The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  In his sixth decade, Uncle Lu suffered greatly when the famine began. A filial child would have sliced off and cooked a piece of his own flesh for his starving master, but I was too cowardly. I went out scavenging for Uncle Lu instead, and last week I came back to find him glassy-eyed on the workshop floor. I lay beside him until nightfall. Then I took him by wheelbarrow to a nearby field, dug a hole as deep as I stood and buried him there. Afterwards I lay on the mound, protecting the unmarked grave for a night and a day. Over my dead body would cannibals dig him up. Uncle Lu had been like a father to me.

  ‘Why have you brought me here?’ I ask you.

  ‘Better here than the gutter, Turnip,’ you say. ‘Better here than where the corpse-snatchers can get you.’

  My head throbs from where your knuckles flew at me. My buttocks and back are grazed from where you dragged me through the streets. I murmur, ‘Do you mind if I sleep now, Tiger?’

  But your eyes are shut. You are already sleeping.

  For many moons the city of Zhongdu has been under siege. The Mongol hordes came from the north, and our city walls are now surrounded by ox-skin yurts and cattle-dung fires, and tens of thousands of Mongol warriors, patrolling on horseback so no one can flee. They watch politely as famished Jurchens abseil down the city walls on ropes, before impaling the escapees with a cloud of arrows. They are breaking down our defences, starving the million citizens of Zhongdu to death. Beyond the city walls, camel-mounted kettledrums beat day and night, as within the city hunger-weakened Jurchens keel over. Every beat, another dead, another dead.

  Before the Mongols came, the markets of Zhongdu were thriving and bustling, selling every beast and fowl and grain. But now our stores of millet, barley and rice are gone. Every animal was eaten long ago and not one remains. Not a cat or a dog, nor a sparrow or a rat. Not even a pet cricket chirruping in a cage.

  The famine-stricken citizens of Zhongdu think only of food. Staggering about the streets, their hollow stomachs rattle with stones, twigs and bark. Mouths chew at nothing, masticating empty air, or chew grass to an indigestible cud. The famine has made insectivores of us, gobblers of grasshoppers and ants. And now a moral quandary has descended like a dark cloud upon the citizens of Zhongdu.

  Do we eat or bury our dead?

  We spend two days and nights on the workshop floor. We are delirious. We drift in and out of consciousness. We don’t talk. We barely move. The glass beads of the wind chime tinkle as they sway gently above. Sometimes I creak my eyelids apart. Through the light and dark coming through the window I track the passage of time. I shiver with cold. I swallow the air, hoping there is sustenance in the emptiness. My stomach gurgles with it. The air burbles through my intestines and splutters back out as flatulence. I swear to take revenge on the Mongols as a ghost after I am dead. But, to be honest, my heart’s not in it. Apathy’s all I feel as my life slips away.

  On the second day you speak: ‘Turnip, I am going out to find some food.’

  I hear footsteps. I hear the door slam. I try to lift my head. Or perhaps I dream I do. I can’t find my head anyway.

  Night. The smell of cooking meat summons me back from the brink of death. I open my eyes. You are squatting by the fireplace, holding two metal skewers of meat over the flames. A groan escapes my lips. My saliva glands are a bursting dam. Hearing I am awake, you hand me a skewer by the wooden handle.

  ‘Tiger . . . what meat is this?’ I ask.

  ‘Cat.’

  ‘Cat? But there are no cats left in the city.’

  ‘I know where they live. I know where to hunt for them.’

  I stare at the skewered pieces of semi-raw meat. The edges are charred. The meat trickles blood on to my wrist and hand.

  ‘If you don’t eat it,’ you say, ‘I will.’

  For twenty minutes there is no sound but our chewing and swallowing. You sink your teeth into your cat-kebab, your eyes slitted, your tiger scars smeared with grease. After the meat is eaten we pick at the fibres caught between our teeth. We lick the juices from our palms. My stomach is convulsing with joy.

  Thereafter our days are like this. During daylight we rest. We watch the sunbeams drifting through the window and shifting in golden bars across the workshop floor. We watch the rise and fall of our chests and swat at the flies buzzing around our ulcerated legs. We listen to the Mongol drums beating beyond the fortress of city walls. We think our thoughts, hunger-weak thoughts that crawl feebly through our minds. Then, after dusk, you vanish into the night to go cat-hunting. Tiger by name, tiger by nature. Hunter-gatherer, you stalk one down and return with a skinned flank of meat.

