The Fourth Sacrifice (16 page)

‘So what did Uncle Yifu say to you?’ Li asked, finally, and she immediately tensed further.

Yifu, at the request of their father, had travelled to Zigong by train to talk to Xiao Ling about her pregnancy and had been killed on the night of his return to Beijing.

She clasped her hands together, wringing her fingers as she spoke. ‘After all the pressure everyone had been putting me under,’ she said, ‘old Yifu sat me down and took my hand and told me my destiny was my own to decide.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘He made no judgements or accusations. He took me through all the options and all the consequences. He asked me to tell him why I wanted a boy. He made no comment upon my reply, but he made me think about it and give expression to my feelings. Nobody else cared what I thought, not Xiao Xu, not his parents nor our father, nor anyone. They just wanted me to do what I was told. Uncle Yifu wanted me to do what I thought was right.’ She turned to Li as the tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks. ‘He was such a lovely old man, Li Yan. Such a good man. We talked for hours and I wanted him to stay for a few days. But he said he had to go.’ She bit her lip. ‘If only I’d insisted, if I’d
made
him stay, he’d still be alive today.’ And the guilt that she had been holding in for who knew how long, rose in great sobs that tore at her chest, and she wept unreservedly. ‘I feel so responsible.’

Li put an arm around her and pulled her to him. She felt so small and fragile, he was afraid to squeeze her too hard in case she broke. ‘You share no blame for his death,’ he almost whispered. His voice was hoarse with emotion. ‘If there is someone to blame then it is me. He would not have been killed if it were not for me.’

But this seemed only to distress Xiao Ling even further. ‘I don’t know why you ever wanted to be a policeman anyway,’ she sobbed, and he felt her accusation in it.

‘Because I wanted to be like him,’ he said, desperate for her understanding. ‘Because I believed in the same things he did – in fairness and justice, and the right of people to live in security without fear for their lives or possessions.’

And she turned her tear-stained face to his. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know you loved him, too.’

They sat for a long time then, just holding each other, until their tears had all been spilled. Finally Xiao Ling wiped her face dry with a handkerchief and sat forward to sip her tea. It was only lukewarm by now. Li no longer felt like drinking his, and he went to the refrigerator and opened a bottle of beer. He stood in the doorway watching her, then took a long pull from the neck of his bottle. The ice-cold beer took the heat out of the burning in his throat. Then he asked the question he had been putting off all night. ‘Why are you here, Xiao Ling?’

She avoided his eye. ‘There is a clinic in Beijing where I can go to have what they call an ultra-sound scan.’ Her voice was husky.

He frowned. ‘What’s that?’ Such things were beyond his experience, and he was apprehensive.

‘It’s where they can get a picture on a television screen of your baby in the womb. They do it with sound, somehow … high frequency sound waves. I’ve been reading up about it.’

‘What is the point of that?’

She hesitated. ‘Sometimes they can tell the sex of the baby.’ And he knew immediately what was in her head, and he felt sick to his stomach. ‘And if they can’t,’ she said, ‘then they can take fluid from the womb and know for sure.’

He stood, motionless, looking at her for a long time. He felt a vein pulsing in his temple. ‘And if it’s another girl?’ He waited for her reply, but she said nothing, and steadfastly refused to meet his eye. So he said it for her. ‘You’re going to have her aborted, aren’t you?’ Somehow it seemed even worse when the ‘it’ had become ‘her’.

Xiao Ling seemed to be examining her fingernails with great interest. ‘If they have to do the fluid test it’ll take about four weeks for the results. I would still only be twenty weeks gone.’

He took a long draught from his bottle and controlled the urge to shout at her. In any case, what gave him the right to judge her? He wondered what Yifu would have said or done, then realised he had no idea. And it came home to him just how different he was in so many ways from the uncle whose standards he had been trying to live up to all these years. Perhaps they were always going to be too high for him. Always just out of reach.

‘This clinic,’ he said at length. ‘It is private?’ She nodded. ‘Expensive?’ She nodded again. ‘How can you afford it?’

‘Xiao Xu has been doing well these last few years. I have saved some money.’

‘And Xiao Xu approves of this?’

There was a long silence before finally she said, ‘Xiao Xu doesn’t know. He thinks only that we have come to visit you.’

