The Incarnations (16 page)

Do you remember what it was like to die? Though your death count is higher than average, your departure from the host body is harrowing every time. Your soul, overcome by grief, floats above the rigor-mortis-stiffened corpse. You mingle with the gases of decomposition rising from the rotting flesh. You leap back into the stopped heart with such force the cadaver jerks (to the fright of workers in the morgue). However, to stay in the host body past the expiration date is a serious offence. Latecomers to the Otherworld are disciplined, and so you leave.

Our souls have never met in the Otherworld. We suffer for our prolific sins against each other separately, and our paths never cross. After incarnation is when we meet. After the hand of fate has snatched up our souls and placed them in the womb to be born again, kicking and screaming into the human world. Fate throws us in the same family, the same harem, the same herd of slaves. But fate sets us against each other. Fate has us brawling, red in tooth and claw. Fate condemns us to bring about the other’s downfall. To blaze like fiery meteors as we crash into each other’s stratosphere, then incinerate to heat and dust.

Now the time has come for my exile to end. For me to go out into the city, to the housing compound where you live. Past the junk-mail-stuffed letterboxes, electricity meters and internet cables, and up the concrete flights of stairs to Apartment 404. I will stand with palms and ear against your door, my eardrum straining at the sounds within: the TV selling cars and fast food; the water heater banging; the clatter of Yida washing dishes in the sink. My eardrums will strain to pick up the sounds. You and your wife and child a mere heartbeat away.

The time has come to deliver this letter. For in your sixth and current incarnation, Driver Wang, we must rebel against fate. So read on. Fate must be outwitted. It must no longer stand in our way.

ATURNIP IN THE
gutter. Purplish white and wrinkled, with dirt clinging to the furrows and roots. A miracle in our famine-stricken city, that a vegetable could survive this long, even interred in the ground. I think I am hallucinating. But you have seen the turnip too, and stare at me rivalrously. Hunger gnawing in our guts, we size each other up. Two Jurchen boys with starved-mutt ribcages, and eyes bulging in our gaunt skulls. Your face has been mutilated by a branding iron, with three wide scars burnt on each cheek. The brandings are tribal and deliberate, and a warning that you are much tougher than I am.

You stiffen and clench your fists. If we fight I will lose, so I pretend that I am deranged. I growl and gnash my teeth (wobbly teeth in bleeding gums, too loose to break your skin). I claw the air, as though ready to rip your throat into geysers of blood. I toss my head this way and that and howl, shuffling wolfishly towards the turnip. Are you afraid? Or could that be a smile on your lips? A smile in this city of hunger-deadened wretches; that would be the second miracle of the day. Now or never, I think, and pounce at the turnip. And there is no mistaking that you are smiling now. You swing your fist, and the battle over the turnip has ended before it has begun.

I come round on a hard wooden floor. You are standing over me, gnawing the turnip raw. ‘Here,’ you say, and toss what remains to where I lie. I devour the vegetable, dirty tangled roots and all. Maggots have burrowed inside. Wriggling maggots. I devour those too.

We are in a glassblower’s workshop, with a workbench of crucibles, scales and long glass-blowing horns. Vases, elliptical bottles and paperweights glint on the shelves. A wind chime of glass pendants tinkles above. The beauty of the glassware does not move me, however. Glass cannot feed a man, after all. Breathing ragged and shallow, you collapse beside me like a sack of bones. The branded scars on your cheeks are like barren riverbeds. How sickening it must have been to smell your own flesh, sizzling under the metal of a branding iron.

‘Who are you?’ I ask.

‘Tiger.’

Your brandings are like tiger stripes. Your name is apt.

‘I was Glassblower Hua’s apprentice,’ you lie, ‘but he’s dead now. We were fishing in the river, when he fell in and drowned.’

You stare at me, challenging me to challenge you. You were never apprentice to Glassblower Hua. Those hands of yours have never painstakingly crafted glass. You are savage as a stray cat. Clever in the way of rogues and thieves and those who live by their wits.

‘Who are you?’ you ask me.

When I was a child, they called me Boy. After my mother died, and I came to live in the Craftsmen’s District with Uncle Lu, they called me Carpenter Lu’s Boy. ‘Turnip,’ I decide. ‘I worked for Carpenter Lu. Though he is dead now too.’

In his sixth decade, Uncle Lu suffered greatly when the famine began. A filial child would have sliced off and cooked a piece of his own flesh for his starving master, but I was too cowardly. I went out scavenging for Uncle Lu instead, and last week I came back to find him glassy-eyed on the workshop floor. I lay beside him until nightfall. Then I took him by wheelbarrow to a nearby field, dug a hole as deep as I stood and buried him there. Afterwards I lay on the mound, protecting the unmarked grave for a night and a day. Over my dead body would cannibals dig him up. Uncle Lu had been like a father to me.

