The Bargain with the River

The county of Ye lay along the great Zhang River, where the water ran broad and brown and, in the season of the spring rains, rose without warning over its banks. It was a rich land when the river was kind, and a ruined one when it was not. The farmers had learned, long before any living man could remember, to buy the river's kindness.

The price was a girl.

Every year, when the willows first put out their leaves, the old witch who lived at the temple by the water would walk from hamlet to hamlet, followed by her acolytes, and choose a maiden from among the poor families of the district. She was to be made the bride of the River God. She would be dressed in fine robes, laid upon a bed of reeds, and sent floating out upon the current until the water took her.

The villagers did not call it murder. They called it duty. They told themselves, and their children, and the strangers who passed through, that the River God was a being of great power, who would send floods to drown the fields and homes of any county that failed to send him his wife. Better one daughter lost than a hundred families washed away.

But the truth had a sharper edge. The families who could afford it paid the witch and the elders of the village a heavy sum to pass their daughters over. The poor could not pay, and so it was always the daughters of the poor who went down to the water. The richer the district grew, the poorer the poorest families became, for the tribute to the river was taken from their own grain and their own gates.

The old witch grew fat on the gold. She wore rings on every finger. Her acolytes rode donkeys and looked down from them at the people they had chosen. The three elders who saw to the collection of the tribute built themselves fine houses, and told each other that what they did was for the good of all.

And the River God, for his part, sent floods every third year or so, just often enough to keep the custom alive. The farmers would look at the ruined fields and say, quietly, that the bride this year must have displeased him. They never said what they thought: that the river would have flooded anyway.

It was into this county that Ximen Bao came, one spring, to be its new magistrate. He was a man of middle years, with a plain face and quiet eyes, and he asked more questions than magistrates were expected to ask. He asked about the granaries. He asked about the roads. He asked, in the end, about the strange toll of young girls, and the fine houses of the men who collected it.

The elders exchanged glances when he asked. The old witch pulled her shawl about her and would not meet his eyes. But the farmers, gathered at the door of the hall, looked at one another and said nothing, for they had learned that it was safer to say nothing.

Then Ximen Bao leaned forward, and his voice was gentle as he spoke. This year, he said, when the time comes for the wedding, I wish to see it myself. Send word to me. I will come down to the river and help send the bride off.