Later, she roamed the realm under heaven for many years, performing deeds of chivalry. Afterwards, she vanished. Some say she went to Mount Mao, on the lower Yangzi, where she studied the alchemy of the body and nourished within herself an immortal embryo.
PARROT
SPEAKS:
21
Now, how was I to reach my mother? The question thrummed in my ears as the boat carried me through the great oxbows the Yangzi makes downstream from the gorges. I should have been excited and happy, nearing Cavegarden Lake at last. But I found it hard to imagine the end of my travels.
I had caught sight of a glittering stone in the claws of the monster who soared skywards from the spot where Feng sank beneath the waters, so I could comfort myself with the thought that Sparker must have been released by the Moon Lady. But Second Daughter and I both grieved for Feng. Had that terrible vermilion dragon devoured him? Imagining it, I shuddered.
Baby refused to leave the village with us. She pressed her lips together and shook her head, a last return to her old silences. I saw her joy, heard her fluent speech at last, and told myself I should be happy for her sake.
So the morning after the festival. Second Daughter and I packed our few things in the enchanted boat and settled on board. It nearly leapt out towards midstream. Bamboo, trees, and scattered houses on the riverbank sparkled, washed clean by hours of rain. Nothing for it but to go on, I thought, and brought out my lute.
I couldn’t play it. With one finger, I traced a mother-of-pearl parrot inlaid in the glossy surface of the wood. Second Daughter placed her hand on my shoulder when I closed the instrument back in its travelling bag. I stared blankly at the swallows skimming for insects above the river.
I lost count of the nights we stopped, though I know it was only a few. One morning Second Daughter briskly announced that she reckoned we were only a short way upstream from the town of Yue-jou, which overlooks Cavegarden Lake. Our conversation turned to Sparker. Was he really free of his stony form and living a hermit’s life? Where had he gone? After days of keeping silence. Second Daughter asked me to take out the scroll and read to her the poem Baby had spoken of. I unrolled the white silk and chanted out the words the Moon Lady had added at the beginning.
One shall speak, and one shall sink
And one shall seek the Way,
And two shall wield their starswords
Till the shuttle goes astray.
Only the last line left us wondering now. Second Daughter must have seen my look of miserable guilt – I could read, and write besides; so surely it was my job to understand? – for she placed her palm on my arm and said, ‘Never mind.’
Soon the boat drew up to the Yangzi’s south shore and halted. We climbed onto the bank. I was looking around for the most likely pathway through the green young rice when Second Daughter called out, ‘Sister, look!’
The boat had vanished; a great rock split the current in its place, the boulder Stoneboat from the Black Dragon River now holding fast in the Yangzi’s waters. Only our few coins sat atop it, barely safe from the water spraying up against the rock.
‘So the Moon Lady’s done with us,’ I muttered. ‘She has what she wanted, and we’re left here on our own.’
Second Daughter, again calling me her elder sister, began a gentle demurral. Then Dragonrill and Moonsabre broke free from their silver scabbards, assumed once more the shape of dragonets, and flew off into the heavens. The scabbards melted away, droplets of quicksilver flowing down into the river. No place for swordswomen in this world, I thought, biting my lower lip – and now no aid for us.
Second Daughter knew more than I did of enduring. ‘We’ll walk to the lake from here,’ she said. ‘It’s not far.’ She picked up my lute in its bag and slipped the strap over her own shoulder.
I wiped my eyes and tried to make a joke. We laughed more than it merited, picked up our bundles, and walked off, choosing the ways leading south among the network of well-trodden paths between the paddy fields.
My spirits lifted: my mother waited for me beneath that huge stretch of water, repository of the Nine Rivers and gateway to underground passages running beneath the earth. In less than two hours’ time, its wavelets lapped near the toes of our boots, mirror-bright.
