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

executions passed from mouth to ear. One story, for instance, related how the headless body of Tan Sitong, of Hunan’s Liuyang County, ran up to Excellency Gang Yi, the official in charge of the executions, and slapped him across the face. In another, as it rolled along the ground, the head of Liu Guangdi, known also as Liu Peicun, intoned a poem in such a loud voice that thousands of witnesses heard it. Even an event of this magnitude had failed to tire Grandma Zhao, and yet on this day, in the city of Tianjin, the responsibility of carrying out the slicing death on an insignificant captain of a mounted bodyguard unit had so enervated the preeminent executioner of the land that he could barely stand. Even stranger was the fact that he could not keep his hands from feeling as if they were burning up.
    The nose fell at the four hundred ninety-ninth cut. By then, nothing emerged from Qian’s mouth but bloody froth—no more sounds. His head, once supported by a strong, rigid neck, now hung limply to his chest.
    The final cut—the coup de grace—entered Qian’s heart, from which black blood the color and consistency of melted malt sugar slid down the knife blade. The strong smell of that blood once again made Zhao nauseous. He cut out a piece of the heart with the tip of his knife and, with his head slumped, announced to his feet:
    “May it please Your Excellency, the five hundredth cut.”

C HAPTER T EN

A Promise Kept
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    1
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    Peking experienced a heavy snowfall on the eighth night of the twelfth month in the twenty-second year of the Guangxu reign, 1896. Residents awoke early to a blanket of silvery white. As temple bells rang out across the city, the chief executioner assigned to the Board of Punishments Bureau of Detentions, Zhao Jia, got out of bed, dressed in casual clothes, and, after summoning his new apprentice, left for a temple to fill the bowl tucked under his arm with gruel. After leaving the chilled atmosphere of Board of Punishments Avenue, they met up with a fast-moving crowd of beggars and the city’s poor. It was a good day for beggars and the city’s poor, as attested by the joyful looks on faces turned a range of colors from the biting cold. Snow crunched beneath their feet. Limbs and branches on roadside scholar trees were a collage of silvery white and jade green, as if clusters of white flowers were abloom. The sun broke its way through a dense layer of gray clouds, creating a captivating contrast of white and red. The two men merged with a stream of humanity heading northwest along Xidan Boulevard, where most of Peking’s temples were located, and where great pots of charity gruel sent steam skyward from makeshift tents. As they neared the Xisi gateway, whose history was written in blood, flocks of crows and gray cranes were startled into flight out of the jumble of trees behind the Western Ten Storehouses.
    He and his alert, quick-witted apprentice lined up at the Guangji Temple to receive their bowls of charity gruel from an enormous pot that had been set up in the temple yard. The blazing pine kindling under the pot dispersed heated air in all directions, which created a psychological dilemma for the beggars in their tattered clothes, who craved the tempting warmth but could not bring themselves to give up their precious spots in the food line. Heat waves formed a mist high above the steaming pot, creating an invisible shield like one of those legendary carriage canopies. A pair of disheveled, dirty-faced monks stood at the pot, bent at the waist, stirring the gruel with gigantic metal spades. The scraping sound of the spades on the bottom of the pot set his teeth on edge. People in line stomped their nearly frostbitten feet on the snowy ground, quickly turning it into a dirty, icy mess. At last the smell of cooked gruel began to spread. In the cold, clean air, the unimaginably rich aroma of food had a stimulating effect on men whose stomachs were rumbling. The light in the eyes of the derelicts was impossible to miss. Several little beggars, their heads tucked down into their shoulders, ran up front and stuck their heads over the edge of the bubbling pot, like little monkeys, to breathe in deeply before running back to their places in line. The foot stomping increased in frequency as the men’s bodies began to sway visibly.
    Zhao Jia, who was wearing dog-skin socks under felt boots, did not feel the cold. He neither stomped his feet nor, of course, swayed