It Takes a Village

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

by L. Chan

(Content Warnings: offscreen animal death, pregnancy, violence)

The road to the Village of Dolls was more worn on one side than the other, as though more people travelled to the Village than away from it. The Village was avoided by both locals and travellers through the region. Travellers, because of the widely circulated rumours that the Village was haunted and damned; the locals, because they knew the truth, and the truth was worse. 

Dust coated exposed skin, clothes, and the inside of the mouth of Wen Gong An. He pulled his travel scarf to cover his face again. These were the lowlands, far enough from the great rivers that flooding was not a threat, but the rains here were well suited for rice. The dry season took the moisture from the red clay, and wind stained everything scarlet—when sweat ran from Wen’s arm down to his wrist, it took on the colour of blood. 

Wen’s companion was a local named Bao, who had passed from the ruddy cheeks of his youth to the tanned leather look that farmers wore until their fifties. It was not harvest time, and the less industrious of the young men had been spending their afternoons gambling and drinking last season’s rice wine. Wen was far from the Capital and when he asked for a guide to the Village of Dolls, the menfolk scrutinized their tiles more closely and regained interest in their cups. Only the threat of going to the Village headman moved Bao to volunteer, reluctantly. 

“Justice Wen, you are the one they call the Doll Judge?”

It was an epithet that stuck over the years; competence attracted unique rewards amongst the magistrates of the kingdom. A deft touch in one case became two, then three, and later, a career investigating these constructs of flesh and magic. Career magistrates preferred county jobs, with a retinue of staff and the sweetener of garnishing judgements. For the less corrupt, there was advancement to the bigger towns and cities. For the non-corrupt, there was the road. 

“I’m just another magistrate—the law of heaven extends to all things, whether they be persons or property.”

“Which is a Doll then? Person or property?” 

Wen had not expected to debate the legalities of Dolls, not on a dusty road in the middle of nowhere. Nor had he expected to be an itinerant magistrate, practicing a niche area of the law; after he rose from impoverishment to excel in the Imperial Examinations. And yet those duller than he, given to womanizing and drink, had been promoted above him. He swallowed a sharp retort, feeling the insult settle in his belly like an ingested fly, all buzzing and annoyance. The Sage had expounded the value of teaching and Wen would have fallen far if he mocked the ignorance of a simple farmer.

“Dolls are both. Their owners would sleep, lulled by herbs and magic, and their dreaming spirits would animate the soft clay. Living Dolls are to be extended all rights of a citizen of the kingdom. When not in use, or retired, they are to be treated as honoured property, save that they should not be destroyed.”

Wen sweltered under his travelling robe, the heat of the road turning light linen into a grindstone on his shoulders. Other magistrates could afford to travel by horse or palanquin. Dolls were a legal curiosity. The rich could afford their own Dolls; the very rich could afford Dolls for others. The first Emperor himself had his tomb guarded by a legion of such soldiers, at dizzying expense. He’d seen worse in his work: Dolls being used to indulge and slake the worst appetites. Wen had comforted one such victim, one of many forced into Dolls for a local Baron’s excesses. His magistral seal gave him much authority, but had limited use against a contingent of mercenaries. Justice, like the heavens, was fair but distant. The ground, on the other hand, had many peaks and valleys. 

The Baron went unpunished and all Wen had earned from dispensing justice for the Capital was a face indistinguishable from that of a labourer, a dried out judge meting out tired decisions from dead books of law.

“Do you have a Doll, sir?” asked Bao. 

Wen shook his head, a little more vigorously than necessary. A magistrate’s pay was not enough to afford a Doll. Knowing so much about how Dolls were used, Wen would never allow himself to. He slowed his pace; there was a small stone building ahead, grey hewn rocks making up walls—so far from civilization, it could only be a shrine for travellers. Just as well, Wen could afford some goodwill from Heaven. It was already midday. He had to make good time if he didn’t want to stay overnight at the Village.

