There is a third arrow, buried deep in the demon’s back. It spasms alert, pausing in its chewing and savoring of Houyi. She drives the knife deep, and hard, into its stomach where she’s felt the beating of its heart. Her hand follows and grips the organ that gives it life. “Do you know who I am?” she whispers through lips flecked with devil ichor. “You do. Tell your master to ply his trade elsewhere, and tell his master to submit to a sage, live a life of piety and repentance. Make this happen, demon, or I shall travel to your realm and end not only you but your entire clan.”
Her fist tightens. A burst of gore. The fiend’s spirit leaps through its mouth in a green-black mist, speeding toward the governor’s estate.Houyi finds herself, without meaning to, on her knees. Beneath her the broken earth is saturated crimson.
Chang’e comes, bow in hand, and presses herself against Houyi as though by sheer determination she can staunch the blood and dull the pain.
“I am,” Houyi murmurs, “mortal now.”
By the next hour she has begun to age.
* * *
Ascending Mount Kunlun, where virtue dwells, is simplicity itself to gods. To mortals it is different, not journey but pilgrimage, to seek what they have not, to petition for what they believe is the desire of their hearts. At the mount’s foot, a town has sprung up.
The home of Chang’e’s brother is months past, and the quiet disbelief of her mother likewise. Shouldering the weight of a bloodied, tornHouyi home, Chang’e stammered to her mother finally that they were not companions or–what Yunping wanted to think–goddess and acolyte, but something else entirely different. That there is a reason they share their room. That their marriage, however distant now, was blessed by Guanyinherself, and shouldn’t that have been good enough?
Chang’e desperately misses the indifference of paradise. If their marriage was not celebrated, if Tianmu found it disquieting, if the emperor had winced at its mention–it was still preferable to this, this crushing grief she cannot understand, the disappointment of her mother. Who will care for you in your old age? And she said, We will care for each other, Mother, and my niece will burn houses and gold for us but it did no good.
A servant listening at the door: in that same night her brother screamed at themGet out, no matter her pleading that her wife was wounded, near death. Is she not of heaven? Little liar. Unnatural whore. They beat Houyi while Chang’e fought, costing one of his men an eye; only byYunping’s begging was Chang’e spared. When they were finally done they dragged Houyi by the hair and flung her out.
All that is behind, but it is so raw and she cannot ask Houyi for comfort. Houyi who knows hunger and despair for the first time, who lay broken for so long, and ages months in a day.
The town itself is small, as yet nameless though many nicknames have been thought up and hung under eaves. Being where it is lets it prosper, profiting from aspirants hoping to scale Mount Kunlun and gain the attention of a sage, to become ones themselves. Being where it is makes it a target too: too many men, and not a few women, of the world believe that great deeds will raise them to ascendance, and what greater deeds than saving cities and villages from malicious beasts? Vengeance-hounded they come to the bottom of Kunlun, and vengeance-hounded they bring with them collections of teeth and talons, maws and mandibles like butcher-hooks. Sometimes the aspirants are adequate to meeting them. Sometimes they are wanting. In the first week of their stay alone Houyi has killed five threats. A few, realizing who she is, keep their distance from the town–a phenomenon that doesn’t go unnoticed by the barbers, hoteliers and traders. They give the couple board, food, shoes. A tailor brings them clothes: brocade gown and sash-pendants for Chang’e and, never asking why, men’s robes and trousers for Houyi.
“They adore you,” Chang’e tells her wife as they attend a dinner cooked exquisitely by a widower living in the shop under their room. Soup thick with crab meat, soft bean curd in hot paste and diced shrimp, turnip cakes fried crisp and brown. Lavish, but the town is grateful.
“I despise what I have become.”
Chang’e’s breath hitches. “Mortal?”
“No.” Houyi gazes into the liquid red of her tea. “Afraid.”
She liberates the cup from Houyi’s unresisting fingers, and takes the woman who was a god into her arms. “It doesn’t make you weak,Houyi. Even gods are afraid. Do you remember the looks on their faces when the suns rose? They were deathly frightened, even the emperor.”
