This was unusual. It was hard enough to survive in hell when you were a rich, powerful man with many faithful descendants and the hell officials’ favor. There were so many other dangers to contend with—demons promoted from other courts, furiously upstanding and eager to hurry on the cycle of rebirth. The eight thousand terra-cotta warriors who had been buried with an emperor, now lost. Left masterless, the warriors roamed the tenth court, looking for trouble. And worst of all, the dead. In hell, as in every other world, man was man’s greatest enemy.

  “A woman needs protection,” Fourth Great-Uncle had said to Siew Tsin when he’d told her he was marrying her off.

  Ling’en had not listened to tiresome old men like Siew Tsin’s great-uncle, or to her furious husband. Ling’en lived alone, in a very nice house her favorite son had burnt for her, and so far none of the disasters predicted for unprotected women in hell had befallen her.

  Because she found Junsheng tedious and avoided visiting, it took her a while to find out about his second wife. Siew Tsin had been married for several months when Ling’en came to see her.

  Siew Tsin remembered her first glimpse of Ling’en vividly. A slender woman, shorter than Siew Tsin, graceful as a willow tree, and youthful-looking despite the grey in her hair. She’d walked into the drawing room where Junsheng and his new wife sat without waiting for the housekeeper to announce her, as if it was still her own house.

  Junsheng had said, “So, you finally condescend to visit your husband.”

  This was when Siew Tsin found out that she was a second wife. It was the start of an unhallowed tradition of her being the last to know anything important.

  Ling’en had glanced at Siew Tsin and drawn her eyes away quickly as if she were not worth being looked at.

  “This is what you bought to entertain yourself in my absence?” she said. “I would have thought you could afford something more expensive.”

  “If you had stayed as I had asked, dear wife, I would have consulted your impeccable taste before I made my decision,” said Junsheng. “Since you were not here, I am afraid we will have to settle for what my crude judgment told me was appropriate.”

  “She is young enough,” said Ling’en. It was as if she were talking about an object of dubious value that Junsheng had bought at a flea market. “But that won’t bring you any sons.”

  “I did not choose her for that,” said Junsheng.

  “Then why marry her?”

  “She is a respectable girl,” said Junsheng. “Her great-uncle was concerned about her welfare and asked me to offer her what protection I could give. He is a learned man, and we have a good relationship.”

  “You haven’t lost your gift for lying,” said Ling’en. “How sordid!—But I suppose men feel differently about this kind of thing.”

  Junsheng did not like this. He liked to think of himself as an honourable man, a patriarch in the good old-fashioned mold. A man of whom Confucius would have approved.

  “You are being vulgar. But that is what comes of your unnatural mode of living,” he said. “It is no surprise that you have become coarse from having to fend for yourself in such a world. If you could bring yourself to behave with some modicum of propriety, you would not have to struggle. I am not an unreasonable man. I don’t think my demands are so outrageous.”

  “You wouldn’t,” sneered Ling’en.

  “All I ask is that we treat each other like civilized beings,” said Junsheng with exasperating patience. “We have been married for so long. I have tried to be a good husband. If you have any complaint about the way I have treated you and our children, you are welcome to express it. All I ask is that you do not work out your grudge in this unseemly way. Feelings are one thing, but think how it makes the family look.”

  “The family no longer exists,” said Ling’en.

  “I am trying to be reasonable,” said Junsheng.

  Ling’en let out what in a less elegant woman would have been a snort.

  “Try instead to be intelligent,” she suggested. “We are dead and things are different. If you understood this, you would see that I am not coming back no matter how many young girls you marry.”

  “It was not for that,” said Junsheng.

  Even Siew Tsin knew this was a stupid thing to say, but Ling’en had apparently made him too cross to be sensible. Ling’en did not bother dignifying his remark with a response, but left the house.

  She was not any nicer to Siew Tsin when she saw her later. Their meetings were infrequent, but Ling’en had not cut all ties. Her relationship with Junsheng impressed on one the dreadful lastingness of marriage. They still operated as a team. They met to discuss money, strategies for keeping the hell officials satisfied, and the latest rumours in the tenth court.

