The Archer Who Shot Down Suns: Scale-Bright Stories

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

* * *

  The second time Houyi sees Juliene the latter exclaims, “You can’t find these things that interesting.”

  The archer smiles faintly. “Do you have mooncakes at Zungcauzit?”

  “Of course.” Julienne glances sidelong at the moon-walk box. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  This time they end up at a Maxim’s outlet, which even at this time of the night is crowded, noisy, and not especially glamorous. They order and have indifferent honeyed pork, dim sum, and pearl tea. Julienne wrings her sleeves and bites her lip. “I do know nicer places.”

  “I don’t mind,” Houyi says. “There’s something to be said for convenience.”

  “You’re so unpicky. Where are you from?”

  “The mainland.”

  A disbelieving laugh, as though she believes someone who dresses as elegantly as Houyi--and her choice of attire is that, by accident--couldn’t possibly have so provincial an origin. “Shenzhen? Peking?”

  “I’m not much for cities.” She looks across the room, where one woman--catching Houyi’s gaze--stops giggling with her friends and blanches. A spider demon. Her shadow briefly flares extra limbs as she scrambles, upsetting iced tea, and excuses herself from the table. “They are too easy to hide in. But I’d rather know about you.”

  Julienne sets down her chopsticks. “Are you flirting with me?”

  This surprises a chuckle out of Houyi. “I’m much too advanced in age for that. Old aunts shouldn’t flirt with young ladies.”

  “You can’t be more than thirty-five.”

  “You flatter me. But regardless I have a wife.”

  The girl puts the tip of a chopstick back in her mouth and chews it with a peculiar fervor. “You got married abroad, I suppose. What’s her name?”

  “Seung Ngo.”

  “Oh come on.”

  “That’s actually her name.” Houyi signals a waitress--she has to call only once to gain attention, which seems to awe Julienne disproportionately--and despite the girl’s protest she pays the entire bill. “I’m about to ask you something very odd and rather personal.”

  “How odd can it be?” Julienne gestures with her glass, whose bottom is black with ice-trapped tapioca beads.

  “Do you visit a cemetery during Chingming?”

  Julienne leans away from the table. “That is a bit personal. And you aren’t even single.”

  “I’m not that bewitching, child.”

  “Well, fine. I don’t go. I don’t owe my parents anything, not even burning them bits of shiny paper.”

  “Ah,” the archer murmurs. There’s little family resemblance; marriages, migrations, and sheer centuries have washed those out, sculpted quite something else in the place of features possessed by Chang’e. But there is, perhaps, something of the same sharpness. “I have a boon I would ask of you.”

  “You talk like you just stepped out of a mowhab set.”

  Houyi has seen her share of those films. They amuse, mostly because when gods do battle there is a great deal more fanfare than even the most ostentatious special effects. “It’s hard to get out of character.”

  They step outside the Maxim’s, into a night thick with neon signs and street vendors peddling counterfeit watches. Houyi thinks, and hopes, that Chang’e will like this place, this era. It will surely suit her curiosity.

  She holds out a hand to Julienne, who frowns but takes it.

  When they reappear in the silence of Che Kung the girl staggers, looks about wildly, and bites down on her knuckles. There isn’t much light apart from the bulbs illuminating a shrine full of Guanyins in white and gold, clothes colorful and colorless. Houyi eases Julienne down to the lip of a blue pool, at whose center yet another Guanyin stands with child in hand.

  “I’m not going,” Julienne says, voice gone thin and breathy, “to scream. I’m not.”

  “I hoped you wouldn’t.”

  When she has gotten herself under control Julienne demands, “What do you want from me?”

  “To burn something.” Houyi draws out what she’s hidden by the shrine. It is caked in ashes, but undamaged: coils of silvered paper linked together, braided into a rope ladder. The length isn’t anywhere near enough, objectively, but she’s learned that such things are only symbols. “While thinking of a… great-aunt many times over.”

  Julienne takes the paper ladder in hand. “This isn’t the right time, there isn’t a picture, I have no incense, there isn’t a grave. I don’t even know her name.”

  “It is Seung Ngo.”

  “Oh,” the girl says, giving a vindicated little clap, “of course. Of course your wife is the goddess on the moon and you’re the archer who shot down nine suns. Does she have a pet rabbit too?”

  “I wouldn’t call it precisely a pet. There’s also a woodsman on the moon, if you were curious.”

  Houyi describes Chang’e to Julienne quietly, quickly, as she makes a fire and wishes she had some skill at sketching. Julienne kneels dazed, but concentrates on Houyi’s voice. She feeds the paper ladder to the flames all at once, as such things are meant to be consigned, and watches as it crumbles. That takes longer than most offerings; Houyi made the ladder strong and thick, just to be sure.

