When a seahorse reaches my age and my size, it is no longer called a courier. It is called a dragon-steed.
The palace grants that name. In the old days the Water Court's steed-trials were far sterner than any human horse fair: five hundred li against the spring tide on a single breath merely qualified you. What they truly tested was temperament — are you steady inside the breaker, unafraid above the abyss; and when your rider goes into the water, do you save yourself first, or the saddle? In the trials of three hundred years ago, I took first place.
First place carried a prize: a saddle bestowed by the inner hall itself. Mermaid-silk lining, reins of dragon whisker, and on the saddle-bow a chiselled line: A steed runs a thousand li, and does not ask about the road home.
To this day I cannot decide whether that line was a blessing or a prophecy.
In my whole life, I have carried three riders.
The first was a sea-patrol officer. Sixty years. On the day of his retirement he stroked my mane and said: old friend, go enjoy some quiet. The second was his apprentice — impatient, thought even the ebb tide too slow. Forty years, and he died in a wreck. Not because I failed him: he gave the saddle to a drowning fisherwoman and let go with his own hands. I carried her to shore, turned back, and the tide had already taken him.
An empty saddle weighs more than two riders.
The third came without warning — in those very days, three hundred years ago, just before the calamity. A personage I had never seen came to the stables at deep night bearing the inner hall's token. He forbade lamps. He gave no name. He swung into the saddle and said only: west, by the dark currents, as fast as you can go.
That night I swam the fastest of my life. In the dark currents you see nothing; I remember only that the one in the saddle was impossibly light — too light for a living man — and impossibly hot, as if he carried a stove of fire against his chest. As we neared the inland river mouth, that bolt of lightning split the sky behind us — up out of the seabed we had come from, straight into heaven. The rider looked back once. I heard him say something very low. It sounded like too late. Or perhaps: it begins.
The river mouth runs shallow; a seahorse cannot enter. He dismounted, folded the reins neatly back over the saddle-bow — gently, as if afraid of waking something — and said: Don't follow me.
Three words, in the cadence of a command. I am a dragon-steed. I know a command when I hear one.
I held station at that river mouth for seven days. He did not return. On the eighth day, the tides began to lose their order.
Three hundred years now. I have never gone back to surrender the saddle — by regulation, when a rider dies or a commission ends, the saddle returns to the inner hall. But has my commission ended? No one has told me. Is the rider dead? I refuse it. A man who burned that hot does not simply cease.
So I carry the empty saddle still, patrolling the long water between the East Sea and the river mouth. When fisher-children beg to ride, I crouch and let them sit a stretch — in front. The saddle is not to be touched. The saddle is being kept.
When the boy from the shore first saw me, his eyes went not to me but to the saddle. He reached out toward the chiselled line on the saddle-bow — and before his fingertip ever touched it, this old body of mine sank half its height on its own. The legs bent. I did not bend them.
In all my life, I have knelt only to the token of the inner hall.
The boy snatched his hand back, startled: what's wrong with it?
What's wrong with me? I should like to know myself. I know only that the line on my saddle-bow has soaked in seawater for three hundred years and never once burned hot — until now.
A steed runs a thousand li, and does not ask about the road home.
But what is a steed to do, when the road home comes asking for it?