Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

He stood, motionless, looking at her for a long time. He felt a vein pulsing in his temple. ‘And if it’s another girl?’ He waited for her reply, but she said nothing, and steadfastly refused to meet his eye. So he said it for her. ‘You’re going to have her aborted, aren’t you?’ Somehow it seemed even worse when the ‘it’ had become ‘her’.

Xiao Ling seemed to be examining her fingernails with great interest. ‘If they have to do the fluid test it’ll take about four weeks for the results. I would still only be twenty weeks gone.’

He took a long draught from his bottle and controlled the urge to shout at her. In any case, what gave him the right to judge her? He wondered what Yifu would have said or done, then realised he had no idea. And it came home to him just how different he was in so many ways from the uncle whose standards he had been trying to live up to all these years. Perhaps they were always going to be too high for him. Always just out of reach.

‘This clinic,’ he said at length. ‘It is private?’ She nodded. ‘Expensive?’ She nodded again. ‘How can you afford it?’

‘Xiao Xu has been doing well these last few years. I have saved some money.’

‘And Xiao Xu approves of this?’

There was a long silence before finally she said, ‘Xiao Xu doesn’t know. He thinks only that we have come to visit you.’

Li was shocked. ‘But it’s his child, too. Doesn’t he have a right to a say in what happens to it?’

Xiao Ling met his eyes for the first time and he saw, to his dismay, something like hate in hers. ‘He wants me to get rid of it whether it’s a girl or a boy.’ There was venom in her voice. ‘They got to him. I don’t know what they said, I don’t know what they threatened to do, but suddenly he didn’t want it any more. It was my fault, my problem, and as far as he was concerned it was up to me to get rid of it.’

Suddenly he understood the crushing loneliness she must feel. The whole world against her. Urging a single course of action. And she, driven by some instinct, or by the dreadful weight of five thousand years of tradition, just wanted a baby boy. A desire that, had she lived in almost any other place on earth, would have been the simplest desire in the world to fulfil.

‘If this … scan … tells you the sex of your baby …’ His mouth was dry, and the question would barely form in it. ‘What will you do if it is a boy?’

This time she returned his gaze, steady and sure. ‘If it’s a boy I will have it, and give Xinxin up for adoption.’

A large kitchen knife came down twice in quick succession, and the heads of the fowl dropped from the rung of the ladder and into the ditch. For a few manic moments, the two headless chickens ran blindly around, blood spurting from their necks. The peasant who had delivered the fatal strokes stood watching breathlessly as the life ebbed from the creatures and they toppled over and lay still in the bloodied earth. A hand clamped itself on his shoulder and spun him round. He found himself staring into the perplexed face of Hu Bo.

‘ What the hell do you think you’re doing, Wang Qifa? ’ Hu demanded.

Wang Qifa held himself erect and said, boldly, ‘ Mr Hu, you were the one who warned us about the dangers of the hidden weapons. The old men in the village told me that chicken blood would protect me from harm. “As long as two chickens are killed, all hidden weapons are powerless,” they said.’

‘OK, cut and check.’ The man beside Margaret spoke into a walkie-talkie, and Margaret saw the image on the screen spool rapidly back to the moment before the knife fell. The exchange between Hu Bo and the peasant had already been shot three times — a master shot and two close-ups. The chickens had only been added when they were happy with everything else. They would only have one shot at them. The sight of their headless frenzy was sickening in itself, but there was additional resonance in it for Margaret.

‘Won’t the animal rights people be after your blood for this?’ she asked.

The man beside her grinned. ‘The chickens belong to a couple in the village. They were always destined for the dinner table. All we did was pay them a lot of money to let us kill them on camera. Now they’ll be guests of honour at a banquet tonight, the main item on the menu.’ He turned to watch the playback.

Margaret had liked him immediately. In spite of the enormous pressure he was under to meet schedules and deadlines, he seemed relaxed and easy-going, even when everyone else on set appeared tense. Michael had introduced them when the production car he had sent for her arrived at Ding Ling.

‘Charles has directed all my series to date,’ Michael had said.

Charles had shaken her hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, Margaret. But call me Chuck. Mike’s the only person I know who calls me Charles.’

‘Maybe,’ Michael had said, grinning wickedly, ‘that’s because you’re the only person I know who calls me Mike.’

Chuck had shrugged hopelessly at Margaret. ‘What can you do? The man’s impossible to work with.’

The shot had finished replaying on the monitor and a voice on one of the walkie-talkies said, ‘Clear.’

‘OK,’ Chuck said. ‘Set up the next shot, Dave. Quickly please. These people are waiting for their chickens.’ He turned to Margaret. ‘Anyway, I’m shooting the blood and guts in such a way we can cut around it if the network thinks it’ll put an early evening audience off its pizza and French fries. But, you know, this is how it happened. We’re just trying to show it like it was.’

They were in a truck that had been kitted out as a video control centre and lowered by helicopter on to a wall thirty feet above the set. Cables spewed out a rear hatch like the entrails of a dead animal, and hung down into the long stone corridor that led to the entrance of the underground palace of the tomb of Emperor Wanli.

‘I still can’t believe they let you shoot this in the actual tomb,’ Margaret said.

‘Hey,’ said Chuck. ‘It took Mike six months to talk them into it. That and a very large cheque. The Chinese are big capitalists at heart. They’ll have worked out exactly how much additional tourist revenue this series is gonna generate. And they must have figured it’s worth it, ’cos they’re having to close it to the public for six weeks — so we can set it up, shoot it, then clean it up. And from our point of view, this is the centrepiece of the series, so if we’re gonna spend the money somewhere, this is where it’s gonna go.’

On the monitor, Margaret saw that the camera had been moved into a low position with the dead chickens in centre frame. She watched as twice, the shot panned up, and then the camera rose more than ten feet as it moved back, so that the whole of the paved passageway leading back between high walls towards the steps of the stele pavilion came into shot. It was one smooth, flowing movement.

‘That looks good, Jackie,’ Chuck said into his walkie-talkie. ‘Dave, is Mike ready yet? Does he want to do a walk-through?’

Dave’s soft Irish voice crackled back across the airwaves. ‘Michael’s ready, Chuck. He says he’s happy to rehearse on tape. It’s a long speech.’

Chuck grinned. ‘OK, if everyone else is ready, let’s try one.’ He said to Margaret, ‘We’ll probably only use Mike in vision at the beginning of this, and at the end. In between we’ll lay over various pictures we haven’t shot yet. We’ll probably re-record the whole speech back in sound dubbing, but it’s nice to get location sound. It’s more authentic.’ And into the walkie-talkie, ‘Jackie, remember once you’ve got Mike waist-high and centre frame, keep him there as the dolly moves back, and only when you bring the camera back down again do I want to see him walk into close-up. When you’re ready, Dave …’