by Greg Bear
One of the residents, Wang Xiuchu, survived by moving from hiding place to hiding place and bribing the soldiers with whatever he had. He also recorded what he saw:
One Manchu soldier with a sword was in the lead, another with a lance was in the back, and a third roamed in the middle to prevent the captives from escaping. The three of them herded dozens of captives like dogs and sheep. If any captive walked too slow, they would beat him immediately, or else kill him on the spot.
The women were strung together with ropes, like a strand of pearls. They stumbled as they walked through the mud, and filth covered their bodies and clothes. Babies were everywhere on the ground, and as horses and people trampled over them, their brains and organs mixed into the earth, and the howling of the dying filled the air.
Every gutter or pond we passed was filled with corpses, their arms and legs entangled. The blood mixing with the green water turned into a painter’s palette. So many bodies filled the canal that it turned into flat ground.
The mass massacre, raping, pillaging, and burning of the city lasted six days.
On the second day of the lunar month, the new government ordered all the temples to cremate the bodies. The temples had sheltered many women, though many had also died from hunger and fright. The final records of the cremations included hundreds of thousands of bodies, though this figure does not include all those who had committed suicide by jumping into wells or canals or through self-immolation and hanging to avoid a worse fate. . . .
On the fourth day of the lunar month, the weather finally turned sunny. The bodies piled by the roadside, having soaked in rainwater, had inflated and the skin on them was a bluish black and stretched taut like the surface of a drum. The flesh inside rotted and the stench was overwhelming. As the sun baked the bodies, the smell grew worse. Everywhere in Yangzhou, the survivors were cremating bodies. The smoke permeated inside all the houses and formed a miasma. The smell of rotting bodies could be detected a hundred li away.
Tian’s hands trembled as he turned over the last page.
“Now you see why the Blood Drops are after me,” said Xiaojing, his voice weary. “The Manchus have insisted that the Yangzhou Massacre is a myth, and anyone speaking of it is guilty of treason. But here is an eyewitness account that will reveal their throne as built on a foundation of blood and skulls.”
Tian closed his eyes and thought about Yangzhou, with its teahouses full of indolent scholars arguing with singing girls about rhyme schemes, with its palatial mansions full of richly-robed merchants celebrating another good trading season, with its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants happily praying for the Manchu Emperor’s health. Did they know that each day, as they went to the markets and laughed and sang and praised this golden age they lived in, they were treading on the bones of the dead, they were mocking the dying cries of the departed, they were denying the memories of ghosts? He himself had not even believed the stories whispered in his childhood about Yangzhou’s past, and he was quite sure that most young men in Yangzhou now have never even heard of them.
Now that he knew the truth, could he allow the ghosts to continue to be silenced?
But then he also thought about the special prisons the Blood Drops maintained, the devious tortures designed to prolong the journey from life to death, the ways that the Manchu Emperors always got what they wanted in the end. The Emperor’s noble Banners had succeeded in forcing all the Chinese to shave their heads and wear queues to show submission to the Manchus, and to abandon their hanfu for Manchu clothing on pain of death. They had cut the Chinese off from their past, made them a people adrift without the anchor of their memories. They were more powerful than the Jade Emperor and ten thousand heavenly soldiers.
It would be so easy for them to erase this book, to erase him, a lowly songgun, from the world, like a momentary ripple across a placid pond.
Let others have their fill of daring deeds; he was a survivor.
“I’m sorry,” Tian said to Xiaojing, his voice low and hoarse. “I can’t help you.”
Tian Haoli sat down at his table to eat a bowl of noodles. He had flavored it with fresh lotus seeds and bamboo shoots, and the fragrance was usually refreshing, perfect for a late lunch.
The Monkey King appeared in the seat opposite him: fierce eyes, wide mouth, a purple cape that declared him to be the Sage Equal to Heaven, rebel against the Jade Emperor.
This didn’t happen often. Usually Monkey spoke to Tian only in his mind.
