Mo Yan - Sandalwood Death

“What you have just said has caused me to look at everything with new eyes,” the Magistrate said with a hint of sarcasm. “But the unpleasant Sun Bing business has its roots.”

“Yes, my husband. Sun Bing could be pardoned for avenging his wife’s humiliation by beating the German transgressor. But the Germans can also be pardoned for avenging their countryman. Following the incident, Sun Bing should have accepted his punishment instead of joining the outlawed Boxer movement and, after taking it upon himself to set up a sacred altar, leading an attack by his followers on the railway shed. Most inexcusable of all, he took hostages. If that is not a rebellious act, I do not know what is,” the First Lady said sternly. “Your livelihood is guaranteed by the Great Qing Court, and as its official representative, instead of single-mindedly coming to the defense of the nation in its hour of peril, you sought to absolve Sun Bing of his crimes. Your apparent sympathy was actually an act of harboring the guilty; what you considered benevolence was in truth collusion with the enemy. How could anyone as well read and sensible as you do something so foolish? And all because of a woman who peddles dog meat!”

The shamefaced Magistrate bowed his head under the penetrating gaze of his wife.

“I know that being barren is one of the seven causes for divorce, and I am grateful to you, my husband, for choosing not to abandon me,” she remarked delicately. “That is something I shall not forget… once things have settled down, I will find a woman of virtue for you, someone who will bear your offspring to carry on the Qian name. But if your infatuation with the Sun woman endures, we can arrange a divorce from her butcher husband so you can install her as your concubine. You have my word that I will treat her as family. But this cannot happen now. If you fail to free the foreign hostages and arrest Sun Bing, you and I are fated to come to a bad end, and you will be denied the pleasure of her charms.”

As sweat soaked the Magistrate’s back, he tried but failed to stammer a response.

As he sat in his palanquin, the Magistrate’s mood oscillated between righteous indignation and utter dejection. Rays of sunlight filtering in through gaps in the bamboo curtain landed first on his hands and then on his legs. He saw the sweat-soaked necks of the bearers up front through those same gaps. His body shifted with each rise and fall of the shafts, a reflection of his drifting thoughts. The dark, sedate face of the First Lady and the bewitchingly fair image of Meiniang entered his mind, one after the other. The First Lady represented reason, his official career, and the dignity that went with it. Meiniang was emotion, life, romance. He would not willingly give up either one, but if he had to choose, then… then… it would have to be his wife. The granddaughter of Lord Wenzheng was, without question, the proper choice. If he failed to rescue the hostages and take Sun Bing into custody, all would come to naught anyway. Meiniang, oh, Meiniang, your dieh may be your dieh, but you are you, and for you I must take him into custody. It is for you that I must arrest your dieh.

The palanquin crossed the Masang River stone bridge and headed toward Masang Township’s western gate along a badly pitted dirt road. It was the middle of the day, but the gate was tightly shut. Broken bricks and shards of roof tiles had been piled atop a rammed-earth wall, behind which men with knives and spears and clubs were on the move. Flapping high above the gateway was an apricot banner embroidered with the large single word YUE, representing the Song Dynasty hero Yue Fei. Young men in red kerchiefs and sashes, their faces smeared with a red substance, kept guard over the banner.

The Magistrate’s palanquin was lowered to the ground in front of the gate. He stepped out, bent slightly at the waist. A voice from high up on the gateway demanded:

“Who comes calling?”

“Magistrate Qian of Gaomi County.”

“What is the purpose of your visit?”

“To see Sun Bing.”

“Our Supreme Commander is practicing martial skills and is unavailable.”

With a sardonic little laugh, the Magistrate said:

“Yu Xiaoqi, you can stop putting on airs for my benefit. When you held a gambling party last year, I spared you from the obligatory forty lashes for the sake of your seventy-year-old mother. You haven’t forgotten that, have you?”

With a smirk, Yu Xiaoqi replied:

“I have taken the place of the Song general Yang Zaixing.”

“I don’t care if you’ve taken the place of the Jade Emperor, you are still Yu Xiaoqi. Summon Sun Bing, and be quick about it. Otherwise, the next time I see you will be in the yamen when you are getting the lashes you deserve.”

