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Smoke in the air, a satchel full of squirming crystalline brains trapped in bloody skulls near my bare feet. I am cai once again. I kick the earth and turn my face north.

“The calling springtime…” I manage to sing, before I double over in agony.

We all expected the same things: husbands of our own to argue with, to walk beside in twilight, to make love to. Pretty babies to grow inside us, to unfurl into themselves and play at our feet.

It’s different for us Hakka, my mother said. Study hard, she begged.

I did. Mornings, I hunched in rice paddies in sweltering heat. Afternoons passed in the library until sundown. Nights, my itchy eyes stared at a computer screen. Often, I woke to my wristlet’s alarm with my head on a desk, and went straight to morning rice-field duty.

We girls knew something of the outside world from online newsfeeds and rice-field gossip. We followed the war in the border states and imagined dashing hi-tech Genghis Khans riding in from the Mongol Republic wastelands, or handsome Japanese and Euro CEO princes waving victory flags from the backs of robotic tanks, rescuing us from the onslaught.

Late one night my wristlet woke me. I fled the library, out into the courtyard, breathless and terrified, for stars still crowded the sky.

The other girls were already on the dormitory roof, screaming, “Fire, fire!” I scrambled up, and from the roof I could see it, too, off in the valley — a slim fringe of glowing orange light.

“That’s the city burning,” an older girl said. “Soldiers will be coming here soon.”

Hours later, after sunrise, they did.

Not Japanese CEOs or Mongol princes. Just rough-faced footmen marching in tight, straight lines. They reminded me of green carrot-tops poking up along garden rows. They looked dignified, almost honorable, in their patchy green camouflage uniforms, and many wore earpieces or carried little computers on their belts. Many carried backpacks big enough to fit a girl into.

They spoke into machines that translated their dialect into ours. “We have liberated the city and come to liberate you, too,” the machines boomed. “The whole province is now under our control.”

We asked, “Whose control?”

“We cannot understand you,” they answered, “Now come with us.” They led us to a convoy of trucks waiting nearby. “Get in the trucks.”

Our teachers stood there, watching silently. One older girl waiting beside me began weeping. “We’re going to die,” she kept saying. Another girl argued with her, told her to be quiet. But the older girl couldn’t stop saying it.

“Why didn’t they take our teachers too? Why only us?” another asked.

“Maybe there was a special truck for them?” the older girl snapped.

But none of us believed that.

After hours of thumping and rattling down brutal roads, of sleepless sobbing and prayers, the truck stopped. Soldiers threw open the back and their machines translated their command: “Get out.”

“Where are we? What’s happening?” We asked these questions, but the men ignored us, didn’t even use their machines to say, “We can’t understand you.”

They led us into a filthy old complex. Inside were tiny rooms, each with a stained mat on the floor. One by one, we were tossed into the cells, alone, to wait.

I’d always envied pretty girls and wished I were like them. The other girls at the dormitory had said, sneering: “You’ve got a mother’s face. A mama-face.” I’d always hated it.

But when they threw open the door, looked me over, and muttered in their language, I was hopeful, thankful for my ugly face. I could hear the girls’ shrieking through the walls, and the men. For once I was grateful for my mama-face.

I thought it would keep them away for a while, at least.

It didn’t. It wasn’t my face that interested them.

Memory, for me, is all fragments. Just tiny moments.

It’s not what they’ve done to my brain — I think I’ve always been like that. I remember only brief, vivid things. The bite of sugared ginger-root with jasmine tea. The feeling of a fresh, hard persimmon in my palm. My mother’s voice at night, singing about the returning cranes of springtime.

I cannot remember her face.

But I remember a dozen hands holding my body down, slapping my cheek as one soldier pushed his thing into me, then another, another. I remember that tearing feeling, as if I were about to break into two pieces. And filthiness. The slick of blood and sweat on my skin, and wanting to close my tired legs. Their voices howling strange, foreign words I’d heard before but couldn’t understand, and the smell of their bodies, thumping against me, them breathing their reek in my face.

And always, that searing pain inside me. My ageless heart thumps against my ribs when memories of that night return to me. Sweat floods my skin, I quiver and curdle inside.

I’m not there anymore, in that filthy cell, bleeding onto that stained mat. But it’s worse, remembering, than it was at the time, I sometimes think. I am still here, still haunted by them, but they are all long dead.

