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

finished. It is heaven’s will, from which there is no escape. As for you, daughter-in-law, you accomplish nothing by weeping or venting your loathing. I was the recipient of the Empress Dowager’s magnanimity, and will do nothing to displease or dishonor the Court. If I do not kill your dieh, someone else will, and he will be better off in my hands than at the mercy of a butcher, what we call a three-legged cat. There is a popular adage that goes, “If you’re kin, you’re family.” I will do everything in my power to ensure that his is a spectacular death, one that will go down in history. Son, I am going to help you make a name for yourself that will open the eyes of your neighbors. They find us beneath them, do they not? Well and good, we will show them that what is known as “execution” is an art, one that a good man will not do and anyone who is not a good man cannot do. Executioner is an occupation that represents the heart and soul of the Imperial Court. When the calling flourishes, the Imperial Court prospers. But when it languishes, the Imperial Court nears its fated end.
    Son, I am using the time before Eminence Qian’s palanquin arrives to fill you in on family affairs. I was afraid that if I did not say this to you today, there might not be another chance.
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    3
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    Your grandfather contracted cholera when I, your dieh, was ten years old. The sickness took hold in the morning, and by noon he was dead. Every family in Gaomi County lost someone to the disease that year, and no house was spared the sound of wailing. People were too busy burying their own to give thought to their neighbors’ troubles. Your grandmother and I—I know this sounds terrible—dragged your grandfather like a dead dog over to the nearest potter’s field and buried him in a makeshift grave. We had no sooner turned to head back home than a pack of wild dogs ran over and dug him up out of the ground. I picked up a piece of broken brick and went after those dogs with carnage on my mind. But they just glared at me through bloodshot eyes, baring their fangs and baying. They feasted on the dead until their whiskers were slick with grease, their bodies sleek and powerful. Fierce as a pack of little tigers, they were a fearful enemy. Your grandmother pulled me away.
    “Your grandfather isn’t the only one, boy,” she said, “so let them go ahead and eat.”
    Knowing that I had no chance to ward off those crazed dogs, I backed off and watched as they tore the clothes off your grandfather and sank their fangs into his body. They went first to the internal organs and finished by gnawing at his bones.
    Five years later, typhoid fever came to Gaomi County and carried off your grandmother, who, like her husband, fell ill in the morning and was dead by noon. But this time I dragged the corpse over to a haystack and cremated it. Now I was on my own, all alone. All day long I roamed the land with a stick in one hand and a wooden ladle in the other, begging for food. At night I slept anywhere I could, staying warm in a haystack or by the lingering heat from a stove frame. Back then, there were lots of young beggars like me, and that made survival especially hard. On some days I knocked on hundreds of doors without getting even the scrapings of a sweet potato for my effort. I was on the verge of starvation when I recalled something your grandmother had told me about a cousin who lived and worked in a yamen in the capital. Life was so good for him, he often sent gifts of silver back home. I decided on the spot what to do. Off to the capital.
    I survived the trip by begging or doing occasional odd jobs for people. And so it went, breaking up the journey by staying in a place long enough to earn a little travel money, my progress slow but steady—hungry one day, full the next—until I reached my destination. Joining a bunch of liquor traders, I entered Peking through Chongwen Gate. I vaguely recalled your grandmother’s telling me that her cousin worked at the Board of Punishments; by asking along the way, I made it to the Six Boards District, where I walked up to one of the two hard-looking soldier-types who guarded the Board of Punishments gate and was sent flying by the back of his sword. A setback, to be sure, but not nearly enough for me to abandon my plan, not after traveling all that distance. All I could do was hang around the Board, pacing back and forth until my luck changed. The street was fronted by