What is a mountain wraith? The old books write: the essence of the hills; skilled at mimicking human voices.
Mimicking voices — that is the whole of our art. When a woodcutter deep in the hills hears his own name called and turns to find no one, that was likely us. The old books call it beguilement, and claim we imitate voices to lead people astray.
Slander, mostly. When we mimic voices, there is usually no purpose at all. It is simply… craving.
A craving for human sound. The mountains are too quiet. Wind, water, beast-roar, birdcall — the same four sounds turned over for ten thousand years. People are different. People speak. One sentence carries joy and anger, origins and hopes. Ever since villages appeared below, we wraiths have lain at the cliff-mouths listening: wedding gongs and funeral drums, quarrels on the threshing floor, the particular melody of a mother calling her child home to eat. Once learned, we rehearse them to the valley at night — the way a poor man counts another's money, and is somehow happy counting.
There were once seven villages under White-Bone Ridge. I knew all seven by heart. The east village spoke hard, hurling words like gravel. The west hollow spoke soft, each ending drawn out three beats. Bridgehead villagers were all loud, their ancestors having shouted at boats across the river for generations.
Then the villages began to empty.
First the able-bodied left, to find livelihoods elsewhere. Then whole households. At last even the old ones who loved their homes most were carried away on their grandchildren's backs. Seven villages; three hundred years; seven emptied. Bridgehead went last — I lay in my old listening-spot that day and heard the final family lock their door: the click of the brass lock, then footsteps, going, gone.
From that day, there were no human sounds left below to listen to.
The craving became unbearable, and I did something you may laugh at: I took over all seven villages' sounds myself.
On moonlit nights I stand on the east village's threshing floor and call the end of the workday in the east village accent. In the west hollow I perform two lines of a mother-in-law squabble. At Bridgehead I raise a round of boat-hauling calls before dawn. I do the roosters. I do the dogs. I do the creak of the millstone and the rattle of the well-windlass, note-perfect.
For whom? There is no audience. The houses are empty; the walls are my listeners.
But I hold that a village, like a person, can die. A person dies when the breath stops; a village dies when its sounds stop. If I keep the sounds going, the village keeps one thread of breath. And if the people ever come back — just suppose, one day, they come back — they will push open their doors and hear not dead silence but their own home accents, and they will know: someone was waiting here all along.
The Bureau's file calls me a shape-deceiving yao occupying abandoned villages. Let them. There are many ways to keep a village. I keep its voice.
Now for the strange matter.
Our mimicry has one iron law: what we have never heard, we cannot learn. It is a born limit — as a mirror cannot show a face that never stood before it.
But three years ago, on an eclipse night, as I finished the boat-calls at Bridgehead, a voice rose in my throat by itself.
Low, and hoarse — the voice of someone who has walked an immense distance, talking to himself. One sentence only:
"…Almost there. Hold on a little longer."
It was no one from any of the seven villages. No voice I have heard in three hundred years of listening. Yet there it sat in my throat, practiced, as if I had rehearsed it all my life. And — strangest of all — the accent was Chang'an. Old Chang'an, of three hundred years past, the kind not even storytellers can counterfeit now.
Since then, every eclipse, that sentence passes through my throat once. I cannot stop it.
Who is almost there? Who is being told to hold on? How does a three-hundred-year-old voice come to rest in the throat of a mountain wraith that has never been to Chang'an?
The night the medicine-basket boy sheltered in one of my empty villages, I could not help myself: through the courtyard wall, I performed the sentence for him.
The courtyard was silent a long time. Then I heard the Taibai-sending speak — and that old grandfather's voice, for the first time, shook.
It said: "Again."
I performed it again. And again. It listened seven times.
After the seventh, it said only four words: "Let him come along."
So here I am. The seven villages' sounds are packed and carried with me — the empty houses left in brother Wangliang's watch.
I am going west to find the owner of that sentence.
He said almost there. That was three hundred years ago.
I want to know whether he arrived.