The Concubine's Daughter Read online

  These were the thoughts and deeds of One and Two, while Three said little. There was nothing she could do but show the lonely concubine what small benevolence she could whenever the opportunity arose. Secretly, by eyes that met without conflict or by tone of voice and touch when unobserved, they had come to know each other as forbidden friends.

  Yik-Munn’s hand trembled as he placed the brimming cup before the shrine. Why did morbid thoughts crawl through his mind at such a moment? Perhaps they came from his ancestors, unsmiling in an assortment of wood and metal frames. Joss sticks pricked the shadows with sparks of cherry red, beside a bowl of fresh peaches, golden kumquats, and plump pomegranates, their stones and pips assuring many sons. He knew how careful a man with young sons must be. The whim of the gods could be as fickle as March winds. When his sons were infants he had dressed them as girls, with jade anklets, to deceive the evil spirits into thinking they were female and not worth claiming, to be passed over as something unworthy of attention.

  He had given them names like Ah-Gow—the Dog—and a silver collar to wear so that they would be protected from the hungry ghosts roaming the skies, ready to snatch them away. He had entrusted each of his sons to Chang-Hsien, whose portrait, bow in hand, hung where they slept, his heavenly arrow ready to shoot down the spirit of purgatory that sought to devour the precious soul.

  Threads of incense wound among rows of tablets on smoke-grimed shelves. Slips of wood, bone, and ivory bore the names of the long-dead and the reign in which they had lived. On the altar, in a brass urn, paper offerings still curled in feathers of blue flame. It was not surprising that thoughts of his sister should come to him here.

  One day she would join these somber faces, and he prayed daily for it to be soon. Great-Aunt had long outgrown her usefulness and lived only to remind him of his failure. She, who had buried three husbands and accumulated their wealth, was the one who controlled his life and the welfare of his family. When the day came to add her photograph to this grim gallery, he would be a rich man, and a free one.

  He felt no guilt at praying for his sister’s death, but it brought tears to his eyes to think of the cost of her interment; if it had been left to him, her remains would reside in an empty wine jar somewhere in the spice fields.

  For many moons, he had been ready to send her on her way. All preparations had been seen to, and he looked with comfort upon the paper offerings that filled each darkened corner: a splendid palanquin to see that her lotus feet would not touch the ground; her favorite foods and a gourd filled with fresh water; effigies of many servants to wait upon her every need; a magnificent mansion for her soul to occupy on arrival; great wads of heaven money to assure her every comfort in the afterlife—all made of colored paper pasted over frames of split bamboo.

  He was a cautious man, and had made generous offerings at the temple for his unborn son. Freshly roasted pig, an abundance of fruit, flagons of good wine, and pyramids of rice cakes as high as his head had been laid upon the altar, then eaten under a tree by Yik-Munn and his family. There was, after all, no worthiness in waste.

  This he had done for every month that his son grew in the womb. Gold and silver paper had also been burned at the shrine of the earth god, and his prayers had been pinned to the sacred banyan in the village to please the tree spirits. There was nothing to say a man should not travel all roads to heaven and call upon many powers when a son was to be born, and he had beseeched them all.

  Yik-Munn was wrenched from this reverie as the screaming changed to a choking moan, and the first lusty cry of his son reached out to him like a hand from above. He fell to his knees and kowtowed deeply three times. Seconds later, a wail of despair wrapped the house in loud lament, the words of the midwife clearly heard echoing among the rafters, filling the joyless rooms, and spreading out across the fields: “Aaaeeeyah … lui, ahhh … lui, aahhhh … luiiii … luuiiii, ahh… . A girl, a girl. It is a girl… .”

  Only then did he know that his preparations and offerings had failed to appease the eight immortals. The dried penis of the wild horse, which he had paid for dearly each week and consumed to increase his issue and assure him of a son, had not been enough. The two duck eggs he had placed so carefully in her chamber pot to attract the precious testicles of a boy had made a mockery of his faith. All gods had turned from him and allowed the beggar spirits to snatch away his son. There would be no new boy child to join the others, to create greater wealth for the House of Munn and add filial piety to a deserving father’s old age, to care for his soul in the afterworld. Why had he been cursed with a female?

