The mountain god observed the creatures on his mountain for half a month but still could not work out what they were up to. Down below, meanwhile, Dahe conducted his studies with great seriousness. After much careful research, he brought two liang of vegetable oil up the mountain one day and finally managed to accomplish that particular thing.
Elio’s Notes: A liang is a traditional Chinese unit of weight. Two liang work out to about 100 grams using modern mainland Chinese measures.
Flushing scarlet, the immortal endured the unfamiliar sensation of Dahe’s rough, oil-coated fingers entering him and asked, “How did you know to use this…?”
Dahe’s face was every bit as red. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and the effort of holding himself back made the veins stand out. As he concentrated on his task, he answered with honest embarrassment, “I… I tried it on myself… If you put a little of this on, you can get it in.”
“…” The immortal’s expression became distinctly peculiar.
“Does it hurt?” Dahe asked anxiously, trying to withdraw the finger he had so laboriously eased halfway in.
The mountain god gasped and swatted his foolish face with a sleeve. “Don’t pull it out, silly boy…”
“Huh? Then… like this…?”
“Mm… But don’t push it in all at once either! Silly boy! You… yes, that’s it. Slower… mm…”
Being so inexperienced, they began this intimate encounter with extraordinary slowness. Everything that followed seemed to last an equally long time. By the time they finally lay tangled together, drenched in sweat, neither had the strength to say another word.
The mountain god lay on his back. Dahe rested his bristly head against the immortal’s chest, warm against the place over his heart. Still catching his breath, the god slowly wrapped an arm around Dahe’s neck and looked into the vast blue sky above.
His gaze pierced the unreality of that dreamscape and fell into boundless darkness. Across that immense vault there was neither sun nor moon nor stars, neither desire nor feeling, not the smallest spark of light.
The immortal closed his eyes as though in a trance and tightened his arms, pressing Dahe more firmly against his chest.
The two liang of vegetable oil were used only that once. Not because they finished it all, but because the immortal found its smell so strange that he flatly refused to use it again.
Dahe scratched his head nearly raw trying every alternative he could think of: watermelon, bananas, cooked red sweet potatoes, yams, figs… He scooped out the soft flesh, pounded it into a purée, and filled bowls with the results. The following day he carried an assortment of bowls up the mountain, as proud as a man presenting rare treasures for the god to choose from.
With one leg crossed over the other and a cigarette in his mouth, the immortal examined each bowl with a deep frown, looking thoroughly displeased. At last he flicked his ash, tipped his chin toward the fig pulp, and announced in the imperious tone of an old lord in the Forbidden City selecting a consort’s name tablet, “Fine. That one.”
Dahe, awed and eager to please, began helping the great lord undress and putting the chosen pulp to use, all while offering another gift. “I picked half a basket of figs too. Shall I bring them up for you to eat tomorrow?”
The mountain god clenched his teeth and shook his head, suppressing a moan. Eat them, my foot!Choosing the fig pulp meant he intended never to eat another fig as long as he lived.
Happy days passed especially quickly. In a blink winter came, then the next New Year, then one calendar after another was replaced. Tourists streamed into the mountains, and the villagers grew steadily more prosperous. Brides arrived from other villages, and households grew larger year by year.
With the population increasing, several village aunties decided to improve matters further by finding spouses for the remaining unmarried men and women. Dahe lived alone in the large courtyard that had belonged to Xiuxiu’s family, with so much empty space. He was nearly thirty, steady, honest, hardworking and thrifty, a man who looked dependable and had probably saved a little money. True, he had lost his wife and daughter, carried a reputation for misfortune, and lived with a slight disability, but it should not be too difficult to find him a gentle mountain woman whose circumstances were similarly imperfect.
After much talk, Auntie Lai arrived at his door one day, delighted to play matchmaker. She knew a lovely woman from the county town who was just thirty. The woman had remained unmarried because she had contracted polio as a child, leaving the muscles in one hand wasted and limiting its movement.
Dahe immediately declined politely. But Auntie Lai was experienced, having successfully matched three village couples, and was not easily deterred. She told him he was old enough to need someone at his side, then ventured to ask whether he looked down on the young woman because of her disabled hand.
Dahe shook his head in alarm. Awkward and sincere, he expressed his respect for the woman he had never met but still declined the proposed introduction.
“Dear child, why must you be so stubborn?” Auntie Lai sighed. “Xiuxiu has been gone so many years. She wouldn’t resent you for moving on!”
At the thought of Xiuxiu, and even more of the little daughter who had never lived to see her third birthday, Dahe’s eyes reddened. He lowered his head and said nothing. Believing he remained too attached to his late wife to remarry, Auntie Lai could only leave with a long sigh.
