The Seal-Craftsman

Yu Jiu remembered the first time he ever smelled cinnabar: a summer when he was seven, following his father into the Huang family's back court to seal their house. His father was an itinerant seal-crafter, who always hung at his belt a dented pewter flask filled with cinnabar mixed with rooster's blood; wherever he walked it sloshed, and the chipped spout dripped red dots onto the flagstones. Yu Jiu was small, barely tall enough to reach the worn, shining bluestone of the Huang threshold; he tilted his head back to watch his father crouch before the steps and draw a talisman, and when the cinnabar fell it writhed on the stone like something alive. The smell hit the nose—sweet and bitter at once, like sucking on a rusty nail. When his father finished, he dipped a finger in the leftover red and touched it to Yu Jiu's left wrist, saying, A seal-crafter's hand must never tremble; tremble once, and the evil knows you, and every mark hereafter begins from here. That night the Huangs laid out wine, and his father, flushed red, lifted him onto his knee and pointed to a rice-grain-sized red mole on his own wrist: Son, this is a mark. Seal away one evil, leave one mark. Everyone in this trade carries them. Yu Jiu learned later that the mole was no birthmark but the brand of evil-aura seared into a crafter's skin; his father had sealed a hundred-odd households in his life, and his wrists and shoulders were layered with them, so from afar he looked as if wearing a jacket speckled with red.

His father died the year Yu Jiu turned twelve. Those were years of war, and the wandering crafter fared worst of all; his father came home with barely half a life left, saying he had sealed the evil in a camp for a passing column of soldiers, and the evil, unsealed, had bitten him back. Yu Jiu remembered his father calling him to the kang before he died, a withered hand clutching the chipped flask, saying, Keep the flask. I've cut cinnabar with rooster's blood all my life; don't you change it. The blood is the lure. Without it you can't seal what's alive. His father spoke and was gone, and the red moles on his wrists never faded, like a handful of red sesame scattered on his skin. Yu Jiu kept mourning three years and wore his father's books thin before he dared take his first job alone—sealing an old dried-up well at the village head, said to have drowned a mother and daughter fleeing famine. He set a stone guardian at the mouth as his father had taught, finished the chant, and a red dot appeared soundlessly on the middle finger of his left hand—not hot, only cool, cool as water rising from the bottom of the well. It was his first mark of his own, and he crouched by the well and sat a long while facing its black mouth, and for the first time felt that this trade was not about sealing evil, but signing a contract with something.

For three years after, he practiced by his father's books by day and by the flask's weight at his belt by night, learning which coin faced which quarter, which root took which stone, until the red on his wrist no longer surprised him. The well at the village head stayed quiet; no mother's cry rose from it again, and he took that as his father's hand still guiding the chalk. He told himself then that sealing was a clean thing—that evil, once housed, stayed housed, and the mark was only the price of the lodging.

His mother died the year he turned twenty-five, of a sickness of the heart, always saying she heard someone coughing by the wall-root at night, though no physician could name the ailment. After she went, Yu Jiu sold the old house and kept only the flask, and from then on walked village to village alone—seal one house, sleep one night—and the marks on his wrist thickened year by year, until he nearly forgot he had once had a home, remembering only that this skin of his had been sealed out for other people.

The year he turned eighteen, Old Squire Huang sent for him. The squire sat in his carved chair, rolling walnuts in his hand, and said the neighboring Liu family had offended the alignments; tiles rattled in their court every night, and their stock fell sick and died. He asked Yu Jiu to come seal it. Yu Jiu followed the Huang steward around to the Liu wall, and over the low partition he heard a woman coughing, the sound muffled, as if water had flooded her lungs. Squire Huang would not let him enter the Lius' gate; he only pressed a heavy packet into Yu Jiu's sleeve and said in a lowered voice, The Lius and the Huangs have fought over that sweet-water well for three generations. Bury this at the root of their back wall, and don't let anyone see. Do it right, and twenty taels of silver are yours. Inside the packet was a clay jar, its mouth sealed with yellow spirit-paper, and on the paper was a talisman Yu Jiu knew—a curse-of-subjugation sigil, with the cinnabar drawn backwards, the strokes curling inward, the very way to draw a living person's breath down into the dark. He understood: this was no sealing of evil, but laying a seal upon it—using the name of a household ward to cut the Lius' living road short. Yet the twenty taels Squire Huang offered would pay his father's medicine debt and buy his mother a padded coat for winter. He remembered his father grasping his hand on his deathbed, saying this trade won't starve you nor make you rich, only ask for a quiet conscience. The two words quiet conscience, before twenty taels of silver, were as light as the loose earth at the Liu wall-root.

