Free The Binding Chair by Kathryn Harrison Page B

mixture of sickening rich woman’s perfume and the sharp, briny odor of her sex. Ahng-wah spat, calling May an ugly bitch in heat.
    In his twenty years, the gardener had had two women, his village chief’s cretin daughter, whom everyone had had, including the chief (all of them considering this barely just compensation for the village’s supporting so otherwise useless a being), and the girl he’d allowed to sleep in the shed where his uncles stored chilies. She, too, was running away from someone or something.
    “Give me my purse,” May said.
    Ahng-wah looked at May. Why shouldn’t she be the third? Having carried her this far, feet and knees and back aching, he considered a handful of jade inadequate payment.
    “Wait,” May said, seeing that he was unfastening the belt in which for eleven miles she had tucked her feet. If she convinced him that rape was too risky, that she would turn him in, perhaps he’d decide to murder her. And if anyone was going to take May’s life, it would be May herself, not this bone-headed lummox. Fury more than danger hastened May’s thoughts. Ahng-wah was strong, but he was stupid and his fears were the fears of a stupid person.
    “Careful!” May said, suddenly inspired. “Careful of the foxes!” Ahng-wah looked around wildly.
    “What fox!” he said. May willed any expression of triumph from her face. What a blessing that he was frightened of animals.
    “Surely you know about the fox girls,” she went on, alluding to local legends that told of bands of female grave-robbers, able to transform themselves into foxes who dug swift, deep holes in which they hid themselves and their loot. “How do you think I came to own so many necklaces?” she asked. “You don’t think I’d run away from a husband who gave me so many jewels?”
    Ahng-wah said nothing, but he studied her face, the exaggerated widow’s peak and long eyeteeth that had always encouraged May herself to believe that she looked a little more like an animal than a woman should.
    “Well,” she said. “Shall I call my sisters? Shall I show you my tail? The hair on my hands?” She thrust them forward.
    “No!” he cried. This was not the chief’s cretin daughter.
    “Then give me my purse!”
    But Ahng-wah was running, running, and May was sitting, dirty, in a ditch, watching her jewels vanish. She touched the one necklace she still wore to make sure it was there, around her throat.
    Five miles to Shanghai—not even a night’s walk, but that was for someone like Ahng-wah, a person with feet, real feet. May sat and listened to the sound of her own heart, cursing her luck. The cruelty of the silk merchant, it seemed to her, lay in not allowing her to die. If he had, she wouldn’t be hiding from him in a ditch, she wouldn’t be bruised and hungry and frightened, forced to draw bitter solace from the one comforting thought available to her: that of the shoes she’d ruined. May fell asleep watching silk divide under the blade of her knife, an image she would resurrect on subsequent bleak nights of her life.
    W HEN THE SUN came up, the road filled with traffic heading toward the city: carts of peppers and leeks and eggs, men staggering under yokes to which forty chickens were bound upside down by their feet, flapping, squawking, shitting. Afraid to beg a ride, sure that her husband was hunting her, May stayed in the ditch, listening and waiting, hidden by high weeds. Another night passed, another day.
    On the third night, as she was falling asleep, aching head filled with visions of torn wet silk, a strange, howling clatter raked the calm. May startled. She got to her feet, dizzy with hunger, and peered over the edge of the ditch at a boisterous crowd approaching under the light of torches, shadows leaping ahead with the flames. It was the clamorous dance of a local bandit-king’s triumphant all-night parade, his dusty, grinning cohorts dragging devices of war of every conceivable vintage: cannons and crossbows