She reported her failure to the other aunties. They all agreed that they had to help Dahe leave his old pain behind and start again. Several days later Auntie Liu arrived with her sleeves rolled up, determined to rescue the poor, lonely fellow in their eyes.
Dahe refused over and over until he grew frightened of being pursued and took to staying on the mountain all day, creeping home only after dark. But one noon, after helping his Third Uncle with farmwork, he was cooking when his Third Aunt planted herself beside the stove like a pillar. “Dahe, that girl Auntie Lai told you about sounds very good to me!”
When he carried the bowls and plates inside, Third Uncle was reclining on the bed with his pipe. “Dahe, if you find someone suitable, bring her into the family. You can’t stay alone forever…”
Dahe silently set out the bowls and chopsticks. He was poor with words and did not know how to explain himself, so he chose to say nothing.
He thought that was the end of it. But after lunch, once he returned to the mountain, even Auntie Zou came over with her broom to advise him. “Dahe, if you don’t like Auntie Lai’s girl, I’ve got someone for you! A distant cousin’s daughter has just lost her husband, and she’s raising a child alone…”
Before she could finish, a great wind swept through the bamboo grove and overturned Auntie Zou’s rubbish basket. She cried out and ran after it as it rolled away.
When he entered his dream that evening, the familiar and wonderfully convenient rock was nowhere to be seen. The mountain god lounged on the bare shrine roof, legs crossed, crunching noisily on a large twisted mahua pastry. Only after chewing for ages did he ask lazily, “Auntie Lai? A distant cousin’s daughter?”
“I’m not marrying them,” Dahe said honestly, edging over to him and trying to wrap his arms around the god’s waist as usual. “I don’t like them.”
The mountain god moved aside, but not fast enough. Dahe caught him in a firm embrace, leaving him to raise an eyebrow and glance sideways. “Oh?”
Dahe nuzzled his neck and murmured warmly beside his ear, “Not them. I’ll marry you.” Then he made a little motion beside the god’s face, as though lifting a bridal veil.
The immortal froze. Once he recognized the gesture of lifting a bride’s red veil, his ears reddened at once. After staring wide-eyed for quite some time, he finally retorted in embarrassment, “I’m an immortal! I should be the one marrying you! No, wait. You… silly boy! You’ve learned bad habits!”
Such honeyed words could only mean he’d learned bad habits indeed!
To prove he was still a good boy, Dahe silenced him with a kiss. After kissing him affectionately for a while, he lowered his head onto the mountain god’s shoulder. “I won’t marry anyone else. But I want to adopt a child.”
“Mm.” The god’s cool fingers stroked the short stubble at the back of Dahe’s head. “It would be good to have a child. Someone to look after you when you’re old.”
Dahe shook his head and placed another light kiss beside his mouth. “Not to look after me. When I’m old, the child can bring you offerings.”
“Oh?” The mountain god stroked the back of his head. “And where will you be?”
“I’ll stay on the mountain with you,” Dahe replied. “By then I won’t have the strength to go down anymore. I’ll stay with you always…”
Before he could finish, the mountain god caught his hair, pulled his head close, and sealed his mouth firmly with a kiss. Brushing his lips against Dahe’s, the immortal murmured, “Don’t say such things… It’s still a long way off. Don’t say them…”
Dahe’s warm palms cupped his cool face.
Dahe was slow-witted, but because he asked for so little, there were certain questions he had begun thinking about long ago. He forced himself to understand a lesson the mountain god had taught him in childhood: birth, aging, sickness, death, joy, grief, meeting, and parting were things no one could escape. His own life would last only a few short decades. He could keep his lonely god company for those decades and no longer. However fiercely he struggled or clung on, he would eventually depart, as his ancestors had done, sinking into silence beneath the mountain’s seeming eternity until their bones turned to ash. He understood it. He simply could not bear to go. Yet however much he dreaded leaving, he still had to understand.
What he never imagined was that he would not be the one to go first.
A few months later, Auntie Lai, Auntie Liu, Third Aunt and the rest suddenly stopped pestering Dahe about marriage.
The reason was simple: the women were reluctant to give up their county-town hukou, their official household registration, and had hurried to find husbands in town instead.
Household registration had never seemed especially important. Life in a county town where the prosperous were supposed to lead everyone else to wealth was not so different from life in a mountain village striving together for moderate prosperity. But now registration had become a question of forced relocation.
