The Terracotta Bride

by Zen Cho

  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."

  Think, Ling'en had told her, what could you do with a thing that resembled a human body? Stronger than a human, more beautiful, and most importantly—immortal. Impervious to illness and the persecutions of demons alike. Such a thing was not pinned to the spokes of the Wheel, unlike the bodies of every natural thing. Rebirth did not apply to it.

  As spirits, Ling'en and Siew Tsin and Junsheng felt alive. They ate and slept in houses with thatched and tiled roofs, as the living did. But everyone knew the sturdy-feeling walls, heavy doors and solid roofs were paper. If they were taken out of the fragile unreal world in which they were suspended, every pleasure and pain of the flesh they believed they experienced would show itself to be an illusion. Light their afterlives with a spark and they would burst into flame—and vanish.

  "We can last as long as our money and luck hold out," said Ling'en. "But sooner or later some demon or god will take us away from ourselves and flush what remains into our next lives, whether we will or no. Sooner or later, we will die.

  "But this man or woman, whoever it was who created our Yonghua—they asked themselves: what if we could transfer our consciousness into something that is not vulnerable to the demands of the Wheel? If there was something like that, it would render the idea of past lives and future lives obsolete. All lives would become one."

  "They want to become Buddhas?" said Siew Tsin.

  "Without putting in the work," said Ling'en. "There is a group claiming that they have found the secret of immortality. They have worked out a way to insert their minds into an immortal shell that does not need food or air to live, that is not affected by material things the way humans are.

  "Once a person has locked their consciousness into this shell, their memories are sealed in with them forever. Even if the shell drank Lady Meng's tea of forgetfulness, the mind would be untouched. The person could climb up into the living world again and live as themselves forever. They say to live in this shell is like being human, but even better."

  "How do you know about this?" whispered Siew Tsin.

  "The revolutionaries asked me for money," said Ling'en. She looked displeased. "Some fool among my servants has been talking too much. It seems people think I am rich enough that I could afford to buy an immortal body to live in. That's why I came to see Yonghua. I would be a fool to buy without checking the merchandise first."

  "Yonghua is—"

  "A trial. And an advertisement. A few hundred gold taels and my mind could be inserted into a body like hers. I must say she is stunning. The chance to have a body like that is very tempting to a woman my age."

  "But I don't understand," said Siew Tsin. "Where is her mind from?"

  "It's just some script they put in there," said Ling'en. "They have not tried the process with any real mind yet. She is only a prototype."

  "And Junsheng has known this all along," said Siew Tsin.

  "His brain has grown soft from lack of use," said Ling'en. "If only he'd started a business as I told him to when we first died. It would have kept him occupied. Being kept in style by his descendants has spoilt him. Now he is indulging in conspiracies and plots. We are too old for such things."

  "How much danger are we in, eldest sister?" said Siew Tsin.

  Ling'en shrugged. "If I were a god, I would be angry at the audacity of mortals, trying to invent a new pantheon. Wouldn't you? But it would be even worse if I were a hell official. It is not just my status that would be threatened. It is my livelihood. What would a hell official do if he did not have spirits to corral into the next life, or to bribe him to refrain?

  "Junsheng is well-known enough that they won't simply collect him and toss him into his next life. They don't want the spirits to revolt and they don't want the rich men to stop paying out. But if they become desperate, they may use other means to get at him and Yonghua. You are not important—but they won't notice if their spears pierce three instead of two."

  Siew Tsin had asked whether Ling'en was going to sign up.

  "Hn!" said Ling'en. "Be tied to this mind for the rest of eternity? That is a worse hell than anything you could endure in the ten courts."

  "But … you're still here," Siew Tsin ventured.

  Some of the old shrewishness returned to Ling'en's voice.

  "And you always do exactly what you should?" She shrugged. "Anyway, the plan will never work."

  "Why?"

  "It's bad theology," said Ling'en. "This fool who created Yonghua was a reanimation engineer when he lived. You'll never persuade me that someone who would do that job could have any understanding of religion."

  "A necromancer?" said Siew Tsin, using the English word. "I thought they were only in Europe?"

  "This Chen Fei was trained in England. The rain in that country must have washed away all his sense," said Ling'en. "Unlike us, Westerners are not content with feeding their dead regularly and putting in the occasional request for protection. They bottle the vital essence just before it escapes the bodies of the dead and insert this into automata, and put the poor creatures to work doing their drudgery for them."

  Siew Tsin's jaw dropped. "But aren't they worried their ancestors will punish them?"

  "Westerners have different feelings about their ancestors," said Ling'en. "They say the soul flies from the body at the moment of death, and the vital essence that clings to the corpse is nothing but energy.

