Sandalwood Death: A Novel (Chinese Literature Today Book Series)

  So Meiniang, bamboo staff in hand, went to a weedy area far from the county town; there she chose a marshy spot where water plants grew in profusion. Curious birds noisily circled the sky overhead. Butterflies kept a respectable distance from her as they flitted to and fro. With her heart mimicking the dance of those butterflies, her feet sank into the spongy ground, nearly making her fall as she beat the bushes with her staff, scaring hordes of grasshoppers, katydids, hedgehogs, and jackrabbits . . . but no snakes. Snakes—what she sought and what she feared. Harboring those contradictory feelings, she continued pounding the bushes. Suddenly there was a raspy hiss, and a big brown snake wriggled out from the bushes to confront her with a hideous look, its forked tongue flicking in and out. Its eyes were hooded and gloomy, but there was a grin on its triangular face. An explosion went off in Meiniang’s head, and everything went black. For a brief moment she was blinded, but she heard a meandering scream tear from her mouth just before she sat down hard on the grassy ground. By the time she had come to, the snake was long gone. Her sweat-soaked shirt felt clammy; her heart was pounding wildly, as if someone were hurling rocks inside her chest. Her lips parted, and she spat out a mouthful of blood.

  What a fool I was, she chided herself, to put any faith in the sorceress’s false words. And why do I keep thinking of Qian Ding? He is, after all, only a man, someone who eats and drinks and then eliminates it all, just like everyone else. Even if he climbed onto my body and squirmed in and out, it would be a sexual encounter and nothing more. What distinguishes him from Xiaojia, anyway? Get a grip on yourself, Meiniang! The rebuke, in a somber voice, seemed to come from high above, so she looked up into the clear blue and cloudless sky, where passing birds were calling out happily. Her mood was a mirror of the blue sky—clear and bright. She sighed, as if waking from a bad dream, then stood up, brushed off some blades of grass that had stuck to her dress, straightened her hair, and started walking home.

  But as she passed the marshy spot, her gay mood underwent a change, for she spotted a pair of white egrets standing in the shallow water of a tiny pool whose surface shone like a mirror. Neither of them moved, as if they had been standing in the same spot for a millennium. The female was resting her head on the back of the male, whose head was turned so he could look into her eyes. They were lovers for whom no speech was needed to draw full enjoyment from mutual intimacy. Suddenly, all that changed, owing perhaps to Meiniang’s unexpected arrival on the scene, or maybe they had been waiting for her to show up, and it was now time to put on a special show. They thrust out their long necks, spread their wings to reveal black feathers hidden beneath the white, and in loud voices, as if shedding their hearts’ blood, welcomed her into their midst. The passionate greeting completed, they entwined their long, snake-like necks. She could hardly believe that any neck could be that soft and supple, with his and hers forming a long braid of deep emotion. Over and over they coiled and uncoiled, a seemingly endless process, one that could have gone on forever, never to end. But then they separated and began to preen one another’s feathers, tenderly yet with amazing speed. Their affection was manifest in the caresses, one feather at a time, and each feather from head to tail. The display of love between the two birds moved Meiniang to tears. Prostrating herself on the damp ground, she let her hot tears merge with the grass as her heart beat a rhythm on the muddy earth. With emotions flooding her soul, she muttered:

  “Heavenly beings, transform me into an egret, then do the same with Master Qian . . . with humans there are high and low, noble and base. But all birds are equal. I beg you, heavenly beings, let my neck entwine with his until we form a red rope. Let me cover his body with kisses, every inch and every pore. What I long for is his kisses covering my body. Oh, that I could swallow him whole, and be swallowed whole by him. Heavenly beings, let our necks entwine for all time, let us fan our feathers like a peacock’s tail . . . I can imagine no greater pleasure, nor any more profound gift . . .”

  Her feverish face wilted the grass beneath it; her fingers dug so deeply into the mud that she was pulling up roots.

  Then she stood up and walked toward the birds as if in a stupor, a radiant smile creasing her mud-and-grass-covered face. She held out her white silk scarf, which billowed slightly in a breeze. Her thoughts took flight.

