Chapter 24: Where can an intimate friend be found (III)

“A Yin!” came the sound of Li Shiyi’s voice, at a loss, from the side.

The E Shou let out a low belch, a stench like something ruined coming from its gut; A Yin anxiously licked her lips, jaw jutting out, the cold sweat delicately and finely giving her the appearance of a haloed flower, the fine hairs from head to foot seeming to have some reaction as they stood up, as if weakly resisting the E Shou’s approach.

The tip of the E Shou’s ice-cold, moist nose came to press against her forehead, the touch of it feeling sticky like a snake; A Yin closed her eyes; yet, suddenly, she felt the fine hairs soften, the shadow enveloping her slowly retreat, the oppressive feeling, along with the tang of the inside of the E Shou’s mouth, disappearing. The clatter of its nails clawed at the dirt, and A Yin panted in harsh breaths and opened her eyes, seeing the E Shou throwing itself in a leap, jumping in font of Li Shiyi.

Li Shiyi gasped in quiet breaths, and said to Song Shijiu in a quiet, quick yet clear, set of instructions, “You haven’t been a person for long, and haven’t told any lies; thinking on it, it won’t eat you; if you can escape, and think of a way to return to Beiping, look for Tu-saozi, and give her apologies.”

Song Shijiu’s eyelashes trembled against her palm, as if a captive, terrified butterfly; and yet, Li Shiyi was oddly calm, and said to her, “And I, I apologise to you.” She didn’t know why she’d suddenly said this phrase, but it was as if she didn’t know how to choose what to say to Song Shijiu; she’d promised to Song Shijiu, carrying her from the tomb, that she would never not attend to her, and yet she hadn’t even looked after her a month and she was going to abandon her to her own; she’d been born pretty, and didn’t have any origin, and although she was agile, her mind was pure, and she didn’t have any well-acquainted friends; in the ways of this time, she didn’t know whether she could survive or not.

Song Shijiu’s eyelashes didn’t tremble anymore; the tip of her nose was faintly red, and she cleverly closed her eyes against Li Shiyi’s palm, asking her earnestly, “If I were to promptly say a great number of lies, then could I die along with you?”

Li Shiyi absolutely hadn’t thought she would say this sort of thing; her mind trembled unpresentably, as if someone had hit the bottom tip of her heart with a strong fist. All the efforts she’d made were for survival, and yet Song Shijiu’s words were as if life and death didn’t really have any difference. She released the hand covering Song Shijiu; Song Shijiu opened her distinct black and white eyes and gazed at her; this time, she hadn’t cried, and hadn’t made a fuss, her nose barely red, soft yet persistent.

The E Shou’s breath puffed behind her ear; before its eyes, Song Shijiu’s lips opened and closed, mouthing silently; she was racking her mind trying to think of every lie she could say; on one side, Tu Laoyao wailed helplessly, along with the sobs of A Yin, who’d exhausted her strength.

Li Shiyi turned her head against the E Shou’s fur, glancing at A Yin. The E Shou opened its bloody, great mouth at the top of her head, spurting bloody foam of all the events past, catching Li Shiyi unprepared.

I am called Li Shiyi.

“The rain pauses briefly in the cold; eleven years ago, a dream of a scene.”^[1] I am precisely that Shiyi.

I hadn’t even been born when my father ran away; it was my mother who gave birth to me alone in a cemetery. I don’t know whether this was the reason that I can hear the footsteps of ghosts. At age five, our family was so poor as to be unable to even open a pot,^[2] and my mother couldn’t raise me and my older brothers and sisters, and had me kowtow to my shifu to learn the arts; she urged me to say that since I could hear the footsteps of ghosts, that also counted as an uncanny skill; before entering a tomb, I could listen, and if there were ghosts, then we wouldn’t go; regardless, survival was the most important.

Though it was called learning an art, it was really sending people off. From age five, I parted from her, and never saw her again after that, so I in fact didn’t know whether a ten year old ought to have their hand held. My mother, after all, never told me.

My shifu loved drinking, and didn’t remember everything; naturally, she wouldn’t remember how old I was, and over time, even I began to nearly forget.

My shifu and I went from the north of Jiangsu to Anhui, then from Anhui to Shandong, and in a wealthy general’s tomb in Jinan, I met A Yin, master and disciple. Compared to my shifu and I, they were very respectable; it was my first time meeting a young lady who entered tombs to rob them, and atop her head there was even a ribbon knotted into a bow. A Yin’s shifu made her up well, and no matter where they went, she was always as pale carved jade; my shifu, on the other hand, took soot and smeared it on my face, telling me that the appearance of the surface wasn’t important at all, and that survival itself was good enough. Shifu was like my mother, always saying the life was the most important; appearance wasn’t important, age wasn’t important, and a single place wasn’t important either.

