chapter 4

chapter 4

Inside the empty room stood a raised earthen bed. The woman ate, drank, relieved herself, and slept on that one platform.

She sat with her legs spread, a quilt wrapped around her body. It was smeared with blood, urine, feces, and some whitish substance I could not identify.

The room stank worse than a pigsty—no, worse than a cesspit.

Flies circled her. Maggots burrowed into the bedsores beneath the quilt and fed. How could she endure such pain without screaming?

Even without teeth, she could still cry out.

When she saw us enter, the woman opened her empty mouth in a grin.

Then I understood why she did not scream.

She no longer had a tongue.

I turned to flee, but the trafficker seized me. “Go on! Pull away that quilt and see what trick she’s playing!”

“I can’t! I’m afraid!” I shrank back again and again.

“Afraid? You little bitch!”

His kick landed squarely over my heart. My sight went black. Breath left me and would not return. Only after several desperate gasps did I barely come back to life.

“Move!”

I dared not resist again. I crawled forward on all fours, seized one corner of the quilt, and pulled.

There was a tearing sound. The quilt ripped free, taking scabs and a whole layer of rotting skin with it. The woman toppled sideways.

Only then did I understand why she sat with her legs apart.

Half a baby’s head was wedged in the bloody cavity between them. It had swollen purple and was plainly dead from suffocation.

Blood flowed from that opening and drained the final trace of color from the woman’s face.

She died without a sound.

Even after her death, the trafficker cursed her for cheating him out of ten months’ worth of eggs.

I was sold not long afterward. My first buyer took me to a bandit stronghold in the mountains. The bandit chief had just abducted a woman to be his bride and needed a servant to attend her.

She treated me kindly. Her voice was always gentle and soft.

Perhaps because she was so gentle, the bandit chief treated her well too. He gave her good food and drink and never struck or cursed her.

She told me that she and her younger brother had been captured together. Their family could afford ransom for only one child. Her parents wept as they chose. In the end, they said they would have to give up the daughter.

And so she became the bandit chief’s captive bride.

She said her parents had never favored one child over the other at home. They gave her and her brother equal shares of food and drink.

Yet she knew that when life and death hung in the balance, she had no right to compete.

“Our family owns several acres of good land and an ancestral home. If they sold them, they could have ransomed us both.” She stroked her slightly swollen belly. “But if they sold everything, what would the family eat? Where would they live? Never mind. I do not blame them. This life is not so bad.”

She thought being the chief’s wife was a fortunate end to her story.

It did not last.

The imperial court sent troops to suppress the bandits, and the chief was trapped in the mountains.

“My days are numbered,” he told her. “But you are still young and beautiful. I will not have you remarry, and I will not let the child in your belly call another man father. You should come with me.”

With one stroke, her own husband severed her head. The child died inside her.

When the stronghold scattered, I was sold again and again until I reached my present household.

The female fruit listened to my story, her tiny hand curled around my fingertip. “Listen to me. Your fate and mine are tied to a single ginseng-fruit tree. If we free that tree, we will both be saved, and retribution will fall upon these people.”

“But where is the tree?”

“At the farthest edge of heaven, and right before your eyes.”

“Before my eyes? You mean…”

I looked through my small square window. In the splendid courtyard stood a long-dead tree, lifeless and out of place.

Could that be the ginseng-fruit tree?

“We will know once we look,” the female fruit said.

A ginseng-fruit tree could spread its branches and leaves, she explained, but it was not meant to remain confined within a single room or courtyard. Such trees possessed spirits. They could run.

That was precisely why every household wanted to keep one.

Some ginseng-fruit trees received water, fertilizer, careful tending, and timely pruning. Those trees willingly remained in a family’s courtyard and bloomed and bore fruit.

Others had never belonged within four walls. No courtyard could ever hold them.

However high the walls or wide the grounds, those trees would leave in search of a greater world.

The farther a tree ran, the less fruit it bore. So people devised ways to stop them.

First they forged an iron chain and wrapped it tightly around the trunk. They called this the Immortal-Binding Rope.

Then they drove three nails, each three feet long, through three of the tree’s roots. These were the Immortal-Fixing Nails.

Finally, they pasted yellow talismans in the east, west, north, and south. These were the Immortal-Suppressing Talismans.

If the dead tree in the courtyard was truly a ginseng-fruit tree, it would bear all three restraints.

The female fruit and I agreed to wait until everyone slept before going out to inspect it.

We waited past midnight. Just as we were about to leave, a baby’s shrill wails tore through the silence from Madam’s room.

The young master was crying again.

“Nan Tao! Where have you died off to? Get in here!” Master and Madam shouted.

I set down the female fruit and hurried out to carry the young master.

Madam ordered me to take him outside and soothe him, then return only when he stopped crying. I carried him into the courtyard and looked at his face in the moonlight.

His eyes were wide and bright.

He was not crying at all.

Then where was the crying coming from?