The Archer Who Shot Down Suns: Scale-Bright Stories

* * *

  Hell is red and black, and red and black, enough light to see yourself–what you have become–and the wounds the demons inflict upon you, with spears and thorn-trees, and long luxurious oil-baths in boiling brass cauldrons. For Houyi it is an arrow-shaft protruding from her breast, it is tears and gashes in her skin, and bruises where they beat her until her heart stopped.

  She examines the shaft. She pulls it out slowly. There is pain; in this place there is nothing but. Enough to make her retch, though the archer does not. Within herself it is control that she values second after memories of her wife.

  When the demons come, she is ready.

  In her hand is only an arrow, stained in her own blood and Fengmeng’s sweat, but she remembers a knife and that is what it feels like, weighs like. Even in this light she is used to the finesse of cutting and tearing, and with the same precision she shoots she drives the knife into gaps between armor; she inserts its tip into eye sockets, and cuts off ears–horse ears, swine ears–with abattoir ease.

  They give pause.

  “I will go willingly,” she says to the soldiers of hell, who know who she is, who have lost kith and kin to her methodical massacres, “if you can show me that my name is on the registry of the dead.”

  The one among them not armed, a capped and robed bureaucrat with a seahorse’s face, consults his scroll. On it unspools, collecting andpuddling until it is up to the bureaucrat’s waist; when it has reached his shoulders he at last concedes Houyi’s name is not to be found. Still she must be placed, named and posited in the hierarchy of hell, and so they bring her to one of the high magistrates: a giant encased in bronze. His face is a mask, twisted into a deep scowl.

  He asks, “Father?”

  “My origins must be known to you. I have none.”

  Ignoring her he goes on, “Mother? Sister? Husband?”

  Thrice she says no; again she tells him that she was born of no parent, made only by the particular wants of heaven. Wants that seem to have expired, but nevertheless.

  In the end she is sent to the Old Woman of Forgetting.

  For expediency Meng makes her house by the gate under which all dead must pass. Its doors are always open, for hourly there are hundreds of men and women deceased who must be processed and made to drink Meng’s mixture. Some unwilling, but most embrace it and cradle the little cups she hands out as though it is salvation.

  Meng receives Houyi privately, in a room full of earthenware and somnambulant lizards. When the archer has seated herself she is offered a cup. It is dainty, this cup, and no color at all–though its sheen reflects her face in rainbows, and behind her she can see the moon racing by.

  She looks up and gazes into Meng’s age-soft face. “No.”

  “It can buy you grace. You may start again a child. With parents and kin, and a life unwinding before you.”

  “Chang’e is not part of this cycle. I’ll only make her grieve, watching from where she is knowing that I’ve discarded memories of her. It would be selfish.”

  Meng withdraws the cup. “What will you do then?”

  “Wait.” The archer fingers the arrow that is also a knife. “Watch.”

  She sits by as the dead file through Meng’s parlor, sipping slow or gulping greedy. Houyi thinks she sees her wife’s mother among them once, but it is difficult to be sure. In the moment before they pass the gate a few become whole again, young again, and then are gone.

  Houyi is a mindful guest. She helps with the brewing and distilling, though she’s careful never to inhale when steam bursts from beneath lids and wafts up in fragrant clouds. She also does the windows over so they would be draft- and fire-proof; Meng chuckles to see this, and asks what it is with her obsession with carpentry when first she was born with a bow. “It keeps me useful,” the archer answers. “It keeps my mind turning, my fingers nimble.”

  It is when she is climbing up to patch Meng’s roof that the dragons come.

  They pull a chariot, and upon the chariot are the mother of suns and her last child. If the demons give Houyi wide berth Xihe sends them outright scurrying, for she blazes and singes, and those who are so used to roasting souls like little to be roasted in turn.

  Houyi is off the roof and on the ground even before Xihe’s eyes fall on her.

  “Archer,” the goddess says as she steps out of her chariot. “Despite your new home you don’t seem especially tortured.”

