‘Ma?’ you ask. ‘What do you want?’
‘Take off your clothes,’ the sorceress commands.
You obey. You stand there naked. A fire blazes in the hearth and the brass pot bubbles and boils. She tells you to kneel. She binds your wrists and ankles with rope. She plunges the blade of the snake-eviscerating knife into the boiling pot. Suddenly, you understand what she intends to do. Weeping, you beg for mercy.
‘I’ll never touch Brother Coming again! I swear on the graves of our ancestors!’
Tied up like a pig for a spit-roast, you wriggle to the door. The sorceress grabs your hair and presses the knife-edge to your throat. ‘Don’t you dare! Or I’ll slit you from ear to ear.’
You kneel by a chopping board. She grabs your penis and testicles and roughly pulls, threatening to kill you if you don’t hold still. Her other hand holds the knife, raising it high. She is shaking with nerves, but her teeth are gritted with intent as the blade swoops down. You see the blood splatter her pale cheeks before you feel the pain. When the pain comes you scream. You scream with such violence it curdles the air. The sorceress is trembling and bathed in perspiration. The castration is harder than expected. Like beheading a chicken whose stubborn head won’t detach. She hacks and hacks, and at last she pulls her hand away in exultation and relief. The knife clatters to the floor and she opens her blood-soaked fist. And what you glimpse before you lose consciousness will haunt you until the day you die. Your blood-glistening organs in the palm of your mother’s hand. Her smile of triumph at having severed you, at the age of thirteen, from the ranks of men.
Months later a man with a donkey comes from the Kill the Barbarians Village to collect you. You are wearing a hemp tunic and carrying a bundle of clothes. Hanging from the belt of your tunic, in a leather pouch, is a silver trinket box with your embalmed genitals inside. The sorceress hands the donkey man a string of copper cash and issues her instructions.
‘All the way to the city of Chang’an?’ asks the donkey man.
‘All the way to the gates of the Imperial Palace,’ says the Sorceress Wu.
‘And then what?’
‘And then you say, “This is Eunuch Wu. A gift to the Emperor.”’
Foot in stirrup, you clamber up on the donkey, grimacing as you straddle the saddle (though the stump has healed, when pressured it hurts). The sorceress turns her back on you and returns to the mud-walled dwelling. The donkey man grasps the reins of the donkey bridle and leads you away.
II
The very day you leave for Chang’an, water gushes out from between Brother Coming’s legs. Her mouth rounds into a cavern of pain as she keels over, wracked by the spasms within. ‘It’s time,’ observes the sorceress, and sends the Runts to fetch pails of water from the Kill the Barbarians Village well. A short while later, I am born. A baby girl with a vigorous cry in her lungs and no deformities visible to the eye.
As a child, I have no name. The sorceress calls me ‘Girl’ or ‘She-brat’. And later, when I am of crawling age, the Runts call me ‘Doggy’. They pat my head and throw sticks for me to fetch and carry back to them in my mouth. When I am of walking and talking age, the Runts have grown up and gone away to labour on pig farms or be the wives of pig farmers in the other villages of Blacktooth County. Leaving me behind with Brother Coming and the Sorceress Wu.
My childhood is much the same as yours. Strangers knocking in the night. The chanting of spells and magnesium flares in the fireplace. For much of my childhood I am under the impression that Sorceress Wu is my mother and Brother Coming my mute idiot sister. The peasants of Kill the Barbarians Village call me the Wu Child and, owing to the sorceress’s reputation for evildoing, forbid their children from going near me. I am very lonely. Brother Coming won’t play with me, and when she goes into the Neverdie Forest, won’t let me tag along. Rejected and hurt, I bully Brother Coming on our bamboo-mat bedding at night. I slap her, and pinch her black and blue, and get away with it, for she never makes a squeak of protest. I abuse Brother Coming for years, until the evening the sorceress looks over as I am twisting her ear and says slyly, ‘That’s no way to treat your mother, She-brat.’
Shocked, I let go of Brother Coming’s ear. The sorceress laughs. ‘Yes, that’s right. You weren’t squeezed out of my loins, Girl. You are the progeny of incest and rape. Your father was the good-for-nothing rapist and your mother the imbecile next to you. No wonder they spawned a she-brat such as you.’
My grandmother makes no secret of her wish to be rid of me and, afraid of being sold into slavery or married off to a pig farmer, I toil for the sorceress. I cook and clean for her, sweeping the floor and scrubbing the pots and pans, keeping our rammed-earth dwelling spick and span. I am filial and obedient and never answer back. But it’s no good. The year I am thirteen, Sorceress Wu tells me of the arrangements she has made.
‘Girl. You are now betrothed to the Young Master Huang of the Huang family of Goatherd Valley. You are to be wedded next week.’
‘But I don’t want to be married,’ I complain in a small voice.
The sorceress scoffs, ‘Want? Want? Want is neither here nor there! The Huangs are the most prosperous family in Goatherd Valley. A she-brat such as you ought to be on her knees with gratitude!’
The next day the man with the donkey comes from Kill the Barbarians Village. He hoists me up on the saddle, and we clip-clop away from Blacktooth County. No one, not the Sorceress Wu, Brother Coming, nor the Runts, come to bid me farewell. I never see any of the Wu clan again.
III
The grandeur of the Huang family mansion is such that I cling to the donkey reins, too intimidated to dismount. The manor has a glazed-tile roof and the walls are lacquered wood (unlike the sorceress’s mud-walled dwelling, which a thief needs only a pail of water to break into). A servant boy leads me through parlours and halls to a shady courtyard of cypresses and a shimmering pond of carp. I am exhausted from riding on donkey-back for three days, plodding along the river Sveltedeer to the foothills of Mount Weep. I am barefoot, in a tattered robe stitched from a discarded rice sack. A girl with no name. Having inherited the sorceress’s hump-backed nose, I lack even prettiness as a saving grace. What if the Huang family are disappointed and send me back? What bloodcurdling punishment would the sorceress mete out should that happen?
‘She’s here! She’s here!’ a woman chimes.
Master Huang and his wife enter the courtyard, a handsome couple in black damask robes of mourning, both tall and stately, with unpocked skin and fine sets of ivory teeth undamaged by rot. Wife Huang claps her hands in delight. She sweeps towards me and gathers me into her sweet, fragranced embrace. ‘Welcome to the Huang family, beloved Daughter-in-Law!’
Wife Huang then releases me and gazes upon me at arm’s length. ‘Oh you are lovely!’ she beams. ‘How lovely you are!’
Master Huang is more muted in his reception. Sotto voce, he says to his wife, ‘The girl is ugly. Horrendously hooked of nose.’
‘Oh shuush!’ scolds Wife Huang. ‘Can’t you see we are blessed? Once the dirt is scrubbed off she will be a passable bride!’
As Wife Huang fusses over me and Master Huang frowns, I am too timid to utter a word. Young Master Huang, to whom I am betrothed, is nowhere in sight. Shyness prohibits me from asking where he might be.
A pretty maidservant named Duckweed conducts me to a bedchamber with rosewood furniture and a four-poster bed with a canopy of chiffon, where I am to rest before the wedding the following day. Incense braziers burn patchouli and myrrh, and goldfish swim in a flower-and-bird-painted porcelain bowl. I daren’t touch anything, lest I grubby it with my hands.