But the coincidence of events is meaningful: the lives of the granddaughter and the little dancer intermesh. ‘My daughters shall have their wishes granted,’ says the Motherqueen in her hissing voice. ‘The mute who would speak shall be tested, the woman barred from her father’s house shall have companions on her quest, and if they succeed, the bargain that the Moon Lady tells me she has made shall be fulfilled.’
Again the Shamanka Star bums and darkens, darkens and bums, I anxious to know more, but the Amah stills her with a single vexed tap from the rhodochrosite sole of a phoenix-patterned shoe. Then she dismisses the Star, and the more self-controlled grandmother, simply by gazing beyond them towards the flourishing blossoms of her orchard, where the peaches of immortality grow. She picks up her writing-brush to send her approval of the Moon Lady’s plan. Dame Shamanka Star vanishes. The grandmother steps with cautious delight towards the jade woman who has beckoned her to take a turn at the thundercall flute. The opening rhythm of the next composition reverberates, struck upon a gong made of limestone from a grotto deep beneath Cavegarden Lake.
Bordermoon Leaves Chang-an
The story has been told of the voyage the Brilliant Emperor of the bygone Tang Dynasty made near the end of his reign to the castle on the moon, bringing back the enchanting melody to which his Precious Consort Yang danced. It is told, too, how, long before that, another dynasty’s brilliant emperor – Mingdi of the Han – met a moonmaid in the hills south of the ancient capital. This beauty was one of the seven students of the Moon Lady herself.
And now, members of the audience, listen today while I recite the tale of a young woman of Tang named Bordermoon who lived in the time Of the Brilliant Emperor. She herself travelled to the palace of the Moon Lady years before he did, guided by a bare-legged moonmaid in a white gown.
It was the seventh night of the seventh month, the Festival of the Weaver Woman Star and the Cattleherd. In households across the empire, women of good families made music and feasted on cool summer melons. In towns and villages, in palaces and country homes, they stitched in happy competitions, matching their skill at needlecraft in honour of the Weaver Woman. The Star herself – that bright beauty whom the inscrutable peoples of the Occident call al-waqi’, or Vega – left her dwelling on the bank of the Silver River, which flows like milk across the sky. This was the one night of the year when all the magpies of the world gather, piping their excited cries, to form of their long black tails and brilliant white breasts a bridge across the astral river. Crossing that chittering bridge, the Weaver Woman met with her lover, the rascally, yellowish Cattleherd Star.
Dear members of the audience, I need not tell you that in normal years in the Chang-an region, the seventh day of the seventh month comes at the end of the rainy season, when the plump grains of rice and millet and wheat begin to ripen towards harvest. Indeed, the skies clear then because the Weaver Woman, preparing for her meeting with her lover or consoling herself after its end, spins and shuttles every wisp of cloud into ethereal fabrics patterned with the heavenly designs of the constellations themselves. Yet in this year, the twenty-first of the Brilliant Emperor’s reign, it was not so. Like the year before, it was marked by repeated downpours and great floods. The Son of Heaven, misguided perhaps by traitorous advisors, had not performed the ancient ritual of ploughing the sacred field to ward off natural disasters. Moreover, the Brilliant Emperor revered Taoism above the teachings of The Compassionate One: sad to say, the pious Buddhist monks of the capital were not called upon to chant scriptures and thus bring a stop to the rains.
But enough of these digressions. The rain did let up for a while that night, though the skies remained patched here and there with foggy scraps. The light of a crescent moon broke through to shine on needle-threading competitions and on the less homely amusements of dashing officials and the singers and dancers who were their companions. In the foothills south of Chang-an, an outing to a country temple had been arranged for a member of the Imperial Chancellory by a young man-about-town named Dreamdragon Feng. This Feng had recently attached himself to the chancellor as a kind of unofficial social secretary. Feng created pleasant times for the venerable official and casually accepted little gifts of cloth or silver in return. The young man had the extravagant nature typical of people from Shu, and made an amusing companion.