“You think you’re not a hero,” the Monkey King said.
“That’s right,” replied Tian. He tried to keep the defensiveness out of his voice. “I’m just an ordinary man making a living by scrounging for crumbs in the cracks of the law, happy to have enough to eat and a few coppers left for drink. I just want to live.”
“I’m not a hero either,” the Monkey King said. “I just did my job when needed.”
“Ha!” said Tian. “I know what you’re trying to do, but it’s not going to work. Your job was to protect the holiest monk on a perilous journey, and your qualifications consisted of peerless strength and boundless magic. You could call on the aid of the Buddha and Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, whenever you needed to. Don’t you compare yourself to me.”
“Fine. Do you know of any heroes?”
Tian slurped some noodles and pondered the question. What he had read that morning was fresh in his mind. “I guess Grand Secretary Shi Kefa was a hero.”
“How? He promised the people of Yangzhou that as long as he lived, he would not let harm come to them, and yet when the city fell, he tried to escape on his own. He seems to me more a coward than a hero.”
Tian put down his bowl. “That’s not fair. He held the city when he had no reinforcements or aid. He pacified the warlords harassing the people in Yangzhou and rallied them to their defense. In the end, despite a moment of weakness, he willingly gave his life for the city, and you can’t ask for more than that.”
The Monkey King snorted contemptuously. “Of course you can. He should have seen that fighting was futile. If he hadn’t resisted the Manchu invaders and instead surrendered the city, maybe not so many would have died. If he hadn’t refused to bow down to the Manchus, maybe he wouldn’t have been killed.” The Monkey King smirked. “Maybe he wasn’t very smart and didn’t know how to survive.”
Blood rushed to Tian’s face. He stood up and pointed a finger at the Monkey King. “Don’t you talk about him that way. Who’s to say that had he surrendered, the Manchus wouldn’t have slaughtered the city anyway? You think lying down before a conquering army bent on rape and pillage is the right thing to do? To turn your argument around, the heavy resistance in Yangzhou slowed the Manchu Army and might have allowed many people to escape to safety in the south, and the city’s defiance might have made the Manchus willing to give better terms to those who did surrender later. Grand Secretary Shi was a real hero!”
The Monkey King laughed. “Listen to you, arguing like you are in Magistrate Yi’s yamen. You’re awfully worked up about a man dead for a hundred years.”
“I won’t let you denigrate his memory that way, even if you’re the Sage Equal to Heaven.”
The Monkey King’s face turned serious. “You speak of memory. What do you think about Wang Xiuchu, who wrote the book you read?”
“He was just an ordinary man like me, surviving by bribes and hiding from danger.”
“Yet he recorded what he saw, so that a hundred years later the men and women who died in those ten days can be remembered. Writing that book was a brave thing to do—look at how the Manchus are hunting down someone today just for reading it. I think he was a hero, too.”
After a moment, Tian nodded. “I hadn’t thought about it that way, but you’re right.”
“There are no heroes, Tian Haoli. Grand Secretary Shi was both courageous and cowardly, capable and foolish. Wang Xiuchu was both an opportunistic survivor and a man of greatness of spirit. I’m mostly selfish and vain, but sometimes even I surp
rise myself. We’re all just ordinary men—well, I’m an ordinary demon—faced with extraordinary choices. In those moments, sometimes heroic ideals demand that we become their avatars.”
Tian sat down and closed his eyes. “I’m just an old and frightened man, Monkey. I don’t know what to do.”
“Sure you do. You just have to accept it.”
“Why me? What if I don’t want to?”
The Monkey King’s face turned somber, and his voice grew faint. “Those men and women of Yangzhou died a hundred years ago, Tian Haoli, and nothing can be done to change that. But the past lives on in the form of memories, and those in power are always going to want to erase and silence the past, to bury the ghosts. Now that you know about that past, you’re no longer an innocent bystander. If you do not act, you’re complicit with the Emperor and his Blood Drops in this new act of violence, this deed of erasure. Like Wang Xiuchu, you’re now a witness. Like him, you must choose what to do. You must decide if, on the day you die, you will regret your choice.”
