Kao,
I’m tired and stupid and senile. I confronted a mandarin who had to know about that cave in Coal Hill. I got him to produce his cage and explain they’re for communication. Then I used it to do some shouting, but then my mind stopped functioning. All I could think of was to hit the bastard over the head with the thing. I’ll have to leave more constructive approaches to you. I’ve tracked a cage to Yang Ch’i. He keeps it in a case in that damned greenhouse of his, and you can handle the guards if anyone can. I’ll send word when my brains are up to something tougher than pre-chewed baby food.
Chang
“How do I look?”
“Sir… Sir…”
“Ox, not over my robe!”
“Sorry,” I managed to say between retches.
Civilized readers will be familiar with Ink Wang’s famous portrait of Master Li, and I was there when Wang painted it. After examining the sage’s face from all angles the artist pitched his brushes into a corner, unbound his long lank hair, dipped it into the inkpots, and jumped around swinging his head in front of the silk as he sprayed ink all over the place. The end result was a pattern of incredibly complex interwoven lines. Ink Wang then sketched a head-shaped outline, blacked out everything outside the perimeter, painted in a pair of bright eyes, and there was Master Li, so lifelike I almost expected him to walk from the surface and call for wine. Ink Wang said it was the only way he could reproduce the landscape of wrinkles that constitutes the sage’s face, and the reason I mention it is to suggest something of the effect when the wrinkles were filled with green phosphorescent Cantonese clay. (Neo-Confucians who have been left behind are invited to think: incredibly old man, bony, labyrinthian wrinkles packed with clay that glows in the dark.)
I was driving a blue-hooded upper-class donkey cart beneath a bright moon that was occasionally obscured by sand clouds. The Yellow Wind hissed against the canvas, and the metal torch brackets lining the elegant lane on Coal Hill seemed to be passing sand-scrape sounds from one to another like one long vibrating lute string. We came to a halt and the guards at the gate of mandarin Yang Ch’i’s mansion crowded around demanding passwords or engraved invitations, and the silken curtains parted and the head of a six-month-old corpse slid out, inch by inch.
“Good evening,” said Master Li.
The guards were no longer present, although high-pitched notes remained for some time, rending the air, and we proceeded placidly up the drive. At the courtyard another row of guards stood ready for promotion, keen and alert.
“Excuse me. We have been summoned to collect a gentleman, and which one of you is…” I fumbled for a list.
Hands pushed the front handle of a coffin through the blue curtains, followed by the head and face of Master Li.
“Good evening.”
Since there seemed to be nobody in the courtyard we left the cart and proceeded to the mansion, where a butler automatically accepted Master Li’s cape, turned to receive the white wooden calling card, and toppled over backward like a board, bouncing up and down three times with a distinct whang-whang-whang sound. Servants, guards, and various flunkies appeared at every doorway and staircase.
“Hello, the house!” I cried desperately. “My beloved great-great-grandfather has contracted some silly little ailment that ignorant medicasters call vehemently virulent, and we merely seek—”
“Good evening,” said Master Li.
Since nobody seemed to be around to receive us we proceeded through the inner courtyards to a central tower, and entered a huge room beneath a great vaulted dome that consisted almost entirely of windows. The heat outside had been bad enough; here it was awful. What’s more, it was as humid as a southern rain forest, and Master Li explained that Yang Ch’i was an avid horticulturist who specialized in exotic tropical flowers. Beneath the floor was a great vat of water kept constantly bubbling by charcoal fires. Vents released steam through a thousand tiny apertures, and moisture coalesced into droplets that splashed down from the ceiling with tiny pit-pat sounds. The room smelled of manure and decay, but most of all it reeked of the gross pulpy stalks of immense orchids: stickily sweet, rotting inside.
“Yang also prides himself on his knowledge of primitive artifacts, and in that respect his pride is justified,” Master Li said. “He’s one of the few who truly respect the craftsmanship of aborigines, and that’s why the Celestial Master said he kept his cage in a case. Yang Ch’i couldn’t possibly keep such a thing hidden away; it would be the jewel of his collection.”
The avenues between plants were lined with display cases containing everything from a costly jeweled hair comb to a child’s doll carved from cheap teak, and I may have learned something when I noticed that moonlight made materials irrelevant, and if craftsmanship was the criterion the doll was the more valuable. The avenues converged at the center of the dome where a single case stood on a circular patch of floor. Here steam was taking the place of heat waves; outlines blurred, and everything seen from the corners of my eyes seemed to be floating up and down as on billows of the sea. The moon was directly above the dome. As I walked forward I watched it change color and shape seen through differing patches of glass: now round and golden as a fabled peach from Samarkand, now elongated and yellow as a squash—a crab must see the moon like that, I thought, peering up through water as it scuttled over sand and seaweed.
The glass alone must have cost a crown prince’s ransom. Never had I seen so much in one place, and never of such quality.
We reached the center display and gazed down at the case and there it was, an ancient cage like the ones we had seen before. Master Li frowned. “Damn. No brush,” he said, and indeed there wasn’t a brush like the one shown in the rubbing. It was like the one we’d picked up outside Ma Tuan Lin’s pavilion, but this time I noticed the hole at the top through which a brush handle could protrude. I reached forward, but Master Li stopped me.
“Careful.”
He examined everything about the floor, the stand, the display case, the ceiling, and only when he was sure there was no visible trap or alarm mechanism did he reach out and carefully lift the glass cover. Steam billowed around us, hissing, blocking my vision, and when it cleared I saw Master Li nod. I reached out and picked up the cage and pulled it back, and Master Li gently replaced the lid.
“Let’s take a look at it,” he said.
In a far corner was a workbench where a bright lantern glowed, giving clearer illumination than moonlight, and we started toward it. My throat tickled badly and I coughed, and then the old man coughed. The sound seemed to linger inside the dome, moving slowly through the moist air. At the lantern Master Li examined the top of the cage and took note of the symbols of the elements on the bars, symbols the Skilled Gentleman had touched with the brush in the rubbings, and then he turned the cage over and looked at the bottom. He became very still.
“Ox,” he said quietly after a long pause, “do you see this tiny little cross scratched on the rim?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“I put it there.”
“Sir?”
“I put it there, Ox, from force of habit, as an identifying mark on a piece of physical evidence. This is the same cage that we found on the island, and that the ape man stole from the shack,” Master Li said.