The next morning, in the grey of early dawn, Wei looked round at his family. Their faces were uniformly grimy, their eyes were caked with dust, and every so often they emitted short, gruff coughs as they tried to dislodge the dirt and phlegm from their lungs. Exhausted, sunk in upon themselves, but still walking.
Grandfather and the two tots slept on the cart beside Second Son, who Wei still had not talked with. Spider Girl was trudging along at the rear of the cart, vigilantly looking around for danger, but she walked with the utmost difficulty and her face was distorted with pain. Wei could only glance at her. She was flagging, increasingly unable to keep up, so he was having to slow the cart.
Not that the cart was going that fast. During the night the donkey had also visibly flagged. At first Wei had whacked him hard on his rump with his stick but after a while not even that hurried him on. He needed water. As the humans dehydrated they peed less and less and the little donkey dehydrated even faster.
What should he do? They were now down to less than two jars of drinking water. Give some to the donkey? On the dusty plain there were no signs of rivers or lakes. They did cross streams, but, because of the hordes which had already passed through them they were trodden-down mires, filled with mud and faeces and piss. Not even the donkey would drink that. After every stream they passed desperate people who had attempted to drink the water, now rolling around vomiting and shitting diarrhoea, or at last in the wrap of death.
Wei thought they could gather some of the water and boil it before trying to drink it – or at least give it to the donkey – but that would cost them valuable firewood.
The solution they arrived at was to help the donkey with her load. On each side of the cart, before they left home, Second Son had attached leather straps. Now Wei and Eldest Son pulled hard at them and took some of the weight. This hurried up the cart and cheered the donkey, which was being led by his wife, but it added to the difficulties of Spider Girl.
Eldest Son, pulling on the other side of the cart, brought Wei some comfort. He was strong, like an ox, but with a face so gentle and unperturbed. He never made any fuss. Just accepted a task, however difficult, and got on with it. Wei was so proud of his son. Of course, he was not the sharpest, most quick-witted of people. To be a farmer you not only needed strength, you also had to have your wits about you, to be aware of everything that was happening on your farm. If, pray to the gods, Eldest Son ever became the farmer of the family’s lands, he would have difficulties, but for now he was everything a father, a family, needed.
On they slogged. His wife had fallen back slightly, letting the rein lengthen out, and she and her beloved Eldest Son were talking softly. Wei was half listening. She was speaking to him in a low soothing voice, almost crooning as she had when she was lullabying him in his wooden cot. She was telling him about how their life would be when this madness, this evil was over, when they were all once more safely returned home, living on their land. How, when she was in old age, he would be the owner and farmer of the land, she and his father, the grandparents, looking after the youngest grandchildren while he and his wife and his older children farmed the land and ran the household.
But while he listened, suddenly Wei was gripped with horror. With a jolt he understood what was actually going on right before his eyes. As she spoke his wife was quietly, surreptitiously, slipping her son something. He would take it and then quietly, calmly, place it in his mouth. No wonder she had recently started to look so thin, so worn, so manic. It was not just because she had just given birth. She was secretly feeding her beloved eldest son. She was deliberately, repeatedly starving herself that he might live. Wei always checked portions of the food as it was handed out so there would be no arguments. Last night she had given fair shares to all. So what she was now feeding Eldest Son was certainly out of her own bowl.
He turned his face away in agony. What should he do? He could remonstrate with her, demand she ate more food, but he could not force her to. She would just point out that in doing what she did she was doing what he himself should be doing – preserving the life of their eldest son. She was being forced to starve herself by his refusal to do the necessary, moral thing in defence of his family and casting out its weaklings. She would say it was her iron will that was standing between the family and extinction. It wasn’t that she didn’t love all her children – except Spider Girl. It wasn’t that she didn’t love and normally show full respect to her father-in-law. It was just that she loved her eldest son most.
Awful decisions were facing Wei. He was not unobservant. Families were reaching these impossible decisions all about him. Casting off the oldest, the youngest, the weakest. Again and again abandoned little toddlers and children came running towards them crying out for food and water, holding out their arms for warmth, but they had to walk right past them as though they did not exist. Old people stumbled and zigzagged towards them, pleading for help, a ride on their cart. They ignored them. These deserted old folk formed groups where they embraced each other for comfort. Round their feet and legs clung the young who had also been abandoned. The living had to navigate their way around these islands of the dying.