Peng-zu law dictates that all wives — we are called cai — are their husbands’ communal property. Thus, the ritual: every so often all the brides of the peng-zu are shuttled off to a new complex. This pattern rules our lives, as seasons once did.

I have crossed snowy wastes, lived deep within brutally scorching deserts, slept in gardens of mottled bamboo, and poured out tea in mountain palaces so lofty I could gaze down upon cloud tops. Each stay has ended the same way: with a forced march.

How long ago was the first one? A dozen years? Hundreds?

For a long time I didn’t know. What they did to me… I can’t feel time’s flow anymore. A blessing, maybe.

On every march since the first, I have walked freely. It was only during the first time that soldiers came, chained us with bands of iron at our necks and ankles, and shouted orders through their machines, waved guns at us. The pills they forced down our throats that first time made us bleed between the legs, from inside.

Only the first time. I never thought to run away after that. The chains were never needed again. The chains were in my mind.

Every march ends in the same way. We reach a wall with a door in the middle. It opens, and all the soldiers left behind flee as if from devils or ghosts.

The peng-zu are neither, but they are terrifying. They emerge, angelic, to lead us, the cai, to their bedchambers. So beautiful, every one of them unearthly, pure as fire. Living among them is like being locked in a prison full of sweetly smiling buddhas, each with a nest of demonic snakes coiled under his robes, each waiting for a chance to pounce.

Such exquisite rooms: silk cushions, scarlet bridal robes, golden hair-combs, looking glasses and jewels and unimaginable banquets. The ancient emperors look like beggars and filthy peasants beside the peng-zu.

An ancient cai with a very young girl’s body, perhaps thirteen, taught me the most ancient tea ceremonies.

“If you do this right, they will love you and give you immortality,” she said. “Make them come so hard they hit the rabbit in the moon, and they’ll give you everything.” She believed it, too. “But not until the tea is drunk. Otherwise they will grow bored with you and never give you the gift. This game is won with squeezed thighs and pretty conversation.”

So many cai believed these lies and fantasies.

I performed the ceremonies well but carefully avoided perfection. A few peng-zu delighted in my grace, praised me, called me ‘wife’ instead of ‘cai.’ Grabbed at me with their greedy hands, tearing my vermilion silks away.

But none was ever overwhelmingly enchanted. I made them grunt but never made one call out my name.

Most of the cai are uneducated: simple country girls, they are convinced that their ‘husbands’ — their owners — are magical beings.

But I know the real story of Peng Zu. He was a legendary Shen Xian, a methuselah who survived for eight centuries. The many emperors envied him, sent bribes, but he shared no secrets with them. He took a long-lived woman named Lady Cai as a lover, taught her the secrets of immortality: sex magic, and tonics of reindeer horn and mica dust.

They claim this fairy tale monster who never existed as their ancestor and Lady Cai as ours, just as they say Peng Zu claimed the Yellow Emperor as his. A lineage of liars. But I know that they are not immortal.

I know. Because I have seen them die.

With every forced march, it grew harder to understand the soldiers’ words. Their translators began failing to make sense to us, as if language were slowly slipping from us.

On the last march, down the high mountain, one tried to speak to me through his translator machine.

“Nya ho,” he said. It took me a moment to realize he was greeting me, his accent was so strange. He fiddled with the machine.

“What’s your name?” he asked through it.

I looked at his face like I would an empty bowl.

He spoke slowly: “Is there an endless cai among you?”

We locked eyes, and I realized he meant immortal. “Why?”

He glanced around, checking perhaps for an angry superior. Then, leaning close to me, he said: “I know. The peng-zu virus… that it’s a sex disease. I want to wash my prick in an immortal woman’s…”

“What? Those monsters have…” I caught myself too late. “Our husbands enjoy us often. If it were a sex disease, every cai would be immortal. Do I look like it to you?”

“How old were you?” he whispered. “When you were captured?”

“Fifteen. They called it ‘liberated’ back then.”

He squinted. “What year was that?”

I thought it over and told him a year a few years after the real one. If he thought me recently captured, maybe he’d go away.

He was awed, instead, and spoke as he would to an old woman. “That was over a century ago,” he whispered, his face suddenly pale as the machine softly translated.

I looked away.

“I’ll see you again,” he said, touching my arm.

Halfway down the mountain we reached some trucks, waiting at a rest-stop. We were sorted, it seemed randomly, and sent into different trucks. I ended up in a group with only one cai I knew, although I couldn’t remember from where. Neither of us spoke, as the others were unchained and herded in behind us. I saw the soldier who’d talked to me, unlocking their neck-bonds. He stood watching me as the truck’s door slammed shut, leaving us in darkness.

