Sandalwood Death (66 page)

“Give him some ginseng tonic!” Zhao Jia ordered his son.

That command awakened me to the acrid yet sweet smell of fine ginseng wafting up out of the black bowl Xiaojia was holding. Deep down I had to admire Zhao Jia for his attention to detail. In the wake of the infliction of the punishment, when all around us was a scene of chaos, he was calmly preparing a ginseng concoction. Maybe it had already been steeping over a fire in a corner of the shed even before he began, one of many preparations for what he knew would be required.

Xiaojia stepped forward, with the bowl in one hand and a spoon in the other, scooped up a spoonful, and held it up to Sun Bing’s mouth. When the spoon touched Sun’s lips, his mouth opened greedily, like a newborn puppy that has found its mother’s teat. Xiaojia’s hand shook slightly, spilling most of the liquid onto Sun Bing’s chin, where a fine beard had once grown.

“Be careful!” Zhao Jia snapped unhappily.

Obviously, Xiaojia, a man who butchered pigs and dogs, was not cut out for a job that required finesse. Most of the second spoonful ended up dripping onto Sun Bing’s chest.

“What are you trying to do?” The loss of the ginseng pained Zhao Jia, who held the lantern out to his son and said, “Hold this. I’ll feed him!”

But before he could take the bowl from Xiaojia, Meiniang stepped up and snatched it away.

“Dieh,” she said in a comforting tone, “you are suffering so. Drink some of this ginseng tonic, it’ll make you feel better . . .”

Tears filled Meiniang’s eyes. Zhao Jia, lantern still in hand, raised it for Xiaojia to tilt Sun Bing’s head up by the chin so Meiniang could spoon the liquid into her father’s mouth, little by little, without wasting a drop.

For a moment I forgot that I was standing on the Ascension Platform, where a man was being put to death, and imagined that I was watching a family of three feeding a tonic to a sick relative.

Sun Bing started coming back to life by the time the bowl was empty. His breathing was not as labored, his neck had regained the strength to hold his head up, and he was no longer spitting up blood. Even the bloating in his face had begun to recede. Meiniang handed the bowl to Xiaojia and reached out to untie the straps binding his arms to the crossbar, muttering comfortingly:

“Don’t be afraid, Dieh, you’re going home . . .”

My mind went blank. How was I supposed to deal with this sudden turn of events? Zhao Jia, an old hand, sprang into action. Thrusting the lantern into his son’s hands, he interposed himself between Sun Bing and Meiniang, as cold gleams of light flashed in his eyes.

“Good daughter-in-law,” he said with a dry, sinister laugh, “snap out of it. This man has been condemned by the Imperial Court. If he is freed, the family of whoever lets him go will be slaughtered all the way to the ninth cousins!”

Sun Meiniang slapped Zhao Jia in the face, then turned and did the same to me. Then she got down on her knees before us both and released a gut-wrenching wail.

“Free my dieh,” she sobbed. “I beg you . . . free my dieh . . .”

Aided by the bright moonlight, I saw the crowd below the platform fall heavily to their knees as a din arose from their depths, and only a single utterance:

“Free him . . . free him . . .”

Powerful emotions surged through my heart. People, I sighed, you do not know what is happening up here. You cannot know what is in Sun Bing’s mind. All you see is how he suffers physically, but you do not realize that by swallowing the tonic, he has shown us that he is not ready to die. Nor is it life he seeks. If he had wanted to live, he could have made his escape from the prison and gone to a place where no one could find him. But the way things were now, I could do nothing but wait and see what happened. Sun Bing’s suffering had already transformed him into a saint, and I could not defy the will of a saint. So I signaled for several of the yayi to come up, where I quietly told them to carry Sun Meiniang down off the platform. She fought and cursed me in the vilest of language, but the result was never in doubt, not when she was up against four men who managed to drag her down off the platform. My next order was for two shifts to stand guard on the platform, while the other two rested, trading places every hour. They were to take their rest in an empty Tongde Academy room facing the street. On the platform I said, “Permit no one but Zhao Jia and his son to come up the plank. You are also to ensure that no one attempts to climb onto the platform from any side. If anything happens to Sun Bing—if he is put out of his misery or taken away, Excellency Yuan would begin by having my head lopped off. But I’d see that yours already lay on the ground before that happened.”

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3

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The next two days and nights passed with agonizing slowness.

