Scale-Bright (17 page)

And perhaps the emperor smiled behind his sleeve, half in chagrin. It might be that he took her answer for insolence and that it would explain what transpired in the following years. For the time being, he merely left her be in her house of bone and fur and scales. She cupped her hand over her fist and bowed to him as he departed.

The suitors started then. Houyi couldn’t pinpoint why men suddenly took up the fashion of wooing her, nor where the idea had started and caught hold of them like fire on dry grass.

First Xuanwu, a monarch in his own right, riding to her home astride the snake that had been his guts, the turtle that had been his stomach. He’d made himself young for her, donning a skin luminous as pearls and robes redder than wounds. Houyi did not receive him beneath her window: instead she took him to a howling gulf between two cloud-cliffs, where she honed herself by shooting sunlight, separating each beam into seven colors. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth rainbows she asked, “Why is it that you want a wife?”

On the turtle’s back he sat, placid; no marksman himself, he was content to watch and admire. “In my mortal years I never wedded.”

“That seems a fair enough rationale,” she allowed. “But I don’t think I will suit your court.”

“It is small, true, and solemn. Still I am a martial being and we ought to complement. I shall have your bow done over in hematite, and your arrows tipped in black diamonds. In your lap furs and feathers and scales shall be piled high, dyed black and obsidian-beaded. You shall be queen over the north, feared for your wisdom and prowess. As my wife you may hunt as many evil spirits as you like and, in the sunless hours, pour their blood into the rivers of my domain.”

“That’s most generous, Xuanwu, for a husband.” She didn’t mention that hematite was not much good to grip and that diamond arrowheads would defeat the point of her practice. “Yet I’m few in years and have not had examples: I do not know how to be a wife, much less a queen. I’ve a love for bright colors besides, which is why I’ve made my house as I did. Will you allow me to remake your palace? I’ll be most careful, papering the walls with the eyes of wolves and the bellies of peacocks, making lamps out of deep-sea beryls, draperies out of sunset skies. That is my requirement, Xuanwu, for what wife may tolerate a house not done in substances and style to her desires?”

He admitted that, certainly, a wife had every right on that matter; he also admitted he wasn’t willing to compromise, for he found the brightness she enjoyed distracting. They parted on good terms, over what was–or what he was led to think was–a philosophical difference.

Marshal Tianpeng, after that. He visited her drunk, as was his wont, gourd clasped under one arm. His fondness for women was legendary: if this one dressed more like one of his soldiers than the girls he chased, he readily discounted that. “For,” he roared, “what’s existence that does not vary? Boring, that’s what. Come with me, Houyi, and I’ll dig you a lake filled with the best wine. I’m a builder too, and have a deft hand with carpentry. I will take apart my abode and you may do it over, in any color and material you like. How is that?”

“Most magnanimous,” she was reported to have said.

“All I ask, lovely Houyi, is that once in a while you wear soft silks and hairpins. Oh, not much, not often–but perhaps one day out of a year, or even five? The rest of the months and hours are yours. You can practice with my men, if you like, to show them just why it is you are named heaven’s best archer and feared by all the wicked.”

The archer sipped the wine he’d poured her. “That sounds very well, Marshal. Then on those days you will also wear soft silks, hairpins, maybe even bangles on your wrists?”

Tianpeng paused his drinking. “What?”

“It is both your custom and mine to dress martially, and you wish me to spend a few days every year changed. Therefore it seems logical that on those same days you will alter yours so that we can be well-matched. It’s not orderly otherwise, and as wife and husband we’ll be subjected to ridicule. Or so I gather, being yet new to existence and not tutored in the ways of our kind.”

He stared into his gourd for a long time. Upending it he found the last drop gone. “I’m not sure it works like that, Houyi.”

“Why not, Marshal?”

In the end Tianpeng left to seek more liquor, more befuddled than angry, having spent an hour trying to expound on the logic of garments and the attributes of matrimony. His own rhetoric turned around to gulp him whole, for he’d never been scholarly. He wrote the archer off as a lost cause. Other girls were abundant, more voluptuous and pliable than she. Also, most womencomprehended clothes.

