Scale-Bright (16 page)

To ground myself I ought to have murmured ritual greetings, every respectful phrase. All that tumbled out of me was, "Majesty, I have an answer to the question of bringing back daylight."

A sharp intake of breath, by whose cadence and pitch I recognized as my husband's.

"Might we see a demonstration?"

"Outside, Your Majesty. I would not wish to ruin the roof."

Gravely he led; royal body, royal head: the limbs of the court must perforce follow. My husband among them; my beautiful husband with his traps at the ready, his snares snapping after my heels. I did not look at him, would not look at him. My voice would not be taken; my courage would not be shaken. The crows moved with me and there I took refuge.

In the courtyard I whispered to one of the crows perching on my shoulder. He leaped into the night, strong as summer morning, and blazed. The emperor shielded his eyes with his sleeve. Courtiers drew back from the stab of midday heat. Dijun had gone utter white.

The emperor gave a contemplative nod. "How did you come by them?"

"They are the sons of my flesh and my husband's blood." I did not tell them I had given birth through my eyes. Feathers slick, leaving me like tears. Cartilage passing through my lashes to harden on the other side; blood-brooks on my cheeks. I smiled slowly. "My children, Your Majesty, every last one of them."

Dijun's proximity rippled against my skin. He would claim us all, wife and progeny, and we would return to his mansion, where in his hexagonal rooms my path would wind around itself until the only way was back. There he would part my thighs and with a kiss murmur, More sons, most precious of wives. "I will want an engineer to help me build a chariot. In this my sons and I will ride, bringing day to mortals and heavens alike. We will glide high and in this way avoid all earthly frights. No flood will ever again cause winter unending or night everlasting."

Dijun fell back. He could not object; could not admit he'd been told none of this, that this plan was none of his, that he did not know his wife. The shame would fall on us both but on him hardest for being unable to master me, inkstaining indelibly what he thought the pellucid waters of his honor. I had strangled his words in the crib of his throat. I had given back the silence he'd forced into me with his mouth.

This was my moment of becoming, and I savored it, every bite, more potent than the best of my orchard.

Taming mounts was no difficulty. Carps newly reborn were docile, and drawn to my power they would acquiesce to anything. With them pulling the chariot I brought Lin and Jia to an inland town where survivors—not Nuwa's clay offspring—had gathered to try again and heal. Fuxi and Dijun had laid down the customs of marriage, man to wife, but this small corner I claimed for myself; wife and wife would live without reproach. I visited them often.

My sons grew in bounds, greedy in their eating, until they stood as tall as I. Soon I had to fly with only one of them at a time, for together their joy would crisp and cook the earth to ashes. After the first three dawns they began to speak, a jabbering chorus of Mother! Their first utterance, their first reality. On the easternmost shore, beyond gods and humans, I nursed a tree to grand heights, mulberries like embers on its boughs and leaves that would cut to pieces anyone other than us. Each sunset I watched my crow-children sleep on the branches.

My sons' laughter was music, and they knew no sorrow.

* * *

It was long after the end, and out of ten sons only one remained to me, the last, the youngest; here approached the part of my story which is known best.

Even then it was such a quiet, submerged part. Mortals learned the legend of how ten sun-crows rose and terrorized the earth with their fatal light, how heroic Houyi—heaven's best marksman, Dijun's champion—shot them down. Xihe went barely mentioned: the suns' mother, nothing more, for the function of giving them birth must be fulfilled by some vessel.

I'd told my sons of what Dijun had done to me, to the one who preceded them as my child of the heart, but they were sons, not daughters: a gulf no motherhood could cross. They wanted only to be a family. In the end I could not impose my hate upon them, for I wished their existences unmarred; I wanted them steeped in bliss. They were only mortal. Few realized that they were not divine, inheriting neither Dijun's agelessness nor mine. They would pass, and some other way would have to be devised to light the world.

Dijun told them: I sometimes long for a fancy to see the sky subsumed by your wings. The brilliance of you all together, for heaven and earth to behold.

My sons had been uncomplicated creatures. Born to be loved. If their father expected a little gesture to earn his, why then, they would gladly give it.

