Monkey (16 page)

Arriving at West Gate Street, disguised as his councillors had suggested, the dragon saw a noisy crowd thronging round someone who was holding forth to them on the conjunctions of planets and stars. The Dragon King pushed through the crowd, and having exchanged civilities with the soothsayer, said he particularly desired to know what the weather was going to be like. The soothsayer handed him a slip on which was written:

Mists hide the tree-tops,

Clouds veil the hill.

 If you want rain tomorrow

You shall have your fill.

‘At what hour will it rain and how much will fall ?’ asked the Dragon King.

‘At the hour of the dragon,’ said the soothsayer, ‘clouds will gather. At the hour of the snake there will be a peal of thunder, at noon rain will fall, and continue till the hour of the sheep. The total quantity will be 3.048 inches.’

The Dragon King laughed. ‘However, it is no laughing matter,’ he said. ‘If rain comes tomorrow exactly in the quantity and under the circumstances you have described, I shall reward you with fifty weights of gold. But if there is no rain, or any of the particulars given by you fail to come true, I shall come and tear down your shop-sign and drive you out of the city, lest you should continue to impose on the ignorant.’

‘Make any conditions you please,’ said the soothsayer
affably. ‘Good-bye for the present. I shall see you again tomorrow after the rain has fallen.’

The dragon returned very agitated to his people, but they only laughed at him. ‘Your Majesty,’ they said, ‘is Supreme Regent of the Eight Rivers; all the rain dragons are under your control. It is for you to decide whether it shall rain or not! Why let yourself be imposed upon by such nonsense? In such a wager as this the soothsayer hasn’t a chance.’

Suddenly a voice in the sky called upon the Dragon King to receive a command from on high. They all looked up, and saw a messenger dressed in gold. The king hastily burned incense and tidied himself. When the message was handed to him it turned out to be an order from the Jade Emperor to go next day with all his thunder and lightning to Ch’ang-an, and give the city a heavy deluge of rain. Detailed instructions followed, coinciding exactly with what had been promised by the soothsayer.

The Dragon King was completely overcome by his surprise. ‘I should never have believed,’ he gasped, ‘that in the mortal world there could exist such a magician. He has mastered the principles of Heaven and Earth. There can be no question of winning against
him.’

‘Calm yourself, great king,’ said a fish general. ‘You can easily get the better of him. I’ve got a little plan that will easily stop his mouth. All you have to do is to make a trifling alteration in the time and quantity of the rain. Then you can claim that his prediction was false and can proceed to pull down his shop-sign and drive him out into the street. It’s all quite simple.’

Next day the king summoned the lords of the wind and of thunder, the rain-boys and the mother of lightnings, and took them with him to the sky above Ch’ang-an. He waited till the hour of the snake before spreading the clouds, at noon he thundered, at the hour of the sheep he released the rain. The rain stopped at the hour of the Monkey, and there was only 3.04 inches of it. He had altered the times by an hour and the quantity by eight points. When all was over he disguised himself again as a scholar and went to the soothsayer’s house. Here, without allowing any time for discussion, he
smashed the shop-sign, brushes, ink-stone, and everything else.

The soothsayer sat all the while in his chair, utterly unperturbed. Then brandishing one of the door-boards that he had wrenched off, the Dragon King bawled,’ You lying quack, you impostor! You’ve swindled all these people long enough! Your divining is a fraud and all your talk is lunatic twaddle. You were utterly wrong about the time of the rain and all the other particulars into which you entered so rashly. Yet there you sit looking as if the world belonged to you! Clear out this minute, or you shall pay for it with your life!’ The soothsayer showed not the slightest sign of perturbation, but on the contrary threw back his head and laughed. ‘I am not afraid,’ he said. ‘It is you, not I, who have committed a mortal offence. You may deceive others, but you can’t deceive me. I know quite well that you are not a student, but the dragon of the Ching river in disguise. You have disobeyed the orders of the Jade Emperor, changed Heaven’s appointed times and measures. There is a special block designed for the execution of dragons, and I fear that is where you will meet your end. Yet you come here and rail at me!’ When the dragon heard this, his scales stood on end with fright, the board fell out of his hand and he flung himself on his knees before the soothsayer. ‘Good sir,’ he cried, ‘I assure you I was only joking. I had no idea that my harmless imposture could really be taken as an affront to the Powers above. I implore you to do what you can for me. If you let me die, my ghost will give you no peace.’