After making my inspection of the Ascension Platform at dawn on the third day, I returned to the Academy room and lay down on the mat-covered brick floor, fully dressed, to rest. Yayi between shifts filled the room with their thunderous snores; some even talked in their sleep. Mosquitoes on that summer morning were a true scourge, attacking silently, drawing blood with each bite. Covering my head with my lapel to keep them away offered no help. From outside came the sounds of shifting bits and halters on German horses that were being fed under the poplars to which they were tied, that and the impatient pawing of their hooves and the desolate chirps of autumn insects in weedy spots at the bases of walls. The intermittent sound of rushing water entered my consciousness, and I entertained the thought that the Masang River was singing a melancholy song. With depressing thoughts rippling through my mind, I fell into a fitful sleep.

“Bad news, Laoye, bad news!” Startled out of my sleep by that frantic cry, I was immediately chilled by a cold sweat. There before me was the face of Xiaojia, his dull eyes harboring the threat of treachery. “Laoye, Laoye,” he stammered, “bad news. Sun Bing Sun Bing is going to die!”

Without a second’s hesitation, I jumped to my feet and raced out of the room. The bright early autumn sun was high in the southeastern sky, spreading its light all across the land, so intense that I was momentarily blinded. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I followed Xiaojia up to the platform, where Zhao Jia, Meiniang, and the men on duty were crowding around Sun Bing. A foul stench struck me in the face before I’d even gotten close, and I was confronted by the sight of flies swarming around Sun’s head. Zhao Jia was shooing them away with a horsetail whisk, sending many of them crashing to the floor; but their places were taken by newcomers, thudding against Sun’s body in suicidal waves. I did not know if they were drawn to him by a smell emanating from his body or were being spurred on by some dark, mystical force.

Meiniang cared not a bit about the filth she was encountering as she wiped away the eggs deposited on her father’s body, soiling her white silk handkerchief. As feelings of disgust rose up inside me, I followed the movements of her fingers: from Sun Bing’s eyes down to his mouth; from his nose over to his ears; from the open, seeping wound between his shoulders down to the scabbed wounds on his bare chest . . . the eggs had no sooner been laid than maggots began to squirm over damp spots on his body. If not for Meiniang, they would have made short work of Sun Bing. The smell of death lingered in the stench floating around me.

More than just a fetid smell emerged from Sun Bing’s body—he was also emitting powerful waves of heat, like a roaring furnace; if he still had functioning organs, they were probably baked to a crisp. His lips, cracked and dry, looked like singed bark; his hair had taken on the texture of an old straw kang cover, so dry that a single spark could incinerate every strand, and so brittle that it could not withstand the slightest touch. But he was still alive, still breathing, the sound of each breath strong. His ribcage, which swelled and retreated violently, produced a deep rattle.

Zhao Jia and Meiniang stopped what they were doing when I arrived, and together they turned to stare at me hopefully. Holding my breath, I reached out to touch Sun Bing’s forehead. It was as hot as blazing cinders, so hot it nearly seared my hand.

“What do we do, Laoye?” Zhao Jia implored, a look of helplessness in his eyes for the first time in memory. So, you old bastard, even you know fear, I see! “If something isn’t done right away,” he said weakly, subdued by anxiety, “he’ll be dead by nightfall . . .”

“Laoye, save my daddy . . .” Meiniang was sobbing. “Do it for my sake, please . . .”

Though I remained silent, my heart was breaking, all because of Meiniang, that foolish woman. Zhao Jia was afraid of what Sun Bing’s death meant for him; but Meiniang was beyond reason. Oh, Meiniang, wouldn’t his death release him from the abyss of misery and usher him into heaven? Why must he endure unspeakable suffering, his life hanging by a thread, all to embellish a ceremony to laud the completion of the rail line? Every hour he lives is sixty minutes of agony, and not the sort that human beings can comprehend, but struggling on the tip of a knife, tormented by boiling oil. On the other hand, each day he survives burnishes his stirring legend, creating yet another indelible impression on the people’s hearts, and writing another bloody page in the history of Gaomi, and for that matter the history of the Great Qing Dynasty . . . back and forth my thoughts went, from one side to the other, over and over, until I lost my resolve. To save Sun Bing was to flow with the current; to let him be was to swim against it. No, this was no time to seem wise. “Sun Bing, how do you feel now?” With difficulty, he raised his head; fragments of sound escaped through his quivering lips, and heated black rays with red threads shot from his slitted eyes, seemingly right through my heart. His exceptional life force shook me to the core, and in that brief moment a powerful thought sprang up in my mind: Let him live. He mustn’t die, for this solemn and stirring drama cannot end like this!

