The first thing I remember is the cold.
Rain was pouring in through the cracks of the rock. I curled up under a shattered slab of cliff, hugging my own tail. Later they told me the lightning that night was wrong — lightning is supposed to come down from the sky, but that bolt drilled up out of the East Sea and lit the tribulation clouds from below. Behind the clouds there were no gods. Only a blackened moon, watching Flower-Fruit Mountain without blinking.
I knew none of this. I only knew that I had fallen from somewhere on the mountain, that it hurt, and that I could not remember where I had fallen from.
Before that, nothing. Other monkeys have mothers, dens, hollow trees where they hide fruit. I have none of that. There is no milk-warmth of birth fur on me, only a faint smell of stone that grows heavier when it rains. Grandpa Long-Arm held my wrist for a long, long time, and finally said: "Flower-Fruit Mountain hasn't birthed a cub like this in three hundred years." He never said like what. When I kept asking, he pushed a fruit into my mouth.
The one who saved me that night was a boy with a medicine basket on his back. The mountain path had collapsed; he nearly went over the edge himself, yet he turned back and dug me out of the rubble and tucked me into his coat. His heartbeat was loud. His palm was burning hot. The strange thing is, I seemed to know that heat — not from this life, but from earlier, from before I even existed. Nobody believes that. I hardly believe it myself.
Then old Grandfather Taibai's voice settled into Water Curtain Cave like a lamp, lighting the three of us at once: me, Little Drillwind, and Benbo'erba. The old one said the yao beyond the mountain were growing restless, that the humans were founding a Bureau to hunt them, that yao and human would soon no longer recognize each other; whoever was willing could form a spirit bond with this child and walk the road west with him.
Little Drillwind asked: what is in the west?
The old one was silent for so long that even the waterfall began to sound loud. He said only this: three hundred years ago, someone carried something to the west. The thing arrived. But what should have come back never came back.
I didn't understand. But I raised my hand — faster than anyone. When I lowered it, a thin ring of lines had appeared on the back of it, like a tiny flower opening in stone. The old one called it the Awakening Mark. Little Drillwind said it was a badge for being chosen. Benbo'erba said it was a badge for doing chores. I think they're both wrong. The mark was warm — as if it had been carved long, long ago, and had simply been waiting for me to raise my hand.
Why did I raise it? Because of the stone seat, I suppose, in the deepest part of Water Curtain Cave. No one may sit there. No one dares. Three hundred years of dust lie on it, and in the dust there is a shallow ring, as if someone once leaned a staff there for a very long time. Every time I pass it, the stone-smell in my chest turns hot — so hot it feels like a heart is about to push its way out from inside.
Grandpa Long-Arm says that when I grow, I will first shed a layer of stone shell and become a Spirit Ape; the road after that, I must choose myself. Some monkeys, he says, grow into the loyal Long-Armed Ape. Some grow into the Red-Rumped Macaque, fastest thing on the mountain. And some — there he stopped, and stared at the waterlight on the cave ceiling.
"And some what?"
"And some hear what should not be heard."
I'm not afraid. Really, I'm not.
I just want to know — where did the one from the stone seat go? Why does all of Flower-Fruit Mountain wait for him, while not a single monkey dares to say his name aloud? And the heat in that boy's palm, the boy who saved me — why is it the same heat as the one inside my stone?
When I reach the west, will I finally know?