  For a family of wealth and nobility, to have a daughter could bring great luck. She could be tutored in ladylike skills and arts and married into a wealthy house for all to profit. But to a farmer, a girl was just another bowl to fill.

  Moments later, carrying a small bundle, Yik-Munn left the house, which was sheltered by the towering pine that gave the farm its name. It was a monkey puzzle pine, the only one of its kind in the district and said to be as old as three centuries. He gazed up into thickly clustered branches spread wide above the house. So tall that its crown could not be seen except from the center of the mustard field, its girth took five long strides to walk around; its bark had the texture of weathered steel with great gouts of golden sap that ran like open wounds. For all his life, the great pine had been a monument to prosperity and strength, the protector of his land, the center of his earthly luck. Now it had failed him.

  It has grown too tall, he told himself. Its energies have turned against me. It casts yin shadows over the house, attracting the shady cool of the female spirit. Perhaps he would have it taken down, whatever the cost, to bathe his house in the yang of sunlight, brighten his spirit and give heat to his energy. He could give the girl a few weeks to recover and straddle her again. By all gods, he would fill the bitch with sons.

  At almost seventy-three years of age, he fought bravely for his potency, paying the village doctor regularly and well to keep him filled with the abundant juices of youth. But his body had never recovered from a boyhood of crippling work and meager nourishment, and the medicines he took were rare and costly.

  His backbone curved like a bent shovel, his large head nodded with every plodding step, and what hair remained upon it was dyed the flat black of chimney soot. He was tall and painfully thin, his distended belly, stooped shoulders, and long neck giving him the look of a tired but angry rooster. His face, jaundiced by opium, was beset by moles that dotted his sunken cheeks like beetles. Only his eyes, almost hidden by sagging lids, still shifted as cunningly as ever.

  Most prominent in his efforts to remain young and to keep face in the village was his commissioning of a set of perfect teeth from Hong Kong, which kept him forever smiling within an elder community of rotted stumps and shrunken gums, shining proof of his good fortune.

  “There are too many women in my house, yet I am cursed with another,” he said aloud for the ducks to hear, lighting a cigarette, drawing hard on the acrid smoke with a deep hiss of relish. How unfairly this moment brought back unwanted memories, clear as painted pictures before his eyes. Memories of his first daughter, the one he had kept to serve her brothers, until one bitter winter’s day when a party of soldiers sent by the local warlord to gather taxes had ridden across his fields with banners streaming. Times were hard, and Yik-Munn had nothing to pay them and little to offer in the way of food. They had beaten him and ordered him to catch the doves in his barn, then cook them with the last of his winter rice and bring them to the camp on the riverbank. They had taken his daughter, then ten years old, for their amusement, and as his wife prepared the doves, they could hear her screams, like the cry of a curlew on the wind. She had died a week later. He sighed; such were the problems of a girl child.

  The bent figure of the midwife scuttled like a spider from the house, the pot containing the placenta—the only payment required for her services. She would sell it in the village to fortify the old ones who needed to digest the ess
ence of the newly born. From the rice store, a tumbledown shed beneath a peppercorn tree, he took the big iron hoe to which he owed all things and waded knee-deep into the field of ripening mustard. He stopped, gazing out across his fields of fennel, hemlock parsley, angelica, chili, and garlic. In their midst was a snow-white field of flowering ginger; closer to the house, a silver sea of foxtail millet beside the rice paddies. The wide hats of his sons and grandsons were dotted among them, his sons’ wives stooped along the rice terraces.

  How hard he had worked to make all this possible, yet how little his efforts were appreciated. Why had the gods betrayed him? Had he not kowtowed at the feet of Kuan-Yin, the goddess of mercy, and laid gold leaf on the knee of the Buddha? What had he done to displease them so? He dropped the hoe, and proclaimed his misery to unfriendly skies: “Bad rice … Bad rice. My fields are bare and my family is hungry. My buffalo no longer pulls the broken plow and pestilence descends upon my crops.” He wrung his hands.