A Yin’s shifu contracted tuberculosis, and, unable to endure the winter, died; tuberculosis would spread, so my shifu and I cremated her; A Yin didn’t drop a single tear, only kneeling down and kowtowing three times.

From then forwards, A Yin and I worked together and lived together, our affection like sisters; Shifu treated her as well as she treated me; her strength was a bit weaker than mine, and at times in the matter of carrying water and chopping firewood, I would secretly help her; when Shifu found out, she didn’t punish me, only smiling and drinking a mouthful of wine, pointing at me and saying, if you help her today, then in the future, you’ll actually be harming her; if you don’t believe me, wait and see.

After, thinking about it, Shifu’s words were reasonable; if I were a bit more diligent as A Yin was then, in future matters, things would be well.

After only a few years, Shifu passed as well; I don’t know if it was the drink that had harmed her body, or entering tombs that had harmed her spirit. Shifu passed entirely serenely; she said, not crying is precisely well; this lifetime of mine, I haven’t made a mistake; you’re someone with a great deal of good luck and blessings.

A Yin and I buried Shifu at Mount Jiuru, and after, put our possessions in order and went to Beijing; the first time coming to Sijiucheng, with its sugar-coated hawthorn, yellow peas, bean-flour cakes, to A Yin was an entirely novel experience; it was just that the novel experience required money, and so we didn’t have it.

In that time, A Yin and I ate plain noodles for every meal, but she didn’t disdain it, in fact telling me with a smile that sometime, when we had money, we’d put an egg on top of the noodles, as many as we wanted to put.

Destitution makes even one with an elephant’s strength cower; the only thing we dared to covet were a few eggs.

After another two years, several kinds of goods came, and we gradually grew more comfortable, and even had some surplus money at hand; at that time, the novelties had already all been tried, and we rented a small courtyard house in the south of the city, and I set up a stall to make a living, and she did laundry and cooked, our days more or less steady.

Then, even later, it was the last day of her eighteenth year. As usual, she left, and as usual, came back with money, closing the door and saying she was exhausted, and didn’t do that sort of work anymore. She always assumed I didn’t know, but how could I have this sort of weakness? How could I not notice that the A Yin I lived with daily wasn’t the same? I saw the cries of unbearable grief she made in the night, and saw the winter day’s exhaustion and laziness that she couldn’t even open her eyes, and heard her speech becoming more and more vicious day by day, heard her, who had before not cared for reading, tossing and turning restlessly, clothes draped over her shoulders, and the sound of flipping through books.

I looked at the books that she had flipped through page by page; the raw edge of the book had been brought out by repeated touch, and the pages had been stained with sweat, each having the record of the Teng serpent. I understood what change had taken place.

I searched the ancient texts, sought out and asked more capable people, even went to Mount Wuling to search it; halfway up Mount Wuling, there was an elderly Daoist who told me that the Teng serpent was a mythological snake race under Nüwa, hard to understand easily; in the Shanhaijing, there’s a portion that says there’s another dragon-bodied spirit under Nüwa, known as the Bai Shai. According to legend, the Bai Shai and the Teng serpent accompanied Nüwa to repair the heavens, and were the attendants who kept Lady Nüwa’s laws; the Bai Shai attended to the left, respected by the Teng serpent.

If I were to find a spiritual being with the Bai Shai’s spirit, there was an eighty percent chance that it could drive out the po spirit of the Teng serpent, peeling it off one’s body. Not many have seen the Bai Shai, but it engenders itself to and subdues the Teng serpent; the Teng serpent often hides in the surroundings of the Bai Shai.

I thanked the Daoist and left, returning to Beiping, but A Yin had moved to the alley, and when I went to search for her to talk to her, she chatted with me, her speech ideal, without breeze, or moon, or emotion.

I didn’t say anything, returning home alone, and after, received several words of rejection and refusal as before. I searched everywhere; if a place had a supernatural yao or beast come or go, if a place had a strange event or a bizarre one, I would go precisely there. The tombs Tu Laoyao couldn’t enter, I went into. Master Wu’s enchanting words of life, I received. A Chun’s problematic matter from a thousand years ago, Xi’an’s antique market’s stores, I asked one by one; the words from A Tang that moved my heart weren’t, in fact, gold and silver or precious stones, but…

What if?

What if.

I’m called Li Shiyi. I love saying “I don’t know”; I often play at “not knowing”. I used the time of a number of years to tell a single lie as flawless heavenly clothes, which is the nonchalance of if nothing had happened.

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Translator's notes:

[1]: From Nalan Xingde’s ci poem “Xie family courtyard savaged by change” (谢家庭院残更立), set to the tune of “Picking mulberries” (采桑子).

[2]: 揭不开锅 (jie bukai guo), referring to being so poor as to have no food at all.