The gathering was a success. Feng had invited several entertainers, and the chancellor had found one of them, a singer named Bouquet, especially delightful. Let us not become too talkative, however, but tell instead about another of the women invited that evening, a young lute player with a stand-offish air, who went by the name of Bordermoon.
How did she look, you say?
Stepping lightly as a mist, she drifts in skirts of clouds.
And dancing wayward as a rainbow, twists a slender waist.
Eyebrows arched like moth antennae knit: she longs for one
As distant as the Cattleherd, cut off by a stream of stars.
Now, this Bordermoon came from foreign lands, and though others found her oddly beautiful, she herself was certain that people looked down on her because of her barbarian eyes. Others mistook her shy withdrawal for excessive pride. Just who it was she longed for, even she could not have said, but late that night she slipped out through the temple gate (where a half-deaf monk slept in the guardroom) and onto the pathway that led farther up the mountain. The Nineglow lanterns that had been set out for the festival were darkened, and the other revellers had gone to sleep at last in the rooms provided for them by the monks.
The Moon Lady, who is sister to the Weaver Woman Star, sent cascades of silvery light down to the human realm, so delighted was she that the skies had cleared. In honour of the festival, this goddess sat at her own loom, working at a cloth of moonbeams. Bordermoon made her way uphill by a radiance that glanced off the damp hard-packed earth and illuminated her way.
In a short while, her restless wandering brought her to a clump of yellow bamboo. The deep resonant boom of a stone gong sounded somewhere in the distance; she turned her head and saw a deserted shrine to the Western Motherqueen, set back into a cave in the side of the mountain. Making her way past the guardian bamboo, she ran her hands over the pillars carved into the rock in half-relief at either side of the mouth of the cave. A long ray of moonlight fell over her shoulder, striking a mossy altar. She thought of her paternal grandmother, recently departed from this world and gone to live with the Amah at Malachite Pond. She prayed.
Bordermoon felt easier then, but the fatigue of the long day settled on her now that her restlessness was past. She spied a whitish carpet, scattered with a design of clouds and magic mushrooms in indigo, lying in an alcove near the altar. With a sigh, she sat down on it to rest.
Now keep your ears clean while I tell how, after some time, a moonmaid in a nacreous dress that trailed off into vapours around her bare calves came and bowed before Bordermoon. ‘Come with me, please,’ she said. ‘My mistress wishes to speak with you.’
Bordermoon found herself rising naturally and walking behind the moonmaid, who said her name was Selena. Though they entered deeper and deeper into the winding cleft of the shrine cave, a diffuse light, like luminescent water, shone round them and lit their way. Soon Bordermoon heard a sound like the tinkling of jade pendants, and felt the chilly air that hangs near an underground river. There, a sky raft waited for them. The two of them stepped easily aboard, and the raft moved itself out into the current.
The tinkling of the water faded and the raft carried them into a purple mist. Then it ascended among the milky iridescences of the Silver River, floating up to the sky.
Selena took a dark red tally from the bosom of her gown. ‘This,’ she said to Bordermoon, ‘was sent to my mistress by the Western Motherqueen herself, signifying her assent to the plan my mistress has for you. Should you succeed, you will attain your heart’s great wish.’
Before the human woman could think of what to say to this scholar from the sky, the raft bumpe
d gently against a crystalline bank. Following Selena, Bordermoon stepped through a field of silvery dust. Then they entered a passageway leading underground; it twisted and turned like a great burrow. At last they came to a library full of scrolls that glowed, each with its own cool light. Among them stood a calm and stately woman, her smooth face beautified by wisdom. She bowed towards Bordermoon as a gracious lady bows towards an underling whom she wishes to honour.
‘I greet you, Miss Bordermoon,’ she said, ‘and thank you for coming at my request. I trust the journey was not too wearying?’
Bordermoon, dazed already by the appearance of the moon-maid and the magical raft, and all that she had seen, could only shake her head and try to return the bow with one as graceful. All her vague longings for some other life vanished like the puff of sparkling dust that Selena was brushing tactfully from the upturned toes of Bordermoon’s slippers. She wished heartily that she could return that instant to Chang-an and see no more of supernatural wonders.
