Sandalwood Death (56 page)

Xiao Luanzi and Xiao Lianzi let go of my father’s legs and stood there for a moment, not knowing what to do, before running straight at the onrushing soldiers, whose shouts merged with crisp gunfire: “Assassins!” Like a hawk, Zhu Ba pounced on my dieh and, unless my eyes deceived me, began to throttle him. I knew at once that he was trying to kill my dieh to keep them from subjecting him to the sandalwood death. Hou Xiaoqi grabbed my hand and dragged me over to the path on the western edge, where we were met by a gang of yayi coming straight at us. Without missing a beat, Hou Xiaoqi flung his monkey at the men. With a screech, the animal attached itself to the neck of one of the petty officials, who voiced his agony with appropriate shrillness. Still holding me by the hand, Hou Xiaoqi ran from the dispatch office back to behind the Main Hall. Yayi were streaming from the Central Hall, and my ears rang with the sound of gunfire, the roar of flames, and men’s shouts, all coming from the courtyard beyond the side gate, while my nostrils were assailed with the smell of blood and fire. The moon abruptly changed color, from silver to blood red.

We kept running, heading north, desperate to make it to the rear garden, our only chance of escape. More and more footsteps sounded behind us; bullets whizzed overhead. When we reached the side of the Eastern Parlor, Hou Xiaoqi jerked a time or two, and the hand holding mine fell away weakly as steamy green blood, like newly pressed oil, streamed from a hole in his back. I stood there, not knowing what to do, when a hand reached out and pulled me off the path, just in time for me to see soldiers run down the path past me.

I had been saved by the County Magistrate’s wife, who quickly led me into a private room in the Eastern Parlor, where she removed my straw hat and stripped the tattered jacket off me, rolling it into a ball and tossing it out a rear window. Then she shoved me down onto the four-poster bed and under the covers. Next she lowered the silk drapes on both sides of the bed, with her on one side and me on the other, in total darkness.

I heard the loud voices of soldiers, who were now in the rear garden. Raucous human noise rose everywhere—the garden’s front and rear paths, the compounds fronting the two main halls, and the side courtyards. Then the moment I’d feared arrived: the pounding of footsteps had reached the Eastern Parlor courtyard. “Commander,” someone said, “these are the Magistrate’s private quarters.” The next sound I heard was that of a whip landing on someone’s back. The drape was pulled back, and a scantily clad, chilled body slipped into my bed and pressed up against me. It was, of course, the Magistrate’s wife, the body my lover had once embraced. There was a knock at the door; the knock then became a pounding. We held each other tight, and though I could tell she was trembling, I knew that I was more frightened than she. The door flew open; she pushed me to the far side of the bed and covered me from head to toe before parting the drape. Her hair was a mess, I assumed; she was dressed for bed, and she must have looked like someone who has been startled out of a deep sleep.

“First Lady,” a coarse voice said, “we have been ordered by Excellency Yuan to search for an assassin!”

With a sarcastic little laugh, she said:

“Back when my great-grandfather Zeng Guofan led soldiers into battle, Commander, he had one inviolable rule to maintain discipline and preserve the cardinal guides and constant virtues, and that was, no soldier was permitted to enter women’s chambers. Apparently the New Army personally trained by Yuan Shikai, Excellency Yuan, has no use for that rule.”

“Your humble servant would not dare offend Your Ladyship!”

“What does daring or not have to do with anything? And what do you mean, offend me? You search what you wish and see what you want. You people have already destroyed the revered Zeng family name, with no voice at the court, and you take your puffed-up courage from that fact.”

“Those are harsh words, Your Ladyship. Your humble servant is only a soldier who obeys his superior’s orders.”

“Then go tell Yuan Shikai that I want to know if it is acceptable for soldiers to break into women’s quarters in the middle of the night, humiliating their occupants and besmirching their virtuous good name. Is Yuan Shikai an official of the Great Qing Dynasty or isn’t he? Does he have no womenfolk of his own? A popular adage has it that ‘A warrior can be killed but not dishonored; a woman can die but not be defiled.’ I shall let my death stand in opposition against Yuan Shikai!”

Just then a flurry of footsteps sounded outside the door.

“The Magistrate is here,” someone whispered.

The First Lady burst into tears.

The Magistrate came through the door and, in a voice quivering with emotion, said:

“Dear wife, I am a worthless man for letting them give you such a fright!”

