Mid-June. Heavy clouds pressed low. Outside Bozhou city, in an abandoned thatched hut.
“Sister Cuilan, hold on just a little longer, it’s almost out!”
“I can’t… Little Yulang, I fear I won’t last…”
The woman lying on the withered straw was barely breathing, her body frail and thin. The belly she carried so high seemed it would crush her waist. Her bloodless face was drenched in cold sweat. Her legs shook as they lay apart, and beneath her was a pool of sticky blood.
Hearing her groans growing weaker, Shen Yujiao’s eyes reddened. She paid no mind that Cuilan had already caught the plague, and reached out to pinch the philtrum under her nose: “Sister Cuilan, you can’t just sleep away, hold on a little longer, I beg you… Think of Granny Tao and Brother Tao, how much they looked forward to the child in your belly. If you just pass like this, even in the netherworld they could never rest easy…”
That nightmare-like torrential rain had finally ceased at the end of the fifth month, but the floodwaters were unstoppable. On the Heluo lands, hundreds of levees broke; waves several zhang high, carrying silt and trees, swept across both banks of the Yellow River. Wherever it reached, houses were destroyed, corpses littered the fields, rotting bodies clogged the roads.
The ancients said: After great calamity, there will surely be great pestilence.
The refugees, driven from their homes, had not yet found a place to rest when a terrible plague spread wildly. First it took the frail old Granny Tao. Two days later, Tao Dalang too was infected.
When he knew he was sick, wishing to exchange for more food to secure his wife and child’s future, Tao Dalang quietly begged Shen Yujiao to accompany him once to the “sick ward”,
The so-called sick ward was a shelter the Liang Prefecture authorities set up to contain plague victims among the refugees. Any infected who voluntarily entered were given, for their family, three sacks of dried sweet potato and one sack of rations. If someone concealed infection but was reported, the informer could claim two sacks of sweet potato.
The name sounded decent, curing the sick, but in truth it was a place where the infected were gathered up and disposed of together.
“Yulang, those three sacks of dried sweet potato and the rations, you must hide them well on your way back, don’t let anyone rob you.”
At their farewell through the ward’s fence, Tao Dalang’s face was already ashen, but the eyes sunken in his gaunt face still shone bright, full of worry and unwillingness to part: “Tell Cuilan she must bring this child safely into the world. In this life, I cannot care for the two of them. If there is another life… I’ll work like an ox, like a horse, to repay what I owe her in this one. If she later meets a good man who doesn’t mind her bringing a child, I won’t resent her if she remarries!”
When Shen Yujiao agreed, that short, honest man knelt down beyond the fence and kowtowed three times toward her: “Yulang, I know you are kindhearted. From now on, I entrust Cuilan and the child in her belly to you…”
Though they had only met by chance, in that half month Shen Yujiao had already regarded the Tao family like her own kin.
She answered him through tears. After their last farewell, she carried those sacks of rations and dried sweet potato away from that ward that flamed day and night, with smoke billowing endlessly.
Cuilan, after all, was a pregnant woman. She could not withstand the blow of losing both mother-in-law and husband in a few days. Stricken with grief, she fell ill herself.
With no other way, Shen Yujiao, her frail body pulling a cart, dragged Cuilan from Liangzhou to Bozhou.
But Cuilan too had caught the plague. On the second day within Bozhou’s borders, she began sweating with fever. By morning her belly ached unbearably, nearly fainting.
When Shen Yujiao lifted her skirts, she saw blood, it was time to give birth.
But in this desolate wilderness, there was no midwife to be found. They could only try within that ruined hut.
“Sister Cuilan, while Brother Tao lived, he always wished to see this child born. Didn’t he say before, he wanted to teach the child carpentry, to show him how to catch rabbits…”
Shen Yujiao pressed hard on Cuilan’s philtrum. Seeing her eyelids flutter open a little, her heart leapt. She kept talking: “I’ve already seen the child’s head. Push again and he’ll be out! Don’t you want to see him? He’s the very flesh and blood of you and Brother Tao.”
Cuilan gave a choking moan, roused half-conscious, her eyes brimming with helpless tears: “Yulang, I truly have no strength left… help me, help me…”
Seeing her cry, Shen Yujiao’s own eyes burned. She hurried to answer: “Tell me, how can I help you?”
Cuilan said: “Take your dagger, cut me open.”
Shen Yujiao was stunned, unable to believe her ears, her words stumbling: “Sister Cuilan, you… what did you say? How could that… No, no, it would kill you!”
“I’ve caught the plague. I won’t live many more days.” Cuilan’s cheeks were sunken, her eyes shadowed as she stared at Shen Yujiao. “To save one is still something. If the child dies in my womb, I cannot live either…”
“No, it can’t be. I can’t do it…” Shen Yujiao shook her head violently, horrified. She had lived seventeen years, never gutting even a fish or killing a chicken. Now to be told to use a dagger to cut open a person, it shattered everything she knew.
