To the Sky Kingdom

by Tang Qi

  A young woman suddenly rushed over from the crowd and grabbed the baby out of Dumpling’s arms, crying, “Oh, goodness, that nearly scared me to death! Oh!”

  The scene seemed strangely familiar. My own mother’s face suddenly flashed into my mind, crying so much she was barely recognizable. “Where have you been for the last two hundred years?” she wept as she held me. “How could you do this to me?” I shook my head to cast off the daydream that had appeared so real it felt almost like falling under some spell. Even when I had almost died alongside Mo Yuan in the Yanhua Cave, Mother had not been as hysterical as that woman. It had never been my intention to leave Qingqiu for two hundred years. It happened five hundred years ago. Qing Cang broke out of the Eastern Desert Bell, and the two of us battled fiercely, following which I slept for 213 years straight.

  Dumpling rushed over to us, huffing and puffing. “Father, why have you been hugging Godfather all this time?” he asked innocently.

  The runaway horses had shaken up everyone, and the lively market streets had fallen silent. Dumpling’s childish voice came out sounding loud and clear.

  In no time at all, the sellers and pedestrians on both sides of the street who had been shaking their heads and sighing over the runaway horses had turned their beady eyes on us. I gave an awkward laugh, removing myself from Ye Hua’s embrace and smoothing out my sleeves. “I took a tumble, and he caught me. That’s it,” I said with an awkward chuckle.

  Dumpling let out a long sigh. “Luckily you tumbled into Father’s arms, Godfather. If you’d fallen onto the ground and bashed your beautiful face, Father would have been most upset. Ali too.”

  I raised my head to look at Ye Hua. “Is that so, Father?” I asked.

  The bright eyes of the crowd shifted momentarily to Ye Hua, who remained completely unfazed. He gave an almost imperceptible nod and said, “Yes.”

  A girl selling noodle cakes near where we were standing seemed to have fallen into a trance. “You’re the first homosexual couple I’ve ever seen,” she said.

  I snapped open my fan to hide my face and sneaked away into the crowd. Dumpling followed behind me, shouting, “Godfather! Godfather!”

  Ye Hua smothered a laugh and said, “Don’t worry about her, she’s just shy.”

  It was nearly noon, and we decided to have lunch at a restaurant at the end of the street near the lake.

  Ye Hua chose a table on the upper floor next to the window. He ordered a jar of wine and a few dishes popular in the mortal world, and mercifully, there was no fish this time.

  A refreshing breeze blew over the lake and toward us.

  As we were waiting for our food, Dumpling brought out all the little objects he had just bought and placed them onto the table to look at. Two amusing little clay figures caught my eye.

  Before we had been served, the waiter brought up two people and asked if they could join us at our table. A slender young Taoist nun walked over followed by a docile-looking servant whom I recognized. After a moment I realized he was the coachman from the market just before.

  The young waiter cupped his hands together and bowed to us in apology. It was only a meal, I thought to myself, and the upper and lower floors of the restaurant were completely full. Dumpling shifted onto my seat, which we shared, and we offered them the two spare seats.

  The nun sat down and poured herself a cup of tea. She took two sips before looking across at Ye Hua. Her bottom lip trembled, but she said nothing.

  It was no wonder: Ye Hua had adopted his frosty god manner again, so different from the image of the kind, sweet-natured man standing at my stove with a spatula in his hand, stir-frying vegetables.

  I helped Dumpling put away his new things. The nun took another sip of tea, looking very nervous. She finally plucked up the courage to speak. “I’m so lucky that you were in the marketplace just now, Immortal Prince, and that you were there to save me,” she said, a tremble in her voice. “You helped Miao Yun escape a disaster.”

  I turned to her in astonishment, and even Ye Hua turned to face her. Miao Yun the nun lowered her head, blushing so much that even her ears turned red. To see through Ye Hua’s disguise in one glance and tell that he was an immortal and that he had used magic to rescue them meant that she was an extraordinary nun. In less than ten years, she would probably be levitating up to the sun and visiting us in the Sky Palace.

