The Plague God

Wei-nan county knew three years of drought. The first year a poor harvest, the second none at all, the third even the grass-roots dug up and eaten. By the court's rule, a disaster year must be reported as disaster, the taxes remitted, the granaries opened. But Magistrate Wang Bi, newly posted, most feared the very character "disaster" — report it and his record was lost, his future with it. So with his clerk Zhao Ren he reckoned to report the starving dead as "bumper harvest," the weeping as "contentment," and levied grain as before, not a grain less.

When the court's messenger rode past the county line, what he saw was a freshly painted gate and tidy threshing-grounds — a stage Wang Bi had thrown up overnight. The messenger gone, the grounds came down and the dead lay back in their places.

Village head Old Sang, seventy, had never filed a complaint in his life. This time he carried half a cake of chaff, walked step by step to the yamen, knelt below the hall, and said three died of hunger each day in his village, begging the lord to open the granary. Wang Bi, finding him inauspicious, had the runners beat him out and break a rib. Old Sang crawled home, gave his last two pecks of old grain to the orphan widow next door, lay down half a month, and got up.

That twelfth month, a stranger came to the county. A blue-cloth gown, a bamboo hat pulled low, a small bronze gourd on his back, age unguessable. He lodged in the ruined temple outside the walls, by day crouched on the field-ridges watching the skeletal villagers share their last mouthful of gruel, by night went to the yamen's back wall to hear Wang Bi feasting his superior, saying "this county has harvested abundantly for years, the people at peace."

The stranger was the Plague God. Heaven, seeing Wei-nan reported "abundant" while the folk's grievances pierced the sky — the gap too wide — sent him down to "visit pestilence" and correct the hearing of heaven. He was not by nature a lover of killing; the office of plague-god is only to collect, for heaven, the accounts that are owed. But he crouched on the ridge seven days and the longer he watched, the poorer he felt.

On the eighth day he stopped Old Sang, who was giving a bowl of thin gruel to a roadside child and licking the bottom of his own.

"Old sir," said the stranger, "is this county truly abundant?"

Old Sang lifted his eyes; in the cloudy pupils was little fear. "Guest is from outside, you wouldn't know. Abundance is the magistrate's abundance; the starving dead are the commoners'. Two ledgers, that don't match."

The stranger nodded, poured a little black powder from the gourd and rolled it between his fingers. "Heaven has ordered me to visit pestilence. By rights the whole county should be stricken. But these on the ridge, I see, lick their own bowls clean and still share with others — what account do they owe?"

Old Sang understood nothing of "accounts," only said hoarsely: "The ones who should die are those who move the brush, not those who move the hoe."

The stranger smiled, a very faint smile, like a wisp of white breath about to scatter in winter.

That night he entered the yamen. Wang Bi sat drinking with Zhao Ren, reckoning how much "surplus" they could squeeze this year to present the superior. The stranger entered uninvited and set the bronze gourd on the desk. Wang Bi, seeing his poverty, would drive him out, but saw a thread of very faint blue vapor escaping the gourd's mouth, and in an instant all the meat-and-wine smell in the room became the earthy stink of a grave-mound.

"Who are you?" Zhao Ren's voice shook.

"The one who collects the account."

The stranger did not lay hands; only with the black powder on his fingertip he drew a stroke on the lintels of Wang Bi, of Zhao Ren, and of several fierce runners who regularly pressed grain for the county. When done he turned and left the yamen, the blue vapor drawn back into the gourd.

Next day the yamen fell ill — Wang Bi burned with fever and raved of "abundance, abundance"; Zhao Ren broke out in black spots and died within days; the fierce runners took to their beds one after another. In the villages outside, not a cough was heard. The households where Old Sang had shared grain, the children still played mud by the wall.

Year's end, the court at last received a true memorial — not Wang Bi's, but a censor from the neighboring county who investigated in plain clothes and reported faithfully. Wei-nan opened its granaries; the grain Old Sang received was enough for his winter.

On the night the Plague God left, he crouched again on the ridge. He held the empty gourd up to the moon; inside, clean and dry. He never liked to see men die, but the accounts of this world must be collected by someone. What he collected was never life, but the debt owed by those who trade the starving dead for their own advancement.

At first light only a small bronze gourd remained on the ridge, cold-gleaming in the frost. The man was long gone.