Old, old — and only now grown into human shape. Laughable, isn't it?
I am the oldest peach tree on Flower-Fruit Mountain. How old? When the one from the stone seat was still a scrap of a monkey, he napped in my branches. He slept badly — rolled about hugging the boughs, snapped three of my limbs. So be it: the three limbs he slept on bore, ever after, the sweetest peaches on the mountain.
There's no arguing sense into a thing like that. Spirit-breath knows its people, the way fruit knows its season.
I saw this mountain in its richest years. In those days Heaven held its Peach Banquet once a year — the immortal peaches of the Jade Pool, mind you, nothing to do with us mountain stock — yet every banquet season, when the celestial wind crossed our slopes, every peach tree on the mountain got drunk with it: blossom past all discipline, fruit past all restraint, even the borers too lazy to bite. The old trees said we were catching Heaven's festival-glow. A feast above, a good year below; humans and yao, each in their proper place.
However many years the Banquet has been silent — that is how many years this mountain has been cold.
No decree ever cancelled it. It simply… stopped. For the first few decades, we old trees still got our habitual drunk each banquet season, the intoxication thinner every year. Then the celestial wind stopped coming, and the glow was cut off at the root. The mountain peaches bloom and bear as ever — but that trace of heaven-touched sweetness cannot be brewed anymore. The young trees didn't believe me. Aren't all peaches sweet the same way? I let them taste one old peach from my limb. When they finished, the whole orchard was silent half the night.
That is when I resolved to cultivate. A tree grows into a spirit not to command wind and rain — but to demand an explanation.
Now that I've managed it, and can walk leaning on my own old root, my first task has been drafting invitations. Yes — invitations to a Peach Banquet. A wild mountain peach spirit has no standing to host the Jade Pool's feast, I know. But I've thought my way to the heart of it: what matters in a banquet was never the immortal peaches or the jade wine. It is that someone is still willing to sit down together. If Heaven won't hold its feast, I'll hold one at the mountain's foot: the monkey troops, the ravine fish, whoever will come up from Aolai Town, passing carters and peddlers — seven guests the first year; last year, over a hundred. Even a young clerk of the Bureau slipped in once for a bowl of peach broth.
At my table there is one rule: human or yao, before you sit you raise three cups. The first to the mountain beneath your feet. The second to the far travellers not yet returned. The third — to the empty seat.
Every year I keep one empty place at the head of the table. The young ones ask who it is for. I don't say.
Not for mystery's sake. Because I am no longer sure myself. At first, of course, that seat was his — the one from the stone seat. But these past years I lie awake reckoning: if he returns, the head seat is his by right. But what if the first to come back is not him? What if it is some other of the scattered, the lost, the ones this three-hundred-year debt has wronged? Then whoever comes — sits.
Last winter, little Peachling came flying to me in a panic: the First Peach was gone, the branch stood bare. And every tree in the orchard had tilted its boughs toward the west.
The young ones took it for an omen of disaster. At my age, I can read one layer deeper —
when trees lean their branches, it is never farewell. It is welcome.
There is news moving in the wind. For the first time in five hundred years of standing, I have left the date on my invitations blank.
One never knows the day they'll suddenly be needed.