‘Why have you brought me here?’ I ask you.

‘Better here than the gutter, Turnip,’ you say. ‘Better here than where the corpse-snatchers can get you.’

My head throbs from where your knuckles flew at me. My buttocks and back are grazed from where you dragged me through the streets. I murmur, ‘Do you mind if I sleep now, Tiger?’

But your eyes are shut. You are already sleeping.

For many moons the city of Zhongdu has been under siege. The Mongol hordes came from the north, and our city walls are now surrounded by ox-skin yurts and cattle-dung fires, and tens of thousands of Mongol warriors, patrolling on horseback so no one can flee. They watch politely as famished Jurchens abseil down the city walls on ropes, before impaling the escapees with a cloud of arrows. They are breaking down our defences, starving the million citizens of Zhongdu to death. Beyond the city walls, camel-mounted kettledrums beat day and night, as within the city hunger-weakened Jurchens keel over. Every beat, another dead, another dead.

Before the Mongols came, the markets of Zhongdu were thriving and bustling, selling every beast and fowl and grain. But now our stores of millet, barley and rice are gone. Every animal was eaten long ago and not one remains. Not a cat or a dog, nor a sparrow or a rat. Not even a pet cricket chirruping in a cage.

The famine-stricken citizens of Zhongdu think only of food. Staggering about the streets, their hollow stomachs rattle with stones, twigs and bark. Mouths chew at nothing, masticating empty air, or chew grass to an indigestible cud. The famine has made insectivores of us, gobblers of grasshoppers and ants. And now a moral quandary has descended like a dark cloud upon the citizens of Zhongdu.

Do we eat or bury our dead?

We spend two days and nights on the workshop floor. We are delirious. We drift in and out of consciousness. We don’t talk. We barely move. The glass beads of the wind chime tinkle as they sway gently above. Sometimes I creak my eyelids apart. Through the light and dark coming through the window I track the passage of time. I shiver with cold. I swallow the air, hoping there is sustenance in the emptiness. My stomach gurgles with it. The air burbles through my intestines and splutters back out as flatulence. I swear to take revenge on the Mongols as a ghost after I am dead. But, to be honest, my heart’s not in it. Apathy’s all I feel as my life slips away.

On the second day you speak: ‘Turnip, I am going out to find some food.’

I hear footsteps. I hear the door slam. I try to lift my head. Or perhaps I dream I do. I can’t find my head anyway.

Night. The smell of cooking meat summons me back from the brink of death. I open my eyes. You are squatting by the fireplace, holding two metal skewers of meat over the flames. A groan escapes my lips. My saliva glands are a bursting dam. Hearing I am awake, you hand me a skewer by the wooden handle.

‘Tiger . . . what meat is this?’ I ask.

‘Cat.’

‘Cat? But there are no cats left in the city.’

‘I know where they live. I know where to hunt for them.’

I stare at the skewered pieces of semi-raw meat. The edges are charred. The meat trickles blood on to my wrist and hand.

‘If you don’t eat it,’ you say, ‘I will.’

For twenty minutes there is no sound but our chewing and swallowing. You sink your teeth into your cat-kebab, your eyes slitted, your tiger scars smeared with grease. After the meat is eaten we pick at the fibres caught between our teeth. We lick the juices from our palms. My stomach is convulsing with joy.

Thereafter our days are like this. During daylight we rest. We watch the sunbeams drifting through the window and shifting in golden bars across the workshop floor. We watch the rise and fall of our chests and swat at the flies buzzing around our ulcerated legs. We listen to the Mongol drums beating beyond the fortress of city walls. We think our thoughts, hunger-weak thoughts that crawl feebly through our minds. Then, after dusk, you vanish into the night to go cat-hunting. Tiger by name, tiger by nature. Hunter-gatherer, you stalk one down and return with a skinned flank of meat.

‘Where is the cat’s head, Tiger?’ I ask. ‘Where’s the fur and limbs? The tail and paws?’

‘I tossed them to some starving orphans,’ you reply.

Petals of blood spill from the meat as you carry it to the workbench. On hands and knees I lick them up with my thirsty tongue. You slam a cleaver into the cat, portioning it up. Then we each hold a skewer over the fire, salivating as the flames lick the rawness away. I can hardly wait for the meat to be cooked before gobbling it down.

Before grilling the meat we lock the door and windows, for the smell of roasting flesh brings interlopers. They knock politely, begging to be let in. They scrabble like rats and whine, ‘Let us have some meat. We are starving out here. We have children to feed. Out of the goodness of your hearts . . .’

