Chapter 87

The rain hung down through the tangled branches of the old banyans, and only two or three drops were left now, falling far apart with a brittle little sound. The green hills and dark clouds and blue mist at the sky's edge melted into one blurred, mottled sweep, and time slipped by inside it without a sound. Zhuo Siheng stood under the tree, his shoulders still wet with the rain that had fallen on the way.

"Your brother isn't coming."

Today the girl wore a different mask, carved of wood, the beak flattened and set aslant like a mountain owl's, but the eyes it left bare were round and winning, with none of the fierce glare of the beasts that serve a mountain god. She had on a village girl's skirt of pale red, plain but quick with life, and as she shook the rain from her umbrella she was like a glad bird shaking out its wings after a flight through the wet.

Siheng had arranged to go with Song Duan to see an ancient Chu shaman's cave nearby. People said secret rites had once been held in it, and the great shaman had told them that if they wished to know the local Chu ways they could go and look for themselves. But Song Duan had drunk with the hill folk the night before and was still dead to the world. The girl shook her head helplessly as she passed the word on. "My cousin was at the village feast last night too. He says your brother drank far too much, and will likely sleep till tomorrow."

Siheng was not surprised. He knew Song Duan's live-for-the-day temper, and would just have to set out by himself. He thanked the girl for the message and turned to go, but a clear voice behind the wooden mask called him back.

"The great shaman told me to go with you." The girl opened her umbrella again. "The cave is rough ground, and an outsider won't find it. She says you're an honored guest and mustn't be slighted."

The people here were simple and warm, with a strange, bright Chu flavor to them. At these rites the girls had toasted Song Duan freely and given him embroidered trinkets, and women too were part of the feast, with none of the usual rules holding them back. So Siheng thought that the two of them walking the mountain road together would be no trouble to the girl, and that a guide was surely better than groping along blind. So he let it be.

Siheng opened his own umbrella, and the two set off side by side. Far off the spring thunder rolled on and on, and along the mountain path the spring flowers were in riot and the grass lay thick as woven cloth. Siheng thought the poem "The Mountain Spirit" from the Nine Songs might have been set in just such a place. The girl walking a step ahead was silent, but her tread was light and her dress plain, and there was something of the old Chu songs' loveliness in her slow walk through the rain.

"You're a scholar. Surely you've read the Nine Songs?"

The girl spoke suddenly, cutting across his thoughts. He had his foot on a patch of slick green moss, and her words struck him square in his musing, so that all at once he pitched forward. A hand came out sideways and just caught him, though the girl who put it out staggered too. In the end they both kept their feet.

But their hands were clasped together.

The last Siheng remembered of a girl's hand was from childhood, leading his two sisters and carrying his brother on his back to the labor-camp canteen for supper. A touch like this was the first in his life. He had a thousand words of apology ready to say once he let go, but when the warmth at his fingertips finally left him, the top-graduate Zhuo, praised by so many for his matchless eloquence, got out only two words.

"Thank you..."

The girl was far cooler and steadier than he was. She only nodded, and walked on. Siheng fixed his eyes on the path, working hard to dodge any "trap" that might trip him again.

But the two of them seemed to have forgotten the question from before.

Halfway up the winding road, Siheng noticed the path here bore the marks of mending, and asked, "Did the yamen ever repair this road?"

"Not the yamen. The Yun family built it, decades back," the girl answered.

"The Yun of central Chu? Descendants of the Prince of Chu'an?" This Siheng truly had not looked for.

"Even Anhua folk think the Jianyang country is a wild, barbarous place, yet Yun descendants have lived here a hundred years. You couldn't call it careful husbandry, but they hold no little land and property all the same. About sixty or seventy years ago the Yun of Jiangzhou put up money to build half this mountain road, but you've walked a stretch of it yourself and know how hard the ground is. They dragged it out two or three years and finished only a third, and after that it came to nothing." The girl paused, as if something else had come to her. "Still, going from Jiangzhou to Jianyang Town now, half by water and half by road, it's a roundabout way, but there's a way through, and no great trouble."

"So there are Yun descendants here. I'd thought most of the Yun kept to their own land in Jiangzhou." Siheng did not know Jiangzhou well, and all he knew of the Yun came off the page.

