As Duckweed bathes me in a brass claw-footed tub of water sprinkled with rose petals, she smirks and wrinkles her nose. Granted, I am skinny and fleabitten and turn the water black, but her rudeness offends me. I am about to marry into the most prosperous family in Goatherd Valley. Who is this servant girl to act so haughty and superior? After my bath, I change into a clean linen robe, and Duckweed brings me a tray with bowls of steaming rice, stewed meat and pickled vegetables. Famished, I bolt everything down, pretending not to care as Duckweed titters behind her dainty hand.
Later, as I lie in bed, Wife Huang enters the bedchamber like a visitation from the Goddess of Mercy. She kneels at my bedside and strokes my temples with a gentle smile. Not once in my thirteen years of girlhood has anyone touched me with such tenderness. A lump forms in my throat.
‘Sleep, beloved Daughter-in-Law,’ she whispers. ‘Tomorrow is the wedding. A day of joyous festivity. You need your rest.’
Daybreak. A sunny morning of birdsong, fragrant breezes and cloudless sky. In my wedding robe of embroidered red silk, my hair elaborately braided into the Anticipating Immortals style, I am radiant. In fact, I will shun modesty and own that I am beautiful for the first time in my life. Looking over the guests in the courtyard, I understand the wedding ceremony is to be an intimate affair, with only Master Huang, Wife Huang and an uncle and aunt in attendance. Evidently there has been a recent death in the family, for they are wearing mourning robes of black and are very solemn indeed. The Buddhist monk arrives and speaks in hushed tones with the Huangs. A cockerel is strutting around, cawing and pecking at the ground. Odd, I think. Why is it on the loose? Young Master Huang has not yet come, and I am jittery and dying to know what my husband will be like.
‘May the ceremony begin,’ intones the Buddhist monk. A stable boy comes forth and catches the cockerel, which squawks and flaps. The boy squats besides me, pinning the cockerel’s wings down and holding it steady. Where is Young Master Huang? The monk holds up a copper censer by a chain and sways it over the squawking bird and me. Strange blue smoke pours out of the censer, chokingly pungent and stinging my eyes. The monk begins to chant and, with an ear attuned to sorcerers’ dialects, I hear he is chanting not Buddhist sutras but ancient dark magic. He is not a monk, but a shaman. A necromancer, conjuring spirits, summoning the dead. The black-robed wedding guests are silent, except for Wife Huang, who sinks to her knees, sobbing and beating her chest. Where is Young Master Huang? The shaman’s eyes roll backwards in their sockets and, as he ululates, I hear the ancient Chinese for ‘marry’ and understand I am being joined in holy matrimony with the bird.
The wedding banquet is a sumptuous feast served with silver ewers of wine. Not a morsel passes my lips and I don’t speak a word. The bridegroom, however, is in high spirits, throwing his wattle-and-combed head back and crowing vociferously, scampering about on clawed feet and pecking up the grain Master Huang scatters for him. Wife Huang has recovered from her sobbing. Whenever our eyes meet across the banquet table she beams and raises her goblet of plum wine: ‘To our son’s new bride!’
After the banquet, Duckweed the maidservant leads the cockerel and me to the bridal chamber. She bolts the latticed door when she leaves, locking the newly-weds in. Unperturbed, the cockerel hops and squawks and flaps up on the conjugal bed. He struts in a half-circle then defecates on the bedspread. Has the son of the Huangs died and been reincarnated into this bird? Is that what the ceremony was about?
‘Young Master Huang?’ I call experimentally.
The bird claps its beak and blinks its beady eyes. I shake my head at my foolishness then decide to call the cockerel Young Master Huang anyway, as he responds to it.
As the cockerel puffs up his feathers and swaggers about, I sit on the edge of the four-poster bed in my red silk wedding gown, wringing my hands on my lap as I ponder the fate that awaits me. Am I really to spend the rest of my days wedded to a bird? What a preposterous destiny! Then, out of nowhere, I hear the low cackle of the Sorceress Wu: ‘Wretched she-brat! Character determines destiny. Fate is the excuse of the spineless and weak!’ And though it was my evil grandmother who sold me into this strange predicament, her words lend me strength.
