Chapter 7

Zhou Honghua's eyes went wide and she shouted, "Oh, very good! You've got together with that little slut of a granddaughter of yours to trick a confession out of me! For all I know this whole business is that little slut's doing! And now the pair of you are singing the same tune and want to beat an admission out of me. It won't be that easy! I've nothing to say!"

Ning Shu laughed coldly inside. She had been half dead a minute ago. Her grandmother had been good enough to save her, and the moment she was a little better she was shrill and vicious again.

Her grandmother looked down at her, shook her head and sighed. "She won't see it."

She turned to go, and Zhu Yongrui caught at her. "Aunt Hu Ying, you can't go like this. Save my wife!"

Her grandmother shook out her sleeve. "It isn't that I won't save her. It's that she won't save herself."

Zhou Honghua's voice came after them, shrill. "Old Zhu, don't beg her. She and that little slut have worked this out together to do me down!"

Her grandmother had already left the room, and Ning Shu hurried after her and looked back at Zhou Honghua one last time. Go on being fierce. Grandma won't save you, and we'll see how many more days of fierce you get.

Once they were out of the Zhu gate her grandmother said, "Ah-Ning. The day the Zhu woman pushed you off the cliff, why didn't you tell Grandma?"

Ning Shu asked, startled, "How do you know?"

"When I was drawing the clotted blood out of her just now, a ghost put it in front of my eyes. The day the two of them pushed you off the cliff, the pair of them together. I saw all of it."

When a ghost puts a thing in front of your eyes, it uses something to carry what it wants you to see. Looking back on it, the black clotted blood must have been what carried it.

The vicious thing wanted her grandmother to know what had happened.

But why would it do that?

Ning Shu turned it over and could not get to the bottom of it, and then remembered she had not answered. So she said, "I didn't say anything because I've no proof. If I'd said it, the Zhu woman would have denied the whole thing, and even in a court it couldn't be settled, and all I'd get out of it is being hated for nothing."

Her grandmother said, surprised, "To think you'd be weighing things like that, at your age."

Ning Shu was not a child. She had been given a life over again and she had to think things through. There was no proof at all that Zhou Honghua and Li Mazi had tried to kill her. In the last life she had said it, and Li Mazi was cruel enough to answer it by breaking her uncle's family, and her grandparents had both ended up ill in hospital because of it.

She was not walking back into that.

But things stood differently now. That vicious thing had fastened on to Zhou Honghua, and it was plainly out to get justice for Ning Shu.

And her grandmother, knowing what she now knew, was angry enough that there was no question of her helping the Zhus against it.

Then, after several quiet days, Zhu Yongrui came to the door again, and this time the hunchbacked man went straight down on his knees in front of it and begged her grandmother through his tears to save his wife, and said that any longer and her life would be gone.

Her grandmother came out and did not so much as lift an eyelid. "A man's knees are worth their weight in gold. You kneel to heaven, you kneel to the earth and you kneel to your parents. What am I, that you should kneel to me? Get up."

Zhu Yongrui said, "Granny Hu, I'm begging you with my whole heart to save my wife. I'll give you whatever you ask. I'd sell the pots off the stove to save her."

"Money?" Her grandmother made a cold sound. "Go and ask about me. Hu Ying has been at this a long time and what she goes by is what's right. If I can save someone I'll do it without a single coin. And if I can't, you can carry mountains of gold and silver to my door and I won't lift an eyelid."

Ning Shu stood on the verandah listening to this and wanted to applaud. Not humble and not haughty. Magnificent.

"Granny Hu, why can't my wife be saved? Last time you got her face right with one silver needle. Just come and look at her again, can't you? You've the heart of a bodhisattva. You're never going to stand by and let my two children lose their mother?"

Her grandmother said crisply, "Your wife's life is in her own hands. The reason the ghost slapped her was that she wouldn't say what shameful thing she'd done. And if she goes on refusing to see it…" Her grandmother counted on her fingers. "Then tonight at midnight is when the underworld officers come to collect her."

That put the fear into Zhu Yongrui. He got up and said, over and over, "Granny Hu, you wait there. I'll get her to open her mouth. I'll get her to say it."

There is no wall in this world that the wind cannot get through. The village had been passing the talk about Zhou Honghua and Li Mazi around for a while already, so when it was said she had done something shameful, that was most of the guessing done. The pity of it was Zhu Yongrui, wearing a green hat on his head and running about everywhere begging for help to save her life.

That evening word came from the Zhu house. Zhou Honghua could not stand any more of it and was willing to say what she had done, and asked Aunt Hu Ying to come and look at her and save her life.

Her grandmother had her aunt fetch her kit and said to Ning Shu, "Ah-Ning, you come along with Grandma. The Zhu woman wronged you, and she can apologise to your face."

Ning Shu nodded obediently and went to follow her out, and her aunt ran over and pushed half a corn bun into her hand. "Eat it as you go. Don't go hungry."

Then Gouwazi came running out too. "I want to come and see!"

"A small boy like you shouldn't go. You'll pick up the bad air and come home ill." Her aunt had been around her grandmother long enough to have learned the patter.

Gouwazi looked at Ning Shu, hard done by, and Ning Shu pulled a face at him, which only made it worse for him.

By the time Ning Shu and her grandmother reached the Zhu compound she could smell it from a long way off, a stench rising to heaven. Ning Shu put a hand over her mouth, and still it drove up her nose and into her head.

