temple, and who could afford hallowed shrines in private temples? Aristocrats, of course, and no peasants need apply. Any claim to “ancestral” lines by those without decent family estates would be greeted by lashes of the rod, a second occurrence would mean mutilation, a third would merit death. Any claim to having received a message from a family ghost by one too low to have a “family,” in the feudal Confucian sense, would be justification for being sold into slavery.
What made the ghost scheme so glorious was the fact that it was without limits. An aristocrat who coveted fertile land belonging to a commoner merely had to reveal that the ghost of his great-great-great-uncle had appeared to tell him that the land in question actually belonged to the family, and deeds to that effect would be found in the brass box in the cellar. (If need be, the ghost could reappear to explain that the deeds may have been written on paper that hadn’t been invented at the time of the supposed transaction, but that merely applied to the earth. The paper had already been invented in Heaven, and the gods had graciously presented the great-great- great-uncle with a sample.) Any legal challenge was referred to a feudal court composed of other aristocratic landowners, and as Confucius himself so charmingly put it: “The superior man is like wind, and the common man is like grass. When the wind blows, the grass bends.”
In the days of Confucius there was no empire. China was a collection of squabbling feudal states, and the single most important reason for the ghost scheme never being put to full effect once the empire was formed was Taoism. The Tao-shihs battled tooth and nail to protect the rights of the peasantry, but now the Celestial Master, leader of Taoists and the empire’s greatest living saint, was proposing that the mandarins put the profits from their illegal operation into judiciously placed bribes, and together with his immense influence and active support the ghost scheme could at last be installed throughout China. In practically no time only aristocrats would be entitled to power, property, and legal protection, with—as the Celestial Master put it—“unimaginable improvement in public morality and civility.”
I should mention that throughout this incredible speech the saint showed no signs of senility. Indeed I had never heard him so forceful and coherent, and when he finally ended his proposal and the cage went dark I turned helplessly to Master Li.
“Sir, can he have suffered some sort of a stroke?” I asked.
Rarely have I seen the old man as perturbed as he was then. He was furiously chewing the end of his scraggly beard as he thought, and then he spat it out and said, “I’ve yet to hear of a stroke that allows an arthritic centenarian to race across lawns like a Tibetan snow leopard. No, Ox, something far more dramatic than a cerebral disorder is going on, and the consequences could be almost beyond imagining.”
He had been sitting cross-legged in front of the cage. Now he jumped up and gazed at the searing brassy sky. The Yellow Wind was a huge hand lifted above the horizon; great grasping fingers reaching toward a sun that was blood red and pulsing in haze as it began to set—I hadn’t realized so much time had passed—and fine grains were whipping against branches and leaves, hissing, scraping: a giant invisible cat at a scratching post, playfully unsheathing its claws.
“Something as dramatic as a solstice that doesn’t take place?” Master Li said softly. “My boy, few disciplines are more dismal than theology, but it may be important to consider the Doctrine of Disaster, which is the Han dynasty’s chief contribution to the subject. Both the I-ching and the Huai-nan-tzu assert that natural disasters are not caused by Heaven, but allowed by Heaven. If men willfully disrupt the natural order of things, the gods will refuse to intervene while nature purges itself of the toxin, usually violently, and if the innocent suffer along with the guilty—well, the only way men learn anything is to have it smashed into their heads with an ax.”
He picked up the cage and retied it to his belt and covered it with his flowing robe.
“According to Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu, aborigines believe Envy almost caused a solstice disaster that was prevented by Eight Skilled Gentlemen,” he said slowly. “We know damn well that either Envy or an incredibly talented impersonator is still with us and up to something, and the problem with Chinese myths is that in China it’s difficult to tell where myth ends and reality begins. The August Personage of Jade will not be pleased to receive a petition to install the ghost scheme from the leader of Taoists, but that in itself shouldn’t…”
He fell silent, and then he told me to bend over and take him on my back.
“All we can do now is go down that list of involved mandarins and find the weak link. You may have to break a few of the bastard’s bones, my boy, but one way or another he’s going enable us to toss the rest of them in jail,” the sage said grimly. “Back to the city and One-Eyed Wong’s, and hurry.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and I took off like a racehorse.
20
At the Wineshop of One-Eyed Wong, Master Li recruited some idlers and sent them out to track down each mandarin and eunuch on the list, and then he led the way out the back door to a maze of buildings squeezed together and leaning over each other to form the dead end of the Alley of Flies. Interconnecting passages run every which way, and by the time bailiffs can make their way to somebody’s room he’s probably in Tibet.
“The Weasel is an aborigine,” Master Li said. “I very much doubt he can add much to what we’ve learned from Hosteler Tu, but I’d like to ask. Do you know where he lives?”
I was delighted to provide something. “Keep turning left,” I said. “Believe it or not, you won’t wind up back where you started.”
We turned left, left, left, left, and would have been back at the end of the alley if there hadn’t been a tiny parallel passageway that led up and across and to the right. The Weasel lived on the top floor, but we stopped short when we saw prayers pasted to his door and smelled incense and heard wails of woe. I pushed the door open, and it was obvious that Master Li wasn’t going to be able to ask. The Weasel was in a very bad way, rolling over his pallet in delirium while his young wife tried to do what she could. She was overjoyed to see Master Li.
“Save him. Venerable Sir,” she begged. “If anyone could save him, it would be you. Everyone else fears contagion and has fled, and I don’t know what to do.”
Master Li had me hold the Weasel still. He examined the red eyes, and a dry tongue that had a peculiar yellow fuzz coating it, like fur, and he probed small swollen bulges like boils on the man’s groin and armpits.
“Did he complain of headache and lethargy?”
“Yes, Venerable Sir.”
“Followed by fever, and a peculiar reaction to light?”
“Yes, Venerable Sir! He screamed that light was burning him!”
Master Li straightened up and squared his shoulders. “My dear, I promise nothing,” he said gently. “We must hope and pray, and to that end I’ll need food, wine, some paper money, twelve red threads, and a White Tiger Great-Killer-Thunder.”
I knew it was all up with the Weasel. Master Li resorts to faith healing only when he wants to give the grieving something to do, and now he opened the tiny window that looked out over mazes of rooftops of Peking, and muttered, “One hundred thousand White Tiger Great-Killer-Thunders, and it still may not be enough.”
“Sir?” I said.
“Not enough, Ox. Not if Envy has his way.” Then he shook himself like a dog shedding water, and added, “Hell, I’m probably imagining things. Let’s do what we can.”
That meant cutting a tiger shape from a piece of paper and writing on it, “The Unicorn Is Here!” This invokes the auspicious star that neutralizes baneful influences, and I cut the sick man’s arm to draw enough blood to stain the tiger red. The Weasel’s wife had brought the other things, and the two of us knelt in prayer while Master Li spread his arms above the patient.
“Weasel, having fallen ill on a jen-hsu day you have collided in the north with the Divine Killer with Hair Unbound Who Flies in the Heavens,” the old man intoned as a priestly chant. “In the south you have encountered the Vermilion Bird, and in the east you have met the Five Specters, but it is in the west where danger lies, for there you have angered the Tiger who is the End of Autumn, the Edge of Metal, the White of Mourning, and the End of the Great Mystery.”
Master Li spread water and incense around and lifted his eyes and arms to the west.
“O Divine White Tiger of the Despoiling Demons of the Five Directions, of the Talismans of Sickness and Ruin
