do if Sun Bing refused to repatriate their countrymen. Now he led his personal attendants to meet the German Plenipotentiary, von Ketteler, and his entourage at the prearranged site on the San Li River bridgehead near the city’s north gate, where they awaited the arrival of Sun Bing. The Magistrate had not mentioned a hostage swap to the German official, telling him only that a repentant Sun Bing had agreed to release the hostages. The Plenipotentiary, inordinately pleased by the news, told the Magistrate through his interpreter that if his countrymen were returned unharmed, he would praise the Magistrate’s efforts to Excellency Yuan himself. This did little to ease the Magistrate’s misgivings, and he responded with a bitter smile as he recalled the dreadful premonition that Sun Bing’s ambiguous comments had left him with the day before, a fear that the three German captives had already come to grief. He prepared for the meeting trusting to luck that all would end well, and with that in mind, he mentioned Sun Meiniang to no one, including Chunsheng and Liu Pu. He merely told them to ready a two-man palanquin, in which he had them place a large rock.
The Plenipotentiary, who was growing impatient as the sun rose high in the sky, kept looking at his pocket watch and telling his interpreter to ask whether Sun Bing was playing them for fools. The Magistrate equivocated as much as possible, avoiding a direct response to the man’s questions and his growing suspicions. Though he was churning with anxiety, he put on a brave, jovial face.
“Please ask the Plenipotentiary for me,” he said to the rat-faced interpreter, “why his eyes are blue.”
The befuddled interpreter could only sputter in response. The Magistrate had a big laugh over his little joke.
A pair of magpies were chattering loudly in a nearby willow tree, their black and white feathers making a lively show around branches that were just turning yellow. The scene was a work of art. Across the river, men with handcarts or carrying poles were making their way up the levee; before they reached the bridgehead, they spotted the foreign Plenipotentiary, who had remained in the saddle of his mighty steed, and the County Magistrate, who was standing in front of his palanquin; they turned tail and ran back down the levee.
When the sun was directly overhead, the sound of horns and drums signaled the arrival of a delegation from the north. The Plenipotentiary hastily lifted his field glasses to his eyes; the Magistrate shaded his eyes with his hand and strained to see who was coming, and heard the Plenipotentiary shout out to him:
“Qian, where are the hostages?”
The Magistrate took the field glasses the official held out to him. The still-distant contingent of men leaped into his line of vision. He saw that Sun Bing was still wearing his tattered stage costume, still holding his date-wood club, and still riding the same old nag. It was hard to tell whether the smile on his face was that of a dull-witted man or a crafty one. In front of his horse, as always, was Zhang Bao the monkey, while the silly-looking Wang Heng was walking behind him, followed by Sun Bing’s senior attendants, Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie, who were both on horseback. They were followed by four musicians—two playing the suona and two on horns—who preceded a slow-moving mule-drawn wagon with wooden wheels on which a tent had been set up. Next in the procession were a dozen red-kerchiefed young men carrying swords and spears. Only the Germans were missing. The Magistrate’s heart turned to ice, and his vision blurred. Even though this was what he had anticipated, he held out a ray of hope that the three German captives were there in the tent on the slow-moving mule-drawn wagon. He handed the field glasses back to the foreigner and avoided the German’s anxious eyes. In his mind’s eye he gauged whether or not the tent could accommodate three good-sized Germans. Two scenarios played out in his head: One was that Sun Bing was according his German hostages the courtesy of riding to their salvation in a mule-drawn wagon. The other was that three bloody corpses were piled inside that tent. Neither superstitious nor much of a believer in ghosts and spirits, the Magistrate surprised even himself by offering up a silent prayer: All you spirits and demons in heaven and on earth, I beg you to let those three German soldiers step unharmed from