Peach Blossom Paradise

by Ge Fei

  10

  THE WEDDING was held soon afterward. Seated once more inside a crimson wedding palanquin, Xiumi felt herself returning to that moment four months earlier when Lilypad had helped her into the palanquin seat. A thick fog had descended that morning and covered everything—the village, the forest, the river, the boat. She had fallen asleep. It felt as if this were the very same morning. Could it be that she had never run into the bandits, never been kidnapped to Huajiashe and imprisoned on a tiny island on a lake, never witnessed a chain of strange events and brutal murders in the village—everything, everything just a dream she had dreamt while napping in the palanquin?

  Yet the reality she now faced was that she was about to get married. She was sitting in a boat on her way to the other shore. Lake water flowed under the gunwale; white shorebirds circled close to the water surface. The wooden rudder creaked loudly as the boat floated toward the village.

  They arrived at their mooring. Through the thin red gauze over her window, Xiumi could see two naked children standing on the beach, staring at her party with fingers in their mouths. She saw trees, burned-out gazebos, courtyard walls, ponds, and sections of the covered walkway, everything decorated bright red. Water still burbled along the aqueducts.

  Celebratory firecrackers had been going off for a while, and the air was tinged with the acrid yet pleasant smell of gunpowder. The palanquin turned into the alleyways, which were so dark and narrow that raising the window blind revealed only wet stone walls. Of course, there was also Han Liu, who walked to the left side of the palanquin in a pair of new blue pants. Emerging from the alleys, they headed west through a grove of trees before the palanquin halted and was shakily set down. Han Liu opened the palanquin door and reached inside to lift Xiumi out, announcing, “We’re here.”

  They had come to the village’s ancestral memorial hall, the only edifice to survive Wang Guancheng’s reforms. It was built of dark gray bricks, which the generations had covered with invasive moss. A pair of stone lions guarded the front door, red wedding bows tied around their necks. Seven or eight grand dining tables stood in the outer courtyard, replete with meat and vegetable dishes of all kinds, while a team of cooks in aprons chopped more meat on a stone slab close by. A slow stream of people moved in and out of the front door, mostly women carrying dripping-wet baskets or bleeding chickens.

  Above the drainage ditch at the far corner, a butcher was slaughtering a pig. He held his knife in his teeth as he lifted a ladleful of cold water and splashed it onto the pig’s neck. The animal kicked and squealed, aware of what was about to happen. The butcher pushed his knife smoothly into the pig’s neck, and a thick stream of blood spurted up, splashing loudly into a bronze basin. Xiumi gasped, having never seen a pig killed before.

  A heavily rouged old woman walked up to her, bowed in greeting, and instructed her to “follow me” before leading her through the back door of the memorial hall, her thick waist rocking above her bound feet. Behind the wall was a square skywell paved with black stones, an apricot tree, and a well with a pulley. The doors and windows of both side chambers were plastered with red paper bearing the character for “happiness.” The scent of mold and dead water assaulted Xiumi’s nose the minute she walked in; yesterday’s heavy rains had clogged the gutters. The old woman fished a key out of her pocket, opened a door, and led her inside.

  This must be the wedding bedroom. A single wooden latticed window on the eastern wall let in little light. A large, freshly carved marriage bed gave off the strong scent of varnish. Its curtains and mosquito netting were new, too; two floral-print bedrolls had been laid out on it side by side, along with a pair of embroidered pillows. A makeup table and two chairs, mirror-bright with a new coat of paint, stood close to the bed. A small oil lamp burned on the table. The single window looked out onto the back wall of a private household; when Xiumi neared the window and stood on tiptoe, she could see past the hedge into the rear courtyard, where an old man was using a chamber pot.

  The old woman said, “When the Boss was fighting with Number Four two weeks ago, his estate burned down, and they haven’t finished rebuilding yet. The rooms in the memorial hall are a bit older; we hope you can put up with it for a few days.” She poured Xiumi a cup of tea, then brought her over a plate of sweets.

  Han Liu addressed the old woman several times, but the other pretended not to hear her. Eventually, two young maids in spring-green clothing came in and stood at attention beside the door, their eyes downcast, hands at their sides. The old woman turned to Han Liu and said coldly, “Auntie, if you have no more business here, you might as well return to the island.”

