We skylarks are the kind that sings to Heaven.
Not a figure of speech. The rule handed down the generations: at the hour of dawn, the flock rises from the peach woods and climbs, singing the full hundred and eight turns, up to the highest shelf of cloud. Why sing? Grandmother said: the sky is too large; keeping it alone would be dreary. The ground has no shortage of liveliness — the sky has none. So there must be some small creature that flies up daily and sings the ground's news to the sky: how far the peach blossom has opened, how many fingers the ravine has risen, how many new cubs among the monkey troops.
And when the song was done, the sky would answer.
Not an echo. An echo bounces back unchanged. The sky's answer was different: the verse that came back down had been listened to — your own melody still, but with a trace of warmth added, like a bowl of water cupped in someone's hands before being handed back. That, Grandmother said, is the sky nodding. In good years, the returning phrase carried a filament of golden light, and whichever bird caught it would molt smooth and easy all that year.
All of this, my grandmother's grandmother heard with her own ears.
By my generation, only the rule is left.
We still rise at dawn. We still sing the hundred and eight turns. And at the cloud-top the song scatters, and that is all. No warmth returns. No golden light falls. Not even a plain echo — the sky is like a house emptied by movers: you call into it, and the sound goes in, and something drinks it.
The flock grows lazier year on year. Some sing from the mountainside now. Some have stopped altogether. Sing for whom, they say.
I won't stop. Not out of piety — out of stubbornness. It keeps seeming to me that an empty house and a house with no one in it are two different things.
So I sing without missing a day. Grandmother's old turns, and new tunes of my own. The year the black moon rose I sang too — tribulation clouds pressing half the mountain into darkness — flat against the cloud-base, all hundred and eight turns to the end. My voice was hoarse for half a month.
Then, a few days ago, something happened.
It was not dawn but the middle of the night. A strange wind startled me awake, and I fluttered to the cliff edge — the whole mountain silent, only that dead-straight column of smoke over the Eclipse Altar standing in the moonlight. A dread I couldn't name came over me, and to steady myself I opened my throat and sang half a turn.
Halfway through, I heard the answer.
It did not come from above. It came from the west.
Far. Absurdly far — the kind of far that has thousands of li folded inside it. The melody was my melody, and the listened-to warmth was in it too. But what it carried was not golden light. Something else. Like a sigh, and not entirely. As if someone at an immense distance had caught my half-verse, held it in their hand a long, long moment — and then, gently, set it back down to me.
I dared not sing again that night. The next day I tried: nothing more from the west, as if that one answer had been my imagination.
But a skylark's ears do not imagine. Grandmother said: a song falling into emptiness and a song falling into a heart make two different sounds.
That night, my song fell into the heart of something.
When the herb-gathering boy set out west, I was first to volunteer. The flock laughed at me: one lark, mortal bone and mortal feather — what are you tagging along for?
I didn't tell them about the answer from the west. I said only: our family's posting is to sing the ground's news to Heaven. And if Heaven has moved house —
then I will sing my way down the road until I find where it moved to.