The twenty taels sat in his sleeve like a stone. He did not spend them that week; he hid them under the kang, and at night the flask at his belt seemed heavier, as if the cinnabar inside had thickened. He told himself the Lius were only a household that had crossed a powerful man, and that he had merely moved earth—yet each time he passed their gate and heard the woman's cough thin to nothing, he felt the second mole on his wrist answer it, warm against his pulse.

On a midnight when the moon was swallowed by cloud, he buried the jar in the wet soil at the Liu back wall. The earth was damp; one spade and water welled up, his hand smeared with mud, and the red mole his father had touched suddenly burned, as if someone had pinched him. The night he came home, a second red mole appeared on his left wrist, set beside his father's like a pair of eyes. At first he thought it steam from the heat, and thought nothing of it. But the mole was hot—especially in the plum rains, when the damp from the wall-root seemed to climb his veins, and the mole throbbed with heat, and the smell of cinnabar seeped thread by thread from his pores, a smell no one else could catch, only he knew it, as if the water of the Liu well were welling out from his wrist.

On the Liu side, first the blood-coughing woman went, then her man, then the sickly little daughter who had been ailing for years—three gone in one winter. The Huang well was contested no more, and the moss on its rim grew lush as never before. Every time Yu Jiu passed the Lius' abandoned gate he felt the earth at the wall-root was hollower than elsewhere, as if something beneath breathed slow. He pressed the matter to the bottom of his heart, told himself it was only guilt, and spoke of it no more; only thenceforth he would never touch the foul art of subjugation again, but worked only proper seals—burying stone guardians, hanging eight-trigram mirrors, setting five-emperor coins, raising sacred Mount Tai stones—mediating where he could, dissolving evil where he could. And yet, even so, the marks on his body kept being added, one stroke at a time.

In the twenty years after, Yu Jiu became the seal-crafter most counted on in those parts. Whoever's house offended the five-yellow, whoever's new grave pressed the dragon-vein, whoever's daughter-in-law could not conceive or whose child cried at night—all came to him. He sealed many evils and gathered many marks: three on the left arm, two on the right, a brow-like line across the chest, one at the nape, two on the back arranged like an ear's shell, and one at the waist that always ached in cloudy weather. Each sealing added a stroke; at first a needle-tip red dot, but with the years it deepened to dark cinnabar, its edge slightly raised, like a grain of rice buried under the skin. He came slowly to know the way of it: what he sealed was a house's evil, but what was marked was the person—the more crooked the household's heart, the deeper he sealed and the darker the mark; the household that truly sought peace left a faint mark that in a few years nearly vanished. He asked an elder of the master's generation, who stroked his beard and looked at the marks on Yu Jiu's wrist and shook his head: This trade of ours has always stood in for others against evil, and borne their sin as well; the mark is the evil's proof that it knows you, and when enough gather, the body is no longer yours—it is the house the evil rents to live in. Yu Jiu did not understand, took the words for mystic talk, paid the consultation fee, and turned away.

Of the houses he worked in those years, three stayed clearest in his mind. One was the opera-stage house in the east of town, whose owner had turned an ancestral stage into a storeroom; at night a smell of water-sleeves drifted down from the beams, mixed with the sweet rank of rouge. He climbed up and found, behind a crossbeam, half a wooden dan-princess puppet whose face had been eaten hollow by worms; he re-dotted cinnabar on the puppet and buried it under the old locust behind the house, and came home with a new mole on his right arm, one that warmed faintly whenever someone passed singing opera. Another was the pawnshop in the west of town, whose keeper had taken in a rusted bronze ward said to guard a house; but from the night it entered the vault the shop's bronzes rang of themselves in the dark. Yu Jiu recognized the ward had long ago been counter-cursed by a former owner; he resealed it with seven talismans and sank it in the city moat, and the brow-line on his chest deepened another notch, as if someone had pinched it with a fingernail. The third was the new house by the River God temple, built on the silt of an old channel; when it rained, a river-bottom stink rose in the rooms. He buried nine Mount Tai stones around the house, and as he moved them he plainly heard water flowing beneath the sand, as if someone were turning over in the water. After these three sealings, the marks on his body had quietly arranged into a vague shape—only then he had not yet thought of a face.