Li was shocked. ‘But it’s his child, too. Doesn’t he have a right to a say in what happens to it?’

Xiao Ling met his eyes for the first time and he saw, to his dismay, something like hate in hers. ‘He wants me to get rid of it whether it’s a girl
or
a boy.’ There was venom in her voice. ‘They got to him. I don’t know what they said, I don’t know what they threatened to do, but suddenly he didn’t want it any more. It was
my
fault,
my
problem, and as far as he was concerned it was up to me to get rid of it.’

Suddenly he understood the crushing loneliness she must feel. The whole world against her. Urging a single course of action. And she, driven by some instinct, or by the dreadful weight of five thousand years of tradition, just wanted a baby boy. A desire that, had she lived in almost any other place on earth, would have been the simplest desire in the world to fulfil.

‘If this … scan … tells you the sex of your baby …’ His mouth was dry, and the question would barely form in it. ‘What will you do if it is a boy?’

This time she returned his gaze, steady and sure. ‘If it’s a boy I will have it, and give Xinxin up for adoption.’

CHAPTER FOUR

I

A large kitchen knife came down twice in quick succession, and the heads of the fowl dropped from the rung of the ladder and into the ditch. For a few manic moments, the two headless chickens ran blindly around, blood spurting from their necks. The peasant who had delivered the fatal strokes stood watching breathlessly as the life ebbed from the creatures and they toppled over and lay still in the bloodied earth. A hand clamped itself on his shoulder and spun him round. He found himself staring into the perplexed face of Hu Bo.

‘
What the hell do you think you’re doing, Wang Qifa?
’ Hu demanded.

Wang Qifa held himself erect and said, boldly, ‘
Mr Hu, you were the one who warned us about the dangers of the hidden weapons. The old men in the village told me that chicken blood would protect me from harm. “As long as two chickens are killed, all hidden weapons are powerless,” they said.’

‘OK, cut and check.’ The man beside Margaret spoke into a walkie-talkie, and Margaret saw the image on the screen spool rapidly back to the moment before the knife fell. The exchange between Hu Bo and the peasant had already been shot three times – a master shot and two close-ups. The chickens had only been added when they were happy with everything else. They would only have one shot at them. The sight of their headless frenzy was sickening in itself, but there was additional resonance in it for Margaret.

‘Won’t the animal rights people be after your blood for this?’ she asked.

The man beside her grinned. ‘The chickens belong to a couple in the village. They were always destined for the dinner table. All we did was pay them a lot of money to let us kill them on camera. Now they’ll be guests of honour at a banquet tonight, the main item on the menu.’ He turned to watch the playback.

Margaret had liked him immediately. In spite of the enormous pressure he was under to meet schedules and deadlines, he seemed relaxed and easy-going, even when everyone else on set appeared tense. Michael had introduced them when the production car he had sent for her arrived at Ding Ling.

‘Charles has directed all my series to date,’ Michael had said.

Charles had shaken her hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, Margaret. But call me Chuck. Mike’s the only person I know who calls me Charles.’

‘Maybe,’ Michael had said, grinning wickedly, ‘that’s because you’re the only person I know who calls me Mike.’

Chuck had shrugged hopelessly at Margaret. ‘What can you do? The man’s impossible to work with.’

The shot had finished replaying on the monitor and a voice on one of the walkie-talkies said, ‘Clear.’

‘OK,’ Chuck said. ‘Set up the next shot, Dave. Quickly please. These people are waiting for their chickens.’ He turned to Margaret. ‘Anyway, I’m shooting the blood and guts in such a way we can cut around it if the network thinks it’ll put an early evening audience off its pizza and French fries. But, you know, this is how it happened. We’re just trying to show it like it was.’

They were in a truck that had been kitted out as a video control centre and lowered by helicopter on to a wall thirty feet above the set. Cables spewed out a rear hatch like the entrails of a dead animal, and hung down into the long stone corridor that led to the entrance of the underground palace of the tomb of Emperor Wanli.

‘I still can’t believe they let you shoot this in the actual tomb,’ Margaret said.

