My arms are a stretch longer than any ordinary monkey's. I pick fruit without climbing, scoop at the moon without touching water. The books say our long-armed kind can seize the sun and moon and shrink a thousand mountains — an overstatement, but the meaning is right: monkeys like me are born to reach things.
To reach fruit. To reach stars. To reach whatever lives high up.
Also, to reach whatever is falling.
Three hundred years ago I was a half-grown cub, and I saw this mountain at its loudest. Banners on every peak, wine bowls lined up to the mouth of Water Curtain Cave, and that one, seated on the stone seat, flicking peach pits across the sky. Then he left — to guard a monk on the road west, they said. The day he went, the whole mountain walked him to the foot of the slope. He waved us back and said: when I return, peaches for everyone, forever.
We have waited through three hundred harvests of the peach trees.
At first we counted days. Then we counted years. Then the word "wait" stopped being spoken — but nobody stopped. No one sits on the seat. No one sweeps the dust. The mark where his staff once leaned, I guard with my life; no cub's claw may touch it. Not for the sake of rules. For the sake of one sentence — he said he would come back. A monkey like him: what he says must hold, though the sky itself falls.
And if it doesn't hold?
That half-sentence I have pressed down inside me for three hundred years, and every year it makes these long arms of mine heavier.
Now I am old — the troop's "Grandpa Long-Arm." The young ones bring me every question they can't settle, as if long arms meant long wisdom. What do I really know? Only keeping: keeping the seat, keeping the peach groves, keeping an eye toward Aolai Town — the quarrels between humans and yao below grow worse, the Bureau's flags are planted by the old waystone now, and the Havoc King's gang is chiseling rock in the back hills again, cutting grooves that all run toward the sea. I have gone at night and touched those grooves. Under my fingertips they are cold in a way stone is not — like touching a channel through which something is being drained away.
I keep account of all of it, so that when he returns I can tell him, item by item.
Then, on that rainy night, the herb-boy pulled a little stone monkey out of a landslide.
I held that cub's wrist a long time. The troop thought I was checking its wounds. I was not. These hands of mine held another wrist, three hundred years ago — he was leaving, I clung and would not let go, and he laughed, pried my claws open, and said arms like mine were just the thing to guard the mountain in his place. I remember the current inside his wrist: like a great river buried under the roots of a mountain.
Inside the wrist of that cub with no origin, there is also a river. Far thinner. Far weaker. But the watercourse is the same one.
I told no one. I said only: this mountain hasn't birthed a cub like this in three hundred years.
The cub grows day by day. It has shed its shell; it stands at the crossroads now. Some nights it steals off to look at the stone seat, thinking itself unseen. I stand with it from the dark, half the night through.
These arms have reached for things all my life. They have reached the sun and moon; they have reached stars. Only two things still hang where I cannot reach —
one is in the west, three hundred years gone without once looking back.
The other sleeps in a grass nest right before my eyes — and where it fell from, I dare not guess, and dare not stop guessing.