‘I can’t myself do anything for you,’ said the soothsayer, ‘but I can give you a hint how to save yourself. You are to be executed tomorrow at noon by the minister Wei Cheng. If you want to escape with your life you must go at once to the great Emperor of T’ang by whom this minister is employed. If the Emperor appeals to him to show mercy, you are saved.’ The dragon went away, weeping bitterly.

That night, at the hour of the rat, the Emperor dreamt that he went out of his palace to walk under the blossoming trees by moonlight. Suddenly someone knelt before him saying, ‘Save me, your Majesty, save me!’

‘Who are you?’ asked the Emperor. ‘Of course I’ll help you.’

‘Your Majesty,’ said the Dragon King, ‘is a True Dragon. I am but a dragon by karma. I have disobeyed Heaven’s instructions and am to be executed by your minister Wei Cheng. I have come to ask you to help me.’

‘If it is Wei Cheng who is to execute you,’ said the Emperor, ‘I can certainly put things right. You needn’t worry.’ The dragon thanked him profusely and went off.

Scanning the ranks of his ministers at Court next morning, the Emperor noticed that Wei Cheng was not in his usual place. ‘You must get him to come here at once, and keep him occupied all day,’ said one of the other ministers, when he heard the Emperor’s dream. ‘That is the only way to keep your promise and save the dragon.’

Meanwhile Wei Cheng, sitting in his house at night, surveying the constellations and burning rare incense, suddenly heard the cry of a crane high up in the sky, and in a moment there alighted a heavenly messenger, bearing instructions from the Jade Emperor that Wei Cheng was in dream to execute the Dragon King of the Ching River at noon next day. Wei Cheng accordingly purified himself, tested the sword of his intelligence and the free fling of his soul, and kept away from Court. But when the Emperor’s summons came he dared not delay, and hastily robing himself he went back to Court at once with the messenger, and apologized for his absence.’ I am not complaining,’ said the Emperor, and when they had discussed State affairs for a while, he sent for a draughts board and invited Wei Cheng to a game of draughts. Just before noon, when there were still a good many pieces on the board, Wei Cheng’s head suddenly nodded, he began to snore heavily, and was evidently fast asleep. The Emperor smiled. ‘No wonder he is tired,’ thought the Emperor, ‘when one thinks of all the public business he has on his shoulders,’ and he did not attempt to wake him.

When at last Wei Chfeng woke up, he was appalled to find that he had dozed in the Imperial presence, and flung himself at the Emperor’s feet, saying, ‘I deserve death a thousand times. I suddenly felt tired; I don’t know why it happened.
I beg your Majesty to pardon me for this gross disrespect.’

‘Get up,’ said the Emperor, ‘you’ve done nothing disrespectful.’ Then emptying the remaining pieces off the board he suggested that they should start a new game. They were just setting the pieces, when in rushed two captains, carrying a dragon’s head dripping with blood. They flung it at the Emperor’s feet, crying, ‘Your Majesty, we have heard of seas becoming shallow and rivers running dry. But of so strange a thing as this we have never heard tell.’

‘Where does this thing come from?’ Wei Cheng and the Emperor exclaimed in chorus.

‘To the south of the Thousand Steps Gallery, at the top of Cross Street,’ they said, ‘it fell from the clouds, and we thought it right to inform you at once.’

‘What does all this mean?’ asked the Emperor, turning much perturbed to Wei Ch£ng.

‘It is the head of the dragon that I killed in dream just now, when I fell asleep,’ he said.

‘But while you were asleep,’ said the Emperor, ‘you never moved hand or foot, nor had you a sword. How can you have beheaded this dragon... ?’

The Emperor was very sad. He had undertaken to save the dragon, and failed to keep his promise. At last he composed himself, and gave orders that the dragon’s head should be hung in the market, as a spectacle for the people of Ch’ang-an. That evening in his palace he continually thought of how the dragon had begged for his help, and felt utterly wretched at having failed entirely to protect it from its fate. He worried so much that in the end he began to feel quite ill.