  “Birds,” she murmured, “birds, give me a drop of your blood. One drop, no more, and make my dream come true. I am you, birds, and you are him. Letting him know what is in my heart is knowing what is in your hearts, so let our hearts beat as one. All I ask, birds, is some of your happiness, just a little. I am not greedy; a tiny bit will do. Won’t you take pity on me, birds, a woman whose heart has been seared by love?”

  The egrets abruptly spread their wings and took off together, four strange, rail-thin legs breaking the mirrored surface of the pond in what some might have seen as awkward and others as nimble steps that left tiny ripples in their wake. Faster and faster they ran, their strength increasing, each step producing a sound like crackling glaze and sending modest sprays of water into the air. Once their legs were as straight as they would ever be, they fanned out their feathered wings, lifted their tails, and were airborne. Flying. At first they skimmed the surface, and then began to settle, reaching a spot opposite the pond, where now they were nothing but white blurs . . . Her legs had sunk into the loose mud, as if she had been standing there for a millennium . . . deeper and deeper, until the mud was up to her thighs and she felt her heated buttocks sitting on the cool mud . . .

  Xiaojia rushed up and pulled her out of the mud.

  For a very long time Meiniang was deathly ill, but even after the sickness passed, her longing for Magistrate Qian hung on. Aunty Lü slipped her a packet of yellow powder and said sympathetically:

  “Child, having taken pity on you, the Fox Fairy has asked me to give you this love-lost powder. Take it.”

  With her eyes fixed on the powder, she asked:

  “Aunty Lü, what is it?”

  “I’ll tell you after you take it. That is the only way it will be effective.”

  So she dumped the powder into a bowl, added water and stirred it, and then, holding her nose, swallowed the foul-smelling stuff.

  “Tell me, child,” Aunty Lü said, “do you really want to know what it is?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I’ll tell you, then,” she said. “Your aunty is too soft-hearted to see a vivacious young beauty like you come to grief, so I have conjured up my ultimate power. The Fox Spirit disapproves of my decision, but you are too far gone for it to save you. What I have come up with is a secret passed down from my ancestors, one that can be applied only to daughters-in-law, never to daughters. I will hold nothing back from you. What you just drank was distilled from the feces of your beloved. It was absolutely genuine, and very costly, not a cheap imitation. It was not easy to get my hands on it, I can assure you. I paid Magistrate Qian’s chef, Hu Si, three strings of cash to fetch it from the master’s privy. After baking it on a clay tile, I ground it into powder, then added croton seed and Chinese rhubarb to create a powerful medicine that can relieve internal heat. Believe me, I did not prepare this lightly. You see, the Fox Spirit told me that this method can shorten the practitioner’s life. But I felt so sorry for you that I was willing to give up a couple of years of my life. Child, there is one lesson you must take from ingesting this nostrum, and that is that the excretions from even a great man like Magistrate Qian are foul and smelly . . .”

  Before Aunty Lü had finished her monologue, Sun Meiniang bent over and vomited, and kept vomiting till all that came up was green bile.

  With this difficult episode behind her, clarity slowly returned to Meiniang’s mind, which had been mired in lard. While her longing for Magistrate Qian lingered on, it was no longer an obsession. The wounds to her heart were still painful, but scabs had formed. Her appetite returned: salt now tasted like salt, and sugar was sweet again. And her body was on the mend. This baptism of love, which had rocked her to her
soul, had taken a toll on her seductiveness and replaced it with innocence and purity. But sleep remained evasive, especially on moonlit nights.

