Mo Yan - Sandalwood Death

“No one removed your bullets,” Yuan said with a laugh. “It was heaven’s intervention.”

“If heaven decided to spare the life of Yuan Shikai,” he said with a sigh, “then you win, Excellency.”

Yuan Shikai cleared his throat and declared:

“Men, your commander’s heart is breaking over the need to subject Qian Xiongfei to the slicing death, for he was once an officer with a bright future. I had great expectations for him, but he cast his lot with those rebelling against the Throne and committed a heinous, unpardonable act. It is not I who am putting him to death, nor the Throne. No, this is an act of suicide. I would have been willing to grant him a simple execution, keeping his body intact, but the national penal code is involved, and I dare not bend the law for one of my own. In my desire to allow him a dignified death, I made a point of asking the Board of Punishments to send us its finest executioner. Qian Xiongfei, that is my final gift to you, and I hope you calmly accept your punishment as an example for the soldiers of our New Army. Listen to me, men. You have been brought here to witness this execution in order, as the adage goes, to scare the monkeys by killing the chicken. It is my hope that you will take away with you a lesson learned on the body of Qian Xiongfei, one of fealty and good faith, caution and prudence, fidelity to the Throne and obedience to your superiors. If you act in accordance with my guidance, I can guarantee you a bright future.”

Led by their commanding officers, the soldiers shouted in unison:

“Absolute fidelity to the Throne, devoted service to His Excellency!”

Yuan Shikai returned to his seat and nodded imperceptibly to his aide, Zhang Xun, who grasped his meaning at once.

“Let the execution begin!” he shouted.

Zhao Jia stepped up in front of Qian Xiongfei, where his apprentice handed him a knife of the highest quality, one made specifically for this purpose.

“My friend,” he said under his breath, “I ask your pardon.”

Despite his attempt to face death without flinching, Qian Xiongfei could not keep his pale lips from quivering, and his irrepressible terror was exactly what Zhao Jia needed to recoup his pride of profession. In that instant, his heart turned as hard as steel and he was as calm as still water. He no longer saw a living human being in front of him. Bound to the execution post was nothing more than blood, flesh, tendons, and bones, assembled in a pattern determined by heavenly forces. Without warning, he drove his fist into Qian Xiongfei’s chest directly above the heart. Qian’s eyes rolled up into his head, and before the effect of that blow had worn off, with a quick circular motion of the hand holding the knife, Zhao snipped a circle of flesh the size of a bronze coin off of the other side of Qian’s chest. He had neatly excised one of Qian’s nipples, leaving a wound that looked like a blind man’s eye.

In accordance with an unwritten practice of the profession, Zhao Jia held the nipple on the tip of his blade in full view of His Excellency Yuan and the officers behind him. Then he displayed the fleshy coin to the five thousand foot soldiers in front of him, as his apprentice announced:

“The first cut!”

The detached nipple seemed to him to jiggle. He heard the rapid, nervous breathing of the officers behind him and a forced little cough from Excellency Yuan. He did not have to look to picture the bloodless faces of the mounted officers. He knew also that their hearts, including Yuan Shikai’s, were pounding at that moment. And that thought instilled in him pleasant feelings of gratification. In recent years, many important men had fallen into the hands of Board of Punishments executioners, and he had grown used to seeing pitiful exhibitions on the execution ground by high-ranking officials who had swaggered through life when they were in power. Not one in a hundred was worthy of the manly Qian Xiongfei, who could suppress his feelings of terror while undergoing cruel torture to the point that they were virtually imperceptible. At that moment, at least, Zhao felt a sense of supremacy. I am not me; I am the agent of the Emperor and the Empress Dowager, the embodiment of the laws of the Great Qing Dynasty!

Sunlight flashed on his blade as, with a flick of his wrist, the piece of human flesh flew from the tip of the knife high into the air, like a pellet, before settling heavily on the head of a swarthy soldier, like a glob of bird shit. The man screeched, as if a brick had landed on his head; he wobbled uncertainly.

Based on an age-old executioner’s custom, the first piece of the victim is a sacrifice to heaven.

Fresh blood oozed from the hole in Qian’s chest like a string of bright red pearls. Some dripped to the ground; some snaked down from the edges of the wound to stain his muscular chest.

The second cut, taken from the left side, was as deftly and neatly accomplished as the first. The remaining nipple was cut away. Qian’s chest was now decorated by matching holes the size of bronze coins. Less blood flowed this time. The blow to his chest had made his heart contract, and that had abated the flow of blood throughout his body, a technique that had evolved out of the experience of generations of executioners in the Bureau of Detentions, perfection based on trial and error.

Qian maintained the noble expression of fearlessness he had worn before the first cut, but a series of moans so soft that only Zhao Jia could hear them emerged, seemingly from his ears, not his mouth. Zhao forced himself to look away from Qian’s face. He was used to hearing wretched shrieks of pain from condemned prisoners as they were being sliced, howls that did nothing to disturb his unfaltering composure. But not hearing a sound from the valiant Qian Xiongfei, who clenched his teeth to keep from crying out, actually rattled him, as if something terrible were about to happen. Forcibly controlling his emotions, he raised the fleshy coin on the tip of his knife, as he knew he must do, displaying it first to His Excellency, then to the officers, and last to the ashen-faced soldiers, who stood before him like clay statues. His apprentice announced:

“The second cut!”

Zhao Jia had figured out that the legal and psychological foundation for the ritual of displaying fleshy parts sliced from the prisoner’s body to the officials in charge of the execution and to the observers was built on three principles: First, it was a display of the harsh rule of law and the unflinching dedication to it by the executioner. Second, it served to instill the fear of retribution in the minds of witnesses, who could be counted on to turn away from evil thoughts and criminal behavior. That was why the Imperial Court had staged public executions and encouraged attendance by the populace throughout the nation’s dynastic history. Third, it satisfied people’s bloodlust. The finest play ever staged cannot compete with the spectacle of a public slicing, and for this more than any other reason, executioners in the capital were contemptuous of actors, who were so highly favored in royal circles.

As he held up the second piece of Qian’s flesh for all to see, Zhao was reminded of scenes from his youth, when he was learning the trade from his shifu. In order to perfect the fine art of the slicing death, executioners for the Bureau of Detentions worked closely with a butcher shop just outside Chongwen Gate. During the off-season, the shifu took his students to the shop to practice their skills; there they helped turn the meat from countless pigs into filling for dumplings, and in the process developed a dexterity of hand and eye as accurate as a scale. If the call was for a pound of meat, a single cut would produce exactly sixteen ounces. When Grandma Yu was the keeper of the Bureau of Detentions official seal, the execution team opened a butcher shop on Walking Stick Lane in the Xisi, or West Fourth, District, where they slaughtered animals in back and sold the meat up front, enjoying a brisk business until one day someone revealed their identities. People not only stopped coming to buy their meat, they obsessively avoided the area, fearing they might be taken off the street and butchered.