Song of the Spring Moon Waning

by E. E. Ottoman

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Book Details

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  About the Author

  Song of the Spring Moon Waning

  E.E. Ottoman

  Upon waking up one morning, Wen Yu is surprised to find a note asking him to return the song thrush given into his care while the owner was sick. The only problem is that Wen Yu was never given a song thrush.

  Though he has no time for distractions from his studies for the palace examination, Wen Yu goes in search of the unknown Liu Yi who left him the note. What he finds is a beautiful imperial eunuch, a talking tortoise, and a collection of mysterious moon poems that force Wen Yu to question what path in life he is truly meant to be walking.

  Book Details

  Song of the Spring Moon Waning

  By E.E. Ottoman

  Published by Less Than Three Press LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.

  Edited by Amanda Jean and Courtney Davidson

  Cover designed by Aisha Akeju

  This book is a work of fiction and all names, characters, places, and incidents are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.

  First Edition January 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by E. E. Ottoman

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 9781620043004

  To Theodore: may you never grow tired of fairytales.

  Acknowledgements:

  As always my thanks to LJ LaBarthe for sharing her wide ranging historical knowledge and editing skills. Thank you to my sister on whose couch I crashed for almost the entirety of writing this. Thank you to Ginger who patiently told me every version of the Mid-Autumn Festival folk story she'd ever heard. Last but not least thank you to Megan for loving this story and believing it was something especial.

  Prologue

  Once there was a dragon, of great age and knowledge, who lived high on the peak of the Jade Mountain. This dragon was a scholar and thus more than content to spend his days studying ancient, secret knowledge as well as observing the world around him. He would spend long mornings talking to the new bamboo shoots as they pushed up through the soil, learning what it was that made them grow. The bamboo whispered to him about how they strove to feel the sun on their leaves, yearned for the wind that blew through the bamboo groves. In the afternoons, the dragon would talk to the fish and hear about their long journeys through the waterways from the mountains to the ocean. The fish spoke of the small streams that climbed hills and mountains, the wide rivers that cut through the valleys. They sang of the still water where the rice grew, the small pools of the forest, all moving towards the wide bottomless, roaring ocean. At night, the dragon would curl his massive body around the very peak of the mountain and call up to the stars, mapping their spinning journey and learning the stories of how they came to live in the sky.

  Human kingdoms rose and prospered or were conquered and passed away into dust. The dragon began to feel a pain in his heart. The stories of the willow trees and the journeys of the birds did not enthrall him as they once had. So the dragon turned his attention inward, trying to find the source of his unhappiness. After much reflection, the dragon realized he was lonely. He had always lived alone on his mountain, observing but never truly touching the world around him, and his heart yearned for more. He wished for a companion, but of all the animals, plants, and creatures that lived with him on his mountain, there were none that did not die and wither in what seemed a blink of an eye.

  Having no one to express his great loneliness to, the dragon began to write poems about how he longed for companionship, for someone to talk to and sit with. He wrote the love letters he would have written to his companion and hid them away inside the mountain.

  One day, however, as the dragon was sitting at his writing desk on top of the mountain in his human form and writing yet more love poems, a great wind sprang up and blew the sheets of paper into the air.

  Leaping up, the dragon tried to capture them, but his human body was too small, and he could not move fast enough or reach high enough. The poems blew away.

  The wind carried the sheaves of paper high into the sky, twisting and turning among the stars as they looked on with interest. Finally, the wind blew the poems up into the celestial realm and straight to the Moon Palace.

  The Jade Rabbit, Great Physician of the Moon Palace, stumbled across the sheaves of paper there. She had just finished a long day of grinding herbs for medicines and charting the bodies of all different celestial beings that came to her for aid. She was looking forward to a rest, so she did not look over the papers right away and merely took them with her to her rooms. Later, though, when she had made herself a cup of tea and unbraided her long white hair, she lit a lamp, sat at the window of her rooms in the great Moon Palace, and began to read the papers she had found.

  When she discovered they were love poems, she made to put them aside, thinking they were too personal for her to read. The loneliness and the sadness behind the words struck her, however, and she continued to read against her better judgment.

  She knew it was a great gift that had been given to her, to be allowed to live in the Moon Palace, granted immortality and the chance to serve all the celestial beings as Great Physician. Yet the Jade Rabbit was lonely as well.

  After finishing the last poem, she went to her writing desk and wrote a poem of her own on the back of one of the papers she had found. She folded it and walked to the window; opening it, she cast the poem out into the wind.

  The sheet slowly drifted down from the Moon Palace into the realm of earth and air, where it landed on Jade Mountain, home of a certain dragon.

  The dragon had moped inside the mountain for many days after losing his poems. He had not eaten or slept and refused to come out, even when the birds sent a troop of monkeys to locate him. Finally, the sheer boredom from moping about his palace forced him to emerge onto the mountain surface. He trudged through the bamboo forest, barely stopping when the bamboo called out to him.

