The Return (4)
The dynasties of old China devised every manner of scheme for shoring up their royal authority.
They rewrote their laws without end, bound powerful clans to the throne through marriage, and whenever they judged it necessary, they stooped to the most sinister of means, waging relentless wars over power.
And among their instruments were the punishments reserved for those who rose against the state — the ones branded traitors to the realm.
A traitor, as a rule, meant a soul who sought to overturn the country entire, and so the royal house made certain to prepare for them a special-execution course stocked with nothing but the most spectacular torments it could devise.
The first of these:
Execution by boiling.
When the very first character in the word means "to boil," you can probably see where this is going.
First practiced in the Shang dynasty — the dynasty famed for the saga of King Zhou and Daji — execution by boiling was a cruelty in which a living person was dropped into a furiously seething cauldron and cooked into human stew, or fried up as human fritters.
It really does mean exactly what it says. I have no words.
Even death by fire — said to be the most agonizing end a human being can suffer — pales beside this punishment.
Fire, after all, burns the body away in an instant. Boiling cooks it slowly, and the condemned feels every last measure of that pain on the way out.
And as a bonus, the boiled or fried corpse could then be paraded before the ministers as a warning to them all.
Good grief. Horrifying.
But the punishment course for traitors does not end there.
The second torment was born of long deliberation — someone, somewhere, wracking his brain for a fresher, more ingenious way to put a traitor to death.
Consider the Spring and Autumn period and the age of the Warring States, when the realms brawled with one another nearly every other day until Qin Shi Huang finally succeeded in unifying them all.
It was in that era that dismemberment by chariot abruptly made its debut.
Dismemberment by chariot was a terror of a punishment: a man's arms and legs were lashed fast with ropes, the ropes were hitched to oxen, and the beasts were driven apart until all four limbs tore free of his body.
The expression for a body split into five separate pieces — the "fivefold dismemberment" — traces its origin to this very punishment.
Ripping the limbs off a perfectly whole human being by brute force — this one, too, would hurt beyond all reason.
Apparently the shoulders and thighs rarely give way; it is usually the elbows and knees that come off first....
Just picturing it turns my stomach.
The man who invented dismemberment by chariot was later shoved out in a struggle for power and died — and the record states that his own corpse was subjected to it.
Having championed a brand of law so harsh it bordered on cruelty and ground the people underfoot, he was so despised that the spectators at his execution chewed on his flesh. Or so the story goes.
Why were they chewing it, though?
There is a saying about a man so detestable that even devouring him whole would not settle the score — but here it wasn't a figure of speech. It was the literal truth?
The imagination of the Chinese does not stop there.
There was flaying — slitting open a criminal's back and peeling the skin from his body in one unbroken piece.
There was the waist-cut, which killed a man by cleaving him in two at the middle with a colossal executioner's blade.
Burying people alive went without saying, and the impalement execution that calls Vlad the Impaler to mind existed in China as well, under the name of the rod punishment.
They truly did cook their fellow man in every conceivable way.
Beyond these, any number of further torments stood ready and waiting for traitors, but explaining each one in turn would take us to sunrise.
The Emperor regarded me with those deep black eyes, dark and unreadable as a shadowed pool.
"Answer me, and be quick. Of the two, which do you wish for?"
"...That is..."
At the sight of me wavering, the Emperor nodded as though it were all understood.
"Ah — as I said only moments ago. Should you have something else in mind, you are free to choose that instead."
"Hmm..."
Would it be better to simply grant them a merciful death?
No.
When it came down to it, these were criminals who had wrung suffering out of countless lives, and they ought to die paying for it in kind.
Had they lost their lives to Seo Yeo or Lü Bu back then, none of this would be necessary now.
By that measure, the bastards who died in the banquet hall that day had been the lucky ones.
I sank into thought, recalling just what sins the magnates still breathing had committed.
First, the smuggler.
That one had smuggled goods in to resell them at a markup, lining his pockets with illicit profit — and worse, he had secretly signed a pact with the river bandits prowling the Changjiang, then murdered and plundered the commoners traveling the roads....
This one gets boiling.
Who did you think you were, some Pirate King?
You loved water so much you went and shook hands with river bandits — so into your own private swimming pool you go, with a great big splash.
Next, the loan shark.
The bastard who engineered situations where people had no choice but to borrow, then cranked the interest to absurd heights and sucked the common folk dry down to the marrow.
There were even records of him cornering young girls over their debts and toying with them....
This bastard gets castration.
Not with any notion of making him a eunuch and letting him live — I mean to sever his manhood entire before taking his life.