The spring river flowed eastward. Even a blade could not stop its waters; the current merely rushed on. Across the country’s magnificent landscape wound a mighty river thousands of kilometers long. The authorities had spent decades dreaming and planning. Their grand design had finally been reduced to a report on a sheet of paper.
One document, several meetings, endless arguments: more than a hundred towns submerged and a million residents moved. Thus was a monumental project, supposedly built for a thousand years, brought into being.
Whether it would be celebrated for eternity or cursed for ten thousand years remained to be seen.
At first, the glorious water-conservancy project had nothing to do with Dahe, buried deep in the mountains and deaf to the outside world. The original flood zone lay in another river basin near a neighboring city.
Then one day a red-headed official order arrived. Late changes to the project had expanded its inundation zone to include the surrounding county towns and villages, and several entire mountains besides, all to be swallowed by this supposedly historic achievement.
The announcement set the picturesque little mountain village in an uproar. The revised order had come so abruptly that more than ten settlements had barely a year in which to move. Different formulas were used to calculate relocation compensation, and the subtleties of those calculations were not lost on the citizens of this country.
Every household scrambled to find out how much compensation it would receive. The day after the order arrived, the village Party secretary led a large delegation to the county government offices.
The villagers left behind chased the secretary’s wife from one end of the village to the other. “So how much will we be paid? Where are we supposed to go?”
“How should I know? Please, everyone, calm down! Haven’t they gone to the county? Wait until they come back!” Their questions set the village secretary’s wife’s head buzzing until she finally hid inside to watch the news.
The villagers kept gathering and chattering in the big square at the entrance to the village. Among all the frightened, agitated faces, Dahe looked the calmest.
He seemed calm only because his mind had gone completely blank.
He stood there in a daze, caring nothing for compensation or the place he might be sent to live. Money meant little to him. As for where he belonged, where could he possibly go except here?
At last the secretary and his group returned from the county, drenched in sweat. He bellowed through a loudspeaker in the square, patiently answered everyone’s questions, and dismissed the meeting. Dahe had absorbed none of the announcement. Only then did he approach uncertainly and ask, “Which mountains will be flooded? What about the mountain behind the village? How high will the water come?”
“Good grief!” The secretary was flushed from talking so much and waved his hand impatiently. “Of course that mountain will be flooded! It isn’t even very high. The county leaders told us the water here will rise high enough to cover the peaks! So don’t leave anything behind. Everybody has to move!”
Dahe stood rigid as the villagers continued to argue and chatter. To him, the world had fallen utterly silent. Then, with a deafening crash, thunder seemed to explode beside his ear.
He fell straight down as the thunder sounded.
When he woke, he was lying in Third Uncle’s bed. His uncle sat puffing on his pipe and, seeing Dahe open his eyes, called to Third Aunt to bring him a bowl of sugar water.
“What’s wrong, lad?” Third Uncle asked. “Feeling better? Does your head hurt?”
Dahe groggily sat up and tried to go outside.
His uncle held him back. “Drink that sugar water before you leave! Where are you rushing off to? I know you’re upset, and I know you love the mountains and don’t want to go, but we have no choice. By next year the water will cover everything.”
Dahe shook his head, broke away as though possessed, and hurried uphill.
Evening had already fallen, and the railings around the tourist area at the foot of the mountain were locked. Dahe found a side path, climbed over the fence, and went up empty-handed to lie on the familiar great rock.
The immortal appeared in a beautiful dreamscape of mountain waters veiled in mist. Cradling Dahe’s pale face, he asked, “What’s wrong? What happened?”
Dahe, still terribly shaken, told him what he had heard that day. The mountain god went still, as though he could scarcely believe it.
“Flood the mountain? How could they possibly drown a mountain this high? And with so many birds and beasts living here, do they mean to abandon them all?”
On that point the immortal simply knew too little about the world. People themselves could be abandoned; what did birds and beasts matter?
But after thinking for a while, he grew calmer and shook his head. “I don’t believe they can cover the entire mountain. The villages at the foot, perhaps. There was a terrible flood down below more than a hundred years ago. I saw it myself.”
Dahe shook his head desperately. “The village secretary said the whole mountain would go under. Not even the peak will show!”
The mountain god was silent for a long time. “…If that truly happens, then it must be Heaven’s decree. There will be nothing we can do to fight it.”
Dahe stared at him, then suddenly seized his robe, eyes wide with emotion.
He cared nothing for heavenly decrees. There was only one thing he wanted to ask. “Then what do we do? Where will you go? The secretary says everyone must move. I’ll take your shrine with me!”