“He was born mortal.”
“I am mortal. I’ve always been. If I’ve learned anything in so short a life it is that fear keeps you alive and coaches you to survive. You are still Houyi the Archer and you save people, and you are the woman I love without limits or conditions.”
Houyi lowers her head to the crook of Chang’e’s neck, pressing her mouth to her wife’s skin: acknowledges the transience of the beating pulse that reflects her own. “Thank you.”
She has not said why it is that they have come to this town and Chang’e was too relieved to escape her brother’s to ask: any destination would have done, so long as it was away.
But now there is a box, which Houyi unearths from the untidy collection that is her belongings: the lid is ivory, carved into a likeness ofHouyi’s house. She opens it–there is no lock save the trust that lies between wives–and lays down the feathers, sleek and black, warm and huge. On each is calligraphy so atrocious it can only have been written with talon-tips. The sun-crow, last of his kind, must have balanced himself precariously: two legs for his weight, the third dripping ink and poised over his own feathers spread out like manuscript pages.
The first reads, We both grieve.
The second reads, more confidently, It was for love that we rose.
Our father said, in passing only, that he would like to see his sons in their utterness subsuming the sky. He thought us our mother’s but never his–and what belongs to Dijun must be Dijun’s alone: you will have become wise of this, we’ve watched you turn by turn. None of us wished to forsake our mother, but we were hungry, so hungry, for his affection. It’s the nature of crows to be greedy. So on that day we decided, what harm could it do? We pulled one another, for without Mother’s chariot the ascent is difficult, and thought we would present ourselves as our father wanted. A moment. It would not hurt anyone.
But it was bright and sweet, and made us drunk. To burn together! As never before, and never again. We did not think. That is why we did not listen when you called to us until our eldest brother died, and then what was there to do but fight, in grief, in fury?
Death was a stranger, to us, to me. To my mother too. She’s never lost, in her absoluteness, her self-contained grace.
The final one is small, half the size of a hand, and says only, I do not ask forgiveness, as you have asked for none. Some things are beyond forgiving and absolving.
“We must bring this to His Majesty,” Chang’e says, though she hasn’t the remotest idea how. Mortals do not petition the celestial monarch, not directly, and who would sponsor Houyi? Not the final sun-crow. “How did these come to you?”
“Falling from the sky at dusk, one by one. I’d have shown them to you, but I wanted to be sure. To have the entire tale.” Houyi puts them back and shuts the box. “I’ve done enough harm to them. To take this to His Majesty will press him to punish the crow. But knowing, for a certainty now, that Dijun did as he did–it is not right, it is not just.”
“It never was, Houyi. There must be an authority to which you can appeal.”
“I mean to ascend Kunlun. Xiwangmu rules there and she has… treasures. I don’t think she will send us back to heaven, but she may grant us life everlasting.”
Chang’e’s pulse leaps. She cannot lie to herself that immortality is a luxury she’s never coveted but, “She will not give it freely.”
“We will earn it. Or I shall. You don’t have to. We wouldn’t be here in the first place if I hadn’t been–”
“Ridiculous but heartbreakingly earnest. W
hy else would I have consented to be yours? I will come with you, and we will do this together.”Chang’e brushes Houyi’s eyelid, lips to lashes, and does not tell her that back in heaven this plagued her: the gulf between them, the eternity that would be Houyi’s by right and hers never. “I will not say no to forever by your side, wandering and witnessing the world. Only make me one promise.”
“I would promise you anything.”
“When we have obtained this miracle, we find Dijun and settle the score.”
Houyi’s smile, which has become rarer than opals, is like the dawn. “You are not frightened of confronting the father of suns?”
“You were not frightened of refusing him. In all the heavens, and all the earth, there’s no woman braver than you.”
They share a laugh, and share a meal, and taste the desserts on the tips of each other’s tongue.