"The Yun are a great clan of Jiangzhou, only they keep an ancestral rule that no one of the house may take office, and they've produced nothing but a few local military men holding frontier posts, with no real power to speak of. Their forefather, looking far ahead, left them lands and holdings all over Jiangzhou, and a few scattered ones in Anhua, mostly kept up by Yun of the lesser branches who live here. A house like that has no shortage of people, naturally. There are two or three Yun ancestral homes in Jianyang Town alone." At this the girl turned suddenly to look at Siheng. "In fact, the great shaman and I are both surnamed Yun."

Without thinking Siheng answered, "I'm surnamed Zhuo."

And at once he regretted it.

What was he babbling about...

But the girl only looked at him, then turned and walked on ahead.

They walked on in silence a while, and came to a cave mouth veiled in hanging vines, with clusters of purple flower buds dangling down before it.

"This is the place," the Yun girl said softly.

Siheng saw footprints still on the ground, left, he supposed, by someone come for the spring rites these past days, and thought nothing of it. He stepped in first and lifted the natural curtain of green and purple for the girl, and she lit the carved grooves in the cave wall, which held tallow lamps not yet burned down, so that the black path under their feet sprang into light.

As they went on, lighting lamp after lamp, a glowing band spread along the wall into the depths, until far inside it lit the whole view bright and clear. In the great belly of the cave, opening wide before him, Siheng saw painted rock-figures in many colors and carvings cut in a plain, childlike line, mostly shapes of hills and beasts, a few plants, and most of all the black bird.

"We Chu people worship the black bird, and hold rites to it through the four seasons, and our divining and fortune-casting mostly begin from it." The girl's clear voice rang round the cave and came into his ears with an oddly soft, downy warmth. "They say this was a place of worship from the oldest times, for asking of heaven and casting of earth. It's long gone to waste now. Apart from the great shaman's offerings now and then, no one comes."

"But I saw fresh mud-prints at the mouth?" Siheng asked.

"Wild animals sheltering from the rain, perhaps." The girl lowered her head a little, and turned the talk. "You went to the great shaman again yesterday, and asked her about the local Chu ways, and said you meant to write a book. Is it true?"

Siheng smiled. "It is, though it's a thing for me and that brother of mine together. On my own I'd hardly keep it up."

"You look like a man who could write a book. He... doesn't, so much." The girl laughed at her own words.

"My friend is a free, unbound sort, something like Zhuangzi. I'm the worldly one, and maybe even less fit than he is to take the thing up." What Siheng said was his honest thought.

The girl tilted her head and looked at him a long while. "I don't think you're worldly at all. When you saw the great shaman again yesterday, you said not one word about how the oracle should be read. Aren't you curious?"

"Fate is a mystery often enough, and seeing it plain doesn't make every step smooth. I've had my own rises and falls, and there are dark turns of it I've never worked out to this day. But every step of the road that brought me here I truly walked myself. So I think an oracle like that has its own deep sense, and rather than get back some reading still lost in the clouds and spend my days in fear of it, I'd sooner stand on my own two feet and prove the thing out, which has more in it of what it means to be alive." Siheng thought as he spoke, in earnest, and answered in earnest, and did not forget to add, "Curious I surely am. But what I'm more curious about isn't knowing the end beforehand. It's how I'm to live up to an oracle so strange and so splendid."

"You can say a thing like that, and still call yourself worldly?" The girl seemed to be smiling, but the mask was in the way, and Siheng saw only two brows curving behind the eye-holes. "Are you really only a scholar?"

"A little more than a scholar, maybe."

Siheng wanted to say he was a scholar in his higher form, but it felt odd to lay out who he was here, and while he wavered the girl laughed twice and pressed him no further, only saying, "Then I'll have to call you Mr. Zhuo."

The two smiled at each other and let the matter drop, and looked about them, and fell to talking of the old things in the cave.

The girl seemed to know the cave well, and had the rock-paintings and carvings at her fingertips. Siheng listened, caught up in it, and every question he put she could answer, and answer with substance. By the end he did not know whether she was still curious about who he was, but he was certainly curious about who she was. Could there be some shaman-woman of the old Chu kingdom still living here?

