As long as I want to find it, there’s always another way. Hadn’t she found ways to succeed at Yao River and Lu, when they were much harder problems? Already the cooking smell from next door was giving her an idea so uncanny it raised the hair on the back of her neck out of disbelief that she could dare try it. But at the same time it felt right. Since she had become Zhu Chongba, there had been an aspect of the world that only she could see—and for that same length of time, she had thought it nothing more than an oddity. Realizing now that it was knowledge she could use was as pleasing as picking up a leaf and discovering that it was perfectly symmetrical. It felt like fate.
She shuffled along the lumpy bed and pressed her red-robed knee gently against Ma’s. “I can’t help Sun Meng directly. What I can do is stay out of it in a way that won’t raise Chen Youliang’s suspicions. But even then—you have to know that Sun Meng still has next to no chance of success.”
Ma gave her a fierce look that barely had any gratitude in it, as though she had merely bullied Zhu into an act of basic decency that had nothing to do with Ma’s personal desires. “At least he’ll have some chance.”
Zhu’s insides twisted at the thought that Ma was going to be disappointed by what Zhu considered decent. She said in warning, “It might give a better outcome, but Yingzi: there are no kind solutions to cruel situations.”
* * *
A cold, wet draft blew into the temple, bringing with it incongruous laughter: despite the rain, Zhu’s men were already gathering in anticipation of the wedding banquet. Inside, Zhu knelt in the red glow from the massive columnar candles. The burning wicks had tunneled deep within the candles so their flames projected dancing shapes on the insides of their red wax shells, like the sun viewed through closed eyelids. At Zhu’s request the cooks had already brought the pots and baskets of wedding food into the temple, ostensibly to keep them out of the rain until the festivities started. Zhu had since moved a careful selection of dishes to the front of the temple and left them uncovered before a field of unlit incense sticks.
Now she took one incense stick and lit it from a candle, then pressed it to the other sticks one by one. When they were alight, Zhu blew them out so their smoldering tips sent up thin streamers of smoke. Then she backed away and waited.
It was the memory of someone who no longer existed. Zhu remembered standing in her family’s sprung-open wooden house, her father’s dried blood under her feet, looking at the two melon seeds on the ancestral shrine. The last food left in the world. She remembered how desperately she had wondered if what the villagers said was true: that if you ate the ghost offerings, you would sicken and die. In the end she hadn’t eaten—but only from fear. She hadn’t known, then, what it looked like to see the hungry ghosts come for their food. But the person she was now, Zhu Chongba, knew. She thought of the countless times she had passed the offerings in the monastery—piles of fruit, bowls of cooked grain—and seen ghosts bent over, feeding. The monks had always thrown that food out afterwards. They might not have known about ghosts in quite the same way Zhu knew, but they knew.
There was a murmur that could have been nothing but a gust of wind in the rain. Then the streams of incense smoke all bent to the side, and the hidden candle flames leaned over inside their columns until the wax glowed hot and sweated red droplets. An icy breeze flowed in the open door, and with it came the ghosts. A stream of the unremembered, their chalk-white faces fixed towards the front. Their unbound hair and tattered clothes hung still despite their motion. Even as accustomed to ghosts as she was, Zhu shuddered. She wondered what it must be like for the eunuch general to live his entire life in their company. Perhaps he’d never even felt the world unmediated by their chill.
The ghosts lowered their heads over the offerings like feasting animals. Their rising murmur resembled distant bees. As Zhu watched them, she had the sense of what had become ordinary regaining its magical strangeness. Her heart thrilled. She could see the spirit world. She could see the hidden reality, the part of the world that made sense of all the other parts, and it was something only she could do. She was using the spirit world, as others did the physical world, to serve her desire. She glowed with the realization that the strange fact about herself was a power that made her stronger—better. More capable of achieving what she wanted.
Warm with satisfaction, she barely noticed the discomfort in her knees. It would normally take hours of kneeling before pain forced her to get up and move. But perhaps this time she twitched without realizing it. Or perhaps she simply breathed.