“Sister Cuilan, don’t give up. Try once more. You can give birth, you can.”
Shen Yujiao staggered on her knees to the space between her legs. Staring at that bloody mess and the overwhelming stench of blood, her stomach heaved uncontrollably. She pressed a hand hard to her chest, forced down the nausea, grasped Cuilan’s legs, and in a hoarse voice said: “Sister Cuilan, listen to my count. Try again. If it still doesn’t work this time, I… I…”
She grit her teeth and forced herself to say, “Let’s try the dagger then.”
But Cuilan also knew how hard that would be on this young girl. She could only clutch the withered grass at her sides, bite down hard on her molars, and follow Shen Yujiao’s commands, breathing in and out, straining downward.
Shen Yujiao had lived half her life as a pampered noble daughter. Matters of childbirth were things she had never once encountered. Now, driven to the duck-on-the-rack position of midwife, she acted purely on instinct.
When at last she saw the baby’s shoulders squeeze free, tears nearly fell from her eyes. “It’s coming out, Sister Cuilan, you did it!”
She fought back her tears, pulled out the slippery, blood-smeared infant, then used her dagger to cut the cord that tied child to mother. But the baby had likely been suffocated too long in the womb, its face was dark purple, its eyes shut tight, and it made no sound.
Panic gripped Shen Yujiao, but she quickly steadied herself. She recalled from old medical texts a method for saving drowning people. Though the situation was different, she had no other choice. She tried prying open the baby’s throat, pressing its chest…
Just as she was about to breathe into it, Cuilan’s faint voice floated over: “Hold it upside down, slap its bottom hard.”
At once Shen Yujiao did as told.
She slapped twenty, thirty times, until the child’s little bottom was flushed red. Just when despair was setting in, the baby finally let out a loud “Waa!”
The sudden turn from darkness to light flooded her heart. Overjoyed, tears spilling down her cheeks, Shen Yujiao carried the baby around to Cuilan’s side. “Sister Cuilan, look, he’s crying! He can cry!”
But Cuilan’s face was even paler than before, her eyes barely cracked open. She tilted her head slightly, glanced at the reddened infant in Shen Yujiao’s arms, and her lips moved faintly: “…”
Shen Yujiao leaned closer. “What did you say?”
Summoning the last of her strength, Cuilan lifted her lids and looked straight at Shen Yujiao. Her voice was thin as a mosquito’s buzz: “Yu…niang, the child… I entrust him to you.”
Before Shen Yujiao could respond, her eyelids shut heavily, her head slumping to the side.
A single tear slid from the corner of her eye, sinking into the dry grass.
“Sister Cuilan!” Shen Yujiao cried in shock.
The infant in her arms seemed to sense it too, wailing louder and louder.
No matter how she called, the woman on the straw never opened her eyes again. From beneath her tattered skirt, bright red blood gushed endlessly, staining the ground.
***
The Annals of Great Liang recorded the disaster of Yuanshou Year Nineteen: “Fifth month, the great flood in Heluo, people starved, the dead uncountable, corpses littered the roads.”
Yet beneath the same sky, in Jinling City to the southeast, life bustled with prosperity, a scene of peace and plenty.
By late July, at the height of summer, the sun blazed like fire.
“Get lost, blind fool!”
In the south of Jinling, a squat, fat beggar was scolding a hunched old woman who had taken his spot: “Don’t you know the rules of the street? This is my turf! If you want to beg, go somewhere else!”
“F–forgive me, I’m new here.”
The frail woman wrapped head to toe in a filthy ragged cloth, hair tangled like weeds, back bent and thin, clutched a bean-sprout-like infant to her chest.
Seeing the fat beggar baring his teeth, she scrambled up from the base of the wall, her voice hoarse and weak: “I’ll go, I’ll go right away.”
“Hmph, at least you know your place.”
The fat beggar snorted, scratched at the lice in his clothes, and sat cross-legged on his spot. From his bosom he pulled out a chipped bowl.
Once his setup was ready, he completely shed his earlier ferocity. Lying weakly on the ground, he cried out to passing pedestrians: “Kind sirs, kind madams, spare a little charity. I have an old mother of eighty and a son of three, our whole family hasn’t had a full meal in seven days…”
The speed of this transformation made even the old woman glance sideways.
At that moment, a passerby tossed a coin into the chipped bowl.
Clink.
Shen Yujiao, who had sat all morning without getting a single coin, widened her eyes. So this is how you beg!?
The beggar, upon receiving the coin, immediately kowtowed, chanting with a singsong tune: “A copper clinks and fortune springs, may the master prosper and wealth flow in. Good deeds bring good returns, may the God of Wealth visit you each and every year…”
Shen Yujiao bit her lip with a complicated look. Kowtow and sing? Wasn’t this no different from the lowest sort in brothels and playhouses?
