The Money God

At the mouth of the west market stood an old locust tree, and set into its trunk a niche barely a foot wide, holding a clay figure of the Money God. The god was no taller than a span, round and plump, smiling with narrowed eyes, a little scale in his left hand and a string of copper coins in his right — like some prospering uncle of a family.

Among the market folk the tale went that this god did not grant riches but only kept account of men's greed and honesty. All day they came and went — vegetable-sellers, cloth-pedlars, porters and hucksters — and each, passing, would drop a coin into the niche, as if to enter it in the books. The coins dropped in were weighed by the god at night: from a greedy man the scale-tip floated light; from an honest one the pan sank heavy. Each dawn a line of characters would appear on the stone ledge by the niche — "Such-and-such rice shop, short three geh by the measure," or "the beggar under the bridge, returned a string of cash" — written by no one known, wiped away and yet returning.

The niche was kept by a lone old woman who sold incense, surnamed Wu. She had watched for decades and said the god was strange: in a greedy house, money ran like water and leaked as it entered; in an honest house, money ran like seed and sprouted where it fell.

That year a pestilence came and the west market was shut for half a month. Rice prices climbed; Shopkeeper Sun of the Sun rice-shop seized the chance to mix sand and short the measure, giving eight sheng for a dou and passing mouldy grain as good. Passing the god's niche he spat and said, "A lump of mud fit to weigh me?" — and went on growing fat.

Across the way lived He the Fourth, a porridge-seller, poor by inheritance, who boiled his one sack of old rice into gruel and shared it with the poor neighbors shut in the lanes. He tossed the god a rusted copper coin; that night the niche was quiet, but on the ledge appeared four characters: "Heart heavy, scale even."

Shopkeeper Sun's mouldy rice laid a stretch of people low; suits entangled him, and one night fire took half his warehouse, leaving him stripped. He the Fourth's porridge stall, meantime, was often left double payment by strangers who said they did it for a dead parent's merit.

Old Woman Wu lived to ninety-three. On her deathbed she pointed at the god and said: "He is no god — he is a balance. The greed and honesty in a man's heart, the scale knows best; it only does not speak."

The niche stands still, and the smile on the clay god's face is, if anything, a little fainter than before.