The paths to the summit of Kunlun are many, and a hundred times again as many maps chart the ways. In that little town the maps are sold, scrolls plain and gilded, striated like elephant hide and utter white, held in bamboo and silver tubes. Adventurous entrepreneurs extend the reach of their commerce through Kunlun’s roads, peddling liquor and glutinous rice, dried fruits and hundred-year eggs. Not a few used to be aspirants but, either in failure or realization, find fulfillment instead through the exchange of coins, in the trade of tales, and the wistful watching of others climbing the mount as they used to do.
There are rivers of fire, waterfalls of blades, and half-seen moths which sip breath and life from the ears of sleeping travelers. Kunlun, even a glimpse, must be purchased by torn flesh and shattered teeth, and blood like black pearls glinting in the night.
Houyi and Chang’e guard one another as flesh guards bone, burning tallow to lure and scorch the moths. When they fell a monster of hard hide they skin it, and sew it into armor against waterfalls. In deep pits they find aspirant carcasses, faces papered in yellow talismans, leaping futilely in death to an escape just out of reach. Houyi lights a torch and frees them from flesh and memory. Chang’e salvages their bones, fire-toughened, to fashion into raft and pole with which to cross the rivers that rise and ebb without rhythm or warning.
It makes them sharp, Kunlun; it is feral, for all its proximity to the virtuous court, and lessons them in wildness. A world is born between them where only they exist–Chang’e and Houyi, Houyi and Chang’e. Traders that they meet at all, for they avoid the mapped and trodden roads, are irrelevant. Sometimes conveniences, other times momentary irritants. Every few days one of them would have to remind her wife, We seekXiwangmu and her treasures, which are said to confer unending life.
The air thins to needlepoints in their lungs and the rivers turn to rime. It is difficult to breathe, but the stairway that leads to the home ofXiwangmu shimmers in the distance: reachable, if only just. Out of an unspoken agreement they stop to gaze upon it, long and long, for thoughXiwangmu’s house is not quite heaven, neither is it of mortals. And what will it be like to taste that air again, sleep under that sky, which looms beyond the one that men and women of the earth see, that roof of the world?
Making their way upward they fast, subsisting on bitter ice-water and each other’s heat: to gain entry to Xiwangmu’s home necessitates purification. Memories of rich warm food wear down until they are as thin and colorless as the cracked brittle road beneath their feet. They hold onto one another, charm against forgetting and hunger. Hand in hand they whisper the other’s name. They do not rest. Only the winds remain, and their hair crusted in frost whipping in the snow.
It is a lifetime, to mount the steps which are steep as walls and half again as tall. They cut apart monster hide and with it wrap their hands, their feet; even so each foothold and handhold draws blood, and the steps hoard every drop. Chill pulls at their eyes, draws tears that freeze on their cheeks as fast as they bead.
When they crest the topmost, the final step, the sky has changed and it is autumn. They are sinew, then, and bone: pushed and pulled by will, held up by the strength of one another’s arms.
Xiwangmu waits for them on the steps of her house, which is only a house, no larger than the needs of a woman content with her own company. Her fingertips are stained brown with soil; across her lap is a broom, its bristles tangled in twigs and leaves, moth wings and spider webs. She wears no regalia, no finery. Heaven’s empress could have been the wife of a merchant or a reclusive scholar.
“I know why you have come,” she says, “but that will wait. Inside: you will want something hot and balanced, and full of colors.”
There is no meat at Xiwangmu’s table, but it little matters. Chang’e and Houyi eat with the delicacy of those too long famished, without appetite, in bites they do not taste and sips they do not feel: hunger has infiltrated their arteries and it is easier to tolerate than to outright cure. If there are parameters and rules to what they should and should not touch, they are not told. When their hunger, conditioned into briefness by fasting, is sated the empress gives them steamed cakes dusted with sesame and studded in dried lychee. She offers tangerines in red papers that tell them it is the new year. Sweetness goes down easier.
“I know why you have come,” Xiwangmu repeats, “and I am willing to grant that which you desire, for it was taken from one of youunrightly.”
“It was never mine,” Chang’e says, and wishes she had not.
