Binu and the Great Wall of China (12 page)
Far-Seeing Eye pulled Binu up out of the hole, grabbed the hoe, and, before she could count to ten, the hole was filled in. He stuck the panther flag in the ground beside her and said, ‘Please don’t get the idea that I am contemptuous of you. It’s just that you should not have chosen Lord Hengming’s forest for your gravesite. Don’t be fooled
by the way all those deer-boys are allowed to run and skip here in the forest. When they die, they are dragged off to be buried elsewhere. Even when we retainers fall ill and die, we are not buried here, so how can I allow you that privilege? Elder Sister, don’t be stubborn, and don’t try to pull any tricks on me. I am Far-Seeing Eye. Ask anyone and they will tell you who has the sharpest eyes of all of Lord Hengming’s three hundred retainers. Even if you buried yourself thirty feet deep, you could not escape the power of my eyes; I’d come and dig you up.’
Seeing that he was unmoving and overcome by exhaustion, Binu and the boy fell to the ground and slept.
The clang of the bell announcing a night hunt startled Binu awake. Sleeping near the river bend, she was once again dreaming of death; the bell brought the dream to an end. She awoke on her filled-in gravesite, and her first sight was a canopy of stars hanging low in the sky over the river bend, speaking to her of all the tiny details of death. To her it seemed the starry sky was stubbornly urging her to hold on to life. She was still alive, and that was a miracle, albeit a miracle she would not have chosen. Several watery pearls were frozen on her face, not dewdrops but tears she had shed as she dreamt. Why was she still alive after shedding all these tears? She recalled that her mother had told her that her father had shed a single tear over Lord Xintao, one teardrop on the mountain top, and was dead by the time he reached level ground. For three days now she had shed so many tears; this morning she had expected to be dead by nightfall and, as night was about to fall, she thought she would die before the sun rose again.
She had anticipated her death for three days, only to open her eyes to a starry sky once more.
As she stood at the bend in the river, looking all around, she pinpointed the source of the sound of the bell – it came from the forest. Moonlight flooded the area, lending the water and the rank grass a cold gleam. The boy was sleeping next to her, but Binu could not waken her gravedigger; he must have been worn out by three days of waiting for her to die, waiting and digging, and doubting her motives.
By now, doubts had crept into Binu’s mind as well. She could not say for sure if she was being untruthful or if she had been misled by the Peach Village
Rulebook
for Daughters
. Perhaps her tears were worthless and she could shed them as much as she liked, without effect. Or perhaps her sadness did not count; her bitterness was a sham. Three days of waiting to die had taken its toll on her and yet she lived on, for which her Angel of Death had a bellyful of resentment.
‘If you say you are going to die, then die,’ he had said.
She could tell that his patience had run out. As he slept on the ground, hoe in hand, snores of contempt emerged from his nostrils.
Binu failed again to waken him, so she went to look
for a new gravesite. She found an ideal location, close to water, near the road, a pristine spot that descended from the riverbed; it was also far away from the frightful potter’s field, but not far from Hundred Springs Terrace. The boy, finally awake, told her that the new territory near the bend in the river would one day become part of Hundred Springs Terrace. But that was in the future, and by then she would already be in the ground and would have come back as a gourd. The people of Hundred Springs Terrace had yet to claim the marshy land by the river bend, so it was left to loaches, to reed blossoms, and to Binu. As dusk settled, a grand, canopied carriage drove by and stopped at the sight of Binu and the boy. Several men climbed down and, like stars attending the moon, guided an elderly official towards Binu. She assumed she was going to be driven away yet again, that this spot too was off limits.
Even before he had reached her, the official said, ‘What are you planting in this uncultivated spot, Elder Sister?’
‘Gourds,’ she replied, not daring to reveal her true intent.
‘Gourds are no good,’ the official said. ‘You should plant cotton. Aren’t you aware that there is fighting going on in the west and in the south? If you plant cotton, you can use it to make uniforms for the warriors
on the battlefields. Women, too, must make contributions to the state.’ The man’s accent and diction were barely comprehensible to Binu, so after they had returned to the carriage and continued on their journey, she asked the boy if the man was Lord Hengming.
