wooden sword in the air, he performed a strange dance. Soon tiring, he stood beside the water basin and, uttering a spell, spat into the basin; then, holding the sword in both hands, he began stirring the water, which slowly turned red. That was followed by another dance. Growing tired again, he went back to stirring the water, until it was the color of fresh blood. Throwing down his sword, he sat on the floor, breathing heavily. He dragged Jintong up beside him and said, “Look into the basin and tell me what you see.” Jintong detected a sweet-smelling herbal odor as he stared at the mirrorlike surface of the water, stunned by the face that looked back at him. How had Jintong, so full of life, turned into a haggard, wrinkled, and very ugly young man? “What do you see?” the fairy pressed him. Natasha’s bloody face rose slowly out of the basin and merged with his. She slipped out of her dress and pointed to the bloody wound on her breast. “Shangguan Jintong,” she cursed, “how could you be so heartless?” “Natasha!” Jintong shrieked as he buried his face in the water. He heard the fairy say to Mother and Laidi, “He’s fine now. You can carry him back to his room.”
Leaping to his feet, Jintong threw himself on the mountain fairy. It was the first time in his life he had actually attacked someone. What courage it took to attack someone who dealt with ghosts and demons! All for the sake of Natasha. With his left hand he grabbed the fairy’s gray goatee and pulled with all his might, stretching the man’s mouth until it was a black oval. Vile-smelling saliva slithered down his hand. Cupping her injured breast in one hand, Natasha sat on the fairy’s tongue and looked admiringly at Jintong. Spurred on by the look, he tugged harder on the goatee, this time using both hands. The fairy’s body bent over painfully, until he looked like the picture of the Sphinx in their geography text. Moving awkwardly, he struck Jintong on the leg with his wooden sword. But Jintong felt no pain, thanks to Natasha, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have let go, because Natasha was in the man’s mouth. The thought of what would happen if he let go made him shudder: The fairy would chew Natasha to pulp and swallow her into his digestive tract. The fairy’s intestines were filthy things! Hurry, Natasha, get away from there! he shouted anxiously. But she remained seated on the fairy’s tongue, as if she were deaf. The man’s goatee was getting more slippery by the minute, for the blood from Natasha’s breast had seeped into his whiskers. He kept tugging, hand over hand, her blood staining Jintong’s fingers. The fairy tossed his sword away, reached out with both hands, grabbed Jintong’s ears, and pulled with all his might. Jintong’s lips parted and he heard shrieks from Mother and First Sister. But nothing was going to make him let loose of the fairy’s goatee. The two combatants circled the yard, round and round, followed closely by Mother and First Sister. Something on the ground tripped Jintong, who stopped his hand-overhand motion just long enough for the fairy to bite down on one of them. His ears felt as if they were about to be wrenched off the sides of his head; the back of his hand had been bitten to the bone. He screamed in pain, but that was nothing compared to the pain in his heart. Everything was a blur. Frantic, he thought of Natasha. The fairy had swallowed her, and she was now in his stomach, crumbling in his digestive juices; the prickly walls of his stomach were kneading her mercilessly. The blurred vista before him darkened until it was black as the belly of a cuttlefish.
Speechless Sun, who had gone out to buy a bottle, came into the yard. With the keen eye and rich experience of a soldier, he immediately figured out what was going on. Calmly as can be, he set the bottle down at the base of the side room wall. “Jintong’s in trouble!” Mother shouted. “Save him!” Speechless Sun effortlessly maneuvered himself up behind the fairy, lifted both little stools into the air, and brought them down together into the man’s calves; he dropped like a stone. Speechless Sun’s stools swirled in the air a second time and came down on the fallen man’s arms; Jintong’s ears were set free. Sun’s stools came crashing into the fairy’s ears; he spat out Jintong’s hand and began rolling in agony on the ground. He reached out to pick up his sword and clenched his teeth. Speechless Sun roared; the man shuddered. By then, Jintong was wailing and struggling to charge the fairy again, determined to rip open the man’s belly and rescue Natasha. But Mother and First Sister had their arms wrapped around him and were holding him back. The fairy took off, giving the crouching tiger, Speechless Sun, a wide berth.
Very gradually, Jintong recovered his equilibrium, but not his appetite. So Mother went to see the district chief, who immediately sent someone out to buy goat’s milk. Jintong spent most of the time lying in bed, only occasionally getting up to stretch his legs. His eyes were as lifeless as ever. Every time he thought of poor Natasha and her bleeding breast, tears sluiced down his cheeks. Lacking the will to speak, he broke his silence infrequently by muttering to himself; but the minute anyone approached him, he shut up.
