Chapter Text
‘Fate leads the willing.’
The Immortal fell quiet and met the beggar’s eyes.
‘I need not tell you,’ he reminded, ‘what befalls those who are not.’
- From the folk tales of Shan Yin, Immortal Warden of Huang Zun.
For the fisherman who dwells by the southern shore of Huang Zun, a few bits of driftwood could mean a pot of hot porridge. If the winds blow favorably, the sea’s spittle can even gift him enough to trade for a turnip or two. And so by dawn, he wanders out to greet the salt-laden winds and feel the white sands close around his bare ankles. His nets are often empty now; the sea has been uncharitable in the past years, and what little he catches is as sleek and thin as he. But the winds had blustered and billowed in the night, and the pale shore lies dappled with dark seaweed and chipped shells and the odd, bleached branch of wood, so Xu the fisherman takes his woven basket and hobbles westwards.
The salt water burns the boils and sores on his feet. What ailment his feet suffer from, he does not know. His soles are thick and calloused; coarse as cured leather, and still they bear him. Not fast, and not well, but he thinks his feet should endure a few more winters yet. By then, his eyes will be too poor, and his hands too weak, and he can remain in his bed, and close his eyes, and think no more of fish and turnips, and let the sea sing him to sleep.
But while his feet still hold him, his hunger is a steadfast wolf, and his thoughts wander to stewed fish and millet and the warmth of a hot bowl between his hands. What his eyes cannot see in the white sands, his feet and hands find for him; little pieces of wood, clusters of clams, the shell of a crab.
His hands find the dead one too, there on the shore of the crescent cove, amidst knots of rotted seaweed and driftwood.
Driftwood, he names him; the man with the bloodied mouth and the threadbare whispers of a heart still awake.
Old Xu knows how to trade. The sea’s spittle for two turnips. A gentler, warmer death for the robes on the drowned man’s back. A fair bargain, the old fisherman tells himself as he hobbles to fetch his nets. His arms have no strength in them to carry such a burden. Let the sands ease his toil; let the gray skies mourn the sea’s whims. Let the winds steal the last shudders of the dying man’s breath. With these unspoken words in his heart does the fisherman haul his catch back to the hut by the bank.
The sea bears witness to his labor, hears his quiet grunts as he heaves the dead upon his back to climb the last steps to his door. Old Xu knows the sea’s wrath too. His small abode he built above the reach of her capricious hands.
He throws the dead one onto his own bed; takes his satchel, takes his robes. Torn as they are, the fabric is soft. He thinks the seamstress might want it. If he sells the satchel at the market, it will keep him fed for many a long, wintry day. The embroidered, empty pouch he finds within the robes, he will keep for the bitter days to come, and warm himself on the knowledge that he has a prize to trade for fire and hot congee.
More than this, he does not find. If the dead one had ever worn a hair ornament or bracelet, the sea has taken them for herself. Old Xu still thanks the winds and spares a dried branch for his stove, so he may stir some warmth under his roof. He tucks his own tatters around narrow shoulders; hides a hollowed stomach and pallid skin drawn taut over sharp ribs, nests a folded rag under a dark head. Then he cooks his own millet and broth and sits down to mend an old pail.
‘Be quiet,’ he says now and then, when the man’s wet breaths shudder through him like a drenched sailcloth in the winds, ‘be quiet and do not fight. Ease into it, and the path will be gentler on you.’
‘Better sleep here,’ he murmurs as he hobbles to the bed to catch the blood running from the corners of the man’s mouth. ‘Better here than at sea. You can stay if you want. Whisper in the wood, wander on my roof, sleep here in the shadows. You have the face of a quiet man. You won’t put out my fires or clatter with the pots, I think. So better sleep here than at sea. She would have you. Many a man has she taken before you. Fishermen, generals, sons and fathers, lords and royal brides. Covetous is she, and jealous, dressed in the moon’s silver at night and the sun’s praise. But below her handsome gown, Fú Mù, she is black and cold as the winds below Naihe bridge. I have known her. Oh, long have I known her. She would have you, and you would wander in her realm, where no light ever reaches, a lonely spirit bound to her dark, salt heart.’
‘So die here,’ sighs the old fisherman as he pours water to wash the salt from the torn robe he has taken, ‘if you can not die in your own bed. And die gently. I will bury you in the sands and give you a name to wear on your grave.’
