Free The Story Of The Stone by Barry Hughart Page A

laughed and danced beneath the moon, and who disappeared as though the earth had swallowed them.
    The other piece of news was that one more section of Princes' Path appeared to be destroyed.
    Master Li tossed his knives down beside the corpse of Brother Shang and said we had better get a few hours sleep. It seemed only minutes before he shook me awake again and handed me a cup of strong tea, and then we set out to meet Prince Liu Pao. He was standing forlornly on Princes' Path, and once more we gazed at the impossible. Nothing lived in a swath of approximately fifty by one hundred fifty feet. Death had cut cleanly. Flowers bloomed beside withered ones, and sap dripped from healthy trees not ten feet from trees whose sap had been sucked right out of them. Again I thought of a cemetery in a nightmare, but something in the pattern of it caused me to frown and sketch shapes in the air. Both Master Li and the prince watched me with widening eyes, and I blushed.
    “Do that again,” Master Li commanded.
    I repeated the patterns.
    “Li Kao, am I losing my mind?” the prince asked. “I could swear that Number Ten Ox is sketching scholar's shorthand for antique Great Seal script, which hasn't been in common usage for a thousand years.”
    “Ox is capable of the damnedest things,” Master Li muttered. “Right now he's capable of sketching the ancient characters for ”Love,“ ”Strength,“ and ”Heaven,“ and I know perfectly well he doesn't understand a single Great Seal ideograph. Well, boy, are you going to keep us in suspense?”
    I turned bright red. “I had a dream,” I said humbly. “Just before you woke me up. Something in this scene reminded me of it, and it had strange patterns.”
    I had dreamed that I was sitting on the grass near a village very like my own. Somebody had attached a bamboo pole and a black flag to the gears of the grindstone at the water wheel, as we did in my village because the gears kept slipping. Farmers could glance up from the fields and see if the flag was pumping up and down, and if it wasn't, a boy would be sent to get Big Hong, the blacksmith, to reset the gears. As the black flag rose to the apex, it flared out and hovered in the air for a moment before starting back down.
    Children were playing in front of the waterwheel. One little girl was jumping up and down. Her long black hair lifted up into the air and hovered for a moment before settling down to her shoulders.
    In front of the children were butterflies fluttering among some reeds. One was black, and it swooped up, paused, hovered, and then fluttered back down.
    The black flag, black hair, and black butterfly formed a nearly straight line that pointed toward my feet. I looked down and saw a small round orange-colored piece of clay. My hand reached out and closed around it, and something told me to keep watching the pattern: up, pause, down . . . up, pause, down . . .
    My fingers tingled. The piece of clay had a heartbeat, and it was the rhythm of the pattern, and an ache filled my heart and tears filled my eyes. Up, pause, down: kung, shang, chueh. I was not hearing the wonderful sound but feeling it in the pulse of a piece of clay, and then I was in my old classroom in the monastery and a bunch of boys were looking at me with eyes like owls and I was desperately trying to explain something very important.
    “Don't you understand?” I said. “The life force of a round piece of orange-colored clay is like a flag and a butterfly and a little girl's hair. Up, pause, down; up, pause, down. The important thing to remember is the pause. Can't you understand that?”
    The boys stared at me solemnly.
    “It's the pause!” I yelled. “It isn't like the heartbeat of a person, and you'll never hear the wonderful sound it makes unless you understand the pause!”
    The old abbot was shuffling toward me. Then he came closer and he wasn't the abbot at all. He was Master Li, and he grabbed my shoulders and shook me and screamed