On the way back he asked her straight out, but hearing it the girl only shook her head. "There's nothing of the sort now. The great shaman is just an old woman the town holds in high honor. She's long in years and has seen a great deal, and truly did meet and learn the old Chu-shaman ways, which is why they look up to her. Each year the rites are kept up so, calling on the old ways to pray for good seasons, but she's no true shaman. By the custom here, every spring rite two unwed girls must wait on the great shaman. She's old, and climbing the heights needs a little care. And I'm only dressed up for the day, standing in for my cousin, who's taken ill. I'm no shaman-woman, of course."

Siheng heard the plain truth in her words, and was about to ask whether all she knew came from the great shaman, when he saw a familiar figure coming up the road toward the town. It was Song Duan, hurrying over now that the wine had worn off.

But when he reached them, what he said was not about the drunken broken appointment. "That Lu something-or-other, the little clerk at your yamen, sent a man to the county office to say a court dispatch has come, and you're to get back as fast as you can." Song Duan looked easy enough, but his words came a shade faster than their wont, for hearing of urgent business he was, this once, a little less at his leisure.

A court dispatch?

Siheng thought: the official kiln and the tribute tea were both settled, and an ordinary dispatch would not need him to rush back, unless...

Unless it was a matter of appointment or removal.

"I'll go to the post station for a horse and ride back. Yuanda, if there's nothing else, stay on a few days. We'll talk about the book later." He had taken two steps when he stopped and turned again to Song Duan. "Lu Hui is older than you. You're not to go calling him a little clerk."

Two steps more, and something seemed to strike him all at once, and he turned back to the masked girl. "Thank you, Miss Yun, for showing me the way. The mountain road is hard going, and this brother of mine is an upright gentleman. I'll have him see you part of the way home." And with that he left, not looking back.

The girl's hand, half raised to wave, could only fall again.

"You'd be Yun Sangwei?" Song Duan was watching the two of them, and said it suddenly, with meaning in it.

"How do you know that?" The girl was on her guard at once.

"Your cousin's looking all over for you. She says you were gone at first light with your mask on, and the great shaman told her you'd gone to see the Chu shaman cave. I happened to be there when they talked." Song Duan smiled. "Best get back. Your cousin's good and angry."

Yun Sangwei said nothing more.

Back in the town, sure enough, her cousin Yun Zhiwei caught her at their old family house, and without a word stripped the mask from her and hauled her off to her room.

"You're far too bold! Off all alone to a wild, god-forsaken place like that! And didn't you go to that cave only yesterday? Why go again today? You've run wilder than ever since you came here. And why dress yourself up so coarse?" Yun Zhiwei was two years the elder, and spoke with a real elder sister's weight. "In two days we go back to Jiangzhou. You've made your rounds of the kin well enough. Now stay home and behave, and no more running off!"

Yun Sangwei badly wanted to say she had not gone out alone, but it struck her of a sudden that if she said she'd walked the road with the Zhuo fellow, she could forget sleeping tonight, so she wisely held her tongue and made no argument.

Yun Zhiwei knew her cousin's temper ran a little strange, and saw well enough now that the girl was unconvinced and only keeping quiet. So she went on, "Once we're back in Jiangzhou you'd best rein your nature in too. Our house still has its name, but we're no great clan for all that, and you must think of the family's face. At least put on a quiet, demure manner. Either you shut yourself up at home, or you're out and gone without a trace. Where's the look of a daughter of good family in that?"

Yun Sangwei knew that if she stayed silent her cousin would nag on and on, so all at once she spoke up. "Sister, on the way back I saw that Master Song. He's calling on Uncle just now."

Yun Zhiwei's face went red in an instant, as if burned through, and she stammered, "I'll go and see whether Uncle's medicine has finished brewing. You stay right here. If you're gone when I'm back, see if I don't tell Grandfather!" And in three steps turned to two she was gone.

Yun Sangwei bent her head and smiled, then shook it. Her eye fell on the mask in her hand, its hollow eyes turned up at her, the mountain owl's unreadable half-smile not fierce or frightening now but as if it were teasing her over something. And lost in her thoughts, she felt that the odd, faint numbness in her right hand where it had touched his seemed to linger still.