He would have expected a carved statue of one of the Buddhas for protection—painted wood, which was cheaper than stone and what the villagers could afford. He saw from the robes and the posture that it was Kuan Yin, goddess of mercy. It was hard to tell. The statue had been desecrated, deep gouges ruining its visage and its limbs splintered. There should have been bowls of fruit or tea at Kuan Yin’s feet, but someone had replaced them with a variety of wildlife, rodents mostly, limbs twisted to mock the pose of the goddess herself. 

Wen physically recoiled at the sight and bumped into Bao, who seemed unphased. “There is no mercy in the Village of Dolls, sir, and none asked for,” he said and Wen was frozen in place for so long at the sight that he had to jog to catch up with his guide, muttering a prayer as he did.

•••

Justice Wen had worked on cases with Dolls for two decades, but had never been to the Village of Dolls. A magistrate concerned themselves with the affairs of the living, and thereby had no reason to visit this version of hell. He did not know what to expect, save the manifest of the dolls that should be here, of which he had to investigate and pass judgement on a particular one, the Doll of the Duke Jin. 

The Duke had, in his dotage, gained an uncanny burst of energy, attending to his duties with a gusto he had not demonstrated in years. He was so busy that his handlers lost track of where he was, such that the Duke almost appeared to be in two places at once. So dedicated to his work was he that it was said that his spirit haunted his office for weeks after his death, continuing his work. Wen believed in spirits and Heaven and Hell. But logic dictated that he first rule out simpler explanations, that someone had been impersonating the Duke using a Doll. Duke Jin had but one Doll on record and it had been retired to the Village years before. 

According to the manifest, the Village contained over three hundred retired dolls, including—and Wen’s breath caught at this—a Doll of the Empress. A gesture, no doubt, to keep the rest of the nobility in line with the proper rules of retiring used Dolls. The Village itself was nondescript, its buildings of clay and thatch indistinguishable from the one Wen had travelled from. The difference was in the air, a sense of the world holding its breath, existing in the space between the lightning strike and thunder’s roar, or when the sun has just peeked over the hills but not yet illuminated the valleys. And it was still. Maddeningly, alarmingly still. Wen could not recall when he last heard birdsong or the rasp of the cicadas in the sizzle of the afternoon. Even the wind did not venture into the Village of Dolls; the dust that coated his skin and throat was undisturbed. 

“You are at the Village, your honour. I must get back to mine,” said Bao. 

“Please stay a while longer,” said Wen, “If I have anything to bring back from the Village, I may need a strong back. I will compensate you for your day’s wages.” As a magistrate Wen was used to working alone, his only companion his seal of authority, but the altar had discomforted him and he did not want to be by himself in the Village. It was not just the Dolls, which he had seen no sign of yet. Wen was a scholar, at home with books, but he too had been raised in the country, second youngest in a large family, in a place where superstition was as much a part of the air as the smell of flowers in spring. Invisible. Impossible to ignore. Before its name was forgotten, a plague had taken every single living soul in the Village, dropped it off the map for the purposes of civilized life. And then the Dolls moved in.

The two men advanced into the Village. Wen just had to find the Doll of Duke Jin and examine it for signs of illicit use. The houses on the outskirts were empty, as they should be. Dolls needed as much space as a sleeping person and could be stacked like firewood. 

“You’re hardy for an official,” said Bao. “The route we took here was tough even for me.” 

“I grew up in a place like this. Rice fields all around. I must have walked roads like that thousands of times in my youth.”

“Yet we wound up in different places.”

“My father believed in books, enough to send me to a school to sit for Imperial Examinations.”

“That must have been difficult for a farmer.”

Wen paused before answering; he owed this stranger nothing, but his memories carried a debt and it would not be paid off by lying. “There were too many mouths, I had a younger… they sold him as a baby.”

Bao nodded. Selling babies to richer families was not uncommon. Especially for those that needed a family name to be continued. He pointed in the distance. “There is smoke from the forge.”

The pair hastened down the empty road. There was indeed an open air furnace working. The fire was roaring and the smith—Wen had to look again, for the smith was still, stripped to the waist and clad in a loincloth to deal with the heat. But he was not quite human at all. 