  ————

  5

  ————

  The moonbeams were like sands of gold and silvery powder. Xiaojia was sprawled on the kang, fast asleep and filling the room with thunderous snores. She walked into the yard, where moonbeams washed over her naked body. Lingering feelings of dejection diminished the sensation, as the source of her illness lost no time in producing fresh new sprouts. Qian Ding, ah, Qian Ding! Magistrate Qian, my star-crossed lover, when will you realize that somewhere there is a woman who cannot sleep because of you? When will it dawn on you that there exists a body as ripe as a juicy peach just waiting for you to enjoy it? Bright moon, you are a woman’s divinity, her best friend. The heavenly matchmaker of legend, is that not you? If it is, then what is keeping you from delivering a message for me? If it is not, then which constellation is in charge of love between a man and a woman? Or which earthbound deity? Just then a white night bird flew out from the moon and perched on a parasol tree in a corner of the yard. Her heart began to race. Oh, moon, you are, after all, the heavenly matchmaker. Though you have no eyes, there is nothing on earth that escapes your vision. Though you have no ears, you can hear whispers in the darkest rooms. You have sent down this feathered messenger after hearing my prayer. What kind is it, this great bird? Its pristine white feathers sparkle in your moonbeams; its eyes are like gold, white inlaid with yellow. It has perched on the highest and finest branch of the tree and is gazing down at me with the loveliest, most intimate look in its eyes. Bird, oh, bird, magical bird, you with a beak carved from white jade, use it to deliver my yearnings—hotter than a raging fire, more persistent than autumn rain, and more thriving than wild grass—to the man I love. If only he knew what was in my heart, I would willingly climb a mountain of knives or leap into a sea of fire. Tell him I would be happy to be a door threshold on which to scrape his feet, and that I would be content to be the horse on which he rode, whipping it to make it run fast. Tell him I have eaten his feces . . . Eminence, dear Eminence, my brother my heart my life . . . Bird, oh, bird, don’t waste another second, fly away, for I am afraid my yearnings and feelings may be too much for you to carry. They are like the flowers on that tree, soaked with my blood and my tears to give off my fragrance. Each flower represents one of my intimate utterances, and there are thousands of those on that one tree. My darling . . . Sun Meiniang, her face awash in tears, fell to her knees beneath the parasol tree and gazed at the bird perched at the top. Her lips trembled as a jumble of indecipherable words poured from between those red lips and the white teeth behind them. Her sincerity was so moving that the bird cried out as it spread its wings and disappeared without a trace in the moonlight, like ice melting in water or rays of light overwhelmed by bright flames.

  A pounding at the gate startled her out of her crippling infatuation. She ran back into the house and dressed quickly, then, with no shoes on her big feet, ran across the muddy ground to the gate, where, with her hand held over her pounding heart, she asked in a shaky voice:

  “Who is it?”

  She hoped, nearly prayed, for a miracle, that the person on the other side of the gate was the beneficiary of her impassioned sincerity, the one the gods had linked to her by a red thread. He had come to her in the moonlight. It was all she could do to keep from falling to her knees and praying for her dream to come true. But the person outside the gate called her name softly:

  “Meiniang, open the gate.”

  “Who are you?”

  “It’s your dieh.”

  “Dieh? What are you doing here at this late hour?”

  “Don’t ask, daughter, your dieh is in trouble. Open the gate!”

  After hurriedly sliding back the bolt, she opened the squeaky gate for Northeast Gaomi Township’s famous actor, Sun Bing—who fell heavily to the ground.

  Moonlight revealed patches of blood on her dieh’s face. His beard, which had been the loser in a contest not long before, but had not been torn out completely, was now reduced to a few scraggly strands curled up on his bloody chin.

  “What happened?” she asked in alarm.

  She ran inside and woke up Xiaojia to help her dieh over to the kang, where she pried open his mouth with a chopstick and poured in half a bowlful of water. He came to, and the first thing he did was reach up to feel his chin. He burst into tears, like a little boy who has been bullied. Blood continued to ooze from his injured chin, staining the few remaining hairs, which she removed with a pair of scissors before daubing on a handful of white flour. His face had undergone a transformation; he now resembled a very strange creature.

  “Who did this to you?” Meiniang demanded.

  Green sparks seemed to shoot out of his tear-filled eyes. His cheek muscles tensed; his teeth ground against each other.

  “It was him, it had to be him. He was the one who pulled out my beard. He won the contest, why couldn’t he let it go at that? He pardoned me in front of everyone, said I didn’t have to do it, but then he carried out his revenge in secret. Why? He’s more vicious than a viper, a marauding blight on humanity!”

