Age.
“Better carry me. Somebody must have given him a lift, and it’s too damn hot for my rickety legs.”
I took the old man on my back and started off again, but soon we were out of sight of the saint, wending our way through mazes of high hedges. The gardens of the Forbidden City are for aristocrats, not peasants, so every view is planned for eyes riding at ease at palanquin level. Pedestrians can’t see much of anything until they reach clear spaces, and when I got to a clear space I stopped so suddenly Master Li almost bounced over my head, and when he was settled again I asked in a tiny voice, “Sir, can there be more than one Celestial Master?”
The ancient saint was so far past the Gate of Peaceful Old Age that he had actually reached the Great Theater, and I would have been hard pressed to cover the distance in the elapsed time even at a trot.
“Let’s concentrate on this one,” Master Li said in a tight grim voice. “Catch him, Ox.”
I took off at a run, taking an angle to come out far ahead of him, and I kept racing through lanes of flowering oleander and pomegranate until I panted to a halt at the Well of the Pearl Concubine. I turned and looked back where the saint should be. There was no slow shuffling figure, and I saw nothing to my right. Ahead of me was the outer wall of the Forbidden City, so the only direction remaining was left, and I turned and almost toppled over. Far, far away, between the Hall of Imperial Peace and the Pavilion of Ten Thousand Springs, a tiny stooped figure was straining to move a pair of canes ahead of his shuffling feet.
Master Li was very still on my back. Then his hands squeezed my shoulders. “Let’s try something,” he said quietly. “Turn away and cut between the Palaces of Tranquil Earth and Sympathetic Harmony, as though we’re giving up and making for West Flowery Gate.”
I did as I was told, and in a few seconds I was again running through mazes of shrubs and trees, and after about four minutes Master Li told me to stop, double back, and take the first opening to the left. I climbed a small hill and got down on my stomach and wormed through low shrubs, and Master Li reached past my ears and parted a pair of leafy branches. We were looking out across the long velvet lawn in front of the Palace of Established Happiness, and my liver turned ice cold.
The Celestial Master was racing across the lawn like a panther, stooped low, leaping gracefully over obstacles. His simple Tao-shih robe billowed behind him like a kite, and he was running so fast the robe’s ten ribbons and cloud-embroidered sash were pop-pop-popping in the air like the blurred wings of racing pigeons. He leaped over a huge stone I would have had to climb, hanging suspended in air, legs spread like a dancer’s, and pushed down with his canes to give his body an extra forward vault as he hit the ground. The saint sped on until he reached the Hall of the Nurture of the Mind. Had we continued on the path we had taken we would now be coming out of the shrubbery in view of the hall, and of the Celestial Master, and suddenly he stopped, and tentatively extended his canes, and an aged, frail, crippled gentleman was painfully pushing himself across the grass.
“Sir… Sir… Sir…”
“Why the note of surprise? We haven’t witnessed a miracle since a disembodied dog head chewed the grand warden, so we were overdue.” Master Li said in a high hard voice. “Ox, back to the Hall of Literary Profundity, and hurry.”
At the hall he had me go around the side and through a maze of little gardens, and then he pried a window open and we climbed through. He picked a lock, made his way through an empty office, had me carry him out the side window and across a balcony, and we climbed through another window into the office of the Celestial Master.
“Remember the little object like a brush used by the Eight Skilled Gentlemen to activate the cages? I assume the Celestial Master had one when he sent his message to the mandarins. Find it,” Master Li ordered.
The room was crowded with mementos of more than a century of service and it could have taken us a month to search it all, but now and then the obvious choice pays off. Master Li overturned the jar of writing brushes and pawed through them, and suddenly his hand stopped. Slowly he picked up a brush and held it to the light. It was incredibly old, with a stone handle and a tip made from the tail of a musk deer.
“Same period, same type of craftsmanship, and same feel to it,” Master Li muttered.
We went outside again, back in the silent shadowed recesses of the library garden. Nobody was around. Master Li wasn’t going to take any chances with the cage we’d almost been killed for in the mandarin’s greenhouse. He had it firmly tied to his belt beneath his robe, and he took it out and examined it with speculative eyes.
“We know that it’s activated for sending messages by touching the symbols of the five elements with the brush,” he said thoughtfully. “What I’m hoping is that it also retains messages. If so, one would logically assume the Doctrine of the Five is also involved, such as the five colors, directions, seasons, celestial stems, mountains, planets, virtues, emotions, animals, orifices, tissues, or flavors.”
My knowledge of the Five begins and ends with the fact that the odor and sound connected with the planet Mercury are “putrid” and “groaning,” so I kept my mouth shut.
It took some time because there was a maze of symbols engraved on the bars, but finally he decided to try the animals associated with the seasons in backward order, and I jumped a foot into the air when the brush touched the head of a tortoise. A sudden glow of light filled the cage, and then I was looking at the face of a mandarin I didn’t know. He was obviously struggling with fear and rage as he tried to keep himself under control.
“Why haven’t we killed the old fool?” he demanded. A tic jumped in his left cheek. “I must know, I demand to know, why haven’t we killed him? Don’t you fools realize that since the Cat dealt with that clerk we have corpses to account for? If we don’t slit Li Kao’s throat he’ll toss us to the dogs!”
Touching the tiger got us another mandarin demanding Master Li’s head, and the water buffalo and phoenix produced boring messages about trading routes and sales figures. Then Master Li touched the brush to the dragon, and the face that filled the cage was that of the Celestial Master. From the first scathing words I realized this was the message Master Li sought, the message to Li the Cat and the Grand Warden of Goose Gate we had almost heard, but not quite.
“…Stick the turd-stained tips of your fingers into your ears and dig out the dung beetles, because I am about to demonstrate the error of your half-witted ways.”
Oh, he flayed them. He turned them inside out. Acid scoured the air as he depicted the idiocy of getting involved in some sort of smuggling racket that could lead to the Thousand Cuts, confiscation of estates, loss of rank and privilege for entire families, and the near certainty that pauperized wives and concubines and children would be led to the auction block and sold as slaves.
“If you idiots have to steal, why not steal something worthwhile?” the saint roared. “In the process you might do good despite yourselves and contribute to the restoration of morality! Listen to me, my wayward children, and I shall lead you toward the light.”
Then he led them toward the light, and I listened with disbelief, and then horror, and then despair to an agonizing degree I have seldom known. The Celestial Master was proposing to revive the ghost scheme of Confucius.
Barbarians must understand that in a civilized country the dead are immensely influential. The living are far too busy with the process of staying alive to pay attention to anything else. Human senses are in actuality “the Six Evils” because sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and thought are barriers against the messages of Heaven. Only the dead are free from such shackles, and when the ghost of an ancestor appears in moonlight or in dreams and bears a cryptic message it is the most important event in a family’s existence. Sometimes it’s a hugely dramatic warning: the Black Stag God is angry and you must flee the valley before influenza strikes, and sure enough ten people who stayed behind die from influenza. Sometimes it’s a great-grandmother appearing in a dream to provide the perfect protective milk name for a new baby, and speaking of babies, who doesn’t know of the ghost of a child who died at birth suddenly appearing to make an older brother jump back in fright—just before that brother’s foot was to land on a poisonous snake? The power of ghosts is awesome, and their pronouncements are unchallengeable.
Confucius knew that, and it inspired a brilliant scheme. He counseled his aristocratic clients to grind the lower classes into the mud once and for all by imposing strict ghost laws. The only ghosts recognized to be valid would be those that had the decency and civility to appear at a properly hallowed shrine in a respectable family
