In the Yongzheng reign a family inside the city was marrying a son. The bride’s family was also a great house, living outside the Sand River gate. The bride got into her sedan, and the riders closed in behind her.
They passed an old grave. A whirlwind came out of the mound and circled the bridal chair several times. The sand flew so that people were blinded; everyone fell back. After a while it settled.
Presently they reached the groom’s house. The chair was set down in the main hall, and the attendants lifted the curtain and helped the bride out.
And then a second bride lifted the curtain and stepped out of the chair as well, and stood beside the first.
Everyone stared. Dress, ornament, colour — not one thing different. No one could tell which was which.
They were helped into the inner room. The groom’s parents looked at each other in horror, and there was nothing to be done, so the marriage went ahead. At the worship of heaven and the ancestors, and at the presentation to the relatives, they stood the groom in the middle with a bride on either side.
The groom privately congratulated himself: he had married one and got two.
Late at night he took both beauties to bed. The maids went off to their own rooms. The parents went to bed.
Then there was a terrible screaming from the bridal room. They dressed and ran. The servants and women forced the door.
There was blood all over the floor. The groom lay fallen outside the bed. On the bed one bride lay on her back in a pool of blood. The other was gone.
They lit lamps and looked about. On the beam perched a great bird, ash-black, with a hooked beak and huge snow-white talons. Everyone shouted and struck at it, but short weapons could not reach. While they went for bows and long spears, the bird clapped its wings with a harsh clattering cry, its eyes lit green like phosphorus, and it was out of the door and gone.
The groom came round on the floor.
“We had been sitting a while,” he said, “and I was thinking of undressing and going to sleep, when the one on my left raised her sleeve and swept it, and both my eyes were plucked out. The pain made me faint. I do not know how she turned into a bird.”
They asked the bride.
“When he screamed and fell, I asked what was wrong, and the thing was already a monstrous bird coming for my eyes, and I fainted too.”
They treated them for months. Both survived. They were very devoted to each other afterwards. But they were two blind people who had to lean on one another, and that is a pitiful thing.
It is said that the great yin of the waste places between graves, and the qi of piled-up corpses, over time turn into the raksasa bird — as large as a grey crane, able to change shape and do harm, and fond of eating human eyes. It belongs with the yaksha, the asura and the preta.
