About the night of my tribulation — I should tell it from the beginning.
When the water rose over our genealogy stone, I was mid-shift-change: the first-half-of-night "Benbo'erba" just set down, the second-half "Babo'erben" not yet taken up. Into that gap between two names, the tribulation clouds came down.
The family calls this molt "taking over the watch." A catfish spirit of a certain age hardens its scales, lengthens its whiskers, multiplies its strength — nothing remarkable. What's remarkable is the name. By family rule, after the molt I am Benbo'erba no longer. From now on I serve the lower-water shift, and I use the lower-water name.
Babo'erben.
My grandfather used to say it was only a name. He was wrong.
In my first sleep after the molt, I dreamed. I was at the bottom of a vast, deep pool. The surface far above was dazzling, and mirrored in it stood a tree in full blossom. Someone swam beside me, shoulder to shoulder, patrolling the pool — one to the left, one to the right. I couldn't make out the other fish's face, but I knew where to turn, which stone to nod at in passing, at which watch of the night to rise for air. My body knew all of it, familiar as a route swum for a thousand years.
Then the surface shattered. The tree came down. Firelight dropped into the pool, and the water filled with the sound of killing. The fish beside me swung itself in front of me and said half a sentence:
"You go first. I'll go lock the—"
The dream breaks there. It always breaks there.
I lay stunned on the ravine floor for a full day after waking. That is not my memory. I have never in this life seen a great pool, never seen a flowering tree fall into water. But I know the weight of that half-sentence. It is the ancestor's voice — the thing that stayed inside this name since that one night at the Jade-Wave Pool, three hundred years ago.
So the family rule was never passing down a name. The name is a casket, and inside it is an unfinished errand. Whoever takes the name takes up the dream, generation after generation, until some generation finally dreams it to the end.
I told my travelling companions about it. The little stone monkey scratched its ears and asked what happened to the other fish. I said I don't know, the dream breaks. It said, then hurry up and dream the next one! Monkeys will be monkeys.
It was the herb-boy who said the thing that dropped through my chest like a stone. He said: go lock the — lock what? What is kept in that pool that must be locked first, before anything else, the moment disaster comes?
I had no answer. But ever since, in the middle of the night, I find myself thinking of the old neighbours of the Jade-Wave Pool. They say the Nine-Headed Beast is moving through the East Sea's borders again. They say the Pearl-Weeping Mermaid's pearls pile up faster every year. They say the Dragon Palace winds its tide gate tighter with every season — and what is a gate, if not a lock built into water?
The thing my ancestor swam off to lock on that night three hundred years ago, and the thing the Dragon Palace now strains to keep wound shut — could they be the same kind of thing?
I don't know. I only know the watch cannot stop. What I patrol now is no three feet of ravine water but a whole road running west. At every waterside we reach, I slip in and swim a circuit — learning the waterways, taking up the old shifts.
One day I will swim down into that pool.
And at the exact place where the half-sentence breaks, I will hear my ancestor finish it.