‘Hey,’ said Chuck. ‘It took Mike six months to talk them into it. That and a very large cheque. The Chinese are big capitalists at heart. They’ll have worked out exactly how much additional tourist revenue this series is gonna generate. And they must have figured it’s worth it, ’cos they’re having to close it to the public for six weeks – so we can set it up, shoot it, then clean it up. And from our point of view, this is the centrepiece of the series, so if we’re gonna spend the money somewhere, this is where it’s gonna go.’

On the monitor, Margaret saw that the camera had been moved into a low position with the dead chickens in centre frame. She watched as twice, the shot panned up, and then the camera rose more than ten feet as it moved back, so that the whole of the paved passageway leading back between high walls towards the steps of the stele pavilion came into shot. It was one smooth, flowing movement.

‘That looks good, Jackie,’ Chuck said into his walkie-talkie. ‘Dave, is Mike ready yet? Does he want to do a walk-through?’

Dave’s soft Irish voice crackled back across the airwaves. ‘Michael’s ready, Chuck. He says he’s happy to rehearse on tape. It’s a long speech.’

Chuck grinned. ‘OK, if everyone else is ready, let’s try one.’ He said to Margaret, ‘We’ll probably only use Mike in vision at the beginning of this, and at the end. In between we’ll lay over various pictures we haven’t shot yet. We’ll probably re-record the whole speech back in sound dubbing, but it’s nice to get location sound. It’s more authentic.’ And into the walkie-talkie, ‘Jackie, remember once you’ve got Mike waist-high and centre frame, keep him there as the dolly moves back, and only when you bring the camera back down again do I want to see him walk into close-up. When you’re ready, Dave …’

Margaret heard the first assistant director’s voice over the foldback warning everyone to be quiet. Then, ‘Roll VT,’ a pause and, ‘Action!’

The camera was close on the dead chickens. Then it started to drift back and lift. Chuck whispered into his walkie, ‘Cue Mike.’

Then she heard Michael’s voice. ‘
Whatever superstitions there may have been about the kinds of defences the Emperor had built into his tomb, the fears of the archaeologists and their peasant labourers were based on historical record and the fatal experiences of grave robbers through the centuries. The Indiana Jones world of concealed traps and hidden weapons was not so fantastical.’

As he walked into shot he waved his arm upwards towards a high brick wall sealing the entrance to the tomb. Clearly visible was an inverted ‘V’ shape in the brick.

‘When, on May 19th
,
1957, after a year of digging, the archaeologists discovered the “diamond wall” that sealed the gate to the tomb, the rumours that grew about what might lie behind it fed very real fears. Science and superstition, culture and ignorance coexisted in the minds of the team members as well as the peasant diggers. People spoke of crossbows operated by a hidden mechanism that would send poison arrows to pierce the flesh of anyone who tried to open the gate. They indulged in talk of toxic gases that would be released to strike down the tomb’s invaders, sabres that would fall from the vaulted ceiling of the interior. No one could survive.

‘
Then, ten days after the discovery of the “diamond wall”, their fears were further fed by the sudden appearance of a mysterious old man
 …’

Chuck said to Margaret, ‘We’ll see the old guy at this point, talking to the peasants.’

‘
He was dressed in ragged clothes and a straw hat, and had a long white, wispy beard. He told the peasant diggers that he possessed an ancient genealogy passed on to him by his ancestors. This document, he said, told of a stream running through the underground palace of the tomb. To reach the coffin they would have to cross the stream, at the other side of which they would find a chasm one hundred thousand feet deep. At the bottom of the chasm were barbed wires bridged by a stepping board. Only those born on a certain auspicious day could cross it. All others would lose their lives.

‘Such was the effect of his story, that the old man made a tidy sum from the peasants who were falling over themselves to have him tell their fortune. But the next day, when the archaeologists heard of it and went in search of this person who was spreading panic among their workers, the “immortal” was nowhere to be found.’

Michael smiled at the camera, reflecting his audience’s scepticism about the old man.
‘Ridiculous? You and I might think so. But Hu Bo and the other archaeologists on the team, educated men all, were not prepared to dismiss anything. For they were studying an ancient account of the construction of the tomb of the first emperor of China, Emperor Qin Shihaung, more than two thousand years ago. Qin not only unified China and built the Great Wall, he constructed a vast army of life-sized terracotta soldiers to guard his mausoleum.’