At the second watch a sound of weeping was heard outside the palace gates, and the Emperor became more agitated than ever. A moment later there appeared before him the figure of the Dragon King, carrying his gory head in his hand. ‘Give me back my life 1’ the head cried. ‘Yesterday you promised faithfully that you would save me; yet when the time came, you sent your minister to cut off my head. Come back with me. I am going to impeach you, impeach you before Yama, King of Death.’ And he laid hands on the Emperor, who tried again and again to shake him off. He
tried too to cry for help, but the cry stuck in his throat. So violent was his struggle that sweat flowed over all his frame.

When at last he came to himself, the apparition had vanished. ‘A ghost, a ghost!’ he cried, and neither he nor his queens and concubines, in fear and trembling, could sleep a wink for all the rest of the night. At dawn his ministers waited in vain for the Emperor to appear at Court, and the sun was well up when at last a messenger informed them that the Emperor was indisposed, and the Court would not be held. News came that the Court physician had been summoned, and when he came out of the palace the waiting courtiers asked him anxiously what kind of sickness it was. ‘His Majesty’s pulse is irregular,’ he said. ‘It misses beats, and then is over-frequent. He talks wildly of seeing a ghost. The pulse showed one intermission to every ten beats. There is no humour in the five entrails. I fear the disease will prove fatal within seven days.’

His verdict caused consternation among the assembled officials. In the midst of the confusion came a message from the Emperor, summoning Hsu Mao-kung and other ministers to his bedside. Addressing them in a firm voice, his Majesty said: ‘Wise counsellors, from my nineteenth year I waged war on four frontiers, and for years on end took part in fierce campaigns. In all that time I was never once assailed by spirits of the dead; yet now I have begun to see ghosts.’

‘In your conquests,’ said his minister Wei-ch’ih, ‘you took countless lives. Why should you begin now to fear ghosts?’

‘Believe me or not,’ said the Emperor, ‘as soon as night comes on, bricks and tiles hurtle about just outside my room, and ghosts or goblins scream in a manner truly terrible. If it were in the daytime, I could make shift to put up with it, but on dark nights it is unendurable.’

‘Your Majesty need not be disquieted,’ said the minister Ch’in Shu-pa’o. ‘I and my colleague Hu Ching-t6 will tonight mount guard outside the palace gates, and will find out what spirit it is that is haunting you.’

The offer was accepted, and the two ministers, in full armour and axe in hand, took up their position outside the palace
gates. But dawn came without the slightest sign of any apparition. The Emperor had a good night’s rest, and in the morning sent handsome rewards to the two watchers. The same precaution was taken for several nights in succession, with the same result. But the Emperor was able to take very little nourishment, and his condition became more and more grave. At the end of this period, the Emperor sent for the two ministers and said that he could not bear the idea of their being put to this inconvenience any longer. ‘I shall send for a clever painter,’ he said, ‘to make your portraits and fasten them up on each side of the gate. Would not that be a good plan?’ The ministers accordingly dressed up in armour, and posed for the painter. The portraits were fastened up on lie gate, and nothing happened all night. However, when this had gone on for several nights, a great din was suddenly heard at the back gate of the palace, tiles again hurtled through the air, and in the morning the news came that the Emperor had been as badly disturbed as ever. ‘We seem to have dealt successfully with the front gate,’ said Hsu Mao-kung. ‘The best thing would be to get Wei Cheng to guard the back gate.’

So when night came, Wei Chêng donned his armour, and, with the sword with which he had beheaded the dragon in his hand, he took his stand outside the back gate. Nothing happened all night, but in the morning the Emperor was much worse. During the day the Empress, despairing of his recovery, summoned the ministers and discussed with them the details of the Imperial interment. The Emperor himself gave final instructions upon vital points of national policy, and named the Prince of Ch’u as his successor. He was then washed, put into fresh clothing, and lay awaiting his end. Wei Cheng now approached the bed, and pulling at the Imperial bedclothes whispered, ‘Your Majesty, have no anxiety. I have a plan which will ensure that you will yet live many years.’