The ghosts snapped around, faster than any human could have. Their murmur shut off so suddenly that Zhu reeled at the silence. Their inhuman faces turned to her, they looked at her, and the touch of their terrible black eyes exploded her delight and satisfaction with a shock that felt like being grabbed around the throat by ice-cold hands. Horrified, Zhu remembered the ominous momentum that had started in Lu. The feeling that some mysterious pressure was building with every divergence she made from Zhu Chongba’s path, and it would only keep growing until something happened to release it. To return the world to the way it’s supposed to be. All of a sudden she was trembling uncontrollably where she knelt.
The ghosts, their eyes still on her, began murmuring again. At first Zhu thought it was only their normal unintelligible ghost murmur, then she realized they were speaking. She recoiled and clapped her hands over her ears, but flesh was no barrier to the sound issuing from those dead throats:
Who are you?
The ghosts’ voices rose; sharpened. Zhu had become ice, and the terrible sound of their accusation was the gong note that would shatter her into pieces. The ghosts knew she wasn’t the person she was supposed to be—who the world thought she was. Her belief that she was Zhu Chongba had always been her armor, but those words peeled her open. They stripped her down to the raw quick of herself, to the person she couldn’t ever be, and laid her exposed beneath Heaven.
Who are you? She would be hearing it in her dreams. There was a blinding pressure in her skull. The ghosts moved towards her, and perhaps it was only because Zhu was between them and the door, but suddenly the sight of their motionless hair and faceless faces was unbearable. She heard herself make an awful rasping sound. Whatever risks she had accumulated by acting differently from Zhu Chongba, this mistake had stupidly—foolishly—multiplied them by some astronomical amount. Risks piled upon risks, until her path to success was as narrow as a needle.
Stumbling to her feet, she fled.
* * *
Monk—Commander—Zhu had put on a fairly decent wedding banquet, Chang Yuchun thought, surveying the lantern-bedecked tents that were keeping the rain off the men beneath. Zhu’s entire force was there. Yuchun supposed if he were marrying someone as beautiful as Ma Xiuying, he might feel like spreading the good fortune around too. But despite the meat and lanterns and dancing, it didn’t feel much like a celebration. Word had spread that Second Commander Xu was being sent away as a hostage, which was the most recent in a series of signs that something deeply unfortunate was about to happen. Anfeng felt as dangerous as a steamer with the lid sealed shut. Fortunately in addition to the food, Zhu had provided an endless supply of wine to soothe their nerves. Yuchun and the others drank themselves insensible under the gently watchful gazes of Zhu and Ma Xiuying from the dais above them, and all the while the rain sheeted endlessly off the awnings and drew curtains across the moon.
The next day everyone was hungover and surly. Without Second Commander Xu their routines were all awry, and for some reason Zhu hadn’t appointed anyone to replace him. Even the next day Zhu left them to their own devices. Normally they would have welcomed the holiday, but their hangovers were strangely persistent. They sat around nursing their headaches and complaining about the rain, which was well on its way to turning Anfeng back into a mud pit. A few men developed a short cough, which Yuchun presumed was simply the cold having gotten into them.
His first indication that something was wrong was w
hen he woke in the middle of the night to an unpleasant twisting in his stomach. Stepping on his roommates in his haste, he made it outside just in time to vomit. But instead of feeling better, he was overcome by the violent urge to take a shit. Afterwards, gasping, he felt as limp as an overcooked noodle. As he wobbled back into the barracks he nearly collided with someone else running out to the latrine. A permeating smell of sickness rose up from the room. He felt like he should be more concerned about this turn of events, but it took every last bit of his strength to find his pallet again. He collapsed onto it and passed out.
When he came to, someone was squatting next to his head with a ladle of water. Zhu. The foul stench of the room nearly made him gag. After the water Zhu fed him a few spoonfuls of salty gruel, then patted his hand and moved on. Time passed. He was vaguely conscious of men groaning around him; the imprisoning tangle of his sweat-soaked blanket; and then finally a ferocious thirst that drove him outside on his hands and knees. To his surprise it was daylight. Someone had helpfully placed a clean bucket of water just outside the door. He drank, choking with haste and weakness, then sank panting against the doorframe. He felt—well, not better, but awake, which was an objective improvement of some kind. After a while he drank some more and looked around. Under the midday sun the street was completely deserted. Flags fluttered overhead. Not the familiar flag of their rebellion, but a cluster of five uncanny banners: green, red, yellow, black, and white, each bearing a red-painted warding talisman at its center. Yuchun gazed at them for a long time, his brain churning, until the meaning dawned.
