Frost on the mat

Shen Gui sat under the tree all night.

A-Yue fell asleep in the middle of the night, curled up against the tree roots, her white clothes covered in mud, her hair disheveled and plastered to her face.

After falling asleep, her face showed no signs of madness, nor any of the alertness that seemed ready to scream at any moment. She looked like someone who had been lost for a long time, finally taking a break by the roadside.

Shen Gui looked at her for a moment, then stood up.

The fog was thick. When he arrived at the tea stall, the old man was moving the stove. The oil lamp from last night had gone out, and the lampshade was covered with a layer of black ash.

The old man paused for a moment when he saw him, holding the fire tongs.

"You haven't left yet?"

Do you have straw mats?

"Yes, there are some, but they're old, used for paving the floor, and they're not worth much."

The old man dragged out the straw mat, patted it twice, and asked, "What does the young master need this for?"

Shen Gui didn't answer. He put down a few copper coins, picked up the straw mat, and turned back to the locust tree.

He draped the straw mat over A-Yue's body.

Ah Yue was fast asleep, only twitching her fingers slightly when the straw mat fell, but she didn't wake up.

The villagers who had gotten up early to work in the fields began to emerge one after another.

Some people carried hoes, some carried buckets of manure, and some led a skinny ox. They all stopped for a moment when they reached the village entrance.

They witnessed Shen Gui draping a straw mat over A Yue. Some frowned, some pursed their lips, and some muttered a curse under their breath.

It wasn't that they felt sorry for the straw mat; they just didn't like anyone being nice to A-Yue.

This light is so dazzling that it makes the eyes peering through the cracks in the doors and windows that people closed last night look inhuman.

But people won't admit that they're not like humans.

Therefore, they would feel from the bottom of their hearts that the guy who was more human than themselves was a bit of an eyesore.

They thought he was meddling in other people's business, and wondered who he, an outsider, was trying to impress.

The old man followed and stood behind Shen Gui. He looked at A Yue, then at the villagers, and his lips moved a few times.

"Young master, you are a kind person," he said, "but you should keep your kindness to yourself; it's useless."

Shen Gui pressed down the edges of the straw mat: "Kindness? It doesn't count."

After saying that, he turned to ask, "Are all the people of Yan this united?"

The old man sensed the sarcasm in the word "unity".

He tried to brush it off with a casual reply like, "That's just how it is in the countryside," or "Everyone has their own difficulties," but Shen Guizheng was looking at him.

The old man felt a chill run down his spine from the stare. He had lived for over sixty years, seen the county constables, the town's Uncle Liu, and even the border guards passing by the village entrance, but he had never seen such a look before.

That's not ferocity; a truly ferocious person has fire and anger in their eyes.

This person doesn't see these things; he just looks at you as if he has already seen your entire life.

"Young master, don't say such things."

The old man lowered his head, poked at the mud with his toe, and after a long while, he sighed.

"Ah, everyone knows about A-Yue's situation. When she first arrived, she wasn't insane yet. She was crying and shouting that she wanted to go home, saying that she was from Jiangping Prefecture and that her father would come to redeem her."

"Back then, most people didn't believe it. There were so many women brought in from outside, who knew which were true and which were false? Besides, even if it were true, what could they do after all the prayers had been offered to heaven and earth?"

He glanced around to make sure no one was eavesdropping, then lowered his voice.

"Zhou Laizi has someone backing him up—Master Liu the Third in town, ever heard of him?"

Shen Gui did not answer.

The old man pretended not to have heard and continued speaking.

"Master Liu is a wealthy man in town. His house has three courtyards and two stone lions at the gate, which are even cleaner than those at the county government office. He employs people under his command, ostensibly as guards, but everyone knows what they are behind the scenes."

"There are twenty-six villages in this area. Each village pays five taels of silver per month as a village protection fee."

"He claimed it was to protect against bandits, but in reality, the bandits were his own men."

The old man started talking, and habitually took off his pipe and tapped it on the sole of his shoe.

"The villages that don't pay will surely have trouble next month. Either they'll lose grain, or people will die. Or a band of bandits will come in the middle of the night and turn the houses upside down. Reporting to the authorities won't help. The officials will come, ask a few questions, have a bowl of tea, and then leave."

"A village that has paid the fee is considered a member."

"If a woman bought by a family runs away to another village, that village has to send her back. If they don't, they'll break the rules, and if they break the rules, Master Liu will have something to say to them."

At this point, the old man advised, "Judging from your demeanor, young master, you're no ordinary person. But Master Liu is even more extraordinary; his power is greater than you think... Anyway, don't provoke him. Even if the county magistrate backs you up, you won't get away with it."

Shen Gui said "Oh," then changed the subject, asking, "She ran away three times?"

The old man nodded.