  Ye Hua swept his eyes over her. “There’s no need to be so polite. It was nothing. Anyone would have done the same,” he said in a flat tone of voice.

  Miao Yun’s ears were now so red they looked as if the blood was about to start seeping out of them. She bit her lip. “Even a finger lifted by the immortal prince should be viewed as a great kindness,” she said in a quiet voice. “Immortal Prince, wou-would you be kind enough to tell me your immortal title so that in the future when I learn to levitate I might visit your immortal residence and repay you for saving my life?”

  Surely not. It sounded almost as if this nun might be . . . flirting with Ye Hua?

  I suddenly remembered the Mount Kunlun rules about taking on apprentices. Neither age nor family background was important, but female immortals were categorically forbidden.

  Mo Yuan must have had a similar problem with women falling for him. I had not been aware of this at the time. It was only now after meeting Ye Hua that it became obvious.

  The faces they had been born with had earned them a huge amount of female attention.

  Ye Hua took a sip of tea. “Good karma only comes around when it is due,” he said in that same flat voice. “You have been on the receiving end of good karma today because you have built up good karma in the past. It has nothing to do with me. Don’t concern yourself about repaying me.”

  He spoke with compelling logic, and Miao Yun bit her lip, saying nothing. Dumpling and I had just finished clearing his things off the table. I lifted my head to give her a smile, which she returned. She looked up at Dumpling, who was waiting anxiously for his food. “What a handsome and well-mannered immortal child,” she said softly.

  “Children are always adorable. It gives no guarantee what he’ll look like later,” I said in an attempt to deflect the compliment. “There was one young immortal from my hometown who was unbelievably adorable when he was young. Three thousand years later he vaguely resembles his younger self, but there is nothing remotely special about his face.”

  Dumpling tugged at my sleeve and looked up at me mournfully. Oh dear, I had gone overboard with my modesty.

  Ye Hua lifted his cup and looked at me with a faint smile. “There’s no point for a boy being too handsome, is there?” he asked. “A charming face won’t help you in a fight like strong pair of fists will. And anyway,” he continued, taking a sip of tea, “girls tend to resemble their fathers and boys their mothers, so as far as I’m concerned, Ali is going to grow up with excellent good looks.”

  Dumpling, who had been looking like he was about to cry, was suddenly radiating good spirits once more. He gave his father an affectionate look and started nudging his way toward him.

  I gave a cough and looked at him lovingly. “It doesn’t matter what Dumpling ends up looking like. He will always have a place in my heart, and I will always be there to look after him.”

  Dumpling turned back to me, his eyes brimming with tears of joy, and he started nudging back toward me.

  Ye Hua gave a quiet laugh but said nothing.

  The wine was the first thing to arrive at our table, but it was soon followed by the food. The young waiter was gracious and considerate, and our pot of sweet osmanthus wine had been heated to just the right temperature.

  Mao the Sun Prince was doing himself proud, and the sun was strong but not fierce. The sky was adorned with the occasional puff of lucky cloud, which looked lovely against the line of shady trees.

  Drinking a few cups of wine in these blissful conditions made me feel inspired to compose a poem. But Miao Yun and her coachman were not drinking, and after two or three cups of wine Ye Hua
disappointed me by asking the waiter to take away our cups.

  Ye Hua seemed to have fallen under some kind of spell while we were eating and kept making desperate attempts to feed me. With a tender smile, he forced food upon me with words like, “You love this, have a bit more!” or “I know this isn’t your favorite, but it’s good for you. Your thinness may not worry you, but it worries me.” I knew he was just using me as an excuse to avoid Miao Yun, but hearing him talk like this still made my skin crawl.

  Miao Yun was obviously not enjoying being made to listen to this either, and her face turned as white as paper. The coachman sensed the strange atmosphere and quickly gobbled down his rice so that he and his mistress could leave.

  Ye Hua finally stopped shoving food toward me and let out a long sigh. “You don’t seem comfortable with terms of endearment,” he said slowly. “What are we going to do about that?”

  I lowered my head and dug my chopsticks into my rice, ignoring him.

