Scale-Bright (21 page)

Chang’e refuses with a knife that opens the sun-father’s cheek. His bone shines gold, and his blood gushes fire.

The rabbit tries to warm her as she navigates the city, telling her stories. It loves her desperately but it is small, and it is not Houyi. Accepting that, it tells her of a room with many windows, each panel painted black as in the court of Xuanwu. Each overlooks a different view, depending on the room’s whims and sometimes cruelty. Of the latter it warns: Please, please be careful.

She does not take caution. It is something. It is, by far, superior to nothing. Xiwangmu’s pill filled her with such lightness that she went up and up, until the moon caught her, and she woke. All her wounds were gone, save one. Existence without Houyi is an injury that festers deeper than apotheosis may overturn.

The moon is a labyrinth, its craggy mountains holding houses that have never been habited, palaces with empty thrones, stone gardens where black waters slosh in basins and ghost swans drift through the air. Through paths paved with calcified eyes the rabbit leads her, up and into a palace where lanterns are tasseled with peacock ligaments and feathers: and is that not a shadow of Houyi’s home, the one in paradise, which feels like many lives ago?

Please be careful. It will not amuse you, the sights. The city loves to deepen hurts. To kill without killing, if it may.

She opens one window and sees sunlight.

Houyi sits in a workshop full of canvas and cut bamboo surrounding her like pieces of a beast she’s slain and disassembled to craft into furniture and weapons. The bamboo ribs suggest the beginning of wings, or perhaps an immense sky lantern. Her lips move, though Chang’e hears only silence and she aches–it hurts, to see without hearing, to see without touching. But at least she sees.

Chang’e requires no sleep, and not much food, now. She holds the rabbit in her lap, and watches as the sky lantern inflates. It floats high into the night, and Houyi gazes after it until it is long out of sight.

The archer climbs a mount greater and higher than Kunlun, and there lays the foundations of a tower. It is built up, and up, but in the end it can bear only so much. Not quite collapsing but listing, and it is not anywhere near high enough.

She finds Chang’e’s mother in the capital and tells her, in words Chang’e reads from the parting and shutting of her mouth, Your daughter is a goddess now.

Yunping does not find any joy in this. She seems so much older, and doubly stooped, having survived but never recovered from that winter.Chang’e cannot remember how long it has been since their leave-taking of her brother’s house. There are lines in Houyi’s face, too, clustering thick at the corners of lips and eyes.

The archer asks after Meijie, and learns that it is now the girl who provides both for her mother and grandmother, a scholar of some means. If she doesn’t do as well as her male peers, she does well enough. The governor has been removed from his post, ensconced in a temple, white-haired and drifting toward a lonely deathbed.

Chang’e sees the Kunlun aspirants, some ascended now, others still seeking entry to heaven. Each does this in her own way, some by marrying a sage, others by the skin of their teeth. For none of them is the path simple or quick.

Between this, Houyi is joined by Fengmeng. She regards him distantly, him existing only at the furthest periphery of her vision and awareness–but her at the center of his. Chang’e can see it in his eyes, the same franticness with which the rabbit adores her but more dangerous, edged by humanity. By years spent out of Kunlun, perhaps, and he beats his fists against the earth crying Why can’t I best you? while Houyi stands aside, her bow clasped loosely. His he has snapped to halves then segments.

Later: Why do you want to best me?

Fengmeng holds himself small as though to protect his heart. To be worthy of having been your disciple; to be worthy of heaven–I cannot be lesser. Not to you.

That is not how the proving of worth functions; you want to be better than I am specifically, and that means nothing at all.

His glance at her face, furtive. You trained Chang’e.

My wife was the best that I ever taught. None compares. Without her I wouldn’t have overcome Kunlun’s trials.

Fengmeng’s hands have turned to fists. What if I’d met you before she did?

Another might have laughed, but Chang’e knows Houyi has always been too kind. It would have been no different. There’s no place for you; there never was. Why do you persist? I’m long done with suitors of any sort, and done with the obfuscations I fed them. They tired me when I was young. Doubly now they exhaust me.

Are you not afraid of being alone?

Solitude may be borne, with some patience. But she looks up at the sky where the sun-crow flies; where at night the moon would rise and she would glimpse the pits and etchings and, rarely, a woman’s shadow.

