Chapter Ninety: The Five Tones and Twelve Pitch Pipes

The moment those five tones and twelve modes were mentioned, it was as if a string of golden lamps had begun to sway in our heads. I may have done some serious study of the arts of the ancients, especially the guqin, where I could at least claim a few original insights. But if one were to speak of connecting that knowledge to musical notation from more than a thousand years ago, I truly would have had no place to begin. As for ancient scores, one had to speak of the two guqin pieces preserved in the Secret Score of the Western Ridge Garden: the Roaming South Wind and the Roaming of Gods and Men.

The lines ran thus:

I ascend the three sacred peaks, where Mount Shang stands rugged and high;
The Five Elders descend from heaven to welcome me in song.
A yellow dragon emerges from the River, bearing books and charts,
Its body winding like silk among the sands.
I examine the charts and read the omens, grieving the heavens in sorrow;
I strike the stones and play the melodies of Shao, sinking into hidden depths.
Birds and beasts move in orderly ranks, and the phoenix comes in august splendor;
The gentle south wind blows, and I cannot help but sigh again and again.
Ah, the fragrance of the south wind:
It may dispel the grievances of my people.
Ah, the season of the south wind:
It may enrich the wealth of my people.

These were lines from Emperor Shun’s Song of the South Wind of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, preserved in the Anthology of Music Bureau Poems. Tradition says it was a folk song from the time of Yu Shun, sung in relation to the Yuncheng salt lake and the lives of the people. This ancient ballad speaks of all things in the world receiving the blessings of the balmy southern breeze. Though the poem is brief, its emotional depth is complex. In the voice of Emperor Shun, it expresses the ancient Chinese people’s dual feeling toward the south wind: both praise and yearning. It is also an embodiment of the ancient union of poetry and the classics.

The Roaming of Gods and Men, however, was different. This piece describes the tribal leader Yao, who, while performing sacrificial rites, played the qin. The wondrous sound moved Heaven, and the divine beings descended to join the people in joyful song and dance, celebrating the great occasion together. Both pieces use the mode known as the Yellow Bell mode, the orthodox tuning.

Thinking of this, I looked again at the clues in the ancient numerals recorded on those three pipes and on the masks. Then I asked, “Could this mode be the Yellow Bell mode commonly used in ancient music?”

Kaleidoscope blinked at my words, then gave a faint smile, surprised. “Well now, I didn’t expect this. Nephew, you’re still so young, and yet you’ve actually studied this old music. You really do make me look at you differently.”

I smiled and waved it off. “Nothing much. I just play the guqin when I’ve got nothing better to do, pretending to have some taste.”

Kaleidoscope smiled too and glanced at the three iron pipes. “The so-called Yellow Bell and Great Bell symbolizes beauty and harmony, which is why it’s called the proper mode. Your reasoning is indeed sound enough.” As he spoke, his eyes flicked toward the Face Ghost Zhang standing nearby. “Third Brother, I must first beg your pardon. Since we’ve come to this point, I can’t help but speak plainly of your fault.”

At this, Face Ghost Zhang frowned, gave a cold snort, and stepped away with his cigarette in hand, retreating to the side for the simple peace of not seeing or hearing anything further.

Seeing Face Ghost Zhang move off, Kaleidoscope clasped his hands together and bowed in his direction, silently chanting a few Amidas as though he had just seen off a plague god and relieved himself of a thousand-pound burden. Then he continued, “Nephew, you saw with your own eyes how I, Old Seven Sha, and Cripple Old Eight were all thrown into chaos just now. That wasn’t because we wanted to fight. It all comes down to your Third Uncle, damn Face Ghost Zhang the Third.”

He even spat onto the ground for emphasis.

That only muddled me further. How could this be blamed on Face Ghost Zhang? What did their fight have to do with him? It wasn’t as if he had goaded them into it, and at the time he might have been off somewhere for all we knew. Yet when they saw those three-headed statues, none of them dared come forward, while it was Face Ghost Zhang who had risked his life without hesitation. And now what? They were biting the hand that fed them, killing the bridge after crossing the river, and even cursing the man besides. I silently cursed them all as nothing but a pack of ungrateful wretches.

Seeing my hesitation, Kaleidoscope smiled. “Nephew, when you were lying there in the passage waiting for orders, did you also hear the sound of the clay xun coming from inside this chamber?”

I nodded after hearing that. “I did. And what of it?”

Kaleidoscope’s expression cooled slightly toward me, and he gave a sneer. “Nephew, you really are still green.” Again that fellow carried a note of offensive mockery in his tone. “Let me ask you: what was your first feeling when you heard that xun echo through the tomb passage? Did you not feel an inexplicable irritability, as though some nameless fire wanted to burst out of you?”