  When all that remains is smoke--Julienne exclaiming how illegal it is to litter temple grounds as they have--Houyi feels as though she has emptied herself into that fire, into that rope ladder of paper, and now as the ashes drift skyward this has flitted beyond her grasp. There’s nothing more she may do.

  “Will I get to see whoever it is that I just burned that for? The great-aunt. Great-grandaunt.”

  Houyi touches the base of her throat, chasing the recall of her wife’s touch. “We will see. I believe she will wish to meet you.”

  “She isn’t a ghost?”

  “Flesh and blood, and beautiful.” The archer stands. “Shall I bring you somewhere else?”

  “I’d hate having to explain myself to the police.”

  She takes the grand-niece of her wife near the Sha Tin station, in a spot quiet and empty enough that they were not seen except by a stray cat. It hisses at Houyi and turns tail, though not before she notes that its eyes are an unnatural, lambent blue.

  Before she leaves Houyi allows her clothes to reweave themselves into the form she favors, a man’s robe and trousers in pale blue. Bow and quiver at her back, reassuring solidity and weight against her spine.

  Julienne stares at her, dumbfounded, as she presses her palm over her fist and bows to the girl in that old way mortals don’t bother with anymore except at New Year. As Houyi departs she can still hear Julienne muttering something about mowhab sets.

   

  3.

  When the rope ladder appears Chang’e knows it is time.

  It drapes halfway in, halfway out of her window. Touching it she knows at once whose hand wove it into shape, whose hand touched it and made the passing of it to her possible. It is still warm, as though hiding in its strands a secret heat. The length of it seems immeasurable. The strength of it feels muscular, the flexibility of it prehensile.

  She sits, gripping the ladder tight, until she feels its gravity bleed into her bones.

  The weight of earth. The weight, perhaps, of kinship.

  Chang’e races over the roof with a lightness impossible anywhere else, toward the garden where she’s hidden a part of herself. She peels away the swans and lions and tigers, the foliage and shrubs not quite real, the leaves and fruits that taste of honey and ice.

  The moon is greedy and will not let her go. And there must, always, be a woman on the moon. Very well: she will give it one that never tires, one that never weeps.

  She points the mannequin at the city, whispering, Go.

  Child-obedient it goes, Chang’e-shaped, as she ties one end of the ladder to a roof finial. Knowing the length will not fail her, she tightens the knot until it no longer budges. Then s
he casts the ladder. It falls, and falls, until it stops taut.

  Between the rough jagged rocks of the moon’s flanks she descends. The wind slices at her, flaying-sharp, scalpels driving between her vertebrae--searing the shells of her ears--infiltrating lungs and nose. Her fingers turn numb, and freeze solid to the rope. Her skin tears. With each rung she weighs heavier.

  Lunar cold recedes. She is halfway, or three-fourths of the way. It becomes very warm and, off the corner of her eye, she sees sun-struck seas, she sees fruits and treetops, a sunlit day. She sees a mountaintop nearly as close to her as her own feet.

  She passes through fire. On the moon slivers of her self vibrate within their wooden cage, leaping and hissing through wooden mouths. The puppet that is her, that appears skin and hair but whose core is cherry bay, clutches itself and translates her raw flesh to amphibious pain-cries.

  On the other side Chang'e is charred hair and blood fruiting on her lips, she is blisters and lymph dewing on her arms. The snow mutes and absorbs the retching of her screams. When she does stand she totters and would have pitched over again if she does not remember that she is breathing freedom, tasting it with lungs, pores, palate.

  She straightens: dignity, she must have that when she does this for the first time. She has witnessed Houyi doing it without thought or effort. Back then she did not imagine she would one day gain the capability to do the same, the right of any deity. She thinks east; she thinks of bringing it close.

  One step, two. Her footprints are shallow in the snow. By the fifth she’s treading on sand, on the howl of tides against cliff. Saltwater laps at her waist, searing the burns on her thighs and hips. What remains of her robes drifts seaweed-heavy in the waves.

  There is a little house by the shore.

  Chang’e limps up the winding path she knows her wife paved: conch shells and sea-smoothed pebbles, dyed in the bright colors that Houyi loves.

  The front door, double-paneled, is shut against drafts. At her touch it parts. Inside, three rooms. An enclosure for ablutions with folded screen and fish-scale tiles, an untidy workshop, and a bedroom. This last is built for two, furniture in duplicates, a pair of armoires side by side: one filled, the other empty as though in hope.

  Houyi sits at the window, back straight, clad in a thin robe carelessly thrown on that leaves one shoulder bare. She turns and her breath leaves her in a long whisper. “Chang’e.”

