15
Just after dawn on the third day of the fifth moon, when the Yellow Wind had temporarily ceased and the sky was clear pale blue, fingers of sunlight reached across the water of North Lake and crawled across the stern of our rowboat as we splashed toward Hortensia Island, and I was astonished to see that already the first heat waves were wriggling like transparent lizards on top of the looming crag that housed the Yu. It was going to be another scorcher, but as I tied to the dock my heart lifted. Yen Shih was already there, and he had torches with him as Master Li had requested.
“It seemed to me that you’d been cheated,” Master Li said cheerfully to the puppeteer. “Ox and I witnessed all the excitement at the grand warden’s palace while you were stuck with a stageful of puppets, so with any luck you’ll get some action today.”
“How delightful,” Yen Shih said, and it sounded as though he meant it.
“I should have thought of this before,” the old man said ruefully. “We need a list of the mandarins and other eminent gentlemen connected to the tea ring, and I also need every bit of information I can find about the peculiar cages Ox and I have described. The key may be the man who apparently found the cages, the late Ma Tuan Lin.”
We were making our way down the path toward the place where that gentleman met his end, and Master Li pointed in the direction of the pavilion.
“Ox and I discovered all that was of interest in his island retreat, and I’ve had his house and office searched, as well as his country estate. I thought we’d reached a blank wall, but now I’m not so sure. Ever hear of Ma before this mess?”
“The honor was never mine,” Yen Shih said.
“You were lucky,” said Master Li. “To know Ma was to invite ulcers. He was one of those scholars blessed with a marvelous memory, one talent—in his case, a gift for languages—and absolutely no brains or judgment whatsoever. His linguistic skills brought him into the Interior Ministry as an expert on our minority populations, and it is no exaggeration to say that Ma Tuan Lin soon became a living legend.”
Master Li seemed to feel a peculiar admiration for the late mandarin, whose career had been amazingly consistent.
“His first post was administrator to the Hu Peh. He arrived during a flu epidemic, during which time that remarkably hygienic tribe fashioned and wore gauze masks,” Master Li said. “His official report stated that his subjects were like human beings except they had nothing but blank spaces between nose and chin; their mouths, he surmised, being placed on top of their heads. He was rewarded by promotion to the land of the Kuang Tung, and it was their ghastly luck that he arrived as they were celebrating their Creation Myth. The official report stated that they would require neither arable fields nor fishing rights, since they existed by eating mud.”
“Sounds like a delightful fellow,” Yen Shih said wryly.
“He got better,” said Master Li. “Ma Tuan Lin was promoted to oversee the Chiao, which led to the massacre of uncounted bewildered grandmothers when he accepted as literal truth a tale designed to make youngsters behave, and reported that the old ladies of the tribe turned into bats at night and flew around devouring the brains of Chinese children. They promoted him to Hainan, and he arrived on the island during a full moon, and one can imagine what moonlight did to Ma Tuan Lin. His official report stated that the girls were actually mermaids who wept pearls instead of tears, so legions of unsavory gentlemen set sail for Hainan to grab girls and make them cry, and I don’t want to go into the disgusting details.”
Master Li had come in sight of the pavilion, and he stopped and waved his hand at it.
“My point is that Ma’s fellow conspirators would scarcely trust a man like that with important documents. My guess is that he was still useful to them, so rather than slit his throat they made sure that he worked on anything connected to the scheme—and that includes the cages—in a place they supervised. His pavilion was right beside the tunnel, giving him ready access to the cave beneath Coal Hill, and that, I’m willing to bet, is where they gave him an office and had somebody search him for sensitive papers before he left.”
“So we’re going back into the cave, to find and search Ma Tuan Lin’s office?” Yen Shih asked.
“Precisely.”
The puppeteer didn’t say anything, but those little lights were dancing deep inside his eyes. I helped him reopen a hole in the weeds covering the tunnel entrance, and we stopped just inside and lit our torches. So far as I could see the tunnel hadn’t been used since the last time we’d been there, and the evidence was fairly good because white dust still covered the ground in the area where something had been chipped from the wall, and we saw no fresh sandal prints. We descended to the path beneath the lake. All I heard was the ominous drip-drop of water trickling from the roof, and the rapid thudding of my heart. The path began to rise toward Coal Hill. As we got close to the cave I heard a sound that resolved itself into laughter, and it was the laughter of men who had triumphed over the problems men are heir to by reverting to bestiality. I can’t describe it. Either one knows that sound or one doesn’t. We extinguished our torches. As we got closer the laughter got louder, and when we peered into the cavern we saw ten men at a table eating a breakfast of roast meat. Dog bones littered the floor at their feet, and dog grease dripped down their jowls, and they roared with mirth as they swapped one stale dirty story after another. The three leaders were all too familiar: Hog, Hyena, and Jackal, who had brutally murdered the little clerk, and I took note of the fact that all the men wore daggers, and there were three crossbows propped against the table beside the leaders.
They were too occupied with greasy dog meat and greasier jokes to notice much else. Master Li promptly slipped into the cave and began crawling between stacks of packing cases, and Yen Shih and I followed him to the back wall. He changed position several times, scanning the ceiling and angles of the walls to judge the acoustics, and then he whispered to us to gather pebbles and take positions where we could throw them through deep shadows back through the tunnel entrance. At his signal the puppeteer and I pitched pebbles, and the rattling sound made the men jerk their heads up and turn their eyes toward the tunnel.
Master Li had his hands cupped around his mouth. He’s tried to teach me how to do it many times, but I have no talent for such things, even though I realize ninety percent of it is getting the listener’s attention focused on the place the sound is supposed to come from. The effect was really remarkable. A high quavering voice seemed to drift from the blackness of the tunnel, a voice I remembered well.
“Give… me… back… my… eeeeears,” wailed the ghostly voice of the murdered clerk.
The thugs sat frozen, dog legs and haunches half crunched between their teeth. Hyena spat meat onto the table and turned to Hog.
“That was Cricket, sure as you’re born,” he whispered.
One of the other thugs jumped to his feet, spilling a wine jar and knocking a platter to the floor.
“Cricket? Cricket? But you said you’d killed the miserable little bastard!” he squealed.
“Give… me… back… my… noooooose.”