Tian rubbed his chin as he appraised Xiaojing. “I don’t know.”
“I can pay.” Xiaojing struggled to turn on the bed and lifted a corner of a cloth bundle. Tian could see the glint of silver underneath.
“I make no promises. Not every disease has a cure, and not every fugitive can find a loophole. It depends on who’s after you and why.” Tian walked closer and bent down to examine the promised payment, but the tattoos on Xiaojing’s scarred face, signs that he was a convicted criminal, caught his attention. “You were sentenced to exile.”
“Yes, ten years ago, right after Xiaoyi’s marriage.”
“If you have enough money, there are doctors that can do something about those tattoos, though you won’t look very handsome afterward.”
“I’m not very worried about looks right now.”
“What was it for?”
Xiaojing laughed and nodded at the table next to the window, upon which a thin book lay open. The wind fluttered its pages. “If you’re as good as my sister says, you can probably figure it out.”
Tian glanced at the book and then turned back to Xiaojing.
“You were exiled to the border near Vietnam,” ?Tian said to himself as he deciphered the tattoos. “Eleven years ago . . . the breeze fluttering the pages . . . ah, you must have been a servant of Xu Jun, the Hanlin Academy scholar.”
Eleven years ago, during the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor, someone had whispered in the Emperor’s ear that the great scholar Xu Jun was plotting rebellion against the Manchu rulers. But when the Imperial guards seized Xu’s house and ransacked it, they could find nothing incriminating.
However, the Emperor could never be wrong, and so his legal advisers had to devise a way to convict Xu. Their solution was to point at one of Xu’s seemingly innocuous lyric poems:
清風不識字 , 何故亂翻書
Breeze, you know not how to read,
So why do you mess with my book?
The first character in the word for “breeze,” qing, was the same as the name of the dynasty. The clever legalists serving the Emperor—and ?Tian did have a begrudging professional admiration for their skill—construed it as a treasonous composition mocking the Manchu rulers as uncultured and illiterate. Xu and his family were sentenced to death, his servants exiled.
“Xu’s crime was great, but it has been more than ten years.” ?Tian paced beside the bed. “If you simply broke the terms of your exile, it might not be too difficult to bribe the right officials and commanders to look the other way.”
“The men after me cannot be bribed.”
“Oh?” ?Tian looked at the bandaged wounds covering the man’s body. “You mean . . . the Blood Drops.”
Xiaojing nodded.
The Blood Drops were the Emperor’s eyes and talons. They moved through the dark alleys of cities like ghosts and melted into the streaming caravans on roads and canals, hunting for signs of treason. They were the reason that teahouses posted signs for patrons to avoid talk of politics and neighbors looked around and whispered when they complained about taxes. They listened, watched, and sometimes came to people’s doors in the middle of the night, and those they visited were never seen again.
Tian waved his arms impatiently. “You and Xiaoyi are wasting my time. If the Blood Drops are after you, I can do nothing. Not if I want to keep my head attached to my neck.” ?Tian headed for the door of the hut.
“I’m not asking you to save me,” said Xiaojing.
Tian paused.
“Eleven years ago, when they came to arrest Master Xu, he gave me a book and told me it was more important than his life, than his family. I kept the book hidden and took it into exile with me.
“A month ago, two men came to my house, asking me to turn over everything I had from my dead master. Their accents told me they were from Beijing, and I saw in their eyes the cold stare of the Emperor’s falcons. I let them in and told them to look around, but while they were distracted with my chests and drawers, I escaped with the book.
“I’ve been on the run ever since, and a few times they almost caught me, leaving me with these wounds. The book they’re after is over there on the table. That’s what I want you to save.”
Tian hesitated by the door. He was used to bribing yamen clerks and prison guards and debating Magistrate Yi. He liked playing games with words and drinking cheap wine and bitter tea. What business did a lowly songgun have with the Emperor and the intrigue of the Court?
I was once happy in Fruit-and-Flower Mountain, spending all day in play with my fellow monkeys, said the Monkey King. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been so curious about what lay in the wider world.
But Tian was curious, and he walked over to the table and picked up the book. An Account of ??Ten Days at Yangzhou, it said, by Wang Xiuchu.
? ? ?
A hundred years earlier, in 1645, after claiming the Ming Chinese capital of Beijing, the Manchu Army was intent on completing its conquest of China.
Prince Dodo and his forces came to Yangzhou, a wealthy city of salt merchants and painted pavilions, at the meeting point of the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal. The Chinese commander, Grand Secretary Shi Kefa, vowed to resist to the utmost. He rallied the city’s residents to reinforce the walls and tried to unite the remaining Ming warlords and militias.
His efforts came to naught on May 20, 1645, when the Manchu forces broke through the city walls after a seven-day siege. Shi Kefa was executed after refusing to surrender. To punish the residents of Yangzhou and to teach the rest of China a lesson about the price of resisting the Manchu Army, Prince Dodo gave the order to slaughter the entire population of the city.
One of the residents, Wang Xiuchu, survived by moving from hiding place to hiding place and bribing the soldiers with whatever he had. He also recorded what he saw:
One Manchu soldier with a sword was in the lead, another with a lance was in the back, and a third roamed in the middle to prevent the captives from escaping. The three of them herded dozens of captives like dogs and sheep. If any captive walked too slow, they would beat him immediately or else kill him on the spot.
The women were strung together with ropes, like a strand of pearls. They stumbled as they walked through the mud, and filth covered their bodies and clothes. Babies were everywhere on the ground, and as horses and people trampled over them, their brains and organs mixed into the earth, and the howling of the dying filled the air.
Every gutter or pond we passed was filled with corpses, their arms and legs entangled. The blood mixing with the green water turned into a painter’s palette. So many bodies filled the canal that it turned into flat ground.
The mass massacre, raping, pillaging, and burning of the city lasted six days.
On the second day of the lunar month, the new government ordered all the temples to cremate the bodies. The temples had sheltered many women, though many had also died from hunger and fright. The final records of the cremations included hundreds of thousands of bodies, though this figure does not include all those who had committed suicide by jumping into wells or canals or through self-immolation and hanging to avoid a worse fate. . . .
On the fourth day of the lunar month, the weather finally turned sunny. The bodies piled by the roadside, having soaked in rainwater, had inflated and the skin on them was a bluish black and stretched taut like the surface of a drum. The flesh inside rotted and the stench was overwhelming. As the sun baked the bodies, the smell grew worse. Everywhere in Yangzhou, the survivors were cremating bodies. The smoke permeated inside all the houses and formed a miasma. The smell of rotting bodies could be detected a hundred li away.
? ? ?
Tian’s hands trembled as he turned over the last page.