I could not see the far shore. I could not see into the depths. But I could feel my mother as close to me as square-shouldered Second Daughter standing by my side.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I called on Lady Guan-yin, the Western Motherqueen, and every other god or goddess I could think of, even the inconstant Moon Lady. I had heard the stories; only with divine aid could a mortal pass through the heavy, ordinary waters of the lake to the dragon realm. Smiling assurance at Second Daughter – I would return for her – I stepped into the lake.
Three times, six times, nine times I entered those broad waters, and each time my feet floated from the bottom as I bobbed and floundered. I breathed in water, I coughed, I choked. The last time. Second Daughter plunged out to where I could grasp her extended arm; otherwise I might have sunk into the lake for good. After that we tried plunging in together, hand in hand. I prayed aloud and invoked my mother’s name. Nothing worked.
Exhausted, I looked at Second Daughter.
‘There’s one thing you might try,’ she said. ‘A gift.’
I exhaled slowly, trying to still the petulance that threatened to rise in me.
‘A sacrifice. Something for the dragons.’ Her gaze rested on my lute.
Well enough, I thought. All else had failed. If I had to make my own way in the world, I would not become an entertainer again, caged up like a gaudy parrot. True, the instrument was precious to me, but so much the better. It would be my mother’s ransom.
One last time I stood knee-deep in the lake. With each step forward, I called on my mother’s otherworldly captors to let me come to her. When only my head and shoulders remained above the water, I raised the lute high with both hands and hurled it as far as I could.
The mother-of-pearl glinted peach and blue and curiously green as the awkward thing arced out and down. It floated. Then water filled it and it sank. I stepped forward, certain that this time my feet would remain on the bottom and I would breathe the airy waters that my mother breathed.
Instead, I felt myself buoyed up again. Useless. I turned back and lay face down on the sun-warmed rock where Second Daughter sat waiting.
She stroked my hair. Some time later – our clothes had nearly dried – I sat up. ‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘You choose the way, please. Anywhere.’ I felt too tired for tears or anger. I followed her, head down.
Silently she led me towards a prosperous village we had skirted perhaps half an hour before arriving at the lake. As we neared the first house, a young woman with a pinched face rushed towards us, quivering with eagerness for strangers’ news. In moments, she had learned something – a story that would suffice, at least – of the two orphaned sisters whose papa and mama had fled a crop failure in the hills of Shu only to die of fever just downstream from the Yangzi gorges. I was giving up my old hopes but not my glib tongue.
‘We left their bones at a monastery there, and travelled on disguised in these odd clothes to find a place to live,’ I told her, thinking as quickly as I could. ‘This was their last command.’ Easy then to look down and blink away the moisture from my lashes.
Pinch-faced Tussah pressed her lips into an expression that radiated understanding, though I noticed deep in her eyes a look of calculation. ‘Splendid luck!’ she said. ‘Not, of course – My condolences on your terrible loss. Naturally your good parents would not wish their daughters to linger on at a monastery unprotected. The tales I could tell you of nasty-minded monks!’ She clicked her tongue. ‘The spirits of your loving parents have obviously guided you here.’ She shook her head as a pious woman would. ‘Come with me.’
We followed her into the village. I cared little what we did at that moment, but Second Daughter seemed glad to be so near Cavegarden Lake.
Tussah asked our family name. ‘Li,’ I told her hastily. Even here. Second Daughter’s name might bring pursuit upon her. Yet I could hardly call myself Heavenglaive or Skywhistle, or even a courtesan’s decorative Dragonfly or Parrot or Border-moon. So I took my other name from my sister’s, and became First Daughter Li: the only one of all my many names that I have given to myself.
As we walked through the village, I caught Tussah staring curiously at my eyes. Amazed that I had forgotten even briefly about my looks, more exotic here than in the north, I spun out some story about our father’s first wife, an outlander who had died in giving birth to me, and the second wife, who bore my sister and raised us both. It seemed to satisfy her.