The Moon Lady – for indeed, dear listeners, it was she –waved a hand, and the room’s unearthly light warmed and softened, easing the tension in Bordermoon’s wide eyes. ‘I have left this night’s weaving aside,’ the goddess said, ‘to ask your help in a certain matter. Only a human can fetch the thing I wish for, and I may receive it only if it is freely given.’ Her voice grew frosty. ‘Do you understand that?’
Again Bordermoon nodded mutely, and the Lady smiled, her remote appeal shining forth as brilliantly as before. ‘A hard time is coming for Chang-an,’ the Moon Lady said. ‘Many people will leave. You would do well to become one of them. In any case, there is nothing for you there that you cannot take with you. But of course things will be difficult for you if you choose to venture forth.’
She paused. ‘A prized inkstone of mine has been, unfortunately, lost. If you will go from the earthly capital to Mothbrow Mountain and fetch a certain stone for me, I will then give you a gift in return – my assistance in finding the person you seek.’
At this, Bordermoon’s tongue loosened, and she let forth a flood of questions. The fact was that the one she sought was none other than her mother, who had been carried off years earlier to be a dragon’s bride. But how – Bordermoon asked – did the Lady know this, and where was the mother now, and was she well, and how was Bordermoon to reach her?
The goddess laughed. ‘I cannot simply tell you all those things, you know,’ she said. ‘Humans do best when they do not read ahead in the books of their lives. But your mother fares well, and awaits your coming anxiously. Let me tell you instead how you can find this stone, and who must go with you on the search, and what means you might employ. Remember, though, that the journey will be a difficult one, and dangerous, and that your success is not at all ensured. Perhaps you would rather live out your life some safer way?’
Bordermoon almost said yes, and almost said no, and lapsed again into silence while the two words struggled inside her. ‘In all fairness,’ added the Lady, ‘I must tell you one thing. If you refuse the journey, you will soon meet an old official who will buy out your courtesan contract and take you as his concubine. He is deaf, and prefers boys to women for pleasure, but he hopes to have a son, though he will not. Your life with him would be neither greatly happy nor excessively sad, and it would be safe. And after some years, these longings of yours would fade. Tell me, is that your choice?’
The voice that would say yes rushed towards Bordermoon’s lips and nearly forced itself out. But she thought of a lifetime in the inner apartments of a rich man’s house, stirred no longer by the passions of her music, or love, or the vague restless searching that she had lived with for years, and she blurted out, ‘No!’
After that, the goddess explained to Bordermoon what was required of her. More will be told of this later. Bordermoon listened carefully, but she was startled when the Lady suddenly asked if she had a bit of writing silk. Surely, the young woman thought, the goddess has silk of her own, and need not beg from me? And when she looked up and saw a moonmaid bringing in a tray with writing-brush and ink, Bordermoon was more puzzled than before.
But just as Bordermoon took a deep breath in order to say cautiously that she had neither paper nor cloth on which to write, she felt a hard lump pressing against her stomach. There, beneath the knot of her scarlet sash, was the little scroll she had found long ago. Bordermoon had no memory of placing it there when she dressed, yet as she drew it out she recognized the tiny dragon’s head carved at one end of the slender sandalwood roller about which the cloth was wound and the faded pattern of stars on the ribbons that tied it up.
‘Ah, that will do nicely,’ the Moon Lady said as she took the scroll. Ignoring the writing already on the smooth cloth, she added a few words in the blank space at the beginning. ‘I have told you what you must do, my child,’ she said. ‘The Western Motherqueen has sent these words for you. Learn to understand them, and you will know what is to come.’ With that, she bowed farewell and left through the far door of the underground library.
And what, you ask, did the goddess write upon Border-moon’s scroll?
One shall speak, and one shall sink.
And one shall seek the Way,
And two shall wield their starswords
Till the shuttle goes astray.
