She allowed herself a smile that did not show on her lips, and gave Xuanwu a polite nod as he passed by. The lion she had fought was many-headed and ferocious, and she’d put its whiskers into the wood of her bow for hardiness, its deep-throated growl for flexibility. More than the hunt, and very much more than the revelry, this had been her true delight.
The court had grown accustomed to her, too, and she was surprised that she enjoyed the company of goddesses. They shared stories; Houyihad few of her own, and was therefore interested best when Xiangu told her of her mortal years. “Not,” the ascendant hastened to add, “that I had many of those.”
“It is no shame,” Houyi offered, “to have many or few. It is all experience and memory, wealth of the rarest and highest sort.”
Xiangu flushed, laughing. “You have such ideas. Do you not believe then in enlightenment, the discarding of the self?”
“I have no opinion. Sometimes I think it would be good if I could be mortal for a few years, so I can see for myself what it is like and thereby decide whether purity suits me.”
The goddess fell quiet. “You wouldn’t.”
“No?”
“Unless you can manifest as a man, you would hate such a life viciously.” She laughed again, sour this time. “Being a woman in the realm of men is… not easy. Certainly it’s not simple here, either, save perhaps for you and the great Guanyin. Yet even for me, for those dancers and serving girls, this is far better. This is the riches we dreamed of, this is the wealth and goodness.”
Houyi frowned. She was not oblivious, and had an inkling of what Xiangu meant. In the abstract: she couldn’t imagine the reality of it, the days and nights of living on earth. “Do you think I should consider taking a pupil? A mortal girl?”
“Yes! Oh, yes.” Xiangu presses her fingers to her lips. “Do you notice, so many more boys than girls are raised to immortality? I was never really taken in as anyone’s disciple. I had guidance, yes, but it’s not the same as tutelage, which makes all the difference. You would have much to teach.”
“I don’t believe I do, in truth, but it is a thought.”
A dash of ceramic on floor tiles. Houyi looked, found a servant standing over a ruin of shards and spilled soup. Her face pale, her eyes wide, and her lips taut over a cry that she had bitten in half.
The silence deafened, and filled Houyi’s ears with endless ringing.
One of the goddesses hissed into that quiet, and rose to grip the servant by her arm, chastisement–threats–on the tip of her tongue. Grim-faced too, the goddess bowed and pushed the girl to bow with her. The mirrors she wore, armor-like, clinked. “Majesty. She is one of mine. I knew she would… I shall send her back to her parents.”
Houyi stood. “My lord, might I beg for her pardon? It is a feast that honors my deed, and I wouldn’t wish to see it marred by severity for a mishap so little.”
The incident was small, and after all so was her request: the emperor granted it, as rich men granted trifles.
She did not dwell on the event or her part in it. So when the dining and performing were done, she did not expect to find a stranger waiting at her door. “I am Chang’e,” the girl said, “and my mistress Tianmu bade me seek you and give you thanks for sparing Wenlan, the servant who disgraced herself at your feast.”
“The feast wasn’t truly mine. You are one of Tianmu’s acolytes?”
The girl’s smile was balanced on a precipice. “I should be so fortunate. No, I was brought here to serve; she doesn’t accept followers. I haven’t the fortitude or the talent even if she did. The Lady Tianmu has been most kind to me, even so.”
Houyi opened her door. “Have you eaten?”
“I… haven’t, no.”
“I’m not much of a cook, but there are some buns I can steam, lotus seeds I can boil in syrup.”
Chang’e shook her head. “I’m not meant to touch celestial food. I eat with other servants. I don’t mean to be ungracious or ungrateful, only…”
“You are of earth?”
She looked down at the hem of her dress, a hint of color on her cheeks made gold by lantern light. “Yes. I serve. I haven’t earned ascendance.”
“I never had to earn it, technically,” the archer mused. “Might there be a difference between divinity earned and divinity inborn? If you put it in a box, the shape of it, the texture? But come in. The lotuses didn’t grow here. They are wild; I picked them while I was abroad. Unless you don’t like sweet things? I can boil them in ginger instead. Or you could eat them as they are, but they aren’t fresh anymore.”