Plague.
* * *
Yuchun turned out to be one of the first stricken, and the first to recover. He didn’t know whether it was because he was younger and fitter than average, or whether his ancestors had finally decided to look out for him. Having started in a fairly contained way, the mysterious plague caught fire: it tore through Zhu’s force, felling everyone in its path. The illness—which according to Jiao Yu was caused by an overabundance of yin in the major organs—started with a cough, progressed to vomiting and uncontrollable shitting, then finally a ferocious fever that melted the fat from a man’s body in the space of days. After that, it was a matter of luck as to whether the patient’s gravely diminished yang vital force began replenishing itself, or whether he was one of the unfortunates whose imbalance worsened even further until their qi ceased to circulate, and they died.
Commander Yi, fearing a spread of the plague to his own men, sent Second Commander Xu back in a panic. The Prime Minister ordered Zhu’s entire temple quarter quarantined. Gates were built and chained shut, and a number of Yi’s men stood reluctantly on guard with their thumbs dug into the qi points in their palms in the hope of staving off infection. The gates were opened only to let food in. Even the dead were forced to remain inside, and had to be buried in shameful mass graves.
Perhaps one in ten men, including Commander Zhu, were fortunate enough to never get sick at all. (Yuchun thought they must be the ones with an overabundance of yang, but when he’d posited this theory to Jiao, the engineer had snorted and pointed out that Zhu’s plucked-chicken physique was hardly that of someone with too much masculine energy.) Zhu, wearing the guilty expression of someone who knew he hadn’t done anything to deserve his good health, directed the efforts of the other survivors in cooking and cleaning. For two weeks he even went around personally comforting and tending the victims. Then one day he vanished: his wife Ma had fallen ill. After that Second Commander Xu took over. He had shaved his head before his secondment to Yi’s command, apparently in the hope that a blatantly religious appearance might offer protection against “accidents.” His bare scalp, combined with plague-hollowed cheeks, made Yuchun think uncomfortably about the stories of hungry ghosts that roamed the countryside in search of people’s livers.
From inside the plague fence it seemed that elsewhere in Anfeng life went on as usual. Every now and then Yuchun saw the other commanders’ forces going about their training, and heard the drumming of the Prime Minister’s ever-more-frequent ceremonies in praise of the Prince of Radiance. But he’d been around long enough to know that what he saw—an Anfeng that was calm, orderly, and obedient—was only the surface.
* * *
Zhu sat at Ma’s bedside. Her helplessness in the face of Ma’s suffering made her feel wretched with guilt. In the mornings the girl slept; in the afternoons and all through the night she thrashed with fever, screaming about ghosts. There was nothing Zhu could do other than offer her water and gruel, and replace the sweat-soaked sheets. Sometimes during Zhu’s ministrations Ma roused and flailed at Zhu, a terrible fear in her eyes. That fear stabbed Zhu’s insides: it was fear for Zhu, that she might get sick from touching Ma. This whole situation was Zhu’s fault: it had never occurred to her that the illness might spread beyond those who had eaten the ghost offerings. Out of carelessness she had unleashed far more than she had sought, and Ma was her victim. But even in the depths of her sickness, Ma cared about Zhu’s suffering.
Her heart aching, Zhu trapped Ma’s frantic hand and squeezed it with all the reassurance she could muster. She had a lot of worries, but dying from ghostly contact wasn’t one of them. “Don’t worry, Yingzi,” she said darkly. “The ghosts won’t catch me. I can see them coming.”
