Henpecked Ho sighed and shrugged.
“Happily ever after?” he said. “You see, that's as far as I had gone when my dear wife had the fragments destroyed. If they lived happily ever after, I cannot imagine why half of the tale remained to be deciphered, although at some point it would most certainly have returned to ginseng lore. What do you think, Li Kao?”
“Ho, they did not live happily ever after, and I strongly suspect that your tablets did not preserve an ancient fairy tale,” Master Li said grimly. “When history crumbles into dust, the events of history are sometimes preserved in the form of myth or fable, and I am rash enough to believe that if Ox and I can get our hands on one or two more missing pieces, we will have the solution to a rather baffling puzzle.”
Li Kao chewed thoughtfully on his beard, and then he said,
“Ho, Ox and I are wrapped in so many chains that we can't move, you are attached to the wall by a leg chain, this dungeon is solid rock, the torture chamber is crammed with soldiers, we are eleven stories beneath the earth, and each landing is guarded by more soldiers. The palace is swarming with the army of the Ancestress, the army of the Duke of Ch'in is camped outside the walls, and Ox and I must escape from here immediately. Unless you look forward to being drawn and quartered, I suggest that you accompany us.”
“I think that's a splendid idea,” said Henpecked Ho.
25. The Triumph of Henpecked Ho
You who know so much more about the world than does Number Ten Ox will have already figured out six or seven different ways to escape from that place, and if you will bear the momentary indignity of imagining that you are soldiers in the service of the Duke of Ch'in we will see if any of your methods is similar to that of Li Kao.
Very well, you are soldiers who have been forced to stand guard in a loathsome torture chamber deep in the bowels of the earth, where slimy green water drips from black stone walls, and sickly white cockroaches crawl through puddles of blood, and fetid feverish odors mingle with the stench of discarded intestines and eyeballs. A horrible scream splits the air! The Key Rabbit topples over in a dead faint, and you follow the executioner into an adjoining dungeon where a ghastly spectacle greets your bulging eyes.
An elderly gentleman of scholarly mien lurches in lunatic circles at the end of a leg chain, frantically clawing at his throat. His face and hands are covered with loathsome black splotches, and his blotched black tongue protrudes most unpleasantly, and black saliva spurts and dribbles from his blotched lips. His eyes roll up until only the whites are visible, and he does an acrobatic somersault and lands upon his back. His hands spastically pound the floor. He bounces rigidly up and down, jerks, twitches, spurts more saliva, and finally comes to rest as stiff as a board.
Another gentleman who is even more ancient, and who is wrapped in so many chains that he can't move, views the scene with eyes that bulge in terror and screams, “The cockroaches! For the love of Buddha, look at the cockroaches!”
The black wine called Wu-fan is invisible upon a black stone floor, and you cannot possibly see that the pounding hands of the deceased scholar have uncovered a trail of it, and that the trail leads to large invisible ideographs that are traced upon a black stone wall. What you do see is that ten thousand repulsive white cockroaches are scrambling frantically across the floor, dashing up the wall, and writhing in artistic patterns upon thick sweet invisible lines that spell out the following message from the Board of Health:
RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!
IT IS THE PLAGUE OF
THE TEN THOUSAND
PESTILENTIAL PUTRESCENCES!
I sincerely doubt that you will stand there and make learned comments concerning the calligraphy of insects.
It was all up to Henpecked Ho, and his timing couldn't have been better. The executioner turned and fled. Ho jerked his leg chain taut and the executioner tripped and fell to the floor, where he was pounded into jelly by the feet of the fleeing soldiers who dashed back into the torture chamber, scooped up the Key Rabbit, who had just regained his consciousness and his feet, and carried him up the stairs like a minnow riding the quest of a tidal wave. “Run for your lives!” they screamed. “It is the plague of the ten thousand pestilential putrescences!” The pounding feet and shrieking voices faded away and Henpecked Ho collected the keys from the flattened form of the executioner. His eyes were worried as he unlocked his leg chain and started to work on ours.
“Do you think that I overdid the saliva?” he asked in a small voice.
“It was perfect,” I said.
“Do you really think so? I was afraid that the final spurt and dribble might appear to be in poor taste.”
“When you do it again, don't change a single spurt or dribble,” Master Li said firmly.
The last chain fell away, and it felt marvelous to stand up and stretch my limbs. We walked into the torture chamber and collected weapons. Li Kao filled his belt with daggers, and I took a sword and a spear. Henpecked Ho had his heart set on the monstrous axe that was used for decapitation, but since he was quite incapable of lifting it, he was forced to settle for a small double-bladed model. Li Kao started leisurely for the stairs.
“There is no hurry,” he explained. “The soldiers from the torture chamber will have collected the soldiers on the landings, and by the time they burst into the palace they will have become a large screaming mob. Anyone who isn't trampled flat will dash into the courtyard, where they will collect a couple of divisions from the army of the Ancestress, and when they hit the wall I doubt that a stone will remain standing. They will then collect the army of the Duke of Ch'in and bolt hysterically through the city and reduce it to rubble, and the citizens who survive will follow in their wake. It is quite possible that we will have to walk to Hangchow before we see another living soul.”
There was a flaw in his reasoning. We climbed the stairs and saw nothing but a few flattened bodies, but when we stepped through the door to the throne room, we ran right into a creature who would not have blinked an eye if the South China Sea had suddenly turned into soy sauce. A bloated figure with a crown on her head leveled a finger like a sausage.
“There is no such thing as the plague of the ten thousand pestilential putrescences,” the Ancestress snarled. “Soldiers, chop these dogs to pieces!”
Her bodyguards closed in on all sides, and we would have been killed instantly if it hadn't been for Henpecked Ho. He whooped with joy and charged straight toward the throne, and his axe was whirling so swiftly above his head that if he had spurted a little flame and smoke he would have resembled the Bamboo Dragonfly.
“Chop-chop!” he howled happily. “Chop-chop-chop-chop-chop!”
Of course he ran right into the spears of the soldiers. We gave him up for dead, but the distraction allowed us to clear a path. Li Kao filled the air with flying daggers and four soldiers fell. “Quick, Master Li, climb upon my back!” I yelled. He hopped up and I raced straight toward the throne, planted the butt of my spear, vaulted over the head of the Ancestress, and took to my heels.
It was a losing game. The soldiers knew the palace and we did not, and sooner or later we were going to reach a dead end. I raced up staircases while Li Kao snatched vases from pedestals and smashed them over the heads of the soldiers below, but there were simply too many soldiers. I ran down a long hallway and tugged at a pair of massive bronze doors. They were locked. I turned and started back, and skidded to a halt as the hallway filled with soldiers. Two columns of men started toward us along the walls, while the captain of the bodyguards led a double rank down the center. We stared at a solid line of glittering spears, and I consigned my humble soul to the August Personage of Jade.