“You have equally earned the way: I will not grant it to one and deny the other. In return I ask for one favor. A mortal woman who served me passed and left in her wake an orphan son, Fengmeng. I would do her a good turn. Teach him the bow.”
The archer flexes her fingers, surprised to find them supple again so soon, stair-cuts turned to scars. The food was more than food, and the sweets more than a magic of fruit and flour. Beside her Chang’e grows quiet. “I have only ever taught my wife, Majesty. It seems trivial, that is true, and more than a fair exchange, but–”
“It is a favor, not a requirement.” Xiwangmu draws from her sleeve a casket no larger than her hand, and places it before the couple. “Within this is a single pill, the last of its kind. In its entirety it will tender divinity, if not acceptance at my husband’s palace, and deny death. Take half each and it will suspend: though it won’t heal flesh already broken, it will give you eternity side by side.”
Houyi’s hand hesitates over the casket. “Majesty.”
“Your loss of immortality came of your own doing, Houyi, of your arrogance. But you are only a child and making mistakes is what children do. My husband never interrogated Dijun, and that’s a galling lack of foresight. Take the pill, but delay its swallowing. It’s been made in a certain way, not meant for unpurified mortals, and it will take six turns of the moon breathing Kunlun before you are immune to its venom.”
Knowing exactly how acute her wife’s sense of duty can be, Chang’e makes herself speak. “Is there nothing I can offer, Majesty?”
“Were you not already a wife, and were I my husband, I would have demanded that you allowed Fengmeng to court you.” Xiwangmu rufflesChang’e's hair. “You are a good child. Once you have gained your wish, find your mother and tell her you are well. That you are happy. Whatever she might have felt at your marriage, it is the terror of all mothers to think their children dead.”
Inevitably Houyi agrees to train Fengmeng: the archer finds herself unable to accept Xiwangmu’s gift for nothing. He is a child of Kunlun, reserved and straining to look wise, and ought to have been taken as someone’s apprentice. The empress chooses otherwise. He must prove himself, like any other, and he cannot do that without being sent into the world to live. “So many ascendants are too young,” Xiwangmu tellsChang’e, “and I do not mean their years.”
The archer is not a lenient mentor. She forces Fengmeng away from the summit and makes him practice on the banks of burning rivers, tells him to aim at the leaping dead, pits him against ancient monsters. Xiwangmu has granted Houyi a seal with her name upon it, which lets the archer return to the empress’
house in a single step. But in the first week she informs Fengmeng he must climb the stairway, as though a petitioner. If Xiwangmu thinks this harsh she does not remark upon it. Fengmeng clenches his jaw and does as he is bidden.
Chang’e wheedles Xiwangmu into letting her pass onto girl petitioners what she’s gained from her own living and what she’s gained fromHouyi. Difficult at first, for she’s little older than her pupils, even younger than some. Understanding is established slowly, respect slower, and eventually a connection emerges. Not quite the prescribed one of mistress and students, but no less true for that.
It occupies her and makes her happier, though she still paces the confines of the room Xiwangmu has given them, and stands at the edge of Kunlun’s summit to watch for her wife’s return. It is so easy to wait, an old habit of hers, from childhood to near-bride to serving Tianmu: and she remembers too how her brothers were the ones sent out to learn letters and make things, to apprentice and seize more than they were born with, while she waited to marry. Waiting, her mother educated her, is a woman’s lot. Waiting for a groom, waiting for a husband, waiting for a child to be born.
It is the first thing she tells her aspirants: You do not have to wait. Do what you must if they are necessary to keep your mothers or sisters warm and fed, but do not wait for luck or unluck to come to you. The second is: If, when, you ascend seek out Xiangu, Guanyin, Tianmu. There is protection, of a sort, and you may find it easier to be.
She observes Fengmeng, too, and what she sees indents her brow into a frown. “He is obsessed with your teaching,” she remarks as they undress for the night. Climbing Kunlun they have had to swathe themselves in layers of fabric, hide, worse; they have sorely missed heat sealed between the curves of their bodies, the immediacy of bare skin.
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