  They still argued about Ling’en coming back to live with Junsheng, but eventually the arguments grew tired, half-hearted on Junsheng’s part. When he realized that marrying Siew Tsin had not insulted Ling’en enough for her to want to return, he lost most of his interest in his new wife. The sex stopped, to Siew Tsin’s relief. And she, now an unnoticed part of the household, retreated into herself. Junsheng had a large library of Chinese and English books. There was Chinese chess to play with any servant who could spare the time. If she got really bored, a thoughtful descendant had even burnt Junsheng a piano.

  It was a quiet death, but not an objectionable one. Siew Tsin sank like a stone in the river of quotidian incident, ignoring the scent of brimstone that gusted in at the windows. She closed her ears to the stories of the depredations of the terra-cotta warriors, the machinations of the spirits, and the intricate bureaucracies of the hell officials. She lived, dead, unnoticed by her husband, the household, and even by her own self.

  Until the terra-cotta bride came.

  Junsheng named her Yonghua, his elegant lady. What Siew Tsin didn’t understand was what function she performed.

  “Men have their needs,” said the housekeeper. In the living world she had been paper, crumpled, folded, rolled, and painted into the form of a woman, burnt as an offering to the revered dead. Here in the afterlife she gave a convincing impression of being flesh, and of possessing all the sad wisdom a real old woman would have had.

  “Junsheng is not a man who thinks much about the pleasures of the flesh,” said Siew Tsin. Because she had gone to a convent school when she was alive, she did not wonder aloud about how much pleasure a terra-cotta body could yield.

  The housekeeper replied, sensing the thought: “You’d be surprised. With Yonghua in his bed, any man would be interested.” It was also part of her persona to be earthy.

  Yonghua was a marvel of engineering, far more advanced than the Qin-era warriors who looted shops, preyed on spirits, and made death hell for humans and demons alike. The terra-cotta warriors were painted to look human, but Yonghua’s creators had coated her in a flexible material that acted and felt like skin. Her cheek was soft and downy, her eyelashes lush and long. Her hair stood out from her head, and the flesh of her arm sprang back to the touch, like fresh dough pressed by a thumb.

  Her creators had made her the most tempting of women.

  “And seeing as they put so many thoughts into her head,” said the housekeeper, “you can be certain they made her for other things as well.”

  “Who created her?” said Siew Tsin.

  The housekeeper flicked a beady-eyed glance at her. Siew Tsin had an odd sense that she had been examined and found wanting.

  “Dirty-minded men, as they all are,” said the housekeeper, with a lightness that seemed even falser than usual. Siew Tsin would have questioned her further, but the housekeeper went on:

  “These busybody men, one day they will make it so it’s impossible to tell between the truly dead and the never alive. The girl is forever asking questions. When the servants dress her, it’s talk, talk, talk. When we asked her where she’d got all her questions from, she said, ‘I was made to be capable of learning. A perfect wife must know her husband.’ Now isn’t that clever, when she had no mother to teach her?”

  “Very clever,” murmured Siew Tsin. The last time she’d had this feeling was when she was still alive and her mother and father talked about her cousin Ming Yen, who was brilliant at school, played the guzheng, spoke in a soft voice, took small mouthfuls when she ate, and never answered back to her parents.

  When on a dull afternoon Siew Tsin wandered into the music room and found Yonghua sitting at the piano, this seemed like an unpleasant joke played by the gods. Of course Yonghua played the piano. Probably she played it wonderfully.

  Siew Tsin backed out of the room, but Yonghua turned and saw her.

  “Ah! Second sister,” said Yonghua. She stood up. “I am sorry. I have intruded. I should have asked you before touching the piano.”

