| SPRING gave way to early summer as I climbed hills and skirted mountains and forded rivers and crossed valleys. I will admit that I was drinking a good deal more than was good for me during my journey, and when I finally arrived at my destination I was quite drunk, even though it was only ten o'clock in the morning. I lurched through an outraged crowd of teachers and students, trampled the headmaster's flower garden, kicked the headmaster's cat into the compost heap, banged an assortment of heads with a heavy jar of wine, and staggered up the path toward the fence around the willow grove. The Headmaster of the Academy of Chang Heng, a suety sort of fellow with quivering jowls and watery eyes, got there first. He blocked the gate and held up an imperious hand, and bellowed in his very best headmaster voice: |
1 |
| "I order thee to halt, thou dissipated and degenerate youth! None but those who pass the tests of purity, poverty, and piety are allowed to enter this sacred grove!" |
2 |
| Pompous ass. |
3 |
| "Chang Heng," I said quietly, "it is Li Kao. I must talk to you." |
4 |
| The fence bowed down to the ground. It was a remarkable effect and I admired it. Students, teachers, and headmaster fell flat on their faces and began bawling prayers and banging their heads against the ground, and I placed a foot upon the headmaster's rear end, walked over him and the fence, and climbed the path to the clearing. Behind me the fence gracefully lifted and settled back in place. |
5 |
| It was a beautiful morning. Bees buzzed among the wildflowers and butterflies flickered above the green grass, and a soft breeze rippled the clear water of the Pool of Past Existences. I sat down and opened my jar of wine. The skull of the great Chang Heng grinned up at me in a friendly fashion. |
6 |
| "I promised to bring you a better brand of wine. This is genuine Haining Autumn Dew, fit for the gods," I said. I poured some into the pool. "Kan pei!" |
7 |
| For several minutes I sat there sipping wine and admiring the wildflowers. Then I said: |
8 |
| "Chang Heng, a thousand years ago the Duke of Ch'in tricked the three handmaidens of the Princess of Birds. He murdered them - I think I know why he murdered them - and he stole the crown of the princess. So long as he possessed it he would never age. But he could still be killed. So he brought ten cartloads of treasure to the Old Man of the Mountain, and the Old Man of the Mountain removed his heart. Then he was immortal and invulnerable, so long as his heart was safe. Five hundred years later you got on his trail." |
9 |
| I paused and gazed at the skull with open admiration. |
10 |
| "How on earth did you do it?" I said. "Nobody gave you a dragon locket. Nobody helped you. You had nothing but your brain to guide you, yet you found the ball and the bell and the flute, and you defeated the labyrinth and the invisible hand and the rigid corpse! How did you do it? Of course you never had a chance, because you still had to rescue the Princess of Birds. The duke could not kill her since she had eaten the Peach of Immortality, but he bought many secrets from the Old Man of the Mountain and he could transform the princess into anything he liked. So you went looking for a raindrop hidden in a thunderstorm, or a petal in a field of flowers, or a single grain of sand concealed among a billion on a beach. It was an impossible task, of course, and you lost your head. Have another drink." |
11 |
| I splashed more wine into the pool. "I have vowed to kill the Duke of Ch'in or die in the attempt," I said. "But you want me to do more than that. You want me to try to rescue the Princess of Birds, and the Old Man of the Mountain says that you will never let me go until I lose my head just as you lost yours. I am greatly afraid that the Old Man of the Mountain is right, and as soon as I can collect my thoughts am going to plead for my life." |
12 |
| I sipped wine for quite some time. Every argument I could think of seemed to have holes in it. It seemed a bit ridiculous for me to argue my case on the basis of morality, but what else could I do? |
13 |
| "Morality is scarcely my strong point," I sighed, "but I seriously doubt that you have the moral right to force me to commit suicide against my will. Why should I risk my life to help the Star Shepherd? What does it matter to me that a minor god I never heard of lost a minor goddess I never heard of either? Unless I consent to be sacrificed my death will be cold-blooded murder, and if you can persuade me to be sacrificed you are a greater genius than I think you are. You know very well that there is a slight flaw in my character. There is also a slight space left in my hollow leg, so I think we should have another drink." |
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| I am not bragging when I say that I did not even blink when I heard the voice. After all I had been through, why should I blink? I poured more wine into the pool and a familiar voice that came from nowhere and from everywhere said: |
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| "That really is excellent wine, Li Kao, and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate it after five hundred years of water." |
16 |
| "I'm glad you like it, I said. "But the point is: are you going to force me to try to rescue the Princess of Birds?" |
17 |
| "Oh no. The choice was always yours to make," the voice said quietly. "I would have allowed you to make it at the very beginning, but in order to choose wisely you had to learn something of life and loss and love and loathing. And other things. Now you are ready to choose, but first I would like to tell you something. Li Kao, no matter what choice you make I will always honor you. I could only guide you, but you had to fight your own battles, and you have been magnificent. Believe me when I say that your ancestors take great pride in having produced such a fighting dog. Even the most distant and illustrious of your ancestors, the founder of the breed, is not displeased with your performance, and he is the greatest fighting dog who ever lived or ever will live. So great that he is divine." |