  At the very top of the mountain, the dragon spotted something—a small square of folded paper. Picking it up, his heart leapt with joy as he realized it was one of his lost poems. When he unfolded it, though, he found something else written on the back.

  "Loneliness sits heavily upon my heart.

  I can barely find pleasure in a cup of tea,

  The bend of the plum tree outside my window, once lovely, holds no joy now.

  These things you also know."

  For a long moment, the dragon stood there, reading and rereading the reply to his poems. Then he moved as fast as he could back down the mountain to his writing desk to write a reply.

  "Monkeys come telling me of the birds' distress.

  The bamboo calls out for my attention.

  Only your words fill my head."

  He did not know from where the reply had come, so he folded his own poem and cast it into the wind.

  In the Moon Palace, the Jade Rabbit smiled when she came upon the poem caught in the branches of a cherry tree. She read it over, and then again, slower this time, before tucking it into her dress and heading for her writing desk.

  "My life is medicines, work and duty

  Here where I live alone in the walls of the moon

  But your words make me smile again

  I wonder if
I might write something to make you smile too."

  On the Jade Mountain, the dragon was awake, looking for a reply poem as soon as the sun had begun to touch the horizon. Finding the small square at last, half soaked from falling into a stream, he carefully laid the sheet out to dry while he went to find himself another ink stone, already composing his reply in his head.

  Many poems were shared as the centuries passed.

  Talk of loneliness turned to shared conversations about their studies. Talk of studies turned to deeper discussions and admission of love.

  "We should meet," the Jade Rabbit finally wrote, "for I long to see you in person."

  "If only I could travel to the Moon Palace," the dragon wrote her. "But I fear I am not powerful enough to cross over from this world into yours."

  When she read that, the Jade Rabbit knew it was true and pondered how they could accomplish it anyway. Going to her workshop, she crafted with her power and knowledge a moon pearl. Combined with the dragon's strength, she thought, it could form a bridge between realm of the Moon Palace and earthly realm of the Jade Mountain so that she could pass down and see him face-to-face.

  She hurriedly composed a letter with her plan and wrapped it around the moon pearl, casting it out the window.

  As the letter and pearl drifted down to the mountain, a storm blew up. The wind and the rain battered against the pearl, crumpling the fine paper and tearing it away. The shreds of letter caught in the branches of a poplar tree. The pearl landed in a stream.

  A fish was the first to chance upon the pearl and, not realizing what it was, swallowed the precious thing whole. It dissolved inside the fish, filling it with the power of the moon. The fish did not realize this, however, and continued on its way down the stream towards the ocean.

  Far from the mountain where the stream turned into a wide, great river, a poor farmer caught the fish. He brought it back for his wife, who was with child. The farmer's wife roasted and ate the fish. A few months later, she gave birth to a boy child, who was born small and sickly but with great beauty and grace, for the knowledge and power of the moon dwelt within him.

  Not receiving any word back, the Jade Rabbit became distressed and wrote the dragon asking why he did not use the pearl and form the bridge between the mountain and the moon. When the dragon heard of the pearl, he searched far and wide for it, but of course it was nowhere to be found. He wrote the Jade Rabbit with great sadness, telling her the pearl was lost, and she wept, for it would be centuries more until she would have the power to make another one. The dragon could not stand the idea that they might not meet. So he did what he had never done; he left the mountain, traveling among the humans, in search of the missing moon pearl.

  But still the two remained parted.

  One

  When Wen Yu woke, he found a note pushed under his door. After stumbling about in a bleary, half-asleep haze, he managed to open his tiny window and light the brazier to boil some water for tea.

  Only when he had a steaming cup of tea in hand and was sitting on his sleeping mat did he open the note.

  I beg pardon for writing to you, but when I was last ill, I gave you my song thrush to care for with the promise that you would return him to me, which you have not done. I grow lonely without his song, and so I implore you to think of my suffering and return him to my care.

  The note was signed Liu Yi.

  Wen Yu blinked, read the note again, set it aside, and took a long draught of tea. Maybe his mind was making things up due to lack of sleep and far too many hours of study, he thought, gripping the cup in both hands. Maybe there was no note at all.

  He looked down at the note. It was still there, and on closer inspection, still said the same thing. The calligraphy in which it was written was very good: simple yet elegant, with a kind of ease Wen Yu himself struggled to achieve. Wen Yu set his cup aside. Courtesy dictated that he answer, which meant he was going to have to track down this Liu Yi. Which in turn meant taking valuable time away from his studies.

  Stretching, he stood and pushed his long hair out of his face, then slipped one hand into the open front of his tunic to scratch his chest. He moved over to the bucket of water to begin washing up. There was some leftover rice, and he stuffed some into his mouth while pulling off the tunic he'd slept in and reaching for a fresh one. He pulled it on, along with his cotton trousers, and belted the tunic around his waist with a wide cloth sash.

