Red Sorghum

at pretty girls passing in front of them.
    Uncle Arhat led his mule onto the main street of town, paved with green cobblestones that clattered loudly under the mule’s shod hooves. To the south, the huge market square was jammed with people from every trade and occupation, haggling over prices, shouting and carrying on, buying and selling everything under the sun.
    In no mood to get caught up in the excitement, Uncle Arhat led the mule up to the gate of the government compound, which looked like a dilapidated monastery, its tile roofs covered with yellow weeds and green grass. The red paint on the gate was peeling badly. An armed sentry stood to the left, while to the right a bare-chested man supported himself with both hands on a staff resting in a smelly honeypot.
    Uncle Arhat bowed to the sentry. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I need to report to County Magistrate Cao.’
    ‘Magistrate Cao took Master Yan to market,’ the sentry replied.
    ‘When will he be back?’
    ‘How should I know? Go look for him at the market square if you’re in such a hurry.’
    Uncle Arhat bowed again. ‘Thank you, sir.’
    Seeing that Uncle Arhat was about to walk away, the bare-chested man sprang into action, churning his staff up and down in the honeypot and shouting, ‘Come look, come look, everybody, come look. My name is Wang Haoshan. I cheated people with a phony contract, and the county magistrate sentenced me to stir up a honeypot. . . .’
    Uncle Arhat and the mule entered the crowded market square, where people were selling baked buns, flatcakes, and sandals. There were scribes, fortune-tellers, beggers using every imaginable ploy, peddlars of aphrodisiacs, trained monkeys, gong-banging hawkers of malt sugar, knickknack vendors, storytellers with tales of romance and intrigue, dealers in leeks, cucumbers, and garlic, sellers of barber razors and pipe bowls, noodle sellers, rat-poison merchants, honeyed-peach sellers, child vendors – yes, even a ‘child market’, where children with straw markers on their collars could be bought or sold. The black mule kept rearing its head, making the steel bit in its mouth sing out. The sun was directly overhead, blazing down on Uncle Arhat, drenching his purple jacket with his own sweat.
    Uncle Arhat spotted the official he was looking for at the chicken market.
    Magistrate Cao had a ruddy face, bulging eyes, a square mouth, and a thin moustache. He was decked out in a dark-green tunic and a brown wool formal hat. He carried a walking stick.
    Caught up in resolving a dispute, he had drawn quite a crowd. Instead of forcing his way to the front, Uncle Arhat led the mule out of the crowd, which blocked his view of what was going on, then mounted up, giving himself the best seat in the house.
    A little runt of a man was standing beside the tall Magistrate Cao, and Uncle Arhat assumed it must be the Master Yan to whom the sentry had referred. Two men and a woman stood cowering before Magistrate Cao, their faces bathed in sweat. The woman’s cheeks were made even wetter by her tears. A fat hen lay on the ground at her feet.
    ‘Worthy magistrate, your honour,’ she sobbed, ‘my mother-in-law can’t stop menstruating, and we have no money for medicine. That’s why we’re selling this laying hen. . . . He says the hen is his. . . .’
    ‘The hen
is
mine. If the magistrate doesn’t believe me, ask my neighbour here.’
    Magistrate Cao pointed to a man in a skullcap. ‘Can you verify that?’
    ‘Worthy magistrate, I am Wu the Third’s neighbour, and this hen of his wanders into my yard every day to steal my chickens’ food. My wife’s always complaining about it.’
    The woman screwed up her face, without saying a word, and burst out crying.
    Magistrate Cao removed his hat, spun it around on his middle finger, then put it back on.
    ‘What did you feed your chicken this morning?’ he asked Wu the Third, who rolled his eyes and replied, ‘Cereal mash mixed with bran husks.’
    ‘He’s telling the truth, he is,’ the man in the skullcap confirmed. ‘I saw his wife mixing it when I went over to borrow his axe this morning.’
    Magistrate Cao turned to the crying woman. ‘Don’t cry, countrywoman. Tell me what you fed your chicken this morning.’
    ‘Sorghum,’ she said between sobs.
    ‘Little Yan,’ Magistrate Cao said, ‘kill the chicken!’
    With lightning speed, Yan slit the hen’s crop and squeezed out a gooey mess of sorghum seeds.
    With a menacing laugh