  “I am a poor man, my harvest is dust, and I cannot fill the rice bowls of my hungry family. Why have you sent me a girl—one who will cost much and return nothing but sons to another clan?”

  The bundle under his arm squirmed and kicked; a muffled cry told him that it still lived. He had wrapped it tight as Pai-Ling fought him like a wildcat. She had clawed so hard to save her baby that the wives would not enter the room, afraid of one as possessed as she. He had struck her hard across the face, flung her to the floor, and locked her in. Even now he heard her shouts from the open window of the upper floor, beseeching all gods to save her child. He felt the pain of fresh scratches welling on his face and neck as he waded farther into the field to escape her wailing, cursing the day he had traveled to Shanghai.

  When the soil underfoot was soft to his heel and far enough from the house, Yik-Munn dropped the bundle, unnerved by this puny life he had hoped to stifle without the striking of a blow—this uncanny will that jerked and twitched like a silkworm shedding its cocoon. This would be the fifth female baby he had buried in the thirty years since he first acquired the land, sleeping beneath the stars with his hoe as a pillow to guard it from thieves.

  The first he had drowned in the rice paddy, but her tiny bones had been unearthed with the spring planting, to be fought over by squabbling ducks. That could bring bad luck, but here in the middle of the mustard field, he could dig deep. He spat on the callused palms of his hands. A dozen times, the broad iron blade bit into yielding earth.

  Pai-Ling sprawled exhausted where she had fallen beside the bed. She heard the distant thud of iron digging deeply into sodden earth, striking fragments of shale with great force. The thuds grew louder, reaching through the open shutters. She struggled to her feet in frantic haste, dragging herself upright to stare in terror from the window.

  The sound was louder, joining the smell of newly turned sod and the sickly stench of night soil. She saw Yik-Munn, waist deep in the middle of the mustard field, swinging the broad, blunt blade of the hoe again and again. The scream that started in the pit of her belly escaped in a howl of despair so far-reaching it lifted the doves from the barn rafters and echoed through the house. Even Goo-Mah, who was hard of hearing, clucked her tongue in annoyance, rapping the wall with her stick at the violent disturbance.

  In the kitchen, wives One and Two did not raise their eyes from their needlework, but Three was jerked to her feet by the wail of torment from the floor above.

  “Do not interfere,” One said quietly, without missing a stitch. Two could only nod her agreement, equally engrossed in the shaping of a peony. Three’s hesitation lasted no more than a second before she rushed up the stairs. She thumped the locked door, calling Pai-Ling’s name until, with a frightening suddenness, the terrible cries were stopped.

  It took only moments for the narrow trench to be deep enough. Yik-Munn straightened; he was no longer young and was unaccustomed to such labors. He lifted the wine gourd to his lips, spilling the last of it into his mouth. Would he need to use the hoe to end this unearthly squirming? He would wait a little longer for the swaddling cloth to do its work. Moments passed; the bundle no longer moved and was silent.

  Yik-Munn looked around. He had no sense of guilt; his neighbors had done the same as he must now do to ensure the prosperity of the family. He dropped the empty wine gourd, looped around his waist with a tasseled cord, to wipe the back of his hand across his eyes and gob his bitterness into the reeking earth.

  Through eyes blurred by unaccustomed sweat, he saw the slightest movement, a sudden swirling of yellow flower heads and a drift of pollen. It was the head of a fox—white as a ghost, ears pointed and alert, eyes the color of milky jade, its slender snout feeling the air like a delicate finger. A bolt of terror transfixed Yik-Munn, his eyes commanded by those of the ghostly beast. Then, as suddenly, it was gone, the wake of its passing swept over by a restless breeze.

  Sweat broke like a fever to prick his neck with fright. That this was a fox fairy come to claim the life he was about to end was as certain to him as the heartbeat that pounded to the rush of his blood. Trembling, he dropped to his knees, snatching at the cloth with frantic fingers, desperately loosening the tight folds that bound the infant’s head.