By dawn, it will be over, he tells himself as the wet gasps weaken, and the mouth of the man turns as gray as the clouds above the sea. The breaths still left in him are but whispers; small embers caught in a candle’s wick. They will not kindle that wick; will not burn.
At nightfall, the first cough shakes the old bed; strains the brittle woodwork. By then, old Xu has eaten the last millet and broth and sits on the lid of an old chest. His qi, as wooden as his bones, is slow to flow now. He knows no techniques to bend it to his whims, and never had a need for them. His is the easy way; let the qi do what it wills. In his youth; he knew how to rap a staff over a pickpocket’s wrist. In the fall of his last years, with eyes weak and hands ridden with tremors, he keeps no treasures to guard. So he listens to the sea’s murmur and the wind’s low song, breathes the scent of raw seaweed and the smoke of burnt wood, feels the wood bite into his back.
The second cough cuts through the quiet like a knife cuts through paper. Old Xu opens his eyes. He finds the man’s chin stained red.
The figure on his bed has no strength left to writhe under the anguish of his convulsions. Red froth gathers between pallid lips; runs down the man’s neck, soaks the brown tatters. Xu the fisherman eyes his door and wonders if his old feet will agree to wander until quiet is restored to his hut, and his driftwood will never draw breath again.
‘The sea spat you out, and still you drown,’ he laments at the gray face. He hobbles closer. And with some efforts from hands stiff and feeble does he turn the man to lie on his side. Blood runs from his mouth, pours onto wooden planks and straw, and the overwrought chest dares a shaken and stolen inhale of breath.
Xu shakes his head at this.
‘A quiet man and a stubborn man, I think,’ says he. ‘With roots like a mountain. And what use, I ask, what use is all this to you now? You torment yourself, and you keep me from my sleep. Unmoor yourself and let us both have peace.’
As he speaks, old Xu drifts back to his stove. The prized satchel he found upon the dying man, he hung up to dry. Now he takes it down to feel the innards with his withered hand.
‘But I promised you a gentler death, and I won’t have you clatter my pots and breathe the cold of the grave on my bed here,’ he grouses. ‘And Tao Ming takes no less than three silver taels for an exorcism these days.’
‘Shush,’ he croaks at another faint cough from the bed. ‘What is it you ask of me? I am no physician, like you seem to have been. See here, what’s these for?’
No consolation is there to find in the physician’s satchel; no bottled, potent remedies, no silver needles, no silken handkerchief of a loved one to fold in the dying man’s hand. Molded, soaked bread he finds. A flask made of a hollowed gourd too. Later he will trade it for a pair of straw sandals. Of the herbs in the medicinal pouches, he is none the wiser. A few dried leaves, a bottle of pungent, dried fungus, a few smaller sachets. One holds the remains of a brown powder; another a red one. All have been stained by saltwater. Only a ragged pouch in pale blue hides bit of oiled cloth, in which the old fisherman finds more dried herbs.
Petals, white and pale red, a nail’s length of some dried root, a few seeds and a confection wrapped in brown paper.
‘What good will all this do now?’ asks the fisherman. ‘No good for you. Perhaps a quiet night for me. I’ll boil this up.’
He puts the pot on his stove. Of water is he rich, for he lives near a creek bound to the sea, and the water there is sweet. And while he suffers to burn more of his wood that day, he still feeds the stove’s black mouth, lights fire and allows the water to simmer.
‘Word by mouth, ear to ear, I have heard that when one good remedy blends with another, it will become poison. So it is with a man and his wife. Well, what will be, will be.’ As he speaks, he adds the leaves and fungus, the petals, the grains of powder; all that he found, he stirs into the water. The sweet he takes for himself and sucks on it, but when he tries a taste of the bitter brew, he spits out the confection and stirs until it melts.
Then, he takes a stool to sit near his bed, heaves the dying one onto his back, raises his head and brings the first spoonful of his poison to a red-stained mouth.
The hooks are thin and sharp as needles. The first one tears through him; burrows into him, hooks the tatters of him to the last, feeble dribble of qi caught in ravaged pathways.
On the bank of the black river, the wanderer halts. A lone spirit is this; gray and vaporous as the mists around his bare feet.
