Chapter 1: The Grave-Sweeping

During the Clear and Bright season the rain falls in endless drizzle; travelers on the road are heartsick to the point of breaking.

Paper spirit-money flutters up like white butterflies; the sound of people weeping is like the cuckoo's cry.

There were still some days before Clear and Bright, but Cold Food was drawing near. Cold Food was the greatest mourning festival of us Han people.

On that day all fire and smoke were forbidden, and only cold food was eaten.

It was also the custom to make offerings to ancestors and the departed, so every Cold Food the burial mounds in the countryside were crowded with countless people burning paper money to express their longing for their ancestors and departed kin.

The day before, the county office of Xinhui in Guangdong had posted a notice ordering the common people to leave the city together today to sweep the graves. Once today passed, the city gates would not be opened again, lest the Old Bandits withdraw and then return.

The so-called Old Bandits meant the Southern Ming forces under Li Dingguo. Li's troops had attacked Guangdong twice, in the tenth and eleventh years of Shunzhi, and had nearly taken Guangzhou and overrun all of Guangdong.

Fortunately Heaven's mandate lay with the Qing, and both of Li's offensives had failed. His forces had already withdrawn back into Guangxi the month before.

Yet although Li Dingguo's main army had pulled back to Guangxi, he had still left some men inside Guangdong. Xinhui county town was the gateway to Guangzhou, with convenient water and land routes, and was a place that had to be held.

If Xinhui fell, Guangzhou would be in danger. For this reason, when Li Dingguo attacked Guangdong the second time, his main objective had been the capture of Xinhui, and he had besieged the county town for a full eight months.

Now, although the main strength of Li's forces had withdrawn, the Qing troops in Xinhui still dared not let down their guard, and the city gates would not be opened lightly even for a moment.

But with Cold Food approaching, County Magistrate Huang Zhizheng, mindful that the county town had been besieged for eight months and that countless residents had died or been wounded, made a special request to the garrison commander to open the gates for one day so the people could go out and make offerings to their kin.

After repeated deliberation, the garrison commander agreed. Once he had the garrison commander's consent, Huang Zhizheng at once had notices posted and organized men to keep order.

To guard against mishap, the Qing troops holding the city sent a squad of soldiers to stand watch outside the walls, and made corresponding arrangements inside the city as well.

After the gates were opened, more than a thousand commoners filed out of the city to sweep the graves.

Seen from a distance, every one of them was dressed in white mourning clothes, every face marked with grief, and the looks they cast at the Qing soldiers guarding the walls were full of bitter hatred.

Yet all of them dared to be angry but not to speak, and only hurried through the gate. As for the Qing soldiers on the walls, not one of them was not silent, pretending not to see the hatred in the people's eyes.

For once they did not speak harshly to the commoners, still less beat them at will, and they did not even dare raise their voices. It was truly strange to see: how had the butchers who ordinarily preyed on the people all turned into kind-hearted bodhisattvas?

Once the people were outside the city, some began scattering paper money along the road. The paper money drifting to the ground in the wind, together with the low murmuring of the crowd, made the scene of the grave-sweeping procession all the more solemn, and all the more desolate.

The crowd was mostly men; women were rarely seen, and the few there were were either aged crones or girls not yet come of age.

Men from the county office kept order in the procession. Along both sides of the road one could see Qing soldiers with swords at their waists and spears in hand.

Like the Qing troops at the gate, most of these soldiers were unwilling to look the commoners in the face, and some turned their heads away outright, pretending to look elsewhere.

Only when the wind-blown paper money settled on their bodies or at their feet did these soldiers twitch their cheeks, imperceptibly, and show a trace of emotion.

The residents of Xinhui who had died were buried together in one place. To call it burial was generous; in truth they had simply been thrown into hastily dug pits.

Most of what was buried there were incomplete remains, and some had no remains at all, only the clothes the dead had worn in life. Many of the towering grave mounds clearly held more than one person, and no one knew how many lay beneath.

Compared with the mounds whose kin still knew them, the unclaimed lonely graves were even more numerous, making up the greater part of this mass burial ground.

Approaching home makes one timid; approaching a grave makes one's heart panic.

When the mourning procession finally reached the mass burial ground, the grief pent up in the crowd could no longer be held back. No one knew whose family began weeping first, but moments later the whole burial ground had dissolved into a chorus of wailing.

The weeping tore at heart and lungs, and to hear it was like being cut with a knife.

As the saying goes, a real man does not easily shed tears, yet what met the eye here was a thousand men weeping all at once. It was enough to stop one's heart.

The Qing soldiers who heard the weeping from a distance did not dare come over for a single look. Many of the runners keeping order had also lost kin, and now they too were heavy-hearted.

Some stood silently in grief; some knelt on the ground and cried out. Only a few runners whom County Magistrate Huang Zhizheng had brought from his home district felt none of this grief for the dead, and stood to one side speaking in low voices.

"The Old Bandits besieged the county town for months on end. The people of Xinhui are all but wiped out. Ah." A runner named Huang Si looked at the scene before him and sighed with deep feeling.

Another runner nodded in agreement.

"That's the truth.

I heard His Honor the magistrate say that those killed and eaten numbered over seventy thousand alone. On top of that, the soldiers under the Prince of Pingnan and the Prince of Jingnan carried off several thousand women.

There are no more than one or two thousand people left in the city now. The people of Xinhui have indeed been wiped out!"