He told himself then that the shape was accident, the way freckles on any old man's back might seem to spell a thing if you stared long enough; but the marks were not freckles, and they did not fade with the sun, and more than once he had woken to find his own hand pressed to his back as if someone—his own sleeping self—had been tracing the lines, learning them by touch.

He had not been without suspicion. At thirty he went to Squire Zhao east of the river to seal a dragon-vein pressed by a new grave, and came home with a new mole on his right arm that burned on every first and fifteenth of the month, hot enough to keep him from sleep, turning him over and over to think of the clay jar at the Liu wall-root. At thirty-five a young couple from the east of the village came asking for a child; the wife had lost three pregnancies, they said, and begged him to seal the yin in the house. He went, hung five-emperor coins from the bedroom beam, and at the moment he turned to leave the mole at his nape jumped; he looked back and plainly saw the wife's shadow on the wall, a span longer than the woman, pinned there unmoving. He dared not speak of it, only pressed the ward one stroke deeper, and as he left the couple thanked him profusely, yet he felt hollow inside, as if what he had sealed for them was not the yin of the house but something come from elsewhere, that had for the moment borrowed his hand to set its foot.

The year he turned forty-seven, in the dog days, a night too close to sleep, he rose and lit an oil lamp to look at his body. The flame jumped, and he saw beside the old waist-mole a new red dot had appeared sometime without his knowing, and with the two on his back and the line on his chest it faintly traced an arc, like the beginning of a brow-bone. He reached to press, and the several moles burned all at once, so he snatched his hand back; the lamp-flowered popped again, and in the room was only his own breathing, and a dampness from some corner he could not name. For the first time he was afraid—not of evil, but of this skin of his, not knowing what more it would grow. That night he held the lamp until dawn; only at the first cock's cry did the marks slowly cool, yet the arc remained.

The year he turned forty-two he took on a disciple named Liu Chun. Liu Chun was a young man from elsewhere, who said his parents had died early and he had drifted here hoping to learn a trade to live by. Yu Jiu found him honest and steady-handed, and took him in. Liu Chun learned fast, with a memory especially keen: the arrangement of every sealing, how many coins, how deep the pit, which line of talisman—he remembered after one look, and at night by the oil lamp copied it into a book. Yu Jiu was privately glad his skill would have a successor. Only once he found Liu Chun gazing at the marks on his back, his eyes strange, as if he knew those red dots. He asked, and Liu Chun only said, Master, the marks on your body are like a picture. He thought nothing of it. Another time, Liu Chun was grinding cinnabar for him and suddenly asked, Master, did you ever lay a seal for someone in earlier years—not a proper sealing of evil, but the kind of subjugation that breaks a family root. Yu Jiu's hand trembled and cinnabar dripped on his sleeve; he stared at Liu Chun a long while and said, A young fellow like you, how do you know of such things. Liu Chun smiled and said, One hears much in the countryside. Yu Jiu asked no more, but from then watched Liu Chun's hands, and noticed they were clean—not a single mole. A man who had studied the craft three years should not have hands so clean.

He asked Liu Chun once to help him seal a minor house, and watched the young man's hands through the whole rite; they moved sure and quiet, and not a flicker of red came to them, though the household's evil was real enough that Yu Jiu's own nape mole sang all the way home. He said nothing, but thought often afterward of a jar buried at a wall-root, and of a face pressed to the inside of the clay, listening.

The autumn he turned fifty-three, Yu Jiu was at the bathhouse having his back scrubbed, and when the man reached his spine he stopped and cried out, staring at Yu Jiu's back. Yu Jiu turned to the fogged bronze mirror on the wall, and saw his back a sheet of dark red, and the marks scattered for decades had somehow joined into a shape—two for eyes, the line for brows, the two on his back hooked into an ear's shell, the line on his chest curving slightly into a mouth. A whole face lay on his back, brows eyes nose mouth all complete, only without expression, as if someone had silently drawn a face on his skin with cinnabar. He reached to touch it, and the face was hot, hotter than any other mark, as if something beneath the skin were slowly waking. The bathman dropped his towel in fright; steam filled the room, and Yu Jiu stood alone in the wooden tub, a burning silence on his back, the cinnabar smell so thick it choked, and even the bathman stepped back and said, Old sir, on your back it looks like someone is lying.