The mountain god looked at him and smiled faintly. Running a hand through Dahe’s tousled short hair, he said, “Silly boy, where could I go? I’m the god of this mountain. Shrine or no shrine, I must remain here and guard it.”
Dahe caught his hand. “Then I’ll stay with you. I’ll stay on the mountain.”
“What foolishness is this?” The immortal smiled in a way Dahe found strangely unfamiliar. “Of course you’ll leave with the villagers. What would you stay here for?”
“I’m not going!” Dahe shouted, his eyes red. “I won’t go! I’ll stay with you! If they’re going to drown the mountain, then let me die here with you!”
The god wrenched his hand free, stepped back, and frowned at him.
“You want to die? You want to die while you’re still so young? I suffered heavenly punishment for saving you, lost most of my divine power, and ended up with my face ruined like this. Was it all so that you could throw your life away?”
“I’m not throwing it away! I never wanted you to be punished! I… that’s not what I mean! I want to be with you. That’s not throwing it away!” Dahe pleaded, unable to put his feelings into words.
“Oh?” The immortal gave a cold, scornful laugh. “So you think I should never have saved you in the first place? I could have let you die before my shrine and buried you in a hole right there. Then we’d have been together, wouldn’t we? If you mean to die anyway, it seems I suffered all that punishment for nothing!”
How could Dahe possibly argue against the immortal’s quick tongue? His face turned scarlet with panic. He went after him, caught his hand, and tried to explain his heart again, only to be swept away with a flick of the god’s sleeve. “Go! Move wherever they tell you! This place is going underwater anyway. You need never come back!”
Dahe had been utterly unprepared for this sudden turn. His eyes widened in terror. It was no longer as though a single clap of thunder had exploded in his mind, but as if a whole storm of heavenly thunderbolts were crashing without end. How could everything have changed so completely in just a few sentences?
Before he could arrange his thoughts into words, the mountain god swept his sleeve again. A sharp pain struck Dahe’s chest, and he was suddenly expelled from the dream.
He tumbled off the great rock with a thud and opened his eyes in the overwhelming darkness around him.
Nearby came a soft rustling: that Black Fur rabbit was pinning its little paramour and carrying on. Startled, the little wildcat underneath shrank farther under the rabbit’s belly. The rabbit gathered it close, and the two beasts lay one atop the other, watching the spectacle.
Dahe did not even glance at the animals. He struggled to his feet, clung to the rock, and shouted hoarsely, “Mountain God! Mountain God!”
The forest was deathly still. The immortal was just as he had been on that stormy night more than ten years earlier: endlessly gentle one moment, suddenly cold and merciless the next, capable of severing every tie in the blink of an eye and truly refusing ever to see him again.
Terrified and despairing, Dahe shouted uselessly for a long while, until his throat was raw.
He crouched by the rock, breathing hoarsely. When his first panic subsided, he understood at last that he was no longer the sixteen-year-old boy he had once been.
His native simplicity, innocence and slowness had never left him. But the cruelty of the world had battered him into adulthood through pain that seemed to tear his flesh from his bones. Now there were things he wished to protect and hold fast to. He would not simply turn and flee in bewildered terror when the mountain god pushed him away.
Holding his head, he trembled in silence for a while. Then a plan began to take shape. He painfully straightened his stiff limbs, rose, gathered his bamboo stall, and limped down the mountain path. Yet he could not bear to leave entirely: with every step he looked back.
He knew the mountain god was watching him. That immortal, who swallowed every sorrow, bitterness, and lonely ache alone and took the crushing weight of divine punishment upon himself, must surely be standing unseen behind Dahe, watching him go with equal reluctance. Dahe knew it.
Only when Dahe’s figure had vanished completely along the mountain path did the green-robed immortal finally emerge from the empty air.
His expression was fixed and still. He stood alone in the desolate cold like a slender stalk of bamboo in the wind, unbroken but whispering a forlorn sigh through every leaf.
Black Fur hopped over. The sight of the immortal in this state made the rabbit lord profoundly uncomfortable, so it seized the hem of his robe and gnawed a mouthful.
The god bent down to stroke its head, then looked at its innocent, foolish companion and suddenly sighed. “You two should…”
He stopped himself mid-sentence, choking back the rest. Secrets of Heaven could not be revealed. Whatever the future might hold, he could neither change it nor dictate the fate of the creatures living in his mountain.
He sighed and gently stroked Black Fur’s ears.
“Life and death are ruled by fate. Take care of yourselves, and I can only hope you escape this calamity…”
That little Black Fur beast sneezed, turned around with complete unconcern, flashed him a white-furred rear, then darted back to pin its wife and pa-pa-pa-pa some more.