help to be poisonous. Emperor Ching swore that horse kidneys were deadly, and Emperor Wu-ti told Luan Ta, the court necromancer, that Ta’s predecessor had expired from eating horse liver. Still, a horse’s heart when dried and powdered and added to wine will restore memory, and sleeping with a horse skull for a pillow will cure insomnia—”
“Hosteler—”
“— and another use for horses leads us back to lamb. In barbarian Rome lambs grow from the earth like turnips, and when they’re ready to sprout the farmers build a fence around them to keep out predators. The baby lambs are still tied to the earth by their umbilical cords and to cut them is dangerous, so the farmers get horses and have them run around and around the fence.”
“Hosteler—”
“The lambs get alarmed and break the umbilical cords themselves and wander off in search of grass and water, and when I get a lamb I like to save pieces of shank meat for ‘Eight Exquisite Lion Head,’ which doesn’t contain any lion, of course: lamb, lichees, mussels, pork, sausage, ham, shrimp, and sea cucumbers. The name is ridiculous because ‘lion head’ in culinary terms is simply a large sausage, and I think the error was on the part of a tipsy scribe who heard shi-zi. ‘lion,’ when a chef really said li-zi, ‘lichee,’ as in the case of the fish stew called —”
“Hosteler Tu!” screamed Master Li.
And now I must confess I blanked everything out. I saw the hosteler’s horrible mouth opening and closing, but all I heard was a chirping sound like a small cricket inside my skull, and I don’t think I was alone. The Chief Executioner of Peking was sitting at his desk with a silly smile on his face and glazed eyes. apparently listening to birdies chirp in the woods, and he was not pleased when Master Li finally dragged him from his reverie.
Master Li had learned nothing else of value. He huddled with Devil’s Hand and discussed something I didn’t overhear, eliciting more cries of “You’re crazy!” and “The world has gone mad!” and finally we prepared to leave. Devil’s Hand dragged the prisoner away in a rattle of chains, and there was something oddly pathetic in the hosteler’s last words to Master Li.
“Wait! It’s very important! I wanted to tell you that the best lotus roots are those from Nanking ponds! Get the red horned nuts from Ta-pan Bridge! Jujubes should be from Yao-fang Gate and cherries from Ling-ku Temple! You must try the sea horses of Kwantung served with Lan-ling wine flavored with saffron, and pork glazed with honey and cooked with cedar wood in the style of—”
The iron door slammed behind them, and that, I prayed, was the last I would ever see or hear of Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu.
19
The fourth day of the fifth moon began with a bang of firecrackers. A great many bangs, as a matter of fact. It was the Feast of Poisonous Insects that warms things up for the great Dragon Boat Race of the double fifth, and usually it’s a merry affair, but not this time. The heat wave hadn’t broken and rain still hadn’t fallen, and everybody knows that when there is no fluctuation in weather for an extended period of time an unhealthy atmosphere is created in which sickness spreads like swarms of locusts, and great plagues begin their incubation cycles, and horrible omens tend to appear: flesh and frogs falling from Heaven, for example, or hens turning into roosters.
Children enjoyed themselves, of course. They’d been laboriously embroidering tigers on their slippers for months, and their mothers dressed them in black-and-yellow-striped tiger tunics, and they shrieked with delight as they hopped around the streets stamping imaginary scorpions and centipedes and spiders, or battled clowns dressed as toads and snakes and lizards with long leaves of ch’ang-p’u grass, shaped like the blades of swords. The parents dutifully set off firecrackers and daubed everybody’s ears and noses with streaks of sulphur as a precaution against poisonous bites, but their eyes were worried and their faces were drawn as they watched heat waves again lift from the streets. The temples were crowded with grandparents praying to Kuan-yin, Goddess of Mercy.
Tempers were rubbed raw. A bloody battle erupted at the Dynastic Gate when a herd of sheep with red- painted tails, meaning they were being led to sacrifice at the Altar of Heaven, somehow got entangled with camels on their way to the caravan loading area at the other end of the city, and nobody could go anywhere for two hours. The Mongol herders were forced by custom to wear heavy sheepskin robes caked with grease, and the Turkish camel drivers were bound to their thick grimy robes and huge felt-lined boots, and everybody was melting, furious at the world, and spoiling for a fight. I mention the incident because Master Li and I got trapped in the middle of it when we set out early that morning for the Celestial Master’s house, and we had to abandon the palanquin and hack our way through the mobs and eventually hire another one, and when we finally reached the house we were told by a soldier guarding the gate that the saint had indeed returned, late at night, but had already left for the Forbidden City.
I didn’t know what to think, and Master Li had withdrawn into his own thoughts the moment we left the executioner’s office the previous night, and he was still uncommunicative.
We entered the Forbidden City without incident, and instead of going straight to the Celestial Master’s office the sage made a stop at the Bureau of Import. When he came back out a short time later the look on his face suggested that at least one thought sequence had paid off.
“Ox,” he said as he climbed back into the palanquin,” I should have done this earlier, but things kept happening to distract me. Do you remember the drugs I used to turn cheap bohea into Tribute Tea?”
I turned red. “No, sir,” I said.
“Prussiate of iron, sulphate of lime, and powder from the fruit of the tamarind tree,” he said patiently. “That last item is rare. Very little is imported, and one must be licensed to buy it. One legacy of late unlamented Legalism is the requirement that companies requesting such licenses must list the names of all corporate officers. Secrecy can still be maintained because such lists are filed by the company name. An investigator has to have the name before he can ask for the file, and some of the names are quite ingenious. Suppose you were one of a group of mandarins involved in a counterfeit tea racket. Suppose you were able to communicate with each other because of old cages, and suppose the use of the cages was explained by a rubbing of an ancient frieze, and suppose you didn’t want people asking for your file. What would you call your company?”
He knew very well I couldn’t answer that. He let me stew in confusion for a moment, and then he took out a piece of paper upon which a clerk had obligingly copied a list of company officers beneath the corporate name Master Li had specified: Sky-flame Death Birds Ghost Boat Rain Race Tea Company, Ltd.
“This is the bunch?” I asked admiringly.
“Exactly. Every bastard involved, including Li the Cat and two other eunuchs of ministerial rank,” Master Li said. “Now, if only…”
He let the sentence die a natural death. He meant “If only the Celestial Master is sane and in one piece and able to help,” and worry returned, and he was silent the rest of the way to the Hall of Literary Profundity. There we were told that we had just missed the Celestial Master, who had hobbled out for his morning walk, but we would surely find him on the lawn leading to the Palaces of the Young Princes. Master Li dismissed the palanquin and set out on foot, and both of us stopped in our tracks and let out long sighs when we reached the lawn. Ahead of us, painfully pushing his canes toward Nine Dragon Screen, was the unmistakable form of the Celestial Master, unchanged from the last time we’d seen him.
“I had feared torture,” Master Li said quietly.
So had I, since that or insanity was the only explanation I could think of for the saint’s signature on a terrible execution order. Now Master Li had to face the likelihood that for once he’d made an error judging calligraphy, and the signature had been forged, but the prospect didn’t seem to bother him. He was almost cheerful as we took a shortcut past the Archery Grounds, but when we came to Nine Dragon Screen there was no Celestial Master.
“Ha! That was a remarkable optical illusion,” Master Li said. “I could have sworn he was right here, but look.”
He pointed to the left and far ahead, and my eyes bulged as I saw a small distant figure hunched over a pair of canes, inching like an arthritic snail past the Gate of the Bestowal of Awards toward the Gate of Peaceful Old
