The old books say there are four kinds of monkey between heaven and earth that belong to none of the ten categories of living things. One of them masters transformation, reads the heavens, knows the earth, and can shift the stars — the Intelligent Stone Monkey.
Three hundred years ago, one Intelligent Stone Monkey used that name up entirely. He burst from a stone, shook the Dragon Palace, shook the Underworld, shook Heaven itself. Then he guarded a monk across a hundred and eight thousand li, walked into Vulture Peak, and never came back.
I am the second.
So the elders of Flower-Fruit Mountain say, at least. On the night of my tribulation I shed the last of my old fur, and the new coat glowed faintly in the dark, like moonlight running on water. The monkeys keeping vigil went quiet first; then someone knelt — I never saw who was first — and in a blink the whole cave was a field of bowed backs. Grandpa Long-Arm stood at the very rear, and did not kneel. He looked at me with half of his eyes full of joy, and the other half full of something I still don't dare examine — the look of a man watching an opera he last saw three hundred years ago begin again from the first gong.
From that day, everything changed.
Fruit finds its way to wherever I go. Young monkeys copy my walk. Old monkeys look at me more and more the way one looks at a temple. When humans and yao quarrel in Aolai Town, people now climb the mountain to "ask the Intelligent Stone Monkey to judge." Even the Bureau's dispatches gained a new line: one Intelligent Stone Monkey, appeared on Flower-Fruit Mountain, form matching the old records; early measures advisable.
Early measures. Measures of what kind, the dispatch does not say.
No one ever asked whether I was willing. It seems it isn't me they need but the name — they need someone to burst from the stone again, need three hundred years of waiting to come to something. All the dust on that stone seat seemed, overnight, to have settled onto my back.
Only the boy with the medicine basket treats me as before. Still splits his flatbread with me, still has me grind his herbs, still tickles my ear with a grass blade when I stare into nothing. Once I asked him: if a day comes when everyone says I ought to go be someone, what should I do? He thought for a long while and said: herbs have their nature, monkeys have theirs; force either into a different shape and both lose their power.
I wrote that down in my heart. Because further west, something is waiting for me — and has waited longer than I have been alive.
The elders' old telling goes: at the foot of Vulture Peak lies a crown, phoenix-winged, purple-gold, worn once by him. If an Intelligent Stone Monkey should one day walk the whole western road, pass the Equal-of-Heaven trial, and lift that crown onto its own head, it will inherit the title that once shook the celestial court — Great Sage Equal of Heaven.
The whole mountain longs for that day. What they don't know is that I have gone to the stone seat at night, knelt the way they kneel to me, and asked silently: Elder — that crown. Did you drop it, or did you leave it?
To pick up what was dropped is usurpation. To leave what was left is betrayal.
The seat gave no answer. The dust did not stir.
I suppose I will only know at Vulture Peak, the moment the crown is in my hands.
But sometimes I wonder — if, in the instant it settles on my head, what I hear is not cheering but the unfinished half of a sentence from three hundred years ago… will I dare to keep listening?