“Of course, with that bit of hair on his head just like those trees behind his hut!”
“Where’s his wife, then?”
Heads turned and turned and someone said: “There she comes — walking from her day’s shopping.”
Looking over the huddled crowd, the magistrate saw a frail woman hobbling beneath a prickling bag of vegetables. He quickly sent another woman to meet her and prepare her for the news. Then he turned to a straight-standing man, grave and clean in simple clothes, who was staring at the corpse and nodding to himself as though now he understood everything. “You know something of what has happened here?” Magistrate Ti asked him in a low voice.
“Myself? No,” the man said flatly, “I was only thinking that he was surprised halfway through his work. See? Look there. He always moved in the same direction. The proper one. From south to north.”
“But what was he doing?” the magistrate wondered.
The man’s brown hand pointed to the narrow trail, to a line of broad footprints. “Only what he did every day of his life. He was wiping out the footprints.”
Standing in the golden-green of the park, his robe hanging cool in a stray breeze, the magistrate was about to ask the man why when he remembered something. “Of course! Master K’ung—”
“That’s right,” the straight-backed man said, pleased. He stepped closer to the magistrate and the dead man as the crowd exchanged their theories among themselves. “You remember some of the old stories that were told about Master K’ung, about Confucius, about some of the troubles he ran into in his day. No one wanted him around to tell them how badly they were living their lives or running their states, so in place after place they threw him and his men out of town.” The man dropped his voice and added in confidence: “I can’t say I blame them much. Who wants some impractical bore coming around to preach to them when he can’t find an honest job to feed his own belly?”
Not hearing the impiety, Magistrate Ti was thinking aloud. “Of course. They attacked him between Ch’en and Ts’ai, troubled him in Shang and Chou, chopped down a tree on him in Sung, and drove him out twice from his home state of Lu.” He looked down at the rumple of clothes at his feet. “And wiped out his footprints here in Wei.”
The straight man nodded with some excitement, absently nudging the body with his toe: “Right! And Mr. Keng here, with his broom still in his hand, being the ardent follower of Master K’ung that he was, took it upon himself these many years ago to avenge the humiliation done to his school by doing the same to the trail of anyone passing by his hut — a harmless enough hobby, really. None of us in this ward thought him dangerous or lunatic. We admired his zeal, in fact. He was a fine scholar in his own way — of the Confucian classics only, you understand. But he harmed no one by what he did. Only himself, by taking everything too much to heart.”
A growing keen interrupted them, as the dead man’s wife drew closer to seeing and believing. The magistrate ignored her, frowning over the scribble of marks in the dust and the perfect work of erasing that the dead man had half completed.
“A very large man,” said Ti.
The footprints were flat and broad and pointed north. Each of the toes was vague in outline, as if nothing truly separated them from one another, or as if they were only five knobs in a single block of hard flesh. They were almost a hand’s length in breadth, made by a man of monstrous proportions, yet curiously shallow. As far as the magistrate could see, they extended only to the point where the trail gave way to rockier fields and finally to the first streets of another ward of the city. He gazed into the warm haze and dust north of the park.
“I wonder where he was headed, the man who made these footprints?”
Again, the straight-backed man was at his side and helpful, pointing out a dingy house on the verge of a running ditch. “Toward that place there, if you want me to tell you. Toward the house where the man that did this lives.”
Subtly, the magistrate maneuvered the man backward to the edge of the path, out of everyone else’s hearing. “Tell me what you mean to say.”
The man moved his shoulders. “Well, you can see for yourself, can’t you? Only look at the rest of the bowl he’s resting his head in. It’s one of those begging-bowls, the kind made of stone that the Buddhists always travel about with. Now we both know that there’s no love between the Confucians and the Buddhists. Never has been, am I right?” He poked in the direction of the dilapidated house. “And who do you think lives there where the toes of these prints are pointing but one of the most disagreeable Buddhists that Heaven ever meant to curse us with?”
The magistrate looked at him sharply. “And the two of them had argued before?”
“When didn’t they?” the other man snorted. “As fierce as thunder, the two of them! And Mr. Keng here always came out the loser — the other man has the louder voice!”
As a rabble of men and horses began to approach the park from the nearest neighborhood, Magistrate Ti dropped quickly to his knees to examine the ground about the body. He didn’t take long, because he knew that the city officials would be arriving in a moment to take charge of everything. He peered and hummed and wagged his huge head, then squinted lower to pick at something embedded within an unswept footprint. It was a common insect that he finally raised to his eyes, a smashed and forgotten insect.
“Come and introduce me to this ghastly Buddhist of yours, will you?”
The straight-backed man easily outdistanced the magistrate, not only in youth and vigor but in his sheer eagerness to get to the Buddhist’s house and start the questioning. Magistrate Ti caught up with him at the broken gate that led through a rotting garden to the faded house. An unhappy dog followed the two men to the door, hanging about, hoping for scraps until the door was opened and a bone was tossed out. It was followed by a man’s face, wide with interest and a voice that rawly invited them in with a shout.
Magistrate Ti studied the room in which he found himself with despair. It was even more bare than the dog’s bone. The walls were decaying with time, the ceiling was uncertain, and the floor was crowded with little more than dirt and emptiness. A stack of worn mats for sitting stood crookedly in one corner and the Buddhist walked immediately toward it, roaring and flailing his arms. “You’ll want some places to seat yourselves, gentlemen. I am a perfect host or I am nothing.” He spun about and flung the cushions at them. “Here — take, take, take!”
Shaken to the hem of his robe by the man’s blunt impropriety, the magistrate could do nothing but stare. The Buddhist was a round and healthy man, of only average height but of great density, his limbs and chest and shoulders massed with muscle and overgrown with hair. His voice swelled the room and the movements of his eyes seemed to leave nothing unseen. Even the coarse smell of his body was a presence among them. Ti sat down doubtfully upon a shaggy mat and glanced at his host’s bare feet. They were broad and spatulate, as flattened as one of his own cushions.
The helpful neighbor from the park made introductions, and Magistrate Ti acknowledged his indebtedness to Mr. Liu Ch’a for his hospitality. The Buddhist scrabbled idly about behind a screen for a while, searching awkwardly for tea or wine, then he gave it up and came to squat down facing his guests. His bristling brows and eyes made his face appear larger than human, more startled than a man gone suddenly deaf. He must have been in his late thirties, no more, but the magistrate thought he had to be the most truly ageless man he had ever seen.
“You will have heard by now,” Ti said, “of the sad death of your neighbor, Mr. Keng.”