The girl gazed down, up, and down again. “With the syrup would be fine. More than fine. Or anything, really. Please. And thank you.”
Chang’e waited as Houyi ignited the lamps and exhaled softly when she saw the house. Her fingers flowed over the porous tibia cross-sections, the chimeral overlap of mammal and reptile, the twisting curling horns that upheld the roof. When she ate the lotus seeds she did so reverent. “It tastes of home.”
The archer ladled boiling water into the teapot, reasonably certain that rainwater wasn’t beyond the strictures permitted to Chang’e. “Do you miss it? Your life?”
“Heaven is perfect beyond words. There’s no hardship here, no starving. There was a dry season when I was young, and I remember my mother weeping as she goaded our one ox to plow the field, weeping over food that was not and would not be. Over the empty bowls, empty plates. But it was home.” She splayed her fingers over sugared steam. “Though there’s much I don’t miss.”
“Such as?”
“Being a daughter. Being a sister.” Chang’e shook herself. “I didn’t mean to waste your time with all this. It’s unworthy of your attention. You are divine and I’m just–myself.”
The archer poured tea. She’d put a pickled plum in each cup, a hint of spice and salt. “I would like to know, unless you’d rather speak of something else.”
Reluctant, then freely, Chang’e spoke. Her childhood, in part, and many matters strange and new to Houyi. Playing in the river, trying and failing to spear fish with a sharpened stick, sleeping on a mat so thin it barely existed. Brothers came up in brief, sporadic mentions, creatures better valued than she was and who weren’t afraid to let her know this was the case. Hot with tea she revealed, in fragments, the red bridal gown and red bridal veil; of how she’d fled both into a night choked with thunder and there was found by Tianmu.
Later, emptied of words long lidded, Chang’e drowsed and drifted off. The archer found her a bed and went to her own, thinking of the puzzles she’d learned and thinking, more than a little, of the girl who had taught them to her.
Houyi asked for and obtained Tianmu’s reluctant permission to take Chang’e through sky and sea, and even to the demons’ world. Though not unafraid, Chang’e trusted the archer and, laughing, would pet glittering eels in one of the dragon kings’ homes. She asked Houyi to teach her to shoot, to cut, for they seemed to her useful things; lessons were given and Houyi made her a knife from the horn of an ox devil.
Once Chang’e pinched Houyi’s cheek. “You should smile more. I’ve never seen you laugh.”
“Neither have I.”
“Does nothing amuse you? Bring you joy? It’d make you look so lovely.” Chang’e reddened. “Not that you don’t already.”
They were standing underneath a tree whose trunk was silver, whose fruits were golden hands fringed with black petals at the wrists. Chang’eturned rigid, at first, when Houyi kissed her. Soon that changed, and when they were no longer breathing from one another’s mouths, the archer drew back and softly laughed.
Chang’e stayed silent for a long time, her breath quivering in her throat. At length she spluttered, “Well I was right. You are beautiful. I don’t know about what we just–” She tangled her fingers in the folds of her robes. “Though I would like to try it again. Maybe. Sometime. Sometime tomorrow. Oh and… I lied.”
“Yes?”
“That Tianmu bade me seek you and th
ank you in her stead. Wenlan was to do it, but she was too shy and I took it upon myself. Without Lady Tianmu’s leave. She reprimanded me for days and gave me twice my usual chores. But it was worth every scrubbed wok.”
Outings followed, and more trees, and more words, during which Chang’e lost her awe of the god and gained in its place a wrenching want for the woman. It culminated in a visit to Guanyin, whom Houyi had a faint idea might be wise in this matter. The white goddess was seated at the edge of a river, attended by two children who would remain children in perpetuity. Guanyin did not acknowledge Houyi.
“Chang’e and I have decided we would wed. But she has misgivings and suggested I seek advice. Might you have any for us, great Guanyin?”
The goddess turned her attention from the waters. Fish that she’d been communing with dispersed, the children likewise. “My advice is to pursue it not, Houyi. It wouldn’t be taken very well by heaven at large.”
“I am a god,” the archer said, unnecessarily. “I would think that’d give me liberty to marry whomever I please.”