She led us towards her mother-in-law’s house, the largest compound in the village. As we walked. Second Daughter and I learned all that Tussah deemed important about the family she had married into. Their storerooms bulged with rice. Just now, they also held huge stoppered jars filled with silk cocoons waiting to be processed. One hired girl had disappeared last week (‘pregnant, no doubt, the filthy trollop!’); the other had been dismissed just that morning for losing a shuttle that had been the widow’s grandmother’s.
‘A small crime, you may think,’ Tussah confided, doubtless observing an odd mingling of consternation and understanding on our faces as we remembered the poem’s prediction about our vanished starswords. ‘But the girl lost or broke everything she touched! So we need two good workers right away.’ She clicked her tongue in admiration. ‘An excellent businesswoman, my mother-in-law! Rather than make do with the shoddy silk reelers and quilling wheels one rents so dearly out here in the countryside during the peak season, she’s patient. “I’ll wait a few weeks,” she likes to say to me, “and hold my cocoons until the better equipment’s available.’”
She stopped short outside the household gate. ‘No need to chatter where one might be overheard,’ she said. The thin scar on my cheek evidently caught the measuring gaze she turned on us then, but she merely pursed her lips and shrugged. ‘You girls look bright enough to know quality when you meet with it. Come on.’
Widow Chian greeted us complacently. Her skin retained a youthful smoothness, though grey streaked the hair she pulled back in a simple bun. She bore the look of one who knew life would bring her what she needed. Later, I came to see her composure differently.
Second Daughter and I settled quickly into life in the Chian household. When my old longing for my mother rose up, I would remember my hopeless attempts to enter Cavegarden Lake and tell myself I had to put the past aside. Once or twice we did ask about the lake but received only vague – or evasive –answers. The villagers regarded it with awe, and kept their distance.
Just how the widow dealt with our unregistered status I never knew. No doubt her brother’s position as village headman helped; she held a good deal more land than a widow’s allotment of thirty mow, plus the standard hundred mou in her two sons’ names. Did a husband twelve years dead live on in the official roll of village citizens? Were Second Daughter and I legally listed under the names of the last two hired girls? I didn’t care. Widow Chian gave us each a set of simple work clothes against our future wages, and she never meant to be unkind.
She did expect us to work as hard as she did. First she taught us how to find the loose end of a cocoon’s single fibre and pass it through the tiny guiding eyes of the silk reeler to make up a thread. Later, she showed us her own way of taking those threads from the reeler and stretching them out on a wooden frame, to be rewound onto smaller reels and spun together on a peach wood quilling wheel. Finally, we learned how to finish preparing the threads for weaving and how to dress and operate the looms.
Sometimes I smiled silently to think how Mama Chen had disparaged the women she called ‘Thread-and-needle stay-at-homes’. The world of Lutegarden House and Felicity Hall favoured the refined and beautiful, but what was more refined than the filaments unwound from the cocoons, what more beautiful than the lustrous threads stretched on the wooden frame?
I told myself I didn’t miss my lute. The household was too busy for music anyway. Besides, they might have thought I put on airs; I badly needed to be liked if I was going to stay on here.
Only in one thing did the Widow Chian indulge herself. She owned two cats, extraordinary breeds of the far northwest that her sons had brought her from great trading cities. Their exoticism gave them value which pleased me. The lively half-grown kitten, whose fur resembled the colour of the darkest oranges, she called Redsteed; the older one, blue-grey and cranky, was known as Grizzle.
A strict ban kept them from the workrooms, but young Redsteed played with whoever sat in the courtyard between the end of the workday and sleep. One sultry evening towards the close of the fifth month, he skittered over to where I chatted with Second Daughter and Springgauze, the younger of the widow’s two daughters-in-law. The cat had found a scrap of crumpled paper somewhere. It made a fine rattling noise on the beaten earth of the courtyard, and Redsteed batted it about while we fanned ourselves and laughed.
