Sandalwood Death: A Novel (Chinese Literature Today Book Series) by Mo Yan Page B

held official rank, but the number of red-capped heads he has lopped off could fill two large wicker baskets. So, for that matter, could the heads of nobles and aristocrats!”
    Xiaojia stood there with a foolish grin on his face, his teeth showing, likely not understanding what his father had just said. But I did, every word of it. I’d learned a great deal in my years with Magistrate Qian, and my gongdieh’s brief monologue nearly froze my heart and raised gooseflesh on my arms. I’m sure my face must have been ghostly white. Rumors about my gongdieh had been swirling around town for months and had naturally reached my ears. Having somehow found a cache of hidden courage, I asked:
    “Is that really what you did, Gongdieh?”
    He fixed his hawk-like gaze on me and said, one slow word at a time, as if spitting out steel pellets, “Every—trade—has—its—master, its zhuangyuan! Know who said that?”
    “It’s a well-known popular adage.”
    “No,” he said. “One person said that to me. Know who it was?”
    I shook my head.
    He got up out of his chair, prayer beads in his hands—once more the stifling aroma of sandalwood spread through the room. His gaunt face had a somber, golden glow. Arrogantly, reverently, gratefully, he said:
    “The Empress Dowager Cixi Herself!”

C HAPTER T WO

Zhao Jia’s Ravings
The adage has it: By the Northern Dipper one is born, by the Southern Dipper a person dies; people follow the Kingly Way, wind blows where the grass lies. People’s hearts are iron, laws the crucible, and even the hardest stone under the hammer dies. (How true!) I served the Qing Court as its preeminent executioner, an enviable reputation in the Board of Punishments. (You can check with your own eyes!) A new minister was appointed each year, like a musical reprise. My appointment alone was secure, for I performed a great service by killing the nation’s enemies. (A beheading is like chopping greens; a flaying differs little from peeling an onion.) Cotton cannot contain fire; the dead cannot be buried in frozen ground. I poke a hole in the window paper to speak the truth and admonish, prick up your ears if you seek to be wise.
    — Maoqiang Sandalwood Death. A galloping aria
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    My dear dissolute daughter-in-law, why do you glare like that? Do you not worry that your eyes will pop out of your head? Yes, that is my profession. From my seventeenth year, when I dissevered the body of a thieving clerk at the silver repository, to my sixtieth year, when I administered the lingering death to the would-be assassin of His Excellency Yuan Shikai, I earned my living at that calling for forty-four years. You still glare. Well, I have witnessed many glares in my life, some far more insistent than yours, the likes of which no one in all of Shandong Province, let alone you people, has ever seen. You need not even see them in person. Merely describing them could make you soil yourself out of fear.
    In the tenth year of the Xianfeng Emperor, a eunuch called Little Insect audaciously pilfered His Majesty’s Seven Star fowling piece from the Imperial Armory, where he worked, and sold it. A tribute gift from the Russian Tsarina to the Emperor, it was no ordinary hunting rifle. It had a golden barrel, a silver trigger, and a sandalwood stock in which were inlaid seven diamonds, each the size of a peanut. It fired silver bullets that could bring down a phoenix from the sky and a unicorn on land. No fowling piece like it had graced the world since Pangu divided heaven from earth. The larcenous Little Insect, believing that the sickly Emperor was rapidly losing his faculties, impudently removed the piece from the armory and sold it for the reported price of three thousand silver ingots, which his father used to buy a tract of farmland. The poor delusional youngster forgot one basic principle: Anyone who becomes Emperor is, by definition, a dragon, a Son of Heaven. Has there even been a dragon, a Son of