Revenge

Liang Qu gritted his teeth. Zheng Xiang, Scabby-Head Zhang — not one good man among them! Last night Zheng Xiang had left so readily, wouldn't even take the yellow croaker, and Liang Qu had truly believed the man simply wanted to do business, even if it touched on his personal freedom. But Dashun was no harmonious society where all men were equal — and in the end, the last straw had been laid down by that dog of a lackey. "Brother Shui — good Brother Shui! Everything I could say, I've said. The silver I owe, I'll pay it back, every wen, I swear. Take pity on me — just treat me like a fart and let me go." Tortured to within an inch of his life, Zhang Tieniu had finally scraped up the strength to string together a whole sentence. Catching Liang Qu's gaze, he hastily tipped his head back and squeezed out a smile. Liang Qu hesitated, looking as though he had not the heart for it. Zhang Tieniu rejoiced inwardly, and was just about to fan the flames with fresh pleading when the figure beside him abruptly vanished — and instead, a patch of shadow fell over his head. He raised his head in bewilderment, and then a scream tore out of him. An upside-down human face lunged at him, pitch-black eyes boring straight into his; through wild, hanging hair the face split into a soundless grin, two rows of grim white teeth pressed against his cheek as if to bite through his neck! "Brother Shui! Brother Shui! What is this? Don't scare me!" Zhang Tieniu's heart all but stopped. Scrambling backward in terror, he plunged one foot into the water. Liang Qu fixed his eyes on Scabby-Head Zhang's streaming, bloodied head and let his smile fade. "You just saw me control the water, didn't you?" "Control water? What water control? I don't know anything — I didn't see a thing!" "Whether you saw it doesn't matter." Liang Qu rose to his feet. The slanting evening sun threw a long shadow across the sampan. The river wind swept past; the reeds, heavy with seed, swayed, scattering their white tufts. Seeing that terrifying face gone, Zhang Tieniu's clenched heart eased a little — but as time passed, the shadow looming over him grew only more unsettling. He craned his head back with all his strength and could make out only a black silhouette edged in gold. He shuffled down a little further, to angle his gaze higher — and in a daze he found himself looking at a face curved in mockery, and above it, a stone raised high! Zhang Tieniu's pupils shrank to pinpoints, his throat quivering — but before a breath laced with the stench of blood could surge upward— Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud! Splash! Huge waves erupted in the reed marsh; amid the white foam ran threads of dark red. A dark shadow glided beneath the hull. The Sow Dragon rolled its body and swept its tail, dragging the corpse — bound fast to the stone, the murder weapon — away toward deep water. Everything done, Liang Qu collapsed onto the sampan, heart pounding wildly, his saliva thick as glue. He raised a hand and watched it tremble, his nails packed with bloody froth. For the first time in his life, a whole chain of killing motions had flowed through his hands with effortless ease. Afraid Scabby-Head Zhang would thrash too hard for him to hold down, Liang Qu hadn't even dared drown him — he had had to smash his skull open with the stone. "Zhang Tieniu pushed me too far. If I didn't strike while he was down and take his life, then even if I scraped the money together fishing, once his wounds healed he'd have his eye on me again. Hurk—" Liang Qu hung over the side of the boat and dry-heaved, bringing up only a little stomach acid. Reasons rehearsed, decision made — yet when it came to the deed itself, his mind had gone blank; he had hammered on and on until the back of the skull caved in completely, leaving a mangled ruin of flesh and blood, before he could stop. The Zeye Marsh of Jianghuai swarmed with flesh-eating fish. Drawn by the scent of blood, they would not need long to erase every last trace of Zhang Tieniu from this world. Done retching, Liang Qu sat back in the boat. Things had come to this: not only had his black-awning boat turned into a little sampan, he had somehow been singled out by the Zhao residence into the bargain — and there was no knowing whether Squire Zhao himself had a hand in it. On the face of it, the whole affair sounded like the idea of Zheng Xiang and Zhang Tieniu alone, but that was entirely one side of the story. Whether Zheng Xiang was currying favor with Squire Zhao on his own initiative, or moving on Squire Zhao's orders, nobody could say — a steward would hardly lay out all the hidden workings for a scabby loafer. If the former, fine. If the latter, he was in real trouble. Squire Zhao was past sixty already. Disgusting — utterly disgusting! Liang Qu, past life and present added together, was nearing forty and still a virgin — while some old thing had long since grown bored of his usual play and wanted to try something perverse. His one consolation was the two taels of broken silver in his pouch. He couldn't afford to offend the Zhao residence — so all he could do was scrape together seven taels of silver as fast as he could and go train at the Yang Family Martial Hall in Pingyang Town, to earn himself a better station. Only — this sampan: