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“Hosteler Tu!” Master Li shouted. “The eight demon-deities who guarded the keys in the cages had a brother, born human, who became a great cavalier. Do your people know anything about him?”

“Brother? I didn’t know they had a brother who was human. They were very strange, and a brother would probably be like the giant water bugs they eat in the south. They say they taste like lobster but in fact they taste like soft overripe cheese, and they serve them with dried salted earthworms that don’t taste of anything except salt. In southern Hupeh they eat the fried flesh of white-flower pit vipers, and stewed marmots, and in Lingnan the delicacy is baby rats. ‘Honey peepers’ they call them, because the little things are first stuffed with honey and then released upon banquet tables and they crawl around going ‘peep-peep-peep’ and diners pick them up by the tails and pop them into their mouths and eat them raw. The better houses tint the creatures with vegetable dyes to harmonize with the service: emerald baby rats peep-peeping around purple porcelain bowls, for example, from which come faint hiccups.”

“Hosteler Tu—”

“The hiccups are made by soft-shell crabs floating in rice wine flavored with rock salt, black Szechuan peppercorns, and anise, and the crabs are far too drunk to mind when diners scoop them from the bowls and eat them raw. Like the rats. On the opposite end of the scale are elephants, of course, and the elephant feet of the south are among the great delicacies of the world, providing one steers clear of the bile. Elephants store their bile in their feet and it moves from foot to foot with the changing of the seasons, and a bileless foot is stuffed with dates and baked in a sweet-sour mixture of vinegar and honey. The only thing they won’t eat in the south is—”

“Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu!” roared Master Li. “How about a creature that’s half man and half ape, and has a silver-gray forehead, blue cheeks, a crimson nose, a yellow chin, and is sometimes called Envy?”

“Envy, oh yes, oh yes. Envy caused it, of course. Somehow he got the gods to turn their backs on earth, and he had the sun ready to set the sky on fire, and he had the birds of pestilence ready to strike, because of the solstice, you see. If the solstice didn’t take place and the sun got hotter and hotter—but that was where the Eight Skilled Gentlemen took over, and when they finished with Envy he was as harmless as a lamb, which is what they won’t eat in the south. I think it’s a misunderstanding involving lamb liver, which can be poisonous if eaten with pork. Just as common ginger can be poisonous if eaten with either hare or horse meat, not that horse meat needs help to be poisonous. Emperor Ching swore that horse kidneys were deadly, and Emperor Wu-ti told Luan Ta, the court necromancer, that Ta’s predecessor had expired from eating horse liver. Still, a horse’s heart when dried and powdered and added to wine will restore memory, and sleeping with a horse skull for a pillow will cure insomnia—”

“Hosteler—”

“— and another use for horses leads us back to lamb. In barbarian Rome lambs grow from the earth like turnips, and when they’re ready to sprout the farmers build a fence around them to keep out predators. The baby lambs are still tied to the earth by their umbilical cords and to cut them is dangerous, so the farmers get horses and have them run around and around the fence.”

“Hosteler—”

“The lambs get alarmed and break the umbilical cords themselves and wander off in search of grass and water, and when I get a lamb I like to save pieces of shank meat for ‘Eight Exquisite Lion Head,’ which doesn’t contain any lion, of course: lamb, lichees, mussels, pork, sausage, ham, shrimp, and sea cucumbers. The name is ridiculous because ‘lion head’ in culinary terms is simply a large sausage, and I think the error was on the part of a tipsy scribe who heard shi-zi. ‘lion,’ when a chef really said li-zi, ‘lichee,’ as in the case of the fish stew called—”

“Hosteler Tu!” screamed Master Li.

And now I must confess I blanked everything out. I saw the hosteler’s horrible mouth opening and closing, but all I heard was a chirping sound like a small cricket inside my skull, and I don’t think I was alone. The Chief Executioner of Peking was sitting at his desk with a silly smile on his face and glazed eyes. apparently listening to birdies chirp in the woods, and he was not pleased when Master Li finally dragged him from his reverie.

Master Li had learned nothing else of value. He huddled with Devil’s Hand and discussed something I didn’t overhear, eliciting more cries of “You’re crazy!” and “The world has gone mad!” and finally we prepared to leave. Devil’s Hand dragged the prisoner away in a rattle of chains, and there was something oddly pathetic in the hosteler’s last words to Master Li.

“Wait! It’s very important! I wanted to tell you that the best lotus roots are those from Nanking ponds! Get the red horned nuts from Ta-pan Bridge! Jujubes should be from Yao-fang Gate and cherries from Ling-ku Temple! You must try the sea horses of Kwantung served with Lan-ling wine flavored with saffron, and pork glazed with honey and cooked with cedar wood in the style of—”

The iron door slammed behind them, and that, I prayed, was the last I would ever see or hear of Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu.

19

The fourth day of the fifth moon began with a bang of firecrackers. A great many bangs, as a matter of fact. It was the Feast of Poisonous Insects that warms things up for the great Dragon Boat Race of the double fifth, and usually it’s a merry affair, but not this time. The heat wave hadn’t broken and rain still hadn’t fallen, and everybody knows that when there is no fluctuation in weather for an extended period of time an unhealthy atmosphere is created in which sickness spreads like swarms of locusts, and great plagues begin their incubation cycles, and horrible omens tend to appear: flesh and frogs falling from Heaven, for example, or hens turning into roosters.

Children enjoyed themselves, of course. They’d been laboriously embroidering tigers on their slippers for months, and their mothers dressed them in black-and-yellow-striped tiger tunics, and they shrieked with delight as they hopped around the streets stamping imaginary scorpions and centipedes and spiders, or battled clowns dressed as toads and snakes and lizards with long leaves of ch’ang-p’u grass, shaped like the blades of swords. The parents dutifully set off firecrackers and daubed everybody’s ears and noses with streaks of sulphur as a precaution against poisonous bites, but their eyes were worried and their faces were drawn as they watched heat waves again lift from the streets. The temples were crowded with grandparents praying to Kuan-yin, Goddess of Mercy.

Tempers were rubbed raw. A bloody battle erupted at the Dynastic Gate when a herd of sheep with red-painted tails, meaning they were being led to sacrifice at the Altar of Heaven, somehow got entangled with camels on their way to the caravan loading area at the other end of the city, and nobody could go anywhere for two hours. The Mongol herders were forced by custom to wear heavy sheepskin robes caked with grease, and the Turkish camel drivers were bound to their thick grimy robes and huge felt-lined boots, and everybody was melting, furious at the world, and spoiling for a fight. I mention the incident because Master Li and I got trapped in the middle of it when we set out early that morning for the Celestial Master’s house, and we had to abandon the palanquin and hack our way through the mobs and eventually hire another one, and when we finally reached the house we were told by a soldier guarding the gate that the saint had indeed returned, late at night, but had already left for the Forbidden City.