  “No, no,” said Siew Tsin. Was it embarrassment that made Yonghua bow her head? Did she have feelings, or just reactions? The wild terra-cotta warriors seemed to be animated only by their own lust and rage, seemed to pillage on their own account. But Junsheng said they were driven by pure instinct—that once the enforced bonds of duty and fealty had fallen away, only the dregs of their creators’ desires were left to drive the machines, unrestrained by human reason.

  “It belongs to Junsheng,” said Siew Tsin. “I have no authority over the thing at all.”

  “But you are the only one who plays it, aren’t you?” said Yonghua. “The paper women told me so. That makes you the natural master of the instrument.”

  “Please do not let me interrupt you,” Siew Tsin was mumbling as Yonghua spoke, still hoping to escape.

  But Yonghua said, “I do not play. I was looking at it out of curiosity. I had never seen such a thing before.”

  She paused. “Will you play it for me? I would like to hear how it sounds.”

  “Oh,” said Siew Tsin. Worse and worse! “I’m not sure that I would give you the right impression. I only had a few lessons when I was a child. I am very inexpert.”

  “As someone who was alive, you will have a better understanding of such matters than me,” said Yonghua. “I do not know anything about music or art. Please teach me.”

  Her directness disarmed Siew Tsin. She sat down and played the only piece she could manage with any respectability—a minuet by Bach. Yonghua watched her all the while, her head bent, her forehead creased, as if she was focusing all her powers on swallowing up the sound.

  “That was not very good,” said Siew Tsin when she was done. An idea came to her. “Junsheng has a gramophone in his study. I’ll play you some recordings of decent pianists. That’ll give you a better idea of music.”

  “Thank you, sister,” said Yonghua. There was a glow in her eyes; they were not so strange now Siew Tsin was used to them.

  Siew Tsin could not remember the last time she had pleased anyone so much. She found she liked it.

  When the housekeeper told them Ling’en had come, Siew Tsin felt an unexpected impulse to hide Yonghua. It was one thing for Ling’en to make unpleasant insinuations about Siew Tsin. Yonghua, blank and innocent as a piece of paper, deserved better. She had no sins to work off, that she should be tormented by restless spirits.

  But Siew Tsin could hardly squirrel Yonghua away under the sofa and pretend she was not there. She closed their book and told the housekeeper to bring Ling’en in.

  Ling’en gave the room her usual quick once-over when she entered, as if she were casing out the exits. Then she cast Siew Tsin and Yonghua one of her veiled looks, which were like being stabbed by a knife emerging from mist.

  “What a charming picture,” she said. “The sister-wives studying together. It must delight Junsheng’s heart that you get along so well. What have you been reading?”

  Yonghua did not look afraid. Siew Tsin was coming to realize that she was not only better at being a wife than Siew Tsin, but better at being a person.

  “Second sister is teaching me the poetry of her country,” she said.

  It was a peculiarity of Yonghua’s that she looked people straight in the eye. She did not mean it as impoliteness. It was one of the subtle things that marked her out as inhuman.

  “Poetry?” said Ling’en. She laughed. “Did they write poems where you came from, Siew Tsin? I knew our cousins in the southern seas were enterprising, but I had no idea they were artistic. I didn’t know you had such an interest in language.”

  Siew Tsin felt her cheeks warm. It was one of the things that Ling’en liked to torment her about, her odd accent and the occasional awkwardnesses that arose in her Mandarin, when she used phrases they had used in Malaya but nowhere else, or when she translated directly from Malay or English or another dialect.

  “I believe there were Chinese poets in Malaya,” she said. “But I was teaching Yonghua Malay pantun. She had not heard of the form before and asked if I would show her examples.”

  “Yonghua speaks Malay, does she?” said Ling’en.

  “I’m a fast learner,” said Yonghua.

  “Of course,” said Ling’en. “That is how they would have made you.”

  Siew Tsin stiffened. In all their days of reading and playing music, she and Yonghua had not touched upon the subject of her provenance. It had seemed to Siew Tsin that it would be indelicate to mention it.

  “Junsheng would not have married you, after all,” said Ling’en, “if you were not the best technology could offer.”