“Upgrades,” the cai whose face I knew whispered to me. Her breath was hot and strangely sweet, like mine.

“What?”

“Upgrades. You haven’t noticed? We’re stronger now.”

I closed my eyes, flexed my muscles. I couldn’t tell, except that my legs didn’t ache.

“That was Taishan complex we were at. The peng-zu there are the head researchers. They’re always upgrading the bug, testing it on us, and then sending us out to spread it to the others. That’s why we’ve all been split up, sent apart.”

Another crazy wives’ tale? Was that what I was, after all these years? Not just a slave, but a container for a disease? But why the newly-captured girls?

“Bug…disease, you mean? But I’m not sick…”

“You’re over a hundred years old, and your tits still haven’t come in,” she hissed. “You don’t feel sick, but you’re infected.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

She was quiet as if thinking. The weak, still-human girls around us sobbed and whispered, a few coughing and sniffling. Poor things.

“I can’t remember,” she finally answered.

I nodded. “Neither can I.”

Sleep took forever to swallow me down, like an enormous snake swallowing a broken-necked child.

When my body slammed down against something soft, I woke.

It was another body. Bones cracked beneath me. Shrieks filled the dark, as I was thrown sideways and then down, and suddenly the bodies were crashing down against me.

My bones did not break.

The darkness was spinning and, inside it, the screams and bodies of terrified girls and women tangled and writhed within the truck.

Something exploded outside.

The truck was rolling downhill, sideways. I couldn’t stabilize myself, so I relaxed, let my body follow the movements. The other girls fought too hard, resisted gravity’s pull, stiffened themselves against it. That was why their bones were cracking. While they hollered in pain, I hummed one of my mother’s night-songs quietly to myself.

Another voice joined in with me. The cai whose face I knew. As we hummed the melody, the truck’s spin seemed to slow, and with a final clattering of teeth and limbs, crashed to a stop.

The smell of blood and piss filled the inside of the truck, and the moaning quickly reached a crescendo. I was in the middle of a pile of jarred bodies, ribs and legs snapped into terrible angles. I kept breathing slowly, and began to dig through them toward the exit.

Someone ripped the door open, and the noise of battle crashed in. Explosions, bombs screaming their way down toward us. Guns stuttered all around, the flashes of their muzzles lighting my way out of the jumbled mess of bodies.

A dozen soldiers piloted springing, bouncing jeeps all around us. In the dark they looked a little like frogs with salt dropped onto their backs, leaping around frantically. Their pilots were blasting terrible-looking cannons at some enemy up above. Everyone was staring uphill at the invisible attackers.

Everyone but him. He grabbed my hand and dragged me out of the mess of whimpering, broken girls.

“Come with me,” he yelled.

I turned, straining against the glare of the explosions to search the truck’s inner darkness, and I saw her eyes–only her eyes–focused on mine. She didn’t move.

I shivered. The soldier assumed I was frightened and forcefully led me away from the battle, off behind some rocks.

“I want to be immortal,” he said, reaching for the zipper of his pants.

I looked at his face. You’re all the same, I thought to myself.

“Can you give me that?”

“Let me go…” I said, and turned to leave. The sudden wave of dizziness that washed over me was startling: somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten how to think of leaving. I felt like I was dream-walking, still really trapped in the peng-zu’s strange, closed world, even out here. My legs locked for a moment, locked completely still.

That was all he needed. He clubbed me on the head, and I collapsed–not unconscious, just shocked by the pain. He dragged me off quickly into the shadows, and then rolled me over and began struggling with my clothing. Robes are not difficult to yank open, but by then I was fighting back, ignoring the pain blooming in my skull as I clawed at his face.

“Stop it,” he hollered, and slapped me. “Don’t you want to be free?”

I was walking away, I thought then, gouging at one of his eyes. How can you bargain with me for what was already mine?

Then he had a pistol in his hand. I stared at it, wondered whether it could kill me, whether he knew if it could.

But that didn’t matter. She had followed us. I saw her creeping up behind him and tensed. While he struggled with the belt on my robe, she pounced, digging her fingers into his throat from behind.

“Die, bastard!” she screamed. They both fell on top of me, and he raised the pistol behind him in a single lunge.

