The wounds on his body improved with each day, congealing, scabbing, with white scarring appearing at its edges.
Shan Chao was always waiting for the day that he would be called to work, yet it never came.
The young man always went out early every day, riding, hunting, then he would go to the shabby bazaar at the desert edge where barbarians gathered to barter for some goods, and bring back flatbreads and salt. Sometimes the bundles would contain goat"s milk wind-dried preserved meat, yet he himself would not touch these often, apparently not fond of its rank odour.
He used animal bones and carved out little toys, once Shan Chao saw there hung by the window a grey-white and yellowed claw, so he carefully touched it, asking: "What is this?"
The young man lifted the hanging screen and walked into the house, taking off the longbow and quiver from his back, without even lifting his head.
"Hawks."
Shan Chao had seen hawks.
When eagles and hawks spread their vigorous wings, they darted across the blue skies like arrows, flying to unknown quarters in the distance, ultimately leaving only a tiny dot in his eyes.
He secretly plucked down that eagle claw and hung it around his own neck, hidden under his clothes, sticking to the skin on his chest.
The young man perhaps did not see, and perhaps he saw but did not care at all. At dinner time his gaze flitted across the empty window frame, but said nothing.
That night Shan Chao slipped out of the house once more, and stood in the small courtyard, welcoming the winds that whistled from the depths of the desert. Within the young man"s emaciated chest his heart throbbed loudly, as he reached out with his hand to press before his chest, where the hard eagle claw dug into his palm.
He hesitated for a very long time, as the sand dunes stretched forever under the moonlight into the distance, with his gaze seeming never to end.
"That is Alniyata,1" a voice spoke behind him.
Shan Chao turned around, and the young man wrapped in an ash-coloured cape was standing in the doorway of the earth house, his head raised up to gaze towards the resplendent Silver River in the night skies.
"……"
Shan Chao also raised his head, and for a while n.o.body in the courtyard spoke, with only the ocean of stars unchanging since times immemorial quietly glittering over their heads.
"…what about that side?"
"The flare of the Dipper and Bull mansions."2
"And those two are…"
"Celestial Pivot, and Twinkling Brilliance.3"
The silent sea of the desert lay beneath the stars, and from far away came the sounds of roving and wailing wolves. Shan Chao hung down his head, quietly picking at the hollow of his palm.
The young man turned around and pushed open the creaking wooden door.
"Come back in and sleep," he said without even looking back.
That momentary dialogue on that late night, seemed to have never existed, and neither of them mentioned it again.
Shan Chao prudently maintained his surveillance, like a wolf cub who was constantly on guard due to having suffered a lot, yet he was unable to peek at the young man"s serene face under his mask at all.
The young man looked after Shan Chao very much — it was a formal, cold and alienated care. He provided food and drink, not minding or asking after, and rarely did he open his mouth to speak, with practically no conversation. At dusk he would sit on the roof to survey the distant burning wheel of the setting sun, with the afterglow washing layer after layer of the desert, appearing like melted gold, stretching boundlessly for ten thousand li, which submerged his lonely and thin silhouette entirely under the long river of its halo.
Who exactly is this person? Shan Chao thought.
Where did he come from? When would he leave?
Would he suddenly leave one day, as suddenly as when he appeared, and completely abandon him in this vast and uninhabited cavity of Heaven and Earth?
The injuries of Shan Chao"s whole body entirely healed bit by bit. After the windy season pa.s.sed, the scabs on his back and legs came off, leaving only countless scars on his dark and coa.r.s.e skin, some deep some shallow, with their forms each unto its own, a silent commemoration of the starving and drifting of these past few years.
One night he awoke to pa.s.s water, and on his way back he saw the young man lying on his side on the futon, and the sword in his palm had somehow exited the scabbard a bit, with the sword edge suffusing circles of cold green light under the moonlight.
— it was a light that young Shan Chao had never seen before in his life, beautiful and extremely limpid, yet also extremely cold and terrifying, making him feel more fear than any weapon he could imagine, including the awful iron tongs in the slave owner"s hand, the fire-tongs, as well as the b.l.o.o.d.y iron chains that impaled the scapulae of fully grown slaves. It was so much that the bones of his vertebrae gave a nip of chilliness.
He stood for a while by the futon, his eyes hardly blinking, as his chest gasped slightly.
After a while he could no longer hold back, and slowly squatted, reached out, intending to lightly touch that seemingly freezing blue sword blade.
Right at this instant, the young man with closed eyes turned his hand back to catch his wrist, and overturned him like lightning!
"Ah!" Shan Chao was caught off guard, his back falling heavily onto the ground, and then his body sunk, the young man turning over to straddle him, with the long sword unsheathed with a clanking, firmly pressed at his throat!