"Toying with" makes it sound tame, but if word of it climbed all the way into my reports, he was unquestionably vile of the worst order.
I have beaten his habits out of him this thoroughly, so I can only hope he lives a quiet, ordinary life in the next one.
Who else was there...
Right. There was the crooked merchant, too.
I carried on down the list of the damned.
Thus, a short while later, my decision made, I opened my mouth before the Emperor.
"My recommendation is as follows."
The Emperor, who had heard me out in silence, answered in a voice that made plain not a shred of it posed any difficulty.
"Good. Then the punishments shall be carried out precisely as the General-in-Chief proposes."
"It is an honor."
With those words, the Emperor said nothing more and simply went on gazing at me.
Caught in the Emperor's stare, I rolled my eyes this way and that, trying to read the room.
What had brought this on all of a sudden?
I re-surveyed the situation — and promptly realized that the Emperor had tilted her head back ever so slightly and was looking up at me.
Even with me bent at the waist, the gap in our heights was greater than I'd imagined, and the whole tableau came off looking irreverent in the extreme.
And then it hit me — she had come down from the throne!
Why had it taken me this long to notice?
Startled half out of my wits, I dropped flat against the floor, straining to make myself smaller still.
At that, the Emperor, who had been watching my performance, spoke.
"There is no need for that."
"Your Majesty?"
"That oblivious streak of yours is as strong as ever, I see."
The Emperor let out a small sigh.
"We fixed our gaze upon you for no other reason than to bid you raise your head — and you take it for precisely the opposite."
...
Wouldn't just about anyone take it that way, though?
What subject in his right mind, finding the Emperor's eyes boring into him, would read it as an invitation to straighten his spine and lock into a staring contest with the throne?
If such a man actually existed, his head would come off in one clean stroke for the crime of defiling the imperial house.
Height difference aside, the Emperor — grown by leaps and bounds since the day we first met — opened her mouth.
"And yet We find that very flaw to be one of the General-in-Chief's charms."
"...It is an honor, Your Majesty."
There she went again.
If ever there was a moment to be thankful that no one else was near, this was it.
Had the great officials in attendance on the Emperor witnessed this scene, they would have speared me with those monstrous glares all over again.
Just recalling it made my skin crawl anew.
For all I knew, those men were not human at all, but machines that fired lasers straight from their eyes.
Whether she read what was in my heart or not, the Emperor let a serene smile settle on her lips and drew still closer to me.
The Emperor spoke.
"What are you doing? Straighten your back, and be quick about it."
"As you command."
Unable to hold out against the Emperor's bidding, I straightened my spine and raised my eyes to her.
The Emperor, who had once asked me through tears whether I might stand at her side, was now of an age that, by my reckoning, deserved to be called an adult.
Perhaps it was the weight the imperial seat carried.
I had known her since she was small, and yet closeness had somehow grown difficult.
Power, as I had long suspected, was not a thing that brought only comfort.
"General-in-Chief."
"You called, Your Majesty."
I answered the Emperor's summons evenly.
The Emperor kept smiling at me, as though turning something over in her mind.
"Come to think of it, We are soon to count our twentieth year."
...
Why bring that up out of nowhere?
A faint, uneasy premonition stirred in me, and I did my best to smother it as I spoke.
"Truly a joyous occasion. I humbly pray Your Majesty will continue to guide this realm for many years yet."
"Hoho. What an amusing thing to say. The one who leads this nation at present is not I — it is you."
Hearing an answer beyond anything I had imagined, I hurried to speak.
"Your Majesty, please — such words, I must beg you—"
"I know, I know. I meant nothing ill by it."
Waving a hand, the Emperor went on in a voice brimming with mischief.
"Are you aware of it?"
"Aware of what, Your Majesty?"
"Of late, the eyes with which you look upon Us have begun to change."
Huh?
Had I?
I could not hide my bewilderment, and the Emperor, confirming it in my face, broke into a sly smile.
"Where once your eyes held nothing but the warmth of one watching over a little child, a certain perplexity has been steadily seeping in."
...
Well, of course it had.
A child not yet grown sidling up to me was one thing; a full-grown adult doing the same was another matter entirely.
In an age when the average life was short, fifteen years was enough to be counted an adult — but by my standards, only nineteen and beyond qualified.
And the Emperor had seen straight through that heart of mine with unnerving precision.
"Judging by your reaction, it seems We may soon set the matter in motion."
"...Forgive an impertinent question, but what matter, precisely, might that be...?"
The Emperor received my question with a smile.
"We shall leave that for the pleasure of the moment."
...
For my part, I rather doubted I would be the one enjoying it.