Erin Eisenhour - [BCS308 S02]

by The Black-Eyed Goddess of Apple Trees

  “Unfortunate that we found you so late in the lunar cycle,” he says as he deposits me on the floor of a small square room with rice-paper walls. “If tonight had been a full moon I’d have had you carved up like a suckling pig an hour ago.”

  The last thing I see is a sliver of Hulin’s pale face and the tremor of his hand on the latch before the door slams shut. At first I can’t make sense of his fear—after all, he’s not the one staring down the shaman’s baton. Then I realize with a jolt that Hulin’s alarm is not for himself but for me. Because he knows from experience when the shaman is making idle threats and when he is simply stating facts.

  When the door opens again three days later I don’t know which is more disappointing—the fact that I am still alive or the fact that the shaman’s face is just as pox-free as mine.

  It turns out the only way to purify the body after an early deflowering—as the shamans fondly refer to the alleged event—is to stew it (me) like a starchy vegetable.

  “This is going to make the meat awfully tough,” I say, tapping my sternum.

  The attendant shushes me. I shrug, sinking into the steaming tub. I’m supposed to use this time for thinking—which I am, just not about my souls. This is a temple, I remind myself, not a fortress. I stare dismally down at my face reflected back in the dark bathwater, conscious of the attendant’s eyes. Of course, escape would be much easier if I wasn’t constantly surrounded by shamans and scholars and Hulin’s big eyes and slack-jawed mouth. Every scenario I conjure up only ends in more guards and more locked doors. So it’s not a fortress, I think, but it’s certainly a prison, designed to keep things in not out. I guess the shamans worry their gods might get tired of squatting on their golden altars all day and one sunny afternoon, just walk away.

  Can’t say I blame them. The circular hall where the Pantheon resides is always miserably stuffy. Time here passes as a shapeless blur of prayers, recitations, and lengthy lectures on various lofty subjects. Apparently the shamans want me to be familiar with the gods I am being offered to, which I think is a thoughtful gesture. It gives the whole affair an intimacy that I think most ritual murder lacks. The names prove too numerous for me to keep track of. Back in Pingli Province we had the Jewel-Eyed Five, plus the little shrine to the Immortal Mothers, which I never lit a candle to because it felt odd to pray to my sister. But here there are dozens, hundreds, endless Tians and Nus and Jade Empresses displayed in a circle so that none appear favored over the others, from Lei, the garish, green goddess of laughter, whose name you cannot speak without a smile, to the stout old Steward with his curved bull’s horns.

  I smother a giggle. This is my fifth lesson of the day. I try to focus on the large words the scholar’s mouth is forming, but my eyes keep slipping to the fresco on the far wall. It depicts the Great Battle of the Chengzi River, and the river god himself stands front and center, fully disrobed for the occasion, every last inch of his dripping chiseled physique etched into the walls in painstaking detail.

  “Is something funny?” the scholar asks, thick, black brows dipping down into his eyes.

  My mother stands by the door, watching. She looks ill.

  “Oh, no,” I say, mopping at the corners of my eyes with my sleeve. “It’s just... I’ve never seen Chengzi depicted with such a... such a studied hand. So... anatomically detailed.”

  “Enough.” The scholar throws down his slate. “My efforts are wasted on this matter.”

  The shaman appears, as always, as if he stepped straight from the shadows. “She is the Elect,” he insists. “The gods do not make mistakes, nor do their signs.”

  “Yes,” the scholar agrees. “But surely the readers of these signs are capable of error.”

  A muscle in the shaman’s jaw twitches. The moment the scholar exits the hall, the shaman darts forward. I shriek as the baton snaps across my cheek once, twice, each flecking my vision with amorphous color.

  “First you dishonor your body!” he rages, “then your family, then me, and now the gods. Do you think you are above this? Do you not realize that there are thousands of girls who pray night and day for a blessing such as yours? An opportunity such as yours?”

