Erin Eisenhour - [BCS308 S02]

by The Black-Eyed Goddess of Apple Trees

  “It’s not so bad,” she said again, seeking out my hand with her own. A smile tugged at her lips. “At least not so bad as it looks. Anyway, it’s easy for me to go because I know he won’t be alone. You had me and... he’ll have you.”

  My mouth opened, closed. I wanted to pull away, but I couldn’t unclasp my hand from hers. Something cool and slimy unspooled in my stomach and I couldn’t figure out why. This moment—the dying moment—was nothing I hadn’t seen before in tales told by puppets and on folded paper, tales told with relish by my own lips to any willing (or unwilling) ear near enough to listen.

  “Bi, you promise, don’t you?” she said. “To love him as I would have loved him?”

  She could have asked me a thousand things; demanded a thousand feats, each more fantastical than the next. One word from her and I would journey across strange seas to the edge of the world, sing and dance until my feet bled and fell off, grow flowers so big and bursting with color and fragrance that even the gods in their heavenly gardens looked on them with envy. But instead I watched her expend precious minutes asking again and again for the one thing that would always be impossible.

  “Of course she does,” my mother sweeps in, taking my sister’s other hand. “We both do.”

  Vaguely I remember nodding. At the time, it was the best I could do.

  When a hand is pressed over my mouth, my instinctive reaction is to clamp my teeth down on that hand—hard.

  “Hey—ouch! Bi, it’s me.”

  The dull outline of a face emerges from the darkness. “Hulin?” I croak.

  “Don’t talk,” Hulin whispers as he drags me to my feet. He throws a heavy shawl over my bony shoulders and ushers me out into the hall. My feet stumble over the uneven stones, over the slumped form of the other guard who is supposed to be on watch tonight. I rub at my eyes still heavy with sleep, as if to clear away the fog hanging over my brain and keeping me from asking any sensible questions.

  “Hulin, where are we—”

  “Shh,” he hisses, pressing a hand to my mouth.

  But by the time we reach the Pantheon’s hall, I throw it off. “Hulin, what the hell is this?”

  He blinks at me as if it’s obvious. “We’re running away.”

  “Running away?” I’m suddenly conscious of the cold stare of a hundred dead divine eyes forming a circle around us. Moonlight cuts through the open windows, painting pale streaks across faces once beatific that are now twisted, distorted, grotesque.

  “It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” Hulin says and grins. “Just like the stories. But we don’t have much time before the others realize—”

  “I can’t.”

  He grips me by the shoulders. “Bi, it’s nearly the full moon. We’re out of time.”

  “Hulin, wait.” My feet slide across the tiles as he drags me across the hall. I yank at his hand. “Stop! Stop or I’ll... I’ll scream!”

  He rounds on me, leveling his eyes with mine. “What is holding you back?”

  “I don’t know,” I whisper. “I—I just can’t—not after—”

  Over his shoulders, the Jade Empress returns my stare. Red ribbons twine about her fingers—to simulate the moment she pulled Nu out from between her legs with her own two hands, since Wei-Li certainly didn’t stick around to do it. They match the red curl of her smile.

  Hulin’s expression softens. “It’s your mother, isn’t it? She’s gone, Bi. And I know she meant a lot to you, but you meant more to her. Wouldn’t she want you to get out if you could? To live on, like the ox-eyed lovers—”

  “But life isn’t like the stories,” I cut in. “You can’t take another volume off the shelf when you tire of the first, can’t bind it up with ribbons when the pages start to fall out—”

  Hulin yanks me toward him and presses his mouth against mine. Several seconds pass before I realize that we are kissing; at first I can only register the sensation as vaguely wet. When Hulin pulls away his face is flushed and his gaze certain. He frowns when he doesn’t see the same expression in mine.

  “Like I said,” I say quietly. “Not like the stories.”

  “How sweet,” calls a familiar voice. We jerk apart as the shaman emerges from the Steward’s broad shadow. The black pits beneath his tired eyes extend the pupils, making them impossibly dark, drowning out the amber. He still wears his daytime robes, the corded belt with the bamboo rod knotted about his narrow waist. At his signal, the rest of the guards file through the far door, forming a tight ring around the perimeter of the room.

  “How very sweet,” the shaman says again as he eyes each silent statue. His lips twist into a smile, or perhaps a sneer. “But perhaps inappropriate for our present company, don’t you think?”

  With an accompanying chink Hulin whips his sword free of its scabbard.

  “Don’t,” I say, tugging at his hand, but he pushes me behind him, brows pressed together in fierce concentration. For the first time, I believe that he actually knows how to use his weapon.

  The shaman’s tongue slips across his lips. “This will not end like you think.”

