Chapter 58 Chasing Away Monsters
CHASING AWAY MONSTERS
He was gone by the time I made it outside—my injury slowed me—but even so, it did not take long to find him.
When I passed the Palisade Garden, I noticed that it was missing its swords. Normally, there were thousands of them, half-buried in the ground, but they were all gone.
I unhooked a lantern from the eaves of a nearby pavilion and ventured into the cold fog; where the light shone, ghost cuckoos cried out with alarm and scattered back into the dark.
It was deep into the garden that I found the swords: arranged densely in a giant dome-shaped cage, held together by their own weights, a dense tangle of lilies, and Dao magic.
“Terren,” I called.
When no answer came, I grabbed one of the swords by the hilt and pulled. It came away with some resistance, a tiny ting breaking the night’s quiet. I worked on prying more away—cutting myself several times in the process—until I had created an opening to the dark center of the cage.
By the red light of my lantern, I could see him. Curled up against one side, very small, his head buried in his knees. He was crying. I could tell by the way his shoulders shook.
“Terren, it’s me.”
No answer.
I crouched beside him in the small hollow, the way I had done with the boy in the meadow. “May I keep you company?”
No answer.
“I’d like to tell you a story, if you would hear it. It’s one that my Ma used to tell me.”
Silence. Not even the stirring of grass in the wind.
“There was a year, before I was born, in which many animals in Lu’an had vanished. Hens and ducks and rabbits, and even the milk goats had not been spared. It had been a desperate summer, a summer when the sun seared the land so dry the catfish were cooked alive right in their holes.”
I kept my eyes on him as I did the telling.
“Nobody knew why, except for an old man who came from the village over.
He walked in a stooped shuffle, and his skin held many wrinkles, so we knew he was very wise.
He told us that there was a fox spirit who lived in the hills.
He said on dark nights, when even the stars were not visible, it would come out hunting; that was why our livestock disappeared.
“Everyone was infuriated. As you can imagine, our village was already suffering from the famine, so this loss was not small. We knew we had to drive the demon away before it could do more damage.
“We tried to set traps for it, the way we might trap a wolf, but the demon was not of this world and could not be contained by normal materials. We tried to lure it with meat and lay ambush in the shadows, but the demon was devious and avoided it. Ba and Uncle Tam even tried going up the hill, to chase it away with sickles, but they could not find it. You know what did work in the end?”
He said nothing, so I answered my own question: “We worked together, all of us, as a village. We picked a clear, windless day, and then we gathered all the scary things we could find. Torches and kites, pots and wood-drums, leftover firecrackers from New Year’s.
We went to the hill. Everyone—from the children to the elderly—clapped and yelled and stomped our feet and told the demon to go away or else.
And, well, it really did grow afraid. It left our village for good, and from then on, no livestock was ever taken again. ”
I finished the tale. The summer remained silent, except for the call of an owl, very far away. The fog hung cold in the darkness between us.
For a while Terren was so still that I thought he hadn’t been listening, but then he said, his voice small and broken, “Why did you tell me this?”
I honestly didn’t know. There was no point to it, except that I wanted to take his mind somewhere else, a place where people were good. “Because these are the stories I grew up with,” I said, wishing I was more articulate. “Because they are lovely and I like them.”
“Demons are not real. Anyone who has spent a day in school or read a book knows that.”
“Then good thing I have done neither.”
“If there was any truth to what your ma told you, then it was probably road bandits who took your livestock. There were lots of them, in the early years of the famine.”
I had suspected as much already, having read the histories by now, the memorials, the records. “Perhaps. But I like my version better.”
At last, he lifted his face from his sleeves and wiped furiously at his eyes. His voice was still broken as he said, “I should have you beheaded for seeing me like this.”
It was another flat attempt to get me afraid of him—or perhaps merely a force of habit. But I knew the threat did not have his heart behind it. “Is that so?”
“Beheaded and worse.”
“Terren, it is not a weakness to be seen.”
There were no knives between us now, no fear, not even enough distance for a sparrow to spread its wings. I looked into his eyes, and though they were older and meaner, there was no question they were the same ones as on the boy I’d seen in the meadow. I looked into them and I saw him.
Maybe it was possible to love somebody that one hated.
Maybe, buried heart-deep, I really did love him.
Not the kind of love a wife shared with her husband—that was not possible, after all he’d done to me; I might have borne no scars, but my body still remembered—but the kind of love one human could not help but feel for another when they had to pry away blades to find them.
I did not know what else to call it, if not love.
“Wei.” Something in my words had made him start crying again. “I’m … I’m lost.”
“Don’t worry. I’m here.”
“Will you hold on to me?”
I was taken aback. “Will it help you?”
He didn’t answer, only cried harder, shoulders shuddering with every heaving sob.
I put a gentle arm around him and brought him close, and his face fell wet onto my shoulder like he could hold it up no longer.
“I don’t know anymore,” he gasped into my gown.
“I…” He was crying so hard he could barely speak. “I don’t know…”
He never managed to articulate what it was he didn’t know, but I knew his meaning. I don’t know how much suffering is normal.
How much was ordinary, expected, the price we paid to live.
How much was created by us, needless.
I didn’t blame him for not knowing. I didn’t think I knew either.
I did the only thing I knew how, which was to sit with him in silence and hold him tight, the way Ma used to do for me.
I let him pour his gasping sobs into my shoulder, each one like his whole body was fighting for air.
They were the rawest, most heartrending sounds I had ever heard come out of a human. “I don’t know … I’m lost … I’m lost…”
He had done many evil deeds, I thought, but he had not done everything he’d been accused of. He might have been a monster, but not all the ugliness in the world was his fault.
I held on to him as the night turned around us, as the dim flame of the lantern brushed our wall of knives and outlined the small shape of him in red.
At last, when the sky was beginning to lighten through the lattice of our cage, he finally seemed to run out of those sounds.
And he whispered, so quietly I almost didn’t hear him, “I did do it. Lady Autumn. I killed her.”
Then he told me how it happened, and the words he spoke were earnest ones.