Chapter 52

The house went up like a kicked hive. Gouwa's aunt and her husband came out with coats thrown over them, and Ning Shu was putting ointment on the bruises on Wu Qingqing's face.

"God above, Gouwa, what have you done?" Gouwa's aunt was shouting. "How could you carry off another man's wife? If the Chens come to this door, what then? Take her back. Now."

Wu Qingqing shrank in against Ning Shu, frightened. "Please. Please."

"Don't worry. I got you out and I'll keep you safe."

Gouwa's aunt could hardly go at Ning Shu, who was family at one remove, so all she could do was jab at Gouwa's head with her finger.

Her own aunt was soft by nature and stood to one side not knowing what to say.

So Ning Shu stepped in front of her cousin. "Don't go at Gouwa. It was my idea."

"My sister and I did it together."

Gouwa's uncle made a cold sound. "Blood will tell, won't it. Brother and sister, one heart."

He leaned on the word blood, and her aunt flinched at it. Gouwa was not her own son and the family all knew it. They had told her more than once to have a child of her own, and she had refused. All she wanted was to raise Gouwa properly.

And now the boy had caused trouble, and the family would be less happy than ever, and would want to bring that up.

Before long her grandmother heard the noise and came into the room.

"A wicked thing to do. I wonder you could bring yourselves to it."

Gouwa put his head down and said nothing, and Ning Shu went quiet too, and Gouwa's uncle took considerable courage from it. "What else is there to say? A boy his age, carrying off another man's wife. It shames the whole family."

Her grandmother looked round at him. "I was talking about you."

He had nothing to say to that, and the light came back into Gouwa's eyes.

Her grandmother said, "Whose wife she is, is hers to say. That is what reason looks like."

Wu Qingqing cried out, "I'm nobody's wife. I was sold here."

Gouwa's uncle went quiet and did not try again.

His wife, though, made an irritated noise. "The Chens paid money for her, whatever you say. And what is reason? What the village agrees on is reason. Go and stand at the end of the road and ask. Who there would say she isn't the Chens' wife?"

"What is standing in front of you is a living person, not livestock led in from the market."

Gouwa's uncle said, sullen about it, "And after a scene like this, how are we supposed to live in this village?"

"What my granddaughter and my grandson have done, I'll answer for." Her grandmother was angry now. "Gouwa. Ningning. We're going home."

That night her uncle drove, and the whole family took the mountain road out of Shangping and were half the night getting back to Pingshui.

Wu Qingqing came with them.

---

The village was divided about what Ning Shu and Gouwa had done. Some of them said good for her, and some said it broke the rules of the thing.

But there was not much any of them could say. Her grandmother stood very high in Pingshui, with what people in the city would call a following that would hear nothing against her. Whatever she did, and whether or not anybody agreed with it, once the name Hu Ying was on the table it was right and it had to be backed.

So when the Chen mother came down on Pingshui the next evening with the men of her family behind her, the villagers stopped them at the end of the road and would not let them in.

"What's all this? What's all this? What are the carrying-poles for? What are the hoes for? Are you going to start something? This is Pingshui, not Shangping. There are ways of doing things."

The Chen mother stood under the plane tree at the end of the road, breathing hard.

"Ways of doing things? Good. That Ye boy stole my son's wife and carried her off home. You judge it. Who's in the right here? And you keeping me standing out here. Is the whole of Pingshui a nest of thieves?"

That was heavy enough to set them off, and the villagers came back at her from every side.

"Your son's a simpleton, and your daughter-in-law went off with our handsome lad of her own accord. Whose fault is that?"

They were enjoying it. "If you want somebody to blame, blame your own son for being no use."

"That's right. Half the girls in this village have their eye on the Ye boy."

The Chen mother could not get past it. Thirty mouths at once, and the more they said the worse it got, so she gave up trading words with them and went straight for Ning Shu's house.

---

"Grandma, the Chens are here. There's a lot of them." Gouwa lay along the top of the wall, keeping watch.

"Let there be as many as they like. Not one of them is coming through my gate today." Her grandmother swept her sleeve. "Ningning, take the girl to the Heavenly Master's shrine."

Ning Shu helped Wu Qingqing into the shrine, and Wu Qingqing held on to her hand. "How many of them are there? Can we hold?"

"Don't worry. With my grandmother here, it doesn't matter how many come."

The banging on the gate had already started.

"Open this gate. Give me my son's wife back." The Chen mother's voice came through it, sharp.

The gate came open with a bang, and her grandmother walked out, entirely unhurried.

The Chen mother said, "Hu Ying, your name carries for miles around. Your grandson has stolen my son's wife. A shameful business like this, and are you going to cover for him?"

Her grandmother made a sound. "This is a country of laws. You say the girl is your son's wife. Where's the marriage certificate? Let's see it."

"What do I want with a certificate? When my son married we fed the whole village for three days. They bowed to heaven and earth and the rites were seen. That makes her our family's wife."

"I don't recognise your rites. The girl doesn't want to go back with you, so my granddaughter will take her into the city and find her parents."

The Chen mother's face changed. "Hu Ying, you'll hand my son's wife over today, or I'll stop treating you as a neighbour. Don't say I didn't respect the goodwill between our villages."