  Knowing she couldn’t stay, Han Liu stood up and looked at Xiumi with tears in her eyes. “Does the young miss remember what I told her yesterday?”

  Xiumi nodded.

  “If you can endure a month, you can endure four years or forty; that’s all there is to it. Suffering will always be a fact of life. Now you’re with Number Six, the new chief, so be careful to obey him at all times so you don’t have to receive pain for no reason.”

  Xiumi assented through tears.

  “In the future, if you have the chance, come visit me on the island.”

  Han Liu sobbed, and her half-open lips quivered, as if she had something more to say. After a heavy pause, she pulled something wrapped in yellow silk out of her pocket and stuffed it in Xiumi’s hand, saying, “Just a little thing, a keepsake in case we don’t see each other for a while.” She patted Xiumi’s hand a few times, then turned and left.

  Receiving the object, Xiumi felt a deep pang of foreboding. Her heart beat hard, then sank into her gut. She hurried over to the oil lamp and unwrapped the folds of cloth. There it was! The entire room began to spin; Xiumi teetered, then cried out as she lost her balance. The frightened old woman rushed over to hold her steady.

  It was another golden cicada.

  Xiumi staggered to the doorway, where the two serving girls reached out their hands to support her. She peered out the door: the sky over the memorial hall was still an ashen gray, as if portending another rainstorm. She saw the apricot tree and the well in the skywell—Han Liu had disappeared.

  The incredibly lifelike cicada looked exactly like the one Zhang Jiyuan had left her, with delicate wings unfolded, as if it were about to lift gracefully into the air. Except for its bulging eyes, which were made of black onyx, the rest of it appeared to be pure gold. Xiumi had learned from Zhang Jiyuan’s diary that a very limited number had been forged—some said eighteen, others sixteen, and not even Zhang Jiyuan knew the exact count. They functioned as secret tokens used by the leaders of the Cicadas and Crickets Society to connect with one another. Rank-and-file members would never see one. It was said that the object would trill like a real cicada in times of emergency, but this of course was just a fairy tale. Han Liu was a simple nun from the mountains—how did she come to possess such an important treasure? Could it be that she too . . .

  Xiumi gently ran a finger over the object’s glimmering gossamer wings. No longer did she gaze on it with tenderness as she once did; on the contrary, she viewed it as a possible herald of bad fortune, like a living thing formed from the essence of the natural world and perfectly capable of trilling with its wings or flying away at any moment. Xiumi stared at it intensely, as thoughts, feelings, and memories chased each other in a rising whirlwind in her head, which began to throb with pain. She stared until exhaustion shut her eyes; she collapsed on the makeup table and fell asleep.

  She awoke to find herself lying in bed still in her clothes. Darkness had fallen outside. Ripe dates and peanuts, dyed red, hung on individual strands of silk tied to the mosquito netting. She sat up, her head still sharply throbbing. The old woman sat on the edge of the bed and watched her with something like a smile on her dried-walnut face. Xiumi got out of bed and walked to the makeup table, where she tied up her hair carelessly and took a sip of cold tea. Her heart was stil
l pounding.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Late at night,” the old woman replied. She pulled a pin from her hair to trim the oil lamp.

  “What’s that noise outside?”

  “They’re singing opera.”

  Xiumi stopped to listen. The sound of the music emerged from somewhere behind the memorial hall. It grew softer and louder as the wind took it. The piece was “Han Yu Snowbound at the Lantian Pass,” which she knew well. It sounded like a large audience was attending; she could hear the clinking of cups, the bubble of voices talking and playing drinking games, the patter of fast footsteps, and even the occasional whine of a dog. Looking out the window, Xiumi saw bamboo trunks bend in the whispering breeze as a diffuse evening blue settled like fog. Four high-stemmed candles on the makeup table had already burned halfway down. A large serving platter next to the candles contained a small bowl of rice-ball soup, two vegetable dishes, and a plate of fruit.

  “The boss just stopped by to visit the young miss, but he saw you were asleep, and didn’t want to wake you,” the old woman said.

