The Terracotta Bride (3 page)

"I only came to satisfy my curiosity," said
Ling'en.

She glanced at Yonghua.

"It's good you're a quick learner," she said to
her. "Make use of your time. You don't have much left."

Yonghua took Siew Tsin's hand and squeezed it. Her fingers
were cold.

The press of those fingers gave Siew Tsin a sudden access
of courage.

"I will see elder sister out," she said. What was
the worst Ling'en had ever done to her, after all? Given her unfriendly looks
and implied she was a whore. Well, Siew Tsin was essentially a whore, and looks
wouldn't have been able to kill her even if she was still alive.

At the door she said, "What did you mean? About
Yonghua not having much time left?"

Ling'en looked surprised. She might have had much the same
expression if her pet dog had raised its head and started reciting Tang poetry.
For a moment Siew Tsin thought she would not answer, but then she said:

"It's not just Yonghua. You are all at risk. Junsheng
is really a fool. He has preserved himself for so long, and now he is throwing
it all away for a gamble."

"I don't understand," said Siew Tsin.

"Ask Junsheng," said Ling'en.

Siew Tsin caught her arm before she could leave.

"He won't tell me!" she cried. "Junsheng
doesn't tell me anything. Nobody tells me anything! They think I'm ignorant.
It's true. I don't know anything. But Yonghua can learn anything. Two weeks ago
she had never seen a piano. Now she can play everything I can, all the sheet
music we own, every piece she's heard on the gramophone. In a few days she will
speak Malay as well as I do. What is going to happen to her?"

If the dog had stood up on its hind legs, danced a ballet,
and then proposed marriage to Ling'en, Ling'en might have looked much as she
did now. But it was an improvement on her looking as if Siew Tsin was something
disgusting that had gotten stuck to her shoe.

"Please tell me," said Siew Tsin. "If it's
trouble, maybe there is something I could do to help."

A smile tugged up the corner of Ling'en's mouth.

"Who knew there was a mind in that pretty little
head?" she said. She shrugged. "There is nothing you can do."

She would leave without saying anything. Siew Tsin could
not bear it. "Please—"

"But you might as well know," said Ling'en. A
smile of pure pleasure spread across her face. "It will annoy Junsheng so
much. I am going to find a sedan chair to take me home. Walk with me to the
main street. I'll tell you."

Yonghua was sitting alone in the room where Siew Tsin had
left her. She looked up when Siew Tsin came in.

"Junsheng's gone to his study," Yonghua said.
"He seemed—"

She hesitated. Yonghua was exquisitely correct on the
subject of their husband, as in everything else. But it was not clear what she
thought of him.

"He did not seem happy," she said.

"He and Ling'en can only fight when they are
together," said Siew Tsin. "Sometimes they do it through other
people."

Yonghua put her head on one side like a bird. "You do
not seem happy."

"Do you know why you were made?" said Siew Tsin
abruptly.

Yonghua did not seem to think this a strange question.

"I was made to profit my makers," she said.

This was true, of course.

"Do you know why Junsheng married you?" said Siew
Tsin.

Yonghua cast down her eyes with the modesty befitting a
young girl.

"I believe it is thought prestigious to own me,"
she said. "I am very expensive."

"Worth more than your weight in gold," said Siew
Tsin. Ling'en had said that.

Yonghua smiled. "Precisely."

Ling'en seemed to have decided that Siew Tsin's years of
torpor came from an intelligent wish to stay out of trouble, rather than
intense shyness. She had said:

"If you have as much sense as you seem to have, you
would take care to avoid that machine. If you pretend ignorance, you might have
a chance. But better than that, save up, or steal if you have to, and get away
from that house. Let Junsheng go to—ah—paradise on his own. There's
no reason why you should be dragged into trouble with him."

"Is that why you left?" said Siew Tsin.

Ling'en was so narrow-faced, high-cheekboned, and
sharp-chinned that everything she did had edges. Her smile cut like a knife.

"I left because I knew we would be the end of each
other if I stayed," she said. "We were always too busy trying to save
the other from becoming what we did not like. This way perhaps I'll avoid
Junsheng's brand of salvation."

"Yonghua, you are in danger," Siew Tsin wanted to
say now, but the door swung open and Junsheng appeared, restored to good
humour.

"My precious, why are you sitting here in the dark? I
am sorry I was cross. That useless old woman! She has found religion and it is
softening her mind. But forgive me. Come upstairs and entertain your old
husband. My useless descendants have exerted themselves for once—we have
a new wireless. You can show me how to operate it."

Yonghua rose, murmuring disclaimers. Siew Tsin stayed where
she was, just outside the circle of light cast by the lamp.

The light shining in through the windows turned the room a
lurid red, smeared with shadows. Outside there was a dim cavern roof for a sky;
black volcanic floor for earth; demons and spirits for neighbours. Despite
their horse heads and bull faces, the demons of the tenth court were mundane
creatures, pot-bellied and often flushed with liquor, courteous enough to the
wife of a rich man. But the red light that filled hell made everyone look
terrifying—human, demon, or otherwise.

It was not a world Siew Tsin would have chosen to live in.
But she did not want to be reborn, either, anymore than Junsheng did, anymore
than all the other spirits showering gold and favours on hell officials so that
they could stay where they were. Rebirth entailed a true death, the severing of
one's memory and the loss of one's self.

That day she sat in darkness for a long time, and only
stirred when a paper maid called her to dinner.

Yonghua heard the attackers before Junsheng or Siew Tsin
knew anything of it. They had been reading, Junsheng playing idly with
Yonghua's hair, Siew Tsin pretending not to be bothered.

Junsheng seemed to have realised that it pleased Yonghua
when he included Siew Tsin. When he called Yonghua to him now he usually asked
his second wife to come along, and they spent the evenings together, talking,
reading and listening to Cantonese opera on the gramophone. He also seemed to
enjoy the pretence of being a family.

