Chapter 3

Outside Qingfeng in the first year of Yong'an, all was ruin.

A huge boulder, pocked all over with hollows, had come down on the city's south gate, smashing the old gate clean out of sight and leaving only a pit like a gap-toothed, broken bowl — the might of Heaven laid bare.

None who saw it failed to fear it; none failed to bow.

Monks and Daoist priests rounded up from inside the city and out, spirit-women and spirit-men who drove off evil, blind fortune-tellers — all pressed into it by the new dynasty's officials — had set up their altar tables and, each by his own method, stood chanting round the deep pit.

At the other three gates the crowds surged all the thicker — though no one knew where they were surging to, or at which gate a way to live might be found.

On the gates still standing, a ring of bloody heads hung; before the blood had dried, a second ring of heads was carried up and strung alongside.

For the fallen dynasty's officials, marked by Heaven's punishment, there was no need to trouble over mercy or kindness now: catch sight of one, and it was a single stroke — chop — done, the head then hung on the gate as an offering to Heaven.

The starving people penned two months in the city came pouring out, and from the country round about more starvelings, who'd been hiding in the dark, kept drifting in.

Old soldiers in tattered cloth armor patrolled at a lazy slouch, and when they met anyone out of line, they'd level a spear-tip — polished silver-bright on human blood and flesh — and give a jab, and all went meek.

Because Heaven had sent down its judgment, the new emperor, reverently bowing to the will of Heaven, had taken the throne; and to please Heaven, in his mercy he'd ordered relief spread out at Qingfeng's three gates, sheds raised and gruel doled out.

Here, then, was a way to live, and those going out and those coming in all squeezed toward it, waiting quietly and in order for a mouthful of life-saving gruel thin enough to show your face in.

Half a gourd-ladle of thin, watery gruel and two mold-furred offering fruits in her belly, and Madam Wang at last had a little strength. Stiff and numb, she began to look about her — at what was left of a once-bustling household, mother kind and children dutiful, now some gone mad, some lost, dwindled to this little handful.

What was she to do? Grief welled up in her and she was wretched enough to die, but she didn't dare spend the strength to cry — who knew where tomorrow's meal would come from.

Every hope gone to ashes, all she could do was give herself up entire to Heaven and let it have its way.

Leaning against a stump of old tree, Madam Wang began muttering curses at her own husband, Master Huo — that Master Huo who, before the siege closed in, had taken his favorite concubine and young son and the only life-saving grain in all Huo Manor and fled into the city — a thousand cuts to him.

Just as she was cursing to her heart's content, Madam Wang saw her eldest son come limping over, carrying half a gourd-ladle of thin gruel.

Huo Yunzhang knelt before his mother, held out the ladle, and, eyes full of tears, urged her: "Mother, don't curse anymore, save your strength — Father can't hear you anyway."

Madam Wang bent her head and drank a few mouthfuls, and her wretched, gnawing stomach settled at last. Reluctantly she took her mouth from the ladle and pushed it toward Huo Yunzhang: "Son, you drink some too."

Huo Yunzhang smiled bitterly and refused: "I've had mine, Mother. Take a little more?"

Madam Wang didn't want to drink, so she looked around, and her eye fell on the seventh girl sitting close by, mud all over her, one shoe run right off her foot.

Feeling someone watching her, Qi Qian'er lifted her face and gave her stepmother a foolish smile. Mm — how many years since she'd last seen her. Last life, if not for Madam, she'd never have met that Scabhead, and never have borne her An'er, the best child in all the world...

And now she'd have to trouble Madam again — without her, she'd never get back to the Chen family.

No getting back to the Chen family, no seeing that Scabhead; no seeing Scabhead, no bearing his good An'er.

She could hardly go knocking on their door and say, just like that: uh, so, I'm your grandson's wife-to-be, and one day I'll bear you the best grandchild in the world?

True, the Chen family struck it rich later and might not think much of her An'er — but whatever others didn't treasure, she treasured.

This mother's heart of hers had been broken more than forty years in her last life, not a single day without longing, without her insides tearing — and now, at last, it was all going to come right.

At the thought, Qi Qian'er picked up the ragged quilt she'd dropped by the tree stump, wrapped herself in it, and grinned a simple grin.

She hated the woman in front of her, but she could bear it, and still grinning she clawed at the rotting earth with the strength of a she-wolf guarding her cubs, grinning all the while.

