Chapter 485: Ghosts

On the first day of the first month of the second year of Wude, just after the cockcrow, the "tithing chief" of the Xiang clan in Qidong Township, Zhaoge County, Henei Commandery — let us call him Chief Xiang — rolled over and rose early. Urged on by this patriarch, the whole household, young and old, bustled into action. When preparations were nearly complete, he had everyone dress properly, ready to offer sacrifices to the ancestral spirits in turn.

Yet only at this moment did a slovenly middle-aged man slowly push open his door, yawning as he stepped into the courtyard and saluted his stern-faced elder brother.

"Elder Brother, great fortune in the first month."

Xiang Chang, courtesy name Ziping, was not bad-looking, but he neglected his appearance. At least for the New Year he spoke a proper word, yet his very next sentence infuriated Chief Xiang: "Usually there is no wine, but today is the first month — surely there is a cup of pepper-and-cypress wine to drink?"

"All you think of is wine, drunk senseless all day long!"

"Grain is scarce everywhere now, and the court forbids officials from brewing wine. As tithing chief, how dare I take the lead in breaking the ban? Are you trying to ruin me?" Chief Xiang glared at his younger brother with irritation. "Use water instead. Hurry and tidy yourself up — you're the only one we're waiting for."

Water is so tasteless. Xiang Ziping was quite disappointed, but he refused the hot water his sister-in-law brought over. Instead, he walked to the water vat, scooped up icy cold water, and poured it directly over his own head! The Xiang children stared, dumbfounded.

"Don't imitate him."

"Your second uncle is a renowned fool for ten villages around."

Chief Xiang felt a pang of grief just thinking about it. Their family was not enormously wealthy, and even in their youth, when it came to schooling, the brighter younger brother had been given priority. Xiang Ziping did not disappoint, earning some renown in the commandery. But later, during the transition from Han to Xin, Xiang Ziping, struck by who knows what, or perhaps driven foolish by studying the mystifying Book of Changes, actually refused an official summons from the court and returned home to live in seclusion.

One could say he avoided the calamities of dynastic change. When the State of Wei in turn replaced Xin, Governor Feng sent men to recruit him, but Xiang Ziping remained unmoved, spending his days sunning himself, picking at lice, and pondering his abstruse and arcane learning, muttering strange sayings like "Riches are not as good as poverty, nobility not as good as lowliness."

Chief Xiang could do nothing with him. Well, their family was not poor anyway — they might as well treat it as feeding one extra mouth.

The ceremony had been prepared in the courtyard. Tiny dried pepper blossoms had been placed in the cups, set aside long ago — because of the wars, this ritual had been suspended for several years. Last year, in the first month, fighting still raged north of the Yellow River. Now the situation had somewhat stabilized; at the very least, Henei was at peace, and the old traditions were remembered once more.

The Xiang children were told by their elders to drink first. They sniffed the pungent scent of the pepper blossoms and refused to take a sip.

It was Xiang Ziping who went over and told them: "Pepper is the essence of the Yuheng star. Eating it makes one youthful and slow to age, and it can also suppress evil qi so you will no longer fall ill."

The children found this intriguing and only then obediently drank. Xiang Ziping also told them the origin of this tradition: "Drinking pepper wine must begin with the youngest, because for you, the New Year means growing a year older. Drinking first carries the meaning of congratulations. After drinking, you must pour wine for your elders."

"Because that means the elders have lost another year."

As he spoke, he led the children to face the household's "elder," Chief Xiang, and offer a toast.

This scene pleased Chief Xiang greatly. If only his younger brother were always this sensible. But the next moment, Xiang Ziping showed his true colors again. This king of the children actually took the lead in pestering Chief Xiang for "glue-tooth candy."

Glue-tooth candy is malt sugar. According to Henei tradition, one must also boil hemp seeds and beans into a powder, then roll it into long strips to eat together — it was what the children looked forward to all year.

But there was none of that either, because although Chief Xiang was a well-off householder, he was too stingy to use hunger-satisfying wheat for a time-consuming, labor-intensive little treat meant only to satisfy a craving. Who knew what next year would bring? When the old grain ran out before the new harvest, they might go hungry! Even the landlord's house had no surplus grain. In times like these, a family eating and drinking its fill was good enough.