Siew Tsin and Yonghua rarely spoke to each other on these
occasions. Yonghua because she was the perfect wife and all her attention was
on Junsheng. Siew Tsin because nobody could know of their friendship. Nobody
could know how much Siew Tsin liked Yonghua.

This was their unspoken understanding. It was a shock when
Yonghua breached it. She shook off Junsheng's hand, sat up and said directly to
Siew Tsin:

"You must leave now. They're coming."

Siew Tsin stared.

"What?" said Junsheng.

But Yonghua was already on her feet. She put her shoulder
against an armoire and pushed it in front of the door while Siew Tsin and
Junsheng goggled.

"That will slow them down," she said.

She turned to Siew Tsin, picked her up by the waist,
and—moving so quickly Siew Tsin barely had the chance to gasp—threw
her out of the open window. Siew Tsin splashed into the ornamental koi pond
just as the terracotta soldiers kicked the door in.

"Run!" called Yonghua. She slammed the window
shut.

There were three attackers, Siew Tsin learned later. It was
easy enough to find a terracotta warrior willing to be a mercenary—it was
one of the few jobs they deigned to do, preferring most of the time to obtain
their gold by force—but they didn't take orders at a low price. They were
expensive.

It was a rare assignation that could task the abilities of
even a lone warrior. Terracotta warriors were made for fighting. They were
inhumanly strong, nearly indestructible, and subject to none of the restraints
that governed the behaviour of humans or hell officials. They were built to
protect the dead. Nothing frightened them.

Three terracotta warriors to murder or collect one rich man
was overkill. But of course their employers had known about Yonghua. They had
taken her into consideration.

Unfortunately for them, they had miscalculated.

It felt like an eternity to Siew Tsin before she managed to
climb out of the pond, but it couldn't have been more than a few minutes.
Coughing, tears running from her eyes, she crawled to the window and pushed the
shutters open. In her hurry, Yonghua had omitted to lock them.

A red clay face loomed out of the window. Siew Tsin almost
screamed, but choked it down. She balled her hand in a fist, raised
it—and realised that a large crack ran along the terracotta warrior's
forehead. She pushed at the head and the body slumped sideways, lifeless.

Inside the room Junsheng was lying on the floor, his eyes
closed. He must have been hit on the head—or thought it wise feign
unconsciousness. And Yonghua—

Yonghua was a blaze of colour, a many-layered swirl of
fabric, her preternatural silence a heart of stillness in a fluid world of
movement. She slammed the heel of her palm into a warrior's jaw, grabbed his
arm and threw him. He crashed into the wall with the sound of a vase smashing
to pieces.

Yonghua turned around, blocked the descending arm of the
other remaining warrior, drew a hair stick from her head and drove its sharp
point into his neck.

The warrior staggered back, groaning. It was a strange
noise, like the grinding of rocks. Even stranger were the words that could be
distinguished amidst the groans.

"Sister," the warrior said. "Sister, have
mercy—"

Yonghua put her fist through his chest.

When she dusted off her hands, Siew Tsin saw that her
knuckles were bleeding. She clambered through the window, stepping daintily to
avoid the shards of terracotta warrior scattered around the room.

"You're hurt," she said.

  Yonghua barely glanced at her bleeding hands.

 "It's just liquid," she said. "See to
Junsheng. Is he hurt?"

 But he was stirring. He opened his eyes and gave
Yonghua a pallid, pathetic look. She knelt by him, slipping an arm around his
neck.

"You are not well," she said.

"I am an old man," he said.

Only 54 when you died
, thought Siew
Tsin,
and you could pass for 40
.

"In my youth I could have fought off these bandits.
But I cannot take shocks like these anymore."

He struggled to sit up. This was what Siew Tsin hated about
men, she thought suddenly, to her own surprise. She had not realised before
that she hated men. But she did, and this was one of the reasons why: this
incessant demand for sympathy and interest from every woman in the vicinity.
Junsheng did not like Siew Tsin, he did not even know her, and yet he was
extending this appeal to her. It was a sticky thing, his need, with tentacles
that would strangle her if they could.

Siew Tsin rejected it.

"You are bleeding," she said to Yonghua.

The look Yonghua gave her was typically opaque, but it felt
like a reproof. Siew Tsin was being too obvious.

"That isn't blood," Junsheng said. "It'll be
a solution dyed to resemble blood, but its function is almost purely
ornamental. It helps oil her joints, but losing some of it won't harm her. You
don't feel it at all, do you, my heart-liver?"

"Not at all," said Yonghua. Her eyes passed
unseeing over the remains of the terracotta warriors lying around them.
Junsheng followed her gaze.

"Fools," he said in low-voiced triumph. "You
are a jewel—worth every tael I paid for you. They underestimated you.
This will have cost them dearly." He turned his head. "See, Siew
Tsin, isn't it as I have always said? This is what comes of religious
mania—it clouds your vision. The man will succeed who allows neither
bodhisattva nor demons to frighten him."

But the self-interested see clearly
,
thought Siew Tsin.

Siew Tsin had believed that Junsheng had married Yonghua
for vanity. She had not wondered why it had occurred to Yonghua's inventor to
create her. If you could make something that resembled a human and endow it
with every grace and beauty possible, what else would you invent but an
exquisite young woman? There would be a sure market.

"You think it is about money and face, and perhaps
lust," Ling'en had said the day Siew Tsin had followed her into the street
to wait for her sedan chair. Ling'en had spoken amidst that heaving crowd of
souls and bureaucrats as if she were discussing hair-cuts instead of conspiracy
and rebellion, her voice unself-consciously clear. "But they are much more
ambitious than that."