Sandalwood Death: A Novel (Chinese Literature Today Book Series)

a human being varies from spot to spot in density and coherence. Knowing where to insert the knife, and with how much pressure, requires a skill that, over time, had become second nature. Gifted executioners, such as Elder Gao Tao and Elder Zhang Tang, sliced not with a knife and not with their hands, but with their minds and their eyes. Among the thousands of slicing deaths carried out down through the ages, none, it seems, had achieved perfection and been worthy of the term “masterpiece.” In virtually every case, what was accomplished was merely the dissection of a living human being. That appeared to explain why fewer cuts were required for slicing deaths in recent years. In the current dynasty, five hundred was the apex. And yet, precious few executions lasted nearly that long. Board of Punishments executioners, in respectful devotion to the sacred nature of this ancient profession, performed their duties in accordance with established practices handed down over time. But at the provincial, prefectural, sub-prefectural, and county levels, dragons and fish were all jumbled together—the good mixed with the bad—and most practitioners were hacks and local riffraff who did shoddy work and exerted minimal effort. If on a prisoner sentenced to five hundred cuts they made it to two or three hundred, that was considered a success. Most of the time, they chopped the victim into several chunks and quickly put him out of his misery.
    Zhao Jia flung the second piece of meat cut from Qian’s body to the ground. To an executioner, the second piece of the victim is a sacrifice to the earth.
    When Zhao was displaying the piece of meat on the tip of his knife for all to see, he was, he felt, the central figure, while the tip of his knife and the flesh stuck on it were the center of that center. The eyes of everyone in attendance, from the supremely prideful Excellency Yuan down to the most junior soldier in the formation, followed the progress of his knife, or, more accurately, the progress of Qian’s flesh impaled on that knife. When Qian’s flesh flew into the air, the observers’ eyes followed its ascent; when Qian’s flesh was flung to the ground, the observers’ eyes followed its descent. According to his shifu, in slicing deaths of old, every piece of flesh cut from the victim was laid out on a specially prepared surface, so that when the execution was completed, the official observer, along with members of the victim’s family, could come forward to count. One piece too many or too few was a serious transgression. According to his master, one slapdash executioner of the Song Dynasty made one too many cuts, and the complaint by the victim’s family cost him his life. Public executioner has always been a precarious profession, since a poor performance can itself be a death sentence. Consider: you must remove pieces of roughly the same size, the last cut must be the fatal one, and you must keep track of every cut you make. Three thousand three hundred and fifty-seven cuts require a full day, and there were times, by order of the sentencing authority, when the process was stretched out to three or as many as five days, making the work that much harder. A staunchly dedicated executioner invariably collapsed from fatigue at the end of a slicing death. As time went on, executioners heeded the travails of their predecessors by flinging away the excised flesh rather than laying it out for others to count. Old execution grounds were known for the wild dogs, crows, and vultures that prowled the area; slicing deaths provided feast days for these visitors.
    He dipped a clean chamois into a basin of salty water and wiped the blood from Qian’s chest. The knife holes now resembled the fresh scars of severed tree branches. Then he made his third cut on Qian’s chest. Also about the size of a bronze coin, it was made in the shape of a fish scale. This fresh wound abutted the edge of one of the earlier wounds but retained its distinct shape. His shifu had said that this had a name of its own—the fish-scale cut, for that is exactly what it resembled. The flesh exposed by the third cut was a ghostly white, from which only a few drops of blood poked out, the sign of a good beginning; that augured well for the entire process, to his immense satisfaction. Shifu had said that a successful slicing death was marked by a modest flow of blood. He had told him that the blow to the heart before the first cut constricted the