I am becoming a murderer, he thought. Do I, against all my sacred and familial obligations, cast off and condemn to death members of my own family? Do I, whose sole purpose in life is to protect, cherish, keep my family together, now plan how to murder them? So I choose Spider Girl – who then – my father? And then, as conditions worsen, one by one Baby Girl Wei, Cherry Blossom, Baby Boy Wei, Second Son, followed by…?
My wife would insist it was her. She would kill herself to put it beyond all argument. Just let my ancestors try to keep her out of their afterlife after she’d done that!!!
On their journey different people, different groups, talked to each other, exchanged news and information. Always, of course, from a safe distance. Wei had heard rumours of mass suicides. Of men who’d dug a hole, killed their family and laid them in the hole, then laid down on top of them and killed themselves. All so that, even though they could not be buried among their ancestors, they would not die and lie individually, doomed to be lonely, perpetually wandering ghosts. But instead they would all still be one family together in the afterlife.
*
Then things got worse. At a brief stop for a midday meal – a Japanese reconnaissance aircraft droning lazily above them – Spider Girl had passed Grandfather a bowl of water and Grandfather had fumbled and dropped it. Precious family water. Wei’s wife, with a righteous tremble in her voice that was not to be contradicted, blamed both at once and demanded that, forthwith, these two wasters and malignants were a threat to the survival of the family and should be cast out from it immediately.
Cherry Blossom and the two tots just stared. So did Grandfather, too bewildered to fathom what was going on. Eldest Son was very embarrassed and went to the front of the cart to feed and guard the donkey. Second Son went to stand beside his father to show he supported him. Spider Girl looked at the ground.
Their journey resumed. But Mrs Wei’s rage did not lessen, it grew. The folly of it all. The wickedness. And as she shouted and denounced him, Wei did not have the strength to gag or silence her, his dear wife, because, in his deepest heart, he knew she was right. He would have to expel from the family either his father or his eldest daughter. If he expelled one he would have enough power over his wife to insist the other stay. Which one? He could not throw out his beloved father for the reason of filial piety. There was no more foul or loathed crime than a son murdering his father. Quite rightly. He owed everything, everything to his father. Which left only his most beloved child, his eldest daughter. Wei could feel his own elder sister, who had been cast out and died in similar circumstances, moving inside him, writhing with the pain. But there was no choice. The family must survive. As though he had heavy lead in every bone in his body weighing him down, he turned slowly, with great difficulty, towards where Spider Girl had been walking. ‘My dearest Spider Girl,’ he said, and looked up at her. But she was not there. He could not see her. Everyone in the family looked around. No one could see her. From the rear of the cart where she had been walking she had disappeared. In the midst of their murderous argument, unnoticed, she had simply vanished.
Wei stopped the cart and jumped on top of it. He had last seen her feeding Grandfather, who sat on the right-hand side of the cart. So that was the direction in which she had probably headed. Wei looked back and forth for her. He couldn’t see her anywhere. How could Spider Girl, with all her walking difficulties, disappear so utterly?
‘Hah,’ said his wife triumphantly, ‘so she is an evil spirit. She can disappear at will!’
Wei could not afford to leave the cart himself to find her. He must send someone else. And out to the right of the cart, where the crowds thinned and the bandits and criminals ranged, was not a safe place to send anyone.
‘Father,’ said Second Son, ‘I will go and look for her.’
‘You will not.’
‘There is no one else to do it, Father. I can do it just as when we first left home and I went ahead in the night to see if there were bandits.’
Wei’s wife, the realist, pointed out drily that as Spider Girl had done what he was just about to do – throw her out of the family – what was the point of risking Second Son’s life going out to look for her when all he was going to do was throw her out again?
Wei gagged his wife, tied her hands behind her back, and sat her on the cart. People passing them mocked her for this.
‘Father,’ said Second Son, ‘I want to go and find her. I love my eldest sister more than anyone.’
Before his father could stop him Second Son ran off to the right of the cart. At least, he trotted off. No one in these conditions – being short of food and crucially water – could manage more than a quiet trot. But that applied as much to the bandits as to the honest folk – though the line between the two of them was rapidly eroding.
Indeed, among the crowds, in addition to the rumours of mass suicides, stories were spreading of blood drinking and cannibalism. Of women exchanging their babies and saying ‘Your family can eat mine. My family will eat yours.’ And some of them weren’t just rumours.
