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

  “The . . . fifty-second . . . cut . . .”

  He tossed the sac to the ground, where it lay in the dirt looking hideous. For the first time in all his years in the profession, he experienced something unique, for him, at least: disgust.

  “Fucking . . . bastard!” In an earthshaking display of loathing, Qian Xiongfei somehow found the strength to curse: “Yuan Shikai, Yuan Shikai, you turncoat, I may not be able to kill you in this life, but I will return as a ghost to take your life!”

  Zhao Jia, afraid to turn his head, could only imagine the look on Excellency Yuan’s face at that moment. Desperate to finish the job, he bent down again, dug out the second testicle, and cut it off. But as he was straightening up, Qian Xiongfei leaned over and bit him on the head. Since he was wearing a cap, the bite did not inflict serious damage, but it did break the skin, even through the cloth cap. Well after the incident, Zhao shuddered when he considered the possibility that Qian could have bitten him on the neck and chewed his way into his throat; or if he had bitten him on the ear, he’d have lost that organ for sure. Experiencing a strange pain on his scalp, he jerked his head upward and connected with Qian’s chin. He heard the frightful crunch of Qian’s teeth as they bit through his tongue, which sent blood spurting from his mouth. But that did not keep him from hurling epithets, now less intelligible, though by no means incoherent, and still directed at Yuan Shikai. The fifty-third cut. As Zhao Jia threw down the thing in his hand, he saw flashes of light in front of his eyes, he felt light-headed, and his stomach lurched. He clenched his teeth to keep whatever it was down, telling himself that he mustn’t vomit, not now; for if he did, the power of intimidation enjoyed by Board of Punishments executioners would die in his hands.

  “Cut out his tongue!”

  Yuan Shikai’s voice thundered behind him in all its fury. Instinctively, he turned to look. Yuan’s face was livid as he smacked his knee with his fist and forcefully repeated his command:

  “Cut out his tongue!”

  Zhao Jia wanted to tell him that this was not the way of his ancestors, but the look of rage, born of mortification, on His Excellency’s face made him swallow his words. What good would it have done to say anything, when even the Empress Dowager respected almost anything that Excellency Yuan said? So he turned his attention to Qian’s tongue.

  Qian’s damaged tongue had turned his face into too bloody a mess to make Zhao’s knife effective. Cutting out the tongue of a crazed condemned individual was a bit like trying to pull the teeth of a tiger. But Zhao was not foolhardy enough to ignore Yuan’s command. Without wasting time, he thought back to his shifu’s teachings and what experience he had gained from them, but nothing helpful came to mind. Qian was still shouting invectives. Excellency Yuan repeated his command yet again:

  “I said, cut out his tongue!”

  At that critical moment, the spirit of the profession’s founder saved the day with an inspiration. After placing the knife between his teeth, he picked a bucket of water up off the ground and emptied it into Qian’s face, bringing an immediate halt to his curses. Then he wrapped his hands around Qian’s throat and squeezed with all his might. Qian’s face turned the color of pig’s liver as his purple tongue emerged from between his teeth. Squeezing the man’s throat with one hand, Zhao reached up with the other, took the knife from between his teeth, and sliced off the tongue. This spur-of-the-moment change to the ritual brought a roar from the formation of soldiers, like a wave crashing over a sandbar.

  Zhao displayed Qian’s defiant tongue in the palm of his hand, feeling it twitch like a dying frog. “The fifty-fourth cut,” he murmured weakly before throwing Qian’s tongue onto the ground in front of Excellency Yuan.

  “The fifty . . . fourth cut . . .” his apprentice announced.

  Qian Xiongfei’s face had turned the color of gold. Blood gurgled from his lips. A mixture of blood and water slid down his body. He was still cursing, even without a tongue. But now there was no way to tell what he was saying and whom he was cursing.

