The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  But here’s the truth, Driver Wang. Blood, though thicker than water, never lasts beyond the span of one life. When the heart ceases to beat, blood oxidizes to rust and flakes away. And the other things that bind you to wife and child – the marriage and birth certificates, and legal documentation of family life, will be dust in a hundred years.

  Our bond, however, transcends the death of the body, though we are hosted by flesh and blood, viscera and bone. Though we eat and sleep, laugh and weep, sneeze and catch colds, we differ from those condemned to live only once. When they die they are dead. After we die we live on.

  Listen. Do you hear that? Outside the door? Strain your ears above the TV and the washing machine’s spinning drum. The chained beast of history is breaking loose. Do you hear his deep and ragged breathing in the dark?

  History is knocking for you, his knuckles striking the door. Don’t pretend not to hear. Don’t pretend he’s not there.

  Open the door, Driver Wang. Let him in.

  6

  Night Coming

  Tang Dynasty, AD 632

  I

  STRANGERS KNOCK IN the night. The common folk of Kill the Barbarians Village, seeking out your mother to confess the torments of the soul. You, a boy named Bitter Root, huddle with the Runts in the corner, and peer through the darkness at the Sorceress Wu as she lowers her hawkish nose, shuts her piercing eyes and listens to the tales of woe. Envy and lust. Wrath and revenge. Flames leap in the hearth, and the sorceress chants in an ancient tongue and tosses into the fire a mysterious dust that flashes sulphurous and bright. She decants into vials potions to cure heart-sickness, abort a foetus, or punish a husband who rapes the twelve-year-old servant girl. She sells bottles of deadly nightshade, and hallucinogenic venom extracted from the heavy-lidded toad she keeps in a bamboo cage. She sells amulets and anti-lust charms. She sells a poultice to the cabbage-seller to grow back his amputated foot.

  A husband killed by bandits. Too many mouths to feed and nothing but steamed grasshoppers to feed them. These are the misfortunes that forced your mother to turn to the dark arts. And what she lacks in supernatural ability, she makes up for with nerves of steel. For sometimes the strangers come back, accusing her sorcery of being a sham and demanding refunds. The sorceress blames the meddling of evils spirits and offers to sell them antidemon charms. She curses them and slams the door. The sorceress never backs down.

  You are Bitter Root, named thus to trick the demons into thinking you are vile-tasting and bad to eat. You are thirteen years old and wild, with never-healing scabs on your knees and your eye-teeth knocked out from falling out of trees. Your hair is filthy and gnarled as roots, and your sun-darkened face grubby and snarling. You are a solitary child. You scorn your pot-bellied little brothers and sisters, whom you call ‘the Runts’, who splash about in the river Mudwash and dare each other to gobble spiders up. You spend your days roaming the Neverdie Forest, toughening to leather the soles of your bare feet. A hunter-gatherer, you steal eggs from nests and trap birds and animals for the stew pot. Stealthy and brave, you part the bamboo saplings and swoop your snake-catching net down on serpents coiled belly-down in the grass. You carry the captured snakes, in a fury of trashing in your net, to your mother. The sorceress kills them and slits their bellies, slicing from fanged head to tail, and extracts the gall bladder and poison sacs for medicinal use.

  You are not Sorceress Wu’s first-born. You have an elder sister, whom the sorceress named Brother Coming, to encourage fate to bring her a son. One year older than you, Brother Coming is a mute, and too dim-witted to do even simple chores, such as raking ashes in the hearth or fetching water from the well. Solitary like you, Brother Coming spends her days in the forest, wandering through the maze of trees and whistling with a blade of grass in mimicry of birdcall. But Brother Coming is not predatory. She is a scavenger, not a hunter. She gathers bird skulls and scapulae, dark feathers and jagged stones, and stows her treasures in tree-hollow hiding places. Toads ribbit in her tunic pockets and beetles scuttle in her knotty hair. The Neverdie Forest embraces Brother Coming. When she curls up to sleep on a bed of moss, the trees above her shed a blanket of leaves should the air turn chill. The canopy shifts to shelter Brother Coming should some rain begin to fall.