  Xiumi made no reply. When the old woman mentioned “the boss,” she must have been referring to Qingsheng.

  •

  It was three or four in the morning when the party ended.

  Qingsheng’s appearance came as a surprise. He kicked down the bedroom door and stumbled in, alone and unarmed, to the surprise and fright of the yawning maids at the door. Xiumi assumed he was drunk. He staggered over to her place on the bed and put one foot up on a chair, like an opera clown. Then he just stared at her, a foolish smile on his face.

  Xiumi turned her head away, but Qingsheng grabbed her chin and wrenched it back to him, face-to-face.

  “Look at me . . . look at my eyes. They’re gonna close in a minute,” Qingsheng commanded, his voice charged with a sense of enormous physical agony.

  Xiumi had no idea what he meant, and stared at him in stunned silence. Pea-size drops of sweat ran down his cheek, and his breathing grew louder. His expression made her think of Zhang Jiyuan on the night they stayed at Chen’s Rice Market in Changzhou. He had looked at her as if he desperately wanted to say something, yet couldn’t reach past a secret pain.

  Xiumi caught a powerful whiff of raw flesh, so strong she couldn’t help gagging. She couldn’t figure out the source of it. She glanced around the room: the old woman and maids were long gone; the memorial hall was tranquil and still. Moonlight flooded the skywell and the apricot tree. The whole place glowed with an ominous silence, like a mausoleum.

  “Want to hear a riddle?” Qingsheng asked playfully. “You have to guess a character. The clue is: a corpse with two knives stuck in.”

  He said that he had met a traveling Taoist fortune-teller that morning in the village. The man was rattling a tortoiseshell drum and waving an Eight Trigrams flag when he stopped Qingsheng in the street and asked him to solve a riddle: a corpse with two knives stuck in. Qingsheng couldn’t figure it out; nor could his bodyguards when he asked them. The fortune-teller laughed. “That’s good. If you can’t guess it, that’s good. Bad news if you could.” He didn’t look like your average priest, though. For one, he had six fingers on his left hand.

  Xiumi’s chest tightened when she heard this detail, but there was no time to feel frightened.

  “I thought that once I killed all thirteen members of Qingshou’s family, the massacre in the village would be done,” he told her. “Didn’t expect that he’d called his people over to kill me while I planned to kill him. We both had the same idea. After the Boss was killed, I drove myself crazy trying to figure out who had done it. Then Two and Five kicked it, Three ran away, and there was no one left but Qingshou, so I figured it must be him. ‘First come, first serve; come late, tempt fate,’ as the saying goes. I just walked out the front door when I ran into him and his crew. They set fire to my house.

  “We locked horns, and all hell broke loose. I fought him from the alleyway right down to the shore; heaven helped me snag both him and his whore of an aunt. Heh-heh . . . I held it together for four whole months, looking over my shoulder every single minute, and now I thought I could finally relax. I played with her for a while until I got sick of it, then I cut off her tits and fried ’em up for dinner and tossed her body in the lake. I wasn’t too hard on old Number Four. I just stuffed him with mud and let it go at that.

  “I thought it was all over. I killed his cook and his florist, I even killed that parrot he had hanging in a cage, and then I burned down the house. I thought I’d finished it. Who could have known the real mastermind hadn’t even stepped out of the shadows!”

  Qingsheng’s eyes opened so wide they seemed ready to shoot out of his skull; heavy beads of sweat continued to form on his broad forehead. She heard him working hard to keep breathing, as if he were trying to inhale her body through his nose. The shadow of a human form flickered past the doorway. Qingsheng noticed it as well, and snorted. “The courtyard looks empty, but the whole place is full of spies. But they don’t dare to come in, they’re afraid of me! As long as I’m alive, as long as I can breathe, they don’t dare come in. They poisoned my beer and stabbed me twice. I’m a dead man walking now. But they don’t dare come in.

  “Too bad I still don’t know who killed me . . .”

  Qingsheng grunted ruefully, then asked Xiumi, “The riddle . . . you figure it out yet?”