  ‘Where is the cat’s head, Tiger?’ I ask. ‘Where’s the fur and limbs? The tail and paws?’

  ‘I tossed them to some starving orphans,’ you reply.

  Petals of blood spill from the meat as you carry it to the workbench. On hands and knees I lick them up with my thirsty tongue. You slam a cleaver into the cat, portioning it up. Then we each hold a skewer over the fire, salivating as the flames lick the rawness away. I can hardly wait for the meat to be cooked before gobbling it down.

  Before grilling the meat we lock the door and windows, for the smell of roasting flesh brings interlopers. They knock politely, begging to be let in. They scrabble like rats and whine, ‘Let us have some meat. We are starving out here. We have children to feed. Out of the goodness of your hearts . . .’

  You snatch up the cleaver and go to the door. How terrifying you are, with your scarred cheeks and wild, lice-ridden mane. The blade of the cleaver and your eyes glint as one.

  ‘Come on in,’ you smile, opening the door wider. ‘Here I am, waiting with my cleaver to chop your children up. I will scoop out their livers and kidneys and boil them for soup.’

  And the starving beggars slither back into the shadows. Though your threats are horrifying, I admire your bravery. Man eat man, this is what our city has become. And you are brutal in our defence.

  When I regain strength, I wander around our city and see how Zhongdu has descended into depravity. The good people have starved to death and the moral conscience of the city has died with them. Cannibalism is now the norm, the wicked feeding on the corpses of the good. They don’t even wait for cover of darkness before shamelessly dragging the dead away. The kitchens of the body-snatchers are fragrant with roasting meat. The maddening aroma wafts about the streets, diminishing willpower in the few places where willpower remains.

  At night we are woken by shrieking in the Craftsmen’s District: ‘Fiend! You ate our boy. You ought to rot in Hell.’

  ‘Who had a bite when they thought I weren’t looking? Who deserves to rot in Hell as much as I do?’

  ‘Liar! Liar!’

  I recognize their voices.

  ‘That’s Swordmaker Fu and his wife,’ I whisper. ‘They had a young son, but from the sounds of it he is now dead.’

  You sneer in the dark, ‘Cannibals. Too lazy to go out and hunt a cat.’

  I shut my eyes, but I am too haunted by Swordmaker Fu’s macabre words to sleep. I lie awake instead, and count my blessings that I am with a fellow-believer in the sanctity of human flesh.

  Every day the Mongol battering rams strike the city gates and the citizens of Zhongdu hold their breath as the beast pounds. Ah, this time we are done for, we Jurchens think. This time they will break our defences. But the Jurchen army, armed with arrows and bows, somehow keep the wolves at bay for one more day.

  One afternoon, as the battering rams pound, you ask, ‘Turnip, have you seen a devil’s horseman before?’

  I confess I haven’t.

  ‘You’ve never climbed the city wall?’

  ‘Not since the Mongols came. It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Come with me, Turnip,’ you say. ‘I know a place we can watch them.’

  We stagger through the empty streets, two young men with gargantuan heads on spindle-limbs. The few Jurchens we encounter scurry by with a hunted look in their eyes. We go to the east of the city, to a cru
mbling stone stairwell in the rear of a weed-choked temple garden. We go up to the stone battlements of the city wall and peer out. I am stunned when I see the enemy camp. Thousands of ox-skin yurts and cattle-dung fires and helmeted Mongol warriors on armoured horses, as far as the eye can see. The Mongols have devoted a city to their siegecraft. You are enraged. Your eyes narrow to vengeful slits beneath your gnarled and tangled hair.

  ‘Barbarians!’ you spit. ‘One day I’ll rip off their heads and piss down their throats. I’ll fuck their mothers and daughters to a bloody squealing pulp . . .’

  Way down below, a devil’s horseman trots towards us on his mare. His skin looks as though it has been flayed off, lime-cured in a tannery then sewn back on as human leather. His nose is flattened between his cheekbones and his yellow eyes glare up from beneath his helmet. Hearts hammering and legs shaking, we crouch down. ‘Has he seen us?’ I whisper.

  An arrow soars whistling over our heads in answer to my question. We flee down the stone stairs back into the accursed city of Zhongdu.