  When you encounter Brother Coming in the Neverdie Forest you ignore her. Your idiot sibling is of no interest to you and you pass her without a nod. Then one day in your thirteenth year you catch Brother Coming stalking you through the trees. Whereas you are forest-coloured, streaked with greens and browns, Brother Coming is pale and conspicuous. Twigs snap and leaves rustle under her feet, frightening the snakes away. ‘Go away!’ you hiss. You hurl clods of mud, which splatter her because she is too feeble-minded to dodge them. You run over and clobber her until she hobbles away.

  But an hour later she is back. Stalking you through the trees. You charge at her and knock her down, and as you roll over with her on the leaf-and twig-strewn ground, you notice the swellings on your fourteen-year-old sister’s chest. Curious, you pull up her tunic. You tweak and peek. You poke and pry and probe her with your tongue. As you grope her, Brother Coming lays beneath you, quiet and unprotesting. As you have your way with her, her eyes register neither pleasure nor pain.

  Many cycles of the moon go by. Starry constellations come and go in the night sky. Skinny Brother Coming is fattening up. As you lay together in the forest, you sink your hands into the ever-swelling bump to push it flat. But the mound of belly grows fatter by the day, warning you things have gone awry. The Runts notice the change in your sister too. ‘Fatty Coming! Fatty Coming! Waddling like a duck!’ they tease. At supper the Sorceress Wu serves Brother Coming an extra ladle of rice gruel. She prepares nourishing herbal soups for her. The Sorceress Wu narrows her eyes at you, her hook-ended nose flaring in suspicion when you are near.

  ‘Bitter Root! Bitter Root!’

  The sorceress is calling, so you fling your fishing pole down by the edge of the river Mudwash and hurry past the Runts (who are squealing, ‘Worms! Worms! Worms!’ and chasing each other with dangling earthworms). You run up the hill to the mud-walled dwelling, eager to please the sorceress, who lately snarls at the mere sight of you.

  ‘Here I am,’ you announce.

  The sorceress is pacing the trampled-earth floor. She looks up and trepidation flashes in her eyes, before the return of her habitual cast-iron will.

  ‘Ma?’ you ask. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Take off your clothes,’ the sorceress commands.

  You obey. You stand there naked. A fire blazes in the hearth and the brass pot bubbles and boils. She tells you to kneel. She binds your wrists and ankles with rope. She plunges the blade of the snake-eviscerating knife into the boiling pot. Suddenly, you understand what she intends to do. Weeping, you beg for mercy.

  ‘I’ll never touch Brother Coming again! I swear on the graves of our ancestors!’

  Tied up like a pig for a spit-roast, you wriggle to the door. The sorceress grabs your hair and presses the knife-edge to your throat. ‘Don’t you dare! Or I’ll slit you from ear to ear.’

  You kneel by a chopping board. She grabs your penis and testicles and roughly pulls, threatening to kill you if you don’t hold still. Her other hand holds the knife, raising it high. She is shaking with nerves, but her teeth are gritted with intent as the blade swoops down. You see the blood splatter her pale cheeks before you feel the pain. When the pain comes you scream. You scream with such violence it curdles the air. The sorceress is trembling and bathed in perspiration. The castration is harder than expected. Like beheading a chicken whose stubborn head won’t detach. She hacks and hacks, and at last she pulls her hand away in exultation and relief. The knife clatters to the floor and she opens her blood-soaked fist. And what you glimpse before you lose consciousness will haunt you until the day you die. Your blood-glistening organs in the palm of your mother’s hand. Her smile of triumph at having severed you, at the age of thirteen, from the ranks of men.
<
br />   Months later a man with a donkey comes from the Kill the Barbarians Village to collect you. You are wearing a hemp tunic and carrying a bundle of clothes. Hanging from the belt of your tunic, in a leather pouch, is a silver trinket box with your embalmed genitals inside. The sorceress hands the donkey man a string of copper cash and issues her instructions.

  ‘All the way to the city of Chang’an?’ asks the donkey man.

  ‘All the way to the gates of the Imperial Palace,’ says the Sorceress Wu.

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘And then you say, “This is Eunuch Wu. A gift to the Emperor.”’

  Foot in stirrup, you clamber up on the donkey, grimacing as you straddle the saddle (though the stump has healed, when pressured it hurts). The sorceress turns her back on you and returns to the mud-walled dwelling. The donkey man grasps the reins of the donkey bridle and leads you away.