He has no name he knows of, and no path to follow. As far as he knows, he has always wandered by the shores of the endless river.
Now and then will he see other wanderers ahead of him; some bent and hooded, others straight and youthful, some with no faces, smooth like river pebbles, others like carved stone. All are pale gray. They come as a stream unending. Many had come before him. Many more will come to wander that way, long, long after the last of him has faded with the mists.
A few, he sees, walk hand in hand, bound and braided into each other, part of a whole on a journey to a land of no return.
They follow a path unseen and do not answer him. He thinks he might have reached for them once; but his hand was of mist and the breath of a moth’s wings, and the cold of them burned him if he came too near.
So he wanders by himself; falters around each bend, treads the smooth stones, and the dead waters lick at the bone-bleached shore before him. Now and then, they reveal to him the faint reflections of a man. A faceless beggar in rags; a royal in an Emperor’s gown. A swordsman in white, a cripple. A boy. He does not know them; has never known them. Neither of them wear tatters of severed threads on their left wrist.
The poison’s hooks, when they catch him, tear an end into the eternal.
Thousand upon thousands, they burn like molten iron. The fire eats at his innards, drains the black river, burns away the bleached shore on which he stands, carries to him the echo of blood on his tongue. With no voice for his anguish, he writhes, claws, wounds himself, tears himself apart to flee that unseen, torturous entrapment. He strives for the dead river, but the waters will not have him. He falls to his knees, claws and claws, but there is no purchase to find on that smooth, cold stone.
Please, he pleads.
No one answers him. No deities are there in the Netherworld with ears for the untethered voices of the nameless.
The first wet breath he comes to know stutters through him with the tremors of qi in raw and tender pathways. He knows the timid flow, the one balm in a sea of an agony beyond endurance. He is the flow.
A poison. The vessel to which the hooks fettered him is steeped in poison; it hollows him, sears through worm-eaten meridians, scrapes out remains of an old ailment black and fetid, knits back parts of him long since withered and crippled. It tears him open to a timid flow which whispers of a name he no longer knows.
A strange qi is this; the moon’s sharp and vivacious silver, braided into currents that are not his own. A gale; a storm. The sun’s mirthful warmth.
The pain ought end him; no heart could bear such anguish. His own had long since surrendered. But the new venom enslaves it; wrings one more quiver from it. And another. And another.
This is penance, he knows, with the wordless, fevered knowledge beyond all thought and reason. He had wronged and been wronged, had asked and received, had wanted but not wanted, had feared and taken but refused and forked his own path, then cast himself by the wayside.
He had —
The whispers are not his, but speak in his borrowed voice. And what they tell him, he can not say. He does not even know his own name. Later, much later, words will entwine the anguish of that night and teach him.
But the man who was brought to die in old Xu’s hut does not come to know words for a long, long while.
For what it is worth, he lives through the night, and rouses chagrin in the old man who has sought to ease his death with such diligence. By the first break of gray over the quiet sea, his wet, bloodied coughs and shudders have turned into raw and strained breaths that cut up his throat. The cold pallor of his skin is mottled by the fire of fever, his fists clenched against the cramps that would have cost him his tongue if the old one had not owned enough sense to set a wooden spoon between his teeth.
Blind, mute and lame, trapped in the hollowed remains of his earthen self, he comes to know day and night as spoonfuls of millet and fish broth. Now and again is there a yellow light in the dark fog; a scent of stale fat and woodsmoke. Now and again does he hear the prattle of a voice like a rusted lock; long litanies that blend with the rhythmic murmurs of the sea.
‘… So there, no need to weep. What do you have to weep for? You lived. Had I known you kept such wonders in your satchel, I should have sold those powders and leaves to Blind Shi. She has a son, Blind Shi, a boy eight years old, who is all bones and clouded eyes who can neither run nor work. I’d have sold those fine powders to her; I’d give them away for half a sack of grain. What good did they do to you where you lie there?’
He does not know.
Now and again is there a stench of rotted seaweed and unwashed rags, of black teeth and old age. A stern hand on his chin, the touch like coarse leather. He shudders away from it; begs reprieve from the coarse sack against his cheek.
‘Be still, you,’ gnarls the voice. ‘Fú Mù, I named you, but you brought no warmth to my stove. All rotten and brittle. What use is there for you? Be still, or I’ll throw you to the sea.’