I grabbed for it too late. The noise of the shot stunned me. She went slack, hands suddenly limp, and he shoved her corpse off, down to the muddy ground. I could smell her blood all over me, all over him.

With her body still shuddering, her head blown open, he said, “I didn’t want to do that. I don’t want to hurt you.” Her face twitched–one eye open, the other fluttering. Spilled out of her skull, covered in foamy blood, were jittering threads of shattered crystal.

I leaned closer. Light flickered through the crystalline fibers. A garden of tiny buds sprouted from them, flowered into wriggling crystalline threads as I watched. Her shattered brain was trying to heal itself. It didn’t know yet that her body was dying.

Is that what’s inside my head, too?, I asked myself.

“All I want is immortality,” he said, his hand on my shoulder, holding me down. “You can give that to me, or I can take it.”

He rolled off me suddenly, barely dodging her hand as it lunged at him. With a curse, he shot five more bullets into her head and chest, and then turned the gun on me. I wondered how many shots he had left.

“You’ll let me go?” I asked, as he stood.

“I promise. Over here, let’s go.” He pointed into a deep ditch nearby. “Take off your clothes.” He wasn’t speaking to me like an old woman anymore.

One last time, I thought to myself as I yanked my robe open, knowing then that he would be immortal after this.

Knowing I would someday hunt him down. And I will, someday.

The distant city lights flickered. I saw instead the terrifying flickering within her broken crystal brain.

I had wandered, lonely and dazed, ever since. But not toward the city. Where?

Part of me had known. As a girl, I’d studied the way birds know where to go, when the seasons turn. Cranes and storks, they have no maps and no names for the places they abandon, breed in, and return from, but they know the places just the same. They are called, just the same.

That was the instinct I felt. Like a crane being called softly, insistently northward.

I fought it, at first, so hard my hands shook and I spat blood onto the ground. The city lights filled me with fear. But I could hide there, I told myself. My stomach squeezed tightly at the thought, and my throat closed off until I turned my eyes from the city to the mountain in the distance.

Taishan. I was being called back to Mount Tai.

No, I thought to myself, desperate in a way I’d never been before. I could hide on a farm, sleep in the millet fields, pay a farmer by washing his prick inside me, or kill him. Nobody would ever find me. I felt my legs shaking, and my bowels released suddenly as I fell to the ground.

I turned my mind’s eye back to Taishan, and suddenly I could breathe again.

Later–how much, who knows?–within my scarlet chamber in the Taishan complex, I curled up in mind-wrenching pain.

Since my return, my belly had slowly expanded. I had hidden it as best I could. It was all wrong. Vomiting, craving sour oranges and plain rice, a soft kick inside the belly. Those were the correct signs. Not this brutal, sharp-edged scraping. Something within me, hard and vicious, was quickening.

It was supposed to be impossible. No peng-zu wife had ever borne a child. That night, some shadow within me rejoiced, finally to have its own possession, something actually mine. This part of me seemed not to notice my terror and agony, not over its bitter, gleeful revenge on my husbands.

I hissed a curse for the nameless–now probably immortal–soldier who’d fathered the thing. Just then, the door to my chamber opened.

It was the oldest peng-zu in Taishan, with a lustful look in his eyes. He wasn’t always that way. Sometimes he only came seeking a game of weiqi, or some tea and a long nap beside me. But that night, the old monster had come looking for a wife.

“I don’t think…” I began, and then I winced and leaned forward as a shock of pain exploded inside me.

“Are you pretending?” he asked. “You can’t get sick of sex. You’re programmed that way.” He knew that I knew how it worked, infection and all. He even described himself in the same way, programmed.

“It’s not that… there’s something wrong.”

“Let me see,” he said, not at all seriously, and pushed me onto my back. I complied, unable to make myself say no or explain. Pulling apart the hems of my robe, he ran his hand over my body, cupping one breast and squeezing it softly before slipping his other hand between my thighs. I went slick in moments, just as I was programmed to do. Then he touched me inside.

I felt a sharp jolt of pain, as something inside me grasped his fingers and held, tight. He tried to pull his hand away from me, but he couldn’t move it at all. When he realized this, he looked at me in horror. “What are you? What have you done?”

“Please,” I said, because I knew if he left the room, he would tell the others. I’d heard of what they did with disobedient cai.

Another jolt of agony exploded within my abdomen, and his body suddenly went tense from terrific pain. “What have you done?” he roared, and tried to tear his hand back away from me. But the grip held firm, and he ended up on the floor with me standing above him. I gasped, wondering what could have done this to him, what I was carrying inside me.

