Let's get one thing straight: I never asked for the title.
Count back eight generations of Drillwinds and every one of us was a minor yao on mountain patrol. Minor yao means: flag-carrier, clapper-striker, errand-runner, roll-caller. In Lion-Camel Ridge's heyday there were three Great Kings on the mountain, each one a devourer of men — and we were minor yao all the same. The first line of our family creed: yao come in great and small; postings do not. Do a small posting as if it were great, and even a minor yao sleeps sound.
My whole life has simply been that creed, carried to the end of the road.
Patrol: from hatchling to my first molt. Escort: from peddlers' loads out of Aolai Town to monkey cubs by the east creek. Lost things, I helped find. Quarrels, I squatted in the middle of and heard out. When the herb-boy first brought the little stone monkey up the slopes to gather medicine, I led the way — which cliff grows purple ganoderma, at which hour the miasma thins, I can count with my eyes shut. The days passed one by one. I never felt myself changing. Only the things entrusted to me grew more numerous, and heavier.
The turn came last twelfth-month.
A pack of children from Aolai Town wandered playing into the borders of the Havoc King's grotto in the back hills. His underlings ringed them in; it was moments from disaster. When I arrived I didn't think much — minor yao have minor yao's ways of fighting. I drew off half, snarled up the other half, used my patrol flag for a spear, and walked seven children out along the game trails through an entire night. At dawn, outside the mountain, their parents knelt to me in a row.
I was terrified. A yao who accepts human kneeling burns years off its own life.
And then the smallest child in the crowd tipped its head back and piped, clear as a bell: "Great Sage Drillwind!"
The silence was total.
On this mountain, those words have an owner. For three hundred years, when the monkeys speak of the one from the stone seat they say "that one," "the ancestor," "him" — not one of them dares say the two words aloud. And now a human child had set them on the head of a minor patrol yao. I waved my hands on the spot: I don't deserve it, it will be the death of me. But children don't care for any of that. One told ten, ten told a hundred, and now even the town storyteller has a set piece: Little Drillwind Storms the Grotto by Night.
That night, back on the mountain, I knelt before the stone seat half the night through.
I said: Ancestor, don't be angry. I didn't accept the title, and I couldn't carry it. Your "Great Sage" was won by fighting — Equal of Heaven, equal as in standing level with the sky. Mine is a few children shouting nonsense. By tomorrow it will scatter.
The seat was silent. The dust did not stir.
But titles are uncanny things — the harder you push one away, the tighter it clings. Come spring, yao in trouble began seeking me before they sought the elders; when the Bureau's flags crossed the boundary line, the troop pushed me to the front to parley. I still strike my clapper. I still patrol my mountain. Only slowly have I begun to taste something:
the "Great Sage" that child shouted and the "Great Sage" of the ancestor may not be the same word at all. His meant: Heaven would not bow to him, and he would not bow to Heaven. The child's meant: someone is guarding me, and I can sleep.
The first kind of Great Sage left three hundred years ago and never came back.
The second kind — who knows — any mountain might raise one. It only takes a yao still willing to treat a small posting as the greatest matter under the sky.
So I've stopped pushing it away. Let whoever wants to shout, shout. I keep only one private tripwire: the day I slack a patrol, drop an escort, or feel sweet inside at the sight of a human kneeling — that day, I strip the two words off myself before anyone else can.
There is one thing, though, that I have never dared tell another yao.
That night, when I finished kneeling at the stone seat and rose, I heard — very soft, very soft, behind me — a single laugh.
Not an angry laugh.
More like… the laugh of someone finally letting out a long-held breath.