The last window opens to Houyi in a valley, surrounded on all sides by men gaunt with starvation, and Fengmeng in their midst whispering to them. She is of heaven; her liver, her hair–any piece of her will bring fortune and prosperity. It is an easy lie to believe for desperate men.

She grips her knives without tension, without fear; she was a protector god, forbidden once to harm humans, but she isn’t that anymore. She kills them with the sure knowledge that it is a slaughter, that none of them is a match for her. When it is down to just Fengmeng, who holds yet another bow having misshot again and again, who snivels on his knees begging for absolution–when it is down to him she only turns away, and tells him that he’s learned nothing from her instructions. For Xiwangmu’s sake I spare you. Nothing more. Of forgiveness she offers none.

The next time, the ambush is an army, amplified by the blood she spilled the first and second and third occasions. She is monster to their heroes, a god gone wrong, come down to earth to wreak ruin. And again there is Fengmeng with his lies, eliding always his own part, his unclean jealousy. She seeks godhood and toward that she has boiled young men in a great cauldron–from their blood, an elixir that’ll grant endless life. Your brothers, your sons.

This time there isn’t enough of Houyi, and too many of them.

This time Fengmeng does not miss, and when she falters for a moment between knife-slashes he takes aim.

He weeps as he loosens the bowstring. But even wracked by sobs and sickness and rage he does not miss. He did, after all, learn from the best.

Chang’e boards the windows shut, one by one, and then the door. She no longer seeks to escape the city.

* * *

Hell is red and black, and red and black, enough light to see yourself–what you have become–and the wounds the demons inflict upon you, with spears and thorn-trees, and long luxurious oil-baths in boiling brass cauldrons. For Houyi it is an arrow-shaft protruding from her breast, it is tears and gashes in her skin, and bruises where they beat her until her heart stopped.

She examines the shaft. She pulls it out slowly. There is pain; in this place there is nothing but. Enough to make her retch, though the archer does not. Within herself it is control that she values second after memories of her wife.

When the demons come, she is ready.

In her hand is only an arrow, stained in her own blood and Fengmeng’s sweat, but she remembers a knife and that is what it feels like, weighs like. Even in this light she is used to the finesse of cutting and tearing, and with the same precision she shoots she drives the knife into gaps between armor; she inserts its tip into eye sockets, and cuts off ears–horse ears, swine ears–with abattoir ease.

They give pause.

“I will go willingly,” she says to the soldiers of hell, who know who she is, who have lost kith and kin to her methodical massacres, “if you can show me that my name is on the registry of the dead.”

The one among them not armed, a capped and robed bureaucrat with a seahorse’s face, consults his scroll. On it unspools, collecting andpuddling until it is up to the bureaucrat’s waist; when it has reached his shoulders he at last concedes Houyi’s name is not to be found. Still she must be placed, named and posited in the hierarchy of hell, and so they bring her to one of the high magistrates: a giant encased in bronze. His face is a mask, twisted into a deep scowl.

He asks, “Father?”

“My origins must be known to you. I have none.”

Ignoring her he goes on, “Mother? Sister? Husband?”

Thrice she says no; again she tells him that she was born of no parent, made only by the particular wants of heaven. Wants that seem to have expired, but nevertheless.

In the end she is sent to the Old Woman of Forgetting.

For expediency Meng makes her house by the gate under which all dead must pass. Its doors are always open, for hourly there are hundreds of men and women deceased who must be processed and made to drink Meng’s mixture. Some unwilling, but most embrace it and cradle the little cups she hands out as though it is salvation.

Meng receives Houyi privately, in a room full of earthenware and somnambulant lizards. When the archer has seated herself she is offered a cup. It is dainty, this cup, and no color at all–though its sheen reflects her face in rainbows, and behind her she can see the moon racing by.

She looks up and gazes into Meng’s age-soft face. “No.”

“It can buy you grace. You may start again a child. With parents and kin, and a life unwinding before you.”

“Chang’e is not part of this cycle. I’ll only make her grieve, watching from where she is knowing that I’ve discarded memories of her. It would be selfish.”

Meng withdraws the cup. “What will you do then?”

“Wait.” The archer fingers the arrow that is also a knife. “Watch.”

