automatic rifles at the shop door and windows. Puffs of white smoke, like daisy blossoms, floated out of the muzzles and hung in the air for a long moment. Sunlight danced off the brass buttons on the soldiers’ tunics and the bayonets attached to the barrels of their guns, blinding bright. A squad of Imperial troops wearing red-tasseled summer straw hats and tunics with white circles in the center, front and back, was arrayed behind them. Suddenly dazed, he dropped the club, which fell to the ground, banging into one limb after another on its way down. Lucky for him he was holding on to a branch, or he’d have followed the club down.
Panic took hold. He knew that this was the calamity he had dreaded. But he held on to a thread of hope that his wife’s acting skills, honed over the years, especially her convincing acts of madness, would work on the German soldiers the way they had on His Eminence Magistrate Qian’s constables, that they would make a fuss until they were sure he was not there and then leave. At that moment he promised himself that if they somehow escaped with their lives, he would pack up and move his family away, far away.
Nothing could have been worse than what happened next. He watched as two of the soldiers dragged his wife, kicking and screaming, down to the river, while a third soldier, bigger and taller than the others, followed with the children, dragging each of them by one leg, as if they were ducks or chickens, and deposited them on the riverbank. Stone broke free from the soldier who was restraining him by biting him on the arm. But then he saw Stone’s small, dark figure back down off the riverbank, down and down, until he bumped into the rifle of a soldier behind him. The glinting blade of the bayonet ran him through. It looked like he screamed, but there was no sound as he rolled like a little black ball down the bank. From his vantage point up in the tree, Sun Bing was blinded by the sight of all that blood.
The German soldiers backed up against the riverbank, where some of them got down on one knee and others remained standing as they aimed at the townspeople. Their aim was unerring—one victim fell for each shot fired. The street and yards were littered with corpses, either face down or on their backs. Then the Imperial troops ran over and put a torch to his shop. First came the black smoke, rising into the sky, followed by golden yellow flames that crackled like firecrackers. The wind rose up and blew the smoke and fire in all directions, even carrying thick, choking clouds of smoke and the smell of fire up to his hiding place.
Then came something even worse. He looked on as the German soldiers began shoving and pulling his wife back and forth, slowly ripping off her clothes as they did so, until she was stark naked. He bit down on the branch he was holding and hit it so hard with his head that it broke the skin. While his heart flew to the opposite bank like a fireball, his body remained bound to a tree; he couldn’t move. They lifted up his wife’s fair body, swung her back and forth, and then let go, her momentum carrying her into the Masang River like a big white fish. Sprays of white transparent water splashed into the air without a sound and fell silently back. Finally, the soldiers speared his children and flung them into the river, too. His eyes filled with blood, nightmarishly, and his heart was on fire, yet he was frozen in place. He struggled with all his might, but in the end he could only roar, freeing his body from its paralysis; bending forward, he managed to topple over, snapping several branches as he fell before landing on the spongy ground at the base of the willow tree.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Divine Altar
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1
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He opened his eyes and was nearly blinded by sunlight streaming in through the branches of the willow trees. The horrific sight he’d witnessed from his perch flashed through his mind, and the constricting pain in his heart leveled him. At that moment the sound of drums pounded against his eardrums, like the drumbeats preceding the first act of a Maoqiang opera, followed by the doleful sounds of a suona, a horn, and then finally the circular, repetitive performance