how was he to make use of it openly, aboveboard? Time flew. On the wharf wrapped in thin mist, figures stirred. Midnight, when fish came out in schools to roam and feed, was the prime hour for fishing; any seasoned fisherman would slip his mooring rope and put out at this time. Yet out in the Zeye Marsh, a youth was poling his way back against the stream of departing boats, toward the wharf. A man who had just untied his mooring rope and was about to pole out saw who it was. "A-Shui? Didn't your family have a black-awning boat? How did it turn into a little sampan? And why are you back at this hour?" Liang Qu lifted his eyes and smiled. "Why, it's Uncle Chen Yi." This Uncle Chen was not Chen Qingjiang, the man who had brought him flatbread when he first arrived. Yixing had many households surnamed Chen; the one before him was another entirely — an acquaintance, nothing more. Seeing fishermen gathered about in twos and threes nearby, Liang Qu knew the moment was right. Grief filled his face, his look so sorrowful he seemed on the verge of tears. "Uncle Yi, you know — a month back, my father—" A few indignant words threaded through with a mournful sigh or two, and Liang Qu told them, in fits and starts, the whole story of how, after his "father" died, Scabby-Head Zhang had ground him down. Only in a few places did he make small changes — where Scabby-Head Zhang had seized the black-awning boat outright, the tale became one of Zhang forcing a trade, taking it in exchange for his own sampan. Hearing the story, not one of the fishermen present doubted it; they even found it perfectly plausible. To rob a fisherman of his boat was like murdering the man's parents. Scabby-Head Zhang had never trumpeted the deed, so few knew of it — and even those who knew could not say for certain whether any "trade" had happened at all. Scabby-Head Zhang bullied the weak and feared the strong; he rarely provoked men of the great clans and never dared push matters too far. Only with an orphan like Liang Qu — alone in the world, and owning a good boat besides — with money stirring a man's heart, would Zhang Tieniu dare act so brazenly. "That Scabby-Head Zhang — he's done every wicked thing under the sun." "Someone should have thrashed that conscienceless creature long ago." "Right! Every single day he comes to rob fish from my fish basket. I could smash him dead with one swing of an oar!" For a moment righteous fury filled the wharf. But listen closely, and it was mostly cursing and grumbling; not one man offered to see justice done for Liang Qu, to go to Scabby-Head Zhang and win the black-awning boat back. Scabby-Head Zhang was tall and powerfully built, and a bachelor with nothing to lose — the barefoot fear no man in shoes — while each of them had elders above and children below, and none cared to court trouble over one lone orphan. Liang Qu sighed, lifted a board, and showed the dozen-odd fish stowed within. "No fishing gear I'm handy with. Fished the whole day today, and I'm worn clean through. Now that I've a little catch to show for it, I'm heading back to sleep." One look told them all: grass carp, silver carp — twenty or thirty wen's worth, perhaps. Heads nodded all around, and with that, no more small talk; the men put out their boats. The weight on Liang Qu's heart finally lifted. To have washed his hands of Scabby-Head Zhang entirely would only have looked deliberate. If anyone combed through the whole business from start to finish, they would surely find something amiss — for instance, if it was a trade of boats, why would Zhang Tieniu have chosen to sell the black-awning boat? Idle and feckless as he was, even he would hardly leave himself without a scrap of room? It could be explained, but the chain of logic would inevitably be thin. Yet people are just as prone to the opposite folly: too much self-consciousness, imagining how deeply others concern themselves with them. The world does not turn around anyone. For side matters, trifles that are no business of theirs, people's memories are in truth very blurred; with the least steering, recollection can be bent onto an entirely different course. No one would imagine that a youth could have the gall — and the ability — to waylay and kill a grown man in his prime. Plant one seed, leave no obvious flaw, and once it sprouts, that seed can grow into "established fact." summary: Liang Qu, seething at Zheng Xiang's smooth departure and Zhang Tieniu's tip-off to the Zhao household, lets the bound, half-dead Scabby-Head Zhang beg and hope, terrifies him with an upside-down, grinning face, then kills him — smashing his skull with the stone rather than risk a drowning struggle — and a Sow Dragon drags the stone-bound corpse into deep water, where the Jianghuai marsh's flesh-eating fish will erase every trace. He resolves to save seven taels for the Yang Family Martial Hall in Pingyang Town, though he must still work out how to use the swapped sampan openly. At midnight he poles back to the misty wharf and, playing the grieving orphan before fishermen including Uncle Chen Yi (not Chen Qingjiang), spreads a doctored tale in which Zhang forced a boat trade; the fishermen curse Zhang but offer no justice, and Liang Qu counts on their vague memories to let his planted seed grow into "established fact."