The figure of the Monkey King faded away, and Tian was left alone in his hut, remembering.
“I have written a letter to an old friend in Ningbo,” said Tian. “Bring it with you to the address on the envelope. He’s a good surgeon and will erase these tattoos from your face as a favor to me.”
“Thank you,” said Li Xiaojing. “I will destroy the letter as soon as I can, knowing how much danger this brings you. Please accept this as payment.” He turned to his bundle and retrieved five taels of silver.
Tian held up a hand. “No, you’ll need all the money you can get.” He handed over a small bundle. “It’s not much, but it’s all I have saved.”
Li Xiaojing and Li Xiaoyi both looked at the litigation master, not understanding.
Tian continued. “Xiaoyi and the children can’t stay here in Sanli because someone will surely report that she harbored a fugitive when the Blood Drops start asking questions. No, all of you must leave immediately and go to Ningbo, where you will hire a ship to take you to Japan. Since the Manchus have sealed the coast, you will need to pay a great deal to a smuggler.”
“To Japan!?”
“So long as that book is with you, there is nowhere in China where you’ll be safe. Of all the states around, only Japan would dare to defy the Manchu Emperor. Only there will you and the book be safe.”
Xiaojing and Xiaoyi nodded. “You will come with us, then?”
Tian gestured at his lame leg and laughed. “Having me along will only slow you down. No, I’ll stay here and take my chances.”
“The Blood Drops will not let you go if they suspect you helped us.”
Tian smiled. “I’ll come up with something. I always do.”
A few days later, when Tian Haoli was just about to sit down and have his lunch, soldiers from the town garrison came to his door. They arrested him without explanation and brought him to the yamen.
Tian saw that Magistrate Yi wasn’t the only one sitting behind the judging table on the dais this time. With him was another official, whose hat indicated that he came directly from Beijing. His cold eyes and lean build reminded Tian of a falcon.
May my wits defend me again, Tian whispered to the Monkey King in his mind.
Magistrate Yi slammed his ruler on the table. “Deceitful Tian Haoli, you’re hereby accused of aiding the escape of dangerous fugitives and of plotting acts of treason against the Great Qing. Confess your crimes immediately so that you may die quickly.”
Tian nodded as the magistrate finished his speech. “Most Merciful and Far-Sighted Magistrate, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You presumptuous fool! Your usual tricks will not work this time. I have iron-clad proof that you gave comfort and aid to the traitor Li Xiaojing and read a forbidden, treasonous, false text.”
“I have indeed read a book recently, but there was nothing treasonous in it.”
“What?”
“It was a book about sheep herding and pearl stringing. Plus, some discussions about filling ponds and starting fires.”
The other man behind the table narrowed his eyes, but Tian went on as if he had nothing to hide. “It was very technical and very boring.”
“You lie!” The veins on Magistrate Yi’s neck seemed about to burst.
“Most Brilliant and Perspicacious Magistrate, how can you say that I lie? Can you tell me the contents of this forbidden book, so that I may verify if I have read it?”
“You . . . you . . .” The magistrate’s mouth opened and closed like the lips of a fish.
Of course Magistrate Yi wouldn’t have been told what was in the book—that was the point of it being forbidden—but Tian was also counting on the fact that the man from the Blood Drops wouldn’t be able to say anything either. To accuse Tian of lying about the contents of the book was to admit that the accuser had read the book, and Tian knew that no member of the Blood Drops would admit such a crime to the suspicious Manchu Emperor.
“There has been a misunderstanding,” said Tian. “The book I read contained nothing that was false, which means that it can’t possibly be the book that has been banned. Certainly Your Honor can see the plain and simple logic.” He smiled. Surely he had found the loophole that would allow him to escape.