  Dressed and at least a little more fed, Wen Yu tied his hair up into a sloppy topknot and sat at his desk to begin paging through his notes. It would be classics and mathematics this morning; he'd take a little time off to see to his mysterious note when he was done, and then it would be time for calligraphy practice. He felt his brush strokes were still too plain and bold, fine for taking notes but not nearly good enough for the upcoming examination. Just thinking the word 'examination' sent his pulse racing, and he pushed away all thought of how little time he had left. Wen Yu turned his full attention to his notes.

  A breeze blew through the open window, rustling the papers on his desk. He noticed the air was not as cold as it had been; spring was definitely coming.

  The sun was high in the sky when he set aside his papers. The practice essays he'd written that morning sat to one side of his desk as their ink dried, while his older notes were stacked on the other end. Wen Yu stood and stretched, trying to work out the kinks in his neck. By the time he passed the examination, his back was going to be twisted up like an old man's from the years of bending over a study desk, but such was the life of a student. Not that he was particularly young, though still considered old enough that he should have a wife and children by now. Maybe if he passed the examination he'd ask Shi Fei to marry him—if she wanted, of course.

  He walked to the sleeping mat and reached for the note, tucking it into his tunic, pulling on a lightweight jacket, open down the front with wide, flowing sleeves. Donning his boots, he headed for the door. His was one of numerous tiny apartments rented out to students who flooded into the Imperial City every three years to study for the examination. The building where Wen Yu rented his apartment was an old, crumbling thing, and he suspected it was on the verge of falling down. Wen Yu's room was at the top of the building, which fortunately meant he had a window; unfortunately, it also meant his ceiling was more likely to leak.

  The street his building stood on was quiet, but the wide, stone-paved main streets off of it teemed with people. Wen Yu darted around carts pulled by oxen and people bent double under loads of the wares they hoped to sell. There were street vendors and shops selling all manner of food, each with a cloth banner hanging down from the eaves of the roof, announcing what it was they sold. Wen Yu found his mouth watering at the idea of beef over rice. He couldn't afford beef right now, so he settled on noodles instead. Anyway, Zhi Ping who owned the noodle shop was a horrible gossip. If anyone would know which of the students had written his note, it would be Old Man Ping.

  Wen Yu ducked into the noodle shop, nodding to the several haggard-looking students who were already there before heading for where Zhi Ping stood behind a low wooden counter next to the vats of broth.

  "Fried noodles today, I think," Wen Yu told him, and Zhi Ping nodded.

  "In broth?"

  "Yes, please." Wen Yu dug out some of his precious coin and slid it over the counter. "And I have a question for you."

  Zhi Ping raised one eyebrow, ladling broth into a bowl. "Oh?"

  "Do you know who Liu Yi is?" Wen Yu took out the note and unfolded it for Zhi Ping to see. "He seems to have sent me a note last night which I do not understand the meaning of."

  Zhi Ping stroked his beard thoughtfully. He set the bowl of noodles and broth in front of Wen Yu. "Not one of the students who live around here, I think, but I can ask my sister; she is friends with the wife of a paper merchant who sells to most of the students who come for the examination, not to mention a fair number of the Imperial bureaucrats." Zhi Ping touched the edge of the note with the tip of
one wizened finger. "He does nice brushwork, though. A scholar for sure."

  "Yes. Yes, he does." Wen Yu reached for his chopsticks, feeling a pang of guilt that he wasn't back in his room studying calligraphy right then. After I eat, he promised himself, and turned his attention to his noodles.

  *~*~*

  "I don't have anything to tell you," Zhi Ping said a few days later as Wen Yu huddled over a bowl of noodles. "My sister said she asked her friend who asked her husband, but neither of them know of a student by that name, or a scholar, for that matter."

  Zhi Ping wiped his hands off on a rag.

  "Fine as ever, thank you for asking." Wen Yu smiled and slid money across the counter.

  A group of students came in, laughing. They ordered as a group and sat together at one of the tables. Wen Yu looked away, feeling a slight pang of loneliness. He missed his sisters, missed Hao Wu and Shi Fei. He hadn't made any friends since being here, too focused on studying and the upcoming examination. There were also other reasons to keep the people here at bay, not the least of which his father's secret and the need to preserve it.

  His father had given Wen Yu a lecture when he left for the capital, as his father always did when Wen Yu traveled somewhere alone. He was not to become close with anyone, his father had said. Wen Yu would be disqualified from the examination immediately, his name and scores struck from the records of all his previous examinations, and his family dishonored. The shame had been evident in his father's voice as he'd spoken of the secret; just remembering it made guilt and loathing lodge like a heavy, cold stone in Wen Yu's stomach. He looked down at his noodles, suddenly no longer hungry.

  Being here made for a lonely existence; he missed the people back home.

  Shi Fei would probably scold him for missing an opportunity to make possibly valuable political alliances. Hao Wu would just laugh, throw an arm around Wen Yu's shoulders, and suggest they take a bottle of plum wine down by the pond and relax.