  That night you go out cat-hunting. When you get back we cook and feast on your kill. After supper we laze on the floor and I watch you in the flickering firelight. I watch you pick fibrous strands of cat-meat out of your teeth. Sprawled by the fire, your eyes are lazy and slitted as a tiger basking in the sun. I reach and stroke the iron-scorched markings on your cheeks. The scar tissue is hard and shiny under my touch. ‘Who branded you?’ I ask. You do not open your eyes. ‘Where do you come from?’ I ask. ‘Who are your people?’ Your robe is open and I move my hand over your famished chest. Your rib bones and tautening nipples. The jut of shadows in your skeletal frame. My stomach tightens. Now or never, I think, and move my mouth to yours. A jerk of your chin warns me this is not what you want. Your hand pushes on the back of my head, pushing down. Down past your sternum, down past your sunken stomach, to the rags about your groin. I loosen the rags and bury my face in the thatch of hair and what lies beneath. I take you in my mouth and feel you come to life. Swelling, growing engorged inside me, against my tongue. The smell of you, unwashed for months, is musty and intoxicating. I glance up. Your eyes are still closed. I move over you, my rhythm quickening until you spurt your bitter seed. Swallowing, I pull my wet and glistening mouth away. Sprawled on your back, your eyes are shut, and you look peaceful, as though having a pleasant dream. As much of a stranger as you were before.

  The Fall

  The hooves wake me at dawn. The stampeding hooves of tens of thousands of Mongols galloping into Zhongdu on horseback. I shake you awake: ‘Tiger! Tiger! Listen!’ You sit up and listen to the kettledrums out in the streets. The yodellings of war cries and the bloodcurdling screams of Jurchens dragged from their homes.

  ‘Hide, we must hide!’

  Shaking, we hurry up on to the roof. I am shuddering hard, pale with fright. ‘O Lord Buddha, have mercy on our souls,’ I plead, over and over, though the mantra brings no peace of mind. You are silent, keeping your wits about you as you watch the Mongols rampaging through Zhongdu. Narrowing your eyes and thinking of how to save our skins.

  The Mongols are orderly and systematic. They plunder our city, ward by ward, street by street, house by house. From the roof, we watch them haul a wealthy merchant’s family out of hiding in the next alley, thrusting spears to their throats and commanding them to bring out their valuables. The family obey. They scurry back and forth, fetching porcelain vases, wooden puppets, silk gowns, paintings, ostrich-feather fans and other family heirlooms. They plead for mercy as they lay the offerings at the Mongols’ feet. But our conquerors have no mercy. They rape the screaming wife and daughters, penetrating and ejaculating in a few thrusts. Then they execute. For many moons the Jurchens have been wasting away slowly from starvation. But now death strikes the city like lightning as throats are slashed and hearts impaled by arrows at close range. The Mongols then set the houses of the slaughtered Jurchens ablaze; smoke darkening the sky as Zhongdu goes up in flames.

  The devil’s horsemen gallop into our alley and we flatten ourselves against the roof as screams rise up from below. You curse as an axe smashes through the bolted door of Glassblower Hua’s workshop, and I shake and beg the Lord Buddha for mercy. I shut my eyes, awaiting death by suffocating smoke (should fate be lenient), or by burning (should fate be cruel). You shake my shoulder.

  ‘Look, Turnip, look. They are letting the craftsmen live!’

  In the alley the Mongols are rounding up the craftsmen of Zhongdu: stonemasons and carpenters and glassblowers and metalworkers, a group of miserable old men with black and swollen eyes being trussed up with ropes.

  ‘We must surrender,’ you say. ‘Stay up here and we will burn.’

  ‘Tiger, no! They will kill us!’

  ‘Stay then. Burn in the flames.’

  Though I am terrified, I go where you go. So, on shaking legs, I follow you down. In the alley you crash to your knees before a Mongol with flaring nostrils and yellow skin.

  ‘I am Glassblower Hua and this is Carpenter Lu! We offer our skills as craftsmen to our conquerors and rulers, the Mongols!’

  A traitorous Jurchen in Mongol robes translates our surrender into Mongolian, as you kowtow, knocking your forehead to the ground. The Mongols seize us. They smite us with their fists, but they do not kill us. They bind our wrists with rope and march us and the other craftsmen down the central avenue of Zhongdu. Massacred victims of the fall are everywhere. Corpses young and old, flung in the dust. And stunned and bereaved and frightened as we are, we know that we are better off than them.