18 |
| The pool flickered, the skull was gone. I was suddenly gazing into a mirror, and the scene it reflected knocked the breath from my body and the wine from my brain. |
19 |
| I was gazing at Heaven. |
20 |
| I gasped at the beauty of the concubines of the Emperor of Heaven, who were laughing and splashing in a rainbow of rose petals where the River of Flowers cascaded down the Cliff of the Great Awakening to the Pool of Blissful Fragrances. I gaped at paths made of pearls, and palaces of jade. I saw the golden groves where the Queen Mother Wang grows the Peach of Immortality, and the seven terraces with the seven rows of trees whose branches are formed of precious stones, which sound musically when the wind stirs them. Everywhere birds of many-colored plumage and divine voices sang so beautifully of the Five Virtues and excellent Doctrines that I began to suspect that virtue might have something to offer after all. |
21 |
| Then the scene shifted and I was looking at a lake in the Land of Extreme Felicity In the West, and before my very eyes the leaves of a lotus slowly opened, and a purified sinner who had completed his cycle around the Great Wheel of Transformations stepped from the flower into the shining light of Buddha. |
22 |
| Suddenly I cried out in wonder and delight, for the scene had shifted again and I was gazing straight at my most illustrious ancestor: T'ien-kou, the greatest fighting dog who ever was or will be. |
23 |
| "What shoulders!" I cried. "What jaws! What teeth! What a murderous expression!" |
24 |
| The great dog sat silent, unmoving, eternally watchful, eternally ready to spring. Beside my magnificent ancestor stood the great Ehr-lang, a warrior so valiant that he had been able to battle the stupendous Stone Monkey to a standstill, and it had taken Buddha himself to defeat the beast. |
25 |
| The Celestial Dog and the Second Lord are the bodyguards of the Emperor of Heaven, and the August Personage of Jade was seated between them upon his throne. The left arm of the throne bore the symbol of the Heavenly Master of the First Origin who preceded him, and the right arm bore the symbol of the Heavenly Master of the Dawn of Jade of the Golden Door, who will someday succeed him. The emperor's robe was embroidered with dragons, and he wore a hat like a flat board from which dangled thirteen pendants of colored pearls on red strings. He had long whiskers and a tuft of beard, and his crossed hands rested upon the Imperial Book of Etiquette. The eyes of the August Personage of Jade were grave and sad, and his fingers fiddled restlessly with the book on his lap. I began to realize that the eyes of Ehr-lang and my great ancestor were also sad and grave, and just as I was wondering what they could possibly be looking at the scene shifted and I saw what they were seeing. |
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| "Namo Kuanshihyin Bodhisattva Mahasattva!" I yelled, for I was looking at the greatest athlete in all the annals of eternity. I was looking at the Star Shepherd. |
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| It was the rainy season in Heaven and the Great River of Stars was filled with raging water. Terrified stars tumbled and splashed through waves that roared like ten trillion tigers, and great black boulders thrust through the foam like giant teeth, but not one star crashed into a rock or bounced over a bank, because the Star Shepherd was at his post. |
28 |
| He bounded across the boulders with the force of a rhinoceros and the grace of a gazelle, he leaped high in the air and twisted, and guided one flying star back to the water with a bare hand while the long crook in his other hand herded three more stars around a deadly rock. His grace was effortless, his leaps and twists and turns were pure poetry, and for all the power of his movement his crook caressed the stars as gently as a mother handling a baby. He was stripped to the waist and barefoot, and his long shepherd's crook was cut from the branch of an enormous tree, and his trousers were spun from simple peasant cloth, and I thought: |
29 |
| "God or no god, that is a real shepherd!" And then I thought: "Great Buddha, I would give anything to see the Star Shepherd do the Sword Dance with Bright Star!" |
30 |
| No sooner had that thought passed through my brain than I began to see why the eyes of the Emperor of Heaven and his bodyguards were so sad as they watched the magnificent Star Shepherd. There was something mechanical about that magnificence. He was not moving as Bright Star had moved in the Sword Dance. He was moving as she had moved when she eternally danced toward a door that eternally closed: beautifully, perfectly, but without joy or hope or pride. For some reason I found myself thinking of Miser Shen, for the Star Shepherd was doing his work as though he was not even aware of doing it, just as Miser Shen had been condemned to go on making money long after he had forgotten why be wanted it. |
31 |
| I was grappling with that rather muddy thought about Miser Shen when the scene shifted once more. I was gazing straight into the face of the Star Shepherd, and I cried out: |
32 |
| "Doctor Death!" |
33 |
| Again it was hard to put my finger on it, but the face of the handsome young god was also the face of the heartbroken old alchemist: totally innocent, completely vulnerable. The eyes of both were the puzzled, wondering, agonized eyes of trusting children confronted with cruelty for the first time. |