Soon he hit it into the crevice behind a doorstep, and couldn’t get it out. I walked over to pluck the bit of paper free. Preparing to roll it into a tighter ball, I noticed a word written upon it. Three horizontal strokes joined by a vertical, a single dot placed at the lower right-hand side: odd, I thought, to see that particular word the very evening after I had dreamed away the hours at the quilling wheel with memories of Nephrite and her jade-white hands. She had taught it to me, the first word I knew how to read or write, long ago in Dim-huang, when she stitched her name inside the collar of the tunic she had sewn for me.
I unfolded the battered scrap, idly curious as to what else it said. In crabbed characters a tiny poem staggered down the paper’s whiteness:
When the ice horse plunges to the river.
The silent shell shall spread its lips and speak.
When pearl and jade have met beneath the waves.
The child of wood shall weave a heavenly web.
By now, the other two had lifted themselves from their stools and come over to see what I was looking at. They moved lazily, for even at day’s end we felt the sticky heat. Then Springgauze’s hand shot out.
‘You can’t see this!’ she said, grabbing the paper from me. ‘It’s written in women’s words!’ She perused it for a moment, then grimaced and shook her head.
‘Oh,’ said Springgauze then. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve made a mistake. It’s just some foolishness, isn’t it? Here.’ She handed it back to me and hurried off to wish her little nephew goodnight.
Second Daughter caught my eye. ‘Women’s words?’
I shook my head and told her that the words were perfectly normal. But the peculiar incident did remind me of my often postponed promise to teach her to read. I showed my friend how to scratch out the word for ‘jade’ or ‘nephrite’ in the courtyard dirt.
She asked me to teach her the rest of the poem. I concentrated on writing each word just so, explaining all I could about their forms. Second Daughter pulled her high-arched eyebrows down in concentration, then cried out, ‘Baby! The second line is Baby! Remember how the villagers made so much of her name meaning “cowrie shell”? And Feng plunged into the river. He must be the ice horse, though I don’t see how or why.’
I thought for a moment. Then I wrote the name Feng: a short dot and an elongated one on the left, signifying ‘ice’, and then the pictograph for ‘horse’. I had never known why it was written that way, but clearly ‘Feng’ was what the word-riddle meant.
‘What does it mean to put “pearl” and “jade” together?’ Second Daughter asked quickly, once I had explained.
I shook my head. ‘The word for “pearl” already has a small “jade” on one side – to show it means something precious. But look,’ I said. ‘If we write “wood”, like this, and “child” under it-see? – it makes the name Li!’
We tried to make sense of the rest, until the shadows lengthened and the Widow Chia
n herself sent us off rather sharply to get the sleep we needed for the next day’s work. When she saw what we had been doing, she said nothing, but her black brows eased back to their usual calmness. A few days later our lessons in the women’s words began.
Many women south of the central Yangzi, we discovered, know a written language not used by men. No fuss is made if a husband or a brother picks up a word or two, but – to judge from what I heard Widow Chian’s second son say to his wife Springgauze – the men mostly scoff or shy away. ‘Women’s business’, they call it, and in that phrase who can distinguish disdain from reverence? In any case, I noticed that the women kept it rather quiet when there were men around.
In form, the words resemble the oldest Chinese writing, not the Soghdian or Indie scripts I had seen along the Silk Road. Springgauze once whispered to me that she had heard that some of them had been preserved long ago when an emperor forbade any written symbols save those he chose as standard; many of the outlawed variant forms became women’s words. Even the order of the words in a sentence, and their relationships to one another, are not like the language these women speak to their menfolk every day. But perhaps I tell more than I ought.
Springgauze clapped her hands, delighted, when she heard that Widow Chian wanted us to learn the women’s writing. ‘I felt terrible trying to keep it from you,’ she confided the day the widow started teaching us. She and I were stringing the warp thread on the largest loom. ‘But you surely understand I had to wait for Mother Chian’s approval.’
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