  The Mongol Juggernaut

  The wagers of war ride on horseback and the slave-drivers lash their whips, driving us Jurchens forth like herds of cattle, away from Zhongdu. Oxen drag the yurts where the high-ranking Mongols reside on wheeled platforms. Sixteen war-horses pull Genghis Khan in his magnificent palace yurt, surrounded by a battalion of ten thousand warriors, defending the ‘Lord of Mankind’.

  The Mongols want to civilize their barbarous lands and have herded up Jurchens with knowledge and skills: bone-setters and physicians; artisans and engineers. They have gathered labourers too: young boys to tend to the animals and put up the Mongols’ yurts; young girls to milk the cows, gather dung for fires, cook meals and serve the Mongols’ voracious physical needs. After months of starvation, many Jurchens fall in the dust, too weak to march. The Mongols whip them and, when they don’t stand and walk, slash their throats. Throughout the day we stagger on and the Mongol juggernaut sheds corpses like a balding man sheds hairs.

  At night we slaves sleep on the bare earth under the sky. When light rains fall we shiver and curve our spines against the drizzle, hugging ourselves in the cold. When there are thunderstorms and heavy rain beats the earth beneath us to mud, we abandon hope of sleep. Lightning illuminates our writhing sea of slaves, mud-drenched and with chattering teeth.

  At daybreak the Mongols lash their whips and we drag our weary bones from the earth. Slave girls ladle rice gruel into our bare hands, and a leather flask of water is passed amongst the herd. The Mongols lash their whips once more and our dark swarm of humanity moves on, the sun beating down and dragging our shadows out from under our feet.

  The Mongol caravan journeys north by hoof and wheel and blistered foot, kicking up a storm of dust. I walk by your side, stride for limping stride. The nearness of you, the rhythm of your breath, and your stoic, determined face is a comfort to me.

  ‘I can’t go on, Tiger . . .’ I say, as my skull throbs and the weals from Ogre’s thrashing whip ache on my back. ‘I am at the end of my strength . . .’

  ‘No,’ you say, ‘there’s strength in you yet. Keep going and there will come a time when we are free. Surrender now and you will die a slave.’

  I would have fallen down long ago and let the ground drink the blood of my slit throat, were it not for you. So long as you are by my side, I can endure. You ease the stoned-to-death feeling in my soul.

  Though the Jin Dynasty has fallen and they
stagger in rags, the craftsmen of Zhongdu brag of their former renown.

  ‘My swords were so sharp they sliced human bone as though it were tofu,’ boasts Swordmaker Fu. ‘Warlords came from thousands of li away for my weapons.’

  ‘My Lady Mu dolls fetched a hundred silvers each,’ says Doll-maker Wan, whose dolls once lived in the bedchambers of the princesses. ‘Lady Mu Flies a Kite. Lady Mu Plays with a Little Dog. I have crafted thousands over the years . . .’

  The craftsmen are distinguished indeed. Gem-cutter Hu’s necklaces were worn on the lily-white necks of the Emperor’s concubines. Stone-carver Peng’s fearsome tomb gargoyles protect the dead in the imperial mausoleums. There is a saying, ‘He who stands upright, does not fear a crooked shadow.’ Well, Tiger and Turnip have much to fear. For we are not who we say we are and our shadows are crooked as bent nails. But the craftsmen of Zhongdu don’t tell on us. The Mongols don’t know our language, and to speak to them is to risk aggravating their tempers and fists. So long as we don’t antagonize them, the craftsmen leave us be.

  The Mongol in charge of our herd has a name that’s some guttural sound in the throat. We do not call our slave-driver by his name, though. Ogre is what we call him. Ogre rides with his leather boots in stirrups and a coat of dog-skins over his shoulders, and his mare is equipped with a hook-ended lance and a horsehair lasso. Your iron-branded scars are nothing compared to Ogre’s battle scars. One fault line cleaves Ogre’s face in two, from forehead to chin, as though someone once pickaxed his head. His nose has been fractured so many times, it’s hardly worth calling a nose. The only word he knows in our Jurchen dialect is ‘Go!’, which he shouts often, as he is impatient with stragglers. When the elderly Fan-maker Zu fainted in the heat, Ogre reached down from his mare and stuck Fan-maker Zu’s chest with the hook-ended lance. Ogre gurgled with laughter and dragged him through the dirt until he was quite dead. He has a gallows sense of humour, it can be said.