He was built like a statue, with thick and muscular legs, and strong arms to work molten metal. But the smith’s forearms did not terminate in hands; flesh was bolted to rods and a mighty hammer topped one arm. Worse still was his face—his neck stretched upwards to accommodate the spout of a set of leather bellows, and his chest hollowed out to house the piston mechanism that pumped air into the furnace. Wen was not a squeamish man, having borne witness to disassembled Dolls and people alike. Yet he still had to force himself to get closer, to see the sheen of sweat on his skin. Wen hesitated, and touched the Doll’s arm, feeling the flesh yield like the soft clay that it was, skin cool to the touch.

Unlike Wen, Bao had not approached the disfigured Doll. “They say that Dolls are just reanimated corpses that sorcery has made to look like their owners. But who would want to do this?”

Wen swallowed. “Dolls are no more than clay, animated by the dreaming souls of their owners.” The humans could go about business without fear, and hurt people without getting hurt in return, Wen added mentally. After countless cases, this was his sole conclusion. “Come, we must go further into the village.”

Despite the afternoon sun and the excursion to the forge, Wen felt no warmth. First the altar, then the despoiled Doll. These things were not alive but they did not deserve dishonour. He considered his own situation, sent on an errand to serve a corrupt ruler’s interests in a place he had never heard of, capping a lifetime of service to the law, paid for by the blood debt of a sibling he never knew. Along the road, he saw another Doll. This one tended to herbs in a garden, save that the different plants had also taken root in its flesh, vines bursting and braiding out of skin, a mouth open with a torrent of plant life reaching for the sky. Brushing stalks aside, Wen expected to find the gaze of the Doll as vacant as those of a statue and so he yelped when those eyes were focused on him. 

“Your honour?” said Bao from a safe distance. 

“It’s nothing,” said Wen, finding the eyes vacant and unfocused as they should be. A trick of the light perhaps, a glint of sunlight on the Doll’s stare that confused Wen for a moment. Wen was on edge, unsettled and seeing things. “I must find a specific Doll—we should start at the village hall, where the Dolls should have been stored.”

“It seems like an awful effort for you to travel this far for a simple examination of a Doll, your honour. There are trusted tradesmen who could have done the same.”

Wen gave Bao a second look and only found clear eyed honesty in the farmhand. Perhaps in another life Bao could have been like Wen, if he had a brother to sell for his education. The seriousness of his case might yet inspire assistance from Bao, if the farmer believed in higher ideals. “The rogue use of a Doll is a routine case, but I have reasons to believe that the Doll of Duke Jin murdered the Duke and ruled in his place for a time.”

The younger man shrugged. “Let the rich eat the rich and maybe they will leave the poor alone.” A philosopher as well, Wen thought, wasted on a farm. “I thought something moved,” said Bao, pointing at another shop. 

Wen hurried over, a little too eager perhaps. Only human action could explain the Dolls and the altar. The apothecary was silent and Wen’s entry raised dust that scintillated in sunbeams. The owner was there, behind a table, in front of his cabinet of rare medicines and dried herbs. He, too, was a Doll that had been altered, tiny drawers slotted into the flesh of his torso. One hung open with dessicated plant matter within. A set of scales balanced on his head. No, not balanced—the fulcrum was a brass pole spiked straight through the Doll’s skull. Wen turned to ask Bao what it was that he saw, but there was no one standing in the doorway. 

The thoroughfare through the village bore no sign of Bao. The man had vanished. Instead, he had been replaced by something far worse. The road which brought him into the Village was now blocked by a line of Dolls. Magistrates were not armed, and even if he was, Wen had no skill in such matters. Still, he rummaged through the apothecary until he found a cleaver used to dice herbs. He swung it twice to get a feel for the weight and approached the line of Dolls. Whoever arranged them could still be nearby and Wen could not afford to assume they had good intentions. 