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4

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Once the commander and his troops were scolded out of the room, the door was shut, and the candle extinguished, I climbed out of the Magistrate’s bed, with moonlight filtering in through the window lattice, lighting up part of the room and leaving the rest in darkness.

“I thank Your Ladyship for saving me from certain death,” I said softly. “If there is another life after this one, I hope I can return to serve you, even as a beast of burden!”

I turned to leave, but she stopped me by tugging on my sleeve. I saw a glimmer in her eyes and detected the subtle fragrance of cassia on her body. That took my thoughts back to the cassia tree that stood tall in the courtyard of the Third Hall. The Mid-Autumn Festival was a time when the perfume of cassia blossoms filled the air, and the County Magistrate and his wife ought to be enjoying a shared drink and the beauty of a full moon. I knew I was not fated to share that enjoyment with my beloved, but the taste of a lovers’ tryst in the yamen late at night was nearly overpowering. People said that my dieh was guilty of disturbing the peace, but in my view, it was the tyrannical behavior of the Germans that had caused all the problems. I thought about the anguish my dieh felt, as if his heart were tied up in knots. Dieh, you old fool! Your daughter nearly ran her legs off, and a gang of beggars did not rest, day or night, all in an attempt to rescue you. In order to do that, Xiao Shanzi knocked out three of his own teeth and bled all over his chest. In order to rescue you, Zhu Ba himself led the effort, which wound up costing the lives of some of his beggars. We exhausted ourselves, devising a ruse to free you from your condemned cell, but when success was nearly in our grasp, you opened your big mouth and sounded the alarm . . .

“You cannot leave, not yet,” the First Lady said, a chill to her voice as she broke into my confused thoughts. I could hear that the situation outside remained unsettled, with the occasional soldier’s shout.

On orders from Yuan Shikai, the Magistrate had been sent to keep watch at the Main Hall. Thoughts of the danger I had barely managed to escape when the commander burst into the women’s quarters with his men would not leave me. The First Lady went over and closed the door, and in the light from the weepy red candle, I saw how red her face was, without knowing whether she was excited or angry.

“My husband,” I heard her say, the chill still in her voice, “your humble wife took it upon herself to hide your lover in your bed.”

The Magistrate took a look outside through the window before rushing up to the bed and pulling back the covers to reveal my face. He hurriedly covered me back up, and I heard him say softly:

“My dear, you magnanimously put aside all previous concerns. You are an extraordinary woman, and Qian Ding thanks you from the bottom of his heart!”

“The question is, should I send her away or let her stay where she is?”

“That is for you to decide.”

There was a shout in the yard. Qian Ding left, obviously flustered. While he appeared to be leaving to carry out his official duties, in truth he was running from an awkward situation. It was the sort of thing that occurred often on the operatic stage, so I knew what he was doing. His wife blew out the candle and let the moon light up the room again.

Feeling awkward, I got up and sat on a stool in the corner, my tongue parched, my throat dry and raspy. As if she could read my mind, she poured a cup of cold tea and held it out to me. Hesitant at first, I took it from her and drank every drop.

“I thank Your Ladyship.”

“I could never have pictured you as a brave and resourceful woman!” the Magistrate’s wife said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

How was I supposed to respond to that?

“How old are you?”

“May it please Your Ladyship, I am twenty-four this year.”

“I understand that you are pregnant.”

“I am young and ignorant, and I can only ask Your Ladyship’s forgiveness for any offense I have given. As the popular adage has it, ‘A great man overlooks the flaws of a lesser man, and a Prime Minister has a capacious nature.’”

“What a clever little mouth you have,” the First Lady replied with the sobriety of her station. “Can you say with certainty that the child in your belly is Laoye’s?”

“Yes, I can.”

“Then,” she said curtly, “do you want to stay or leave?”

“I want to leave,” I said without a moment’s hesitation.

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5

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I stood beside a gatepost in front of the yamen staring blankly inside. I’d not slept a wink, suffering through a hellish night worse than any performed onstage. This was no performance, but it would not take long for it to find its way into operatic lore. Before I left the yamen, the First Lady urged me to go somewhere far away to keep myself safe. She even handed me five liang of silver. But I was not about to leave. My mind was made up. If I was going to die, it would be in Gaomi County, nowhere else. Whatever happened, happened.

All the local people knew that I was Sun Bing’s daughter, and they spared no effort to shield me, like mother hens protecting a single chick. White-haired old ladies tried to hand me still-warm eggs, and when I refused to take them, they stuffed them into my pockets.