  Zhao Jia’s hands were burning up and seemed in danger of being reduced to ashes. He was on the verge of collapse. Professional pride, however, kept him focused on the job at hand. Yuan’s disruptive order to cut out the man’s tongue had freed him to put his victim out of his misery without delay, but a sense of responsibility and personal ethics would not let him do that. As he saw it, not inflicting the requisite number of cuts was more than a blasphemy against the laws of the Great Qing Dynasty; it was an act of disrespect toward the good man tied to the post before him. Under no circumstances could he allow Qian to die before the five-hundredth cut. If he did, he would give credence to the view that Board of Punishments executioners were little more than common butchers.

  Zhao Jia wiped the bloody water from Qian Xiongfei’s skin with a chamois dipped in saltwater; then, while rinsing it in a bucket of clean water, he cooled his overheated hands and dried them. Qian’s tongue-less mouth was still vigorously opening and closing, but the sounds coming out of it were growing weak. Zhao knew he needed to speed up the process, remove smaller pieces of flesh, and avoid spots with heavy concentrations of blood vessels. It had become necessary to make a practical adjustment in the cutting scheme he’d begun with. Rather than call into question the skills of a Board of Punishments executioner, this change was a direct result of Yuan’s disruptive command. In a move that went unnoticed by the witnesses, he jabbed the tip of his knife into his own thigh to produce a sharp pain that drove away his sluggishness and at the same time took his mind off his burning hands. With renewed energy, he stopped worrying about Yuan Shikai and the ranking officials behind him and gave no more thought to the five thousand soldiers arrayed in front. His knife began swirling like the wind, removing pieces of Qian’s flesh that rained down like hailstones or a swarm of beetles. The next two hundred cuts removed all the flesh and muscles from Qian’s thighs, followed by fifty cuts to do the same to his upper arms. Fifty cuts in the abdomen preceded seventy-five on each side of his buttocks. By that time, Qian’s life was hanging by a thread, though light still burned in his eyes. Bloody foam oozed from his mouth, while his viscera, now bereft of constraint by muscles and skin, strained to exit his body. That was particularly true of his intestines, which were writhing like a nest of vipers beneath a thin membrane cover. Zhao Jia straightened up and exhaled. He was sweating profusely; his crotch had gotten sticky, from either blood or sweat, it was hard to tell which. He was paying for his desire to honor the life of Qian Xiongfei and uphold the prestige of the Board of Punishments executioners with his own blood and sweat.

  Six cuts remained. With the knowledge that success was within his grasp, Zhao Jia could bring an end to the performance at a more comfortable pace. With the four hundred ninety-fifth cut, he sliced off Qian’s left ear. It had felt like a chunk of ice in his hand. Then came the right ear, and when he threw it to the ground, the formerly emaciated dog whose full belly now scraped the ground ambled up to sniff the latest offering before turning and walking off in a show of contempt, leaving behind a foul-smelling discharge from beneath its tail. Qian’s ears lay untouched and unwanted in the dirt, like a matching pair of gray seashells. Zhao Jia was reminded of something his shifu had told him. When he was carrying out the slicing death on that exquisite prostitute on the marketplace execution ground, he had sliced off her delicate left ear, from which a pearl-studded gold earring dangled. The ear had held a powerful attraction for him; forbidden, however, from taking anything away from the execution ground, he had no choice but to reluctantly throw it to the ground. A mob of transfixed observers broke through the cordon of guards and swarmed to the spot like a tidal wave; their crazed, terrifying behavior drove away the birds of prey and wild animals prowling the execution site, all in pursuit of the detached ear. It may have been the gold earring they were after, but the shifu, knowing that this interruption could ruin everything, sprang into action by immediately slicing off the prostitute’s other ear and flinging it as far as he coul
d. His quick action saved the day by diverting the onrushing crowd. His reputation as a man of superior intelligence was well earned.

  Qian Xiongfei now presented a ghastly sight. Zhao readied himself for the four hundred ninety-seventh cut. By tradition, he had two options. He could cut out the condemned man’s eyes or cut off his lips. Since Qian’s lips were already such an awful mess, to do more seemed a shame, so he decided to cut out his eyes. Zhao knew that Qian was going to die with an unresolved grievance, but in the end, what did that matter? Young brother, he muttered to himself, you have no voice in this decision, but by removing your eyes, I will let you become a ghost that is content with its lot. The heart cannot grieve over what the eyes cannot see. This will cause you less suffering down in the bowels of Hell. No suffering in either this world or the next.

