Scale-Bright (23 page)

But the hunt is Houyi’s domain and delight. Though there is nothing left she could recognize, no commonality of name--for people speak differently now, and name their children differently especially on this isle--and little to see in the cast of skull and shape of eyes, she’s chased the tracks of genealogy to Hong Kong.

It is not that she keeps secrets from Chang’e. But she doesn’t want to hold out a false hope, when it’s taken her this long, when it’s this thin and flimsy a thing.

In the Space Museum it is almost empty, climate-controlled air whispering against her skin, a quiet hum of electricity. She goes past the glassed cases of spacesuits and shuttle models, the gravity well demonstration with its whirling metal spheres, the instrument panels that simulate a cockpit. But it is the photographs of lunar landings that snatch at her attention, make her linger.

“You’ve been showing up every other night.”

She glances up, unsurprised. “You work here.”

“Unfortunately.” The young woman is in the process of locking down doors, dressed for the cold. Belatedly Houyi realizes she is not. “Well, we’re closing soon.”

They leave the museum separately, and board the same boat off Star Ferry to Wanchai. Houyi sits by the railing, where the winds buffet her hair and tear at her skin. When the young woman settles beside her, Houyi hears her frown before she even asks, “Aren’t you even a little cold?”

“It doesn’t bother me. You are Julienne, I think?”

Julienne’s hand brushes the spot on her sweater that corresponds to where her employee’s card has been. “People don’t wear name tags in real life. It’s awful.”

“Hau Ngai.”

The young woman blinks, but offers no commentary nor wonders aloud just why it is that she has a name so masculine.

* * *

Chang'e continues in testing and measuring her enemy.

With no drop of joy but plenty of grim clarity, she sets one of the houses on fire. No small feat, for the moon is cold and the building pure rock, but the rabbit keeps bottles of phoenix flame. Small collection--even in heaven the substance is rare--but she pinches one anyway, guilty but not guilty enough to seek another solution. After a stone house is reduced to blackened rubble, Chang'e finds herself unable to leave the pavilion Wu Gang built for days after. The surrounding courtyard turns in upon itself, and she can venture no further than the edges. Like an impertinent child in need of correction she has been punished.

The rabbit visits with sticky rice wrapped in ghostly lotus leaves. It plucks at its whiskers nervously. "Why did you do this?"

To that she only gives a serene smile. "What could be done to me?"

"If you wreak such ruin regularly? Banishment to earth as a mortal, or a demon. Or worse, Lady. You aren't beyond the wheel, and when it turns it can break you, pulping flesh and grinding bones. Immortal doesn't mean impervious."

Her expression tightens. "I'll keep that in mind. Thank you, rabbit."

Subsequent experimenting becomes subtler. She notes the times when she can glimpse the earth through windows, through archways. Then she might step through, and be on a mountain, in a temple, on the street of a city. She's never fast enough, but it is a close race.

So, then, what she wants to do might work. Might. As long as the symbolism, the center of story, is satisfied.

The ghost animals have neither voices nor words of their own. A few eels and frogs can be coaxed to echo Chang’e, and that suits her purposes. The trouble lies in luring them. They do not behave much like their living counterparts, neither eating nor mating; owls and starlings sometimes swim languidly in the lakes, and twice she’s seen carps up in the branches of a stone cypress. She’s tried to tempt them with cakes, fruits, wine, dumplings. None avails. Tatters of fabric and melted candle wax do even less.

Finally she starts giving out pieces of herself.

Clipped locks of her hair attract middling interest. She turns to pain, a hairline thread open in her hand--and they come, attending her blood like courtiers around an empress, wet toothless mouths latching onto her skin. She whispers words at them in slow stressed syllables: her name, common phrases, the way she greets the rabbit and the woodsman. Thank you and You didn’t have to and The food you made is delicious. It is like reciting poetry. Conversations so repetitive she can conduct them on her own, exhausted to banality and prescribed lines.

Chang’e melts the rabbit’s remedy, the one that unites spirit to body, and blends it with her blood.

The mixture takes a long time to boil, blood and medicine far thicker than water, and when she pours it into sculpted mouths too quickly it splashes and scalds her. Her eyes water at the pain. She does not allow it to slow her down.

