The young ones call me the Rafter Swallow Immortal. I am no immortal. I have merely lived so long that a thing everyone else forgot has become my own skeleton.
Let me tell you that thing. When I finish, you will understand why our clan flies west every year.
Three hundred years ago I was a young swallow, my nest on the main beam of the Gao ancestral house. That autumn, the Gao family held a wedding. The third daughter was being married — yes, that Miss Gao, the one the storytellers have worn to rags.
The storytellers made it a monster-snatches-bride farce. They were not there. I was. My nest sat on the main beam, and the hall of red candles and wedding silks was spread directly below me.
The bridegroom I saw was a towering fellow, frighteningly strong, who could eat three pecks of rice at a sitting — and who filled all seven of the Gao house's great water-vats in one round of carrying, and plowed faster than ten oxen. The silver bracelet he gave the third daughter he had smelted himself, in the kitchen stove. She feared him at first; then she took to watching him work through the door-crack, and watching, she began to smile. None of this do the storytellers tell.
On the night of the wedding rites, calamity came.
A traveling monk burst in, with a hairy-faced monkey. What followed was chaos: the glare of ritual instruments, the monkey's laughter, the bridegroom's true form revealed — a boar. The hall of guests fled screaming for their parents; half the red candles went over and set the wedding silks alight.
When the chaos settled, the bridegroom had been taken — bound west in the monk's train. As he went, he looked back once, at the embroidery tower.
I have seen many eyes in my long life. In that backward glance there was no monster. There was a single word: debt.
The third daughter did not weep or wail. She picked up the red veil with its burnt corner, tore it in half, had her maid carry it to the courtyard, and said one thing to the eaves full of frightened swallows:
"Swallows, swallows — you who travel south and north each year: if your road ever passes the west, look in on him for me. See whether he is eating properly."
Of all the swallows under those eaves, the one who accepted the charge was me.
That half of the veil I carried back to the founding nest. And from that year, the clan's rule was set: every autumn equinox, one flight west.
For the first decades, we could truly watch him. The pilgrim band walked slowly and we fly fast; catching up, we would settle in a nearby tree and look: he shouldered the luggage-pole, ate enormously, slept soundly, took the monkey's scoldings now and then. We flew home and performed it all for the third daughter, and she listened in her tower, stitching shoe-soles — each pair larger than the last, cut to the measure of a boar's trotters. She never said so. We all understood.
Then the band passed into the borders of Vulture Peak, where swallows cannot follow. And then came the calamity no one can name — the merit never returned, the pilgrims never returned, and the black moon climbed the sky.
The third daughter waited until she was seventy. Before the end, she gave the final pair of shoe-soles to her maid's daughter with these instructions: keep them. The road back is long. He will wear through shoes.
The Gao house stands in its eleventh generation now. The embroidery tower has fallen; the shoe-soles are still kept in the camphor chest. Every twelfth month, the mistress of the house renews the camphor — she can no longer say why. Only that it is a rule from the ancestors.
You see how it goes with the human world: the matter is forgotten, and the rule survives. A rule is memory that refuses to finish dying.
I am too old now for the west road, so I keep the founding nest and the half veil, and the young fly in my place. The child who returned this year reports that the bell in the deep west has reached its fourth strike.
At night I turn it over: the bell trues itself one strike a year — truing toward what? At my age I can half guess. The bell is waking. And when a bell has woken, can the one who rings it be far behind?
So, boy bound west — this old swallow entrusts you with one small thing.
You are going further west than any swallow can. If someday you truly meet a towering fellow with the look of a boar about him — no matter what he has become by then, yao or god, in glory or in ruin —
do not mention the Gao family. Do not mention the veil. Least of all mention the seventy years.
Ask him only one question, from me:
"These three hundred years — have you been eating properly?"
And if he freezes —
that will be him.