  Qian closed his eyes just as Zhao held his knife up to them, catching him by surprise. This cooperation brought Zhao feelings of immense gratitude, since removing the organs of sight was an unpleasant task, even for someone who killed for a living. Taking advantage of the opportunity granted him, he inserted the tip of his knife into a socket and, with an almost imperceptible flick of his wrist, out popped a clearly defined eyeball. “The four hundred ninety-seventh cut,” he said weakly.

  “The four hundred ninety-seventh cut . . .” His apprentice’s announcement was barely audible.

  But when Zhao held his knife up to the right eye, it opened unexpectedly; at the same time, Qian released the last howl of his life. Even Zhao shuddered at the sound, and dozens of soldiers fell to the ground like bricks in a collapsing wall. Zhao had no choice but to apply his knife to Qian Xiongfei’s remaining eye, which was blazing. What emerged from that eye was not so much a ray of light as a red-hot gas. Zhao Jia’s hand was burning as he fought to hold on to the slippery handle. Young brother, he said prayerfully, close your eye. But this time Qian would not cooperate, and Zhao knew he mustn’t delay, not even for a moment. He forced himself to act, slipping the tip of his knife into the right eye, and as he circled the socket, he heard a barely audible hissing sound. Yuan Shikai could not hear it; the ranking officials standing in front of their horses, looks of utter terror on their faces, perhaps like foxes grieving over the death of the hare, could not hear it; and the five thousand soldiers who had been reduced to wooden statues with bowed heads could not hear it. What they all heard was the flaming, toxic howl that exploded out of the ruined mouth of Qian Xiongfei, a sound that had the power to drive an ordinary man insane. But it had no effect on Zhao Jia. What had affected him, nearly rocked him to his soul, was the hissing sound the tip of his knife made as it circled the eye socket. For a brief moment, he went blind and deaf as the hiss entered his body, encircled his viscera, and took root in the marrow of his bones. It would not leave easily, not then and not later. “The four hundred ninety-eighth cut,” he said.

  His apprentice lay passed out in the dirt.

  Dozens more soldiers fell headlong to the ground.

  Qian’s eyes lay brightly on the ground, sending gloomy, deathly blue-white rays through the mud that all but covered them, as if staring at something. Zhao Jia knew exactly what they were staring at—it was Yuan Shikai—and the thought that crowded his mind was: would Yuan recall the gaze from those two eyes in his memories of that day?

  Zhao Jia was beyond exhaustion. Not long before this, he had beheaded the Six Gentlemen of the failed Hundred Days Reform movement, an event that had caused a national, even an international, sensation. In appreciation of the great Liu Guangdi’s talents in front of his apprentices, he had sharpened the sword named “Generalissimo,” which had become rusty and saw-toothed, until it could cut a hair that fell on it in half. The other five gentlemen owed their swift, painless deaths to their association with Liu Guangdi. When he lopped off their heads with Generalissimo, it was lightning quick, and he was sure that all they felt when their heads were separated from their bodies was a momentary breath of cool air on their necks. Owing to the speed of decapitation, some of the headless bodies flopped forward, and others jerked upward. The faces all had the appearance of being alive, and he believed that long after the heads were rolling in the dirt, clear thoughts continued to swirl inside. After the Six Gentlemen had been dispatched, talk of miracles created by a Board of Punishments executioner swept through the capital. All sorts of fanciful tales relating to the six executions passed from mouth to ear. One story, for instance, related how the headless body of Tan Sitong, of Hunan’s Liuyang County, ran up to Excellency Gang Yi, the official in charge of the executions, and slapped him across the face. In another, as it rolled along the ground, the head of Liu Guangdi, known also as Liu Peicun, intoned a poem in such a loud voice that thousands of witnesses heard it. Even an event of this magnitude had failed to tire Grandma Zhao, and yet on this day, in the city of Tianjin, the responsibility of carrying out the slicing death on an insignificant captain of a mounted bodyguard unit had so enervated the preeminent executioner of the land that he could barely stand. Even stranger was the fact that he could not keep his hands from feeling as if they were burning up.