All of this happened in a flash, and Shan Chao had yet to recover from the pain, the aura of death had already enveloped his whole body.
—that was the first time in his life, that he had truly been so close to death.
With only half an inch more, the sword edge would easily cut his trachea, and without extra trouble slice apart his neck bones like tofu.
Shan Chao"s whole body shook like chaff in the wind, as he saw the young man open his eyes under the moonlight.
"……"
The two of them had one high and one low, facing each other for a while, and the darkness was so silent that their breathing could not be heard.
"…next time don"t do that," the young man finally said, raising his hand to sheathe back the sword, his voice still hoa.r.s.e from having just awoken.
"You"ll get killed."
Young Shan Chao finally decided to flee, and he knew that there would be a village not far from here, but he also knew that he could not choose the cold desert night, and the best time was in the afternoon.
The young man hunted back a sand fox, and scooped out its innards, hanging the meat to dry in the wind behind the house, and tanned the fur to exchange for salt in the bazaar. He left in the afternoon, and Shan Chao constantly waited until the hoof-prints by the door had been blown flat by the winds, before he dug out the water and rations that he had hidden in the brick bed, went behind the house to untie the dried meat and store it in his bundle, but hesitated a bit before hanging back half of it.
He left the small courtyard, turning back once he had climbed a sand dune, at the small earth house standing all alone on the boundless yellow sand stretching far as the eye can see, like a lone boat on the ocean drifting gradually further away.
Goodbye, he thought.
Thank you, stranger.
If every child was said to have had the experience of running away in their childhood, then to Shan Chao, in his life so far that was his first long and difficult trek.
That experience was engraved in one"s heart and carved in one"s bones in this way, that for several years after it, it was still carved into his mind, until it was displaced in the future by an even more cruel even more desperate fleeing.
Under the scorching sun the coa.r.s.e sand quickly wore through his shoes, singeing a large blister on his soles, with every step a great pain. Although his water consumption had been carefully calculated, yet a child without enough understanding of the desert still had it hard to cope with the speed that a large quant.i.ty of his sweat evaporated, with heat exhaustion and dehydration leaving his lips cracked, and his eyes blacking out, making it hard to distinguish the directions.
Before sunset he was practically relying on willpower to advance, enduring the hottest and driest stage, and quickly twilight came from the four directions, the curtain of night fell, and the desert was enveloped by the slowly rising moon, with extreme chill stealing away the last vestiges of heat in the sands.
Young Shan Chao stopped walking.
The four directions were sand dunes as far as the eye can see, as he gazed towards the lonely heavens and earth, a vast and obscure ash-white filling the eyes.
The winds smoothed out his footsteps, with the path he came from made flat and smooth without trace, as if he had never left behind any evidence of his existence.
"……" Shan Chao"s lips parted and closed a few times, as if wanting to mutter and call for that young man, yet he could not make any sound.
His throat was already extremely hoa.r.s.e.
Moreover, he had never known that young man"s name.
Shan Chao sat on the ground, opening his leather bag to drain the last drink, and with a sweep of his hand flung it aside, lying down on the freezing sand to look up to the skies.
In the autumn the Silver River cut across the skies, and in the desert it was especially clear and dazzling, metamorphosed into the starry tides with waves surging forth. The heavens and the earth were like the first swaddle of life itself, lightly wrapping the young child"s body riddled with injury, gentle, merciless and vast, as it carried his last consciousness towards the eternal abyss.
There would no longer be hunger over there.
No more endless fear, and no more hopeless loneliness.
"…the Dipper and Bull, Alniyata…"
On that night so similar, the young man wrapped in a cape of rough cloth looked up to the sky, distantly pointing towards the vast ocean of stars:
"Celestial Pivot, Jade Balance4, Twinkling Brilliance…"
Young Shan Chao abruptly turned over his hand, grabbing the sandy ground, and turned over with difficulty. He lurched two steps before falling, and then crawled up bit by bit, vaguely looking towards the direction that he had come from.
—right at that instant, his slack pupils contracted.
On a nearby sand dune, that young man"s clothes fluttered in the wind, his thin silhouette stretched long under the moonlight.
He extended a hand to Shan Chao, and lying still on his palm was an eagle claw, as his voice spoke, low and serene: "You dropped something."
"……"
Both of them faced each other, and an ineffable feeling arose from Shan Chao"s heart, rushing to his throat. Yet he was so parched that he could not even make a teardrop, and his chest could only make hoa.r.s.e and shameful gasps, using strength from some unknown place to crawl up:
"—did you come to kill me?"
The young man shook his head.
"Then what did you come for?"
The wind gave a sharp whistle in pa.s.sing, and from distant corners came the long howls of wolf packs, wandering and lingering, gradually parting for the moon"s direction.
