To the Sky Kingdom

by Tang Qi

  I was feeling quite choked up too, and my heart was very heavy.

  Zhe Yan asked me if I would like to stay over at the peach grove. I thanked him for his kind invitation, but declined. I asked instead for a big handful of health recovery and energy supplement pills, and with the clear moon up above me, I climbed onto a cloud. Zhe Yan had already given Ye Hua all the treatment he could, and he tried to convince me to stay in the peach grove, saying there was nothing else I could do to help his recovery. But I just wanted to be there to look after Ye Hua. Even if there was nothing particularly useful I could do, I just wanted to be there by his side, tending to him.

  I cast a spell and turned myself into a moth to avoid the sky soldiers and napping tigers at the Southern Sky Gate. I spent a long time trying to remember the way to Ye Hua’s Zichen Palace and eventually flapped my way through the gates.

  Zichen Palace was in complete darkness when I arrived. I fell to the floor, accidently knocking over a stool, which landed on its side with a loud clunk. The palace was immediately flooded in light. I saw Ye Hua sitting up in bed, wearing a white silk gown, giving me a curious look. I had only seen him wearing his black cloak, and seeing him in this flimsy white silk gown, well, it did something to me. And his jet-black hair hanging loose, oh yes, that did something to me as well.

  He stared at me for a while and then frowned. “Aren’t you meant to be looking after the oldest prince of the Western Sea?” he asked. The way he was frowning had a strong effect on me too.

  I gave a nervous laugh. “De Yong is just fine,” I said calmly. “When I was down there tying up the loose ends of this Western Sea affair, I started thinking about your injured arm. I worried that you might find it difficult to hold your teacup steady when you’re pouring hot water, so I decided to come back and help look after you.”

  He gave me an even more puzzled look, followed by a slight smile, and then shifted over to the edge of the bed saying, “Come here, Qian Qian.”

  His voice was so deep that it made my ears turn red. “That’s probably not a good idea,” I said with a cough. “Why don’t I go to Dumpling’s bed and squeeze in there with him instead? You have a proper rest, and I’ll come back over and see you tomorrow.” I turned around, about to slip out, but before I had got past Ye Hua’s door, the entire hall descended into pitch darkness. I lost my footing and knocked over that same stool again.

  Suddenly Ye Hua was behind me with his arm around me. “Now I can only hug with one arm, so if you don’t like it, you can always struggle free,” he said.

  In the past when Mother was instructing me on how to be a good wife, she had mentioned a husband and wife’s boudoir etiquette, and this situation in particular. She explained that when a girl first became a wife and her husband came to her seeking pleasure, she should delicately push him away at first. That way he would see her as a restrained girl to be cherished.

  I had thought that my little cough had been a delicate yet clear expression of refusal. But it seemed that Ye Hua had not taken it very seriously. Unfortunately Mother never taught me what to do if this recently married girl’s husband did not accept her delicate refusal, and how she might continue to maintain the impression that she was a restrained girl to be cherished.

  Ye Hua’s loose hair brushed against my ear, tickling it and making me flustered. I quietly turned around and returned his hug. “If I stay, do you agree to stay on your half of your bed?”

  He coughed, and smiled. “With your lithe figure, you won’t take up half the bed.”

  I gave him a coy little push and fumbled for the edge of the bed. I hesitated before deciding to take off my cloak. I lifted up the corner of the bed quilt and lay down inside. I retreated toward the wall and pulled the cloud quilt over, covering myself. I waited until Ye Hua had joined me in the bed before retreating even farther against the wall.

  He used his one able arm to hook me and nimbly pulled back the cloud quilt covering my body. He took hold of a corner of the quilt and yanked it toward him, whipping it off me completely.

  Although it was a midsummer night in early Lunar July, it was chilly in the Ninth Sky. I put my cloak back on. If I spent the whole night like this, it would not be me looking after Ye Hua the next morning, but rather him looking after me.

  Maintaining my dignity was not something that overly concerned me. I nudged a bit closer to him and closer still. He turned around to face the edge of the bed, and I moved in closer still.

  I continued moving toward him. He turned back around facing me, and I nudged myself right into his arms. He hugged me with his left hand, saying, “Would you rather spend the night sleeping soundly in my arms with the quilt over you, or hunched in the corner without the quilt?”

