In the Mother-of-Pearl Villa beneath Cavegarden Lake, when the paper is unrolled, the Dragon Monarch looks about her at the others come together by the light of moonpearl lamps for tonight’s banquet. Her son is whispering something to Seagem. Feng and Nephrite are making rather strained conversation with the vermilion dragon, who has just finished off a plate of scallops and is filling their cups with wine. Second Daughter stares at one of the serving starfish, though her thoughts appear to be fixed quite happily upon the moon. Greenpearl is looking down at her slightly ink-stained fingers. She hasn’t eaten much.
‘Hexagram 57,’ the Dragon Monarch announces. ‘A message from the Amah.’ She pauses to reflect. ‘Hsun, The Penetrating, it is,’ she tells them. ‘Or some might say. The Gentle. Its element is wood, of course. It means changeableness and scents wafted by the wind. In the family of Dark and Light, it represents the eldest daughter.’ She stops. ‘It is the hexagram of homecoming.’ Her eyes meet Seagem’s. Seagem turns to Greenpearl and squeezes her daughter’s hand.
Two late-night talks: In a coral chamber, Seagem speaks urgently. The Hsiao River Princeling smiles with doleful compassion and shakes his head.
Seagem’s vermilion lover growls something in her ear; the woman frowns prettily. ‘No, he’s right,’ Seagem replies, soft-voiced. ‘You know what she is like about uninvited guests.’ Her fine-haired husband begins to speak, then presses his lips together and sighs.
‘But,’ Seagem continues slowly, ‘there’s one thing that might work. We’ll let it rest till morning, while I think about whether it can be done.’ The vermilion dragon shrugs. The Princeling blinks, surprised but far from optimistic.
Meanwhile, out among the waterweeds, Greenpearl and Second Daughter stroll by the flickering light of distant stars, strangely augmented here in the dragon realm. Second Daughter says that she will give up going to the lunar palace, that she will travel on with Greenpearl, that surely somewhere in the human realm they can find a home. Greenpearl refuses. She insists her friend cannot ignore this celestial calling. Both know it to be true.
Off in his own sleeping quarters, Feng tosses restlessly remembering a certain delicious look that passed to him from Greenpearl. No enchanted journey calls on their bodily energies now. If only she could stay!
And Nephrite, behind a guest-room door that shines with purple cowrie shells, lies as sleepless as the others. As a mortal who has acquired some transcendent powers, she is welcome to return to the Mother-of-Pearl Villa any time she wants to. The Dragon Monarch took her aside to tell her this, pointing out that Nephrite now can fly to Flower Mountain and that from there she knows the way. A kind of invitation, surely, but all that Nephrite thinks of is the look she got from Greenpearl at the banquet’s close: indefinably different, perhaps, but surely just as sweet.
Later still, the new moon climbs the sky. In a village on the neck of land between the Yangzi and Cavegarden Lake, a widow woman squeezes her tired eyes, then checks the warmth of the tiny silkworm eggs spread out on their trays. The work goes on, though her daughters-in-law still nurse their sorrows. They will heal, the widow thinks, glad that it will still be some weeks before the voracious larvae hatch. Back in her own room, she falls into forgetful peace at last.
Off to the northwest, high windborne loess drifts through the air. Stars and moon, tinged auspicious yellow, shine down on the garden of an entertainment house in Liang-jou. Within, the ageing proprietress mutters and rolls over in her curtained bed. Bathed in fortune’s light, she sighs. Then the corners of her mouth slide upwards, and she rejoins the throngs of sleepers –men and women, barbarians and Chinese – who fill the valleys and the fertile uplands of Great Tang.
In another Yangzi River village, just downstream from the gorges, a shamanka wakes. She steps outside and sees in the cloudless sky the rarefied light of earthshine reflected in the dark space embraced by the thin crescent moon. Like mist or ash, the faint glow manifests some powerful force in subtle form. She knows it signals a great good, returns contented to her bed, and dreams of swimming easily beneath slow silver waters.
Did Seagem sleep at all last night? In any case, she rose early, and returns now from a predawn conference with her mother-in-law to join Greenpearl and her three friends at a gloomy farewell breakfast. Her husband and her vermilion consort chat drowsily in a corner. Feng says nothing, hunched moodily within his stately robes – except to mutter Turtle’s egg!’ when he scalds his tongue on his third cup of tea. Only Second Daughter reveals a hint of suppressed happiness as Nephrite tells her White Aureole will meet them in the cave on Flower Mountain; she will guide the new scholar to the cinnamon-shaded garden on the moon.
As for Greenpearl, she has gathered her determination. After all, she has seen her mother at last and knows she is content. The quest is over, and if that leaves her with no place to go she will simply have to find one on her own.
Second Daughter turns to her with reassurances of regular letters. She puts her mouth to her friend’s ear. ‘Nephrite will come to you again, if she can manage it, and Feng as well. Just look at him!’