The bathman backed to the door and would not come nearer; Yu Jiu dressed slowly, his back to the wall, feeling the face there press against the cloth as if it too meant to dress. Outside, the autumn light was flat and grey, and the cinnabar smell on him drew a stray dog that followed him half a street before he shoed it away with his crutch. He did not go home by the usual lane but circled through the market, though the smell drew stares, because he did not want to be alone with his back until he had seen it by lamplight.

That night he dug out his father's old books, their pages eaten by worms, and in a hidden layer found a torn scrap bearing one line: Not seal, not brand; what is sealed is evil, what is branded is debt; when debt is full, the body returns to its true owner. He went cold all over, and the lamp-oil popped once, like someone laughing in the dark. Of the houses he had sealed through the years, most were wealthy; some held true evil, some only the unspoken malice in a man's heart—and Squire Huang's command to him that year had plainly sealed the Lius' living breath down into the dark. He recalled them one by one, and only then saw that the brows and eyes of the face on his back overlapped with the blood-coughing Liu woman, the ashen face of her man before he died, and the thin shadow the little daughter cast on the window paper. Not one face, but the grievance of the Liu family of three, borrowing stroke after stroke of mark, pieced back into a person upon his body.

He held the lamp and looked at the face on his back, again and again. The left-eye mole sat a little high, the right a little low, the two eyes unequal, as if the person always turned his face aside to look at you—and he remembered the Liu man walked with his head tilted, from a childhood fall, as everyone in the village knew. The mouth-line curved slightly to the left, and he recalled the Liu woman spoke so too, her mouth born drawn to one side, smiling like weeping. What struck him most was the new red dot between the brows, set precisely where the little daughter's cinnabar mole had been—the child had been sick, and a red dot of warding had been marked on her brow that she never washed off till death. One face, pieced together from the three of them, not drawn on but grown in, grown into his own skin. He brought the lamp close and saw at the face's eye-corner an exceedingly fine line, like a tear-track, or like someone beneath the skin dragging a fingernail again and again.

He set the lamp down and dressed, but sleep would not come; he sat with his back to the wall and felt the face breathe against the boards, a slow heat that rose and fell like a chest. Once, near the hour of the ox, the mouth-line seemed to move, and he lunged around with the lamp to catch it—but the face was only a face, silent and complete, and the room behind him held nothing but the dark and the drip of the eave. He understood then that the thing on his back was not watching the room. It was watching him.

He wanted to erase it. First he scrubbed hard with lye until the skin broke and bled, but the face only reddened where it tore, as if angered, the cinnabar smell mixed with blood turning his stomach. He went to the City God temple and begged three talismans, mixed cinnabar with egg-white and pasted his back full; at night the papers caught fire with no wind, leaving a scorched mark, yet the face remained, and beneath the burn showed a deeper dark cinnabar, like charcoal that would not burn through. He even tried to pick the marks out with a silver needle; the instant the tip pierced the skin the whole face flared hot, his hand jerked, the needle fell, and when he looked up the mouth of the face in the mirror seemed to have curved a little. He ran to the Taoist priest on West Street and asked for a rite; the priest stepped the star-paces and chanted a whole night, and wiping sweat at the end said quietly, Master Yu, this is no evil but a debt; a rite cannot seal a debt, only press it, and only for a while. He went home and the face on his back was indeed quiet two days; but on the third night the plum rains came, the damp from the wall-root rose, and the face burned hotter than before, as if the pressing had only fed its fire.

He remembered how he had sealed the Lius to death—bury a curse-jar, draw the earth-evil into the house, and the living become the evil's food. He would use the same method, and seal this face back.

He found a clay jar three times the size of that year's, sealed it with yellow spirit-paper in the old way, and in his own back court chose the true-north bearing and dug a deep pit. He meant to stand in the pit bared to the waist, using his own body as the lure, to seal stroke by stroke of mark into the jar. But when the pit reached waist-deep he suddenly knew something was wrong. The pit's size matched his own frame to the inch; its walls were set with five old coins in the five-emperor arrangement, and that arrangement was exactly the line he had taught Liu Chun—round outside, square within, heaven above, earth below, five coins arching the center; and the pit's bottom was laid with bluestone, its face worn shining, identical to the threshold stone he had seen in the Huang back court at seven. He remembered with a jolt that this house was not his. He had bought it from Liu Chun three years before; the deed was vague, saying only that Liu Chun was returning home and eager to sell, the price unusually low. Now he saw the house had long been prepared for him—wall-root, pit position, coin-method, stone—all according to his own rules of sealing. Liu Chun's hands were clean not because evil had never touched him, but because the evil simply did not leave its mark on him; he had another method, and left the marks to others.