  Slightly surprised, I said, “We can both sleep hunched in the corner with the quilt over us.” As soon as I said this, I wondered if there was something wrong with my brain.

  Hugging me, he gave a quiet laugh. “Not a bad idea.”

  We spent the night cuddled up, a pair of lovebirds squeezed up against the wall. It may have been a bit squished, but I slept very soundly leaning against Ye Hua’s chest. Within my sleepy haze, I thought I heard him say, “You know, your personality is exactly the same as before. You still can’t accept anything from others.”

  I gave some vague answer from within my dreamy state. Seeing him had given me partial reassurance, and I slept so soundly that I cannot remember what my response was.

  In the middle of the night, he started to cough violently, and I was woken up with a jolt. He crept quietly out of bed, tucking the quilt back in at the corners for me, and then hurriedly pushed open the palace doors and went outside. I listened carefully to his coughing fit outside the palace hall. He was obviously trying to cough quietly, and if not for my sharp fox ears, and the attention I was paying, I probably would not have heard him. I stroked the place in the bed next to me where he had just been lying, a sudden welling of sadness in my chest.

  He spent some time calming himself down outside before returning to me. I pretended to be asleep, obviously quite convincingly, as he pulled back the quilt and lay back down without seeming to be aware that I was awake. I could smell the faint salty scent of blood. I lay against him, and once I sensed that he had fallen back to sleep, I nuzzled into his arms and reached out an arm to hug him. I was overcome by sorrow, such deep sorrow. And with that in my heart, I gradually drifted off.

  The next day when I awoke, I could not see any sign of his illness. I almost started to doubt all the sorrow, joy, worry, and concern I had felt the day before and wondered if the whole thing had been no more than a haunting dream.

  But I knew that it had been no dream.

  Being with Ye Hua had made me start to really miss Dumpling. I had heard that there was a religious assembly to be held on Spirit Mountain over the next few days, where Gautama Buddha would be hosting a forum to spread Buddhist teachings and enlighten all beings. Cheng Yu would be taking Dumpling to attend these activities.

  I was concerned that the religious atmosphere in the Western Paradise would be too austere for a boy Dumpling’s age and that he might get quite bored, but Ye Hua disagreed. “He’s only going to the Western Paradise so he can eat Spirit Mountain sugarcane. And anyway, Cheng Yu is there to look after him. Even if the other immortals behind the altar get so bored they fall asleep, Ali will be just fine.”

  I decided he knew what he was talking about. Ye Hua’s complexion had not yet returned to normal. Zhe Yan had told me that his right arm had been bitten off completely and the new arm was not yet functional. Every time I saw it, I felt hugely upset, but I knew I had to keep it to myself. Meanwhile he acted as if he was not the slightest bit concerned. News of his injury had reached all the officers, from the highest-ranking Ninth Sky Emperor to the ninth-rank immortal officers, and as a result, over the last few days, no one had come to bother him with trifling matters, leaving him unusually carefree.

  I was worried about Ye Hua’s injury and wanted to st
ay near him for the time being. Concentrated Beauty was a fair distance from Zichen Palace, not as near as Qingyun Palace, and besides, I felt strange staying where Ye Hua’s first wife had lived. I decided to move in with Dumpling at Qingyun Palace for a while. It probably violated some Sky Palace regulation or other, but understanding that I was from a wild place like Qingqiu, the immortal attendants let it pass and made me up a bed in Qingyun Palace.

  I got out of bed very early for the first few mornings and braved the predawn darkness, using my hands to guide me all the way to Ye Hua’s Zichen Palace. Once there I would help him dress and we would eat breakfast together. Because I had not woken up this early for many tens of thousands of years, I gave the occasional sleepy yawn as we were eating.

  A few mornings later, I had just managed to pry myself from sleep and prepared to make my bleary-eyed way over to Zichen Palace. But when I opened my eyes, I suddenly saw Ye Hua there, propped up in bed beside me, reading a book. My head was resting on his immobile right arm while his left arm held a scroll of marching combat tactical deployment diagrams. He saw that I was awake and turned the page, saying, “It’s not light outside yet. Sleep some more. I’ll wake you when it’s time to get up.”