  I desperately shield my head with my arms as the baton cracks across my stomach, too short of breath now to cry out. They need me, I repeat over and over again, like a mantra, drowning out my own panic, they cannot let me die, they need me. But through my muss of hair I catch sight of the shaman’s cool black eyes—black but with trace amounts of amber, like hot embers—and as the baton descends again and again and again, I realize with paralyzing certainty that he will not stop until he has proven his point—proven that he could kill me, if he liked, here and now, Elect or not. Just because he wants to. Just because he can.

  My mother screams, swaying as if nearing a faint. The other scholars who had previously been cowering on the far side of the room gallantly rush to her aid with fans and pitchers of water. The shaman’s grip grows slack and then he lets go of me altogether. I drop to the floor in an unceremonious heap of tangled hair and twisted robes. Hulin rushes to my side and eases me upright with a hand placed lightly in the middle of my back.

  “Are you alright?” he asks quietly, seeing my shoulders shake. But it isn’t until he brushes my hair back from my face that he realizes the wet rattle in my chest isn’t a struggle to breathe but, rather, laughter. My mother leans into a pillar, speechless. She thinks I’ve gone mad, and maybe I have. As I look up into the shaman’s deep smoldering eyes I realize, in the first true moment of genius in my entire life, that I have all the means of escape right here, ricocheting around my brain, rockets just waiting to be ignited.

  In the morning I say an impassioned prayer to Chengzi and his abnormally large pectoral muscles and then set about on my quest to be thoroughly insufferable.

  I blow bubbles in my bathwater, bounce my leg constantly during meditations, and snort incense fumes to see if they can actually get you loopy (they cannot, but the sticks do make the inside of your nostrils all tingly). My mother is beside herself with humiliation. The shaman drops the serene exterior of the spiritual authority. He spits his words, and his face is constantly red and pinched from the swell of barely contained righteous fury just beneath the surface.

  “I’ll have your mouth sewn shut,” he whispers into my ear. “I’ll have your lips sealed together with hot wax.”

  I yawn, stirring my tea with my pinkie. “Stole that line from my mother, didn’t you?” Amber liquid sloshes over the rim of the cup, soaking the front of the shaman’s robes. “Oops,” I say, almost languidly, rolling up my sleeve and extending my arm in preparation for the descent of the shaman’s baton. But now we both know that his arm will wear out long before my resolve.

  It gives me comfort, tracing the ugly purple welts on my skin as I lie on my sleeping mat at night. I think of them like medals or maybe tattoos, and when one starts to fade I can’t help but cry—even with my guards no doubt listening at the door outside—because these marks are mine and it’s like losing a part of me. I might as well have beaten them into my skin myself.

  “You need to do what they say.”

  I wobble about the perimeter of the temple’s garden, ignoring the groan and sway of the bamboo, the distant lapping of water, the trill of a bird in the nearby wisteria tree. Each shuffling step requires my full attention, what with the stones the shaman has strapped to my slippers. They’re a metaphor for my divinely appointed task, and a rather ham-fisted one at that.

  “Bi, did you hear me?” Hulin presses, glancing anxiously over his shoulder. One hand is fixed on the hilt of his sword, the other holding my parasol aloft, presumably to shield my delicate skin from the milky sunlight that occasionally leaks through the clouds. “You need to start behaving or else—”

  “Or else what?” I say through my teeth. “They’ll kill me?”

  “They could cast you aside,” he whispers, and his voice is pleading.

  “Well, they’re welcome to do it.” I t
ake another tottering step, bracing against the wind. It claws straight through my thin robe. “Tits on a stick, it’s cold!”

  A scholar emerges from a nearby plot of orchids where he had evidently been meditating. He shoves past us in a huff, clutching his cushion under his arm.

  But Hulin’s eyes are wide and bright with curiosity. “Do all girls in Pingli talk like you?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” I say, shuffling forward again. “There are no girls in Pingli.”

  Technically it’s true. In the records there are no girls, at least not by name; only small black dots denoting the presence of sisters, wives, mothers. I remember as a child watching the census-taker scratch my father’s name onto his little slate, and below that our three dots, arranged like tea kettles on a shelf. One of the dots was slightly smeared, almost like a little face with two braids set on opposite sides. I like to imagine this was me.