  “I am that,” Yonghua agreed, “of a certainty.”

  Siew Tsin could not stop herself from shrinking as Ling’en came over to them, but Yonghua next to her did not so much as twitch.

  Ling’en reached out and took Yonghua’s chin between slender, sharp-tipped fingers. Yonghua’s skin would be cool, Siew Tsin knew, and Ling’en would feel along the line of her jaw, under her fingerpads, a steady pulse, its beat as regular as clockwork.

  “What is he playing at?” whispered Ling’en. But though she spoke about Junsheng, she was looking into Yonghua’s eyes. Siew Tsin did not know what she saw there.

  “Getting to know your new little sister?” said Junsheng’s voice at the door. “How nice to have a visit from you, Ling’en. The whole family under one roof, for once.”

  “In your dotage you are becoming like a woman who cannot open her mouth without reproaching her grandchildren for neglect,” said Ling’en.

  She dropped her hand. Yonghua’s ink-pool eyes were still fixed on her, wide and dazzled.

  “Hell is not the most interesting place I have lived either,” Ling’en continued. “And old age in death is less rewarding than old age in life. But surely it is going a little far to start trading in blasphemy.”

  “What could she mean?” said Junsheng. He was smiling with his mouth but not his eyes.

  “The thing’s an abomination,” said Ling’en.

  “You are becoming pious in your old age.”

  “You know I am not generally concerned about appeasing the gods,” said Ling’en. “But I’m not in the habit, either, of putting them out. It is none of my business. It simply seems odd that you have spent all these years exhorting me to return for my own safety, only to start playing with fire yourself.”

  Junsheng shrugged.

  “There’s always someone who will overthink these things,” he said. “I am an old man, and I’ve worked hard for my pleasures. Don’t I deserve some fun at my age?”

  “How stupid you must think me,” she said. “You used to pay me more respect, Junsheng. This isn’t about lust—not for sex, anyway. But far be it from me to meddle in affairs not my own.”

  “Are you leaving already?” said Junsheng.

  “I only came to satisfy my curiosity,” said Ling’en.

  She glanced at Yonghua.

  “It’s good you’re a quick learner,” she said to her. “Make use of your time. You don’t have much left.”

  Yonghua took Siew Tsin’s hand and squeezed it. Her fingers were cold.

  The press of those fingers gave Siew Tsin a sudden access of courage.

  “I will see elder sister out,” she said. What was the worst Ling’en had ever done to her, after all? Given her unfriendly looks and implied she was a whore. Well, Siew Tsin was essentially a whore, and looks wouldn’t have been able to kill her even if she were still alive.

  At the door she said, “What did you mean? About Yonghua not having much time left?”

  Ling’en looked surprised. She might have had much the same expression if her pet dog had raised its head and started reciting Tang poetry. For a moment Siew Tsin thought she would not answer, but then she said:

  “It’s not just Yonghua. You are all at risk. Junsheng is really a fool. He has preserved himself for so long, and now he is throwing it all away for a gamble.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Siew Tsin.

  “Ask Junsheng,” said Ling’en.

  Siew Tsin caught her arm before she could leave. “He won’t tell me!” she cried. “Junsheng doesn’t tell me anything. Nobody tells me anything! They think I’m ignorant. It’s true. I don’t know anything. But Yonghua can learn anything. Two weeks ago she had never seen a piano. Now she can play everything I can, all the sheet music we own, every piece she’s heard on the gramophone. In a few days she will speak Malay as well as I do. What is going to happen to her?”

  If the dog had stood up on its hind legs, danced a ballet, and then proposed marriage to Ling’en, Ling’en might have looked much as she did now. But it was an improvement on her looking as if Siew Tsin was something disgusting that had got stuck to her shoe.

  “Please tell me,” said Siew Tsin. “If it’s trouble, maybe there is something I could do to help.”

  A smile tugged up the corner of Ling’en’s mouth.

  “Who knew there was a mind in that pretty little head?” she said. She shrugged. “There is nothing you can do.”

 

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