Others followed, half-hearted attempts to make a bride out of Houyi. Not from any real yearning, she realized, but because she must be placed somehow, being fatherless, brotherless, unmarried, and not motherly in any way. But the tide ebbed. No mortal origin in her, so perhaps she was not dissimilar to Guanyin: meant to be celibate. The white goddess had even been known to take on a masculine aspect.

The suns’ father alone did not relent. Dijun watched her and sometimes they encountered one another at court, exchanging passing words and obligatory greetings. He had his avian sons, who lit the world with their heat, track her when she left the safety of celestial confines–to kill, to find new and sharp things with which to make arrows, to collect sounds and smells in her bowstring. Houyi did not require help and, with the wariness of a born hunter, knew when the presiding sun monitored her from his mother’s chariot. Infidelity in the hatching, and abetted unwittingly by Dijun’sown wife. She contemplated telling Xihe of this, but found no opportunity. The suns’ mother was remote, rejoicing only in her distance and abhorring any society not her sons’. And though Houyi was fearless, she could not fly so high, nor endure the birds’ fire.

She prepared herself, close-lipped, for one last courtship.

He came to her armed in the glory of himself, whose seed had made possible the winged conflagrations that were his sons, whose incandescence had captured aloof Xihe for ten fleeting moments. Even the emperor was not so resplendent: Dijun was gold of skin and mouth, and flame threaded through his hair and the fabric of his robe. When he found her, he knelt as though she was empress, as though she were not merely an archer.

Houyi tried not to cringe from the heat. She grimaced, in that subtle way she’d mastered, with only the crinkling of her eyes and the slightest shift in the angle of her brows. To most it did not show; to Dijun, clothed in brilliance, it was invisible.

“I have long admired your grace,” he began.

“You do not have to kneel,” she interrupted.

“I wish to submit and supplicate–to tell you that of you I will ask nothing, no silk or hairpin, no surrendering of your bow, no parting with your house. I will come to yours, if you will have me, and sleep where you point. I do not offer you jewels, for I know you crave none. I give myself and beg you to accept.”

The archer glanced skyward. “You have a wife.”

“Xihe and I had children to give humans life. We had children because we were alone. We had children because fires burned within us that had to be birthed, given shape. There’s ever been only duty, Houyi, and when my wife speaks it is only to our sons. They are her world; I am nothing.”

“I cannot mother the crows, Dijun, nor chariot them to their ascent. I’m not made of such material that can withstand the edged branches ofFusang. I cannot give them my breast to rest their heads when they tire.”

“You do not have to. Xihe loves her sons, and they will remain hers. I will forfeit her and forfeit my office. It will be my contentment simply to be yours, my peace to know your embrace.” Dijun opened his hands, and flame like molten gold fell, scorching the bones with which Houyi had paved her garden paths. “Please.”

She knew there would be consequences. She knew Dijun could not be crossed. She knew he could not be deterred, or brushed off, or misled. In the face of all this, she pulled him to his feet–she was strong–and said, “No.”

He looked at her, eye to eye. They were of a height, mandated to be tall. “Why?”

“Because,” she said very softly, “I do not wish to be your wife. This is not due to any shortcoming of yours, nor mine. I simply do not wish this, and ask that you seek elsewhere for a bride.”

In silence, Dijun gazed at her. In silence, Dijun took leave.

* * *

On the day Houyi returns to face judgment the court is gravid with the weight of immortals from every rank, celestial and ascendant, sage and disciple, even half-mortal apprentices. Divine beasts wind themselves around palace pillars, lending the gleam of their scales and seven-hued wings to the polish of everlasting wood. They shy away from Houyi, remembering well how she loves to adorn her quiver and house.

Today she does not see them. Grime and red sand cling to archer and mortal woman; they leave dirty footprints wet with the blood of birds, fringed with feathers and ashes. Though Houyi moves with the same grace she always has, and Chang’e with the same light steps, nothing in them is seemly. The archer tastes dust in her mouth, and death of shriveling and peeling, of flesh thinned to paper. Here the air is cool and sweet, the lakes fresh and full. Ten suns rose; nine fell before their scorching blast could reach these lands.