  Houyi does not speak of her mortal decades. “I’m sorry that I did not speak to you before. None dared approach you, and I could not myself reach so high.”

  “I’m not here for your excuses. You seem adrift, archer, and in want of a new duty. So I’ve come to bring you to that.”

  The archer gives her host thanks, promising to return and finish her work with the roof. Meng does not ask if this is what she’s been waiting for, and Houyi does not offer to explain.

  Houyi touches the chariot; pulls her hand away from its metal to find blisters on her fingers. “It burns.”

  “This was made for me, and drank in the fire of myself and my sons. You will absorb some, until the heat lives in your gums and your lungs, until you can illuminate a day mandated to be wan.” Xihe does not smile; her anger is beyond malice. “But it will always burn. Remember this, archer. Each dawn will hurt. This is punishment, not exaltation.”

  “I do not fault you, lady.”

  “Do not mistake me: I care little for Dijun’s faithlessness. We are barely spouses. I do not despise you out of puerile jealousy. It is the murder of my sons that I cannot forgive; it is for that you have been sentenced.”

  “What I did is beyond forgiving.” Houyi touches the reins gingerly. It leaves a ruby welt on the heel of her palm. “But I would ask for a boon.”

  Xihe looks at her, as though from a great height. “Why do you believe you deserve one, much less that I’d grant it?”

  “It is not much.” The archer bows low, her humility an offering, lower than she ever bowed to the emperor. It is obeisance; it is a suspension of pride. “And I believe you might do, in recognition that we were all injured by the same blow.”

  The goddess’ mouth twists. “Dijun keeps a scar from your wife’s hand. The first, for one so vain. He never understood why I forsook him, why the children are not his. It is a simple point. My sons could have spoken to me. Asked. I might have found them a safe way. I knew, I always knew, how tedious they found it to spend nine days out of every ten on Fusang. How they loved to be together.”

  The one surviving son hides his face in the shadow of vast wings. He has grown thin and tattered in grief and singularity, in bleeding his light and heat, in rising alone and resting alone on Fusang’s empty branches. His wings droop, eyes like obsidian gone to dull stone, dry as baked prunes.

  “I could have come and spoken to you. I did not. Of such silences are misfortunes built, I’ve learned, not fate or any decree greater than us.”

  “Ah,” Xihe murmurs. Her eyes remain hard. “I will not forgive you. Understand this. I will never forgive you.”

  “Yes,” Houyi says, and keeps her gaze trained on the dragons Xihe has tamed for her chariot. One rolls a limpid eye toward her, cautious, whiskers quivering.

  “What is it that you want then? That you cannot grasp for yourself despite your conceit?”

  She tells Xihe.

   

  * * *

  The moon is brittle spite and envy, and if it ever was a bird the memory of wings and flight is long past. The paths to it are hard, from it harder still. It is why those not quite of heaven, the chastised and the exiled like Chang’e, are sent here.

  But the moon is hungry. It lusts for warmth, which slides past as though its jagged cliffs and mountains are sieves, and in that rare moment when the sun-crow comes near the moon lowers its guard. It drowses and basks, opening itself, a plea written across its bar
ren city. The lanterns come alive all together, flickering into characters, tentative greetings.

  Chang’e stands in one of the high courtyards. The rabbit curls in her arms, rejoicing that she–almost–smiles as chariot, dragons and crow pass overhead. From this distance the goddess’ figure is invisible.

  This time the chariot pauses and lowers. City shadows cavort wild, unused to this abrupt change in light and temperature. The swans flee into ponds and lakes, some part of them recalling a day long ago where ten suns convened.

  Houyi lands, lightly, on her feet. She climbs the path spiraling up to Chang’e in quick, long strides. There are tears in her eyes, the sun’s radiance on her skin.

  “Oh,” Chang’e whispers, and, “oh, why are you crying?” Said even though she, too, gasps and her words are leaving her like broken glass.

  When they embrace their cheeks are wet, salt-smeared and fever-warm. They touch and touch again to make certain the other exists. If they are seen, if they are watched, they do not care.