  I am ashamed to say that from that moment forth, I no longer had to fumble my way through the darkness to his palace each morning. Instead, he was the one to rise early and come into Dumpling’s palace, and as a matter of course, breakfast was relocated to Qingyun Palace too.

  Those Sky Palace days were spent in a similar way to how we had spent our time in Qingqiu. Following breakfast, we would take a walk together and then head to his study, where we would brew two pots of tea. He would get on with his things, while I would get on with mine. When night fell we would play a game or two of chess by the flicker of candlelight.

  Every so often the medicine prince would visit Xiwu Palace, but he never said anything in front of me. Running into him reminded me of Ye Hua’s injuries, and so I did not much enjoy his visits. Apart from that, I found everything very pleasant. I was at the age that I no longer had clear access to memories from my youth, but I knew that being with Li Jing had never given me the happiness and wholeness that I was experiencing now.

  Despite my advanced years, the lack of peach blossom experience in my younger life meant that I had all these romantic sentiments and notions: things I had read in poems that I had stored up and never had a chance to do. Now that these feelings had been stirred up inside me, I allowed myself the occasional daydream about how it would feel to wander under the moonlight with Ye Hua or frolic amid the flowers together.

  But Xiwu Palace was much higher up than the moon, and if the two of us had wanted to moon gaze together, we would have to do so by looking down past our feet. If we were lucky we would see the moon, but we would have no chance to bask under it and have its soft light shine down onto our bodies, creating a hazy, dreamlike mood. So lofty activities like composing poems under the moon were out of the question; I had to just swallow down my disappointment and give up on the notion. Luckily when Ye Hua and I took our strolls, we would pass many different types of flowers and shrubs, so we had more or less frolicked in the flowers.

  When Ye Hua used to drag me off for our early morning walks back in Qingqiu, our circuit of the pond and the bamboo forest near the foxhole mainly consisted of him asking me what I wanted for lunch. We would discuss what we were going to eat in great detail, and when we passed Mystic Gorge’s thatched hut, we would call out for him and give him a list of ingredients to get us.

  Ye Hua did not have to worry about cooking for us in the Sky Kingdom, so now when we strolled, Ye Hua would ask me about the play script I had read the day before instead. Usually I raced through these frothy books, seeing them as nothing but a way to pass the time, and as soon as I had finished one, I would forget everything about it, including the female protagonist’s name. All that I was left with was a vague idea about what kind of story it had been.

  But since Ye Hua had started taking an interest, I became more attentive when reading these scripts, making sure that I would be able to recount the story for him the next day. After a few days of retelling these stories as we strolled along, I decided I had a talent for it.

  On the seventh of July, the Spirit Mountain’s Buddhist assembly came to an end, and that meant Dumpling would be on his way back to the Sky Palace. There was a cool breeze blowing that evening, and the fragrance from the osmanthus flowers on the moon that had opened early this year floated all the way to the Ninth Sky.

  I sat with Ye Hua in the Jade Pool pavilion. There were a few lanterns hanging up inside, and a tung oil lamp had been placed on the marble table. Ye Hua was holding his pen in his left hand and drawing a tactical deployment diagram under the lamplight.

  I had studied tactical deployment for twenty thousand years during my Mount Kunlun apprenticeship and was proud to have excelled way beyond my results for Taoist studies, Buddhist studies, and all the other studies I detested and finished at the top of the class. But whenever I saw a tactical deployment diagram nowadays, it did not just give me a headache, but an allover body ache. I sat for a while admiring the way Ye Hua held his pen before leaning to the side of the pavilion bench, closing my eyes, and letting my mind wander.

  As soon as I closed my eyes I heard a clear, melodious child’s voice floating over from the distance. “Mother! Mother!” Dumpling was calling. I stood up and looked. Sure enough there he was, wearing a lustrous jade-green tunic and hauling what looked like a rather heavy cloth bag over his left shoulder.

  The weight of the cloth bag made him walk in a zigzag path. When Ye Hua saw him, he stopped working on his diagram and walked over to the pavilion steps to have a look. I got up from the pavilion bench and strolled over to watch too. “Mother!” Dumpling shouted out again from a hundred or so paces away. I called out in response.