  "I suppose when Chen Fei died he expected the Devil to greet him in a top hat and tails. Instead he ended up here with the rest of us Chinese. So he has turned his hand to this—perverting the technology of our ancestors for his own vanity. Once he has raised enough funds to fix himself and his followers up with immortal bodies, I expect he will climb up into the world with his army and try to storm the Christian heaven—or the Royal Society, which is much the same thing to him."

  Siew Tsin could not imagine Junsheng putting himself out for membership of any
society, heavenly or royal or both. She said so.

  "No. But for self-interest?" said Ling'en. "My dear sister, who would not move the worlds for that?"

  The day after the attack, Siew Tsin shut herself up in Junsheng's library and read furiously.

  If she had paid attention, she would have guessed what was going on. The clues were there. Junsheng had a startling number of books on automata, the qualities of terracotta as a building material, rebirth, and the soul. There were Buddhist scriptures, anthologies of Taoist tales of the Immortals, and motivational pamphlets on how to win friends and influence people.

  And maps. Siew Tsin gave these her closest attention.

  When she emerged, her head swam with information—philosophy fighting with topography, folktales entangled with engineering.

  It had all been there, laid out like dishes on a banquet table. Junsheng had not even taken care to hide which books he had been reading: they were stacked on the desk and scattered on the floor. He'd written notes to himself in the margins and folded over significant pages. If Siew Tsin had had half the ordinary curiosity of the average sentient being, she told herself, if she'd bothered to peep in one or two of these books, she would have found out what Junsheng was up to.

  But she hadn't been interested. Idiot that she was, she had gone into the library and taken down her silly romances, her philosophers, her biographies of great men and women, her Greek and Latin primers. She'd read everything except anything that mattered. She'd told herself that even if nothing was happening externally in her life, at least she was learning. That was something valuable in itself. The nuns at the convent school would have said so.

  But the nuns at the convent school had been wrong about death. Why should they be right about anything else?

  And Junsheng—he thought so little of her that it had not even occurred to him to hide his research, though everyone knew she spent hours in the library. This was a level of disregard that went beyond contempt. To Junsheng she did not have a brain; she did not have feelings; she did not have motivations. She was a total nonentity and need not be worried about.

  The worst thing was that he was right.

  Locked in a wordless tantrum, she went to her room and packed her things. Then she went to Junsheng's bedroom and searched his wardrobe. For some reason, when his descendants burnt hell money (which they did with pious fervour and regularity), it always appeared at the bottom of his wardrobe, under the magnificent traditional garments he never wore and the naughty magazines they hid.

  There was quite a lot of money this time. Junsheng must have been too distracted by his plans to collect it.

  If Yonghua agreed to her plan, they would not have far to go. But where they were going, there would be demons to bribe, as well as gods they would need to hide from. They might have to spend a night or three outdoors. They would need the money.

  She put it at the bottom of her bag.

  Then she screwed up her courage and went to look for Yonghua.

  "She is in the music room, mistress," said a paper maid. The newly awake Siew Tsin noticed the look she gave her. It was a wary look, almost as if she were afraid of her reaction to—what?

  She puzzled over it on the way to the music room. It was strange: she had never thought of the paper servants as real before. She had not considered that they might have feelings and thoughts of their own. But weren't they basically the same thing as Yonghua?

  People.

  We are slave owners, she thought.

  The idea was so shocking that she forgot to announce herself when she got to the music room. She opened the door, the words already on her lips to tell Yonghua. But her mouth stayed open and the words never came out.

  Ling'en and Yonghua sprang away from each other. Ling'en was looking more human than Siew Tsin had ever seen her, her usually flawless hair dishevelled and her face a fevered pink, as if she had been drinking.

  Yonghua was not flushed and her hair was tidy, but the look in her whiteless eyes was dazed.

  She had looked like that the first time she had met Ling'en, Siew Tsin realised. And they were here, where Siew Tsin had first played Yonghua Bach. Here.

  "I am sorry," said Ling'en. It was an astonishing thing to hear from her, but Siew Tsin barely felt the surprise over the sharp pain at her heart. "Yonghua wanted to hear a folk song from my home region. I can't sing, so I have been playing her scraps. We were—that is—"

  She seemed to realise how ridiculous she sounded. She stopped and gathered her dignity around her.

  "I should be going," she said. She nodded at Yonghua like a schoolmistress chiding an absent-minded child. "Remember what I told you."

  "Yes," said Yonghua. Her voice was a floating thing, unmoored from feeling. She turned her face to follow Ling'en as she left.