"…I came to bring you back, Shan Chao." The young man finally said.
"You have a place you should return to, I am the person who will bring you back."
From Shan Chao"s eyes there gradually floated up shock, astonishment and complete loss, yet the young man"s face behind the mask did not even have a single expression. They gazed at each other for a long time, until the slowly rising crescent moon had swapped the angles of their shadows, when Shan Chao finally opened his mouth amidst hoa.r.s.eness and shivers:
"You… exactly who are you?"
The young man"s eyelashes hung down, and then raised his hand to take off his mask.
In that instant, the mood in Shan Chao"s eyes was immediately replaced by a sort of astonishment.
The young man raised his head to look at him, his gaze serene and steady, his face handsome and gentle. At this moment there would not exist a person more good-looking than him, the silver light of the moon and stars shining down to reflect on the desert, as if the entire world had been shaded in a tender and indistinct halo, to wash away all the pain and despair to the far corners of the world.
"I am surnamed Xie, with the single name of Yun (云)."
"The Yun is from "a lone star of signal-fire reaches the north clouds"5."
"A teacher for one day, a father for ever, henceforth I am your Master.6"
Under the starry skies a long series of footprints meandered across the desert, Xie Yun carried on his back the eleven-year-old Shan Chao, walking towards the simple and crude little house built with stones far away.
There a warm oil lamp was alight, whose heart gave off a crackle of sound, letting out a bright light in the dark night.
"Master…"
"En?"
"Where did you say that we were returning to?"
Xie Yun turned his head to face the south, and a moment later he withdrew his sight, lightly sighing.
"That day will surely come…" he answered evasively, a mist drifting from his lips, wordlessly disappearing into the frigid autumn night of Mobei.
At the same time, under the precipice of Sword-Forging Manor.
Lightning lit up the sky dome once again, and world-shaking thunder rolled exploded, as the thunderstorm finally fell heavily from the night sky.
"…hu … hu…"
Under the great rain Shan Chao"s eyes closed tightly, the muscles of his entire body stretched taut and practically convulsing, the veins across all ten knuckles bulging out in a terrifying sight. In the next moment he abruptly exploded, turning a hand to draw his sword on conditioned reflex, a stunning whistle exploding from the Seven Stars Longyuan!
HISS—!
Snowy light cut through the canopy of rain, sword-intent roaring out, breaking apart the surrounding rock with a loud rumble!
"Xie…" Shan Chao"s head throbbed with chaos and pain, as he rigidly clutched his temples, and he involuntarily spat out two words from between his teeth: "Xie Yun—"
Translator"s Notes Chapter 12: Chinese Astrology vs Astronomy
Chinese astronomy developed mainly independent of Western, Islamic and other cultures, except with the influence of India during the expansion of Buddhism into China during the Han dynasty. Here is a piece on the Twenty-Eight Mansions.
During this time, the Chinese lunisolar calendar was considered to be a symbol of a dynasty. As dynasties would rise and fall, astronomers and astrologers of each period would often prepare a new calendar to be made. Like most other cultures of that time, astronomy and astrology were deeply intertwined - the stars were believed to reflect the lives of people, and the emperor"s fate reflected that of the empire in general.
The star Polaris - called Ziwei in Chinese - is called the Emperor"s star, because it is surrounded by the other stars. Those born under this star are said to have the fate of emperors, but it does not equal having a comfortable life. Seeing that the emperor"s fate reflected that of the nation in general, the royal courts would use Purple Star Astrology to get detailed readings on time-dependent queries.
On this point, I"d like to point out that Huaishang wrote τ Scorpii as "third star of the Heart mansion", which is its modern Chinese name. Its ancient name is "son of the Great Fire". This however is a minor detail.
- LLS
1 ZH: 心宿三 - modern Chinese name of Paikauhale, Bayer designation τ Scorpii. In Chinese, 心宿, meaning Heart, refers to an asterism consisting of τ Scorpii, σ Scorpii and Antares, cla.s.sed under the Azure Dragon in the Twenty-Eight Mansions.
2 ZH: 斗牛光焰 - this is another line of poetry, stemming from a poem of Song dynasty poet Xin Qiji "Cry of Water Dragon · Crossing Nanjian Shuangxi Building."
3 ZH: 天枢 - Chinese name for Dubhe, α Ursae Majoris. ZH: 摇光 - Chinese name of Alkaid, η Ursae Majoris
4 ZH: 玉衡 - Alioth, ε Ursae Majoris
5 ZH: 一星烽火朔云秋 - this is a line from Wen Tingyun"s poem 回中作, which dates after the time period of this story by about a century, maybe more.
6 ZH: 一日为师终生为父，从此就是你师父了 - the word Master here has the meaning of teacher, not the literal master -slave relationship.
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