Madam Wang shot Qi Qian'er a glance, still full of distaste. Look at Wurong and Liuning — sent out, they'd run off to save themselves and never come back. Only this girl, a few broken fruits tucked in her arms, not daring to eat them herself, had come dumbly running home.

Foolish past all bounds, truly.

Pleased with her own cunning, Madam Wang began once more to feel there was nothing in this world she couldn't hold in her grip.

In short, it would never once occur to the woman what road those two poor lost girls had run to; she simply reckoned she'd kindly set them free to live.

Distastefully Madam Wang drew her eyes back and said to her eldest son: "Son, give — give it to your seventh sister to drink. She — well, she's got a conscience, at least. Better than that old wretch of a father of yours!"

Huo Yunzhang nodded and, with something softer in his face, handed the ladle to Qi Qian'er. In the old days he'd never once had a kind look for his concubine-born brothers and sisters.

Qi Qian'er took the ladle with a witless look, thinking: this beat that little field mouse of before, anyway. She wasn't hungry, but she could only bow her head and force it down, and as she drank she kept an ear cocked to the mother and son's talk.

Madam said: "No knowing whether your second brother's found anything in the city. That old beast — he — he'd best be dead."

The eldest young master said nothing, and only after a good while stammered out: "Mother — my father, Father surely never thought he'd not get out. Wasn't it Eldest Uncle — Eldest Uncle called him, and Father, Father didn't dare not go, did he?" And here Huo Yunzhang lowered his voice: "Mother, whatever you do, don't bring up Eldest Uncle. It's a new dynasty now."

Madam cursed no more, and in the end only sighed softly: "A thing no one could have foreseen. How did it come so fast?"

Huo Yunzhang nodded with a faint sigh.

No one could have foreseen it. Others might not know, but his family had watched over the imperial estates for the crown, generation on generation; they had seen the crushing weight of those at the very top. Year after year, at each year's end, they'd tended the estate's yield with care, and warily escorted a hundred-odd great carts of it up to the gates of the capital, to the first family under heaven.

Such a place, such a house, such a dynasty — a realm that for hundreds of years had been bowed to with a roar like mountains and seas — gone, just like that? How could you bring yourself to believe it?

Surely this was a dream?

---

The autumn wind blew, and the daylight wore on and on until it wore down into dark.

Wrapped in the ragged brocade quilt, Qi Qian'er lay with her eyes narrowed, turning things over in her mind — thinking of the past, of the present, and of how, in the end, she was going to live from here on...

No knowing why Heaven had opened its eye on her. Maybe — maybe out of pity for the way she'd ended: old, alone, a widow with neither son nor daughter?

Last life she'd been a coward. From her earliest memory she'd pitched in at the rough work on the estate — spinning thread and mending with the sharp-tongued women of the back court, and when the busy season came and there was no one else to spare, chopping wood and boiling water and doing men's work alongside her elder sisters.

Back then she and her sisters felt the most frightening person in all the world was Madam.

If Madam let them live, they lived; if Madam said beat them to death, then beaten to death they truly would be.

At six she'd already witnessed a killing — though she'd never dared open her eyes to look, she'd heard the sounds of it.

One of the household's concubine-mothers had crossed Madam, and Madam had gathered all the concubine-born to the back court and said to the fourth sister, the concubine's own daughter: today I'm going to beat her to death — do you hate me for it?

The fourth sister, terrified, shook her head and said she wouldn't dare — but Madam didn't believe her either. She had the concubine beaten to death, one blow of the staff after another, and then turned around and locked the fourth sister up to starve to death.

Qi Qian'er used to feel that the greatest heaven in the human world was Madam, and it never crossed her mind to ask how a person could be so wicked, so cruel.

Madam had a merciless hand. When the master bedded a concubine and a child came of it, Madam left not one — either sold off or done away with by some contrivance. The girls could be well into their teens and still, at the words "Madam wants you!", wet themselves with fright on the spot.

Daughter of the house though she was, the life she led was sometimes worse than a servant's child's — she didn't even rightly know what her own father, Master Huo, was called.

One of the household's old women had let drop, though, that theirs was a family with backing: the eldest master was some sort of registrar for His Majesty's house, and so her whole family managed the imperial estates for the emperor.

Qi Qian'er could spin and weave, embroider and plait mats, make clothes and stitch shoe-soles, chop wood and cook... From her earliest memory she'd worked alongside the estate's convict-slaves and tenant farmers, never a day of rest.

