“Wait!” cried the merchant. He grabbed my shoulders. “My dear tragic boy,” he whispered, “when you cleaned the blood from the meat, what kind of pin did you use?”
I was really quite touched. Li Kao had done all the work to bring the whale alongside, and now he was letting me use the harpoon.
“What kind of… why, I don't remember!” I said.
“You must remember!” the merchant howled. “Was it or was it not a silver pin?”
“Yes, it was,” I said thoughtfully. “Now I remember clearly. It was a pin of the purest silver, although it fell to the ground as I came to the final piece of meat, so of course I had to use another one.”
“Silver?” he asked breathlessly.
I let the tension mount while I wrinkled my brow in thought. “Gold,” I finally said.
The abbot had always warned me against judging by appearances, and that merchant was a classic example. His hoggish appearance suggested self-indulgence at the expense of all else, yet he did not rejoice because his gluttonous world had been saved. Tears streamed down his cheeks and his belly shook with sobs.
“Oh my boy, my poor tragic boy, the slightest contact between porcupine and gold is fatal,” he wept. “By the evil curse of some malign spirit, you used gold for that one last piece, and then with loving hands you placed it upon the plate—”
“Of the woman I loved!” I shrieked. “My stupidity has slain my beautiful bride!”
I fell over the coffin in a faint, which allowed me to open the jar of the Elixir of Eighty Evil Essences that was concealed on the other side.
“To think that my beloved great-grandson could have been responsible for such a ghastly death!” Master Li gasped.
“I have often heard of porcupine poisoning, but I confess that I have never seen it,” the merchant said in a tiny voice. “Is it very terrible?”
The guards and customs officials had been edging closer, with quivering ears, and they glanced nervously at the coffin.
“She began by breaking out in red spots, which spread until every inch of her skin was covered,” Master Li whispered. “Then the red began to turn green.”
The Elixir of Eighty Evil Essences was performing splendidly, and an unbelievable stench was lifting from the coffin.
“Gllgghh!” gagged the Chief of Customs.
“Then the ghastly glaring green began to turn black,” Master Li whispered.
“Black?” the merchant said, waving fumes from his face.
“Well, to be pedantically accurate, it was a greenish-purplish-yellowish black that tended to run at the edges,” Master Li said thoughtfully. “Then the smell began.”
“Smell?” said the Chief of Customs, gagging through the noxious cloud.
“I cannot describe that loathsome smell!” Master Li wept. “Guests began to run for their lives, and my beloved great-grandson reached out to touch his bride—oh, how can I describe the horror of that moment? His fingers actually entered her body, for her smooth and supple skin had become soft jelly from which green and yellow corruption oozed. And the smell, the smell, the hideous toxic stench that caused dogs to collapse in spasms and birds to topple lifelessly from trees…”
For some reason we appeared to be alone.
A few minutes later we staggered from the customs shed and joined the others, who were heaving their guts out over the rails of the pier. Allow me to inform you that the Elixir of Eighty Evil Essences can make a stone vomit. The merchant, the guards, and the customs officials held a conference and voted to toss us, along with the coffin, into the sea before corruption killed them all, but Li Kao appealed to their patriotism by pointing out that if my bride landed in the sea, she would destroy the Chinese fishing industry for at least three thousand years. A compromise was reached, and they provided us with a wheelbarrow for the coffin, a couple of shovels, and a terrified bonze who led the way to the lepers’ cemetery, banging upon a gong and bellowing “Unclean! Unclean!” The bonze took to his heels, and we watched the sails of the merchant's ship disappear in the mist as he sped away with his four wooden cases, one of which was a coffin from which the funeral decorations had been removed.
We ripped the funeral decorations from the merchant's case and I pried the lid open. Inside I found a small bag lying upon a canvas cover, and I dumped the contents into my hand and stared in disbelief.
“Pins? Master Li, why would that merchant hire an army of guards to protect some cheap iron pins?”
“Great Buddha, that fellow couldn't possibly have been working alone. He must be the representative for a consortium of the richest companies in China!” Master Li gasped.
I didn't know what he was talking about. Li Kao jerked the canvas cover aside and scooped up a strange object from a pile—we later discovered that there were 270 of them—and began attaching pins to it. The iron practically jumped to the surface, and the next pin stuck to the end of the first one.
“Ten pins,” he prayed. “If it will hold ten pins! Seven… eight… nine… ten… eleven… twelve… thirteen… fourteen… fifteen… sixteen… seventeen…”
The eighteenth pin fell to the ground, and Li Kao turned to me with wonder in his eyes.
“Number Ten Ox, barbarian merchants and navies will sell their very souls for Chinese magnetic compasses that are pure enough to hold ten inch-long pins attached end to end, and we have hundreds that are pure enough to hold seventeen! My boy, I have made some hauls in my day, but this is ridiculous,” he said gravely. “You and I have just become the two wealthiest men in all China.”
14. Lotus Cloud
The first order of business was to establish our credentials as gentlemen of vast wealth and generosity, and I have a blurred memory of flowers and gongs and incense and silver bells, boat races and dice games and cricket fights, brawls and banquets and tangles of luscious bare limbs. We sailed upon brightly painted brothel barges that floated over azure lakes—and docked at artificial emerald islands where pallid priests with flabby faces and twitching hands sold the strangest things in peculiar pagodas—and we rode through the streets in a palanquin so huge that it was carried by sixty swearing servants. Naked dancing girls were draped around us, and we scooped handfuls of silver coins from a brass-bound chest and hurled them to the adoring mobs that followed our every step.
“Buy clean clothes!” we yelled. “Sweeten your foul breaths with decent wine! Get rid of your loathsome lice! Bathe!”
“Long Live Lord Li of Kao!” the mobs howled. “Long live Lord Lu of Yu!”
I have probably given the impression that I had forgotten the importance of our quest. Such was not the case. Every night I dreamed of the children of Ku-fu, and I began to be tortured by guilt, and it was with immense relief that I heard Master Li say that our status was well enough established and it was time to make our move. He decided that the fastest way to get to the Key Rabbit would be to burn our palace to the ground, since it was rented from the Duke of Ch'in at a ruinous rate, and I was roasting a goose over the embers when the little fellow pattered up.
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!” he wailed. “Regulation 226, paragraph D, subsection B: palaces, rented, accidental destruction thereof—”
“Willful. I found the view boring,” Master Li yawned.
“Subsection C: palaces, rented, willful destruction thereof. Full value plus fifty percent, plus firefighting costs, plus wreckage-removal costs, plus triple the normal fine for disturbing the peace, plus fifty percent of the total for defaming the view provided by the duke, plus—”
“Stop babbling, you idiot, and give me the grand total!” Master Li roared.