  Houyi may not stay; her new duty tugs at her as hell tugs at the newly dead. But they have time to kiss, and love, and make each other laugh. Chang’e holds to her tight when it is time for Houyi to return to the chariot. “For now it will do,” she tells Houyi, “but you must come back soon. And write.”

  The archer promises. “Always.”

  On that night, the moon shines at its brightest: and mortals below see in that an auspice for newness and wonder, to be celebrated in rich cakes and lantern lights each night Houyi brings the chariot and finds her wife.

  When they part, they do knowing that they will see one another again: a year to them is as short as an hour. And maybe, someday, they will find a path easier to travel, a freedom for Chang’e to come and go as she pleases. They plan for that, long days in sunlit grass and lotus seeds in syrup.

  Nothing is beyond reach when they have come so far, and they are not afraid.

 

  Chang'e Dashes from the Moon

  1.

  There’s a lady on the moon and she has a rabbit; at mid-autumn we have mooncakes when her husband visits.

   

  Long ago the moon grew a city on its skin like nacreous shell around a pearl, and in this barren city lives a goddess who was once a girl.

  The goddess counts the years, at the beginning.

  She folds gold paper and silver paper at the proper months, and burns them for her mother. She makes houses of glassy yellow windows and pale walls, double-storeyed, and burns those so that her mother will have a comfortable residence in her passage through death. She makes animals, companions, furniture. When she begins counting in decades instead of years she starts burning offerings for her niece. It is the wrong way around; she is the elder, and she should be the one waiting beyond for her niece's sendings.

  But she is immortal, and her family is not.

  After the first century she burns offerings for her mother, her niece, and her niece's children. Who knows what descendants do now, whether they remember their duty? So she takes it upon herself, just to be safe. She watches the houses in the mortal realms change and lengthen, until they become towers which pierce the clouds, until their cities are thick and thronged and she can’t imagine locating her kin anymore in the million-millions that overwhelm the streets.

  Sometimes her name slips away from her. In defiance she etches into the soft stone of the lunar city, I am Chang'e, and I have a wife whom every night I long to meet. Her chiseling erases itself before an hour finishes.

  The walls are high to fill her sight. The houses are huge to make her small.

  In moments where she can rouse herself from lassitude, Chang’e indulges in fury. Though her mortal life she learned much, the knife and the bow. Cut though she might, the moon does not bleed. She loosens flaming arrows into the dark, but the moon does not burn. There are moments when, stepping through a garden gate or passing through a door, she glimpses a world under sunlight. It does not last.

  Often she watches the rabbit toil at its mortar. It makes no mention of leaving; this it seems to consider its rightful place. But it is the closest she has to a friend.

  “Does the moon think?” she asks, as though in idle wonderment.

  The rabbit pauses its pounding. “What makes you think so, Lady Chang’e?”

  “It is only a thought.” She nods at its jars and pots. “What are you making?”

  This medicine, it explains, reunites flesh and spirit: those chased out of their own skin by malicious devils, those who have spent too long in dreams, those sent to the underworld by an accounting error. Many ills require such a cure.

  Chang’e peers into the mortar at the thick, glittering purple paste. “It’ll work on any body?”

  “Even ones not of flesh,” the rabbit says with solemn pride. “My pharmacology is unrivaled, though many have tried to match it.”

  She smiles and strokes its long ears. “Perhaps one day you can make me a pill to make me heavy, so heavy that I will sink from the sky and return to the earth.”

  Its nose twitches and it looks at her with sad red eyes. “I wish you would be happy, Lady Chang’e.”

  “I’m happy, rabbit.”

  She does not say that happy does not come from wishing. Once she thought that was so, swept into the arms of the archer god who came into being full-grown and graceful as though born from a wish. Centuries later she has learned otherwise.

  A ghost butterfly alights on her shoulder. There are many of those in the gardens of the moon, phantom swans and mute songbirds, wisps of feathers and beaks that come apart if she looks at them too hard. A menagerie of creatures on the verge of breaking down.

  Chang'e will not break with them.