“Eat, young lady,” they said tearfully, “you must eat to stay well and strong.”

Truth is, as I knew all too well, before troubles had beset my dieh, all these county women—young and old, daughters of fine families and prostitutes from local brothels—had ground their teeth when they heard my name mentioned and would have loved to take a bite out of me. They hated the fact of my relationship with the County Magistrate, they hated the fact that I lived better than they did, and they hated the fact that I had healthy, unbound feet that could run and hop and were prized by the Magistrate. Dieh, when you raised the flag of rebellion, their attitude toward me changed for the better, and better still when you were taken into custody. When the Ascension Platform was erected on the Tongde Academy parade ground and an announcement was posted in all the villages that you were to be dispatched by the sandalwood death, well, Dieh, your daughter was transformed into everyone’s favorite niece, loved by all.

Dieh, last night we tried to save you, and almost won. If you’d not lost your head, the deed would now be done. Dieh, oh, Dieh, four beggars’ lives were lost. Look at the winged walls beside the gate~~your heart will ache, blood from your eyes will run. On the left two heads, on the right three, one monkey and two human. On the left Zhu Ba and Xiao Luanzi, on the right Xiao Lianzi, Houqi, and his monkey, all rotting in the sun. (So vicious that even an innocent monkey was not spared!)

The sun climbed slowly into the sky, yet all was quiet inside the yamen. I imagined they would wait till noon to take my dieh out of his cell. But already, people—dignified individuals in robes and hats—were emerging slowly from Shan Family Lane, opposite the yamen gate. As the most famous lane in town, it had gained notoriety for being home to not one, but two Imperial licentiates. That glory, however, belonged to the past. Now the family’s reputation was propped up by a single metropolitan licentiate, not quite so honored, but still worthy of admiration. No one in the county enjoyed higher prestige or greater respect than Shan Wen, an old man whose style name was Zhaojin. Although he had never visited our home to buy spirits or dog meat and was a virtual recluse who spent his days reading, writing, and painting, he was no stranger to me. I must have heard Qian Ding mention his name a hundred times, and when he did, his eyes glowed as he stroked his beard and studied samples of the old man’s painting and calligraphy hanging on his wall. “How can a man like that suffer such neglect!” he said with a sigh, and followed that with “How can a man like that
not
suffer such neglect!” When I asked what he meant by such confusing talk, he would only lay his hand on my shoulder and say, “All the notable talent in this county of yours is concentrated in a single individual, but now the Royal Court plans to do away with the examination system, and he will never have a chance to pass the Imperial Examination, to ‘win laurels in the Moon Palace,’ as they say.” But as I studied the scrolls, with hills and trees that looked like none I had ever seen, with dim outlines of people, and with written characters that did not conform to those I knew, I failed to see a sign of greatness. But what did I, a mere woman who could sing a few Maoqiang arias, know? Master Qian, on the other hand, was an Imperial licentiate, a man of vast knowledge who knew many things; if he said something was good, then good it was, and so in my eyes old Mr. Shan was truly a great man.

Licentiate Shan had bushy eyebrows, a prominent nose and mouth on a large face, and a beard that, while finer than most, was inferior to Qian Ding’s, the most impressive beard anywhere in Gaomi after my dieh’s was plucked clean; old man Shan now owned the second-finest beard in the county. He was striding at the head of the procession emerging from the lane, head held high, a man comfortable in the position of leader. His head was cocked at a slight angle, and I wondered whether that was a permanent impairment or something unique to today’s circumstance. I recalled having seen him in the past, more than once, in fact, but that detail had escaped me. Cocking his head gave him sort of a wild look, more like a bandit chief than a man of learning. The crowd behind him was composed exclusively of prominent Gaomi personages. They included the corpulent pawnbroker Li Shizeng, in his red-tasseled cap; the skinny Su Ziqing, proprietor of the local fabric shop, who never stopped blinking; and pockmarked Qin Renmei, proprietor of the herbal medicine store . . . everyone who was anyone in Gaomi’s county town was there. Some wore somber looks and kept their eyes straight ahead; others, clearly skittish, kept glancing around, almost as if looking for support; and still others walked with their heads down, staring at the tips of their shoes, seemingly afraid of being recognized. Their emergence from Shan Family Lane drew the immediate attention of everyone on the street, taking many by surprise. But there were those who knew exactly what this augured.