The old vine of White-Bone Ridge had an evil name once. Deservedly. That vine was me.
I am a strangler vine become spirit. The strangler's species walks the way of coiling and throttling from birth: fasten to a tree, wind up it ring upon ring, borrow its height to reach the sun — then tighten, drain, and when the host stands dead, wear its shape and be the "tree" yourself. Before my awakening I lived so for two hundred years. The trees I strangled would girdle the ridge.
The day of my awakening I remember with total clarity. Heaven's lightning struck the old pine I was wound around. The thunder-fire ran down the resin to where our bodies twisted together, and I woke in pain — not the burn's pain. For the first time, I was feeling the old pine's pain in my arms.
Two hundred years I had used it for a footstool. It had been in pain the whole time.
The pine could not be saved. The winter it died, I lay coiled on its hollow shell and thought one thought through to the end: for a vine, to coil is instinct, to tighten is instinct — but what one does after taking hold, it turns out, can be chosen.
The same strength that strangles a thing can bind a thing together.
So I changed trades. Whatever on the ridge is broken, collapsed, or cracked comes to me for binding. The hill-folk's fallen bridge: I laid my own body across and lashed the banks together — thirty years and holding. The old cliff-edge tree with the split trunk: I hooped the wound and let it grow itself closed. Even brother Skeleton's bone-assembly work — wherever tendon and cord run short, the vine-cords are my supply.
In the funerary trades, the moth sisters gather what remains of the soul. I gather what remains of the form. While the form holds, longing has somewhere to perch.
Three hundred years of binding has taught me an art all my own: one touch of a tendril on a break, and I know the break's temperament. Some breaks are resigned — bind them and they settle. Some are unwilling — you must coax along their grain. And a very few breaks are feigned: strung tight inside, waiting for something to come close. Those, I walk around.
Last month I met the strangest break of my three hundred years.
Beneath the rubble of the fallen Grudge-Bone Altar lay half a stone stele. When the boy's company broke the altar, the foundation was torn up — and this stele emerged from the deepest course of the footing. Understand me: it was not part of the altar. It was under the altar. The altar had been built, deliberately, to press it down.
The stele was snapped into three, and the breaks were old — far older than the altar. As always, I reached out a tendril to touch —
and at the instant of contact, my vine-tip went sour.
Not pain — sourness. As if I had bitten deep into an unripe fruit; the sourness shot the length of the tendril to my root. In three hundred years and tens of thousands of breaks, no break was ever sour.
Stranger still came after. I bound the three sections back into place, and that very night, the seams began to weep.
Stone — weeping sap. Amber-colored, sticky, with the faintest breath of sandalwood. One bead a night; by dawn it sets, like a tear-track crystallized on rock.
There are characters on the stele, weathered down to the floors of their strokes. No rubbing would take, so I asked brother Wangliang to read the shadows by moonlight — carved words stand clearer in shadow than in sun. Three nights of reading yielded the opening four characters:
"By imperial decree, this stele is raised."
A stele raised by decree — snapped in three, and pressed beneath a grudge-altar for three hundred years.
What stele requires an altar of grievances to hold it down? What inscription can keep stone sour for three centuries — and set it weeping, night after night, the moment it is made whole?
Before descending the ridge, the medicine-basket boy came to the ruins to see the stele. He caught a fresh-welling bead of sap on his fingertip, raised it close, and said suddenly: this scent — it's like the scent when Grandfather Taibai's sending disperses.
The sending was elsewhere at that hour. When it returned, the boy led it to the stele. It hung before the stone a long, long time, and said not one word.
But my tendril lay on the stele throughout, and I could feel it —
while the sending hovered there, the stone's sourness eased.
Like a man who has held his grief three hundred years, finally standing before the one old friend he may weep in front of.
The boy asked if I would come along. I left my main stem to watch the stele, and sent my strongest runner with the company.
On this road I bind as ever — broken bridges, broken bones.
Only now I carry one added care:
by whose decree? Raised for whom?
And — does the decree still stand?