The storytellers can recite the eighty-one tribulations backwards. But ask them what the first one was, and nine in ten must stop and think.
The first tribulation happened at Double-Fork Ridge. Its entry in the ledger reads: attendants lost to the pit.
The monk was newly out of Chang'an, with two hired attendants and a horse. They lost the road in the dark, fell — men and mount together — into a trap-pit, and were dragged away by a demon. The demon laid a feast, and the two attendants were divided and eaten. The monk, frightened half out of his soul, was led to safety by an old man with a staff — later revealed to be the Gold Star of Venus, Taibai, come down from heaven.
The demon who laid that feast styled himself General Yin.
That was me.
I offer no defense. The feast was mine; the eating was mine. I was the demon-king of Double-Fork Ridge then, tyrant among tigers, a century deep in the eating of men and righteous about it — men eat pigs and sheep; tigers eat men; heaven births and heaven feeds, and strength decides. When those two went down my gullet, I never even asked their names.
The turn came decades later. Word of the pilgrimage's completion traveled back east, and the storytellers began arranging the eighty-one tribulations. The first tribulation they set down was my Double-Fork Ridge. In the playbooks I enter and exit within half a page — the least remarkable appetizer-demon of the whole grand opera.
But the night I first heard that telling, I did not close my eyes.
Because I remembered something: the two attendants had names. The storyteller spoke them — one of the Chen family, one of the Liu; porters hired outside Chang'an, wages drawn, promising their families they'd see the monk past the frontier and come straight home.
They never came home. They became a footnote to "the first tribulation." The world remembers the monk's peril; it remembers Taibai's staff; even I, the monster, have my name in the playbill. Only those two men have nothing — not even graves.
A tiger does not know the word shame. Our dictionary holds only strong and weak. Yet that night a bar of red-hot iron lay in my belly. A hundred years of eating men beyond counting — and these two, of all of them, pinned me. In time I understood why: because they died on the threshold of a great undertaking. That undertaking's merit reached heaven and sheltered the four seas — and the first page of its account-book records two lives no one ever claimed.
Of all ghosts, the small wronged ones pressed beneath a great merit weigh most.
I raised two graves for them on Double-Fork Ridge. No remains — the remains had long since become me. What lies buried is what I tracked down in Chang'an: the Chen porter's half-string of unspent wages, and a wooden tiger the Liu porter had bought for his son.
A wooden tiger. He bought his boy a wooden tiger, and then a real one ate him. Tell me that is not the cruelest joke under heaven.
From the day the graves were raised, I ceased eating men, and ceased leaving the ridge. Three hundred years: paper money burned at Qingming, the graves swept on every death-day. When the tiger clans set their new law — no eating people — the elders came for my word. I gave them one sentence: use me as the counter-example, and teach it to every generation of cubs.
And through those three hundred years, I have waited for exactly one thing.
The pilgrimage succeeded; the Buddhist teaching promises merit made whole and mercy for all sentient beings. I waited for one thread of that vast merit to find its way to those two grave-mounds — no more than a thread; a thread would do; enough to carry two porters into a good rebirth. That is heaven's arithmetic. That is what the great merit owes them.
And what did my waiting receive? The merit severed mid-road. The black moon hoisted into the sky. Even the ferry of rebirth at a standstill — on lamplighter Netherglow's nether road, the queue is three hundred years long.
My two porters, I fear, are standing in it.
So when the medicine-basket boy climbed the ridge, I came out of my cave. The first time in three hundred years.
The young ones of the clan asked why I would go. I told them: the ledger of the eighty-one tribulations opens on my page. Now the whole book has been waylaid —
then let the collection begin with the first tribulation's debtor, page by page, until the account comes home.
Boy — this life of mine was spared, three hundred years ago, beneath Taibai's staff. Now his sending guides you west. This old tiger has few arts left —
but whoever means to add one more "tribulation" to your road will walk over my carcass first.