“ ‘Eight Skilled Gentlemen,’ “ Master Li said thoughtfully. “Sounds like they may have practiced alchemy or engineering or astronomy in addition to their priestly and magical duties.”
The Celestial Master shrugged. “I never found a clear reference to their exact function, and I doubt anyone did. There was, however, one extraordinarily interesting fragment concerning them that I put down at the time as primitive myth, but peculiar enough to make notes of.”
The saint picked up the sheaf of papers and shook his head wonderingly as he looked at them.
“So long ago,” he said softly. “It had completely fled what’s left of my mind, and then suddenly, after you’d left for Hortensia Island, I remembered, and at least I keep good files. Long, long ago, the Eight Skilled Gentlemen were said to have enlisted the aid of eight very minor demon-deities, siblings although physically dissimilar. What they wanted them for was no longer known, but a brief description of each was provided. You can see why I planned to show you the origin of a hallucination.”
He slid a paper across the table. It was old and somewhat faded, but still clear, and I caught my breath. Years ago as a young scholar the Celestial Master had sketched a little old man who carried a glowing ball of fire, and beneath it he had written, “Third demon-deity: Pi-fang, kills with something like a tiny comet.”
Master Li whistled sharply.
“Save your whistles,” the Celestial Master said with a smile, and he slid another sheet across the table. This time I uttered a distinct yelp, and then turned bright red as the Celestial Master winked at me.
We were looking at a one-legged creature who was playing something like stone chimes, and beneath it was neatly written, “Fifth demon-deity, K’uei, the Dancing Master. Kills by forcing victims to dance themselves to death.”
Master Li’s eyes were gleaming. He seized an ink stick and a stone and a brush and some paper and went to work, swiftly copying each sketch and brief descriptive comment. Each of the eight creatures was very odd in that it was a killer whose ability to kill was limited to a specialty that couldn’t possibly massacre large numbers of people, such as our modern crossbows and exploding charges of Fire Drug—but then, I had to admit that the very limits and peculiarities made violent death seem real and terrible, like strangling hands around one’s throat as opposed to a random missile that strikes by accident on a battlefield.
“I said there were these eight and they were siblings, but later in a passing reference too insignificant to lead anywhere an anonymous commentator said there was a ninth child, a boy,” the Celestial Master said.
“Could he possibly have had a face like a painted ape?” Master Li asked sharply.
The Celestial Master smiled. “Not a chance, Kao. I said he was a boy, and I meant it. He was human, which implies one of his parents was mortal and one divine, and he was said to possess extraordinary beauty.” The saint shrugged. “That’s why I never tried to follow up on a ninth child. It reeks of a thousand fairy tales.”
“If not a million,” Master Li muttered.
I looked at the sketch he was making. It was of the fourth demon-deity, a huge snake, and it was very strange. Part was terrible: two human heads with fangs, a great crushing constrictor’s body—but it wore two silly little hats and a jacket far too small for it, and somehow it seemed lost and lonely, and beneath it the Celestial Master had written, “The Wei Serpent has known greatness and sorrow. It cannot abide noise, and when a carriage rattles past it raises its heads and hisses.”
Apparently the Celestial Master was reading my expression, and he said, “I know, Ox. There’s something sad about these creatures as well as terrible. They seem ancient to us, but they had to be among the last recognized by the aborigines, and gods—even minor demons like these—of a dying race are often creatures of pathos. You must ask Master Li about it sometime.”
Master Li had finished. He folded the papers neatly and put them in his money belt and reclaimed the cage.
“I’ve told all I know. Do you have anything else?” he asked.
“If I did I’ve forgotten it,” the Celestial Master said. “What’s next for you?”
“Ox and I are going to pay our respects to Eight Skilled Gentlemen,” he said. “Meaning I’m going back to Hortensia Island, and I want to show Ox the Yu. After that—well, I have a theory worth testing. I’ll report when I have anything worth talking about.”
The effort to maintain mental clarity had been exhausting. The Celestial Master managed only a wink and a wave as we bowed our way backward and then out the door, but Master Li was as full of energy as he’d been in a year.
“Ha!” he exclaimed as we walked out into the sunlight. “What a delightful development! I take back everything I said about white whales turning into minnows. What kind of case did I originally predict this would be?”
I thought about it.
“The spout reaches toward the stars, and the wake rocks offshore islands as it swims toward us, circumnavigating sacred seas with the awesome authority of an iceberg.”
“Slightly over-alliterative, but not bad,” said Master Li.
5
We stopped at Master Li’s shack in the alley and changed into comfortable clothes and replaced the old cage in the hiding place beneath the pallets, and I boiled some rice and went out and found a vender of the strong fermented fish sauce we both like. We hadn’t slept in thirty hours, but the excitement of the case was keeping us wide awake, and a short time later I was at the oars again, rowing back to Hortensia Island.
I’d never seen the Yu. The island is mandarin territory, and the visit I’ve recounted was my first, but before I can describe the Yu I have to explain it.
The history of China is punctuated by more Great Floods than scholars know what to do with, and one of them a couple of thousand years ago left the Peking Plain covered with thirty feet of mud and silt. The city that was to become Peking was built in many stages on the hardened crust, and geomancers decided that in the process too much attention had been paid to male yang influences and too little to the female yin, and the imbalance must be corrected. The fastest way to strengthen yin is through water, so the North, Central, and South lakes were created by digging down through the crust and filling the holes with water drawn by canals from the Hun and Sha rivers. (Actually the lakes are called “seas,” but that’s confusing, so they’ll be lakes on these pages.) The earth from the lake beds was heaped up and tamped down to form Coal Hill, thus creating the world’s costliest pile of dirt, and while digging the bed for North Lake workmen ran into a mass of nearly solid rock, which was left as it was. Water filled up around it, and eventually it was covered with a layer of earth and planted with pretty pink-and-blue-flowering shrubs imported from the Cannibal Coast (Japan), and thus Hortensia Island was born.
One day when the water had risen to a certain level an extraordinary thing happened. A great burst of sound suddenly arose from North Lake: hauntingly beautiful, but without apparent theme or musical form. It was like the sound of a huge horn except it had a husky hollow undertone as it swooped between huang-chung and ying-chung, the low and high notes of the un-tempered chromatic scale. The eerie sound lasted only a minute or so. Then it died away and wasn’t heard again until six months had passed, at which time excited scholars announced that the sound seemed to be occurring at the precise moment of the winter and summer solstices.
The phenomenon was tracked to a cavern on Hortensia Island, in a crag jutting out over the water’s edge on the southeast side facing the city. The cavern had been notable only for ancient wall carvings and statuary, but now a brilliant young musical student announced that in uncovering the island the workmen had uncovered a cave that was actually a musical instrument devised by aborigines to work as a solstice-sounder, although he had no idea why they wanted such a thing. A hole in the floor of the cavern seemed to lead down through a hundred feet of solid rock to an unreachable lower chamber, and the musical student theorized it was some sort of wind-chest. When the water reached a certain level, and the temperature and humidity—perhaps even the intensity of sunlight—were just right, pressure was created that caused great amounts of air to be sucked inside. The air swooshed up through a network of tiny tunnels in the stone that been thought to be natural but revealed marks of axes and chisels, and exited up through the cavern roof.