The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (7 page)

She crept downward toward the dark pond and the crack beyond. By now only a suggestion of ebbing sunlight cradled the moon and stars. She was well-concealed from the nearest watchtower and suspected no one would care to arrest her anyway, if the soldiers’ beliefs matched Flybait’s. Flybait himself was observing from atop a rise, honoring his pledge to verify the dare, but expecting some horrible and un-choosy doom.

She waited. Stars spun.

“I’m bored,” Flybait called.

“You could come down here.”

“No, thank you.”

“Then tell yourself a story.”

“At a time like this!” Flybait scoffed.

“Best time for stories,” she said. “Especially spooky stories. I’ll tell you one. If you come sit beside me.”

Slowly he did so, though he stared out at the dark water and the looming crack beyond. Handling males, Lightning Bug once said, was a combination of affection, discipline, and bribery. (Lightning Bug was not exactly a model of the three womanly devotions and four virtues.) Next-One-A-Boy aimed for the bribe, and told Flybait a story of another male, long ago but not so far away, using the words Lightning Bug had taught her.

The Tale of the Girl in the Window

Centuries ago, when the Walls still grew from their tails in the desert, the son of the emperor’s master architect caught the eye of the emperor’s daughter.

The boy was of course destined for scholarship and was, naturally, sequestered in a country house by the sea. No girl or woman was allowed near, as he’d already shown distraction near the feminine form. Least of all would his father countenance a princess coming near the lad, for such were far beyond his station. A dalliance might upset all the master architect had worked for.

So the boy studied by the wan light of the hovel’s window, memorizing the classics, gazing at the turbulent sea. There were in none of these texts the deeper feng shui secrets of his father’s craft, the manipulation of the land’s chi for the benefit of humankind. Rather the boy learned of literature and history and wise sayings by old masters.

To know these classics was to learn more than dusty old tales. To the elite of the Empire they were like a second language. For the naming of a classic might stand for ten thousand ordinary things.

Thus alluding to the divinatory
Book of Jagged Lines
might convey the full gamut of triumph and reversal.
The Classic of Excruciating Etiquette
, if invoked, might convey that sense of proper behavior to which all of Qiangguo aspired but none quite attained (for to fully engage the mind, the panoply of ritual must surpass the mind). The
Nine-Times-Nine Ruses
may be quoted individually, but referencing the whole work implies a universe of guile. And
The Classic of the Cardinal Directions
, with its monsters of every clime—hungry ghosts yearning for human warmth, treacherous shapeshifting foxfolk, the man-eating Nian driven away by firecrackers every New Year—is synonymous with horror and mystery, but also with childhood. Most classics are not, however, as engrossing to the young as
The Classic of the Cardinal Directions
. And so the boy’s tutors had saved it for last.

Wearily he studied, plodding his way toward that treasure at the end of his bookshelf, and felt as though his youth were seeping hour by hour through a small, unscabbed wound.

Thus the boy was thoroughly distracted when a teenaged girl appeared at his window. She was pleasingly slender, and yet rich roundness was visible through clothing sewn a trifle tight. She caught his eye, and as if these two youths shared a secret joke, she giggled, running one hand in a two-second, seemingly eternal journey along the curve of her hip. She moved on, and he saw no more of her the rest of the day. Yet she was there the following day, and the day after that, again passing wordlessly by the window, again miming the caresses he himself longed to give. This was an enchanting mystery, because few people, let alone flirtatious teenage girls, were allowed to intrude upon the boy’s solitude. Wrenched with desire, he at last confided with his father, hoping to learn she was a daughter of his household staff or else a village maid with friends at the manor.

The master architect was concerned. He had no idea who the girl could be. He kept watch, but when the boy was accompanied, the girl was always absent.

One night a storm arose while the boy slept in the hovel, his face planted in the
Summer and Winter Annals
. He woke with a start, and his foot brushed something covered in fur.

Terrified, he gave the thing a savage kick.

At that moment lightning split the air and the hovel as well.

The boy fell, dazzle and thunder filling his mind.

When he recovered, he searched the hovel’s ruin for his classics, but none was left but
The Classic of Cardinal Directions
. He found as well the corpse of a huge fox. Thereafter his love was never seen.

His father was pleased on two counts. Not only was his son safe, but he knew of a saying, “Monsters are safest under the feet of the worthy.” If one of the diabolical foxfolk would seek shelter from the heavens beside the boy, it might mean that Heaven found him particularly favored.

And the Master Architect recalled how the boy’s mother had possessed in late pregnancy auspicious stretch marks upon her belly—marks that resembled two coiling dragons.

“Um, so you think the monster is one of the foxfolk?” Flybait said, looking awkward at talk of bellies and curvaceous young women. Next-One-A-Boy had no idea why her own presence might amplify his discomfort. She was plain as a rag, after all. If the boy stared at her, it just proved he was an idiot.

“I think,” she said, “that this crack diverts the land’s chi from whatever purpose the master architect had in mind. I am guessing chi flows into the Walls all along their length. But here the chi leaks, and all that leftover energy takes form from the people’s fears.”

“I think,” he said, “you should not be called Next-One-A-Boy. I think you should be called Spooky Girl.”

“I am as my parents named me,” she snapped.

“Crazy . . . what’s that?”

