Braids and ribbons, brocades and satins,
Bedspreads of kingfisher feathers, seeded with pearls,
While damask canopies stretch overhead
Lit by bright candles of orchid-perfumed fat.
MASTER LI: O soul, the food is ready.
Rice, broomcorn, early wheat mixed with millet,
Ribs of fatted ox, tender and succulent,
Stewed turtle and roast kid, served with sauce of yams,
Geese cooked in sour and bitter, casseroled duck, fried flesh of the great crane,
Braised chicken, tortoise seethed in soup of Wu,
Fried honey cakes and malt-sugar sweetmeats,
And jadelike wine, honey-flavored, fills your cup,
Strained of impurities, cool and refreshing.
A tiny twinkling light appears high overhead, in the deepest shadows of the vaulted ceiling.
YU LAN: Hear the musicians take their places, O soul,
Set up bells, fasten the drums, sing the latest popular songs:
“Crossing the River,” “Gathering Caltrops,” and “The Sunny Bank.”
Dancers await you, attired in spotted leopard skins.
Bells clash in their swaying frames, the zither’s strings are swept,
Pi-pas and lutes rise in wild harmonies, the sounding drum sonorously rolls.
The shining light glows larger and brighter as it sinks down toward the dais; Master Li and Yu Lan guide it to the liver of the grand warden’s wife, who has been observing all this with eyes like soup bowls.
MASTER LI
YU LAN: Your household awaits you, O soul!
Lovers await you, O soul!
Life awaits you, O soul!
Come back! Come back! Come back!
The light disappears as the shaman and shamanka ease the soul back into the patient’s liver. Master Li closes her eyelids and has her lie back and softly tells her to sleep. Yu Lan steps to the front of the dais and speaks in the general direction of the grand warden, while still maintaining the distance of the Mysteries.
YU LAN: The sickness is gone. Life and love await,
but forget not the Tao. Take great care in your sacrifices and prayers, for evil influences seek to return where once they have sported, and to the Three Venerables should be offered nine lengths of green embroidered silk. The Servants of Wu ask nothing, being content with the thrill of battle and the joy of triumph. Return now to the red dust of the world.
Doors are flung open, and sunlight pours in, and the audience stumbles out. The litter is carried back to the lady’s bedchamber, while poppy fumes carry their thick sweet fragrance toward the clouds.
I picked myself up from the floor (I was lying beside the giggling bat) and gasped deep lungfuls of fresh air. Yu Lan and Master Li were pouring pitchers of water over their heads, and Yen Shih descended from his perch on the rafters, grunting and gasping and practicing eye-focus as he stretched his arms and legs.
“That went rather well, considering we didn’t have time for a decent rehearsal,” said Master Li.
“I’ve seen worse,” Yen Shih said.
Yu Lan, as was her habit, made no comment. She walked out past me: silent, graceful, distant as a drifting cloud, secretly smiling.
“You see, Ox,” said Master Li some time later as we were walking through the palace gardens, “to a shaman the identification of a medical problem and its appropriate treatment is merely the beginning. In this case the problem was easy to identify. It was tadpoles.”
“Tadpoles?” I said.
“Precisely,” he said. “You’ve had a rather unfortunate encounter with the grand warden, so perhaps you can sympathize with his bride. She’s a bandit chief’s daughter, my boy, practically born on horseback and happy out in the hills where she grew up, and here she is in a gloomy pile of stones where she’s supposed to spend her time sewing and gossiping with maids. On top of that it’s her duty to present her husband with children, and one can imagine what she thinks of that shifty-eyed cowardly creature as the father.”
Master Li stopped at one of the decorative ponds in a courtyard close to a high gray wall, where a balcony ran beneath tall windows.
“Tadpoles,” he said, pointing down at the green water. “One of the oldest of old wives’ tales holds that a woman who swallows fourteen live tadpoles on the third day after menstruation, and ten more on the fourth, will not conceive for five years, so the poor young woman has been swallowing the creatures. They’re harmless. What isn’t harmless is the parasitic flatworms that transfer from the tadpoles to the swallower’s stomach and make her sick as a yellow monkey. Yu Lan and I gave the lady a powerful vermifuge and forbade tadpoles until further notice, and since she’s basically as healthy as a horse she’s already recovered in a physical sense.”
He thoughtfully regarded the tadpoles, and reached into a pocket and took out a small vial with a stopper in it.
“That,” he said, “is where conventional medicine stops and shamanism begins. What good is it to cure the body when the real damage is to the spirit? Think of the humiliation to a bandit chief’s daughter forced to swallow tadpoles, the destruction to her self-esteem! So Yu Lan and I—with the invaluable assistance of Yen Shih—made the lady feel she was the most important person in the whole world as the forces of good and evil battled for her soul. The final step to the cure is eliminating the need for tadpoles, of course. She’ll find the obvious solution to the problem of proper parenthood in due course, but no respectable shaman would take the chance of a relapse while she’s figuring it out.”
With that he removed the stopper from the vial and pulled out the front of my tunic and dumped a live scorpion down inside. Until an official disrobing contest is held in all the major provinces, the record belongs to me. I was out of my clothes and into the pond in three seconds flat.
“Wha-wha-wha—” I said, or something equally intelligent as I splashed scorpions away.
“Sorry, Ox. I assure you that I’d first removed the venom from the thing, and I thought it would be funny. I must be farther on the road to senility than the Celestial Master is. Dear me, dear me,” he said as he sauntered happily away.
The pool turned out to be less than two feet deep, so I was not in a modest position as I tried to untangle my clothes and get them back on, and while I was trying to squeeze my left foot into my right sandal a very elegant footman appeared and informed me my presence was demanded inside. He turned me over to a maid who did a great deal of giggling as she led me upstairs, and I was ushered through elegant doors into a luxurious bedchamber with tall windows opening to a narrow balcony that overlooked a shallow pool where tadpoles swam, frolicking through the thongs of my missing left sandal.
“Tee-hee!” said the warden’s wife.
That wasn’t really her style, so she dropped the coyness and crooked a commanding finger.
“Come here, you,” growled the bandit chief’s daughter.
I subsequently learned that nine months later she gave birth to a son (thirteen pounds eleven ounces) and chose the milk name Liu Niu. The assumption was that she was thinking of a minor deity called Liu-hai, so the milk name meant “Lucky Calf,” but if she happened to be thinking of another minor deity called Liu-lang the milk name means “Sexy Ox,” and I will leave it at that.
10
When I passed the tadpole pond again that night I had Master Li riding on my back, and this time I slipped silently behind bushes and then began to climb. Away from us, at the drawbridge, trumpets were blaring and soldiers were standing at attention. The sage had wanted to get the matter of the grand warden’s wife out of the