She finishes the statue in what she imagines is winter, where the moon's lapses are more frequent and she gets to see the earth almost every day; her prison’s mind turns to deserts and brightness, while hers turn to sanding and polishing.

Her features are duplicated across the carved face. No amount of paint will make it seem flesh, but she has prepared a solution for that.

She waits as the ghost animals slip into the mannequin, drawn irresistibly to arterial sweetness. Perhaps they sip at this mixture, and are content; perhaps they struggle to escape. They can’t. Having imbibed the medicine they will be bound.

Hands on the shoulders of the statue she concentrates. It isn’t something she’d have been able to do mortal--martial practitioners may, and she was never that--but her ascendance has bought more than imprisonment. It will cost her, for she is guided by instinct, not discipline.

A brush of vitality she can scarcely afford to spare trickles through her fingertips. With it, a fraction of herself, that which makes her Chang’e and divine. It suckles at her as though a babe, and she nurses it into a facsimile of life. When she is done her knees are weak.

She clasps the wooden doll to her, mouth to wooden mouth, “You are Chang’e.”

It is silent. Only wood, sanded and painted amateurishly.

“You are Chang’e,” she repeats, “and you have a wife whom every night you long to meet. You met her in heaven. Under a golden tree and black petals she first kissed you. Her name is Houyi, and you are wedded wives.”

“I am,” it repeats haltingly, in a voice not quite hers, “Chang’e.”

Once the first word has been uttered color flourishes, wood limbs softening to skin, chiseled hair flowing into soft strands. In the best silks she has she dresses the statue, and on its head she puts pearls and ivory. When she is done she hides it deep among the ghosts, draping it in swans and lions winter-pale.

* * *

The second time Houyi sees Juliene the latter exclaims, “You can’t find these things that interesting.”

The archer smiles faintly. “Do you have mooncakes at Zungcauzit?”

“Of course.” Julienne glances sidelong at the moon-walk box. “What does that have to do with anything?”

This time they end up at a Maxim’s outlet, which even at this time of the night is crowded, noisy, and not especially glamorous. They order and have indifferent honeyed pork, dim sum, and pearl tea. Julienne wrings her sleeves and bites her lip. “I do know nicer places.”

“I don’t mind,” Houyi says. “There’s something to be said for convenience.”

“You’re so unpicky. Where are you from?”

“The mainland.”

A disbelieving laugh, as though she believes someone who dresses as elegantly as Houyi--and her choice of attire is that, by accident--couldn’t possibly have so provincial an origin. “Shenzhen? Peking?”

“I’m not much for cities.” She looks across the room, where one woman--catching Houyi’s gaze--stops giggling with her friends and blanches. A spider demon. Her shadow briefly flares extra limbs as she scrambles, upsetting iced tea, and excuses herself from the table. “They are too easy to hide in. But I’d rather know about you.”

Julienne sets down her chopsticks. “Are you flirting with me?”

This surprises a chuckle out of Houyi. “I’m much too advanced in age for that. Old aunts shouldn’t flirt with young ladies.”

“You can’t be more than thirty-five.”

“You flatter me. But regardless I have a wife.”

The girl puts the tip of a chopstick back in her mouth and chews it with a peculiar fervor. “You got married abroad, I suppose. What’s her name?”

“Seung Ngo.”

“Oh come on.”

“That’s actually her name.” Houyi signals a waitress--she has to call only once to gain attention, which seems to awe Julienne disproportionately--and despite the girl’s protest she pays the entire bill. “I’m about to ask you something very odd and rather personal.”

“How odd can it be?” Julienne gestures with her glass, whose bottom is black with ice-trapped tapioca beads.

“Do you visit a cemetery during Chingming?”

Julienne leans away from the table. “That is a bit personal. And you aren’t even single.”

“I’m not that bewitching, child.”

“Well, fine. I don’t go. I don’t owe my parents anything, not even burning them bits of shiny paper.”

“Ah,” the archer murmurs. There’s little family resemblance; marriages, migrations, and sheer centuries have washed those out, sculpted quite something else in the place of features possessed by Chang’e. But there is, perhaps, something of the same sharpness. “I have a boon I would ask of you.”

“You talk like you just stepped out of a mowhab set.”