To the girl she was then, this was simply what living was: apart from Madam and her sort, people like them were meant to live just so, and the day they could work no longer, they'd die.

Somehow, Qi Qian'er thought again of that old eunuch surnamed Liao. In the old days, a man like Master Huo — he'd not have spared him so much as a flick at the corner of his eye.

Surely so — a Chief Steward out of the palace, a man like that...

Thinking and thinking, the night grew deeper. All around her ears was a dim blur of sobbing. The ground round the great pit at the city gate had been cleared and ringed with soldiers, and a spirit-woman who couldn't chant the sutras and had been found out was dragged forth, her head taken with a single stroke and thrown into the pit...

From the officials' side came a burst of cheering, and the sound of the monks chanting carried from the south gate to the east.

In the small hours, the carts hauling corpses rolled past her ears, their wheels creaking, creaking... Half-asleep in her ragged quilt, Qi Qian'er thought muzzily: I'll just wait. Wait till tomorrow, when Madam sells me off, and then I can go find that Scabhead...

She slept until, right by her ear, came a rustling, and, on and off, voices again — and a weeping someone was struggling to hold down.

So she woke again, but she didn't want to open her eyes; she kept them shut and listened close. The second young master, choking down his sobs, cried low: "Father — Father's and Eldest Uncle's heads are at the city gate, hanging there — Mother! Mother, we have to run... the sky's fallen in!"

Ah. So Master Huo had gone and died a second time.

Madam made no sound, only beat at the ground with her hand, over and over. She'd stuffed her mouth with something or other, and let out the same broken, muffled whimpering as that concubine long ago who'd been beaten to death.

Then the eldest young master said: "Mother... presently we'll go home and dig through what's there, give away what we must, and run... or else the day they remember us, not one of us lives! Mother — let's run — our lives are what matter!"

Ah! So that was how it was. So this was how it had happened.

Now Qi Qian'er understood it all.

Last life she'd been, for what it was worth, the old lady of a sixth-rank official's house. Scabhead never cared for her, and she'd worn out her years in the old place on Quanqian Street — but the later her had at least learned to read and gained some sense of the world.

She understood now. The family's situation was this: the old dynasty had fallen, and her Eldest Uncle counted among the last remnants who'd resisted for it to the end. Madam and the rest, terrified of being dragged in, could only sell off the concubine-born and flee.

A cheating little gladness rose in Qi Qian'er's heart: then they'd run for nothing. After the new dynasty was founded, there'd been a few chaotic years, and the court had hunted down remnants — but hunt as they might, she'd never heard of anyone hunting the family of an estate-steward who'd managed the imperial manors for the emperor.

Thinking on it now, killing her Eldest Uncle and her father Master Huo had been, really, like killing that spirit-woman — just an idle, offhand thing...

When all's said and done: it was your turn for bad luck, so bad luck you got.

Nowhere to take your grievance, and no reason to be had just now.

Over there, the crying went on.

Huo Yunzhang, a bitter smile all over his face, glanced round to be sure no one was watching, then said low: "Mother, the night Heaven sent down its judgment, on that side — never mind Father, not one man defending the wall got away. Even the Sixth Prince's head is hanging up now... The imp— that house didn't escape either; they say they were all hanged together. Those not dead are being pulled up root and branch. Make up your mind, quick! And what are we, anyway? Look at the folk of Mianzhou — the army came, not a blade was raised, the ones who threw the gates open go on enjoying high rank and fat salaries. And what was Eldest Uncle? They didn't even know his face — but no, he had to play the fool, and drag Father down with him besides..."

The dull smack of a slap. Qi Qian'er's eyes flew open, bright and clear on the stars overhead. That Sixth Prince — she knew of him too, as it happened; she'd not have called him to mind if the eldest young master hadn't spoken. That old eunuch had been the Sixth Prince's man, hadn't he.

So he was dead too.

Having landed her slap, Madam Wang looked warily about her, then cursed under her breath: "What Sixth Prince — whose Sixth Prince! Sixth Prince, still? That's a remnant! A remnant — all of them — remnants who deserve a thousand cuts!!"

Madam Wang ground her teeth as she said it.

Qi Qian'er slowly closed her eyes. Huo Yunzhang, afraid, ducked his head and looked all around, and finding it quiet, nodded helplessly and choked out: "Mother's right, they are! They're all... thousand-cuts — remnants!"