The Messenger

The guards lifted the old sorceress as if she had been a sack of grain. She began to scream then, and the rings on her hands flashed in the sun, and she screamed the names of her gods and of her ancestors and of the men who had helped her collect the tribute for so many years. No one moved to stop them. The crowd stood frozen.

They carried her to the edge of the water. She was a heavy woman, and she fought, but the guards were young and strong. They lifted her and threw her out, not onto the reeds, but into the current itself. She came up once, her shawl over her head, and then the brown water took her down.

Ximen Bao stood on the bank with his hands behind his back, watching the water. He waited a long moment, as though listening for an answer from the river. Then he turned to the acolytes, who were huddled together at the edge of the crowd, their faces white.

The old witch is taking too long, he said. She is old, and perhaps the current has wearied her. We must send someone to urge her on. And without another word, his guards seized the foremost of the acolytes — a young woman who had helped dress Zhinv that morning — and threw her in after her mistress.

She did not come up. The water closed over her head, and the place where she had gone down showed only the same brown ripples as the rest of the river. The crowd began to murmur. Somewhere, a woman began to weep. But no one stepped forward.

Ximen Bao waited again, his head slightly bent, as though he had not finished listening. This is strange, he said at last. The old woman and her disciple are long in returning. Perhaps the river prefers men's voices to women's. He turned, then, to the three elders who had come to see the wedding, and his eyes found them out where they stood, white as paper.

Gentlemen, he said, will you be so good as to go down and discover what is keeping them? The three elders began to back away, holding their hands out before them, begging. But the guards had already taken them, and the crowd, which had been silent until that moment, made no sound at all as the three men were carried, struggling, to the water.

The eldest of the elders went down first, still pleading. The second went after him. The third tried to run, and was caught by a guard before he had taken three steps. They threw all three into the river, and the river received them without a word, and the surface of the water, after a few moments, was as smooth as it had been before.

Ximen Bao stood on the bank for a long time. He did not smile. He did not gloat. He looked out over the water with the same grave, patient expression he had worn when he arrived, as though he were genuinely waiting for the River God to send back his messengers.

The villagers watched him. They had begun to understand, slowly, that this was not a madness, and not a sacrifice. It was a lesson. The men who had told them for a hundred years that a girl must die every spring were themselves, at last, being asked to keep their own bargain with the river.

At last the magistrate turned to the crowd. His voice was quiet. Messengers, he said, are a long time returning. Perhaps the River God keeps his guests. I will wait no longer. Let every man here return to his home. The bride, this year, will not go into the water. And the crowd, as one body, exhaled.