Free The Blue-Eyed Shan by Stephen; Becker Page B

beams were fitted to the thick posts, and the wooden tholes greased with hog fat and driven. The sun was high now and the men worked slowly.
    Mong took the heads from Kin-tan and sewed the flaps of neck skin to the bamboo slats. He then bound the cages shut. Naung ran hemp line through holes in one end of each balance beam and knotted it securely. These preparations took the time of one meal, or of a good bath in the stream, or of one cheroot.
    When all was in readiness, Mong bound the cages to the inner ends of the balance beams. Two teams raised the posts and planted them deep in their pits; two teams shoveled dirt around them and tamped it firm.
    When the posts were up, Naung hauled on his hemp lines. The balance beams swung up, and the cages hung above the road, and the heads brooded down at them. Naung then tied the hemp lines through notches low on the posts. “No more digging for a while,” he said. “No more construction. For a while we repair only. And replace heads as needed.”
    â€œTen is a good number,” Mong approved. “Five to the south and five to the north.”
    â€œBut this is a double,” said Ko-yang, “which makes eleven.”
    Mong scowled.
    â€œEleven is not a bad number,” Naung said quickly. “One for each finger and one for the big finger.”
    Mong laughed, though Ko-yang seemed surly, and Naung breathed easier. “Now we make our visits.” The men assembled and marched back along the road, and where the cages were down because fearful or defiant travelers had hacked through the hemp lines, Naung knotted or replaced the hemp. They continued south, beyond the teak grove and East Poppy Field, to repair the other five cages. Naung liked this road. He was a traveled man and knew a small thrill, an eagerness, at the flat dun glare of the road between the green groves, the straight run of it like the airstrip at Muong Sing. He liked it even better now, with his handiwork complete, six to the north and five to the south, eleven former highwaymen and brigands saying to all who approached, “Dawdlers, beware: see what befalls evil men here.”
    They trooped back to the village and lingered over a late noonday meal, each in his own house. In the afternoon Naung made his rounds, inspecting all sentry posts, surprising a sleepy Shwe, taking him unawares by the throat and then delivering, for the twentieth time, a lecture on the functions of a sentry. Shwe was drooping, middle-aged, a smoker of much opium. Naung decided to retire him to farm work, with the Sawbwa’s permission.
    Naung took an hour off then, and played pigs-in-their-pens with Lola so that he could rejoice in her bright brown eyes, her wavy hair, her ivory skin, the warmth of her imp’s grin, the tug of her fingers. She was almost ready now for women’s clothes. Growing up!
    In the evening he reported to the Sawbwa. The Sawbwa’s breath whistled through the hairs of the Sawbwa’s nose; the Sawbwa removed his turban to fluff the white hair and scratch the yellow scalp. “It is well done and still I do not like it,” the Sawbwa said. “We are Shan and not Wild Wa. Our way should be the way of the Lord Buddha, and not the way of savages who worship stones and human heads.”
    â€œBut if we must become like the Wild Wa to survive,” Naung said reasonably, “then we must.”
    â€œIf we become like the Wild Wa,” said the Sawbwa, “then we have not survived.”
    The Sawbwa of Pawlu could distinguish faces at twice a man’s length; at a hundred paces he could see, or at least perceive vaguely, the presence and motion of men and women on a hillside. His kidneys ached always; his urine was greenish yellow, but this did not alarm him because colors were to him muted and dull. He cleared his bowels perhaps once in three days. Sudden pains, sharp pangs in various joints and bones, were his way of life.
    He knew that he was Chinese,