  We were still eating when Ye Hua’s desk official, Jia Yun, suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Fortunately he had made himself invisible; who knows how all the mortals would have reacted to suddenly seeing someone floating in midair in the restaurant.

  He mentioned a letter that needed urgent attention, although I switched off when he went into details. Ye Hua turned to me and said, “Well, it looks like I am needed back at the Sky Palace. Will you stay here with Ali this afternoon and show him around? I’ll come back and join up with you both this evening.” My mouth was too full of rice to speak, so I just gave a nod.

  I came out of the restaurant and looked around. The sun was directly above us. It was so hot that the market sellers had moved their things under the awning, while those that had not managed to grab a good spot were packing up to go home, looking miserable.

  When I was settling up in the restaurant, the waiter graciously pointed out that I had overtipped him and then suggested I go along to the Free Thought Tea House to listen to their storytelling. The tea was a little expensive, but the storytelling was excellent.

  I was certain that there was no storytelling in the Sky Palace, and Dumpling had probably never been to a reading. I grabbed his hand and led him there so he could experience it.

  The storyteller was an old gentleman whose hair and beard had both turned half white. When we sat down, he was telling the story of a wild crane repaying a debt of gratitude.

  It was a completely new experience for Dumpling, whose eyes sparkled as he listened. Sometimes he would give a knowing smile; other times his fists would ball up tightly or he would let out a deep sigh. At Zhe Yan’s I had always had countless books at my fingertips and found this story somewhat contrived and uninspired. I asked for a pot of green tea and sat at the table, letting my mind wander.

  It was midafternoon in no time, and the storyteller was hitting his wooden block to shake up the audience with the words: “And if you want to know what happens next, you’ll have to come to the next session.” I could see the lanterns outside the window were starting to be lit.

  I opened my eyes in a daze and looked around for Dumpling, but the place where he had been sitting was now empty. I started to shake, immediately wide-awake.

  Luckily I had brought along my water mirror. In the immortal realm, a water mirror functions just like a vanity mirror, but in the mortal world, it can be used to find people. I just hoped Dumpling was in an easily distinguishable location. If he were standing in a nondescript room, the water mirror would be completely useless.

  I found a secluded spot and wrote Dumpling’s name onto the mirror’s surface. A white light shone out in immediate response. I followed the white light with my eyes and stumbled, almost dropping the mirror.

  My goodness. The room Dumpling had ended up in certainly could not be called nondescript. It contained a carved rosewood bed on which lay a scantily clad couple. The man was half naked, while the woman underneath him had on nothing but a bright red slip. Decent mortal women did not tend to wear such garish colors. I was starting to feel giddy, but I forced myself to stand up straight and grabbed a passerby. “Excuse me. Do you know which direction the town brothel is in?” I asked.

  He looked at me carefully, sizing me up before finally pointing to the building diagonally across from the Free Thought Tea House. I thanked him and raced over. I heard him give a faint sigh behind me and say, “And he looked like such a well-brought-up boy. Who would have thought he would be such a degenerate? Such immoral times we live in.”

  I knew that Dumpling was inside the brothel, but I did not know which room. I made myself invisible so as not to disturb the madam’s business and started to go from room to room.

  I searched through thirteen rooms before finally finding him floating in midair, also invisible, his chin in his hand, looking pensive. I reached out and dragged him through the wall, away from the passionately kissing couple on the bed.

  My face was burning red.

  Luckily their bedroom activity had not progressed past kissing. I had first visited the mortal world during my Mount Kunlun apprenticeship. Thirsty for knowledge, I had read as much erotic fiction as I could get my hands on. There were lowbrow books that could be found in any market for three pennies a copy, and ones so rare that the only copy could be found hidden underneath the emperor’s pillow. Some of these books described encounters between men and women, and others men and men, all of which I dabbled in. I used to read them, looking as calm as a plank of wood, with neither my face reddening nor my heart jumping about wildly. But not so today. It was a different situation: I was with a child and witnessing live action. If that was not enough to turn my old face red, I really did not deserve to have Dumpling call me Mother.