  II

  The very day you leave for Chang’an, water gushes out from between Brother Coming’s legs. Her mouth rounds into a cavern of pain as she keels over, wracked by the spasms within. ‘It’s time,’ observes the sorceress, and sends the Runts to fetch pails of water from the Kill the Barbarians Village well. A short while later, I am born. A baby girl with a vigorous cry in her lungs and no deformities visible to the eye.

  As a child, I have no name. The sorceress calls me ‘Girl’ or ‘She-brat’. And later, when I am of crawling age, the Runts call me ‘Doggy’. They pat my head and throw sticks for me to fetch and carry back to them in my mouth. When I am of walking and talking age, the Runts have grown up and gone away to labour on pig farms or be the wives of pig farmers in the other villages of Blacktooth County. Leaving me behind with Brother Coming and the Sorceress Wu.

  My childhood is much the same as yours. Strangers knocking in the night. The chanting of spells and magnesium flares in the fireplace. For much of my childhood I am under the impression that Sorceress Wu is my mother and Brother Coming my mute idiot sister. The peasants of Kill the Barbarians Village call me the Wu Child and, owing to the sorceress’s reputation for evildoing, forbid their children from going near me. I am very lonely. Brother Coming won’t play with me, and when she goes into the Neverdie Forest, won’t let me tag along. Rejected and hurt, I bully Brother Coming on our bamboo-mat bedding at night. I slap her, and pinch her black and blue, and get away with it, for she never makes a squeak of protest. I abuse Brother Coming for years, until the evening the sorceress looks over as I am twisting her ear and says slyly, ‘That’s no way to treat your mother, She-brat.’

  Shocked, I let go of Brother Coming’s ear. The sorceress laughs. ‘Yes, that’s right. You weren’t squeezed out of my loins, Girl. You are the progeny of incest and rape. Your father was the good-for-nothing rapist and your mother the imbecile next to you. No wonder they spawned a she-brat such as you.’

  My grandmother makes no secret of her wish to be rid of me and, afraid of being sold into slavery or married off to a pig farmer, I toil for the sorceress. I cook and clean for her, sweeping the floor and scrubbing the pots and pans, keeping our rammed-earth dwelling spick and span. I am filial and obedient and never answer back. But it’s no good. The year I am thirteen, Sorceress Wu tells me of the arrangements she has made.

  ‘Girl. You are now betrothed to the Young Master Huang of the Huang family of Goatherd Valley. You are to be wedded next week.’

  ‘But I don’t want to be married,’ I complain in a small voice.

  The sorceress scoffs, ‘Want? Want? Want is neither here nor there! The Huangs are the most prosperous family in Goatherd Valley. A she-brat such as you ought to be on her knees with gratitude!’

  The next day the man with the donkey comes from Kill the Barbarians Village. He hoists me up on the saddle, and we clip-clop away from Blacktooth County. No one, not the Sorceress Wu, Brother Coming, nor the Runts, come to bid me farewell. I never see any of the Wu clan again.

  III

  The grandeur of the Huang family mansion is such that I cling to the donkey reins, too intimidated to dismount. The manor has a glazed-tile roof and the walls are lacquered wood (unlike the sorceress’s mud-walled dwelling, which a thief needs only a pail of water to break into). A servant boy leads me through parlours and halls to a shady courtyard of cypresses and a shimmering pond of carp. I am exhausted from riding on donkey-back for three days, plodding along the river Sveltedeer to the foothills of Mount Weep. I am barefoot, in a tattered robe stitched from a discarded rice sack. A girl with no name. Having inherited the sorceress’s hump-backed nose, I lack even prettiness as a saving grace. What if the Huang family are disappointed and send me back? What bloodcurdling punishment would the sorceress mete out should that happen?

  ‘She’s here! She’s here!’ a woman chimes.

  Master Huang and his wife enter the courtyard, a handsome couple in black damask robes of mourning, both tall and stately, with unpocked skin and fine sets of ivory teeth undamaged by rot. Wife Huang claps her hands in delight. She sweeps towards me and gathers me into her sweet, fragranced embrace. ‘Welcome to the Huang family, beloved Daughter-in-Law!’

  Wife Huang then releases me and gazes upon me at arm’s length. ‘Oh you are lovely!’ she beams. ‘How lovely you are!’

  Master Huang is more muted in his reception. Sotto voce, he says to his wife, ‘The girl is ugly. Horrendously hooked of nose.’

