In his sixth decade, Uncle Lu suffered greatly when the famine began. A filial child would have sliced off and cooked a piece of his own flesh for his starving master, but I was too cowardly. I went out scavenging for Uncle Lu instead, and last week I came back to find him glassy-eyed on the workshop floor. I lay beside him until nightfall. Then I took him by wheelbarrow to a nearby field, dug a hole as deep as I stood and buried him there. Afterwards I lay on the mound, protecting the unmarked grave for a night and a day. Over my dead body would cannibals dig him up. Uncle Lu had been like a father to me.
‘Why have you brought me here?’ I ask you.
‘Better here than the gutter, Turnip,’ you say. ‘Better here than where the corpse-snatchers can get you.’
My head throbs from where your knuckles flew at me. My buttocks and back are grazed from where you dragged me through the streets. I murmur, ‘Do you mind if I sleep now, Tiger?’
But your eyes are shut. You are already sleeping.
For many moons the city of Zhongdu has been under siege. The Mongol hordes came from the north, and our city walls are now surrounded by ox-skin yurts and cattle-dung fires, and tens of thousands of Mongol warriors, patrolling on horseback so no one can flee. They watch politely as famished Jurchens abseil down the city walls on ropes, before impaling the escapees with a cloud of arrows. They are breaking down our defences, starving the million citizens of Zhongdu to death. Beyond the city walls, camel-mounted kettledrums beat day and night, as within the city hunger-weakened Jurchens keel over. Every beat, another dead, another dead.
Before the Mongols came, the markets of Zhongdu were thriving and bustling, selling every beast and fowl and grain. But now our stores of millet, barley and rice are gone. Every animal was eaten long ago and not one remains. Not a cat or a dog, nor a sparrow or a rat. Not even a pet cricket chirruping in a cage.
The famine-stricken citizens of Zhongdu think only of food. Staggering about the streets, their hollow stomachs rattle with stones, twigs and bark. Mouths chew at nothing, masticating empty air, or chew grass to an indigestible cud. The famine has made insectivores of us, gobblers of grasshoppers and ants. And now a moral quandary has descended like a dark cloud upon the citizens of Zhongdu.
Do we eat or bury our dead?
We spend two days and nights on the workshop floor. We are delirious. We drift in and out of consciousness. We don’t talk. We barely move. The glass beads of the wind chime tinkle as they sway gently above. Sometimes I creak my eyelids apart. Through the light and dark coming through the window I track the passage of time. I shiver with cold. I swallow the air, hoping there is sustenance in the emptiness. My stomach gurgles with it. The air burbles through my intestines and splutters back out as flatulence. I swear to take revenge on the Mongols as a ghost after I am dead. But, to be honest, my heart’s not in it. Apathy’s all I feel as my life slips away.
On the second day you speak: ‘Turnip, I am going out to find some food.’
I hear footsteps. I hear the door slam. I try to lift my head. Or perhaps I dream I do. I can’t find my head anyway.
Night. The smell of cooking meat summons me back from the brink of death. I open my eyes. You are squatting by the fireplace, holding two metal skewers of meat over the flames. A groan escapes my lips. My saliva glands are a bursting dam. Hearing I am awake, you hand me a skewer by the wooden handle.
‘Tiger. . what meat is this?’ I ask.
‘Cat.’
‘Cat? But there are no cats left in the city.’
‘I know where they live. I know where to hunt for them.’
I stare at the skewered pieces of semi-raw meat. The edges are charred. The meat trickles blood on to my wrist and hand.
‘If you don’t eat it,’ you say, ‘I will.’
For twenty minutes there is no sound but our chewing and swallowing. You sink your teeth into your cat-kebab, your eyes slitted, your tiger scars smeared with grease. After the meat is eaten we pick at the fibres caught between our teeth. We lick the juices from our palms. My stomach is convulsing with joy.
Thereafter our days are like this. During daylight we rest. We watch the sunbeams drifting through the window and shifting in golden bars across the workshop floor. We watch the rise and fall of our chests and swat at the flies buzzing around our ulcerated legs. We listen to the Mongol drums beating beyond the fortress of city walls. We think our thoughts, hunger-weak thoughts that crawl feebly through our minds. Then, after dusk, you vanish into the night to go cat-hunting. Tiger by name, tiger by nature. Hunter-gatherer, you stalk one down and return with a skinned flank of meat.
‘Where is the cat’s head, Tiger?’ I ask. ‘Where’s the fur and limbs? The tail and paws?’
‘I tossed them to some starving orphans,’ you reply.
Petals of blood spill from the meat as you carry it to the workbench. On hands and knees I lick them up with my thirsty tongue. You slam a cleaver into the cat, portioning it up. Then we each hold a skewer over the fire, salivating as the flames lick the rawness away. I can hardly wait for the meat to be cooked before gobbling it down.
Before grilling the meat we lock the door and windows, for the smell of roasting flesh brings interlopers. They knock politely, begging to be let in. They scrabble like rats and whine, ‘Let us have some meat. We are starving out here. We have children to feed. Out of the goodness of your hearts. .’
You snatch up the cleaver and go to the door. How terrifying you are, with your scarred cheeks and wild, lice-ridden mane. The blade of the cleaver and your eyes glint as one.
‘Come on in,’ you smile, opening the door wider. ‘Here I am, waiting with my cleaver to chop your children up. I will scoop out their livers and kidneys and boil them for soup.’
And the starving beggars slither back into the shadows. Though your threats are horrifying, I admire your bravery. Man eat man, this is what our city has become. And you are brutal in our defence.
When I regain strength, I wander around our city and see how Zhongdu has descended into depravity. The good people have starved to death and the moral conscience of the city has died with them. Cannibalism is now the norm, the wicked feeding on the corpses of the good. They don’t even wait for cover of darkness before shamelessly dragging the dead away. The kitchens of the body-snatchers are fragrant with roasting meat. The maddening aroma wafts about the streets, diminishing willpower in the few places where willpower remains.
At night we are woken by shrieking in the Craftsmen’s District: ‘Fiend! You ate our boy. You ought to rot in Hell.’
‘Who had a bite when they thought I weren’t looking? Who deserves to rot in Hell as much as I do?’
‘Liar! Liar!’
I recognize their voices.
‘That’s Swordmaker Fu and his wife,’ I whisper. ‘They had a young son, but from the sounds of it he is now dead.’
You sneer in the dark, ‘Cannibals. Too lazy to go out and hunt a cat.’
I shut my eyes, but I am too haunted by Swordmaker Fu’s macabre words to sleep. I lie awake instead, and count my blessings that I am with a fellow-believer in the sanctity of human flesh.
Every day the Mongol battering rams strike the city gates and the citizens of Zhongdu hold their breath as the beast pounds. Ah, this time we are done for, we Jurchens think. This time they will break our defences. But the Jurchen army, armed with arrows and bows, somehow keep the wolves at bay for one more day.
One afternoon, as the battering rams pound, you ask, ‘Turnip, have you seen a devil’s horseman before?’
I confess I haven’t.
‘You’ve never climbed the city wall?’
‘Not since the Mongols came. It’s too dangerous.’
‘Come with me, Turnip,’ you say. ‘I know a place we can watch them.’