  He lowered his plump little body and squatted down so that he could slowly and carefully lift the cloth bag off his back and onto the ground. He lifted a little hand and wiped the sweat from his face, shouting, “Mother, Mother! Ali has brought you some sugarcane from Spirit Mountain. I chopped it down myself!

  “I chose the biggest and thickest sugarcane to chop down,” he added, giving a proud giggle. He turned around and grabbed the top of the cloth bag so that none of the sugarcane could fall out, and straining his whole body, he dragged it step by step up to where we were.

  I was about to go and help him, but Ye Hua stopped me. “Let him bring it over himself.”

  All my attention was on Dumpling, and I did not even notice that he was not alone until I saw a figure flash out from behind a bush of some flower I have forgotten the name of. This person was carrying a cloth bag as well, only his was much smaller than Dumpling’s.

  He took a couple of steps toward us, and under the soft, glowing light of the lantern, I saw his beautiful little pale face staring across blankly.

  “Cheng Yu, Cheng Yu, this is my mother,” Dumpling shouted from behind. “See, isn’t she beautiful?”

  So this beautiful pale face belonged to Cheng Yu, the god who dared to defy the power of the mighty and pluck hairs from a tiger’s tail.

  Cheng Yu stood there staring blankly at me for ages. Then he reached out and pinched my thigh. While I was grimacing from the pain, he turned to Ye Hua. “Your Majesty,” he said tentatively, “may I please touch the empress?”

  Ye Hua gave a cough. I was startled. Cheng Yu wore a broad gown with wide sleeves, a man’s attire, but his voice was soft and gentle, and the flesh of his chest rose and fell in a very unboyish way. I had done my fair share of cross-dressing over the years, and my wisdom and experience told me that this Cheng Yu was actually a girl.

  Before Ye Hua had a chance to respond, Dumpling had huffed and puffed his way over. He stood in front of me, defending me from Cheng Yu. He raised his head in a defiant way and said, “Didn’t Third Grandfather cure you of this bad habit? Why do you have to touch everything new and interes
ting you come across? My mother belongs to my father. He’s the only one who can touch her. You’re not allowed.”

  Ye Hua chuckled, while I gave a cough.

  Cheng Yu’s face turned green, and sounding aggrieved, she said, “She’s the first goddess I’ve ever seen. What would be the harm in just touching her?”

  Dumpling gave a disgruntled snort. Cheng Yu, still sounding aggrieved, said, “I’ll just touch her once and only for a second, surely you couldn’t object to that?” Dumpling continued giving a series of disgruntled snorts.

  Cheng Yu pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and used it to wipe her eyes. “I soared up to the Sky Palace to be an immortal when I was still so young. His Third Majesty works me so hard, and I am constantly tired. I have so many years of dreariness ahead with nothing to look forward to. The only wish I’ve ever had was to see and to touch a goddess. It’s such a modest wish. How cruel Si Ming has been to keep me from satisfying it.”

  She looked so miserable you might have thought her parents had just died. My brain was turning. I assumed the person Cheng Yu had called His Third Majesty was the same person Dumpling had just called Third Grandfather and that it must be Sang Ji’s younger brother and Ye Hua’s third uncle, Prince Lian Song.

  Dumpling’s mouth flattened in annoyance. He looked first at me, then at his father, hesitating for a while before saying, “Okay, you can touch her, but only once.”

  Ye Hua glanced at Cheng Yu, and then returned to the marble table to continue with his tactical diagrams. Before he picked up his pen, he issued the soft words: “Not only do you have the gall to take any liberties with my wife in front of my face, you also trick our son into giving you permission. You’ve really surpassed yourself this time, Cheng Yu.”

  Before she had even touched the seam of my robe, Cheng Yu’s excitedly extended hand dropped obediently back down to her side.

  Dumpling dragged his heavy cloth bag all the way up into the pavilion, and he stood there with a serious expression on his face as he unfastened it. It was indeed filled with sugarcane, cut into sections. He picked out a particularly succulent section and handed it to me, then picked out another just as succulent for his father. But Ye Hua was holding the pen in his left hand, and because his right hand had no function, he was unable to take the sugarcane.