I ordered a pair of duty yayi to fetch the county’s preeminent doctors: Cheng Buyi, our expert surgeon, from Nanguan, and Su Zhonghe, the renowned internist, from Xiguan. “Tell them to come with the most effective nostrums at their disposal as quickly as humanly possible. Say that you have come on the order of the Shandong Governor, Yuan Shikai, Excellency Yuan, who will tolerate neither disobedience nor delay. No mercy will be shown to anyone who defies his order!” They left at once.

I then told one of the yayi to summon Chen Qiaoshou, the papier-mâché craftsman, who was to bring with him all his tools and craft material. “Say that you have come on the order of the Shandong Governor, Yuan Shikai, Excellency Yuan, who will tolerate neither disobedience nor delay. No mercy will be shown to anyone who defies his order!” He left at once.

I then ordered another yayi to fetch Pockface Zhang, the tailor at the clothing store, who was to bring with him his tools and two yards of white gauze. “Say that you have come on the order of the Shandong Governor, Yuan Shikai, Excellency Yuan, who will tolerate neither disobedience nor delay. No mercy will be shown to anyone who defies his order!” He left at once.

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4

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Led by the two yayi, expert surgeon Cheng Buyi and renowned internist Su Zhonghe stepped onto the Ascension Platform. Cheng was a tall, lanky man with a dark, clean-shaven face; wizened and seemingly devoid of body fat, he moved with quick and nimble ease. Su, on the other hand, was short and portly; completely bald on top, he sported a lush, graying beard. Both local men of distinction, they had been ensconced in front-row seats during the battle of the beards between Sun Bing and me. Su Zhonghe had arrived with a full backpack; Cheng Buyi carried a small white cloth bag. Their nervousness showed. A gray cast underlay Cheng’s dark complexion, as if he were unusually cold. Su’s paler face was tinged with yellow and covered with a slick layer of sweat. They knelt at my feet, but before they could say a word, I bent down and had them rise. “This is an emergency,” I said, “which requires the medical mastery of the finest physicians. You know the identity of this individual and are fully aware of why he is here in this condition. Excellency Yuan has commanded that he must remain alive until the twentieth of this month. Today is the eighteenth, which gives us two days and two nights to carry out Excellency Yuan’s orders. One look at him will tell you why I have summoned you here. So now I ask you two gentlemen to come forward and put your skills to use!”

The physicians deferred to one another over and over, neither willing to step up and attend to their new patient. Two men—one tall, the other short; one fat, the other skinny—bowed back and forth, up and down, producing such a comical scene that a young and inexperienced yayi actually covered his mouth to stifle a laugh. I felt nothing but disgust over their ludicrous demonstration of superficial etiquette. “That’s enough decorum,” I said assertively. “If he dies before the twentieth, you”—I pointed to Cheng Buyi—“you”—I pointed to Su Zhonghe—“you”—with a sweeping motion, I pointed my finger at the people crowding around the platform—“and, of course, me—all of us will be buried with him”—I pointed to Sun Bing. You could almost cut through the tension in the air up there. The dumbstruck physicians could only stand and stare. I turned to Cheng Buyi. “You’re a surgeon. You first.”

Cheng stepped gingerly up to Sun Bing like a dog stealing a piece of meat off a butcher block, reached out, and gently touched the tip of the sandalwood stake between Sun’s shoulders with one slender finger. Then he went behind Sun to examine the butt end of the stake. Each time the stake moved, top or bottom, colored bubbles oozed out, carrying the stifling stench of rotting flesh and sending the flies into convulsions of deafening buzzes. The physician staggered up to me and slumped to his knees on wobbly legs. His face twitched and his mouth twisted, like a man about to break down completely. His teeth chattered as he managed to say:

“Laoye . . . his internal organs have shut down . . . there is nothing I can do . . .”

“Nonsense!” Zhao Jia, his eyes wide, glared at Cheng Buyi. “Take my word for it,” he said sternly, “there is nothing wrong with his internal organs!” Then his gaze shifted to me. “If they had suffered any damage,” he defended himself, “he’d be dead by now. He could not have lived this long. You can see that for yourself, Laoye!”