Sandworms eat earth. That much you know.
Whatever the earth holds, we eat: rotted leaves, snail shells, the timber-crumbs of sunken ships, the odd copper coin — coins don't digest; they pass through intact, and the ferry ravens trade them for dried fish. After three hundred years of boring, this body of mine is a living ledger of everything under the Flowing Sands.
Which is why, the moment my teeth closed on it, I knew: this thing does not belong to this river.
Sixty years ago, cutting a new gallery through the deep sand thirty li west of the old channel, I bit down and my tooth-ring rang against something hard — not stone-hard; stone's hardness is dead. This hardness was strung, like biting a bowstring drawn to full draw.
I swallowed it whole. Don't laugh — swallowing is how a sandworm investigates. You swallow first, learn what it is, and spit it back if it doesn't suit.
This one went down and would not come back up.
It was light; fist-sized; shaped like a lotus petal, or perhaps a snapped-off segment of a golden band. The instant it reached my gut it flared hot — once, only once — and then it dissolved, flowing down my body ring by ring, and every ring it passed began to glow gold from the inside out.
I thrashed through the underdark for three days trying to churn it back up. On the fourth day I stopped. Because I had noticed: it was not harming me.
Quite the opposite.
The gilded rings turn blades; fire cannot cook through them; even the marrow-boring wind of Yellow-Wind Ridge slides off. And stranger still is what happens at night. At the midnight hour, the golden rings warm of their own accord — and then, ring by ring, very softly, they begin to recite.
Not a noise. A recitation. The melody rises and falls with tremendous solemnity, like a great assembly chanting sutra behind a very thick wall. I cannot understand the words — I am a worm; what would I know of scripture? But listening, all the tangled things in me — the fear of dark, the old grudges, the greed — settle one by one, like silt sinking out of muddied water.
Eventually I crawled to old brother Stone-Monk and asked. He listened at my flank through an entire night, and at dawn — this stone man whose face has not moved in three hundred years — the weathering-lines of his face were trembling, crack by crack.
He said: little worm, what you swallowed is the residual will of a dharma instrument.
He said: when an instrument that has attained the Way is broken in form, its vow-force does not scatter. It chooses ground, buries itself, and waits — for a body that can carry it onward.
I said: brother, then surely it chose wrong? It should have waited for an eminent monk, a celestial general — how does such a thing end up in the belly of a sandworm?
Stone-Monk looked at me a long time, and said the sentence I keep to this day:
"Perhaps what it was waiting for was not eminence. Perhaps it was waiting for something willing to bore downward."
Willing to bore downward.
So I dig my galleries as before, chasing my glub-glub sounds. Only now, with this gold along my rings, I dare dig deeper. The tepid heat of the deep that stuns other sandworms does not stun me; the rings light up one by one as I descend, like a miner's lamps.
And there is one thing I have told no one — not even brother Stone-Monk.
When the ting, ting of that stirred pot sounds in the deep, the recitation in my belly changes.
It quickens. It climbs. As if — pressing down. As if two voices were facing each other across the deep earth: one stirring, one chanting; one coaxing the pot toward the boil, one holding its lid down with all its strength.
Sixty years now. And year by year, the chanting grows hoarser.
Even the residual will of a dharma instrument tires. One broken petal, in the belly of one worm, holding the line alone against that vast pot below — for sixty years.
So I dig my parallel gallery beneath the boy's westward march, and I dig harder than anyone.
This little petal of vow that my body carries — before its voice gives out entirely, I must
find the instrument it broke from. Or find the one who made the vow in the first place.
How much of it remains, I cannot say. I know only that at midnight, every midnight, it still recites.
And while it still recites — there is still time.