• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“I haven’t done anything to you. All this is mine. I earned it. I didn’t steal it from you. I’ve never seen you before in my life. Who are you?”

“I am a female avenger.”

Then—heaven help him—he tried to be charming, to appeal to me man to man. “Oh, come now. Everyone takes the girls when he can. The families are glad to be rid of them. ‘Girls are maggots in the rice.’ ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’” He quoted to me the sayings I hated.

“Regret what you’ve done before I kill you,” I said.

“I haven’t done anything other men—even you—wouldn’t have done in my place.”

“You took away my brother.”

“I free my apprentices.”

“He was not an apprentice.”

“China needs soldiers in wartime.”

“You took away my childhood.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’ve never met before. I’ve done nothing to you.”

“You’ve done this,” I said, and ripped off my shirt to show him my back. “You are responsible for this.” When I saw his startled eyes at my breasts, I slashed him across the face and on the second stroke cut off his head.

I pulled my shirt back on and opened the house to the villagers. The baron’s family and servants hid in closets and under beds. The villagers dragged them out into the courtyard, where they tried them next to the beheading machine. “Did you take my harvest so that my children had to eat grass?” a weeping farmer asked.

“I saw him steal seed grain,” another testified.

“My family was hiding under the thatch on the roof when the bandits robbed our house, and we saw this one take off his mask.” They spared those who proved they could be reformed. They beheaded the others. Their necks were collared in the beheading machine, which slowly clamped shut. There was one last-minute reprieve of a bodyguard when a witness shouted testimony just as the vise was pinching blood. The guard had but recently joined the household in exchange for a child hostage. A slow killing gives a criminal time to regret his crimes and think of the right words to prove he can change.

I searched the house, hunting out people for trial. I came upon a locked room. When I broke down the door, I found women, cowering, whimpering women. I heard shrill insect noises and scurrying. They blinked weakly at me like pheasants that have been raised in the dark for soft meat. The servants who walked the ladies had abandoned them, and they could not escape on their little bound feet. Some crawled away from me, using their elbows to pull themselves along. These women would not be good for anything. I called the villagers to come identify any daughters they wanted to take home, but no one claimed any. I gave each woman a bagful of rice, which they sat on. They rolled the bags to the road. They wandered away like ghosts. Later, it would be said, they turned into the band of swordswomen who were a mercenary army. They did not wear men’s clothes like me, but rode as women in black and red dresses. They bought up girl babies so that many poor families welcomed their visitations. When slave girls and daughters-in-law ran away, people would say they joined these witch amazons. They killed men and boys. I myself never encountered such women and could not vouch for their reality.

After the trials we tore down the ancestral tablets. “We’ll use this great hall for village meetings,” I announced. “Here we’ll put on operas; we’ll sing together and talk-story.” We washed the courtyard; we exorcised the house with smoke and red paper. “This is a new year,” I told the people, “the year one.”

I went home to my parents-in-law and husband and son. My son stared, very impressed by the general he had seen in the parade, but his father said, “It’s your mother. Go to your mother.” My son was delighted that the shiny general was his mother too. She gave him her helmet to wear and her swords to hold.

Wearing my black embroidered wedding coat, I knelt at my parents-in-law’s feet, as I would have done as a bride. “Now my public duties are finished,” I said. “I will stay with you, doing farmwork and housework,