“Perhaps if you intend to become a man–that is doable, of course.” Guanyin looked, for a moment, like someone else: clothed in yellow instead of her customary white, tall and bearded with bristling brows. “For the ceremony’s duration at least and, for preference, several years afterward. So the idea would stick. Beyond that if you return to being a woman, why, that happens.”
“I don’t think I can, but even if I could, I feel no urge to become a man.”
“Then,” Guanyin said, flattening water reeds into neat rows, “I recommend against it. You will not be happy; neither will Chang’e.”
The archer pursed and unpursed her lips. “There are gods with a taste for men.”
“Oh yes, I know a dragon’s son who has a great fancy for sun-beaten farmers. But that is… looked upon differently and in any case he doesn’t mean to marry them. Wife and wife are unheard of and, as a rule, we are not fond of things too novel or strange. There are limits to what is permissible, archer, even for you–and your doings are more permissible than most. You do recognize that?”
“We could be less than open about it.” Compromising.
Guanyin drew out a handful of water and molded it, sculpting it into a pagoda around the ribs she’d made with reeds. “Heaven is full of loose lips. One would think it ought to be otherwise, we being what we are, but there it is. Do you mean to persist in this?”
“Chang’e and I are in accord, yes.”
“Then bring her and I will bless you both, though I don’t believe it will do much good in the end. For that, archer, I am sorry. Even I may not protect everything.”
Chang’e and Houyi wedded, with the same quiet of a mouse stealing through a room full of cats. But Guanyin was proven correct: secret became news. On her part the archer heard the beating of wings, and felt the heat of the sun as it slanted onto their ceremony–both of them in red, though veils, being redundant had been dispensed with–as though, for a moment, one of Dijun’s sons was gazing down at them.
Not long after that, the ten suns rose and Houyi was called to duty.
* * *
Houyi has never been mortal and, in ignorance, knows no terror. The emperor’s sentence sits on her but lightly.
The land is slow to heal. As though making up for that single searing day the sky broods, clouds churning thick as mud, crackling with flashes from Tianmu’s mirrors. Rain fills cracks in the soil, transmutes dirt to mud, deepening red sand to bruise, ivory sand to honey.
Chang’e shivers, tugging useless drenched silks to herself. Houyi doesn’t feel the cold and damp so keenly. Her senses have not adjusted, not convinced yet of mortal fragility. She puts her arm over her wife, a trade of warmth for chill. “You did not have to come. This is my punishment to endure. You shouldn’t have come.”
“I came because I wanted to. Never forget that, Houyi.” Chang’e interlaces her fingers with the archer’s. “Tianmu would be loath to take me back under her wing in any case.”
“Guanyin would shelter you.”
“Out of pity, and I’ve had enough of that. It is not love. It’s not even appreciation. Does it help that we can now grow old together? No, it wouldn’t, would it?” She tries uselessly to wring her sleeves dry. “If we head northeast… My eldest brother makes his home there. He is, or was, wealthy and our mother lives with him. It’ll make this almost bearable for you, Houyi. No paradise, but it is comfortable.”
Houyi doesn’t require comfort, but does not say so. Her wife’s mother. She imagines that. A family. That too is a difficult concept to grasp, she who has had none.
If she has lost her deific span, she hasn’t lost that curious way with which gods travel: a method that truncates distances, sidestepping conventional time. Houyi is subliminally aware she will forget the how of this soon, but for the moment she puts it to use and they are at the estate when morning dawns cool and clear. Perhaps Tianmu and her husband have tired for the moment, and the dragons have gone to rest.
The brother’s home has survived, shaded under ancient trees too obstinate to wither and subsisting on a well hidden deep underground. Haggard but alive, servants and family both come to greet Chang’e and Houyi.
The brother: “Back from heaven at last? It was good of you, to be so silent. Never sending word to ask how we fare.”
But Chang’e's mother, Yunping, only embraces her with eyes gone wet and full. She is bent; Houyi recalls the story of the ox and the goading.
Introducing Houyi is complicated. Her mode of dress is glanced at sideways by the brother, who scrutinizes with scowl and sneer. His family (two wives, three sons, and an ignored girl named Meijie: young, ox-horn hair buns) follows suit, some without any real conviction. What the house’s master does it is best to copy.