Her grandmother looked round the yard. The woman had brought fifteen or twenty men in their prime, every one of them with a carrying-pole or a hoe for a weapon, and some with torches. They had not come to go home empty-handed.

Her grandmother took a step back and said coldly, "If you want to force your way into Hu Ying's house, let's see whether you're able."

Then she drew out a paper charm and said the wind charm over it, and the wind got up all round them at once, and several of the men were blown sideways and had to put their hands on the wall to stand.

The Chen mother was not a woman who believed in any of it. "It's a trick on the eyes. Search the house. Find that woman."

Several of the young men pushed their way in, and her uncle and aunt hurried to stop them. "Don't go in the house. We can talk about this."

"Talk about what? Lads, if they won't hand her over, burn the place." The Chen mother was directing it. "Start with the front house."

Behind her a man came up with a can of oil and began pouring it along the front house, where her uncle lived.

---

Gouwa looked out from the shrine door. "Sis, it's bad. They're going to burn the house."

"Stay with Wu Qingqing. I'm going out to help my grandmother." Ning Shu went for the door, and for some reason the shrine door was shut fast, and however she pushed at it, it would not open.

Ning Shu remembered perfectly well that she had not locked it on the way in. Why would it not open?

"Sis, it's alight. Our house is burning." Gouwa was shouting. "I have to get out there and help my mum and dad."

Ning Shu ran to the window, and sure enough the front house was burning.

"Sis, why have you locked the door?"

"I didn't lock it."

Ning Shu turned round and came face to face with the Heavenly Master, and understood. He had locked the door.

He was not letting them out.

And at that moment the wind got up hard outside, and out of a sky that had shown neither star nor moon, the rain came down in sheets.

It killed the fire in no time at all.

"Where has that come from?"

"Never mind the rain. Find the woman."

Several of the young men ran straight for the shrine in the back yard.

"The door's locked. She'll be in there."

"Break it down."

The banging started, and it went on.

"Sis, they've found us."

"Don't be frightened. They can't get in."

And then Wu Qingqing broke, and the sound that came out of her was everything she had been holding down for a year.

"You aren't human." She was screaming it. "It will come back on you. I'll see to it, dead or alive."

Then she threw herself at the corner of the table where the Heavenly Master's offerings stood. Gouwa was quick and got himself in front of it, and she went into his chest instead.

"Oh, God." Gouwa put a hand to his ribs. She had hurt him.

"Don't do that. We're going to keep you safe." He got her steady again.

Wu Qingqing wept against him, and they could hear it outside in the yard.

With the rain coming down in sheets over all of it, there was not a person there who did not feel the misery of it.

Wicked. It was a wicked thing.

---

The rain put the fire out, and her grandmother stood in it with her eyes hard, looking at the Chen mother, and asked her quietly, "Are you not afraid of what comes back on you?"

The Chen mother shouted it at her. "Comes back on me? What comes back on me? I've lived a good many years and I've never seen any of it."

She had barely finished when the lightning came down out of the sky and took her where she stood.

Every one of them heard it.

The Chen mother dropped, and the whole of her was burnt black, a piece of charcoal with nothing left in the face to tell one part from another.

The villagers stood and stared.

"God above. The Chen woman's been struck."

"That's heaven come to collect her."

"That's what comes back on you. That's exactly what it is."

"And she earned it. Look what she did."

---

The business went on most of the night.

The rain stopped, and the young men carried the Chen mother's body home.

The villagers drifted away.

But it did not cool off. Within a few days the story of the Chen woman buying a wife and being struck by lightning for it had gone round every village for miles.

In every household that had bought a wife, when it rained, they stayed indoors and would not come out.

Ning Shu and Gouwa spent the whole winter holiday walking that district, asking which house had a bought wife, and by the end of it people saw the pair of them coming and scattered as though they were carrying plague.

But nobody dared cross them either, with what had happened to the Chen mother standing there as a warning.

Whoever resisted got what was coming. There was nothing else for it, so they handed the women over and put it down to bad luck.

Several of the women Ning Shu helped were sent into the city, and at the city end Lu Zheng had people meet them and help them find the families they had been taken from.

Wu Qingqing went home to Shaanxi. She said goodbye to Ning Shu at Jiangcheng station.

"You gave me my life back. I'm no use to anybody and there's nothing I can do for you, but if you're ever in trouble, come to Shaanxi and find me. You're my own sister."

Ning Shu held her hands and said, "Put all of it behind you. Go home and live well and start again. There's still time for everything."

"Mm."

Whenever you begin, once you decide to be done with what came before, there is still time.

Ning Shu watched her go out of sight past the barrier, and something in her ached.

---

Then it began to rain outside, hard, with no warning at all.

Lightning came across the sky, line after line of it.

Ning Shu did not understand it, and stood in the doorway waiting for it to pass, and then, in among all that lightning, she saw the shadow of a phoenix.

Thunder and lightning, wind and rain together.

That one enormous shadow of a phoenix, over the piled black cloud, with everything behind it.

Ning Shu rubbed her eyes quickly, and when she looked again the phoenix was gone.

Had she imagined it?

She was not sure. She only knew the red point on her forehead had begun to burn.

And then Fu Nansheng rang.

"Ning Shu. You've reached the Way."