Chief Xiang impatiently shooed away his brother and the children: "There are the five pungent vegetables — go eat the five pungent vegetables!"

These five pungent vegetables were chives, shallots, garlic, field mustard, and other sharp-flavored greens mixed and cooked together — and that was the New Year's morning meal.

The children frowned at these green, "stinky" vegetables, finding them hard to swallow. Xiang Ziping, however, kept stuffing them into his mouth. Erudite as he was, he also told the children a story.

"One year, while traveling to Luoyang, I strayed by mistake into the ghost market of Mount Mang!"

Telling ghost stories to children on New Year's — who but an eccentric like Xiang Ziping would do such a thing? He said: "Just as I was frantic with fear, a Confucian scholar also entered the ghost market. But none of the ghosts dared harm him; instead, they all hid away. And so I was saved."

"I then asked that scholar how he could make all the ghosts avoid him. He replied, 'I originally possess no magic art — it is only that I ate the five pungent vegetables before coming...'"

At this point, the children had already gathered eagerly around Xiang Ziping, wondering why even ghosts would fear someone who ate the five pungent vegetables — when they saw Xiang Ziping suddenly open his mouth wide and breathe a great gust of air over everyone.

"Ugh..."

The five pungent vegetables were already strong-smelling to begin with, and after being chewed in his mouth, they were even fouler. The children all scattered with a roar.

Only Xiang Ziping remained where he was, clutching his belly in laughter. "Now do you understand why?"

After a while, the children forgot about it and came running back excitedly, keeping Xiang Ziping company as he hung peachwood charms — they had heard these could also drive away ghosts.

"Remember, ghosts fear not only peachwood charms, but also stench."

"Then would dung and urine work too?" The little nephew, who had lost his parents and could only lodge with the Xiang family, seemed to have grasped the method for dealing with ghosts, and then pressed further:

"Uncle, you said you've seen a ghost — what does a ghost actually look like?"

A group of young boys with their hair in tufts crowded around Xiang Ziping, frightened and curious at once.

The little nephew asked: "Do they look like the Red Eyebrow ghosts across the river?"

Xiang Ziping stopped what he was doing and looked at his nephew. "Who spoke to you of the Red Eyebrows?"

The child said: "The peddler who comes to the hamlet. He said that on the other side of the great river, there are countless evil men, all ghosts transformed from drowned wronged souls, their foreheads smeared with blood — they're called the Red Eyebrow ghosts..."

That was the sole channel of news for the youths of this small village. Xiang Ziping pondered briefly, then said: "I, for one, think that the descriptions of the Red Eyebrows in Henei nowadays are greatly exaggerated. As far as I know, they are merely pitiful people who could not survive and fled into exile seeking food..."

"What nonsense are you spouting!"

At that moment, Chief Xiang came over carrying a struggling chicken, cutting off his younger brother's foolish talk. "The Red Eyebrows are nothing but murdering, plundering bandits. Wherever they pass, not a blade of grass grows. When hunger drives them to extremes, they even eat the living. To my eyes, they are more vicious than ghosts."

He frightened the children away and glared at Xiang Ziping. "Aren't you the one who pays no heed to worldly affairs and only wants to be a hermit? Why say such things to them? Do you know the Red Eyebrows so well?"

He did know a bit more than the average person. This time, Xiang Ziping did not argue back. He went to help his elder brother kill the chicken — "help" in name only; in truth, he merely held down the wings and legs, and when his brother brought down the knife, he even turned his face away, unable to bear it.

"Why turn away? When it comes to eating chicken, I don't see you afraid." Chief Xiang scolded his brother, but his hands did not stop. Together they burned incense before the gate, set up peachwood figures, twisted pine and cypress branches into ropes and hung them up, and sprinkled chicken blood on the door — a ritual to expel pestilence.

The true "ghost" was only the all-pervading pestilence. The household once had over a dozen members. After a great epidemic passed, only two-thirds remained. The elderly had all passed away, and even the servants were nearly all dead. Outside the hamlet gate, grave mounds faced one another.

