The nickname "oil-thief" was coined to curse my ancestors.
The fat in question is lamp oil. The old rat-immortals had greedy tongues and worked the temples exclusively: an ever-burning lamp on an altar, oil fragrant, wick strong — one curl of the tail, one dip, one lick, and the lamp dimmed a shade. The temple keepers itched with fury, could never catch one, and settled for carving little curses into the lampstands: may the oil-stealing rat fall into darkness forever.
A vicious curse. But the old ones had a private piece of crooked wisdom, and it came down to me: boy, remember — we only steal the oil. We never blow out the flame. Stolen oil can be refilled. But once a lamp goes out, there are things that can never be relit.
As a pup I didn't understand it. I do now. Because all over Gao Village, the lamps are going out one by one — and not by anyone's breath.
The oil itself is vanishing.
The first was the ever-burning lamp of the Earth God's shrine. The keeper had filled it to the brim at nightfall; by dawn the lamp was dead and the bowl so dry it showed your reflection — not one bead of oil at the bottom. He cursed us rats for three days. I couldn't swallow that. We dip. Who could lick a bowl cleaner than washing it?
I staked out that lamp for three nights.
Deep in the third night, I saw it with my own eyes. No rat. No moth. No wind. Past the midnight hour, the oil-line in the bowl began to sink on its own, as if an invisible mouth were pressed to the underside, drinking. The instant the level touched bottom, the flame snapped down to a blue point — and in that instant I saw it: in the brick-seam beneath the lampstand, a thin black line flared once, swollen and glutted, and crawled away under the skin of the ground.
Its heading: the old altar in the mulberry fields.
That place again. The mouse bookkeeper traced the grain there. Brother Bristleback traced the stamped hoofprints there. And now the temple oil — no, more than the temple: I have been house to house since. Whose stove suddenly devours twice the firewood. Whose oil lamps drink themselves dry. Why supper cools faster than it used to. Why even a bride's red candles cannot last one wedding night.
The village's entire fire-breath is being drunk away, swallow by swallow.
Grain is the fat of the soil; oil is the fat of the flame. It has bled the earth-veins and moved on to the fire-veins. A few more years of this, and Gao Village will be a dead village of cold stoves and black lamps.
So I changed trades.
By day I sleep. At nightfall I shoulder my little oil-gourd and work the brick-seams, the rafters, the backs of stoves — every path the black lines crawl. I get there ahead of them and "steal" the oil out of each household's lamps into my gourd. When the invisible mouth arrives at midnight and sucks up nothing, I go house to house and pour the oil back. Refill the lamps. Renew the fires.
The villagers can't explain it and find it eerie: lamps that died in the evening are burning again by the small hours. One grandmother declared her ancestors were showing favor and laid out an offering in thanks. Among the offerings was a dish of pork cracklings. Well — it would have been rude to refuse.
During the days the medicine-basket boy spent investigating the altar, he kept glimpsing a small rat-shadow crossing the village at night with a gourd on its back. He crouched down and asked what I was doing. I thumped the gourd till it boomed and mimed it out: steal the oil, return the oil, keep the lamps.
He understood, and laughed. He said: "That's not oil-thieving. That's lamplighting."
Lamplighter. A fine word. Eighteen generations of a cursed nickname, overturned in mine.
Now I travel west with him, gourd on my back, and in it a full measure of Gao Village lamp-oil.
And I have added a second line to the old ones' crooked wisdom: on the west road, refill every temple lamp you pass; leave every stove an ember —
oil may be stolen, debts may be owed. But the lamps: not one is permitted to go out.
If every lamp dies — when the ones who went west finally come home, what will they find their way back by?