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

light-headedness and a general weakness that spreads to their limbs. They then fall into a trance that nearly destroys their ability to speak. They have become blithering idiots, impervious to medical intervention, because they do not suffer from a physical malady.”
    “I hope this won’t usher in a second Taiping Rebellion,” Young Master Wu said. “I’ve heard old people recall the time in the Xianfeng reign when the Taipings came north, how they first cut off queues, and then heads.”
    “No, nothing like that,” Second Master said. “This time it’s German missionaries casting their secret spells, or so I heard.”
    Scholar Qu had his doubts.
    “What could they expect to accomplish by cutting off queues?” he asked.
    “Don’t be such a naïve pedant,” Second Master replied, clearly annoyed. “Do you really think that’s what they are after, a bunch of queues? What they want is our souls! Why else would those particular symptoms appear in men who lost their queues? It’s a clear sign of losing their souls.”
    “I still don’t quite understand, Second Master,” Scholar Qu said. “What good can it do the Germans to take all those souls?”
    Second Master smirked in response.
    “I think I know the answer,” Young Master Wu said. “It’s tied to the construction of the railway, isn’t it?”
    “Our young Wu is nobody’s fool,” Second Master said. Then he lowered his voice and added in a mysterious tone, “What I am going to tell you now must remain here with us. The Germans bury men’s queues beneath the railroad tracks, one for each railroad tie. Every one of those queues represents a soul, and each soul represents a hale and hearty man. Here is something to think about: The trains are manufactured out of pig iron and weigh a ton. They neither drink nor eat, so how can they move across the land? And not just move, but move at an unthinkably high speed. What powers them? Think that over.”
    The mind-numbing thought produced an eerie silence. The whistle of a teakettle out back pierced the men’s eardrums. Disaster loomed; they all felt it. Chills ran down their necks, touched, it seemed, by an invisible pair of scissors.
    As anxiety over the safety of their queues gripped the men, the young clerk from the town dispensary, Qiusheng, scurried into the teashop as if flames were nipping at his heels.
    “Proprietor Sun,” he said breathlessly, “bad news . . . my shopkeeper sent me to tell you . . . German engineers . . . making improper advances to your wife . . . shopkeeper says you have to hurry or something terrible could happen . . .”
    The news stunned Sun Bing, who dropped the teakettle in his hand and sprayed hot water and steam all around him. But shock quickly turned to anger and a pulsing of hot blood through his veins. The patrons looked on as his scarred chin began to twitch and the peaceful, benign look on his face took wing and flew away, supplanted by a fiendish grimace. Using his right hand for leverage, he leaped over the counter and grabbed the date-wood club resting against the door before running out into the street.
    The excited teashop customers were all abuzz; still reeling from the frightful news about pigtails, they had now been given a second dose of bad news, with Germans taking advantage of a Chinese woman, effectively transforming terror into anger. A storehouse of resentment had been building among local residents ever since the Germans had begun construction of the Jiaozhou-Jinan line, resentment that had spilled over into loathing. Courage that had long been hidden within the residents of Northeast Gaomi Township burst to the surface, and a sense of righteous indignation took hold in people’s hearts, erasing all concerns over their own physical safety. Sun Bing’s patrons fell in behind him, shouting loudly on the road to the marketplace.
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    4
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    The wind whistled past Sun Bing’s ears as he ran down the narrow street, the blood in his veins surging to his head, causing his eardrums to throb and hum and his eyes to glaze over. People along the way might as well have been made of paper the way they rocked back and forth as bursts of air emanating from his frantic passage hit them in waves. Distorted faces brushed past his shoulders. He saw a tight circle of people in the square in front of the Jishengtang Pharmacy and the Li Jin General Store. He could not see what they were looking at, but he heard his wife’s screams and