  When Xiumi didn’t respond, he grabbed her hand and put it on his waist. Her fingers touched something solid and round—it was the wooden handle of a knife. The blade had completely entered his belly. Her hand dripped with blood.

  “That one’s not the problem. There’s another one in my back, touching my heart. My heart’s about to stop beating. It hurts. I’ll die unsatisfied . . .”

  His voice grew weaker, fading almost to a whisper; she watched the lids of his huge eyes close and open, then slowly close again. His hands began to shake.

  “My heart’s about to fall,” Qingsheng said. “You know what that means? When your heart falls, that’s when you die. Brief, very brief, but it’s the most unbearable moment of your life. It happens to everyone, no matter how you die. It doesn’t hurt, honest, it doesn’t hurt, it feels like panic . . . like I can hear my heart talking. It’s saying, ‘I’m sorry . . . I just can’t keep beating, not even one more time . . .’ ”

  Qingsheng tipped backward and fell heavily to the floor. Immediately he jumped back up, then fell down again before he could find his balance. He tried a few more times before giving up. His body shivered feverishly, and he flopped around on the floor like a freshly slaughtered chicken.

  “I’m not gonna die, I won’t,” Qingsheng growled as he ground his teeth together. Coughing up a wad of bloody phlegm, he raised himself up to say, “They can’t kill me that easily. Bring me a cup of tea to drink.”

  Xiumi had retreated to the opposite end of the bed in fear and covered her face with a curtain. She knew that the poison in Qingsheng’s system was taking effect. A short sword stuck out between his shoulder blades, a bright red tassel dangling from the hilt. He spat out another mouthful of bloody sputum, and began to crawl on his hands.

  “I want water. My chest hurts like hell.”

  He looked up at Xiumi and kept crawling. He’s crawling toward the table for some tea, Xiumi thought. He made it to the edge of the table and tried to stand without success. He bit down hard on the table leg. A chunk of wood broke off in his teeth with a snap.

  That marked the end of his strength. Xiumi saw his legs kick a few more times. He let out a raucous fart and died.

  This gave Xiumi the answer to the riddle. A body with two knives stuck in it was the character for “ass.”

  11

  “I’LL JUST call you Big Sister,” the stable boy said.

  “Then what do I call you?” Xiumi asked.

  “Stable Boy?”

  �
�That’s your real name?” Xiumi turned her head away. Her lips tingled with pain, as if he had bitten them.

  “No, it’s not my name. I don’t have a name. But since I was Number Five’s stable boy, that’s what everyone in the village calls me.” He lay on top of her, breathing hard as he licked her ears, eyes, and neck.

  “You’re what, twenty?”

  “Eighteen,” the stable boy replied.

  His panting sounded like a dog’s. His body was dark and slick as an eel, and his hair was stiff. He buried his face in her armpit, his body quivering. He whispered repeatedly, “Mama, Sister, Mama, you’re my real mother . . .” He said he liked the smell of her armpit because it smelled like horse sweat. He said that the first time he saw her in the boat, his heart sliced open. All he wanted to do was to look at her, to look at her face. He couldn’t get enough of just looking.

  Memories of that moonlit night surfaced in Xiumi’s mind: lake water gurgling beneath her; the tall reeds parting and closing, then parting again. The stable boy staring at her. She remembered his tender, adolescent eyes: wet, clear, disheartened, and pained, like a river beneath the full moon.

  Qingde had been dozing beside him. The stable boy grinned stupidly at Xiumi, showing his white teeth, thinking Qingde wasn’t aware. Yet whenever Xiumi stared back, he would immediately blush and look away, and play with the tassel of his machete. He had propped one foot on the table, revealing a shoe with a hole that exposed his toes. He didn’t stop staring and smiling at her the whole night. Later on, Qingde dumped the burning ember of his pipe onto the stable boy’s palm, searing his skin and making him jump in pain. But after Qingde had fallen back asleep, the boy had licked his lips and kept on smiling and staring.

  The stable boy held her so hard his fingernails dug into her flesh as his body continued to quiver.

  “I just want to hold you like this and never let go. Even if someone put a knife on my neck, I wouldn’t let go,” the stable boy said. He looked even more like a child when he spoke.