They kneel, wife and wife, before their monarch.

Who speaks. 
It was ill-done, Houyi.

Yes, Majesty.

He gives sentence. Her bow will be taken from her: quiver, arrows, string. She will be Houyi the Archer no longer but must take on another name, after which a goddess will take charge of her, to instruct her in the worth of wisdom and forbearance. On these qualities she must contemplate. In a few centuries, should she be deemed adequate, she may be restored to her former station.

Chang’e is widening her eyes, angry. Even so she recognizes that this may be borne. It could have been terrible and final, and it is not. She touches her wife, takes comfort, but Houyi remains wary. The archer knows predators and prey both.

Then: 
No, Majesty. No.

Distant Xihe, whose bare arms are muscled like an archer’s from eons of charioteering and the weight of her children; aloof Xihe, who rides in the silence of the sky, above and beyond the emperor’s regard. Where she walks the tiles blister. When she speaks the air sizzles. She does not kneel, and this breach of decorum draws forth a shuddering collective gasp. 
My sons, save one, are lost. I shall not suffer their murderer among our ranks, and if you decree that must be so, then I am quit of heavens. Better to seek refuge in the demons’ nation, for there at least justice of a sort may be seized.

The emperor shakes his head, admonishment. 
Justice is not a series of strikes dealt back and forth. It is not a duel, a skirmish, a war. Justice is weighed on a scale, right against wrong, wrong against wrong. Your sons were not blameless and there must be an accounting. What’s done is blood-hot, but righteous. Years of labor are ahead for all of us to repair and restore. The dragons shall weep until they bleed from their eyes to water the land. Who knows when the sea may brim again, may throng again with their thousand thousand lives?

She holds her head high, the mother of suns. 
I birthed them because I had to, and loved them in spite of that. They were children. They were only children.

Houyi is not a mother, does not intend ever to be. But she remembers that the crows soared and danced in the skies, and ignored her as children ignore interruptions to their play. She remembers their beauty and how their joy gripped her even as she brought down the eldest. They broke on a ground too cracked to cushion them, in lakes too empty to buoy their fall. They tried to burn her, but she fired the first shot; what else could they have done?

There is something in Xihe’s magnificence that hurts her.

And Houyi rises, while Chang’e grips her wrist whispering, No, no, please no, Houyi. It’s enough.

Majesty
, she begins and Chang’e is trying not to cry,
 I did commit a wrong. Their deaths were at my hand. This too is a crime that must, on its own, be weighed.

My sentence has been given
, says the man on the throne. 
My word is final.

Xihe deserves better.

The emperor leans back into his vast, living throne, and when he exhales it is a long tumultuous sigh: like storms dying down. He looks from one goddess to one who will soon no longer be. 
Very well.

In the crowd, his flame swallowed, Dijun watches.

* * *

The feast nominally honored victory, but the palace thrived on a collective impulse for feasts, and any excuse would have done. Houyi ate with enthusiasm but drank sparingly, and chuckled at Marshal Tianpeng’s loudness. When the dancers–girls not yet ascendants but disciples of goddesses–appeared to undulate and sing, the marshal’s laughter crested to a rumbling that shook his table and his companions’ seats.

She allowed herself a smile that did not show on her lips, and gave Xuanwu a polite nod as he passed by. The lion she had fought was many-headed and ferocious, and she’d put its whiskers into the wood of her bow for hardiness, its deep-throated growl for flexibility. More than the hunt, and very much more than the revelry, this had been her true delight.

The court had grown accustomed to her, too, and she was surprised that she enjoyed the company of goddesses. They shared stories; Houyihad few of her own, and was therefore interested best when Xiangu told her of her mortal years. “Not,” the ascendant hastened to add, “that I had many of those.”

“It is no shame,” Houyi offered, “to have many or few. It is all experience and memory, wealth of the rarest and highest sort.”

Xiangu flushed, laughing. “You have such ideas. Do you not believe then in enlightenment, the discarding of the self?”

“I have no opinion. Sometimes I think it would be good if I could be mortal for a few years, so I can see for myself what it is like and thereby decide whether purity suits me.”