The feathers of my youngest were growing rime, aging before their time. Absorbing the work of his brothers was more than he was made for, and in time he would fade. It was terrible for a mother to mourn her children—but when my offspring was mortal and I was not, what was to be done? Life was change.

He fell asleep, my last son. In the sky a dead crane drifted.

A footfall; a radiance. "Xihe."

"You ever visit uninvited, husband," I said without looking at him. "It seems you do not understand the meaning of unwelcome."

"You were a delight once."

"These days I'm rather delighted with myself." I turned my attention to scrubbing one of my dragons' necks. "Heavenly etiquette is all that stands between you and the event of your eyes being pulped between my dragon's teeth. I'd personally gouge them out with my thumbs. Since our wedding night I've longed to do this."

His robes rustled as he backed out of the dragon's reach. "You would not. And could not."

I looked down at my arms, at muscles hardened over centuries. "How precious that you think so."

"In celestial census we remain spouses, Xihe. What would befall you if you attempted to murder your own husband?" He drew closer. "And witness what has transpired after you left me. Your sons dead. You cannot govern yourself, much less them. One child is all you have left to live for."

I could not keep from laughing. "That's what you think?" I stepped into the chariot and tugged the reins. The paired dragons arched and reared. "I live for myself, Dijun. For that I have been made; for that I have been born—for myself, not for you, not even for my sons."

Life was change, and not even the mother of suns would forever stay the same. The limitless skies opened for me. Into them I soared, flames pouring out of me in a roar, a dragon's gate carved into the night.

Mine alone to leap.

Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon

It is the aftermath of the world’s end, and nine birds–nine suns–lie dead while Houyi cradles the curve of her bow, her fingers locking around the taut hardness of its string. The tenth sun, the last, has fled. 
Chastise them
, Dijun said, a father’s plea. But there is the land and the horror and the dryness, desiccated corpses in empty dust trenches that were rivers not long ago. There are dead dragons, too, and snake women with bright eyes–and is it not right to bring down the suns, is it not what Houyi is meant to do? She is a god who protects; she is a god given a duty.

The birds are dead. They no longer burn, but the places where they have fallen will long after be black scorch marks, indelible. There will be consequences. It does not matter that her first shot meant to warn: wing clipped, the eldest sun plunged and shattered on the earth. Seeing their brother fall they attacked, and she had to defend herself.

Behind her Chang’e is inhaling and exhaling shallow scraps of air. They will not let this pass.
What will you do now? Where will we go?

And the archer whispers, 
I saved them all.

She knows, as she has known since she notched that first of nine arrows–even in the firestorm of their rage she was a peerless shot, one arrow per bird all she needed–that for her there will be no thanks. They have transgressed enough, wife and wife, and this shall be the final insult tolerated.

So Houyi only takes Chang’e’s hand and says, 
I am sorry.

Night comes, and with it the first drops of rain. Somewhere a dragon king or queen serpent stirs and tastes the air with a forked tongue. The Sea Mother sifts sand out of her eyes, which have been so parched, so dry. Out of their bellies and mouths rivers will surge forth, tides will rise bright-green with brine, and the world can go on as it did before the convening of ten triple-legged suns. This is their duty, as the murder of sun-crows has been hers.

* * *

Houyi sometimes thought she might have been mortal. But all she remembered was the bow and slivers of wind which she soon learned to pin to wood with arrowheads. Neither mother nor father commanded her early recall.

Easily enough she was accepted under the jade roof, for new yearly new deities swelled the court. When the time came to instate her, some consternation arose. What she was, ought to be, seemed evident from the divine weapon and quiver on her back. Whether she should be titled accordingly was a matter of debate.Archer-God denoted a militarial register: should she be appointed general, marshal, or captain in the bargain as other deities of similar associations were? Wasn’t there a young man from the realm below, skilled with the same weapon? Houyi could perform as his follower, his hunter, and she could keep the bow.

