grand warden had not been able to pay proper attention to his food, Master Li told me, since he kept getting reports from search parties scouring the castle for the Snake, and it shouldn’t be long before he’d get anxious enough to lead a party himself. That, said the sage, would give us our chance.
“Ox, we must get our hands on the warden’s cage,” Master Li said urgently. “Those incredible things can apparently project images and sounds across half of China, perhaps even farther, and if we can figure out how they work we may be able to contact the Celestial Master in time to prevent him from getting his throat cut.”
“Would they dare?” I said in a shocked voice.
“From the excited words of the mandarin whose face first appeared, it’s almost certain that the Celestial Master is playing some sort of game to lead them into indiscretion, but I doubt that he grasps the danger,” he said grimly. “Mandarins in danger of losing money will do anything, and in this case they’re also threatened with losing their hides.”
I thought of people like Li the Cat and his servants Hog and Hyena and Jackal closing like rabid rats around the saintly old gentleman, and I shivered.
“Venerable Sir, have you ever heard of anything like those amazing cages?” I asked.
He chewed his scraggly beard thoughtfully.
“Not exactly,” he said. “Su O in his Tu Yang Tsa Pien describes the Mirror of the Immortals he saw in the country of Lin. He said it was a crystal used by physicians, and when a patient stood in front of it he became transparent, so the physician could examine the internal organs or find cracks in bones. Su O is not the most reliable of witnesses, of course, but in this case his story has been confirmed by a reputable source, the Hsi Ching Tsa Chi, which repeats the description with the additional information that the crystal is four feet wide and five feet nine inches tall. Su O also asserts there are smaller portable versions called Discerning Pearls, and that’s as close to the cages as I can get. It seems to me that the operating principle of the one shouldn’t be much different from that of the other, although I could be totally wrong.”
I said we were looking down at the courtyard and Yen Shih’s wagon, in front of which the banqueters were gathered, but I haven’t yet described the wagon in detail. It was huge, and one whole side could be lowered to form a stage with sliding extensions to make it even larger. The canvas top also extended, and a loft ran from one end of the stage to the other. There Yen Shih practiced a craft that approached magic. The loft was a maze of wires and strings and gears and wheels and pulleys and pendulums, and the puppeteer leaped and bounded across bamboo rafters with the agility of a cat as one hand spun this and pulled that, and the other hand manipulated a tangle of wires so fine they were nearly invisible, and below on the stage the lead puppet soared in the leaps and whirls of the Dragon Dance while an entire chorus of puppets pirouetted in the background. (It is literally true that a deranged duke once had Yen Shih arrested for devising a puppet so lifelike it seduced Lady Wu, and only the intercession of the duke’s mother prevented a great scandal.) A battery of bamboo tubes led down to various parts of the stage, through which the puppeteer projected the voices of the characters. In complicated plays Yu Lan would help out from below, hidden behind a screen, providing female and children’s voices and manipulating scenery. Backdrops were painted on canvas panels that could be revolved to give four different views, and Yu Lan could do wonderful things with lanterns.
Master Li told me quite seriously that Yen Shih was the greatest puppeteer he had ever seen, and possibly the greatest who ever lived. I mention this in a fit of self-pity. This was the climax of the evening, and Yen Shih was to perform his masterpiece, and I was going to miss it.
A clash of cymbals brought a great cheer from the audience, and the curtains of the brightly lit stage pulled apart to reveal a famous set: the combined house and yamen of Magistrate Po on the left and the town brothel, Mother Hsien’s House of Joy, on the right. An even louder cheer greeted the first two puppets, Fu-mo (straight man) and Fu-ching (comic), who would warm up the audience before joining the play as major characters. They traditionally swap fast lines that satirize local dignitaries and lampoon current scandals, uttering howls of mock outrage at each sally and bashing each other over the head with pig bladders. Much of the dialogue that drifted up to us meant nothing to me, but roars of laughter from the audience indicated that Yen Shih had done his homework. Then Fu-mo and Fu-ching began establishing their own characters, bemoaning the fact that suspicious householders were resorting to locks and barred doors and fierce guard dogs, and gamekeepers were making poaching a dangerous occupation, and there were practically no purses to pick, and it had been a month since an easily fleeced simpleton had come to town. While this was going on I was trying to put a spell on the grand warden.
“Stay, stay,” I said silently. “Watch all of it before you start searching.”
Yu Lan was strumming the pi-pa chords, and tears filled my eyes when I heard the first lines of the most famous song in the civilized world, sung in a peasant accent so pure it practically reeked of mud and manure.
The voice was followed by the singer, and I actually began to cry when I saw the puppet. It was a rustic so close to the simple soil that he was barely one step up from a water buffalo. Every inflection, every slap of a sandal, every scratch at hair lice, every coarse gesture was so perfect that for a moment I could have sworn I was back in my beloved village, and homesickness swept over me like heavy surf. He carried the pig he was taking to market, and Fu-mo and Fu-ching were so stunned by this gift of the gods that they toppled over backward.
The incredibly complex plot of Hayseed Hong deals with the peasant’s efforts to regain his pig from the two crooks, and in the process Yen Shih would use every puppet he had. I was settling back happily to watch when Master Li jabbed my ribs.
“Let’s go,” he said.
The grand warden, curse him, had left his chair and collected his bodyguards and was striding toward us, and I could do nothing but bend over so Master Li could climb on my back, and then I had to move around the corner of the parapet and lose sight of the greatest of all puppet plays performed by the greatest of puppeteers. Life can be very unfair.
The grand warden and his search party pounded down corridors and through rooms and closets while we followed their progress on the balconies outside. The damn place had more chambers than an anthill and it was slow going, but we had to be absolutely sure that we would be undisturbed when we went for the cage. The maddening thing from my point of view was that we kept crossing balconies with views of the wagon below. I would see scraps of action, as when Fu-mo and Fu-ching bought Hayseed Hong’s prize pig with a rare priceless diamond from the frozen north (Hayseed Hong, from the south, had never before seen a piece of ice), and then I had to move, and when I again got a glimpse of the stage the country bumpkin was on his way home and had decided to take out his diamond and admire it.
“Sheeeeeee-ut! The son of a bitch done pissed in my pocket and run away!”
Then I had to move away again, missing the part where the crooks greet the returning peasant with drugged wine and make off with all his clothes, and I just got a glimpse of Hayseed Hong as he toppled through a window into the bedchamber of the wife of Magistrate Po.
“Help! I am assaulted by a naked fiend!”
Magistrate Po, at another window, was admiring the moon in suitably Neo-Confucian fashion.
“Will you be quiet, woman? The superior man does not perceive lewd sounds or indecent spectacles.”
Then I was out of sight and sound again, and around another tower, and then back to the glow of stage light.
“I am assaulted by a naked fiend who is not entirely bad-looking!”
“Woman, I must have quiet! The ears of the superior man are undented by unpleasant sounds, just as his kidneys and liver are purged of laziness and negligence, falsehood and depravity.”
The grand warden had vanished, and I had to crawl through a window and tiptoe down hallways until we found him again. Then I had to race back and dive out to another balcony before his men could see us.
“I am assaulted by a naked fiend who is not entirely bad-looking and who appears to be hung like a