Their parents' grave mound was not far away. When the two brothers took the chicken to pay their respects, the old farmers they met were quite deferential to the Xiang brothers. Xiang Ziping was the most learned man in the village; people sought him out for everything from carving steles to reading letters. Although Xiang Ziping wished to be a "hermit," he was not arrogant toward his fellow villagers. He turned no one away and refused any payment, only pulling them aside when the task was done to ask one question: "Do you have any wine?"

As for Chief Xiang, he was even more responsible for managing the entire village's taxes and militia training.

The village hamlet's sacrificial rites were solemn, yet also casual. When it was over, people naturally fell into idle chat before the clan graves:

"Chief, will we still have to drill after spring begins?" The farmers all hoped that after the first month ended, they could properly tend their crops. Being organized by the hamlet and the post station to drill in the township was far too much of a disruption.

"Of course we must drill." Chief Xiang kept the authorities' propaganda — the "Red Eyebrow threat theory" — ever on his lips. "Haven't you heard? The neighboring Dong Commandery is being ravaged by Red Eyebrow bandits right now. A great battle was fought south of the great river."

"Didn't the Wei army win? We heard it was even a great victory." The old farmers, however, were not the least bit sensitive to this; instead, they felt their homeland was quite safe. "Besides, even if a small band of raiders came through, Wei Commandery stands in the way. They'd never reach Henei territory."

Ah, they were simply afraid that if they drilled too well, they'd be dragged to the front lines to fight!

The old farmers chatted a while longer about domestic matters. It was very clear that Chief Xiang was already a die-hard official of Wei. Whenever his fellow villagers complained that taxes were heavy and corvée labor burdensome, he would retort: "Could they be heavier than during the Xin Dynasty?"

"That, they have not been."

Under the Xin Dynasty, nominally only a one-tenth tax was collected, but the ad hoc levies were far too numerous. There was even the absurd act of ordering each household to hand over half of its assessed property.

Chief Xiang had been to the commandery office of Henei and had seen the procession of the Fifth Emperor from afar, and he was quite proud of this. After becoming tithing chief, he had also gone to the county seat to receive "training" from the Assistant Magistrate, a Palace Gentleman sent from the Western Capital, and had learned many new postures.

He lectured the old farmers: "Think back to when the 'royal army' of the Xin usurper Wang Mang passed through and forcibly demanded grain. If we refused, they seized us as conscripts and sent us to the front lines. If we gave it, we could not pay the rent-tax the following year. What were we to do?"

"I was not yet tithing chief then, and only went as a scholar of the hamlet to reason with that Xin army officer. He actually said that if the farmers sent their wives and daughters to serve them, they would not need to hand over the grain. How could such words even leave his mouth! No wonder people at the time said they would rather meet the Red Eyebrows than meet the Grand Preceptor."

Under the State of Wei, the tax collected was one-twelfth of the harvest, but because Henei had actively contributed to the war effort, it received a reward of a ten percent tax reduction. The child poll tax was abolished outright, and there were no more ad hoc levies arriving at any unknown moment. All told, the burden could be considered lighter — setting aside the unavoidable local corruption, that is.

But with frequent warfare in Hebei and Henan, plenty of Henei men had been conscripted to haul grain and build roads; luckily they didn't have to go far, were sent back as much as possible during the busy farming season, and anyone who had already served once was exempt from further service for three years.

He said to the village tithing-man, "The reason His Majesty ordered every district and village to train militia is to guard against bandits — the Red Eyebrows are right across the river! Would you rather have the new army, the Red Eyebrows, or the tax clerks of Great Wei?"

The moment they heard that, all their grumbling seemed to vanish like smoke, and their opinion was unanimous.

"Tithing-man, of course we'd rather be subjects of Wei. I have a son serving in the army too; he had someone in camp write a letter home, and it was the young gentleman Shaoping who was kind enough to read it aloud for me! He's with the Ji province troops and was allotted land at Julu — a full fifty mu. That's more land than my family could scrape together in five generations."