Hearing this, Qi Er, the runner standing at the far edge, could not help saying, "The soldiers of those two princes are truly tiger-and-wolf troops. They don't behave like soldiers of the court at all. The evil they've done..."

"Keep your voice down.

You mustn't say such things carelessly." Huang Si was a prudent man.

He shot Qi Er a glare, then looked around before saying, "If you want to speak of evil, the Old Bandits' evil is worse. If they hadn't come to attack Xinhui, would the people of this city have suffered so terribly?"

"Yes, yes. It's the Old Bandits who did the evil."

Qi Er knew he had misspoken and hastily nodded in agreement. He was about to curse the Old Bandits a few more times when he heard someone cry out from the grave mounds: "Teacher Wu has fainted from weeping!"

Qi Er asked in surprise, "Which Teacher Wu?"

Someone beside him said, "The one who teaches school east of the city."

"Oh." Qi Er suddenly understood, and his face filled with sympathy. "He must be grieving too hard over his wife."

Huang Si looked toward where the shout had come from and shook his head.

"Madam Li was truly a good woman.

That day the soldiers had come to seize Teacher Wu, but she said her husband was fifty and still had no son, and that if the soldiers took him away, the Wu family line would be cut off. So she begged the soldiers to take her and eat her instead, and thus saved Teacher Wu's life.

Thinking of it now, that woman was truly chaste and heroic!"

Everyone nodded at this. Then Qi Er thought of something and asked, puzzled, "But wasn't Madam Li taken and eaten? Then what's buried in that grave?"

Huang Si's cheek twitched, and he said in a low voice, "Madam Li's head. The soldiers left it behind. After the Old Bandits withdrew, Teacher Wu buried it here."

As he spoke, he caught sight of a familiar figure not far off, and pointed him out to the others.

"There, that's Scholar Lin.

His wife, Madam Mo, was a good woman too.

That day the soldiers came to seize his mother-in-law to cook and eat, but she said the old woman was too old and her flesh would not taste good, while she herself was young, and the flesh on her body was tender, and the soldiers could feast on her to their hearts' content.

The soldiers listened, let the mother-in-law go, and ate Madam Mo instead. They didn't even leave her head behind...

What's buried in this grave is Madam Mo's clothing from when she was alive. Scholar Lin kept it as a keepsake for himself." (Author's note: gu means mother-in-law.)

"But the most pitiful of all was the daughter of Scholar Liang's family. Eleven years old, and at such a tender age she knew to offer her own body in place of her father's. Truly admirable."

"I heard the soldiers had thought the girl's frame was too small, with too little meat on it, and didn't want to kill her.

But the girl said to them, 'Do you think that because my body is small and my flesh is little, I'm not enough to fill your bellies?' Then she snatched a blade and cut her own throat. Seeing that, the soldiers let Scholar Liang go, and boiled his daughter's body."

"Madam Huang, wife of Wu Shirang, a student at the county school, also begged to die in her husband's place. I heard that when the soldiers killed Madam Huang, they wept as they did it, and ate her with tears streaming down their faces. Ah, what a tragedy among men."

"......"

One horrifying tale after another was told, and even the hardest heart could not bear to hear them. The runners' expressions had long since changed; inwardly they were all sighing with grief, and at the same time thankful that such calamities had not befallen themselves.

Even the most grief-stricken cannot weep forever. By now the wailing on the graves had gradually subsided.

Everywhere one looked there was the smoke and fire of burning paper money. The mourning staffs stuck into the grave mounds were especially striking, one after another in an endless line, impossible to count.

Huang Si stood for a while, then looked up at the sky and told the others, "I reckon we'll be able to return to the city in another half a watch. Everyone stay alert. Later, see which families need help, and lend a hand where you can."

"Aye, understood." The runners answered in unison.

Huang Si, finding nothing more to say, turned around. By chance he noticed a young man standing before two fresh graves in the northeast corner.

Because the man's back was to Huang Si, he could not make out his face. What struck Huang Si as strange was that before the young man there were no offerings, not even paper money.

Nor did the young man kneel on the ground like the others; he stood bolt upright, and not a sob, not even a choked sound, could be heard from him.

"Who is that? How can he come empty-handed like that? Does anyone know him?" Curious, Huang Si turned and asked the runners beside him.

The others looked where he was looking and all shook their heads; not one of them knew the man. Just then a runner who was born and bred in the county happened to walk by.

They stopped him and asked. The runner glanced at the young man and did recognize him.

He told them, "That's Scholar Zhou. His parents, wife, and children were all eaten by the soldiers.

He's the only one left in his whole family. A pitiful case."

He paused, then added, "Those two graves are empty. There's nothing in them."

Hearing this, the others were at once filled with sympathy for Scholar Zhou. After saying a few words of pity, they dispersed and went about their own tasks.

Zhou Shixiang, standing before the graves, did not hear the runners' talk in the distance. Even if he had, he would have made no response to their pitying words.

What needed weeping over had long since been wept over; what tears needed shedding had long since been shed. Now, apart from revenge, there was no other thought in Zhou Shixiang's heart.

His parents, wife, and children had all become food in other men's bellies. Such a horrifying tragedy shocked even Zhou Shixiang, who was living his second life, and brought agony to him, who had fully inherited the emotions and memories of the body's original owner.

This pain was bone-deep pain, pain he would never forget as long as he lived, pain that would wake him in fright for the rest of his life!

Author's note: Cold Food was originally the greatest mourning festival of the Han people. In later ages it merged with Clear and Bright, and Clear and Bright came to be observed instead.