Under the eaves of Gao Village, our family keeps forty-three nests. The oldest sits on the main beam of the Gao ancestral house — its mud relaid past counting, but the nest is still the nest. Grandmother Rafter-Swallow says it is our clan's founding nest, older than the village genealogy itself.
People say swallows are homebodies. In truth, half of a swallow's life belongs to home. The other half belongs to the road.
Every autumn equinox, the whole clan rises and flies west.
Why west? I asked Grandmother as a fledgling. She said: old custom. I asked again. She said: fly until you reach the age you're meant to know, and you will.
I have flown it four times now. What the west road looks like, I can tell you — there is scarcely a living creature left in this world that knows that road better than the swallows.
Leave Gao Village, cross the Flowing-Sands River: half a ferry-landing remains, and the ferryman has become the ferryman's grandson, whose own hair has gone white. Beyond lies Yellow-Wind Ridge, where the wind has teeth, and we fly pressed to the valley floor. Past the ridge, the posts and towns and hill-shrines — on my first flight, a cook-smoke every ten li. On my second, every thirty. Last year we flew more than half a day before the land showed one thread of smoke.
The people are fewer. Fewer each year. Not the fewer of dying out — the fewer of being emptied: houses intact, well-ropes still on their windlasses, and no one there. We swallows see it most plainly, because under the eaves of the empty houses, the nests remain. An empty swallow's nest is no great matter. An empty human eave is the coldest sight on the road.
But one thing on that road grows stronger instead.
The bell.
In the deepest west there is a bell. Which mountain, which temple, we cannot say — at a certain wall of cloud, our wings fill with lead and we can fly no further, only turn back. The bell sounds from beyond that cloud, further west still.
My first year, I heard it strike once. Muffled, cracked — the voice of a broken bell.
My second year, twice. The tone had begun to true itself.
My third year, three strikes — and in them, the faintest tremor, like a human throat in the instant before speech.
Last year, my fourth: four strikes. And the last of the four drew out a long, long tail of sound that followed our flying wedge for hundreds of li, refusing to fade.
When I gave my report, Grandmother said nothing for an entire day. At dusk she summoned the whole clan beneath the founding nest and spoke one sentence:
"Learn next year's road by heart. Not one bird falls behind."
This year I reach the age I'm meant to know. On the eve of departure, Grandmother called me alone up to the beam and showed me the deepest part of the founding nest. Set into the mud, sheltered by layer upon layer of each generation's fresh plaster, lies a thing: half a red bridal veil. Wedding red. Three hundred years old, and the color not yet gone.
Grandmother said: our family does not fly west by a migrant bird's instinct. We fly west because we were entrusted.
Entrusted with what? Carrying word to whom? Is the half veil a betrothal gift or a token of proof? Grandmother says these things belong to the swallow who flies at the point of the wedge in the year the bell completes its count.
How many strikes complete it?
Grandmother closed her eyes and said: nine.
Five strikes remain. At the present rate — one strike a year — five years.
The medicine-basket boy travels west by the ground road. We have made our arrangement: he walks the earth, I fly the sky, and each evening I drop into his camp as his scout. He asked what I get out of it.
I said: company. The ground road, I hear, is harder than the sky's. You are few. And we swallows —
swallows remember roads. And we remember people.
In five years, when the bell strikes nine, I mean to be flying at the point of the wedge. And if, in that hour, the impassable cloud stands open —
then for Grandmother, for forty-three nests under familiar eaves, for that half of a red veil — I will be the first to see what waits behind it.