The Archer Who Shot Down Suns: Scale-Bright Stories

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  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.