  The tiny face was twisted and turning blue. Finally, bubbles of air emerged as a breath was sucked in and a juddering cry escaped the daughter of Yik-Munn. At that same moment, with a final howl of torment that spiraled through the twisted branches of the pine, her mother leaped from the window with wide-open arms.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Fox Fairy

  A year later, all thoughts of fox fairies had faded in the minds of Yik-Munn and his wives. He did not doubt that this was what had visited him in the mustard field. If the girl child had died, the fox would have entered its body and haunted those responsible to their graves and beyond.

  But Yik-Munn had gone quickly to the temple and paid the abbot to exorcise bad spirits and to purify his house with due ceremony and with no expenses spared. The priests had come in scarlet robes and black caps to sprinkle chicken blood on the doorposts and hang the Pa-Kua mirror, so that unwanted spirits would be driven away by their own ghastly reflections.

  The Lion of Purification had pranced from room to room with choking censers of burning ash, and much banging of drums and clashing of cymbals. Ropes of firecrackers exploded among the peppercorn trees and outside every door with a din that the deepest pits of the underworld could not ignore. The Lions had collected a generous lai-see, the fat red packets of lucky money offered with much ceremony to their gaping jaws, and the temple had accepted a donation to the deity that would cause the gods to smile as one.

  All was well, the priests assured Yik-Munn. The fox had passed on too quickly to have entered the child’s body, and the child had survived. The fox fairy lived only in sepulchers, graveyards, and untended tombs. They were no friend of the living, yet companions of the dead, with the power to become a woman of great beauty to seduce an unsuspecting man.

  But the prosperous and lordly Yik-Munn, the fortune-teller announced for all to hear, was still young at heart with the strength of the wild horse—one with great face for whom prayers were regularly said at the temple. He was assured that the female he had sired would bring much to him in return for his compassion. If her hands were small enough and her fingers fast, the silk-weaving factory of Ten Willows might take her. If her hands were too large and her fingers short and strong, she could be sent north to the Yangtze Valley to pick oranges and peaches, apricots and jujube; or downriver to Canton, Macao, or Hong Kong, to be sold to a rich Chinese or Parsee merchant—even to the household of a foreign devil. The prospects of profit for such a girl, Yik-Munn told himself, were many and varied. He was greatly relieved by such propitious omens. He had told his women to feed the child and keep her in an outbuilding.

  That Pai-Ling the concubine had accidentally fallen from the window and to her death upon the iron spikes of a harrow was certainly a misfortune, but could not be blamed u
pon the innocent. He had beaten Number Three for creating such a fuss about it. She also had to be locked away while his sons pulled the concubine’s body from the rusty tines that had pierced her body. Waiting until nightfall to see her buried in the ginger field, he had left it to them to wrap her in a suitable shroud and choose a spot unknown to him, where the earth was soft and the grave could be deep. It would cause less trouble for his family if she were disposed of without great ceremony. Otherwise, the story that the House of Munn had been host to a fox fairy and that demons roamed the fields of Great Pine Farm would spread like locusts along the length and breadth of the river.

  Number One and Number Two hated the child. They did not believe the priest or the fortune-teller, thinking them liars who said what they were paid to say. From the moment she could stand, the daughter of Pai-Ling sought the open fields, leaving the house when eyes were turned the other way to hide among the mustard plants, straying ever farther to the edge of the ginger field, crouching silent as a toad on the rich earth while they shouted her name.

  Number Three, the youngest of the wives by perhaps ten years, found it hard to forget the death of the unhappy concubine. She had watched the single lantern weaving like a firefly through the fields, to bury Pai-Ling in the ginger field, but she never spoke of it. Nor did she listen to the frightened jabber of those about her.

  “She is beckoned by her demon mother,” Number Two wailed, afraid of her own shadow. “She tries to lead us away from the house. She cavorts with imps and specters.”

  “Nonsense,” grunted Number One, who feared old age and poverty far more than the presence of unfriendly ghosts. “She is no more than a stupid and willful child who needs to be taught her place. I will find her and beat her till she is afraid to open her eyes.”