LITMIR.BIZ

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the road leading to the village. Was it in fact a reincarnation of the blind woman? All the women in Blue Cloud Prefecture had had previous lives, and some of those had come from the water. Wang Jie’s voiceless mother, at one time an aromatic calamus, crawled down into a calamus thicket just before she died, and when Wang Jie ran up to the riverbank, his mother was nowhere to be seen. He could not tell which calamus plant was his transformed mother, so each year at Qingming, the day for sweeping graves, he went down to the river and performed the rites for all the calamus there. If someone could transmigrate into a calamus plant, Binu was thinking, couldn’t the blind woman have transmigrated into a frog? She turned to scrutinize the frog, and was shaken by what she saw. The amphibian’s eyes were like pearls, pure but lustreless. Yes, it was blind!

      Hoisting up her robe, Binu ran like a madwoman and shouted fearfully, ‘It’s her, it’s her, she’s come back as a frog!’ No one was around to hear her – there was nothing but grass and weeds – so not a soul heard Binu reveal the frog’s true identity. As she ran, she dimly heard the sound of wind coming at her from the river, carrying with it the mountain woman’s cries for her son, and a sudden clarity in the indistinct shouts, ‘Qiliang! Qiliang!’ Unable to believe what she was hearing, Binu slowed her frantic steps, then stopped running altogether. She stood still beneath a mulberry tree and thought about whether she should fear the ghost of a frog. She was not really afraid, so she resolved to ask the blind woman the name of her son. The frog hopped wearily toward her; it was indeed a frog, one whose blind eyes held the sorrow of the mountain woman, but its tightly closed mouth uttered not a sound about the life of the departed.

      ‘What is your son’s name? Is it Qiliang? I’m asking you the name of your son.’

      Binu waited patiently under the mulberry tree, until she realized that the frog was unable to answer this simple question. The villagers had said that people who live all year round in the mountains have no proper names and are either called by numbers or named after animals or plants. So the blind woman’s son could not be called Qiliang. Remembering this lessened her anxieties, so Binu heaved a long sigh and, with her hands on her hips, looked down at the frog and said, ‘It’s fine with me if you don’t say anything. I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m a raft, and you want to go with me to find your son! Well, you’re quite well informed. The people in Millstone Village do not know that I plan to go to Great Swallow Mountain, but it seems that you know. My husband Qiliang is there, building a great wall. It is thousands of li from here. I am going there, even though I cannot hire a horse. But you, how can you get there? You could try hopping that far, but I’m afraid you’d be a cripple before you got there.’

      She had planned to hire a horse, or if there were no horses or her savings were inadequate to hire one, she would have hired a donkey. But, as it turned out, there were no donkeys either, and now it seemed that there was only this frog. What good was a frog to her? She could not, after all, ride north on its back.

      Returning home empty-handed, she again met up with Sude and his pigs. He laughed when he saw her. ‘I wasn’t lying, was I? All the horse traders were taken away in the summer, and no one can say whether they are men or ghosts today. How can you expect to hire a horse? You traded away your mulberry trees and your silkworms, didn’t you? Well, if you have the money, why not hire one of my pigs? I’ll show you how to ride it. Yes, hire one of my pigs.’

      Binu ignored the ravings of the pig herder and, with worry written all over her face, led the frog past Sude’s pigs, sighing over her fruitless trip to Banqiao. With Qiliang gone, it seemed that nothing remained!

      Clouds filled the Blue Cloud Prefecture autumn sky. Though weak and fragile, they rolled northward, passing over winding mountain ranges and abandoned groves of mulberry trees. Binu dreamed endlessly of Qiliang coming down the slope of North Mountain. Up in the sky the silvery Weaving Maid, Vega, was pointing the way home to Qiliang. Binu complained to people that she had seen him coming down North Mountain in the morning. ‘So why is he still walking when the sun drops below the mountain at dusk? Why won’t he come down?’ she said.