  Hulin misses the joke, but he laughs anyway. “You’re a funny girl,” he says, falling in step behind me, then repeats under his breath, “A funny girl.”

  One of the temple girls—the one the shaman struck—has caught the pox. They whisk her away to another location before she even shows her first spot. Her sisters’ accusatory stares burn into the back of my head as they jerk the comb through my hair the next morning, but since the moon is still waxing crescent, my heart stays lodged in my chest (though I try not to think about the alternative, except in a purely hypothetical sense). It’s easier to forget why I’m here now that my mother has taken to napping more frequently and Hulin is my friend. You’d think he’d take advantage of such a captive audience, but I do most of the talking during our garden strolls.

  “Then the woman carves out the ox’s eyes and sticks them into her husband’s bloodied sockets,” I say breathlessly, due to the fact that Kuen’s chunky arms are locked around my neck. He’s mercifully fallen asleep, but now I have to drag this drooling sack of flour around in addition to my stones. “And for the first time in his life the man opens his eyes and looks upon the face of the love of his life. That’s why they say lovers are ‘ox-eyed’ for one another.”

  Hulin laughs. “We never had stories like this where I grew up. We had ‘divine histories’—Chengzi slaughtering the thirty thousand, the Jade Empress mixing the love elixir for Wei-Li, Feihong journeying across the oceans...”

  “The gods are the subject of shadow puppetry,” I say dismissively. “Fantastical characters who feud and fuck and spread misery as often as they do good fortune. We tell stories about them to little children, and not even good stories.” Good stories meaning stories about farmers’ wives with slit-open bellies sprouting apple trees in the back garden.

  “You should have been a poet,” Hulin observes.

  “Believe me,” I say, adjusting my grip on Kuen. “If I could make a decent living sitting by a creek and writing three-line stanzas about grasshoppers all day, I would.”

  “It’s hard to think of a better life purpose than to create beautiful things out of nothing.”

  Now that’s a surprise. In fact, it might be the first profound thing I’ve ever heard Hulin say.

  I shift my attention back to my feet, ignoring Kuen’s hot breaths on my neck. “My sister used to say all women are born artists. To us, ‘there is nothing more natural than creation.’”

  “Your sister sounds very wise.”

  Something in Hulin’s inflection suggests that he is about to offer his condolences, so I cut in with the first question that comes to mind. “So, the Academy, huh. What happened to that?”

  Perhaps there are better ways I could have phrased this, but I’m too desperate to change the subject. Anyway, Hulin has apparently convinced himself that my general lack of tact is not a character defect but rather a part of my natural charm.

  “My brothers are there now,” he says, smiling fondly at Kuen. “But I’m the youngest and my father thought he should, you know, give something back—to the ones who made us.”

  For what? I think. In the shadows of the wisteria I think I see my sister’s face, the way her kind eyes and fine cheekbones looked shrouded in the black folds of her widow’s veil. “Don’t you see, Bi?” she once said so serenely, smoothing her hand over the slight curve of her swollen belly. “It’s a gift. When they take, they always give us something in return.”

  “Nah,” I say, folding my arms around Kuen. “We don’t owe the gods a damn thing.”

  “What are you doing?” my mother asks from across the hall, tearing her eyes away from Lei’s glittering green stare. She must have sensed the shift in my breathing from steady inhales and exhales to faint, whistling snores.

  I rub at my eyes with my sleeve. “What does it look like? I’m resting.”

  She storms across the hall to swat at me with her fan. Kuen laughs from his blanket nearby on the floor. “You are supposed to be clearing your mind. You must be a clean slate for the gods to write their will upon and... and anyway, you have the nights to sleep all you want.”

  “Not anymore,” I say through my teeth. “Because now our dear holy man has gotten into the habit of sitting outside my door muttering incantations until the sun comes up.”

  He’s been at it ever since they carried out the third girl.