Greenpearl’s smile twists wryly. Yes, if only she could stay here, she would have friends and lovers enough, and never worry about distinctions between the two. But she doubts that a river tortoise or a Lady of the Tao still bound by human flesh will really be able to make their ways to whatever place she will stumble into once she is forced back to the human realm. Perhaps she will simply wander all her life.
‘And something else,’ says Second Daughter, louder now, so that all can hear. ‘That poem the cat Redsteed brought you?’ Nephrite looks interested but holds her peace. ‘I was thinking about it late last night. Remember, we worked out about Feng and Baby in the first two lines. And you, daughter of the house of Li and daughter of dragons, whose element is wood, are surely “the child of wood”. I think –’ She frowns in recollection. ‘How did the last couplet go?’
‘ “When pearl and jade have met beneath the waves,”’ says Greenpearl automatically. She starts then, and looks from her mother Seagem to Nephrite’s jade-white hands.
Second Daughter joins Greenpearl in chanting the last line: ‘ “The child of wood shall weave a heavenly web!”’
Seagem smiles benignly. Nephrite looks as if she sensed the misty, ashen light of hope. Feng drains another cup of tea. Greenpearl is irritated; she has said she is through with weaving, and she is certainly through with garbled rhymes.
Greenpearl cuts Second Daughter off before she can say more and begs leave to depart. But Seagem bids her listen.
The mother describes how she too believed the arts of needle and loom to be a trap, trivial beside the arts of brush and ink. ‘But consider this, daughter,’ she adds. ‘You learned those words in women’s script in the house of the silk weavers and nowhere else. With them, you could have read what was written on your scroll. And would that scroll of yours exist at all without some woman’s weaving of the cloth? I believe the Dragon Monarch means you to understand that, to weigh the value of what was given you – and weave upon it your own web.’
Greenpearl looks up, puzzled.
‘Daughter. You’ve put words together in song lyrics, and in poems. Are you willing to do that again?’
Yes, Greenpearl says, she is more than willing. A part of her would like to leave immediately, to get the misery over with. But if reciting poems can help them stay together a few hours longer, she will stay on. Besides (she puts away her old doubts for the last time; Second Daughter is right, the opening of the waters proved it: she is a poet), the making, and her mother’s praise of it, would bring her pleasure.
‘Then, daughter, I will have your lute returned to you.’ Seagem holds up a hand to signal that no questions need be asked. ‘Yes, it came to me when you cast it into Cavegarden. But you weren’t ready yet to enter in yourself. Now let me ask you this.’
Seagem leans forward, staring into eyes where the wish to stay has replaced the defiant assertion of the will to leav
e. The Monarch loves nothing so much as a good story,’ she says. ‘Ask Feng.’ The Minister of Fictive Histories nods. ‘So I spoke with her this morning. She has thought over the message from the Amah and has decreed that if you’ll read to her what’s written on this scroll, a bit each afternoon perhaps, you may stay on here, as her Minister of Verisimilar Romances. Are you willing?’ The mother holds out the fine-spun roll of writing silk, given her so long ago by the Western Motherqueen.
Greenpearl opens her mouth to protest. She is willing indeed, but the scroll is blank! She pulls it – dry now, yet washed white all the same – from her sash to show her mother.
‘Daughter, if the Monarch commands you to read to her what’s written on the scroll,’ Seagem continues, ‘and there is nothing written on it, what must you do?’
Now Greenpearl claps her hands and bursts out laughing. Second Daughter, Feng, Nephrite, and the others follow. Soon, even the vermilion dragon sees the answer and roars for a catfish-in-waiting to bring a brush and ink.
‘But what,’ Greenpearl says a moment later, carefully grinding the inkstick on its stone, ‘should I write? The scroll is small when it’s rolled up, but it’s much too long to fill with poetry or songs. Look at it.’ She gazes at its magical emptiness, silent now, great with potentiality.
‘Take up your brush, child,’ says the mother. ‘Write the story of yourself.’
So Greenpearl dips the fine fur of the writing-brush into her ink’s dark pool, and writes: Once above a time, deep within the rosy cloudbanks of the morning sky…
Epilogue:
Nu
Wa’s
Grotto
Again
The small waterdragon nudges Nu Wa’s hand again. Fu Hsi stretches and yawns. ‘Excellent, dear sister. Told as only you can do it. Those yellow-mud creatures are indeed amusing.’ He slides his tail around hers sensuously. ‘I don’t suppose…‘he begins.
‘We ought to get some sleep,’ says Nu Wa, though her lips slide into a faint, considering smile.
‘I’m not sleepy,’ Fu Hsi says, his eyelids heavy. And the waterdragon looses a tiny plaintive prrt deep within its throat.
‘Hush,’ Nu Wa answers. ‘Rest now, and when you wake up, I’ll tell another story. Or maybe…’ The smile grows wider. ‘Maybe then we’ll play.’ She rolls over on her side and, with determination, shuts her eyes. The other two sigh and do the same.
Lying there, sliding towards the uncarved silence of sleep, Nu Wa considers how the next tale might begin. My name is, for the moment, Parrot, she thinks. And wonders how it will all come out this time around.
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