A question: why has the waterfall of Water Curtain Cave never once run dry in three hundred years?
Mountain springs fail. Ravines change course. Even the tides of the East Sea have lost their rhythm. Yet this one curtain of water never thins in drought, never freezes in the twelfth month — it hangs across the cave mouth day and night like a curtain that cannot be drawn aside. The monkeys have lived behind it for centuries, and not one of them has ever asked why.
I have. Because I am what holds it up.
My line, too, began as ravine fish. But fish differ from fish. Some keep to their own bend of water for a lifetime. Others molt — and with every molt, their water widens. By the time you reach my molt, the scales are scales no longer: they are waves. When I walk, a tide-sound follows; when I raise a hand, water gathers from every quarter. The old speech of my kind calls this stage "Mer-Emperor" — not emperor as ruler, but as in vastness: the great water moving in majesty.
The day I reached it, I heard the sea at the foot of the waterfall.
Not a metaphor. In the spray of this waterfall there is one thread of salt, fine beyond fine. I traced it downward, into the lowest rock-cleft of Water Curtain Cave, and found a water-vein — thin as a hair, cold as a blade's spine. One end ties to the clouds above the summit. The other runs due east, to the deepest floor of the sea. All of Flower-Fruit Mountain, it turns out, is a mountain steeped upon a single thread of water; and this curtain is the one short length of that thread that surfaces into daylight.
Three hundred years ago, while the one from the stone seat still lived here, that vein ran warm. The old fish all remember: sweet water on the mountain, obedient waves in the sea, and between mountain and sea this thread beating like a pulse.
Now, someone is drawing that pulse out.
Those seaward grooves being chiseled in the back hills — I have sunk into the vein and listened. Each time the grooves hum, the water in the vein lurches seaward, as if someone impossibly far away were hauling in a net. What's being hauled away is not the water. The water remains. What goes is the unnameable thing within the water — the old fish called it the water's spirit. Water stripped of spirit makes lazy springs, shallow ravines, and a curtain growing thin.
I have done the arithmetic. Drawn at this rate, the curtain that has held for three hundred years will not hold through the next three hundred.
So I stay, and do what I can do. On rising water at night I gather the scattered vapour back mouthful by mouthful and splice it into the curtain. The monkeys think the falls simply run high after rain. They don't know there is an old fish behind the curtain, stitching a leaking net inch by inch.
The day the herb-boy brought the little stone monkey to take their leave, he stood a long while before the falls. The way that child looks at water is not ordinary — most people watch a waterfall for the spectacle; he was reading the run of the vein, as if he half-sensed something. At the end he asked me: Elder, where does this water lead?
To the sea, I said. And past that — under it.
He asked: what is under the sea?
I did not answer. Some words, spoken too early, merely frighten a child; spoken too late, they cost the world dearly. I told him only this: when the road west takes you through the East Sea, look at the Dragon Palace's tide gate for me. The tighter that gate is wound, the more fully the thing beneath the sea has come awake.
As for what that thing is —
that inverted bolt of lightning, three hundred years ago, that drilled up out of the sea into heaven: all of you saw only its upper half, the half in the sky.
We of the water saw the other half. The half below.