You snatch up the cleaver and go to the door. How terrifying you are, with your scarred cheeks and wild, lice-ridden mane. The blade of the cleaver and your eyes glint as one.

‘Come on in,’ you smile, opening the door wider. ‘Here I am, waiting with my cleaver to chop your children up. I will scoop out their livers and kidneys and boil them for soup.’

And the starving beggars slither back into the shadows. Though your threats are horrifying, I admire your bravery. Man eat man, this is what our city has become. And you are brutal in our defence.

When I regain strength, I wander around our city and see how Zhongdu has descended into depravity. The good people have starved to death and the moral conscience of the city has died with them. Cannibalism is now the norm, the wicked feeding on the corpses of the good. They don’t even wait for cover of darkness before shamelessly dragging the dead away. The kitchens of the body-snatchers are fragrant with roasting meat. The maddening aroma wafts about the streets, diminishing willpower in the few places where willpower remains.

At night we are woken by shrieking in the Craftsmen’s District: ‘Fiend! You ate our boy. You ought to rot in Hell.’

‘Who had a bite when they thought I weren’t looking? Who deserves to rot in Hell as much as I do?’

‘Liar! Liar!’

I recognize their voices.

‘That’s Swordmaker Fu and his wife,’ I whisper. ‘They had a young son, but from the sounds of it he is now dead.’

You sneer in the dark, ‘Cannibals. Too lazy to go out and hunt a cat.’

I shut my eyes, but I am too haunted by Swordmaker Fu’s macabre words to sleep. I lie awake instead, and count my blessings that I am with a fellow-believer in the sanctity of human flesh.

Every day the Mongol battering rams strike the city gates and the citizens of Zhongdu hold their breath as the beast pounds. Ah, this time we are done for, we Jurchens think. This time they will break our defences. But the Jurchen army, armed with arrows and bows, somehow keep the wolves at bay for one more day.

One afternoon, as the battering rams pound, you ask, ‘Turnip, have you seen a devil’s horseman before?’

I confess I haven’t.

‘You’ve never climbed the city wall?’

‘Not since the Mongols came. It’s too dangerous.’

‘Come with me, Turnip,’ you say. ‘I know a place we can watch them.’

We stagger through the empty streets, two young men with gargantuan heads on spindle-limbs. The few Jurchens we encounter scurry by with a hunted look in their eyes. We go to the east of the city, to a crumbling stone stairwell in the rear of a weed-choked temple garden. We go up to the stone battlements of the city wall and peer out. I am stunned when I see the enemy camp. Thousands of ox-skin yurts and cattle-dung fires and helmeted Mongol warriors on armoured horses, as far as the eye can see. The Mongols have devoted a city to their siegecraft. You are enraged. Your eyes narrow to vengeful slits beneath your gnarled and tangled hair.

‘
Barbarians!
’ you spit. ‘One day I’ll rip off their heads and piss down their throats. I’ll fuck their mothers and daughters to a bloody squealing pulp . . .’

Way down below, a devil’s horseman trots towards us on his mare. His skin looks as though it has been flayed off, lime-cured in a tannery then sewn back on as human leather. His nose is flattened between his cheekbones and his yellow eyes glare up from beneath his helmet. Hearts hammering and legs shaking, we crouch down. ‘Has he seen us?’ I whisper.

An arrow soars whistling over our heads in answer to my question. We flee down the stone stairs back into the accursed city of Zhongdu.

That night you go out cat-hunting. When you get back we cook and feast on your kill. After supper we laze on the floor and I watch you in the flickering firelight. I watch you pick fibrous strands of cat-meat out of your teeth. Sprawled by the fire, your eyes are lazy and slitted as a tiger basking in the sun. I reach and stroke the iron-scorched markings on your cheeks. The scar tissue is hard and shiny under my touch. ‘Who branded you?’ I ask. You do not open your eyes. ‘Where do you come from?’ I ask. ‘Who are your people?’ Your robe is open and I move my hand over your famished chest. Your rib bones and tautening nipples. The jut of shadows in your skeletal frame. My stomach tightens. Now or never, I think, and move my mouth to yours. A jerk of your chin warns me this is not what you want. Your hand pushes on the back of my head, pushing down. Down past your sternum, down past your sunken stomach, to the rags about your groin. I loosen the rags and bury my face in the thatch of hair and what lies beneath. I take you in my mouth and feel you come to life. Swelling, growing engorged inside me, against my tongue. The smell of you, unwashed for months, is musty and intoxicating. I glance up. Your eyes are still closed. I move over you, my rhythm quickening until you spurt your bitter seed. Swallowing, I pull my wet and glistening mouth away. Sprawled on your back, your eyes are shut, and you look peaceful, as though having a pleasant dream. As much of a stranger as you were before.