  “Please.” I give Hulin’s hand another desperate pull. “Don’t do this. Not for me, not for—”

  “Stay behind me,” Hulin says, his sword arm steady. He mutters a prayer to Nu, though I can’t tell if he is invoking him as patron of youth or patron of untimely death.

  “Shit,” I mutter, and the familiar far wall has never looked so flat, so final, “Shit—”

  I cut myself short. Something small and red in a statue’s cupped hand catches my eye. Wedged between Lei and a much more subdued interpretation of Chengzi cut from white marble is the figure of a woman carved from a deep, rich cedar wood that I don’t remember being there before. She wears an impish, self-satisfied smile. I can’t tell what the red thing in her hands is, but on closer inspection I see that her eyes are black pearls, twin pools of deep liquid black.

  Breaking free of Hulin’s grip, I glide across the tiled floor, transfixed. The shaman’s eyes dart between me and the wooden face of this strange god whose name I can’t seem to recall. But as the distance between us halves, then quarters, I realize it doesn’t matter. There is something in the contours of her face—in the faint crow’s feet on either side of her eyes, in that sly smile—that I recognize just as I would my father’s loping gait at a distance or the bruised back of my hand. This face is older and I like to think wiser, but it is still my own face staring back at me.

  I study the fine wrinkles that line the mouth, moving down to the folds of her robe, the sleeves pushed up past her elbows. Someone has placed a red apple in the statue’s hands, which are curled close to her chest. An offering, I suppose. I pick it up, rubbing at the waxy skin with the corner of my sleeve, and laugh aloud because there is something my mother was always trying to tell me that now I finally understand.

  As I turn the apple over I murmur, “You’ll look after him, won’t you?”

  The black-eyed goddess stares serenely back at me.

  “Good. That’s good.” I turn to the shaman. “The moon is full?”

  “Waning gibbous,” he corrects with a dignified sniff, as if I hadn’t already made up my mind about him being an insufferable prick.

  “Full enough,” I say coldly and raise the apple to my lips. In the moment that follows the only sounds are the gentle ksh-ksh of the wind in the trees outside, the groan of the rafters overhead, and my own furious chewing as I take bite after bite. The shaman is too bewildered to scold me for snacking on sacrificial fruit, which I suppose, in my case, is a bit like cannibalism. His jaw twitches as he watches me return the apple core to the statue’s waiting hands and wipe my sticky palms on my shift.

  “Thank you,” I murmur to the statue, and then to the shaman, “Do you know the story of the Nuying Woman and the old apple tree?”

  He blinks. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him at a loss for words. “I... faintly recall it.”

  I slump against the base of Chengzi’s like
ness, resting my head on a bulging calf muscle. A bit of apple skin is caught between my teeth. I pry it out with two fingers.

  “Well,” I begin, only a little smug, “the Nuying Woman is a practical person. Not prone to sentimentality. So, of course, she marries a farmer.” I grimace slightly at the funny taste of bitter fruit at the back of my mouth. “Anyhow, skip ahead a few decades and she’s lying on her deathbed and she can’t help but think how depressing a place a coffin is—just four walls and a bit of damp earth—as if death wasn’t already enough of a nuisance—”

  I frown down at my chest where the skin has begun to ripple and bubble at the surface. “You know, I’ll just cut to the chase. The farmer fetches a nice, sturdy paring knife and... and...”

  The shaman’s eyes dart between my face and the statue. Suddenly they triple in size. “No,” he rasps. “Not her. The gods can’t choose her. Anyone but her—”

  A cry, a shout, the rush of slippered feet on cold stone floors. Before I can tip over onto the ground a dozen hands hold me aloft. Eventually they set me down in a small, square chamber that I do not recognize. A hole has been cut into the ceiling, letting a bit of pale, watery moonlight leak in. My stomach roils as something inside strains to get out, like tiny fists beating against the underside of my sternum. Voices pass over me, tripping over one another in their panic, though the shaman is loudest of all.

  “The moon—look—it’s too early—”

  “There’s no time—”

  “Cut it out! Cut it out!”

  On my left and right are my mother and sister, coarse hands, brown faces.

  “It’s the best I could do,” I tell them.

  My sister squeezes my hand. “I think it’s beautiful.”

  Somewhere far away are the holy men’s voices, the hiss of metal on metal, last-moment recitations and prayers. One of the scholars pleads for my eyes to be covered, but I beat him to it, letting them roll back into my head. As I catch a final glimpse of the shaman’s thin face I smile.

  The shaman’s hands are red and dripping, but not from the lump of muscle he clutches—one might say, cradles—in his cupped palms. Instead its flesh is wrinkled and brittle, stiff and scaly as tree bark, its veins threaded with green.

  And bursting from the heart’s center—a sprout.

  © Copyright 2020 Erin Eisenhour