34 |
| Miser Shen was dead. His spirit was reunited with little Ah Chen. Doctor Death would die. His spirit would be reunited with the most wonderful wife in the world. But the Star Shepherd was immortal, and of course he moved without hope or joy or pride: what he did was magnificent but never again would the Princess of Birds be there to see him do it. Not through all eternity. And the August Personage of Jade could do nothing but gaze sadly at his favorite nephew and fiddle with the book on his lap, because the Imperial Book of Etiquette is unyielding and beyond challenge: a vow had been made, a vow had been broken, and the Princess of Birds had passed from the protection or Heaven. Heaven does not accept excuses. |
35 |
| Suddenly I was gazing at the Star Shepherd from a great distance, watching his shining form leap and turn and bound and twist with impossible grace, and as I did so I heard a voice whispering in my ear, and my blood ran cold. It was the snickering voice of the rigid corpse. |
36 |
| "You will dance for me forever," the monster laughed, and once more I felt the strangling arms and saw the ghastly capering corpses. "For ever and ever and ever," said the monster |
37 |
| The dance of the Star Shepherd in the Great River of Stars gradually faded away, and then I was looking straight down at the face of a dying friend, and instinctively I leaned closer: |
38 |
| "Immortality is only for the gods," whispered Henpecked Ho. "I wonder how they can stand it." |
39 |
| The sun was shining, and the birds were singing, and the breeze was fragrant with wildflowers, and a bleached white skull was grinning up at me from the bottom of a pool, and I took a deep breath and bellowed at the top of my lungs: |
40 |
| "YOU DIRTY CROOK!" |
41 |
| I had been set up step by step and plucked like a pigeon. The hook had been baited with the Celestial Dog himself who was "not displeased" with my performance, and now if I did not try to do what he was forbidden to do I would disgrace my most illustrious ancestor. It was unfair! It was a swindle! It was superb. |
42 |
| "Chang Heng, it is a tragedy that you wasted your life on good works," I sniffled. "You could have become the greatest crook in the history of China." I wiped my eyes and poured more wine into the pool. "You win. I will try to rescue the Princess of Birds, and with any luck the Duke of Ch'in will pitch my head into your pool and the two of us can stare at each other for the next million years. Kan pei!" |
43 |
| "Did you say that this wine was made in Haining?" said the voice. "If so they have learned a great deal since my time." |
44 |
| "They call it Autumn Dew." I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. "Believe it or not a Haining merchant discovered the secret of making it in a savage barbarian backwater called Aquitania." |
45 |
| "I have heard of the place. I believe that they also produce a truly loathsome byproduct of spoiled milk called cheese." |
46 |
| "That is the place." |
47 |
| I split the rest of the wine and sipped my share in silence for a minute or two, and then I sighed and stood up. |
48 |
| "Chang Heng, it is very pleasant chatting with you but the Duke of Ch'in is probably scouring the country for me and I suppose I had better get going. It seems to me that I should concentrate on finding his heart. If I could find it I might be able to force him to produce the Princess of Birds by threatening to slice the slimy thing to ribbons." |
49 |
| "And if he produced the princess?" |
50 |
| "I would slice the slimy thing to ribbons. All I would need then to restore the princess to Heaven would be her crown and the three feathers of the Kings of Birds, and I already know where they are. You could not have found the duke's heart when you were alive, because you would have done the same thing," I said, "but you have had five hundred years to think about it. Can you point me in the right direction?" |
51 |
| "Follow the dragon, Li Kao," said the quiet voice. |
52 |
| "Follow…but Chang Heng, the dragon wound all the way to the end of the locket when it led me to the basin of oil in the cemetery! How can I follow the dragon?" |
53 |
| Behind me something metallic went clang! I whirled with drawn dagger, but the clearing was empty. Then I saw what had caused the noise, and I walked over to Chang Heng's marvelous seismograph. One of the dragonheads around the rim of the kettle had opened its jaws, and the metal ball had fallen into the mouth of the frog below. |
54 |
| "Thank you," I said. |
55 |
| I aligned the eyes of the dragon with the map of China engraved on the lid and memorized the general path I should take. Then I took a deep breath and walked straight toward the trees, in the direction of the dragon's eyes. The trees leaned aside and spread their branches apart. I walked through the gap and found a faint path and started down it, and the trees closed silently behind me. |
56 |
As an interesting footnote to this episode I later discovered that the Headmaster of the Academy of Chang Heng had climbed the tallest tower of the school in order to spy upon my impious actions at the Pool of Past Existences. When the willow trees spread silently apart his students heard a loud scream, and when the willow trees closed behind me the students heard a sickening thud. The headmaster was buried with great ceremony, but to this lay the local peasants swear that on moonlit midnights you can see his ghost bouncing up and down upon the ground beneath the tower. Only a fool would question the ghost stories of the peasants of China.
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