But this awareness was still not deep enough, nothing like that in Wei, Guanzhong, or Luoyang. After all, Henei, as the luckiest commandery under heaven, had not suffered a single military disaster since the end of the Xin dynasty. First it was peacefully taken over by Ma Yuan, and Diwu Lun too adopted a conciliatory policy, leaving the local power structure untouched. During the Hebei campaigns, Henei provided the grain while Wei Commandery provided the men; very few of them had to march off to distant battlefields.

This left the people of Henei contented and comfortable, yet ignorant of war. On the way home, the tithing-man was deeply troubled by this: "They say it's a whole commandery away, but it's barely over a hundred li to the big river crossing!"

As they neared home, they caught a faint whiff of brewing wine drifting from the village's other well-to-do household. Glancing back at his younger brother smacking his lips, the tithing-man's heart softened. "We didn't get around to making malt sugar, but on the seventh day of the first month, take some cloth to the county market and trade it for a little — let the children have a taste."

"Truth is, I stashed five shi of grain at the very bottom of the granary, planning to brew wine with it next year."

Xiang Ziping broke into a grin. "Elder Brother means to break the prohibition?"

"The court doesn't enforce it all that strictly." The tithing-man smacked his own lips too. "Pepper-water — honestly, even worse to drink than peach-branch broth."

"Just as the children can't settle down without a taste of sugar in their mouths, if you and I don't get a cup of wine down, this New Year might as well not have happened!"

……

And so the New Year festival passed. From the first day of the first month to the seventh, each day had its own customs.

On the sixth day, the tithing-man, worn out from days of bustle, could finally sleep in. The women gathered up cloth and cut "five-colored silk" — this had nothing to do with Diwu Lun, but was an old custom of the Central Plains: they cut it into human shapes and pasted them on screens, or wore them at the temples, crafting them into flower-shaped ornaments to give one another as gifts.

As for the children, they took wooden poles with a long-discarded wuzhu copper coin dangling from the tip, ran circles around the manure heap, and then brought the coin at the end of the pole down hard on the pile of dung.

It was said that this could make a person's wishes come true.

For the children of the Xiang household, their wish was, of course, to eat malt sugar! Their second uncle, Xiang Shaoping, had set off for town at first light with a bolt of cloth. Though he styled himself "a minor recluse hidden at home" — the sort whom no ordinary person could get to stir and who had no interest in office — when it came to the children, Xiang Ziping was more than happy to run the errand.

They all waited eagerly for their uncle to return bearing fragrant malt sugar.

"Spin a few more circles! The more you spin, the more likely your wish comes true!"

Xiang Ziping's favorite nephew spun on and on, who knows how many times. The pit by the privy stank, but the malt sugar in his heart smelled sweet.

He seemed to hear his playmates cheering him on, to hear the clanging of gongs, to hear the people all around suddenly break into a run, fleeing for their lives back toward their homes.

By the time the young nephew finally stopped, his head was spinning and he plopped down onto the ground.

When he looked up, he saw a mass of figures in the distance rushing swiftly toward the village. He thought it was his second uncle, but after rubbing his eyes, what met his gaze were streaks of blood-red eyebrows.

A band of ragged Red Eyebrow fighters, blades in hand, were striding into the quiet little hamlet.

Everyone else had fled home. Only one foolish half-grown child remained, clutching a wooden pole, standing before the manure pit and staring blankly at them.

Acting on orders from Chengtou Zilu to cross north over the river, they had skirted the heavily defended walled towns and spent two days reaching this small rural settlement far from the main roads. They were simply too famished to go on.

"Time to requisition grain."

A Red Eyebrow aide beckoned amiably to the child, motioning him over to guide them. But the half-grown boy only backed step by step toward the manure pit, his face full of terror, until he was on the verge of stumbling in — and then something suddenly flashed through his mind.

That's right — Uncle said ghosts fear filth!

He abruptly bent down, scooped up a handful of filthy pig dung, and hurled it hard at those garish, terrifying red eyebrows, his voice breaking into a sob.

"Go away!"

"You evil ghosts!"

……

PS: Chapter 2 will be up in the middle of the night.

For first-month customs in the Han dynasty, see the *Jingchu Suishiji*: "Also, string coins onto the foot of a staff, circle around and cast them onto the dung heap — it is said to make wishes come true."