  She inhales the scent of the rabbit’s works, smells bitter and tart, fierce and demure. In the chambers of her heart she holds an idea, a solution. Holding it close and hid--so the moon will not hear, so the moon will not see--she leaves the rabbit and, steps light as the passing of autumn, follows the ghosts.

   

  * * *

  Heroic Houyi shot down nine sun-crows to save humanity, and through schemes of the jealous came to his ruin; in death he rose to the tenth sun, where ever after he made his home.

   

  For material Chang’e would have liked clay, soft and obedient to her hands, but the city is pavement end to end, and hard soil or harder rock where it is not. She settles with cherrywood, which is all they have to make anything from, there being an endless supply from the one tree. Over and over she’s watched its leaves unfurl green and fresh and branches burst forth stronger and steelier than before. The faster Wu Gang hews, the faster it regrows. Like the rabbit he never mentions escape, content to suffer and wait out his sentence on the moon, but sometimes she thinks it is merely that he has no one to return to.

  Appropriating chisel and saw from the woodsman’s cache she learns the fundamentals of carving, and over the months comes to understand where to chip, where to cut, where to etch: the subtleties of grain and knots, the differences between sap- and heartwood. Though she isn’t done when Houyi’s visit nears, it is progress and it keeps her busy, elbow-deep in shavings and dust.

  On this day mortals kindle lanterns for her and Houyi, she hears, and puts on dragon dances. And marry: it’s been absorbed into the matchmakers’ calendars, one of the most favorable dates in the year and certainly the most in the season. Chang’e doesn’t know how to feel about that. She remembers being a mortal girl on earth, in a sedan chair gilded and painted crimson, her face behind a veil. Her lips pursed into a thin line, her skull full of thunder. She’d have become a merchant’s junior wife, the last in a hierarchy of five; dreams of anything else would have shriveled up and died in her unmourned.

  Perhaps mortals are different now, and marriages are happier things. Houyi has suggested they might be, but she finds that beyond the reach of imaginati
on.

  Zhongqiujie has become an annual celebration for the inhabitants of the moon--which is to say, all three of them--as though to make up for the lack of congratulations and liquor when she wedded Houyi. Wu Gang brings lanterns shaped as vast lotuses and serpents. The rabbit has made cakes, viscous lotus paste inside and the salted yolks of ghost birds: they were pale rather than orange, but they taste no less rich. She thanks them, heartfelt. “It means more than I can say, both to me and Houyi.”

  “It is good for husband and wife to unite, Lady Chang’e.”

  Her smile stiffens. With effort she keeps it from hardening into a rictus. Tact has become as necessary as the air they breathe, and so Chang’e has ever avoided the subject. “You have met Houyi.”

  His mouth sets. “I have had the honor of acquaintance with heaven’s best archer, Lady Chang’e.”

  “I realize Houyi doesn’t dress as most women do. It pleases her to dress as she does, and she requires no more reason than that.”

  “Goddess, it’s never been my place to criticize how the divine garb their sacred persons.”

  “Very good. So, Houyi is a woman. On this we can at least establish a common ground?”

  The woodsman nods.

  She wishes she could say this marks progress. Unfortunately Wu Gang has never mistaken Houyi’s gender: he has always recognized that her wife is female, that Chang’e is monogamous. Yet he puts that side by side with the idea that Chang’e has a husband, and in a stunning blast of illogic reconciles the two. “Houyi is married to me. This makes her my wife, as I am hers. There is no one else.”

  He looks down at his feet. He looks up at the moon’s roof. Delicately, he hedges, “Have you considered, Lady Chang’e, that the archer is in truth a lord, and when he comes to you puts on a woman's guise to please your tastes?”

  Chang’e very much would like to remain poised, graceful, unassailable. Instead she wants to strike him. “I was there when she entered the court. She’s always been as she is, and must’ve lost count of the times she’s been asked if she would like to incarnate a man.”

  The woodsman kneels by one of the lantern beasts and makes a pretense of patting the silk flat. “Husbands do not always tell their wives everything, goddess. On this I can attest. It’s not maliciously meant; men cannot give themselves wholly to their spouses.”