  The nose fell at the four hundred ninety-ninth cut. By then, nothing emerged from Qian’s mouth but bloody froth—no more sounds. His head, once supported by a strong, rigid neck, now hung limply to his chest.

  The final cut—the coup de grace—entered Qian’s heart, from which black blood the color and consistency of melted malt sugar slid down the knife blade. The strong smell of that blood once again made Zhao nauseous. He cut out a piece of the heart with the tip of his knife and, with his head slumped, announced to his feet:

  “May it please Your Excellency, the five hundredth cut.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  A Promise Kept

  ————

  1

  ————

  Peking experienced a heavy snowfall on the eighth night of the twelfth month in the twenty-second year of the Guangxu reign, 1896. Residents awoke early to a blanket of silvery white. As temple bells rang out across the city, the chief executioner assigned to the Board of Punishments Bureau of Detentions, Zhao Jia, got out of bed, dressed in casual clothes, and, after summoning his new apprentice, left for a temple to fill the bowl tucked under his arm with gruel. After leaving the chilled atmosphere of Board of Punishments Avenue, they met up with a fast-moving crowd of beggars and the city’s poor. It was a good day for beggars and the city’s poor, as attested by the joyful looks on faces turned a range of colors from the biting cold. Snow crunched beneath their feet. Limbs and branches on roadside scholar trees were a collage of silvery white and jade green, as if clusters of white flowers were abloom. The sun broke its way through a dense layer of gray clouds, creating a captivating contrast of white and red. The two men merged with a stream of humanity heading northwest along Xidan Boulevard, where most of Peking’s temples were located, and where great pots of charity gruel sent steam skyward from makeshift tents. As they neared the Xisi gateway, whose history was written in blood, flocks of crows and gray cranes were startled into flight out of the jumble of trees behind the Western Ten Storehouses.

  He and his alert, quick-witted apprentice lined up at the Guangji Temple to receive their bowls of charity gruel from an enormous pot that had been set up in the temple yard. The blazing pine kindling under the pot dispersed heated air in all directions, which created a psychological dilemma for the beggars in their tattered clothes, who craved the tempting warmth but could not bring themselves to give up their precious spots in the food line. Heat waves formed a mist high above the steaming pot, creating an invisible shield like one of those legendary carriage canopies. A pair of disheveled, dirty-faced monks stood at the pot, bent at the waist, stirring the gruel with gigantic metal spades. The scraping sound of the spades on the bottom of the pot set his teeth on edge. People in line stomped their nearly frostbitten feet on the snowy ground, quickly turning it into a dirty, icy mess. At last the smell of cooked gruel began to spread. In the cold, clean air, the un
imaginably rich aroma of food had a stimulating effect on men whose stomachs were rumbling. The light in the eyes of the derelicts was impossible to miss. Several little beggars, their heads tucked down into their shoulders, ran up front and stuck their heads over the edge of the bubbling pot, like little monkeys, to breathe in deeply before running back to their places in line. The foot stomping increased in frequency as the men’s bodies began to sway visibly.

  Zhao Jia, who was wearing dog-skin socks under felt boots, did not feel the cold. He neither stomped his feet nor, of course, swayed from side to side. He had not gone without food; for him, lining up for charity gruel had nothing to do with hunger. It was a ritual passed down by earlier generations of executioners. According to the explanation given by his shifu, lining up for a bowl of charity gruel on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month gave executioners the opportunity to demonstrate to the Buddha that this profession merely provided a livelihood, like begging, and was not undertaken by men who were somehow born to kill other men. Lining up for charity gruel was an acknowledgment of their low standing in society. For executioners in the Bureau of Detentions, meat-stuffed buns were available every day, but this bowl of gruel was a once-a-year affair.