But as soon as the thought surfaced, she gave a bitter, mocking smile. From Bozhou to Jinling, hadn’t she begged all the way here?
Shen Yujiao, oh Shen Yujiao, do you still think you are some lofty noble daughter, a matron of a great clan? Whether you can even survive to reach the south is unknown. What pride, what dignity, is there left to fuss over?
“Waa…” The weak cry of the infant in her arms cut off her brooding.
Lowering her head, she lifted the cloth covering the swaddling, and looked at the fragile baby curled like a kitten. Sourness welled in her chest, but her lips gentled as she cooed: “Peace, peace, don’t cry. Auntie will find food for you.”
Since that day in the thatched hut outside Bozhou, when Cuilan died of blood loss giving birth, Shen Yujiao had carried the baby alone, fleeing ever southward.
The hardships of the road, each time she soothed the child to sleep, each silent night she recalled them, she herself wondered how she had endured.
Perhaps human life is both frail and unyielding. Even at the bottom of the dust and mire, as long as there is the faintest will to live, limitless strength can be drawn out.
She had only arrived in Jinling yesterday. Never had she expected the beggars here to be so aggressive. The wall was government land, yet they drove her off from begging, how hateful.
With a quiet sigh, she held the child close and turned to try her luck elsewhere.
No one knew whether it was that Jinling City was at odds with her fate, or that she could not bring herself to cast aside all dignity and kneel to beg. After wandering half a day, she managed only to get half a steamed bun.
Though her stomach was growling and her eyes were going dim, when she saw the child crying so pitifully, she still broke the half bun into pieces, begged a bowl of water, soaked it, and fed the child little by little.
In the blink of an eye it was evening. The shopkeeper who had given her the bowl of water, seeing her pitiful state, gave her another half a flatcake: “If you head west out of the city five li, there’s an earth god temple. The temple is dilapidated, but at least it has a roof for shelter. Before the sky gets completely dark, go there and spend the night.”
Shen Yujiao hugged the child and thanked the shopkeeper. Seeing the sun sinking in the west, she wasted no more time and hurried outside the city.
Pushing herself hard, she barely reached that half-new, half-old earth god temple before night fell.
What delighted Shen Yujiao even more was that in front of the Earth God stood two plates of offerings, one of pastries, one of fruit.
Though the pastries were covered in dust and the fruit had wilted, to Shen Yujiao, who had not eaten a full meal in so long, even dusty and shriveled was better than starving.
“Grandfather Earth God, you let me borrow a patch of ground to shelter from wind and rain. I am deeply grateful. I shouldn’t take your offerings as well, but I am far too hungry… Please pity me. I will eat your offerings today, but when I have money one day, I will certainly buy fresh ones to repay you.”
Speaking thus, she laid the sleeping child on a nearby cushion, then respectfully kowtowed three times to the kindly smiling Earth God, before reaching for the two plates of offerings.
The moment the crisp, sweet pastry touched her tongue, Shen Yujiao nearly wept, she could no longer remember how long it had been since she had tasted sweetness.
With one hand clutching the pastry and the other holding a plum, she laughed and cried at once, enjoying this “feast bestowed by Heaven.”
Suddenly, from outside the quiet temple came a noise.
Shen Yujiao’s back went rigid. The long flight south, fleeing famine, had made her ever more wary and sharp.
Confirming that the faint sound was not the wind but footsteps, Shen Yujiao’s heart leapt in alarm. Borrowing the last glow of the setting sun, she glanced quickly around, then scooped up the child and slipped beneath the altar.
The yellow curtain hanging from the altar table just managed to hide her thin figure.
And just as the footsteps stopped at the doorway, she also managed to pull the two plates of offerings under the altar.
The next instant, the door was pushed open, and in rushed a crowd of footsteps.
“Boss, this time we’ve struck it rich! That old dog Qian, who usually acts so high and mighty, just now you only waved your knife a few times before him, and he obediently had his people bring out the silver!”
“Hahahaha, the way he cowered, I almost burst out laughing!”
“I say, it’s all thanks to our boss’s might! That blade-work just now, truly earth-shaking, ghost-weeping!”
There seemed to be five or six men, talking excitedly as they strode into the hall.
Hidden beneath the altar, Shen Yujiao heard talk of knives and money, and her heart sank, had she run into bandits?
Hearing their footsteps coming closer and closer, she held her breath, silently covered the baby’s ears, and prayed desperately that the child would not wake.
Suddenly, above her, a lazy yet teeth-gritting voice rang out: “Which little b*stard ate the offerings I put out for the Earth God? Even stole the plates, driven mad by hunger, eh?”
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