed, ten in all, and even the most human of them was ugly beyond belief.
“Oddly enough, Ox, there are art lovers who consider these to be very beautiful,” Master Li said. “Whether those who created them thought they were beautiful or ugly cannot be determined, but the terms really aren’t relevant. These are carvings of minor gods, demon-deities, and unless we and the Celestial Master have been taken in by extraordinary illusions we’ve seen creatures that may be of the same breed.”
I thought of the one-legged chimes player and the ape-faced burglar and the Celestial Master’s little man hurling fire, not to mention a lowly monster like a vampire ghoul. “Sir, can such creatures really be beautiful?” I asked.
“Beautiful and terrible,” he said. “Our distant forefathers swept across this land exterminating a people and a culture, seizing and reshaping whatever interested them. Theologians will tell you that simultaneously an invasion was taking place in Heaven, with old gods being ruthlessly overthrown and new gods taking their place, while the most dangerous and powerful of the old deities were placated by titles and duties and honors and absorption into the pantheon.”
I had nowhere near enough knowledge or experience to feel the same excitement that was making Master