“My companion,” Chang’e says coldly, “is of heaven.”
Her brother’s outlook changes abruptly. So does that of his sons, wives, and daughter. “Great sage.” Deep bows.
It suffices for the moment.
Meijie pays attention, despite not having any paid to her, and is the first to notice Houyi’s bow. “Lady,” she says one day, “I hear things from… that.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think bows are supposed to hiss and purr and bark.” Said with the perfect certainty of the very young.
“It’s not a fashion, no.” Houyi watches Meijie eye her knives. “These things fascinate you.”
“No they don’t. They are boy things. For my brothers.” A little belligerent Meijie straightens. “You look silly. You are silly. Big Mother says so.”
The archer cocks her head at the child. “Would you like to learn how to use knives?”
“I’m not a boy.”
“Neither am I. Nor do I want to be one.”
Unable to reconcile this paradox the girl sticks her tongue out and runs away.
Houyi contemplates the unfathomable minds of children and returns to the room she shares with her wife, to find Chang’e red-faced and trembling with rage. “My brother,” she says when she’s regained her composure. “He wanted to know when you would bring him luck and coin and make shark fins magically appear on the dining table thrice a day. You are only two more mouths to feed, he said. How does he dare?”
“Technically he’s right. I could hunt. There would be meat, of the stringy and fatless sort. As for sharks, I imagine they’re all dead.” The archer settles into her wife’s lap. It’s a close fit and she has to hold her weight just so, but they’ve had practice. “There’s more, though, isn’t there?”
Chang’e crumples almost into her old self, the silent girl under Tianmu’s charge. “He wants me to marry. There’s a governor who–the details aren’t important, though my brother thinks he has a pet sorcerer of some sort, which is how he went through this unscathed. Stores upon stores of food. If he was a rich man before he’s swimming in gold now. And my brother had a portrait of me sent to him. That’s all I’m good for, all I eve
r was.”
“I’m sorry, Chang’e. For making you return to this. I shouldn’t have–”
“You’ve already apologized. Five times. Ten! I told you it doesn’t matter. I told you I will not bear heaven, or anything else, without you.” More quietly she says, “This governor took four wives. Only one remains. The other three died, supposedly by accidents or… worse. I don’t know. The living one is striped, my mother says, from back to ankles. Always she weeps. If he cannot have me, he will take Meijie, and my brother has already given his consent. Meijie, Houyi, little Meijie. His own daughter. She’s not even twelve. She’s a long way from twelve.”
“Where does he make his home?”
Chang’e looks at her wife sharply. “You are mortal now.”
“Yes.”
They always lie close, breast to back. Tonight Houyi keeps a small distance so that when she rises in the deep of the night she doesn’t wakeChang’e. She takes her weapons and finds a few servants still up, and coaxes out of them the governor’s address. They give it pale-faced, half in hope; they think her much more than she is. She cannot correct them.
Her strides are long and she doesn’t yet know fatigue. The moon, half-full, lights her way.
The monster is a blot in the sky, crouching on the roof of the lord’s mansion, which curves around a lake brimming with sleek fish. Houyidoes not hesitate. She lets fly as she always has, cleanly, precisely.
It might have heard the twitch of released tension, the letting go of bowstring. It might have reached out and gripped the passing wind, and used that to turn her shot aside. The fiend moves and the arrow penetrates not its eye but a spot between ear and horn. Cartilage parts, noiseless, into shivering shreds.
Houyi shoots once more–a shaft lodges in, and protrudes from, the beast’s throat–and it is before her, closing the distance in loping bounds. A knife in her hand, its point testing and triumphing against tender places: she twists and pulls, trailing gore and ligament from the inside of the demon’s elbow.
It shrieks in her face, a spume of sound and bile. She turns aside, the blade again finding and plunging into the softest of its flesh. Blood warms her, filling her mouth with the aroma of coins, as it sinks teeth into her flank and wraps her close with the snake of its tail. This is not new toHouyi: she’s fought, been wounded, carries scars. It’s never made her heart stutter, nor slowed her down. Until this moment.
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