One hazy morning, as he lay in bed staring at the ceiling, his tears over Natasha’s injured breast barely dry, he felt his nose stop up and his brain begin to turn mushy; a need to go back to sleep swept over him. All of a sudden, a shrill, hair-raising scream tore from Laidi and the mute’s room, driving away all thoughts of sleep. Cocking his ear to hear what it was all about, the only thing he heard was a buzzing in his ears. He was about to close his eyes when another shrill scream, this one longer and more horrifying, came on the air. His heart raced and his scalp tightened. Driven by curiosity, he crawled out of bed and tiptoed over to the door to the eastern room, where he peeked in through a crack. Speechless Sun, stripped naked, was a big, black spider, wrapped around Laidi’s soft, thin waist. Slobber covered his protruding lips as he sucked first on one of Laidi’s nipples, then the other. Her neck stretched out long over the edge of the bed, her upturned face white as the outer leaf of a cabbage. Her full breasts, the same ones Jintong had seen as she lay in the mule trough all those years before, were like yellowing steamed buns, lying spongily above her rib cage. There was blood on the tips of her nipples and bite marks on her chest and upper arms. Speechless Sun had turned Laidi’s body, once so fair and silky, into something that looked like a scaled fish. Her long legs lay bare on the bed.
When Jintong began to sob, Speechless Sun picked up a bottle at the head of the bed and flung it toward the door, sending Jintong running out into the yard, where he picked up a brick and threw it at the window. “Mute!” he shouted. “You’re going to die a horrible death!”
The words were barely out of his mouth when exhaustion overcame him. Natasha’s image floated before his eyes and quickly dissolved like a puff of smoke.
The mute’s powerful fist smashed through the window; Jintong backed off in terror, all the way to the parasol tree, where he watched the fist draw back inside the room and a stream of yellow piss emerge through the hole and drip into a bucket beneath the window, placed there for that very purpose. Grinding his teeth in anger, Jintong walked over to the side room, where a strange figure came up to him. The person walked at a crouch, dragging his long arms behind him. Beneath his shaved head and bushy gray eyebrows, the large black eyes were circled by fine wrinkles and were so forbidding it was hard to look into them. Purple welts – some large, some small – covered his face, and his ears were scarred and ragged, burned in places and bitten by frostbite in others, looking like the shriveled ears of a monkey. He was wearing a gray, high-collared, ill-fitting tunic that reeked of mothballs. A pair of bony hands with chipped and cracked nails hung at his sides and shook uncontrollably. “Who are you looking for?” Jintong asked in a loathsome voice, assuming it was one of the mute’s comrades-in-arms. The man bowed deferentially and replied, his tongue stiff, his mouth forming the words awkwardly:
“Home… Shangguan Lingdi… I’m… Birdman… Han…”
3
Birdman Han gave me a terrible shock on the day he walked back into our house. I dimly recalled something involving a bird fairy in my past, but that was all about some romantic dealings with the mute, that and the incident where the fairy had jumped off a cliff. But I had no memory of this strange brother-in-law. I glided off to one side to let him out into the yard, just as Laidi, a white sheet around her waist, and naked from there up, ran out into the yard. The mute’s fist tore through the paper window covering, followed by the upper half of his body. “Strip!” he said. “Strip!” Laidi, in tears, stumbled and fell. Her sheet had been stained red by blood from down below. And that is how she appeared in front of Birdman Han – tormented and half-naked, blood dripping down her legs.
Mother returned, with Eighth Sister in tow and driving a goat ahead of them. She didn’t seem overly surprised by First Sister’s unsightly appearance, but the minute she spotted Birdman Han, she crumpled to the ground. It wasn’t until much later that Mother told me she realized at once that he had returned to demand his due, and that we would have to come up with the principal and interest for the birds we’d eaten fifteen years before, before he’d been taken forcibly to Japan, where he’d escaped and led a primitive existence.
The arrival of Birdman Han would bring to an end the wealth and rank we had obtained by sacrificing Mother’s eldest daughter. But that did not stop her from preparing a sumptuous welcoming meal. This strange bird that had dropped from the sky sat trancelike in our yard as he watched Mother and Laidi busy themselves at the stove.