She sits by as the dead file through Meng’s parlor, sipping slow or gulping greedy. Houyi thinks she sees her wife’s mother among them once, but it is difficult to be sure. In the moment before they pass the gate a few become whole again, young again, and then are gone.

Houyi is a mindful guest. She helps with the brewing and distilling, though she’s careful never to inhale when steam bursts from beneath lids and wafts up in fragrant clouds. She also does the windows over so they would be draft- and fire-proof; Meng chuckles to see this, and asks what it is with her obsession with carpentry when first she was born with a bow. “It keeps me useful,” the archer answers. “It keeps my mind turning, my fingers nimble.”

It is when she is climbing up to patch Meng’s roof that the dragons come.

They pull a chariot, and upon the chariot are the mother of suns and her last child. If the demons give Houyi wide berth Xihe sends them outright scurrying, for she blazes and singes, and those who are so used to roasting souls like little to be roasted in turn.

Houyi is off the roof and on the ground even before Xihe’s eyes fall on her.

“Archer,” the goddess says as she steps out of her chariot. “Despite your new home you don’t seem especially tortured.”

Houyi does not speak of her mortal decades. “I’m sorry that I did not speak to you before. None dared approach you, and I could not myself reach so high.”

“I’m not here for your excuses. You seem adrift, archer, and in want of a new duty. So I’ve come to bring you to that.”

The archer gives her host thanks, promising to return and finish her work with the roof. Meng does not ask if this is what she’s been waiting for, and Houyi does not offer to explain.

Houyi touches the chariot; pulls her hand away from its metal to find blisters on her fingers. “It burns.”

“This was made for me, and drank in the fire of myself and my sons. You will absorb some, until the heat lives in your gums and your lungs, until you can illuminate a day mandated to be wan.” Xihe does not smile; her anger is beyond malice. “But it will always burn. Remember this, archer. Each dawn will hurt. This is punishment, not exaltation.”

“I do not fault you, lady.”

“Do not mistake me: I care little for Dijun’s faithlessness. We are barely spouses. I do not despise you out of puerile jealousy. It is the murder of my sons that I cannot forgive; it is for that you have been sentenced.”

“What I did is beyond forgiving.” Houyi touches the reins gingerly. It leaves a ruby welt on the heel of her palm. “But I would ask for a boon.”

Xihe looks at her, as though from a great height. “Why do you believe you deserve one, much less that I’d grant it?”

“It is not much.” The archer bows low, her humility an offering, lower than she ever bowed to the emperor. It is obeisance; it is a suspension of pride. “And I believe you might do, in recognition that we were all injured by the same blow.”

The goddess’ mouth twists. “Dijun keeps a scar from your wife’s hand. The first, for one so vain. He never understood why I forsook him, why the children are not his. It is a simple point. My sons could have spoken to me. Asked. I might have found them a safe way. I knew, I always knew, how tedious they found it to spend nine days out of every ten on Fusang. How they loved to be together.”

The one surviving son hides his face in the shadow of vast wings. He has grown thin and tattered in grief and singularity, in bleeding his light and heat, in rising alone and resting alone on Fusang’s empty branches. His wings droop, eyes like obsidian gone to dull stone, dry as baked prunes.

“I could have come and spoken to you. I did not. Of such silences are misfortunes built, I’ve learned, not fate or any decree greater than us.”

“Ah,” Xihe murmurs. Her eyes remain hard. “I will not forgive you. Understand this. I will never forgive you.”

“Yes,” Houyi says, and keeps her gaze trained on the dragons Xihe has tamed for her chariot. One rolls a limpid eye toward her, cautious, whiskers quivering.

“What is it that you want then? That you cannot grasp for yourself despite your conceit?”

She tells Xihe.

* * *

The moon is brittle spite and envy, and if it ever was a bird the memory of wings and flight is long past. The paths to it are hard, from it harder still. It is why those not quite of heaven, the chastised and the exiled like Chang’e, are sent here.

But the moon is hungry. It lusts for warmth, which slides past as though its jagged cliffs and mountains are sieves, and in that rare moment when the sun-crow comes near the moon lowers its guard. It drowses and basks, opening itself, a plea written across its barren city. The lanterns come alive all together, flickering into characters, tentative greetings.