‘Him? That was a royal emissary, sent by the King himself. Even Lord Hengming is afraid of him.’
‘I don’t care where he came from,’ Binu replied, ‘I did not block his way, so he cannot stop me from digging a hole.’
Torches in the forest turned half the sky red, the wind carried the voices of men, the cries of deer, and the whinnies of horses to the river bend. Binu did not know what was happening in Hundred Springs Terrace. She nudged the boy, who jumped to his feet, and when he heard the call of deer whistles he exclaimed, ‘A hunt!’
He gazed longingly over at the forest beyond the river, and said, ‘It’s a night hunt, a night hunt! I’ve never been on one of those. Forget about the grave, I’m going back to being a deer-boy.’
‘You can’t leave,’ said Binu. ‘When I say I’m going to die, I’m going to die. Who knows, I might be dead when the sun comes up. If you leave, who will throw dirt into my grave?’
A look of loathing came over the boy’s face. He glared at Binu for a moment, then abruptly scooped out a hoe-full of dirt and flung it at her. ‘Throw dirt! Throw dirt! I’ll throw it for you right now. It’s not fair; always saying you’re going to die, but never actually doing it. You’ve held me up long enough, and all for a measly ear-pick.’
‘I understand your feelings, and it confounds me too that I am still alive. Living is hard, but dying is harder.’ Binu looked up into the sky above the river bend. ‘A while ago I asked the stars what kept me from dying. I dreamed I was dead, the same dream I’ve had many times, but I awoke, and there again was the starry sky.’
‘You’re lazy, just sitting around waiting to die. You won’t hang from a tree, because a hanged ghost has a long tongue, and you find that ugly. You won’t jump into the river because a drowned ghost will float off in the water. Instead you insist on being buried in the ground. What’s so good about that anyway?’
‘I am a gourd, child. How can I come back as a gourd if I’m not in the ground?’
This infuriated the boy. ‘You are not a gourd. You are a dung beetle. Only dung beetles burrow into the ground to die.’
The boy ran off into the night, leaping nimbly over the hoe and disappearing from sight in the direction of
the hunt. Binu could not hold him back, and again she stood alone, this time in the chill of moonbeams. She hadn’t known that life could contain so much suffering, that even dying could be such hard work. Winds rustled the reeds on the riverbank and swept at her hair. She looked down at the ground, where she saw her own shadow. Ghosts do not cast shadows, and she definitely had one. After three days and three nights, how could she still be dragging a shadow up and down the river bend? She thought back to the ways of dying that the boy had mentioned. Hanging from a tree was the quickest and easiest. She could do that without help; all she needed was a sash. But the boy was right, she’d seen people who had died that way, with their eyes popping and their tongues hanging out, and the scene had terrified her.
The second way lay right in front of her. All she had to was walk up to the deepest part of the river and drown herself. That wouldn’t be difficult either. Just lie down and let the water swallow her up. But she was a gourd, not a fish. Gourds need to sprout, and if there was no earth from which the shoot could emerge, there would be no gourd and she would have no rebirth. The cold ripples of the moonlit water filled her with terror. With water there would be no rebirth, and more than twenty years of bitterness would have been endured in
vain, all those tears shed for nothing. More than twenty years of days and nights, each passed in futility.
Binu stuck one foot into the water, while the other leg held itself back. A stalemate raged for a while, until she decisively pulled the first foot back onto dry land. Death by water was out of the question, no matter how easy it might seem. She consoled her wet foot, and herself as well, that she would die sooner or later, but it would be on solid ground.
Silence reigned on her side of the river, but from somewhere in the distance came the croak of a frog, then another. It must be my frog, she thought, somewhere in the grass over there. She searched the riverbank for a few moments, then suspected that the croaking may well have come from the roadside. ‘This is no time for hide-and-seek,’ she muttered. ‘I’m not interested in you, so go and look for your son.’ She had abandoned all thoughts of finding the frog, since they had parted company and were no longer travelling companions. If it had been a person, that would have been wonderful, for then she wouldn’t have to travel alone. But they were women existing in two different worlds and speaking of different matters. The living woman was searching for her husband, the dead woman for her son. They might travel together, but would never
be
together.