It was a hard day for the villagers who had come to watch. It stank like that and they were still tipping their heads back and craning their necks to see into the yard. If that kind of staying power had gone into building the country, the country would have overtaken Britain and caught America years ago.

The room had no air in it, so Zhou Honghua had been moved into the yard. She lay on a reed mat with her whole body ulcerated, breathing shallow and making small sounds.

Ning Shu went close with her grandmother. She was wearing only a vest, and the skin of her was breaking down in patches and running with pus and blood, and the look of it put the gooseflesh up on you.

And in the height of summer, with the flies and the mosquitoes going round her, even her own family would not come near, because the smell was unbearable.

The Zhou Honghua in front of them now was eaten up with it and had nothing of her old malice left. She dragged air in in great mouthfuls, and every breath heaved her chest hard, and the breathing came out thick and hoarse. She begged. "Granny Hu, save me, please. I really can't go on."

Her grandmother looked at her coldly and said, "Then say what you did, every part of it. You may keep your life yet."

So Zhou Honghua began to tell it. How she and Li Mazi had met in the corn field. How Li Mazi came at night to the back of her house and made a noise like a frog, and when she heard the signal she came downstairs and slipped out to him. How the two of them were meeting in the woods at last and Ning Shu saw them, and how they were afraid the girl would talk, and put their heads together and settled it, and pushed her down the slope.

While this was being said her grandmother's face was cold and hard, and there was a fire burning in her eyes.

As for Zhu Yongrui, he had gone completely blank. It had never occurred to him that his wife had been meeting another man and had put a hat that size on his head.

A good many villagers had gathered at his gate, and hearing this they went up like a pot boiling over. Not only had the Zhu woman gone behind her husband's back, she had tried to take a life.

It was monstrous.

And the Zhu family's old mother went nearly mad with rage at it. She snatched up the carrying pole from the side of the yard to bring it down on Zhou Honghua. "I'll beat you to death, you shameless piece of filth!"

"Shaming the Zhu family wasn't enough for you, you had to go and nearly kill somebody's young daughter! Taking a wife like you into this house, we must have been paying for eight generations of bad luck!"

Several of the sisters-in-law got hold of the old mother and talked her down and told her not to make herself ill over it.

The old mother threw the pole on the ground and wept, and took hold of Ning Shu's grandmother and tried to kneel to her. "Sister Hu, the Zhu family has wronged you. If anything at all had happened to your granddaughter we'd have a great sin on us. This woman has got what was coming to her and she deserves to die for it. Don't save her. We don't own her as a daughter-in-law any more."

Her grandmother caught the old mother and held her up. "The Zhu family have been decent people for generations, and Hu Ying does things by her conscience. She's told the truth of it and she's apologised to my granddaughter, so I'll do what should be done. Call it for the sake of the two small children."

With that her grandmother took the cinnabar brush out of her case and drew several talismans, burned them to ash into a bowl, steeped it in water and handed it to Zhu Yongrui. "Have her drink this down. Morning, noon and night, mix Yunnan Baiyao with powdered locust bark and put it on the sores. Three months of care and she should be all right."

Zhu Yongrui was not eager about it. He could not look at the woman now without the anger rising in him. But there were two small children in the house, and they were so young, and he could not leave them without a mother.

The Zhu family's old mother fetched a thick stack of red envelopes and held it out to her grandmother. "Take this as a little something to make it up to Ningning. It's nothing at all, really, but if you won't take it, Sister Hu, our consciences won't let us rest."

Ning Shu looked at that stack. It was like a brick. There was no telling how much was in it. The Zhus did have money.

Her grandmother was about to refuse, and Ning Shu said suddenly, "The other day Uncle was saying he wanted to take my cousin into the city to have his lip done."

Having his lip stitched meant going under the knife, which was as good as a small operation, and it would not be cheap. On top of which Ning Shu was about to start middle school, and money would be wanted everywhere. In the end her grandmother took it.

Her grandmother earned next to nothing from her work as a rule. She took whatever the villagers meant kindly by, and when a household had no money, a string of cured pork or a basket of fruit settled it.

Her grandmother really did do the work the way she described it. Setting things right, putting down demons, upholding the Way.

Ning Shu did not see it that way, though, and least of all after a life spent rising and sinking in the entertainment industry. She understood that in this world money is the master. The great rich men of Lu Zheng's kind, with money and with power, could play a small person like Ning Shu to death as easily as stepping on an ant.

In this life Ning Shu was not going to be the fish on the board again, waiting for whoever held the knife. She had to make money, and a great deal of it.

With that fixed, the road ahead was clear enough. She was twelve, but she was not going to spend it the way an ordinary twelve-year-old would. She had to work for her own future and her own life, and the first step was to put money by.

And while Ning Shu was quietly laying her plans for making money, something caught at the edge of her eye. Over in the crowd a little way off there was a small boy with a bloodless face, in black silk clothes, watching her from a distance.

There were plenty of grown-ups there holding children. The reason this one boy pulled her eye at once was that a knot of black ghost-air hung about the whole of him, cold and grim, and he did not belong to the same picture as anyone else there.

The boy's skin was as white as paper, without a trace of blood in it.

And the shape of his face, all of it, was Lu Zheng's over again.