I walked to the table and picked up one of the jars and swallowed some of the raw alcohol that Devil’s Hand and Master Li called wine, and after I stopped coughing I felt a little better, although not much. The executioner was returning, and by the sound of it he was dragging a prisoner in chains.
“You’re ten times as crazy as the rest of the world, Kao!” Devil’s Hand shouted.
“Why? For seeking the company of a splendid fellow who’s as cute as a little lamb and twice as gentle?” Master Li said sweetly.
The executioner and his prisoner came through the door, and I reeled. The soft squat body, the froglike posture, the saliva spraying from fat flabby lips…
“Three times as gentle,” said Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu.
18
Every historian is faced with a chapter in which he cannot win. If he includes the relevant material he will send his readers screaming into the night, and if he doesn’t include it he isn’t writing history. Thus scholars wrestling with the wars of the Three Kingdoms must grit their teeth and include learned commentaries on the Seven Sacrileges of Tsao Tsao, and I must confront the task of transcribing the words of a horrible hosteler. It was difficult for those first hearing him not to conclude that his speech was simply another weapon in an overstocked arsenal, but no, it simply reflected his second obsession, his first being murder.
“Ox,” Master Li once told me, “never forget that Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu is half aborigine. Our forefathers stole the fertile fields from his people and chased them into rocky mountains where there was almost no food. Then mineral deposits were discovered, so we chased the survivors into malarial marshes where there was even less food. Hunger became the heritage of aborigines, their birthright, and in a psychological sense Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu was born starving.”
Today as the hosteler comes closer and closer to deification, even minor editing of his pronouncements is considered to be heresy. If I leave out one adjective I may be ripped to pieces by the howling mob, but I plead special circumstances. When I saw his ghastly face in the executioner’s office everything went fuzzy, and for some time I heard nothing but a loud buzzing sound in my ears, and when the buzzing died down the interview was already underway.
“…oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, the Yu was built by the Eight Skilled Gentlemen to make music that turned into water, ‘Water of the Setting Sun’ my old grandmother called it, although the name is probably as misleading as ‘Three Fish Lamb Soup,’ which contains no fish. It also contains no lamb. The characters for ‘lamb’ and ‘fish’ when written together mean ‘delicious,’ so the name is actually ‘Three Delicious Soup,’ and it is made from chicken breasts, abalone, ham, bamboo shoots, snow peas, sesame seed oil, chicken stock, and rice wine. I like to serve it followed by Su Tung-po’s carp, which is extremely simple, as befits a creation of genius. You just wash the carp in cold water and stuff it with hearts of cabbage and rub it with salt, and then—”
“Hostler Tu,” Master Li interjected, “the Eight Skilled Gentlemen carried—”
“— pan-fry it with onions, and when it’s half cooked you add a few slices of ginger, and finally some bits of orange peel and a little turnip sauce. Su Tung-po also invented Poor Man’s Salad, which goes wonderfully well with the carp: sung cabbage, rape-turnip, wild daikon, and shepherd’s purse. Add a bit of—”
“Hosteler Tu—”
“— rice and some boiling water and you can turn it into soup, but you must be careful about the water. The great Chia Ming wrote in his Essential Knowledge for Eating and Drinking that the water for Poor Man’s Soup must be from snow or frost, which had to be swept into the pot with a chicken feather. To use a duck or goose feather was to invite stomach cramps, which he also said could be caused by cooking pork, eels, or mud loaches over a fire made from mulberry wood, and Chia Ming grew quite upset over the subject of spinach.”
“Hosteler Tu! The Eight Skilled Gentlemen carried cages that they sometimes used for communication, but I think they contained something else that was guarded by eight demon-deities. Do your people say anything about that?” Master Li asked.
“Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, cages—oh my, yes. The cages held the keys.”
“Keys to what?”
“Keys to the music that turned into water, of course, and the guardians were said to be very strange and almost as dangerous as spinach, which Chia Ming said is an alien substance imported from Nepal, a very unpleasant country inhabited by perfidious men, and its character is cold and slippery and eating it weakens the feet and causes stomach chills, and if young dogs or cats eat spinach it will cause their legs to bend so they can’t walk. In that case the dogs can at least be used for k’eng hsien, the canine stew Confucius loved so much he put the recipe in the Book of Rites, but I don’t know what one can do with bent-leg cats.”
“Hosteler—”
“Unless the cats happen to be nursing mothers. I’ve read that the boy emperor Ching Tsung was devoted to ‘Clear Wind Rice,’ which was made with rice, dragon’s brains, dragon eyeball powder, and cat’s milk, but to tell the truth I think ‘cat’ is a misprint—besides, that could be a dangerous dish if the cat was white, because white cats climb up on roofs and eat moonbeams, and eating moonbeams can cause people to go mad. Of course, cats are consumed along with everything else in the south, where they even eat giant water b—”
“Hosteler Tu!” Master Li shouted. “The eight demon-deities who guarded the keys in the cages had a brother, born human, who became a great cavalier. Do your people know anything about him?”
“Brother? I didn’t know they had a brother who was human. They were very strange, and a brother would probably be like the giant water bugs they eat in the south. They say they taste like lobster but in fact they taste like soft overripe cheese, and they serve them with dried salted earthworms that don’t taste of anything except salt. In southern Hupeh they eat the fried flesh of white-flower pit vipers, and stewed marmots, and in Lingnan the delicacy is baby rats. ‘Honey peepers’ they call them, because the little things are first stuffed with honey and then released upon banquet tables and they crawl around going ‘peep-peep-peep’ and diners pick them up by the tails and pop them into their mouths and eat them raw. The better houses tint the creatures with vegetable dyes to harmonize with the service: emerald baby rats peep-peeping around purple porcelain bowls, for example, from which come faint hiccups.”
“Hosteler Tu—”
“The hiccups are made by soft-shell crabs floating in rice wine flavored with rock salt, black Szechuan peppercorns, and anise, and the crabs are far too drunk to mind when diners scoop them from the bowls and eat them raw. Like the rats. On the opposite end of the scale are elephants, of course, and the elephant feet of the south are among the great delicacies of the world, providing one steers clear of the bile. Elephants store their bile in their feet and it moves from foot to foot with the changing of the seasons, and a bileless foot is stuffed with dates and baked in a sweet-sour mixture of vinegar and honey. The only thing they won’t eat in the south is —”
“Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu!” roared Master Li. “How about a creature that’s half man and half ape, and has a silver-gray forehead, blue cheeks, a crimson nose, a yellow chin, and is sometimes called Envy?”
“Envy, oh yes, oh yes. Envy caused it, of course. Somehow he got the gods to turn their backs on earth, and he had the sun ready to set the sky on fire, and he had the birds of pestilence ready to strike, because of the solstice, you see. If the solstice didn’t take place and the sun got hotter and hotter—but that was where the Eight Skilled Gentlemen took over, and when they finished with Envy he was as harmless as a lamb, which is what they won’t eat in the south. I think it’s a misunderstanding involving lamb liver, which can be poisonous if eaten with pork. Just as common ginger can be poisonous if eaten with either hare or horse meat, not that horse meat needs