  Zhao Jia considered himself to be the most dignified individual in the long line of men. But there, just beyond several beggars with their swaying heads and panting mouths ahead of him, was a man standing as tall and unmoving as Mt. Tai. He was wearing a black robe and a felt hat and carried a blue bundle under one arm. He had the typical look of a low- or mid-level official in what was known as a “plain water yamen,” one with limited funds and few opportunities to enrich oneself. He would change into his official attire, which was in the bundle under his arm, once he was inside the yamen. But no matter how hard up a Peking official might be, he could always get something from officials from the provinces on their annual treks to the capital on official business. At the very least, he was in line for “ice and coal fees.” But if he was so incorruptible that he refused even that sort of “iron rice bowl” subsistence, his government salary surely made a range of baked goods affordable, so there was no need to line up with beggars and the city poor for a handout of charity gruel at a local temple. He wondered what the man looked like, but was well aware that the capital attracted people of exceptional hidden abilities, that even the crudest inn could be home to a man of special talents, and that a customer at a won-ton stand could easily be a heroic figure. A true man does not reveal his identity; if he does, he’s not a true man. The Tongzhi Emperor, having tired of his imperial harem, ran off to Hanjiatan to cavort with prostitutes, and when he lost his taste for delicacies from the Imperial kitchen, he went to Tianqiao for bowls of soybean milk. How, then, could Zhao Jia be sure what lay behind the man’s purpose in lining up for charity gruel? He could not, so there was no need to go up to take a look. Instinctively the men in line edged forward as the aroma of gruel intensified, pressing the line tighter and tighter, which shortened the distance between Zhao Jia and the man up front. By leaning to the side, he had a view of his profile. But no more than that, since the man kept his eyes straight ahead. All Zhao could see was his somewhat unruly queue and a shirt collar made shiny by unwashed hair. Chilblains dotted the lobes and rims of his fleshy ears, some already oozing pus. Finally the anticipated moment arrived: it was time to hand out the gruel. Slowly the line began to move forward. Curtained carriages drawn by horses and mules and residents of the city with baskets to deliver gruel to friends and families made their way together to the oversized pot from both sides of the line. The alluring aroma grew stronger with each step closer to the pot, and Zhao Jia heard stomachs growling all around. Holding their bowls in hands that were black as coal, the men crouched down by the side of the road or stood against a wall to slurp the contents. The two monks were now leaning over the pot, dipping large, long-handled metal scoops into the gruel and impatiently pouring the contents into one bowl after another; inevitably some dripped to the ground from the scoop or the sides of the bowls, and was immediately lapped up by mangy dogs whose hunger was stronger than the pain from the kicks they received. Now it was the man up front’s turn. Zhao Jia watched as he took a small bowl from under his robe and held it out to the monks, who gave him a curious look. Each of the bowls held out by the others in line seemed larger than the one before, and some could rightly be called basins. He, on the other hand, could cover the lid of his porcelain bowl with one hand. The monks used extraordinary care when they poured gruel into his bowl, filling it to the brim almost as soon as they tipped the scoop, which held several times the amount of the bowl. With his bundle still tucked under his arm, the man gripped his bowl in both hands and politely bowed his thanks before walking, head down, to the side of the road, where he lifted the hem of his robe, sat down, and quietly began to eat. The moment he turned around, Zhao Jia spotted his high nose, large mouth, and sickly pallor, and he knew who the imposing man was—the director of one of the Board of Punishments’ many bureaus—though he did not know his name. He reacted by sighing inwardly at the man’s plight. To be the head of a Bureau in one of the Six Boards meant that he had passed the Imperial Civil Service Examination, yet here he was, so poor he had to beg a bowl of gruel in a charity tent. It was the height of absurdity. From decades of experience in official yamens, Zhao Jia was well acquainted with the means by which various officials fattened their purses and the vagaries of promotion. This fellow, who was crouching in the snow by the side of the road eating a bowl of charity gruel, was either hopelessly incompetent or a man of rare virtue.