Later he went through a handwritten book Liu Chun had left behind, and between its pages found a drawing he had never seen, showing exactly the arrangement of the face on his back, with a line of small characters beside it: All that the master seals returns to the master; the Liu family's debt of three generations, repaid tonight upon the master's body with the master's own art. He stared at those words, his hand shaking so he could hardly hold the paper—Liu Chun was no orphan wanderer, but a descendant of the Liu family, the reckoning brewed from that well and that abandoned court, who had studied three years only waiting for this day.

That is to say, someone had used the method he had taught, and the very method he had used on the Lius, to seal him. He was not the crafter come to seal a face; he was the evil in this house, the one to be sealed.

Outside the pit the wind rose suddenly and passed through the halls, carrying a smell he had known all his life—cinnabar mixed with rooster's blood, and the damp earth of the wall-root. In the wind seemed to ride the Liu woman's muffled cough, the one flooded in her lungs. He heard footsteps outside the wall, very light, as if someone walked toward him carrying a pewter flask, its spout chipped, drip-drip-drip, dropping red dots on the flagstones. He dared not look up, only buried his face in his arms, yet the face on his back woke fully in that moment, burning to the heart, every mole opening like an eye, all looking at him at once. He understood at last: not one of the evils he had sealed for others had truly been sealed; all of them had climbed back onto his body along the marks. And now he himself would become a jar, a stone, a thing sealed within a house, bearing forever for the living of this world that breathless yin.

He thought of the twenty taels, of the padded coat his mother never wore, of the well that never ran dry for the Huangs, and of Liu Chun's clean hands copying his every move by lamplight; and he understood that the contract his father had spoken of was not between crafter and evil, but between crafter and the dead, and that it was always the crafter who was signed. The flask's drip came closer, and with it the smell he had carried all his life, now no longer only on his skin but in the very air of the pit, as if the house itself had learned to bleed cinnabar.

The night wind tightened; the wind through the halls carried the Liu cough, one upon another, as if the one beneath the wall-root had at last found the road home. Yu Jiu crouched at the pit's bottom and made his body smaller, but the pit fit him exactly, not a hair loose. He heard his marks light up one by one beneath the skin, as if someone were drawing, stroke by stroke, another face upon his back—this time, the face was his own. The footsteps outside stopped at the pit's edge; the drip-drip of the flask stopped too; only the night wind through the halls remained, and that smell of cinnabar that would not disperse, slowly soaking the whole house, and the man in the pit with it, into red.

The next spring the house changed hands. A young couple returned from the city, liking the quiet location and the cheap price, and moved in gladly. The first months were peaceful, only the ground in the back court, however it was sunned, stayed damper than elsewhere, and now and then a little dark red seeped from the bluestone cracks, as if someone were grinding cinnabar beneath. Each plum rain, the wind crossing the main hall carried an indescribable smell, sweet and bitter at once, like sucking on a rusty nail. Once the wife rose at night and heard a very faint cough by the back wall, muffled, as if water had flooded the lungs; she nudged her man and said, Listen, is there someone outside the wall. The man turned over and said, No one, it's the wind. The wind crossed the hall again and blew out the lamp on the table, and in the dark the ground in the back court, quietly, burned once more.

Later, when people asked where the former master Yu had gone, the neighbors only shook their heads, saying he had not been seen out of doors since that winter, the house stood empty a while, and a young man called Liu Chun came to settle the affairs, saying the master had gone wandering. But after Liu Chun left, no one saw Yu Jiu again. When the new couple tidied the side room they found, hung from a beam, a chipped-mouth pewter flask, long dried inside, leaving only a layer of dark red scab; they bent close, and it still smelled of that sweet-bitter, like sucking on a rusty nail.

The couple kept the flask on a high shelf, meaning to toss it, but never did; some nights the wife said the house felt warmer than it should, and the husband said it was the spring. They had a child that winter, a healthy boy, and on his brow, at birth, was a single red dot no wider than a grain of rice, which the midwife said was a mark of good fortune. The wife laughed, and did not tell the husband that when she held the boy to the lamp, the dot on his brow sat exactly where, on the former master's back, the face had worn its own.

Midnight Record note: The marks on a seal-crafter's body were never the evil knowing him; they were the way home, known by those he had sealed to death.