The Story of the Stone (The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, #2)

by Barry Hughart

“My boy,” he said gloomily, “we live in the last days of a once great civilization. Dry rot has set in, so we paint it with lies and gild it with fool’s gold, and one of these days the whole works will blow away in a high wind and where an empire once flourished there’ll be nothing but a bunch of bats flying in and out of a bunghole.”

“Ox, what do you smell in the air?” he asked. “Wet earth, pine needles, pork fat, donkey manure, and perfume from Mother Ho’s House of Joy,” I said. “Wrong. You smell destiny,” Master Li said happily. “Destiny that appears to be approaching with the delicate tread of an overweight elephant.

“A freak forgery that can make scholars doubt their sanity is worth a fortune, but a tracing of it couldn’t fool an illiterate baby. If the idiot tried to sell it to the wrong man, he’d soon be contemplating the pretty fish swimming around his solid stone sandals.”

more people have been massacred because an emperor’s sandals didn’t fit properly than because he received a sign from Heaven, and whenever I hear a high priest howl for divine retribution, I suspect acid indigestion.”

will point out that a noise some people hear and others don’t isn’t speaking to the ears. It’s speaking to the heart, and you have a hole in your heart. All young people do. It’s there to catch the wonderful things of the world, and later on it gets filled up by broken things.

“Number Ten Ox, you couldn’t teach a banana to turn black!”

“Laws lie, the eyes see only what they have been conditioned to see, and the mind is a refuse pile of other people’s ideas,” the prince said. “Only the hand tells the truth. The hand!” he cried passionately. “Trust the hand, and it will never lie to you.”

Now the strange unfocused eyes took on a different aspect, and I decided I was looking at a man who had found the world not to his liking and stepped outside it—like Pea-Head Chou in my village, who joined the roosters every morning and commanded the sun to rise.

In darkness languishes the precious stone. When will its excellence enchant the world? When seeming is taken for being, being becomes seeming. When nothing is taken for something, something becomes nothing. The stone dispels seeming and nothing, And climbs to the Gates of the Great Void.

“Li Kao, you have been known to occasionally catch the ear of Heaven. If the opportunity arises, you may handle the situation as you think best, keeping in mind that our patron must be tough, smart, quick, remorseless, and blessed with the moral principles of a rutting angleworm. It’s a damn shame you yourself happen to be the wrong sex.” Master Li stood up and bowed. “Never have I received a greater compliment,” he said sincerely.

For what appeared to be an eternity the saint gazed down, silently communing with the instrument, and then his head slowly lifted. Piercing black eyes burned holes through the audience. A wrinkled finger lifted, and the wrinkled voice that emerged from the beard was like the drone of a pedagogical bee, yet vibrant with authority.

In addition, I decided, he moved like a cat, and Master Li once said that certain Egyptians say that a cat lives in the moon, and everybody knows that the soul of a cat is formed from the composite souls of nine debauched nuns who failed in their vows.

A whore’s hopes can be measured in the distance between two wrinkles, and what could Grief of Dawn look forward to?

“This is my esteemed former client and current assistant, Number Ten Ox,” Master Li said. “This is Moon Boy, the world’s foremost authority on sounds and bottoms like peaches.”

Master Li tapped his imperial censor’s emblem and regarded the terrible creature with the scientific detachment of a butcher examining a chunk of meat. “Lord Li of Kao, emissary of the Son of Heaven, to see the Recorder of Past Existences. Immediately!” Master Li snapped.

Endless lines of the dead were converging upon a humble cottage where Lady Meng brewed and served the Broth of Oblivion. When the dead were herded back into lines their minds were as empty as the eyes of politicians,

Show me a quest for personal immortality and I’ll show you a path through a slaughterhouse, and the incense of personal divinity is the stench of other people’s corpses.

My head was hurting, and words slipped like sly lizards through cracks in my solid granite brain, darting, stopping motionless, creeping cautiously toward meanings:

“When somebody performs my autopsy, he’ll open the skull and pull out a turnip that’s been masquerading as a brain,” he said sourly. “I still can’t begin to come to grips with this weird case.”