  For a long time she looks at him. “Then it is quite fortunate I didn’t marry a man, isn’t it?”

  “Lady Chang’e, I didn’t mean to give offense. You know that.”

  “No,” she says, “you didn’t.” It would profit neither of them to say that only makes it worse.

  To his credit Wu Gang has done much to ensure their privacy, having built from nothing a pavilion large enough to contain a small court: embellishing and furnishing it with enough ornaments for the same. All colors, all light: the rabbit’s wine steams amber, the wood is defiant red.

  She takes one of the lacquered chairs, sits, and counts. Cherrywood armrests dig into her palms.

  She feels her wife’s arrival on her eyelids, a finger of heat down her cheeks. When she looks again Houyi is there, warm and real, a little breathless.

  The first moments are always difficult: they have gotten used to over three hundred days without the other. Absence has become more familiar than presence. Neither knows what to say, how to reacquaint herself to the actuality of her wife.

  Chang’e stands. They embrace and habit takes charge. Habit makes Chang’e take Houyi by the wrist, and lead her to the cushions, silk and satin the color of bridal drapes.

  “There are no walls,” Houyi murmurs.

  “No one will watch,” Chang’e says and discovers there is more than habit, that despite everything--the sheer stretch of the centuries--there is still desire. She draws her wife down with her, and for the next moments they do not speak at all.

  Eventually they come to the wine, a single cup between the two of them. Chang’e straddles Houyi’s lap, sipping amber heat that goes down scalding, tangerine-tart. Given their position, which they settle into as surely as key into lock, she feels awkward when she finally asks, “What have you been doing?”

  “Bearing your absence without grace.”

  She traces a line down the archer’s breast, doubling and circling back. Her palm pushes gently against Houyi’s heart. “Do you still think of us as married? Or just--”

  “Friends who become lovers, very briefly, once a year?” Houyi leans into her touch, eyelids fluttering against her cheek. “I have thought on it, though I feel the time differently.”

  “My kin are all dead.”

  “Yes,” the archer says gently, “that’s why the centuries pass unmarked for me, for I’ve nothing on the changing mortal earth, but for you… I’ve consulted many gods, many sages. Most continue to say that in a few centuries perhaps your sentence will lift, and you need only to wait it out. Obviously I disagree.”

  Chang’e presses her nails to the edge of her mouth. “I can’t--not another century. Not another decade.”

  “I know.” Houyi exhales. “If there’s a way we will find it; if there’s anything I can do I will do it, and none will stand between me and your freedom. I swear this.”

  Chang’e makes herself smile. She might have made herself say that she is absolute, that she has no doubts, that what is between them is steadfast as the moorings of a continent. But it was Houyi’s forthrightness that first made her say, Oh, may we have a thing like marriage, might we become wife and wife? It was that, and many things besides, which Chang’e loved. Between them there can be no lies, and few secrets. So she whispers, while they’re still so close their teeth are on each other’s lips, the fragment of a thought she’s been hoarding close to her breast.

  Long after the chariot has gone Chang’e remains to watch its trail, wisps of gold that too quickly dissipate, a thin memory of stars.

   

  2.

  On earth Houyi, too, dresses like a man. But in this place of chrome and skyscrapers it is less remarkable than it once was, at a time when she was made to walk the earth in flesh susceptible to death. Having let her hair down she becomes even more ordinary, for mortal men now keep theirs very short. Some are clean-shaven entirely, even though they aren’t monks.

  She comes at night, when her duty relents, and haunts the ocean’s side. She watches the ferries crossing the gulf between city districts: strange to think that Hong Kong and Kowloon, once very much unlike, can now be counted two parts of the same whole. It’s taken her several centuries, to track as she has never before, not prey of hooves and fangs and tiger-fur, but a thin faded line of blood. A long time ago she met the mother, brother and niece of her wife, but there’d been time apart. When she looked again they were all gone.

  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 muse
um 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.