Houyi has seen her share of those films. They amuse, mostly because when gods do battle there is a great deal more fanfare than even the most ostentatious special effects. “It’s hard to get out of character.”

They step outside the Maxim’s, into a night thick with neon signs and street vendors peddling counterfeit watches. Houyi thinks, and hopes, that Chang’e will like this place, this era. It will surely suit her curiosity.

She holds out a hand to Julienne, who frowns but takes it.

When they reappear in the silence of Che Kung the girl staggers, looks about wildly, and bites down on her knuckles. There isn’t much light apart from the bulbs illuminating a shrine full of Guanyins in white and gold, clothes colorful and colorless. Houyi eases Julienne down to the lip of a blue pool, at whose center yet another Guanyin stands with child in hand.

“I’m not going,” Julienne says, voice gone thin and breathy, “to scream. I’m not.”

“I hoped you wouldn’t.”

When she has gotten herself under control Julienne demands, “What do you want from me?”

“To burn something.” Houyi draws out what she’s hidden by the shrine. It is caked in ashes, but undamaged: coils of silvered paper linked together, braided into a rope ladder. The length isn’t anywhere near enough, objectively, but she’s learned that such things are only symbols. “While thinking of a… great-aunt many times over.”

Julienne takes the paper ladder in hand. “This isn’t the right time, there isn’t a picture, I have no incense, there isn’t a grave. I don’t even know her name.”

“It is Seung Ngo.”

“Oh,” the girl says, giving a vindicated little clap, “of course. Of course your wife is the goddess on the moon and you’re the archer who shot down nine suns. Does she have a pet rabbit too?”

“I wouldn’t call it precisely a pet. There’s also a woodsman on the moon, if you were curious.”

Houyi describes Chang’e to Julienne quietly, quickly, as she makes a fire and wishes she had some skill at sketching. Julienne kneels dazed, but concentrates on Houyi’s voice. She feeds the paper ladder to the flames all at once, as such things are meant to be consigned, and watches as it crumbles. That takes longer than most offerings; Houyi made the ladder strong and thick, just to be sure.

When all that remains is smoke--Julienne exclaiming how illegal it is to litter temple grounds as they have--Houyi feels as though she has emptied herself into that fire, into that rope ladder of paper, and now as the ashes drift skyward this has flitted beyond her grasp. There’s nothing more she may do.

“Will I get to see whoever it is that I just burned that for? The great-aunt. Great-grandaunt.”

Houyi touches the base of her throat, chasing the recall of her wife’s touch. “We will see. I believe she will wish to meet you.”

“She isn’t a ghost?”

“Flesh and blood, and beautiful.” The archer stands. “Shall I bring you somewhere else?”

“I’d hate having to explain myself to the police.”

She takes the grand-niece of her wife near the Sha Tin station, in a spot quiet and empty enough that they were not seen except by a stray cat. It hisses at Houyi and turns tail, though not before she notes that its eyes are an unnatural, lambent blue.

Before she leaves Houyi allows her clothes to reweave themselves into the form she favors, a man’s robe and trousers in pale blue. Bow and quiver at her back, reassuring solidity and weight against her spine.

Julienne stares at her, dumbfounded, as she presses her palm over her fist and bows to the girl in that old way mortals don’t bother with anymore except at New Year. As Houyi departs she can still hear Julienne muttering something about mowhab sets.

3.

When the rope ladder appears Chang’e knows it is time.

It drapes halfway in, halfway out of her window. Touching it she knows at once whose hand wove it into shape, whose hand touched it and made the passing of it to her possible. It is still warm, as though hiding in its strands a secret heat. The length of it seems immeasurable. The strength of it feels muscular, the flexibility of it prehensile.

She sits, gripping the ladder tight, until she feels its gravity bleed into her bones.

The weight of earth. The weight, perhaps, of kinship.

Chang’e races over the roof with a lightness impossible anywhere else, toward the garden where she’s hidden a part of herself. She peels away the swans and lions and tigers, the foliage and shrubs not quite real, the leaves and fruits that taste of honey and ice.

The moon is greedy and will not let her go. And there must, always, be a woman on the moon. Very well: she will give it one that never tires, one that never weeps.

She points the mannequin at the city, whispering, Go.