  The archer spreads burn salve over her; from the familiar vegetal smell she recognizes it as the rabbit’s work. When she can speak again without her face hurting she murmurs through cracked lips, “What did you do?” Her voice claws its way out a ruin, cold-wracked, fire-scourged.

  “I found your family.” Houyi pours her lukewarm water, keeping at arm’s length as though unsure if she may touch Chang’e.

  “Family.” Chang’e holds her cup, presses it to her smeared cheek for relief. “I’ve family left?”

  “Your niece had children. It took me a while to track them--they spread and went away to far lands. Some never came back; it’s difficult to read their footprints.” The archer brushes away what remains of her wife’s hair. Charred handfuls fall out. “Her name’s Julienne.”

  Chang’e repeats it. “What a peculiar name.”

  “She is of the same blood as you. Else when she burned it the ladder wouldn’t have found you.”

  “Or let me escape.” Kinship, she thinks, the surest anchor.

  She looks at her wife, who has done so much, who has opened this path. “Can you,” she asks uncertainly, “take me to see this girl?”

  * * *

  Julienne zips up her jacket and chafes her hand, wishing she’d declined the invitation to the class reunion. Her schoolmates haven’t gotten any more interesting than the last time, and all the women remain--as far as she can tell--depressingly straight.

  At her feet night club flyers rustle, garish things heavy on neon-pink and black. Tomorrow someone is going to be fined for littering. She stops at a 7-11 for chrysanthemum tea, a bar of chocolate, sanitary pads. Ordinary items for an ordinary life.

  The MTR station is quiet, dead last-train hours and closed convenience stores. She hopes that the one night of oddity in Che Kung hasn’t ruined her for a lifetime of normalcy. In a way Julienne resents that woman--whoever or whatever she was, for surely she was not that Hau Ngai--for disrupting her life. She tries not to dwell on it as she waves her card at the turnstile, goes down the escalator, and into a front carriage. The only other passenger is an older man, dozing. Yesterday’s issue of the Apple Daily flutters by his side.

  The smartphone in his shirt pocket chirps and shakes at the next stop. He wakes groggily, disembarks, and Julienne finds herself alone.

  A hand falls on her shoulder, jerking her out of the white-noise zone born of electrical glare and the ghost of her own reflection foregrounding the tunnel rushing by. Julienne looks up to find two women. One tall, in suit and slacks. The other, astonishingly, in cheongsam. Pearls in her hair, either a net or secured by supernatural means.

  The goddess is known to be exquisite.

  Julienne realizes her mouth has fallen open. She shuts it.

  Seung Ngo cups Julienne’s face in her hands. She startles to find that the goddess’ palms are not velvet; they are rough, harder than her own, as though she is a woman who works with her hands. The most menial Julienne’s ever gotten is with keyboards. Carefully, as if speaking Gwongdongwa for the first time Seung Ngo says, “My wife was wrong. I do see written on you my mother and Third Niece.”

  Finding her voice finally she says, a little irritably, “Not my parents, I hope.”

  The goddess--her ancestress--lets her hands fall away. “You’re your own, mostly. Will you introduce me to the rest of our clan?”

  Julienne splutters a laugh. “I don’t think they can take the shock.”

  “They don’t have to know everything. And you, of course, will always be my favorite.”

  “Do I get the thickest red envelope?”

  “Insolent child,” Seung Ngo says fondly. “I’ll stuff yours with gold.”

  A cool female voice announces that the next station is the end of the Island line. Julienne tries to imagine New Year and Chingming with all their family obligations. She’s refused to show up for several years now. “Next Zungcauzit my cousins in Indonesia and Singapore are coming home. You’re supposed to be on the moon by then, but…”

  Seung Ngo laughs. “I’ll be with you, not to worry. I’ve never tasted mortal-made mooncakes.”

  “We put ice-cream in them now. All sorts of fillings. You can even buy them off-season.”

  “Oh, my,” the goddess says.

  “But until then I’ve got photo albums. Of--the family. Baby pictures too. Do you want to see?”

  “I’d like nothing more.”

  The two immortals take each of Julienne’s arms, clasping her between them, and somehow they exit without needing either octopus card or ticket. Julienne knows that this year she’ll attend all the family gatherings. Perhaps they won’t go very well. But she will have two divine aunts with her, and isn’t that worth something?

  Very different, if nothing else. And never boring.

  “It feels like I’m continuing a story,” Julienne breathes. “You might’ve heard of it before.”

  Hau Ngai tilts her head. “And which one is that?”

  “On the moon,” she begins, grinning, “there’s a lady with a rabbit...”

 

  An excerpt from Scale-Bright