  My mother’s grip is so tight it crumples the paper of her fan. Faint beads of perspiration line her forehead. Something about the light here gives her skin an ashen quality.

  “I don’t understand you,” she says. “Everyone here is so generous, so kind. We have a roof and good clothes and more food than we can eat and—and you should be more grateful, Bi, grateful!”

  I push myself to my feet. “That’s not what Baba says. He says we all end up in the same place at the end of the day, so it really doesn’t matter what the hell I do—”

  “Your father,” she spits, “only says those things because he’s allowed to wallow in all life’s disappointments and curse the gods for his lot. Because he has the luxury to be weak.”

  She claps a hand to her mouth—that small, steady hand whose creases and callouses used to fascinate me so much when I was a child. Her bottom lip quivers. She stands before me small and shrunken. Like crumpled paper.

  I reach for her hand, which is cool and limp, and whisper, “It’s okay. I won’t tell.”

  She pulls away, mopping the sweat from her pale cheeks with her sleeve, stirring the air with her fan. “It’s very... very hot in here, don’t you think?”

  I frown. The windows are open today. “Mama, maybe you should lie down for a bit.”

  She takes an unsteady step forward. “Yes. A rest. That sounds so...”

  And she tips over like a jug of water, spilling out across the floor. Shamans and guards and scholars flood into the hall at my calls. They descend on my mother the way crows do, and the effect is made all the worse by the way their drooping sleeves and silly tassels flutter in the breeze from the open window. I hear Kuen wailing somewhere far across the hall, pushed to the side and forgotten, and underneath that I hear the word “pox” and then the shaman’s sharp commands: “Get the Elect out. Get her out.”

  Hulin locks his arms around my waist and hoists me into the air with more strength than I realized he possessed, ignoring every curse I throw at him. I can see my mother’s open hand on the floor through the tangle of bodies, the strain of the muscles as she grasps at the air. Someone has the decency to slip the crumpled fan back into her damp fingers.

  The shaman will not let me within ten feet of my mother in her current condition, so I watch the progression of the crusted red spots up her arms and around her throat through a crack in the door. A snuffling sound reminds me that my father is here in the corridor, too, in the same spot where he has sat for the past two days, watching the masked healers flurry in and out. It’s not his swollen eyes or his inability to put a full sentence together that alarms me. It’s the fact that for the first time in years, I am certain he is stone-cold sober.

  “Bi, I can’t go back after t
his,” he whispers. “She’ll be in the walls, the floor, the trees, the fields. She’ll be waiting for me...”

  I smooth Kuen’s black hair over his round, little head. He will not let my father touch him while he’s in such a state, recoiling at the sight of his inflated red face.

  Hulin sneaks a furtive glance at the shaman. “Do you want me to carry him for a bit?”

  “No,” I murmur, moving my hand up and down, up and down. “It’s fine.”

  A terrible image flashes before my eyes of Kuen’s face poxed and scarred; my father and I watching him writhe in his cradle, just waiting for him to die. I pull his face closer to mine, this face that, at this proximity and if the light hits it just right, carries echoes of my sister’s.

  “What are we going to do?” my father says hoarsely. “Bi, without her I’m—I’m not—”

  “It’s okay, Baba,” I say. “You don’t have to say it.”

  He looks to me, wide-eyed and grateful. “You are so much like her, you know.”

  I turn away, watching an attendant dab at my mother’s cracked lips with a damp cloth. “No. Everyone knows I take after you.”

  No wonder the pain is so deeply wedged into my chest. It’s like watching five deaths all in one. Or maybe just one five times over.

  It’s easy to revisit a memory like Kuen’s birthday. Every last little detail has been carved into my brain—the stale stench of sweat, the grating hum of the cicadas, my father’s fading footsteps as he raced off in search of another healer, one who wouldn’t give up.

  “It’s not so bad,” my sister assured me, her head propped against my knee. Her skin was stretched across her bones. All the color in her face had been soaked up by the heap of blood-stained towels in the far corner of the room.