I paused, thinking back to the scene just then. Now that he mentioned it, there truly had been a strange and unfathomable restlessness in me. I looked at Kaleidoscope, signaling for him to continue.

He nodded. “What Third Brother had been doing with those three pipes was deliberate. He was trying to make the three of us fight.”

“Ah?” I stared at Kaleidoscope in shock, my eyes wide. If what he said was true, then Face Ghost Zhang was certainly the inside man. But after calming myself a bit, I thought, no, that can’t be right. If this fellow wanted those three to fight to the death, would he have had to come out and stop Iron Crutch Liu and the other man from grappling? I immediately waved a hand. “Come on now. What you’re saying is downright ungrateful. If it weren’t for Face Ghost Zhang, you’d already have been skewered to death by Iron Crutch Liu. Would you still be standing here breathing so peacefully?”

Kaleidoscope gave a cold snort and waved dismissively. “Nephew, if I were dead, do you think you lot of illiterates could have safely made it out of this Heavenly Pool water chamber? I’m not bragging about my merits, but the writing on the tomb gate ahead, and that paradox stairway—if it weren’t for me, could you really have come this far so smoothly?”

I had nothing to say to that. Kaleidoscope’s erudition, I had to admit, left me convinced. If there truly had been no one like him in the group, who knew what kind of ordeal we would already have met.

“Leave that aside for now,” I said. “Why don’t you first think about how to break the mechanism on these three pipes?” By then I no longer wanted to hear him go on. I already understood clearly that although these people seemed to be one team, in truth they were split into at least two factions, perhaps more, each harboring secret intentions. Thinking of this, I hurriedly changed the subject and kept him from saying more.

Kaleidoscope understood and nodded. Since the tomb gate incident, after I had unknowingly opened the gate, those old hands from the Nine-Pass Gate seemed to have taken me more seriously, and no longer lectured me in the old style.

“Nephew, I know you don’t like hearing it. I’ll admit it too: your Third Uncle, that Face Ghost Zhang the Third, though only in his twenties, can be said to rank second in the trade, after our eldest brother, Heaven-Penetrating Pass, and our second brother, Hou Qiankun. But you also know that when the young achieve fame early, pride is hard to avoid. We all came through our youth; we understand.”

I nodded without answering, and pointed to the three iron pipes beside me, signaling him back to the topic.

Kaleidoscope glanced sidelong at the pipes and nodded. “Third Brother’s error was in using these three iron pipes wrongly, which produced the xun melody in discordant tones. Whether intentional or not, I won’t say, but you understand this much: if the tones are set wrong again, and our whole group breaks into a brawl, that will be no laughing matter.”

I nodded. “Then what tuning do you think it is, if not the Yellow Bell mode?”

Kaleidoscope thought for a moment, then let out a long sigh. “I’m not sure whether my guess is right. As for the age of this tomb, there are only two prevailing theories at present. One is the Pala Dynasty of India; the other is the Kushan Dynasty near the Hexi Corridor. Though these two ruling powers were separated by several centuries, in Central Plains terms both the Pala Dynasty and the Kushan Dynasty were regarded as foreign peoples. You’d agree with that, wouldn’t you?”

I nodded in agreement.

“In that case, nephew, do you know the qin piece called the Barbarian Reed Pipes?”

It dawned on me at once. I had not expected Kaleidoscope to mention it, and only then did I realize how true it is that one regrets the lack of learning only when one needs it most.

The barbarian reed pipe was originally a Mongolian edge-blown wind instrument, also called chaoer or modun chaoer in folk usage, resembling a pipe-shaped brass-like trumpet. And the qin piece he had just referred to was the famous Chinese guqin work Eighteen Laments of the Barbarian Reed Pipes.

Tradition says it was composed by Cai Wenji at the end of the Eastern Han, who wove the timbre of the barbarian reed pipe into the guqin. Some scholars, however, believe it to be a folk composition. The piece is divided into thirty-nine variants, including Greater Barbarian Reed Pipes and Lesser Barbarian Reed Pipes. The most widely circulated version is the record in Sun Pixian’s Qin Manual from the Wanli reign of the Ming dynasty. According to that score, Eighteen Laments of the Barbarian Reed Pipes is a guqin piece composed of eighteen songs.

“Then what you mean is to play the clay xun in the Rui Bin mode?” I asked uncertainly.

Kaleidoscope nodded, seeming quite confident in his conclusion.

Helpless, I nodded as well. There didn’t seem to be any better explanation. Then I picked up the three golden masks bearing the ancient secret notation and handed them to him.

“I can’t make sense of the score on these. You handle it.”

Kaleidoscope gave a teasing smile. “Nephew, let me explain the notation on these scores to you.”