  Yonghua's creator must not have taught her that people were allowed to smile for themselves, over their own happiness. She had never smiled except when the script in her head told her it was the appropriate social response. As she looked after Ling'en, her face was smooth as a block of silken tofu.

  Someone should have taught her that you smile when you are happy, thought Siew Tsin. Someone ought to help her find out everything she wants to know.

  "Were you looking for me, second sister?" said Yonghua, her eyes still far away. "Or do you want to play the piano? I should not disturb you. I will leave."

  "No," said Siew Tsin. "Stay. I am going."

  She went back to her bedroom and unpacked her bag. She put everything away. It would be a while before she could bring herself to look at the things again. But she kept the money.

  Siew Tsin woke in the morning to confusion. The house rang with raised voices. As she went downstairs, rubbing her eyes, paper servants rushed past her. Distress hung in the air like a bad smell.

  Junsheng was sitting in the dining room, drinking black coffee. He had a newspaper spread out on the table in front of him, but he wasn't reading it.

  "Good morning," he said when he noticed her.

  "What is happening?" said Siew Tsin.

  He had clearly been waiting for somebody to ask him this. He took off his spectacles and set them on the table with the deliberateness of an actor following a script.

  "It appears it is just you and me again," he said.

  Siew Tsin reached out blindly and touched the table. Its solidity comforted her. She sat down.

  "Ling'en has outmanoeuvred me," said Junsheng. He spoke in an even, detached voice, sounding like an old scholar lecturing on some abstruse topic. "I thought she was angry about Yonghua because she was growing pious in her old age. Ling'en never used to care about what was allowed or not allowed by the gods. We used to be the same. We believed in doing the best one could for oneself and one's family.

  "But some people take up religion, you know, when they get old. When Ling'en scolded me about Yonghua, I thought: Maybe soon she will give up and turn herself in, let them process her into the next life. I was right about that. But I was not so clever as I thought. I did not predict that she would take Yonghua with her."

  "How do you know where she has gone?" said Siew Tsin. "Was there a message?" Wouldn't Yonghua have left her a message?

  But that distant absorbed ecstasy in Yonghua's eyes—no. She would not have been thinking about anyone else.

  Oh, love was so cruel.

  "Where else would she go?" said Junsheng. "She knows she could not evade me if she stayed here, and she would hardly have escaped to any of the other courts of hell. No. She has gone down the bridge."

  Of course Ling'en had thought of it before Siew Tsin did. Ling'en had done everything first—married Junsheng, kissed Yonghua, run away with her to find the next life.

  "And she just had to take Yonghua with her," said Junsheng. He shook his head. "Ling'en was not spiteful in the old days. I remember her when she was young. You are a nice enough girl, and Yonghua was a work of art, but Ling'en was a real woman. I died before she did, you know, and in the five years after I
died our family's wealth tripled under her management. I never met anyone like her. And now we have come to this."

  "What will happen to them?" said Siew Tsin.

  "Ling'en will die," said Junsheng. "Yonghua will probably get smashed to pieces once the authorities realise what she is. May Ling'en be reborn as a cockroach for this turn. What is it?"

  A paper servant put his head in at the door. He was fluttering as he came forward, his face pale.

  "Master, we interviewed Lady Meng, as you ordered, and it appears—it appears—"

  "Ling'en drank the tea?" said Junsheng.

  "Both Mistress Ling'en and Mistress Yonghua did," said the servant.

  Junsheng frowned. "That would have had no effect on Yonghua. She cannot be reborn. She is not real."

  "Lao Ding told Lady Meng this," said the servant. "Lady Meng replied, 'Then this will make her real.'"

  "That is impossible," scoffed Junsheng.

  "Master, there is more," said the servant. "At Lady Meng's pavilion, it seems they purchased this."

  He opened his hand. In his palm lay a twist of red thread.

  Junsheng could not have looked more shocked if the servant had slapped him in the face. He reached out and picked up the string.

  When a spirit is ready to go on to the next life, there is one way for it to cling to the things its old self valued. Only one thing may be chosen—the most precious thing. The one person amongst all people in the cosmos, living and dead, it wishes to hang on to, when it becomes necessary to let everything else go.

  The spirit and its chosen one bind their ankles together with red thread. They may take each other's hands and smile at each other. When they walk down the bridge into the world of the living, they know it won't be the last time they see one another. The red thread is better than a promise—it's a guarantee. It means they'll meet again in the next life. It means they'll love each other there, too.

  Siew Tsin would not have thought of that. She didn't know women were allowed to bind themselves to each other. She would have sacrificed herself and Yonghua on the mere hope that the next life would be better.