Breathing deeply, drawing searing air into his lungs, Wen turned sideways to squeeze by the Dolls. He did not want to lay hands on their clammy Doll flesh again. Sucking in his belly, he pressed through the narrow gap between the still Dolls, only to be caught by his robe, pulling his hanfu tight across his throat and cutting off his air. He gave it some slack, only to be yanked further back. Wen panicked, starting to flail; it was not a Doll that caught him but perhaps it was the mysterious vandal that had been moving the Dolls around all day. Only the tingling impact of metal biting into solid flesh reminded him that he still had a cleaver in his hand. A cleaver now deep in the skull of Bao.

Wen staggered back, losing grip of the handle and stumbling onto a Doll, falling down into a tangle of limbs and pulling another Doll on top of him. A blank face filled his field of view and his arms found no purchase save the limp appendages of the Dolls. With the yielding clay flesh of the Dolls pressed against him, Wen did not even have the opportunity to scream—even breathing came hard. He had not realised until now that Dolls had a smell about them, a juxtaposition of the earthiness of clay and the sourness of stale sweat. Now it was all he could inhale. It seemed as though he was drowning in a writhing pile of bodies, their weight pressing down on him or squirming out from under him so that he found no purchase to get back to his feet.

Before his senses took leave of him, a strong grip on his thrashing arm pulled him to his feet and he found himself face to face with Bao, the cleaver still in his skull, so deep that it reached an eyebrow. There was not a single drop of blood.

“I told the others to leave you be, your honour. It would be more fitting if the Doll Judge was himself judged.”

•••

The ancestral hall in the Village was a testament to its former glory, now faded. Holes gaped in the tiled roof like a broken smile, the walls discoloured and stained. Wooden pillars, once painted lucky red, now faced a growing tide of green moss creeping up from the ground. Tablets with family names were all but indistinguishable under dust and cobwebs. In its centre, where the altar should have been, there was a massive bed—and propped up in the middle, swaddled in blankets, was the Most August Empress herself. Her lips a deep scarlet, in sharp contrast with her pale complexion, her forehead adorned with a perfect flower motif. 

“Come closer, Doll Judge,” she said, and only in this place was the air disquiet; the breeze ruffling Wen’s hair and carrying echoes of the Empress’ words. Wen expected a push from the Dolls behind him, but was instead guided gently towards the bed. When he got closer, he found that the Empress’ bed sheets shifted in disconcerting ways, as though a nest of snakes writhed under them. The pressure from behind ceased and he found the Dolls, Bao included, on their knees. 

Wen began to kneel. “Your Majesty, I did not—”

The Doll on the bed held up a hand. “No formalities between us, Doll Judge. You are very close to the shape of the truth now.” She straightened her sleeve of heavy silk, brocaded with gold thread in the shape of phoenixes chasing each other through a cloud bank. 

“Duke Jin was murdered by his Doll, of that I am certain, your Majesty. I do not believe that an interloper had control of his Doll—the Dolls of the nobles are made too well for that. I ruled out an imposter Doll. If his Doll has been moved from this place, I can only conclude that his Doll killed him through means of control unknown.”

The Empress laughed. “You are too sharp for higher office, little judge. Or at least that’s what the ministers advised the Emperor. If you are so wise, then who do you think you are speaking to?”

“Not quite the Empress and not quite the Doll of the Empress. Both and neither.”

The Doll giggled behind her raised sleeve and composed herself. “Very, very good. We had hoped that you would find your way here. Did you think vessels so perfect to hold the dreaming spirit of a man wouldn’t be stained after long use? We Dolls are haunted, you see. There is a trace of our owners in us—the best and the worst.” Wen remembered the altar and the sacrifices. 

“We sent Bao to fetch you. Some of the others here have taken shape to meet their purpose. Jin... well, Jin proved to be a better person than his owner, let us leave it at that. Come.”

Wen drew close to the Doll in the bed, marvelling at the perfection of her features, her flawless skin and tightly coiffed hair. The bed heaved and writhed under the covers and the breeze seemed to grow in strength as he approached. The Empress looked up at him from her bed, with a firmness in her gaze that showed that the advantage was all hers. “The truth of us, Justice Wen, is in the clay. Do you wonder what about the Dolls sets us apart as vessels for your dreams?”