So Binu decided to return to her gravesite; in the moonlight it had the look of an unfinished grave, but also a crude and simple home. It was warmer inside than outside, for there was no wind down there. She was on the verge of sliding into the hole when, suddenly, she spotted the frog – it was crouching in her grave, looking up to hear what she had to say. In the days since she had last seen the frog, it had grown wizened and its blind eyes were far more sorrowful, emitting a light of hopelessness.
‘Get out! Go and search for your son,’ cried Binu as she knelt beside the hole. ‘Come out of there. My good feelings for you are gone. I prepared a bundle for Qiliang and let you hide inside. Now I’ve worked hard to dig a grave, only to have you come and take it over. A frog you may be, but you have taken advantage of me. A little thing like you has no business in a hole this big. There is mud on the riverbank, and any spot will do for you. Why have you chosen my hole?’
The frog refused to come out, apparently having decided to end its journey of misery in this hole in the ground. Binu did not know if it planned to occupy the hole alone or was prepared for them to die together. Whatever its motives, she would have none of it. She clapped her hands and stamped her feet, but the frog was
unmoved. Finding it impossible to get rid of the frog, Binu grew wilful. She picked up the hoe and brandished it in front of the hole.
‘If you don’t come out of there,’ she vowed, ‘I’ll come down, and we’ll see who is left standing. Even if this was just a dry well, it would still be reserved for me alone.’
The frog stayed put, a single tear on its face bringing a white light into the darkness. Binu turned away to avoid looking at that tear. Sorrow had lost its power on this night; a woman who did not cry had already shed all the tears she had, and the tears of the frog were now someone else’s burden. Neither could get a reaction from the other. So a long confrontation between a pair of one-time travelling companions developed at the river bend, and an air of antagonism turned the atmosphere icy. Even the water flowing in the moonlight gasped tensely.
Back at Hundred Springs Terrace, Lord Hengming had chosen to ride each of his precious Snow Mountain horses instead of a horse-man.
Tens of thousands of thoroughbred Blue Cloud white horses had galloped off with generals and their troops to battlefields during three years of war, and even before the winds of war in the southwestern border region had abated, all the remaining horses – fine steeds, sick ponies
and old nags – had followed the wall builders north. All three hundred of Lord Hengming’s retainers knew how passionate their master was about his hunting outings, that he would rather die than give them up; when he saw how his stable was being depleted of horses, he grew sallow, and the sharp eyes of his retainers spotted that his idle buttocks had grown even more sallow than his face. He had received a special dispensation, given only to nobility, to keep three of his favourite horses, but the retainers, who were accustomed to doing everything necessary to lessen their master’s worries and ease his hardships, sought replacements for the missing horses. By pooling their wisdom and efforts, a fervent tide of creativity and thinking swept through Hundred Springs Terrace, leading eventually to the invention of horse-men.
This invention created a glorious new page in the
Old
Chronicle of Archery
. Hundred Springs Terrace’s horsemen opened up a new world, and not just in Blue Cloud Prefecture; the rulers and aristocrats of seven prefectures and eight counties followed its example, and this enterprising practice for the greater good of the Kingdom was praised by the Court, with the King announcing considerately that the horse-men were to be exempt from military conscription. As the news spread, young men in cities and rural areas everywhere began to vie for this
new occupation, producing a craze for running with heavy loads. They ran up mountains with boulders on their backs; they ran through forests with logs on their backs; they ran at home carrying their aged and unproductive grandparents on their backs. They practised equine gaits, breathing and snorting characteristics, even whinnying, as they ran like horses, only faster.
Riding humans for the hunts became fashionable in aristocratic circles, gaining steadily in popularity. But, as with the development of anything new, problems soon arose. Arrows flew in the forests and on mountain slopes, driving great quantities of wild deer, muntjacs, rabbits and mountain gazelles out of the hills and up to the mountaintops, while birds flew off to unknown places; soon the joys of hunting were under serious threat. Horse-men had bows but no targets, they had speed but nothing to chase. With the disappearance of quarry, they could only return empty-handed.