  At that moment, her lovesickness was suddenly cured, and as she pondered her dazed and confused thoughts over the past several months, she felt both shame and remorse. It was almost as if she had conspired with Qian Ding to rip out her own father’s beard. Magistrate Qian, she said to herself, you are a mean and sinister man, someone to whom justice means nothing. What made me think that you were a tolerant, loving people’s Magistrate, instead of a cruel and ruthless thug? So what if I hovered between human and ghost because of you? That was my fault for demeaning myself. But what gave you the right to treat my father with such cruelty after he publicly acknowledged his defeat? When you pardoned him in front of everyone, I was so moved that I got down on my knees and let you tear my heart to shreds. That gesture earned for you a reputation of magnanimity, while all the time you planned to seek revenge in secret. How could I have let myself become besotted by a beast in human form, a true scoundrel? Do you have any idea what sort of life I have lived over the past few months? It was a simple question that produced both sadness and anger in her. Qian Ding, I will one day erase your dog life for tearing out my father’s beard.

  ————

  6

  ————

  After picking out two nice fatty dog’s legs, she cleaned and tossed them into a pot of soup stock, where they boiled noisily. She added spices to enhance the flavor of the meat, and tended to the fire herself, making it as strong as possible at first and then letting the meat stew over a low flame. People out on the street could smell it cooking, and big-eared Lü Seven, a regular customer, banged on the door when the aroma drifted his way. “Hey, Big-Footed Fairy,” he shouted, “what wind cleared the air this time? You’re cooking dog’s legs again, so put me down for one.”

  “I’ll put you down for one of your damned mother’s legs!” she cursed loudly and banged the side of the pot with a spoon. In the space of a single night, she had recaptured Dog-Meat Xishi’s nature—easy to laugh and quick to curse—and had regained her looks. Where the enchanting gentility that had characterized the days of all encompassing yearning for Qian Ding had gone, no one knew, but it was gone. After polishing off a bowl of pig’s-blood gruel and a plate of chopped-up dog entrails, she brushed her teeth with salt, rinsed her mouth, combed her hair, and washed her face, then applied powder and dabbed on some rouge before changing out of her old clothes and taking a good look at herself in the mirror. She touched up her hair with wet fingers and placed a red velvet flower over one ear. Her eyes were moist and bright, her appearance one of grace and elegance. Even she was so taken by her own beauty that tender feelings made a reappearance. An assassin in the making? Hardly. More like a sexual provocateur. She nearly crumbled under the weight of her tender feelings, and hastily turned the mirror around so she could grind her teeth and let
the hatred reignite inside her. In order to reinforce her confidence and keep her will from dissolving, she went inside to take another look at her father’s chin. The flour she’d spread on it had formed clumps and was giving off a sour, unpleasant odor that had drawn flies to it. Presenting an appearance that both nauseated and pained her, he awoke with a shout when she lightly poked his chin with a piece of kindling; obviously in pain, he gazed at her with a vacant look in his puffy eyes.

  “I want to ask you, Dieh,” she said coldly. “What were you doing in town at that hour?”

  “I went to a whorehouse,” he admitted frankly.

  “Pfft!” she uttered in a mocking tone. “Maybe some whore picked your beard clean to make herself a flyswatter.”

  “No, we’re all on good terms. They would never do that to me,” he insisted. “When I came out of the whorehouse, I was walking down the lane behind the county yamen when a masked man jumped out of the darkness, knocked me to the ground, and yanked out my beard, hair by hair!”

  “One man could do all that?”

  “He knew his martial arts. Besides, I was pretty drunk.”

  “How do you know it was him?”

  “He had a black bag hanging from his chin,” he said confidently. “Nobody but a man with a fine beard would take such care of it.”

  “All right, then, I’ll avenge you,” she said. “You may be a scoundrel, but you are my dieh!”

  “How do you plan to avenge me?”

  “I’ll kill him!”

  “No, you can’t do that. That is beyond your ability. If you can yank out a handful of his beard, that will be vengeance enough for me.”

  “All right, that’s what I’ll do.”

  “But that is impossible too,” he said, shaking his head. “With his powerful legs, he can jump three feet in the air, which is how I know he is a practiced fighter.”