Second Son, keeping a sharp eye out all the time, avoiding any person or groups looking in any way hostile, hurried among the crowds, shouting Spider Girl’s name, calling out to people whether they’d anywhere seen a fat girl with a bad limp and hair on her upper lip? Uniformly they said no. He asked a group of monks – they hadn’t seen her. A group of university students – no. But Second Son did not lose hope. He felt useful and because he felt useful he felt happy. He was serving his father. He was looking to try and rescue his eldest sister, whom he loved more than anyone else. She always was the one who had talked to him most and with whom he had the most fun. She made him laugh. But he could see her nowhere.
With a sensible head on his young shoulders, Second Son returned to the cart after half an hour. Wei thanked him profoundly for trying to find her and reminded himself he must still speak to Second Son and try to soothe him when they were alone. But he was in agony about the loss of his daughter.
For five minutes, so that no one would see him cry, he crawled under the cart and wept. Then he came out. He untied his wife’s hands and gag and lifted her down off the cart and their journey resumed.
*
The next morning the landscape they were crossing started to change. Low hills hemmed them in on either side, so the people on the march became more herded together, started to walk in closer proximity to each other.
Wei was as usual pulling the right-hand side of the cart. His father, tressed to the cart, was sitting beside him, ignoring him, lost in his thoughts. His face and jaw were wriggling and grimacing. Suddenly he turned and looked straight at his son.
‘Explain this,’ he said in quite a hostile tone of voice.
‘Explain what, Father?’
‘Explain to me why the Mandate of Heaven has been revoked?’
‘I did not know it had been revoked, Father. Why do you say it has?’
‘It must have been. It is the only reason why all this can be happening. All this madness and confusion and suffering. It is the emperor.’
‘We do not have an emperor any longer, Father.’
‘We always have an emperor. And he is not ruling with justice or compassion. Instead there is anarchy. So, according to divine law and custom, the gods would have let the people overthrow him and put in his place an emperor who would rule with justice and compassion. That is what should have happened. Do you follow me?’
‘No, Father.’
‘Fool. It is the gods. Always in the past the gods have loved us human beings – rightly. The gods up there in the skies have watched out for evildoers and punished them, the gods in Heaven have loved all people equally so that we in turn would love all other human beings and treat them as our own brothers and sisters…’
‘Father…’
His father continued, his voice rising shrilly. ‘The gods loved us. They ordered the sun and moon and stars to bring us light, guide us day and night. They gave us the four seasons and the snow and the frost and the rain and the dew so that the five grains and the flax and the silk would grow in the ground and on the trees so that we could use and enjoy them. But…’
‘Father,’ Wei broke in, becoming increasingly alarmed. ‘I do not understand. what are you saying?’
‘Fool! Halfwit! What I am saying is that the gods, up there in Heaven, who are meant to be grateful for our gifts and offerings, who are meant to listen to our prayers and protect us, have grown malicious and greedy and concerned only with their own pleasures. They have turned Heaven into a brothel, a place of lust and drink and murder. A pigsty. A stinking shithole!’
‘Father, I cannot listen to you any longer.’
Straining at his bonds, his face rigid and livid, his father gazed right into his son’s helpless soul.
‘The gods are drunk! They are killing each other! They have deserted us, their people, abandoned us to the mercies of wild dogs and wolves!’
Wei could not listen to his father’s thoughts any longer. They corresponded too closely to dark thoughts he himself had been harbouring over the last few days. He shouted out to Eldest Son on the other side of cart to change places with him so each could rest the arms and shoulders they had been pulling on. Eldest Son would not understand a word his grandfather was saying and just grin at him in his usual embarrassed way.
His wife stopped the donkey. The two men exchanged places. They continued.
Wei didn’t know where to look, what to think. It was as though his father had laid his soul bare. All the thoughts, all the anger he had been suppressing for days came welling up. All the lines which had once run directly from him, his family, directly north to the gods in Heaven, seemed to be twisting and jangling and splintering in disarray. Where there had once been calm and loving voices, now there was only screaming and obscenities and lunacy. And he suspected that the ancestors were themselves suffering a similar pandemonium and bewilderment.
The hills on either side of them had come narrowed, squeezing all the refugees close up together as they passed though the gap. The Japanese spotter plane flew over them, dully, slowly.
Wei stirred himself. He had to pay attention. Keep watch. He looked around his family. All except one were still there. Still trying to survive. Families lost members all the time but the family endures. It was his duty to make sure that it endured. Wei ate bitterness and endured.
In the cart Grandfather’s mood changed. In his quickly fragmenting consciousness he suddenly saw his grandchildren and he loved them. These were difficult times. He would tell them a story that would soothe them, bring them cheer.