Fú Mù. Driftwood.
Throw me to the sea, he begs.
The leathered hands do not.
Now and again, the moon’s silver quavers and runs dry in his raw and sore meridians; there is not enough left to tether the spirit to the crippled vessel, and the one named Driftwood can once more see the pale shores of a river darker than any night. But when he falters, the storms and sun’s warmth still enfold him; breathe his breaths, coax his heart to beat.
They are not mine, he comes to understand, one moon’s turn past the day the fisherman had brought him to his hut to die.
With that knowledge comes a word. Yangzhouman.
But the storms and the sun’s warmth are not Yangzhouman, and yet they are part of his currents; his qi to have, to own, to be.
He does not remember who they had been, the two who had given so generously of themselves.
‘A liar, I think,’ croaks the old one in his corner, as he is wont to do when the nights fall and the sea is in turmoil. ‘You have the face of a liar, do you know? Oh, I shall wager the women had a good eye to you. Well, you are not much to look at now. My eyes are poor enough, and that is a mercy. Look at yourself; hollow cheeks and bitten mouth. What did you bite yourself for, I ask you? You got a liar’s mouth.’
The silence which follows the judgment of his character is thick and laden. Steps hobble back and forth over creaking wood. Uneven, a clear, cold part of his mind supplies him, old.
Then,
‘I will cut your hair, I think.’
Driftwood folds in on himself. A short moment after, a leathered hand finds his shoulder and a fist winds into sweat-stiffened tresses.
The first word he comes to breathe is water.
The hut stands empty at high noon; Xu the fisherman has wandered out to trade his fish and dried seaweed.
No one gives him water.
The first sight he comes to know is the blurred, salt-stained scraps of old sailcloth hung from the rafters. They billow like quiet ghosts and take him for one of their own.
As winter comes, the days bring more, but not with a generous hand. By and by, he learns to sit, to hold a spoon, to wash his own face with a wet cloth.
‘Lotus root,’ says the old man as he tucks a bowl of paste between his hands. ‘Eat while you still have teeth. It’s yours. I sold your hair.’
He eats. The warm paste quells the cold within his hollow stomach for as long as he can raise the spoon to his mouth.
‘What is your name?’ asks the fisherman one eve. That and much more does he ask, for he came from town with a pot of rice wine in him, and his tongue is oiled and loose. From where does he hail? What sect had lost him? Had he been a seafarer, a physician on a ship? Had he left behind a wife, a son? Would his near and dear seek far and wide, would they pay in tears and riches to see his face once more?
Driftwood scratches his nose.
‘I do not know,’ he says.
The first time he sees his own reflection, he carries water to old Xu’s hut. The path to the creek is not long, but demands of him a climb to reach the green bank above the sands. The skies are dark that day, stern and grim. A cold breeze blows from the sea; crowns her peaks with ivory, combs the grass where the sands meet the curbs of dry earth. He sets down the pail and bends down to rest, a hand on his knee, the other closed around his stick, and sees in the water a thin, wan face. He sees chalked skin drawn taut over his bones; foul against uneven hair that falls short of his shoulders.
Driftwood, he thinks. Burned and carved and hollowed out; bound to the brittle prison by an inner force that is not his own.
He does not stall for long. Xu the fisherman has patience for boiling sinewy seaweed until he can chew it, and for guttering candles and the whims of the winds and the sea. But he has no patience for driftwood which will not burn, and the blows he meted out with his staff bruised skin and left an ache to last.
Driftwood no longer knows how to soothe such aches; his qi is a faint current that flows as it wills. His hands still think they know a physician’s touches, but those do not avail him; his pale skin does not mend; the cuts he earns himself when he cuts turnips with his feeble hands bleed and bleed. Only at night, on the threshold to sleep, does he feel the remains of storms and sun’s warmth lick at his wounds.
He dreams of two dogs. A small, cheerful one with a pale coat. A dark, scarred pit fighter. They lick at his wrists, hide their snouts against his neck, follow at his heels, become his shadows.
‘Huli Jing.’
The name leaves his mouth with the first break of dawn. Xu the fisherman stirs in his chair.
‘Is that what you think you are?’ he croaks. ‘Huli Jing? I think not.’ He picks up his sandal and throws it across the hut.
‘Come light the stove for an old man.’