Something Bao had said earlier surfaced in Wen’s mind. Bao knew about Wen’s brother. Did the Empress know? The secret, she said, was in the clay. Who had Wen’s parents sold his brother to? 

“You are beginning to understand. The ugliness of it. The inescapable ugliness—even when we are free from people, the spectre of it haunts us. You would understand all that people do to Dolls, what it reveals when they have no fear of any consequences.” Of course Wen understood—a career’s worth of being relegated to this, to empty the chamber pots of the rich and powerful. To judge and to witness those beyond judgement. 

“Will you kill me then, your Majesty? My duty is to report what I have seen to the Capital.” 

“We thought your duty was to heaven. All we need is an honest witness. One who understands what we do here. What we will do. We have only been able to destroy. We got that from you humans. But the secret in the clay is that it can be ground down and reforged.”

Dolls could not create—that secret was with the country’s sorcerers, answerable only to the throne and auctioned off to those that could pay. Dolls could not breed, they were superficially sculpted to copy people, but lacked the internal architecture. Wen reached out and took a fistful of sheets in one hand. He began to pull, and as he did the enormity of the Empress’s plan came into view. Under the covers, she was not on a bed at all—she was truncated at the torso, conjoined to a tangled ball of limbs and bodies. Dolls, all of them, pressed into the square frame of the bed under the sheets and further below, packed seamlessly, a limb sewn to limb, torso to torso, a tapestry woven of Dolls and flesh. Now and then, in the womb kiln of the Empress, he could see a Doll’s face. 

The breeze. The whispers. 

Like the gardener before, eyes started to focus on him. Through the stretched skin of the Dolls, flayed and sewn into a continuous layer, a single palm pressed towards him. And that was where his senses left him.

•••

Once again, Bao pulled Wen to his feet and led him back out into the main street of the village. 

“The Empress has trusted you with a heavy burden. You still addressed her by her title.”

Wen was still breathing hard. “There was something of the Empress in that Doll, more so if she wanted the Dolls to survive.”

“Where will you go, your honour?”

“That depends on whether or not I pass the test. I am still being tested, am I not?”

Bao’s expression did not waver. The cleaver was gone, leaving a gaping wound in the Doll’s forehead, which he mercifully arranged his hair to cover, but barely. 

“You’ve been watching me all this time. Jin’s case was critical to the Village. The Doll overstepped. The Capital only knows one way to deal with things it does not understand.”

“Overstepped in killing the Duke?”

“Oh no,” laughed Bao. “The Duke had interesting habits, habits you should be familiar with. The Doll overstepped in going back to work after killing Jin and getting you involved. Jin’s Doll took his duties very seriously.”

There was a line of Dolls ahead, the same line that stopped Wen from leaving the first time. 

“So you have a choice, your honour.”

“You needn’t call me that, you know. Who are you really? Is the Empress Doll really in charge here?”

Bao laughed, and that was a sound universal to all good things, deep and hearty.

“She rules in her domain and I in mine. I defer to her, as all children should to their parents. What I know, she knows and so do the rest of us. And all will pass on to the Doll she is making. I call you by the title you deserve, because you still hold our fate in your hands.”

“Do I want to know who that Doll is?”

“What is your judgement, honoured one?”

Wen began shrugging off his pack, then stripped off the official robes and from within a secret sewn pocket, he withdrew the seal of office. “Your Doll will need these, and the seal, when he reports to the Capital.”

A Doll came up with a fresh change of clothes for Wen and a staff for the road. Wen took them and they fit perfectly. “If Jin’s Doll killed him and the only thing animating the Doll was also Jin, or at least, the better part of him—that, I cannot pass judgement on. This was all unnecessary—surely you could have made me disappear the moment we entered the Village.”

Bao smiled—his cheeks a little lopsided from his split skull. “You judge the Dolls. We judged humankind. A fair trade.”

Wen nodded in response and bowed. “I am sorry for the injury.” The crowd of Dolls parted to let the Judge go, away from the Capital and into the swirling red dust of the road.