      Someone answered, ‘You mustn’t think such thoughts. You were having a bad dream. If Qiliang had come down the mountain in the morning, by nightfall his head would be rolling on the ground.’ They told her that all the Blue Cloud Prefecture men who had escaped from their labours in the north and come home had been caught and taken back. Their captors had then dug a huge pit on the other side of the mountain and buried the escaped labourers alive. With all those corpses down there, the people went on, it is likely that the mulberry trees on the back slope will grow tall and lush next year.

      Qiliang had once said to Binu, ‘If you cross those mountains and pass through seven prefectures and eighteen counties, you will reach Great Swallow Mountain.’ But he had never told her how long that would take. As she walked along the riverbank on her way home, she gazed up at the far-off mountains, which appeared to retreat farther and farther into the distance the longer she looked. She wondered why there were so many mountains in Blue Cloud Prefecture, and could not imagine what a place without mountains might look like, what sort of world it might be. Many of the residents of her village had travelled to the plains and returned filled with envious stories of the splendour and richness of those places, whose residents did not, as foretold, have three heads and six arms, but were graced with the good fortune of vast land holdings. Binu had never seen a plain, and the people’s descriptions of such places made her head spin. She was reminded again of the Kindling Village sorceresses’ prediction, that if she did not hire a Blue Cloud horse, she would be struck down by illness and die on the plain. Who would come to bring her home? Would she die in a mulberry field or in an irrigation ditch, or would she die on a heavily travelled public road? Did people who lived on the plain grow mulberry trees? Did they grow gourds? If there were no gourds, there would be no one there to bring them home and, after she died, would she turn into a lonely wandering ghost?

      Binu anxiously made her way home. At the village entrance, she changed direction and led the frog toward the nine mulberry trees. They had been submerged under the flood waters, yet all nine stood there calm and composed, looking as if they’d been planted in a paddy field. ‘You see how fine those nine mulberry trees are? Even after being under water, they’re as good as ever,’ she said to the frog. ‘Those nine trees have fed vast numbers of precious silkworms, but now they belong to someone else.’ She waded through the water up to the largest tree and stood there, pointing to the gourd vines wrapped around the trunk. ‘See that,’ she said to the frog. ‘That is Qiliang and me: one is a mulberry tree, the other a gourd. You are the lucky one, your spirit can go wherever it wants on those frog’s legs. Qiliang and I need a place where we can put down roots together. I’m not sure if mulberry trees grow up north, or gourds, and I wonder if there’s a place where we can settle down.’

      As she stood beneath the tree, Binu took one last look at the limbs and branches of all nine trees; seeing them was like seeing Qiliang. The image of him washing his face early in the morning materialized out of thin air as the sun was setting; though it was autumn, she could see him as if in winter. Though she had not been able to hire a horse, she saw him riding down the slope of North Mountain on a great Blue Cloud horse, wearing the new winter coat she’d taken him. How handsome and valiant he looked! Could there be another Peach Village man dressed as smartly? A blue cotton coat crafted by the seamstress from East Village, brocaded hemp shoes from Hailing Prefecture, and a phoenix-patterned sash that cost half a bushel of rice. The sash had a jade-inlaid hook on which he could hang anything he wanted.

      Binu picked a gourd from the ground around the mulberry tree. Tears flowed from her palms when she did so. The tree and the gourd cried too, wetting her hand. The gourd had been taken from the heart of the mulberry tree, just as Binu had been torn from the heart of Qiliang. The vine was unhappy, the tree was unhappy and the woman was unhappy. But she knew that, whatever her feelings, the gourd had to be picked, for she needed to settle the matter of her reincarnation before she left. The sorceresses of Kindling Village had revealed another strange fate, and the memory of that dark prediction made her tremble with fear. ‘You were once a gourd,’ they cautioned menacingly, ‘so you should not casually leave the safety of your home. People are buried in the ground all over the world, but for you, Binu, no grave awaits. If you die in a foreign land, your ghost will turn back into

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