“Please,” I begged, but he began to scream as loudly as he could and pound his free hand against the wall.

I couldn’t breathe or think clearly. I did the first thing that came to mind, grabbing the oil-lamp-stand beside the bed and slamming it into the back of his head as hard as I could.

After the first strike he collapsed, but I kept pounding at him until his skull split open and the crystal threads spilled out, jittering into a mess of blood and brains. Panic gushed up within me, the same drowning panic I’d felt when I thought of fleeing the peng-zu world forever. Terror forced me to slow down, but it did not master me.

When I calmed for a moment, his hand dropped down to the ground with a thud, fingers bruised black and crushed flat. Staring into the still-flickering, trembling bloody filaments of braincrystal at my feet, I realized that nothing could stop me as long as I could swallow the pain. I could be like a giant snake, too, and swallow the stricken crane of my instincts.

My mind choking, I fled the palace into the night.

The other cai were horrified when, a few days later, I returned at dawn. I told them, all these wives of the monsters, about the abandoned truck I’d found not far away full of guns and bombs and dead soldiers, and told them what I wanted to do.

“Come with me,” I begged.

“Are you insane? Leave, now,” hissed the thinnest cai, who’d never liked me. “They’ll kill us all. After the murder…”

“I want to,” I explained, bristling at the word murder. “I can’t go unless I destroy this place. I’m bound here. It’s some kind of…” They wouldn’t understand the notion of programming. “A… a spell,” I said.

“We can’t leave either,” whined a younger cai. “You know that. The pain… it’s too much.” She shook her head.

“You can. If I can do it, you can.”

“No,” several of them said at once, and backed away from me. I worried that they might call the peng-zu. They didn’t.

“Please,” I repeated over and over again, weeping. “I’ll carry you. Anything. I have to destroy this place.” A sharp-edged squirm tore at my insides, and I knelt down in pain. “I’m going to burn it to the ground.”

They all stood there staring at me. Most of them frightened, but a few looked relieved to know it might soon end. A few of them even smiled.

When I left, to return to my truck, I went alone. But not one of them tried to stop me.

Why haven’t the soldiers come?

Surely they’ve seen the smoke by now, pouring skyward. Perhaps their programming, like mine, went silent after the palace was burned to cinders. Or have they fled, terrified that whatever burned down Taishan complex–the center of peng-zu society — will come for them next?

I can’t be bothered to kill them. Standing outside the ruins, I have stared for hours into the smoking mess. The sweet stink of burning flesh turned my stomach as I waited for their piled corpses to finish burning, but now it is done. They are as charred as possible–a fire that would turn them to ash and cinder was too much to ask for.

First, the wives. Rummaging through the charred mound of bodies, I dig out each of the skulls. With a hammer, I smash each one open. The blood is baked around their crystalline brains, and I have to completely shatter the skull to free it. Still quivering and glinting–still thinking–their crystal brains wriggle free and, as they do, I hammer them to tiny, mindless fragments. The tiny shards are still budding new filaments, glittering, but they cannot house a whole mind. This is the best mercy I can show them, to make them finally free.

Then I turn to the peng-zu’s shot, stabbed, bodies, now burned as well. So many tried to flee. And failed. With their skulls, I am far more careful. If they break free and connect to other crystal brains, perhaps they will build or steal themselves new bodies and live again.

I handle each skull like a fragile egg, wrap it in a thick square of plastic cut from the tarpaulins left on the truck. That will do until I can embed them in iron and bury them. Minds whole, they can flicker alone, forever, in darkness.

That tug: I feel it again. Smoke still thick in the air, human grease and ash caked on my hands and face, I turn northward…to Beijing. I can see the ruined city, the red gate, and the peng-zu palace beyond it, in my mind. I touch my bulging belly, wonder, “How can I go there like this?”

I begin to sing my mother’s song, for strength.

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Gord Sellar is a Canadian living in South Korea, where he lectures at a University in the suburbs of Seoul. Since attending Clarion West in 2006, his work has appeared in various venues including Asimov’s SF, Interzone, Fantasy, and Flurb. He has work forthcoming in Diet Soap and the Starship Sofa podcast, and later this year his story “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues” will be appearing in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois.

Gord’s website can be found at http://gordsellar.com. If you’re interested in reading more about the background and context of “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands,” please visit here.

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