Clack-clack. Clack-clack. When you hear the watch-clapper, that's me, patrolling the mountain.
We Drillwinds have held the patrol posting for as long as our family goes back. Great-great-grandfather served on Lion-Camel Ridge: strike the clapper, shake the bell, and sing it out — the Great King bids me patrol the mountain! In those days you patrolled for a king. How many caves on the slope, how many yao in each cave, how many seals of command over each yao — all of it reported, item by item. Great-great-grandfather called that "a mountain with a master."
Then Lion-Camel Ridge scattered, and the family fled east until we settled on Flower-Fruit Mountain. A fine mountain: fruit everywhere, sweet water, monkeys who don't bully newcomers. One thing wrong with it —
this mountain has no king. The one from the stone seat has been gone three hundred years.
The old ones of the family never broke the habit of the posting. Out before dawn with the clapper, patrol till sundown, come home, stand at the mouth of Water Curtain Cave with the register raised, mouth open for the day's report — then remember there is no one to report to. So the old ones would set the register down, square and neat, on the stone by the cave mouth, and go patrol again the next day. Three hundred years of registers have stacked on that stone. It's half a hill by now.
By my generation, we no longer even think about the "to whom." Patrol is patrol. What hour the dew falls heaviest, which peach tree ripens first, how many new claw-prints in the rocks of the back hills — I keep it all. If you ask me, a patrol isn't for catching yao. It's for keeping a promise: a mountain may go without a master, but never without someone minding it.
Lately, though, the footprints have gone wrong.
First, over by Aolai Town: people planting flags with the character for HUNT on them, who throw rope-loops over any yao caught out alone. Then the back hills: the Havoc King's gang chiseling stone in the dead of night, groove after groove, every one of them running toward the sea. I put my ear close once. The grooves hum — like something flowing along the rock, down toward the water. And on the full-moon nights there is smoke over the Eclipse Altar, smoke that rises perfectly straight. Even the wind can't bend it.
All of it went into my register. And when I finished writing, the old family ailment flared up again — report it to whom?
I was still fretting when old Grandfather Taibai's voice came down into Water Curtain Cave. It lit three of us at once — me, the little stone monkey, Benbo'erba — and said a child was going west, and asked who was willing to walk with him.
My first thought wasn't how far the west was. It was: my backlog of patrol reports finally has somewhere to go. I shot up and asked: what's in the west?
The old one answered slowly. Frighteningly slowly. Three hundred years ago, someone carried a thing to the west. The thing arrived. The one who carried it never came back.
Ha. No family understands that better than mine. A posting that went out and was never closed — that's a matter bigger than any king.
So I went. Clapper at my belt, register on my back. Patrolling the whole way: finish Flower-Fruit Mountain, patrol the East Sea; finish the East Sea, patrol Gao Village; patrol every station to the foot of Vulture Peak. I mean to see with my own eyes whether walking the entire western road, watch-station by watch-station, can turn up where that three-hundred-year-old unclosed case got stuck.
Clack-clack. Clack-clack.
Oh — one more thing, which I've never told another yao. In all my years of patrolling, on nights when the great wind rises, there is one direction on the summit where the wind sounds different. As if someone very, very high up were imitating my clapper.
One strike. Then another.
It isn't an echo. Echoes don't miss the beat — and this one strikes the old cadence, the patrol-rhythm of my great-great-grandfather's day. The Lion-Camel Ridge cadence.
On this mountain, apart from me — who else would know it?