“Enough of this charade,” the man from the Blood Drops spoke for the first time. “There’s no need to bother with the law with traitors like you. On the Emperor’s authority, I hereby declare you guilty without appeal and sentence you to death. If you do not wish to suffer much longer, immediately confess the whereabouts of the book and the fugitives.”
Tian felt his legs go rubbery and, for a moment, he saw only darkness and heard only an echo of the Blood Drop’s pronouncement: sentence you to death.
I guess I’ve finally run out of tricks, he thought.
You’ve already made your choice, said the Monkey King. Now you just have to accept it.
Besides being great spies and assassins, the Blood Drops were experts at the art of torture.
Tian screamed as they doused his limbs in boiling water.
Tell me a story, said Tian to the Monkey King. Distract me so I don’t give in.
Let me tell you about the time they cooked me in the alchemical furnace of the Jade Emperor, said the Monkey King. I survived by hiding among smoke and ashes.
And Tian told his torturers a tale about how he had helped Li Xiaojing burn his useless book and saw it turn into smoke and ashes. But he had forgotten where the fire was set. Perhaps the Blood Drops could search the nearby hills thoroughly?
They burnt him with iron pokers heated until they glowed white.
Tell me a story, Tian screamed as he breathed in the smell of charred flesh.
Let me tell you about the time I fought the Iron Fan Princess in the Fire Mountains, said the Monkey King. I tricked her by pretending to run away in fear.
And Tian told his torturers a tale about how he had told Li Xiaojing to escape to Suzhou, famed for its many alleys and canals, as well as refined lacquer fans.
They cut his fingers off one by one.
Tell me a story, Tian croaked. He was weak from loss of blood.
Let me tell you about the time they put that magical headband on me, said the Monkey King. I almost passed out from the pain but still I wouldn’t stop cursing.
And Tian spat in the faces of his torturers.
Tian woke up in the dim cell. It smelled of mildew and shit and piss. Rats squeaked in the corners.
He was finally going to be put to death tomorrow, as his torturers had given up. It would be death by a thousand cuts. A skilled executioner could make the victim suffer for hours before taking his final breath.
I didn’t give in, did I? he asked the Monkey King. I can’t remember everything I told them.
You told them many tales, none true.
Tian thought he should be content. Death would be a release. But he worried that he hadn’t done enough. What if Li Xiaojing didn’t make i
t to Japan? What if the book was destroyed at sea? If only there were some way to save the book so that it could not be lost.
Have I told you about the time I fought Lord Erlang and confused him by transforming my shape? I turned into a sparrow, a fish, a snake, and finally a temple. My mouth was the door, my eyes the windows, my tongue the Buddha, and my tail a flagpole. Ha, that was fun. None of Lord Erlang’s demons could see through my disguises.
I am clever with words, thought Tian. I am, after all, a songgun.
The voices of children singing outside the jail cell came to him faintly. He struggled and crawled to the wall with the tiny barred window at the top and called out, “Hey, can you hear me?”
The singing stopped abruptly. After a while, a timid voice said, “We’re not supposed to talk to condemned criminals. My mother says that you’re dangerous and crazy.”
Tian laughed. “I am crazy. But I know some good songs. Would you like to learn them? They’re about sheep and pearls and all sorts of other fun things.”
The children conferred among themselves, and one of them said, “Why not? A crazy man must have some good songs.”
Tian Haoli mustered up every last bit of his strength and concentration. He thought about the words from the book:
The three of them herded dozens of captives like dogs and sheep. If any captive walked too slow, they would beat him immediately, or else kill him on the spot. The women were strung together with ropes, like a strand of pearls.
He thought about disguises. He thought about the way the tones differed between Mandarin and the local topolect, the way he could make puns and approximations and rhymes and shift the words and transform them until they were no longer recognizable. And he began to sing:
The Tree of Dem herded dozens of Cap Tea