  There were girls outside the brothel room talking to potential customers in sweet, dulcet tones. They were still conducting their dirty business, but at least these ones were fully clothed.

  There was not one quiet spot in the entire building.

  A maid walked gracefully past us, dressed in red and carrying a tray of mung-bean cakes. Sticky-Rice Dumpling gave a sniff and turned visible to chase after her, asking for one. I followed him and had no choice but to become visible too. As soon as this maid saw Dumpling, she was enchanted. She stroked his little face, turned to smile at me with flushed cheeks, and then handed him the whole tray of cakes.

  I pulled Dumpling into a dead-end corridor and thought carefully about the lecture I was about to deliver. I wanted to make him realize what he had done was wrong, but I did not want to upset him. Today was his birthday after all, and Ye Hua had asked me to make sure it was a happy one.

  I gave him a smile. “The storytelling at the Free Thought Tea House was rather good, I thought,” I began good-naturedly. “You seemed very engrossed at the beginning, so why did you decide to run off? And of all places, why come to this one?”

  Dumpling gave a frown. “I saw a fat boy kissing a young girl in the street. The girl didn’t seem to want the fat boy to kiss her, but when she tried to stop him, the fat boy got angry and called a group of ugly boys over who surrounded the girl. The girl looked so scared I had to do something. So I went to save her. I ran down the stairs, but couldn’t see any sign of them. A man outside told me that the fat boy had carried the girl into the flower house. I was worried they were going to hurt her, so I decided to go in and rescue her. The old woman at the door wouldn’t let me in, so I made myself invisible and slipped past her. Oh, I really don’t know why the man called it a flower house. I went around the entire place and didn’t see a single flower.”

  On hearing his last sentence, my heart started hammering. Please, Dumpling, don’t have seen anything too awful, I begged silently.

  Dumpling was the equivalent age of a mortal child of three. It was an age when his immortal root was extremely unstable, and he needed a lot of care and guidance. His father had looked after him so well for the last three hundred years. If under my watch he saw things he should not have, he might start to spawn untoward ideas, whic
h would bewitch his immortal consciousness, and Ye Hua would want me dead.

  I swallowed and listened to the rest of his tale.

  “When I found the fat boy, he was lying out flat across the floor, and there was a man in white next to the young girl, hugging her. Seeing that she was safe, I decided to come back and hear the end of the story, but I went through the wrong wall and ended up in that other room.”

  Tenth Apprentice and I did so badly in our magic of deduction classes that Mo Yuan sent us to the mortal world as a punishment and made us work there as fortune-tellers. We set up a stall in the marketplace to tell fortunes and read bones. Every few days we would see a decent woman being tormented or molested. If she was unmarried, a knight would draw his sword and roar as he rushed over to defend her, and if she was married, her husband would appear and draw out his sword. The knight and the husband would always be dressed in white when they appeared.

  Dumpling rubbed his nose and gave another frown. “There were two people rolling around on the bed together in that room. They were tangled up in a ball together. I wanted to know why they were tangled up like that, so I stayed there for a while to watch them.”

  My heart pounded. “And what did you see?” I asked, my voice trembling.

  He appeared to be thinking carefully. “They were kissing each other, yes, kissing . . . and touching each other, yes, touching.” He paused. “Mother, what were they doing?” he stuttered.

  I looked skyward and thought about how to answer him. I adopted a serious expression and said, “Mortal people who study Taoism have a practice known as harmonizing and studying one another. That’s what the couple you saw was doing. Harmonizing and studying one another.”

  “Mortals are so wholeheartedly devoted to Taoism,” Dumpling said in a wise little voice.

  I gave a burst of laughter.

  I turned around and bumped my head against the firm chest of someone who reeked of alcohol. I rubbed my nose and took a couple of steps back to get a clearer look. In front of me stood a man with a fan in his hand. His slender eyes lit up as he regarded me. He had a pleasant face, but too much fire in his organs had dulled his skin. He had obviously been harmonizing a bit too diligently, and the lust was wearing out his kidneys.