‘Do you want a story?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Baby Girl Wei and Baby Boy Wei chorused. Cherry Blossom clambered on board to listen. Second Son, who was walking behind the cart to keep guard, would have listened but was called forwards by Wei so he could lead the donkey while his wife fell back to keep guard.
‘The story I’m going to tell you is a very special one,’ said Grandfather. ‘It’s called “The Dragon’s Pearl”.’
‘Ooh,’ said everyone.
‘Once upon a time,’ said Grandfather, ‘there was a boy and his mother who lived close to the River Min. They were good people but very poor. The boy used to go out every day into the countryside and cut grass to sell at market, and by doing that they just managed to make a living.’
Wei started to relax. A grandfather telling stories to his grandchildren, what could be more right.
‘But one year,’ Grandfather continued, ‘a terrible drought came on the land. Nothing anywhere would grow. The river dried up. And however far the boy would wander into the countryside, everywhere the plants and the grass had died. And every day the mother and her son grew thirstier and more hungry.’
Baby Girl Wei was looking straight at her grandfather and sucking hard on her thumb.
‘But,’ continued Grandfather, ‘nothing would stop the little boy from walking out, further and further into the countryside, to try and find grass. And one day he was rewarded for all his effort. Because he came across a patch of the greenest, brightest grass he had ever seen, shining in the sunlight. He was so pleased. The little boy cut it immediately and took it back to the market and sold it for a great price and he and his mother were able to buy more than enough food and water.
‘The little boy kept on going back to the grass. Each day it was as green and plentiful as it had been the previous day.’
Elder Son and Wei both listened to this story they knew so well. Second Son couldn’t hear because he was too far ahead. Cherry Blossom slipped off the cart to walk next to her mother, still listening hard. Even Wei’s wife, hostile as she might feel to Grandfather staying in the family, softened and listened to a story that had delighted her in childhood.
The crowds were starting to thicken as they pressed through the narrow valley between the hills. Grandfather continued with his story.
‘The little boy wondered how the green grass could keep growing every day. And then he had a thought. Dragons were said to be very kind-hearted and great givers of food and life. Perhaps they were causing the grass to grow.
‘And so that night the little boy stayed behind to see if a dragon would come. And sure enough, in the evening, over the horizon flew this beautiful dragon, all glowing with lights and glistening with colours.’
‘I love dragons,’ said Baby Girl Wei.
‘And,’ continued Grandfather, ‘The dragon flew down and landed just where all the grass was growing, and the little boy knew…’
‘Look, Grandfather.’ said Baby Boy Wei, pointing, ‘there’s a dragon?’
He was pointing backwards, behind the cart, into the sky. There was indeed an object there, wobbling slightly up and down, quite close to the horizon. The sunlight flashed and reflected off it. Grandfather Wei looked but could see anything because his eyesight was so poor.
‘Yes,’ said Baby Girl Wei, ‘it could be a dragon. It has lovely colours and is making a dragon sort of roar.’
The Japanese reconnaissance plane had waited until sufficient numbers of refugees had pushed into the narrow funnel of the valley before radioing. The pilot at the controls of the Nakajima Ki-27b fighter bomber he had vectored in jockeyed his plane into the best attack line on the crowds. He carried a single Type 94 fifty-kilo high-explosive bomb slung beneath his plane. He locked into his final line of attack, sped in on the starting-to-panic civilians, dipped his nose, and as the plane’s speed increased took aim at the centre of the target, releasing his bomb and simultaneously starting to fire his two machine guns. As the weight of the bomb fell away the nose of the plane rose too. Thus, although the machine gun bullets arrived first among the refugees, they went over the heads of the Wei family and sprayed and shattered the limbs and bodies and lives of people three or four hundred yards ahead of them. But the bomb, falling straight and true on the fighter bomber’s original trajectory, was making precisely for the Weis’ cart.
Produced at the Tachikawa Hikoki K. K. factory at Tachikawa near Tokyo, the bomb sped through Cherry Blossom’s blue parasol, sliced straight through Grandfather and Baby Boy Wei – leaving Baby Girl Wei totally untouched – before passing through and smashing the wheat jars and the full water jar – the wood of the cart igniting through friction – then obliterating the donkey and decapitating a ducking Second Son, and continuing through the air for a further fifty yards, killing three adults, two children and a horse, before embedding itself finally and fatally into a cart full of young men which it slaughtered en masse. It had not exploded. The detonator, made by Korean slave Son Joon-Ho in the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries factory in Nagasaki, had failed to detonate.