  ‘Oh shuush!’ scolds Wife Huang. ‘Can’t you see we are blessed? Once the dirt is scrubbed off she will be a passable bride!’

  As Wife Huang fusses over me and Master Huang frowns, I am too timid to utter a word. Young Master Huang, to whom I am betrothed, is nowhere in sight. Shyness prohibits me from asking where he might be.

  A pretty maidservant named Duckweed conducts me to a bedchamber with rosewood furniture and a four-poster bed with a canopy of chiffon, where I am to rest before the wedding the following day. Incense braziers burn patchouli and myrrh, and goldfish swim in a flower-and-bird-painted porcelain bowl. I daren’t touch anything, lest I grubby it with my hands.

  As Duckweed bathes me in a brass claw-footed tub of water sprinkled with rose petals, she smirks and wrinkles her nose. Granted, I am skinny and fleabitten and turn the water black, but her rudeness offends me. I am about to marry into the most prosperous family in Goatherd Valley. Who is this servant girl to act so haughty and superior? After my bath, I change into a clean linen robe, and Duckweed brings me a tray with bowls of steaming rice, stewed meat and pickled vegetables. Famished, I bolt everything down, pretending not to care as Duckweed titters behind her dainty hand.

  Later, as I lie in bed, Wife Huang enters the bedchamber like a visitation from the Goddess of Mercy. She kneels at my bedside and strokes my temples with a gentle smile. Not once in my thirteen years of girlhood has anyone touched me with such tenderness. A lump forms in my throat.

  ‘Sleep, beloved Daughter-in-Law,’ she whispers. ‘Tomorrow is the wedding. A day of joyous festivity. You need your rest.’

  Daybreak. A sunny morning of birdsong, fragrant breezes and cloudless sky. In my wedding robe of embroidered red silk, my hair elaborately braided into the Anticipating Immortals style, I am radiant. In fact, I will shun modesty and own that I am beautiful for the first time in my life. Looking over the guests in the courtyard, I understand the wedding ceremony is to be an intimate affair, with only Master Huang, Wife Huang and an uncle and aunt in attendance. Evidently there has been a recent death in the family, for they are wearing mourning robes of black and are very solemn indeed. The Buddhist monk arrives and speaks in hushed tones with the Huangs. A cockerel is strutting around, cawing and pecking at the ground. Odd, I think. Why is it on the loose? Young Master Huang has not yet come, and I am jittery and dying to know what my husband will be like.

  ‘May the ceremony begin,’ intones the Buddhist monk. A stable boy comes forth and catches the cockerel, which squawks and flaps. The boy squats besides me, pinning the cockerel’s wings down and holding it steady. Where is Young Mast
er Huang? The monk holds up a copper censer by a chain and sways it over the squawking bird and me. Strange blue smoke pours out of the censer, chokingly pungent and stinging my eyes. The monk begins to chant and, with an ear attuned to sorcerers’ dialects, I hear he is chanting not Buddhist sutras but ancient dark magic. He is not a monk, but a shaman. A necromancer, conjuring spirits, summoning the dead. The black-robed wedding guests are silent, except for Wife Huang, who sinks to her knees, sobbing and beating her chest. Where is Young Master Huang? The shaman’s eyes roll backwards in their sockets and, as he ululates, I hear the ancient Chinese for ‘marry’ and understand I am being joined in holy matrimony with the bird.

  The wedding banquet is a sumptuous feast served with silver ewers of wine. Not a morsel passes my lips and I don’t speak a word. The bridegroom, however, is in high spirits, throwing his wattle-and-combed head back and crowing vociferously, scampering about on clawed feet and pecking up the grain Master Huang scatters for him. Wife Huang has recovered from her sobbing. Whenever our eyes meet across the banquet table she beams and raises her goblet of plum wine: ‘To our son’s new bride!’

  After the banquet, Duckweed the maidservant leads the cockerel and me to the bridal chamber. She bolts the latticed door when she leaves, locking the newly-weds in. Unperturbed, the cockerel hops and squawks and flaps up on the conjugal bed. He struts in a half-circle then defecates on the bedspread. Has the son of the Huangs died and been reincarnated into this bird? Is that what the ceremony was about?

  ‘Young Master Huang?’ I call experimentally.

  The bird claps its beak and blinks its beady eyes. I shake my head at my foolishness then decide to call the cockerel Young Master Huang anyway, as he responds to it.