Listen to what follows and then you will understand all this. But now our story divides into two strands. Let us put one aside and tell more of this Dreamdragon Feng, a former scholar and unsuccessful examination candidate who had fallen into a life of knavery and hocus-pocus. In truth, he longed to return home to Shu but feared the grief that knowledge of his failure would bring to his aged parents. He was not a bad young man – he preferred to make his living by catering to the whims of well-to-do companions rather than by outright deception. But with the aid of a clever servant named Sparker, he had worked out several conjuring tricks that had got him out of more than one tight spot. Using them, he would pass himself off as a heterodox wizard. Indeed, besides this servant, only the old woman who ran Feng’s cheap lodgings knew that the failed Student Feng and the Wizard Mimesis were one and the same.
Now, the Moon Lady realized the difficulties that awaited Bordermoon and had decided that this Dreamdragon Feng and his servant would be useful companions for the young woman on her quest for the stone. Accordingly, after guiding Border-moon back to the shrine cave of the Western Motherqueen, the moonmaid Selena appeared to Feng in his sleep, and conveyed to him the Moon Lady’s wishes: that he comply with any requests that Bordermoon might make of him, for only in that way could he escape his probable fate, a painful execution for chicanery and the proclamation of his misdeeds throughout the empire.
The young man bowed before the unearthly beauty. When he awoke, his teeth chattered with fear, for he had felt the cold breath of ill-fortune on the back of his neck more than once. To spare himself exposure, and to spare his parents the shame of hearing their son’s name trumpeted in every marketplace, he decided he had best comply.
So in the morning, when the sleepy entertainers and their gentlemen friends began the return to Chang-an, he was quick to agree when Bordermoon took him aside and stammered out her strange request. Indeed, so eager was his response that Bordermoon flushed with surprise. But then he described his dream to her.
Eight days and nights passed like the clicking of fingers. The moon swelled and All Souls’ Night arrived. Wraiths of mist trickled along city alleys; clammy breaths of air glided down paths between summer’s fields. The Buddhist cloisters and monasteries of the empire prepared beautiful displays of candles and flower cakes and artificial fruit trees, set forth as offerings to the spirits of the departed. In the Taoist communities, too, public lectures were given on suitable scriptures. Those who stayed at home made their own reverent sacrifices to the dead, fearing the ravenous ghosts who wander the earth because no living person cares for their needs.
In their lodgings, Dreamdragon Feng and his servant Sparker donned the robes of a great wizard and
his assistant. Feng’s was made from a length of crimson silk given him by the chancellor, trimmed with satin in black and white. Embroidered words of power, the swirling circle of yin and yang, and other mystic signs covered the front and back. The padded soles of his high black boots stood more than five inches thick, adding to his stature and granting him an imposing gait. Sparker, bent under a heavy load of sacks and poles and other strange accoutrements, followed him as they made their way to the dancers’ conservatory, not far from the Imperial Palace itself.
When they reached the gateway to the quarter, Sparker began to emit a series of weird moans, punctuated by quick high yips. Now, this wily fellow was no more a true magician than was his master, but he had learned the art of casting his voice so that it seemed to emerge from some other place, while his own lips moved not at all. Accordingly, after Feng rapped on the gate with his thick black persimmon-wood staff, the gatekeeper who poked his head out thought the eerie noises came from the head of the staff itself.
‘Stand back!’ shouted Feng in a deep and terrible voice, quite unlike his usual rather pleasant one. ‘Can you not hear the cries of my Great Empyrean Factotum Staff? This is the night of wandering ghosts, and I have determined that there is dreadful trouble in this place. Stand back, I say! Stand back!’
The gatekeeper had no other choice, for the staff twitched and jerked in Feng’s hand, and master and servant stepped quickly over the threshold and into the courtyard. Before the man could speak, Feng whirled on him and snapped, ‘The gate, fool! Close the gate. I refuse to be responsible for any evil spirits that have followed me here, be they mountain demons or valley shades, living cadavers or spectres undead, ghouls or devils or hungry haunts. I, the Wizard Mimesis, Long-lived Grand Official of the Orthodox Covenant of the Great Unity, am come to help you in this accursed place on this most dangerous of nights. But I will not be responsible for the work of fools.’
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