Pinioning
Eleanor Yan Hun Yung, Group 4: Fiction, St. Paul's Co-educational College
he does not love him. It does not matter whatever he does, nor what they do, she will never love him.
Sometimes she imagines that she might like him, be grateful towards him - but love? No, she cannot.
It is not as if she is infatuated with another. In fact, she imagines that, in another life, she might
be able to love him, had they met naturally and not been joined together thanks to the machinations of
the elders - elders, she thinks, who are blind in every way and not just their eyes. Without consulting her,
discussing with her, or even bothering to inform her the day before it was to happen, they married her off to a
complete stranger. She was not even permitted a moment of hesitation or word of protestation as she was
bundled into the sedan, decorated and carried away, she noted, like a prize ox to the market.
So she cannot bring herself to love him. It is not through any fault of his own - he fell victim to the
elders too. He is not abusive, not drunken, neither cheats nor lies to her. He works hard and efficiently, he
provides all she needs, he is always tender and kind to her, and sometimes she feels a little guilty that she does
not return his care. She speculates that her inability to love may be in opposition towards the way she was flung
into her marriage; sometimes, she believes that she does not love him simply because she does not. There is no
other way to explain it.
When he is conscripted to join the wall-building efforts - the emperor wants to build a massive wall up
in the north, though no one here is quite sure why, and all able-bodied men must go - she watches him leave
with dry eyes. It’s not that she will not miss him, it is that she finds herself unable to cry, and is not false enough
to squeeze tears out. Other women bid their husbands goodbye with rivers of sorrow; she kisses his cheek and
says that she will miss him and hopes he will be back soon. Judging by what she has heard, her hopes will not
be met.
Funny, she thinks, how lonely it feels to come back to an empty house. It is not as if she has enjoyed
any particular marital bliss. Maybe it is just that she has become used to life with him - and admittedly, it was
sweet, in its uncomplicated but detached sort of way. Some older relatives pay visits to console her, keep her
company, even when she has not asked for it. She suffers their presence, listening them natter on and on about
their husbands and children and incredibly exciting daily lives, aware of an increasing sense of suffocation.
She can’t recall whose idea it was, that they ought to visit their husbands up north. Why on earth would
you embark on such a long and arduous journey, when there was no real hope of your husband actually
returning home until...until whenever the wall might be finished? But she follows them anyway - she feels,
somehow, compelled to visit him. Perhaps she owes it to him, since she does not love him; perhaps she is just
curious about the conditions at the wall.
Regardless, she goes. The journey is as difficult and merciless as she has expected, and not all of them
make it there. Sometimes she contemplates turning back, but she never does. She is compelled to trudge on,
hanging her head; she barely knows the way back, and running off would earn the scorn and bafflement of the
women around her. She wonders if she is condemned to continue on forever, until she catches sight of the grey
stone, which soon morphs into a coiling grey dragon, twisting and twining through the hills, and the ant-like
men scurrying all over it.
It seems to take forever to find him. With the guards, she is often rebuffed, if not abused or chased, or
endures catcalls; the odd one willing to help cannot provide much information. The workers, few of whom have
the time or the strength to choke out a reply, know even less. It takes weeks, weeks of walking up and down the
rough stone, along the walls wrought together through tears and sweat and blood and bodies, before she finds
him.
He’s changed, but that is to be expected. What she has not anticipated is how he has changed - grown
old by decades, when he should only have aged by years; scars and callouses line every inch of skin. Each stone
he heaves seems to bring him closer to the edge of the grave. All at once her heart begins to bleed in pity, and
she imagines that if she loved him she will be howling on her knees, begging him to stop and screaming at the
foreman, why, why.
Instead, she gnaws her lower lip, and watches the men struggling at work - men who, in another life,
would not be corpses here in the unyielding rock, but tilling fertile land in the peak of vitality. She feels herself
burning in anger. The injustice! Around her, men, who should have their own will, their own lives, their own
work, sacrificing themselves to build a wall for the distant, horribly distant emperor, an emperor who has never
looked upon the faces of these men. At best, the workers will come out of this - if they ever manage to, since to
her it seems that this brutal behemoth shall never be completed - they will be old, broken, and unable to see this
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