Something was stirring out on the water. Moonlight and shadow and echoes and whispers converged within the great crack in the Wall, and a thing took shape from them, swirling and rippling. Cold wind blew in their faces, and with it came a rasp of vast laughter, ripe with the odor of decay.

“The Nian!” Flybait called, leaping to his feet.

“Maybe,” Next-One-A-Boy said, rising and shaking. “Focus now, and help me.”

“I am too busy wetting myself.”

The thing was a beast of darkness and moonbeams and curdled cloud, crackling with blue lightning, in the shape of a storm-grey lion with flashing eyes and floating hair. It would have been charming at bedroll size, intimidating at man size, terrifying at horse size. It was big as a house. It pawed the water, standing eerily atop it, snorting smoke like the bonfires of all forbidden history books. It roared, and in its roar were the cries of generations of the uprooted and slaughtered. It narrowed its burning gaze at the two bandits.

Flybait surprised Next-One-A-Boy. He splashed into the water ahead of her, saying, “Run! Run away!”

This act of gallant idiocy broke her own hesitation.

She grabbed the rice ball Flybait had nibbled and threw it into the pool. The monster claimed it. Lightning flashed and rice sizzled.

“Come on!” she called to Flybait.

“So! You believe?”

“I believe you are a fool!” She grabbed his arm, dragged him uphill. Some bit of sense trickled through his feeble boy-brain and he followed.

So did the monster. Next-One-A-Boy tossed another rice ball downslope and the beast pounced upon it. She would have to tell Lightning Bug the recipe was a success.

“You have a plan, right?” Flybait babbled. “You have it all figured out. You have worked out a proper exorcism.”

“I don’t know! Not exactly! I do think it’s a manifestation of concentrated chi. This place must be thick with it.”

“What do you do with a manifestation of concentrated chi?”

“I don’t know!” She threw another rice ball. “But it likes sticky rice. Everyone likes sticky rice.” She rummaged in her pack and found the special rice ball with a long string sticking out. “You have a tinder box. Can you use it?”

“I am the best!” said Flybait, tapping a small bamboo tube on his belt. It was filled with paper, a piece of flint and a piece of steel attached to it by twine. “Why, once, when Five Fingers needed a distraction . . .”

“Light the fuse! I will distract!”

“Fuse?”

She did not answer, but dashed toward the Wall, tossing sticky rice balls as she went. The Nian devoured each treat in turn. Each lotus leaf wrapping bore a character representing one of the twelve animals of the zodiac. She had begun with Tiger and by now was on Pig. She hadn’t thought the decorations would matter, but if the chi-beast did in fact echo the legendary New Year monster, the ordering might help.

“How are you doing?” she called out to Flybait.

“I have vast hopes! You?”

“I am losing my meal.”

“I am preparing a dazzling feast!”

“The guest is coming!” She ran to the Wall and scrambled up it, for in this place the stones were splintered and rough, an earthquake-cracked tumble held in place by the surrounding structure. She tossed another rice ball (Dog) and climbed above the height of the monster, though surely not out of range. The thing made quick work of the rice ball, so she tossed the ones marked with the Rooster, the Monkey, and the Sheep. The beast that resembled the Nian raced around like an overexcited lapdog. It was taking longer to chew each ball, for it was to some degree material, and the sticky rice was gumming up its gullet. It was also paying less and less attention to its surroundings.

She had two rice balls left. She saw Flybait still struggling to light the fuse. The beast snuffled up to the Wall, and she had to throw the ball marked with the Horse. “Hurry,” she murmured.

The chi-thing gulped down the morsel and took a long thoughtful look at the antics of the boy on the rise. The girl whistled and threw the last rice ball, the one marked with the sign for Snake.

Her throw was off. Like a wily serpent the rice ball landed in the grass, too near to Flybait. The monster leapt upon the ball, just inches from Flybait. The boy somehow kept working with his flint and steel.

As the thing chomped and swallowed the rice ball, Next-One-A-Boy shouted, “Here! Here! Happy New Year! May you be rich! Congratulations and good fortune, now give me a red envelope!” and anything else that crackled into her mind. It worked. The would-be Nian bounded toward her, and Next-One-A-Boy felt almost as if she too were wrapped in a lotus leaf, smelling of starch and sugar.

Behind it, Flybait struck a light. The paper in his bamboo tube burned.

He would not be in time.

Lightning Bug had told her,
You struggle too much, girl.

With what?
Next-One-A-Boy had answered.

With everything. Be like water. Let go.

Everything good I got by struggling!
she had responded.
The only ones who never struggle are the dead!

Now she was about to be dead. She had just one good way to avoid the oncoming lightning-jaws.

She let go.

Plunging toward the ground, expecting to break bones on impact, she was startled to find herself whisked aside in mid-fall by a leaping figure dressed all in black. Even the face was wreathed; only two stony eyes were revealed in the moonlight.

The leap that carried Next-One-A-Boy to safety was in its own way as astonishing as the lion of storm and shadow. They landed beside the pond, and the figure set the girl gently down.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Someone who worries when children play with fire,” said a woman’s muted voice. “But it is too late now. Look.”

Flybait was rushing forward, bellowing, “Rice! Yummy tasty sticky rice! Now with extra firepowder!”

For the fuse on the rice ball was lit, and the precious explosive Next-One-A-Boy had purchased and stuffed into the rice was about to go off.