There are seams in the wind. You ground-walkers wouldn't know.
However hard a wind blows, it is never one solid piece — it has grain, joints, thin places. Ordinary birds ride the wind. We falcons are otherwise: we hunt the seam, and finding it, drive straight in and split the wind in two. Hence the name. These wings of mine are the fastest blades on the mountain.
What's the use of fast? Uncle Red-Rump asked me that once. Three hundred years of running, he said, every trail on the mountain, and never a road that reached Heaven. Young and hot-blooded, I answered: you can't run there because the ground has an end. The sky has no end — one day I'll fly you out a road to prove it.
Later I learned the sky not only has an end. It has an invisible ceiling.
Every bird that ever aimed high has struck it. At a certain layer, the wind abruptly goes full — seamless, a density without a single joint. Your blade will not go in. You can only slide along that layer as along a sheet of ice. My grandmother's generation had a phrase for it: Heaven has shut its window.
I refused to accept it. Season after season I patrolled beneath that layer, hunting for one seam.
And then came the night of rain.
When the inverted bolt drilled up out of the East Sea, I happened to be sheltering on the cliff. Every eye on the mountain was measuring how bright the light was. I alone saw something else — where the lightning passed, that full layer of wind had torn.
A rent, running from the sea's surface up into the deep of the tribulation clouds, its edges still whitening.
I was through the rain and climbing before the thought finished forming. Raindrops hit my face like gravel; I didn't care. A place no wing had entered in three hundred years stood torn open above my head. I threaded up along the lightning's path, higher and higher, past every altitude of my life — the common clouds shrank to a grey rind beneath my feet, and the wind took on a smell, old and clean at once, like a hall unopened for three hundred years.
I saw the inside of the tribulation clouds.
And the inside is not cloud. It is structure, stacked layer on ordered layer — like rafters, like beams, as if someone had taken cloud for lumber and raised a canopy over the entire sky. The black moon is set into the canopy's roof. Up close it is no moon at all: it is the lid of a hole, or the hole of a lid — I cannot say which. I circled three times, meaning to climb and see it plain.
On the third circle, something on the roof of the canopy moved.
Not the black moon. Beside it — in the shadow of one of the "beams." It did not lunge. It made no sound. It only turned its head — if that was a head — toward me. Slowly.
I had never in my life turned tail. That day I did. My wings split three layers of wind going down, and when I dropped back into the peach woods a finger's width of my tail feathers was scorched. Not by lightning. The lightning had long since ended.
I have not spoken of what is up there to any bird since. Unbelieved, it is wasted breath; believed, no one sleeps again.
The rent sealed itself by the next day. I patrol there still; the wind is full again, as if nothing ever happened.
But I remember where the hole is. And I have worked out something that keeps me from sleep more surely than the thing on the canopy roof —
a canopy that was built implies hands that built it. Hands imply a door left somewhere. No builder under heaven raises a canopy without leaving a door. The only question is where it opens.
The herb-gathering boy is walking west, and I have gone with him. The boy thinks I fly guard over him. True enough. But I keep a second ledger: all the way west, I mean to skim the underside of the tribulation clouds and patrol every beam of this canopy, one by one.
Under the shadow of some beam, there is a door.
And on the day I find it, I intend to learn — whether the thing that turned its head so slowly is the keeper of that door, or whether it, like me, is locked on the outside.