"The first two times were alright, because the villagers saw it. The third time was the worst, because we were intercepted by Master Liu's men."

The old man paused, as if the smoke in his mouth had suddenly turned bitter.

"The sun was very strong that day, and she couldn't run fast. Her leg was already injured at that time, but she still crawled, using both her hands and feet, and her body was covered in dirt."

"Third Master Liu's men dragged her back, stripped her of her clothes, and tied her to this tree."

The old man pointed to the old locust tree.

"Let the whole village watch."

It was very quiet in the fog. A drop of water fell from the old locust tree and landed on the straw mat next to A-Yue.

The old man's face scrunched up.

"Some people are too afraid to watch, so they close the door; others watch and then say some unpleasant things."

"The next morning, after everyone had left, I dared to cut the rope with a knife."

"I'm not a good person, young master. Don't look at me like that. I was scared back then. I was scared of Master Liu, scared of Zhou Laizi, but I was even more scared that my old bones would have their eyes gouged out in the underworld."

He gave a wry smile.

"Later, A-Yue went insane."

The old man took a puff of his cigarette; the smoke mixed with the white mist and quickly dissipated.

"The children threw stones at her, the women cursed her for being dirty, and the men looked at her—not to mention the way they looked at her. I'm old, but I'm not blind."

"Me and a few other old folks, thinking we're all getting old, we'd like to do what good deeds we can. We'll give her half a bowl of porridge or a steamed bun now and then, but that's all we can do."

"We also reported it to the authorities, but we didn't dare to tell the truth. We could only report it as a ghost disturbing the people. The county came and questioned Zhou Laizi. Zhou Laizi said that it was his wife and that she was mentally ill. The officials just made a case without conducting any investigation."

"The case file is thrown into the county office, filed, and that's it."

The old man concluded with a sigh, and the embers in his pipe gradually died down.

Shen Gui's gaze had been fixed on the old locust tree for half the conversation. After the old man finished speaking, he asked, "This place wasn't called this before, was it?"

The old man didn't react immediately: "Huh?"

Shen Gui asked again, "What was the village called before?"

"The older generation said it," the old man answered truthfully, "This place... I think it wasn't called Ancient Locust Village before... it was called Locust Tree Gully."

Shen Gui's gaze paused for a moment.

The old man quickly added, "I heard it from my father, who heard it from his father. I don't know if it's accurate, but it's been a long time, so long that the family genealogy is worn out. If it's wrong, please forgive me, sir..."

Shen Gui asked, "That man surnamed Liu, have his ancestors lived here for a thousand years?"

The old man shook his head: "I really don't know. The Liu family lives in the town, which is more than ten miles away from the village. I only know that they are a wealthy family that has been around for several generations. They have a lot of land and shops, and the county gives them face."

Shen Gui didn't ask any more questions; no wonder the place looked familiar when he first arrived.

He remembered that when he passed through here a thousand years ago, this place was called Huai Shu Gou (Locust Tree Gully), a place where mountain bandits roamed, robbed caravans, looted villages, and committed murder and robbery.

At that time, I was not very accomplished, but I was very ambitious. I had a conflict with the bandits and I remember being injured. I was recuperating in this place, and when I had nothing to do, I planted a locust sapling by the ditch.

This is the one in front of you.

A thousand years have passed since the tree grew from a sapling to a trunk that takes several people to encircle.

At that time, the local gentry who colluded with the bandits in Huai Shu Gou also had the surname Liu. It seems that they didn't kill them all and missed some of their collateral branches.

Same surname, same deeds, still doing them a thousand years later.

Shen Gui didn't express any sentimentality, but he felt that things in this world were sometimes more meaningless than immortality itself. The same old tricks were endless, which made even writers tired of writing about them.

"Giggle giggle—"

The rooster crowed from the west end, the dog barked twice and then quickly shut up, and suddenly there was movement on the other side of the courtyard wall.

First came the sound of feet stomping through muddy water, then the man's muffled curses.

A ragged man squatted in the corner, his face pockmarked and yellow foam dripping from his mouth. He reached out and grabbed the straw mat covering Ah Yue and yanked it off forcefully.

"You're quite comfortable lying here, aren't you, you stinky woman?"

He glanced at her sideways. "Wearing a straw mat? Who the hell put that on you? Was it some random guy?"

Ah Yue curled up into a ball and started laughing again. Her laughter was hoarse and sent chills down one's spine when it mingled with the morning breeze.

Zhou Laizi kicked him several times: "Laughing, laughing, laughing, all my bad luck is because of you, you slut."

After venting his anger, he wrapped the straw mat tighter around himself, turned and walked west of the village, muttering incomprehensible profanities.

The old man, standing behind Shen Gui, whispered, "This is Zhou Laizi."