In the end Meng, who attended court rarely and spoke up less, pointed out the obvious solution. Let the god-to-be compete with the boy and decide thereby which deserved the title. The boy was summoned, Houyi matter-of-fact defeated him, and that settled the matter. Out of respect forMeng–who had abandoned gleaming nacre and ever-blooming gardens, and agreed to a duty of doling out oblivion in hell–the emperor did not gainsay the result, and out of fear too that the Old Woman of Forgetting might leave her hell-post in pique. Few were suited to it, fewer still willing. Brewing amnesia had become a woman’s work: no male of his court would stoop to it, and no goddess would leave the hard-won comforts of paradise.

Houyi became the divinity within the sacred instant between tautness and letting fly. But she remained merely Houyi the Archer. The army’s marksman division continued headless, making do with reporting to the artillery chief, whose main passion was vested in ballistae and who had little appreciation for the finesse of arrows.

All agreed, however, that the engineer’s eccentricities and injustices were preferable to Houyi. She endured this as she would endure other slights in the knowledge that she stood one excuse away from demotion. The archer might be new to celestial ways, but she’d seen how other women acted–the wives, the mothers, the sisters–and how they were acted toward: no fault of theirs, but it was a strict and narrow path they walked. Houyiwas nothing if not a quick study.

“And where might I live, Your Majesty?” she asked of the emperor, kneeling in her men’s clothes.

An absence of answer from the man on the throne. He didn’t appear young, the emperor, though he took care to look in his prime: oiled hair, oiled mustache, earlobes lengthened to denote wisdom. A crown that dripped sapphires orange, blue, green.. “It’ll have to wait,” he said imprecisely, “for the masons need to rebuild the palace wings Dijun’s crow-sons burned down. They were most enthusiastic their last visit to our court, but who may deny a father his sons?”

“Yes, Majesty.”

She descended to the earth, passing through storms and sky-lakes, and sought out lairs of great beasts. One tiger, of some nine centuries in age and known for his cunning, fell to her after seven nights and seven days of tracking and trapping. An angry typhoon, manifesting in a litter of foxes joined to one mind, surrendered its flesh to her after she’d pierced the hearts of its bodies one by one. Her fame grew, almost incidentally, in the demons’ realms.

It couldn’t be helped that she was seen by mortals and that they began to chronicle her, imagining for her an origin rooted in one of their own. In one province they said she was a warrior hermit; in another they insisted she was the son of a goatherd, and in the capital they linked her to the royal lineage, calling her a prince.

Houyi considered correcting them, but she was busy drawing up the plans of her house. In any case the hearts of mortals were obedient. When she appeared to scholars in person, she was certain, they would immediately rewrite their manuscripts to match the facts of her existence. Academics must be empirical, or else what were they for?

She made the pillars of her home out of tiger femurs. The roof was the ribs of foxes, delicately strong, and the lattices of her windows were the finest in heaven, put together from the bones of immense sharks that feasted on the flesh of fishermen. Hardened feathers and scales of demonic owls and lizards became the tiles on her roof. Her methods of construction were barbaric, but when the house was completed few were able to say it was not exquisite. Her deeds, too, secured her position. Was it intended? None could tell, for she was indifferent to all–the praises more grudging than respect, her own skill, her effortless slaying of wicked spirits–and kept her thoughts hid and close.

The emperor was said to pay her a personal visit, telling her, “This is most excellent work.”

“I’m honored, Majesty.”

“You could consider the office of our chief architect. Building and making are the noblest of arts, the most dependable of sciences. We need nobility and dependability, Houyi. For look: many of the court are happy to range abroad and subjugate heaven’s enemies, yet when we call for solidity and wisdom, who provide but a rare handful?”

“Demons,” Houyi was reported to have said, “require killing, Majesty. It’s a fact that they are fecund and breed without need or care for the natural process of things. Quell one and five more rise to replace it, springing full-grown out of filth and mud.”

“That is a truth.”

“I am grateful, Majesty, that you thought me fit for a post so exalted. But while the matter of masonry and the laying of pillars may wait, the multiplying of devils can only be regulated through hard labor and vigilance. I give myself to this work so that another may enjoy the privilege and comforts of being your chief architect.”