“Wait here,” Yu Xiaoqi said. “I’ll take a message in for you.”

Wearing an inscrutable smile, the Magistrate glanced at his attendants. They are nothing but simple farm boys, he was thinking.

Sun Bing, wearing a long white gown and a silver helmet adorned with a pair of stage-prop plumes, appeared in the gateway. He was still carrying his date-wood club.

“Visitor at our city wall, state your name!”

“Sun Bing, oh, Sun Bing,” the Magistrate said sarcastically, “you still know how to put on a show.”

“The Supreme Commander does not converse with the unidentified. I repeat, state your name!”

“Sun Bing, you are truly lawless. Hear me out. I am a representative of the Great Qing Empire, Gaomi County Magistrate Qian Ding, with the style name Yuanjia.”

“So, it is the trifling Magistrate of Gaomi County,” Sun Bing remarked. “Why have you come here instead of functioning as a good official in your yamen?”

“Will you let me be a good official, Sun Bing?”

“As Supreme Commander, my only concern is to exterminate the foreigners. I have neither the time nor the interest to bother with an insignificant County Magistrate.”

“Exterminating the foreigners is what I have come to see you about. Open the gate and let me in. We will both be losers if their army decides to come.”

“Whatever you have to say, you can say it from out there. I can hear you.”

“What I have to say is extremely confidential. I must talk to you privately.”

After a thoughtful pause, Sun Bing said:

“All right, but just you.”

The Magistrate stepped back into his palanquin.

“Raise the chair!” he ordered.

“The chair stays outside!”

The Magistrate parted the curtain.

“As a representative of the Imperial Court,” he said, “I am expected to be carried in.”

“All right, but only the chair.”

The Magistrate turned to the head of his military escort. “Wait for me out here.”

“Excellency,” Chunsheng and Liu Pu said as they held on to the shafts, “you must not go in there alone.”

The Magistrate smiled.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “Supreme Commander Yue is a sensible man. He will not do injury to this official.”

With a series of loud creaks, the gate opened inward to permit the Magistrate’s palanquin to enter, swaying from side to side. The musketeers and archers of the escort attempted to storm their way in after him, only to be pelted by rubble raining down from atop the wall. When they took aim at their attackers, the Magistrate ordered them to lower their weapons.

The palanquin passed through the newly reinforced wooden gate and was quickly enveloped in the heavy fragrance of pine oil. Through gaps in the bamboo screen, he spotted half a dozen furnaces that had been set up on either side of the street, the fires kept red-hot by large bellows. Local blacksmiths were hard at work forging swords, their clanging hammers sending sparks flying. Women and children walked up and down the street with flatbreads and leeks stripped of their hard skins; lights flashed in the eyes of the glum-looking women. A little boy with tufted hair and an exposed belly who was carrying a steaming black clay pot cocked his head to gape at the Magistrate’s palanquin, then suddenly raised his juvenile voice in a rhythmic Maoqiang aria: “A cold, cold day and heavy snow~~northwest winds up my sleeves do blow~~” The boy’s high-pitched voice made the Magistrate laugh, but what came next was a dose of bone-chilling sorrow. Reminded of the German soldiers who drilled alongside cannons lined up on the Tongde Academy grounds, the Magistrate took a hard look at the ignorant Masang Township residents, who had been whipped into a state of fanaticism by the bewitching black arts of Sun Bing, and he was struck by feelings of obligation to rescue them from their plight. The sonorous inflections of a pledge rang out in his mind—what the First Lady had said made perfect sense: at this critical, perilous juncture, he must reject all thoughts of dying, whether in the name of the nation or of the people. To seek death at this moment would be shameful and cowardly. A world in turmoil gives rise to great men, and it is incumbent upon me to take a lesson from Lord Wenzheng, who defied difficulties and laughed at danger, who fought to save desperate situations and liberate the masses from peril. Sun Bing, you bastard, you have led thousands of Masang residents into the jaws of death, all to satisfy your thirst for personal vengeance, and I am morally and legally bound to see that you are punished.