Dusk creeps into the bridal chamber, and I plot and wait as the shadows thicken. My spouse is quieter now, grooming his plumage, plucking out the odd feather not to his liking with his beak. When at last the bolt slides back and the door creaks open, the bridal chamber is completely dark. It is Duckweed, bringing the supper tray. I needn’t see her face to know she is smirking. Duckweed lowers the tray on a rosewood table then turns to the dresser to light the oil lamp. I waste no time. I leap up, grab the water carafe from the tray and smash its neck against the bedpost. At the shattering of glass, Duckweed gasps and spins round. I knock her head with my knuckles and drag her to me by her hair. I touch the jagged edge of the carafe to her throat.
‘Don’t scream,’ I warn her, ‘or I’ll stab out your eyes!’
Duckweed whimpers. In the flickering oil-lamp light her eyes are frantic. Not so high and mighty any more.
‘Tell me what is going on. Speak!’
Duckweed speaks. A breathless rush of words. Young Master Huang died in a tragic hunting accident the year before. He’d passed on before marrying, so his parents wanted to find him a bride, a companion for the afterlife. I was the Spirit Bride in a Spirit Wedding and the cockerel the stand-in for the Spirit Groom. Then, with some satisfaction, Duckweed adds that the eminent Huang family would never have wed me to their handsome son were he alive.
‘Now let me go!’ Duckweed weeps. ‘I have told you everything.’
‘Liar!’ I spit. ‘What happens next?’
Duckweed won’t say. I scratch the broken glass of the carafe against her cheek, drawing blood. ‘Oh no! Not my pretty face!’ she wails. The maidservant then reveals the final stage of the Spirit Wedding: the Sacrificial Ceremony. The following morning I am to be ritually slaughtered then laid to rest beside the corpse of Young Master Huang in the Huang family mausoleum, joining him in eternal sleep. I thank Duckweed, then I beat her with my fists until she is limp and barely conscious. I rip off my accursed silk wedding gown and change into Duckweed’s servant robes and woven reed sandals. Out of spite I snatch up the Spirit Bridegroom, tucking him under my arm. I slip out of the unbolted door and make my getaway.
IV
I flee through the night. The runaway Spirit Bride, dashing pell-mell through paddy fields of croaking frogs, leaping over ditches and streams. ‘Run! Run! Run!’ squawks Young Master Huang under my arm. And I obey, hurtling through the darkness without pause for breath or to ease the stitch in my side. The Huang family own a stable of horses and will come galloping for me at dawn.
Where in the Middle Kingdom am I fleeing to? As far away from Goatherd Valley as possible. And then, who knows? As I tear through the night, I think of you, the father I have never met. Eunuch Wu of the Imperial Palace in Chang’an, loyal servant to the Emperor Taizong. I decide to go to Chang’an and find you. I am your daughter, and perhaps our blood bond will oblige you to find me lodgings and work. Perhaps you will find me a position as a chambermaid in the Imperial Palace. Perhaps the Emperor Taizong will fall in love with me, and I will ascend from servant girl to empress. And with these fatuous thoughts of fame and fortune in my head, I run and run, wishing I could grow wings and fly to Chang’an.
By sunrise I am staggering beneath the strange turquoise peaks of the Tiltingsky mountain range, following the Turnabout River to its end. Under my arm Young Master Huang stabs at me with his beak, wriggling to be set free. Fed up with his squirming, I wring his neck. Widowed at the age of thirteen, I tuck my spouse’s feathered corpse back under my arm and stagger onwards, not daring to stop. At sundown I build a fire, pluck Young Master Huang, then roast and eat him. He is delicious. As I suck the marrow from his bones and lick bird fat from my fingers, I contemplate the journey ahead. The city of Chang’an is three years away by foot, and one year by horse and cart. A thousand-league journey I must rise at the crack of dawn to begin. Sated with bird, I fall asleep, full of uncertainty but grateful not to be in the Huang family mausoleum, dead.