MASTER LI: O soul, come back!
In the east are giants a thousand fathoms tall,
And ten suns that melt metal and dissolve stone.
YU LAN: O soul, come back!
In the south the people have tattooed faces and blackened teeth;
There coiling snakes devour men as sweet relish.
MASTER LI: O soul, come back!
In the west the Moving Sands stretch for leagues;
You will be swept into Thunder’s Chasm and dashed to pieces,
And beyond lies a desert with red ants huge as elephants.
YU LAN: O soul, come back!
In the north is the Frozen Mountain of the Torch Dragon,
Its eyes glaring red, with serrated teeth and wild mad laughter,
And the sky is white and glittering and rigid with cold.
MASTER LI: You cannot climb to Heaven above, O soul,
For leopards and tigers guard the gates,
And slant-eyed wolves pad to and fro.
YU LAN: You cannot descend to the Land of Darkness,
For there the monster lies, nine-coiled;
Three eyes has he in his tiger’s head, and his body is a bull’s.
Smoke rises around the litter. When it clears Master Li and Yu Lan are flanking the patient, heads and hands lifted toward the stars.
MASTER LI: O soul, we call to guide you, standing by your body to lead you back in.
The quarters of the world are full of harm,
But here in your old abode are high halls and deep chambers.
Stepped terraces, storied pavilions.
Warm breezes bend the melilotus, and set tall orchids swaying,
Sending scents through chambers of polished stone
With ceilings and floors of vermilion.
YU LAN: Many a rare and precious thing awaits in your chamber;
Braids and ribbons, brocades and satins,
Bedspreads of kingfisher feathers, seeded with pearls,
While damask canopies stretch overhead
Lit by bright candles of orchid-perfumed fat.
MASTER LI: O soul, the food is ready.
Rice, broomcorn, early wheat mixed with millet,
Ribs of fatted ox, tender and succulent,
Stewed turtle and roast kid, served with sauce of yams,
Geese cooked in sour and bitter, casseroled duck, fried flesh of the great crane,
Braised chicken, tortoise seethed in soup of Wu,
Fried honey cakes and malt-sugar sweetmeats,
And jadelike wine, honey-flavored, fills your cup,
Strained of impurities, cool and refreshing.
A tiny twinkling light appears high overhead, in the deepest shadows of the vaulted ceiling.
YU LAN: Hear the musicians take their places, O soul,
Set up bells, fasten the drums, sing the latest popular songs:
“Crossing the River,” “Gathering Caltrops,” and “The Sunny Bank.”
Dancers await you, attired in spotted leopard skins.
Bells clash in their swaying frames, the zither’s strings are swept,
Pi-pas and lutes rise in wild harmonies, the sounding drum sonorously rolls.
The shining light glows larger and brighter as it sinks down toward the dais; Master Li and Yu Lan guide it to the liver of the grand warden’s wife, who has been observing all this with eyes like soup bowls.
MASTER LI
YU LAN: Your household awaits you, O soul!
Lovers await you, O soul!
Life awaits you, O soul!
Come back! Come back! Come back!
The light disappears as the shaman and shamanka ease the soul back into the patient’s liver. Master Li closes her eyelids and has her lie back and softly tells her to sleep. Yu Lan steps to the front of the dais and speaks in the general direction of the grand warden, while still maintaining the distance of the Mysteries.
YU LAN: The sickness is gone. Life and love await,
but forget not the Tao. Take great care in your sacrifices and prayers, for evil influences seek to return where once they have sported, and to the Three Venerables should be offered nine lengths of green embroidered silk. The Servants of Wu ask nothing, being content with the thrill of battle and the joy of triumph. Return now to the red dust of the world.
Doors are flung open, and sunlight pours in, and the audience stumbles out. The litter is carried back to the lady’s bedchamber, while poppy fumes carry their thick sweet fragrance toward the clouds.
I picked myself up from the floor (I was lying beside the giggling bat) and gasped deep lungfuls of fresh air. Yu Lan and Master Li were pouring pitchers of water over their heads, and Yen Shih descended from his perch on the rafters, grunting and gasping and practicing eye-focus as he stretched his arms and legs.
“That went rather well, considering we didn’t have time for a decent rehearsal,” said Master Li.
“I’ve seen worse,” Yen Shih said.
Yu Lan, as was her habit, made no comment. She walked out past me: silent, graceful, distant as a drifting cloud, secretly smiling.
“You see, Ox,” said Master Li some time later as we were walking through the palace gardens, “to a shaman the identification of a medical problem and its appropriate treatment is merely the beginning. In this case the problem was easy to identify. It was tadpoles.”
“Tadpoles?” I said.
“Precisely,” he said. “You’ve had a rather unfortunate encounter with the grand warden, so perhaps you can sympathize with his bride. She’s a bandit chief’s daughter, my boy, practically born on horseback and happy out in the hills where she grew up, and here she is in a gloomy pile of stones where she’s supposed to spend her time sewing and gossiping with maids. On top of that it’s her duty to present her husband with children, and one can imagine what she thinks of that shifty-eyed cowardly creature as the father.”
Master Li stopped at one of the decorative ponds in a courtyard close to a high gray wall, where a balcony ran beneath tall windows.
“Tadpoles,” he said, pointing down at the green water. “One of the oldest of old wives’ tales holds that a woman who swallows fourteen live tadpoles on the third day after menstruation, and ten more on the fourth, will not conceive for five years, so the poor young woman has been swallowing the creatures. They’re harmless. What isn’t harmless is the parasitic flatworms that transfer from the tadpoles to the swallower’s stomach and make her sick as a yellow monkey. Yu Lan and I gave the lady a powerful vermifuge and forbade tadpoles until further notice, and since she’s basically as healthy as a horse she’s already recovered in a physical sense.”
He thoughtfully regarded the tadpoles, and reached into a pocket and took out a small vial with a stopper in it.
“That,” he said, “is where conventional medicine stops and shamanism begins. What good is it to cure the body when the real damage is to the spirit? Think of the humiliation to a bandit chief’s daughter forced to swallow tadpoles, the destruction to her self-esteem! So Yu Lan and I—with the invaluable assistance of Yen Shih—made the lady feel she was the most important person in the whole world as the forces of good and evil battled for her soul. The final step to the cure is eliminating the need for tadpoles, of course. She’ll find the obvious solution to the problem of proper parenthood in due course, but no respectable shaman would take the chance of a relapse while she’s figuring it out.”
With that he removed the stopper from the vial and pulled out the front of my tunic and dumped a live scorpion down inside. Until an official disrobing contest is held in all the major provinces, the record belongs to me. I was out of my clothes and into the pond in three seconds flat.