The Terracotta Bride Read Online Free Page B

an arm around his
neck.
    "You are not well," she said.
    "I am an old man," he said.
    Only 54 when you died , thought Siew
Tsin, and you could pass for 40 .
    "In my youth I could have fought off these bandits.
But I cannot take shocks like these anymore."
    He struggled to sit up. This was what Siew Tsin hated about
men, she thought suddenly, to her own surprise. She had not realised before
that she hated men. But she did, and this was one of the reasons why: this
incessant demand for sympathy and interest from every woman in the vicinity.
Junsheng did not like Siew Tsin, he did not even know her, and yet he was
extending this appeal to her. It was a sticky thing, his need, with tentacles
that would strangle her if they could.
    Siew Tsin rejected it.
    "You are bleeding," she said to Yonghua.
    The look Yonghua gave her was typically opaque, but it felt
like a reproof. Siew Tsin was being too obvious.
    "That isn't blood," Junsheng said. "It'll be
a solution dyed to resemble blood, but its function is almost purely
ornamental. It helps oil her joints, but losing some of it won't harm her. You
don't feel it at all, do you, my heart-liver?"
    "Not at all," said Yonghua. Her eyes passed
unseeing over the remains of the terracotta warriors lying around them.
Junsheng followed her gaze.
    "Fools," he said in low-voiced triumph. "You
are a jewel—worth every tael I paid for you. They underestimated you.
This will have cost them dearly." He turned his head. "See, Siew
Tsin, isn't it as I have always said? This is what comes of religious
mania—it clouds your vision. The man will succeed who allows neither
bodhisattva nor demons to frighten him."
    But the self-interested see clearly ,
thought Siew Tsin.
     
    Siew Tsin had believed that Junsheng had married Yonghua
for vanity. She had not wondered why it had occurred to Yonghua's inventor to
create her. If you could make something that resembled a human and endow it
with every grace and beauty possible, what else would you invent but an
exquisite young woman? There would be a sure market.
    "You think it is about money and face, and perhaps
lust," Ling'en had said the day Siew Tsin had followed her into the street
to wait for her sedan chair. Ling'en had spoken amidst that heaving crowd of
souls and bureaucrats as if she were discussing hair-cuts instead of conspiracy
and rebellion, her voice unself-consciously clear. "But they are much more
ambitious than that."
    Think, Ling'en had told her, what could you do with a thing
that resembled a human body? Stronger than a human, more beautiful, and most
importantly—immortal. Impervious to illness and the persecutions of
demons alike. Such a thing was not pinned to the spokes of the Wheel, unlike
the bodies of every natural thing. Rebirth did not apply to it.
    As spirits, Ling'en and Siew Tsin and Junsheng felt alive.
They ate and slept in houses with thatched and tiled roofs, as the living did.
But everyone knew the sturdy-feeling walls, heavy doors and solid roofs were
paper. If they were taken out of the fragile unreal world in which they were
suspended, every pleasure and pain of the flesh they believed they experienced
would show itself to be an illusion. Light their afterlives with a spark and
they would burst into flame—and vanish.
    "We can last as long as our money and luck hold
out," said Ling'en. "But sooner or later some demon or god will take
us away from ourselves and flush what remains into our next lives, whether we
will or no. Sooner or later, we will die.
    "But this man or woman, whoever it was who created our
Yonghua—they asked themselves: what if we could transfer our
consciousness into something that is not vulnerable to the demands of the
Wheel? If there was something like that, it would render the idea of past lives
and future lives obsolete. All lives would become one."
    "They want to become Buddhas?" said Siew Tsin.
    "Without putting in the work," said Ling'en.
"There is a group claiming that they have found the