Perhaps the ghosts wouldn’t catch her, but dead men haunted Zhu’s dreams. Even apart from the horrific outcome of having been noticed by the ghosts, Zhu wasn’t sure this had been the better way. Nearly as many of her men had died as would have if she had backed Chen in the coup. She supposed at least they had died with clean hands, which was good for their next lives. The only person’s hands covered in blood were Zhu’s own. And the coup hadn’t even happened yet. She dreaded the thought that her men might recover, and the quarantine be lifted, before Guo and Sun even made their move. What if she had wrought all this for nothing?
Her entire life Zhu had considered herself strong enough to bear any suffering. The suffering she had pictured, though, had always been something of her own body: hunger, or physical pain. But as she sat there with Ma’s hand burning in her own, she recognized the possibility of a kind of suffering she had never imagined. To lose the ones I love. Even a glimpse of it felt like having her guts dragged out. Xu Da had recovered, but what if Ma’s life was another consequence of Zhu’s mistake?
Zhu wrestled with herself. Her stomach shrank as she felt the resurgence of her oldest fear: that if she prayed, Heaven would hear her voice and know it was the wrong one.
With all her might, she seized that fear and pushed it down. I’m Zhu Chongba.
She knelt and prayed to Heaven and her ancestors more fervently than she had in a long time. When she finally got up she was surprised and gratified to find that Ma’s forehead was already cooler. Her heart flew with relief. She won’t die—
And even as Zhu stood there with her hand on Ma’s forehead, she heard a familiar roar in the distance: the sound of battle.
* * *
Guo and Sun’s coup attempt lasted a day, put down nearly as quickly as it had started. The city was still smoking when Chen’s men opened the plague gates and issued the summons. Zhu, taking in the scale of the destruction as they walked through the streets, thought that Guo and Sun had come surprisingly close to success. But of course a loss by any margin was still a loss. Everywhere blood was mixed into Anfeng’s yellow mud. Whole sections of the city lay blackened. Since Anfeng was a wooden city, some men might have hesitated at the idea of setting Sun’s barricades alight. But Chen was not that sort of concerned person.
In the center of the city the corpses had been piled high at the foot of the platform. This time both the Prime Minister and the Prince of Radiance were absent. This was Chen’s show. The remaining Red Turbans, including Zhu and her men, gathered silently beneath. Zhu noticed that although Yi’s force was there, Yi himself was nowhere to be seen. Presumably someone had killed him. She hoped Little Guo’s spirit appreciated the gesture.
&n
bsp; After a sufficient amount of time for contemplation of the corpses, Chen’s men brought out the surviving leaders of the uprising. Zhu saw Sun, Right Minister Guo, and three of Sun’s captains. They had been dressed in white, with the blood already showing through. Sun was missing an eye and his pretty face was almost unrecognizable. He glared mutely down at them, his blood-blackened lips pressed together. Zhu had the disturbing impression that Chen had done something to his tongue to prevent any last-minute speeches.
The captains were the first ones killed. As far as executions went, it was quite humane—surprising, considering Chen’s involvement. The man in question watched from the stage with the eye of a connoisseur of cruelty. The crowd was silent. With the mountain of bodies staring them in the face, not even Commander Wu’s men could muster up any enthusiasm for the process. Sun stood stoically throughout: a man looking his fate in the eye, knowing that his only hope lay in his next life being a good one. His own death, when it came, was as quick as one might hope in such a situation. Still, Zhu was glad that Ma had been spared the sight.
As it turned out, there was no need for anyone to recalibrate their opinions of Chen’s mercy: he had merely been saving his dramatics for Right Minister Guo. In front of the watching Red Turbans, Old Guo was skinned alive. Chen had clearly found some kind of inspiration in the many years he had watched and waited for his colleague’s downfall. That death took a very long time.
Chen, who apparently believed actions spoke louder than words, left the stage as soon as it was done. Passing Zhu, he paused.
“Greetings to the Left Minister,” Zhu said, subdued, and made her reverence at a ninety-degree angle. She clamped down on the nausea that was threatening the contents of her stomach. For all she’d known Right Minister Guo’s fate, it was another thing to witness the manner in which it had occurred. She had the miserable thought that she had underestimated Chen’s cruelty.
She Who Became the Sun Page 28