Striking the Balance

“What do you want?” Liu Han asked coldly. She knew the most probable answer to that, but she might have been wrong. There was at least a chance Hsia had come up here on Party business rather than in the hope of sliding his Proud Pestle into her Jade Gate.

She didn’t stand aside to let him into the room, but he came in anyway. He was blocky and broad-shouldered and strong as a bullock-when he moved forward, he would walk right over you if you didn’t get out of his way. Still trying to keep his voice sweet, though, he said, “You did a fine job, helping to blow up the little scaly devils with those bombs in the gear the animal-show men used. That was clever, and I admit it.”

“That was also a long time ago now,” Liu Han said. “Why pick this time to come and give me a compliment?”

“Any time is a good time,” Hsia Shou-Tao answered. Casually, he kicked the door shut behind him. Liu Han knew exactly what that meant. She started to worry. Not many people were in the roominghouse in the middle of the afternoon. She wished she hadn’t opened the door. Hsia went on, “I’ve had my eye on you for a long time, do you know that?”

Liu Han knew it only too well. She said, “I am not your woman. I am partnered to Nieh Ho-T’ing.” Maybe that would make him remember he had no business being up here sniffing after her. He did respect Nieh, and did do as Nieh ordered him-when those orders had nothing to do with women, at any rate.

Hsia laughed. Liu Han did not think it was funny. Hsia said, “He is a good Communist, Nieh is. He will not mind sharing what he has.” With no more ado than that, he lunged at her.

She tried to push him away. He laughed again-he was much stronger than she was. He bent his face down to hers. When he tried to kiss her, she tried to bite him. Without any visible show of anger, he slapped her in the face. His erection, big and thick, rammed against her hipbone. He shoved her down onto the thick pile of bedding in a corner of the room, got down beside her, and started puffing off her black cotton trousers.

In pain, half stunned, for a moment she lay still and unresisting. Her mind flew back to the bad days aboard the little scaly devils’ airplane that never came down, when the little devils had brought men into her metal cell and they’d had their way with her, whether she wanted them or not. She was a woman; the scaly devils starved her if she did not give in; what could she do?

Then, she’d been able to do nothing except yield. She’d been altogether in the little scaly devils’ power-and she’d been an ignorant peasant woman who knew no better than to do whatever was demanded of her.

She wasn’t like that any more. Instead of fear and submission, what shot through her was rage so raw and red, she marveled it didn’t make her explode. Hsia Shou-Tao yanked her trousers off over her ankles and flung them against the wall. Then he pulled down his own, just halfway. The head of his organ, rampantly free of its foreskin, slapped Liu Han’s bare thigh.

She brought up her knee and rammed it into his crotch as hard as she could.

His eyes went wide and round as a foreign devil’s, with white all around the iris. He made a noise half groan, half scream, and folded up on himself like a pocketknife, his hands clutching the precious parts she’d wounded.

If she gave him any chance to recover, he’d hurt her badly, maybe even kill her. Careless that she was naked from the waist down, she scrambled away from him, snatched a long sharp knife out of the bottom drawer of the chest by the window, and went back to touch the edge of the blade to his thick, bull-like neck.

“You bitch, you whore, you-” He took one hand away from his injured privates to try to knock her aside.

She bore down on the blade. Blood trickled from the cut. “Hold very still,Comrade,” she hissed, loading what should have been an honored title with every ounce of scorn she could. “If you think I wouldn’t like to see you dead, you’re even stupider than I give you credit for.”

Hsia froze. Liu Han pressed the knife in a little deeper anyhow. “Careful,” he said in a tiny, strangled voice: the more he made his throat move, the more the knife cut him.

“Why should I be careful?” she snarled. It was, she realized, a good question. The longer this tableau held, the better the odds Hsia Shou-Tao would find a way to turn the tables on her. Killing him now would make sure he didn’t. If she left him alive, she’d have to move fast, while he was still too shocked and in too much pain to think clearly. “Are you ever going to do that to me again?” she demanded.

He started to shake his head, but that made the knife blade move in his flesh, too. “No,” he whispered.