I am the sweeping-boy of the Fire-Cloud Cave. Lowest post under the King's command — fire-tender, floor-sweeper, oiler of the five fire-carts. All me.
The King is Red Boy. Three hundred years ago: the Holy Infant King whom a skyful of gods could not subdue.
That year the Bodhisattva took him — the lotus throne conjured from heaven-blades, the five golden bands, and away to the Southern Sea to serve as the child Sudhana. The cave emptied overnight; when the tree falls, the monkeys scatter — so it has always been. Everyone urged me as they left: boy, find another mountain. The King isn't coming back. Once you stand at the Bodhisattva's knee, who returns to a demon's cave?
I stayed.
Not from extraordinary loyalty. A fire-tender knows one truth: let the stove go stone-cold, and it is hard to light again. A home is the same. The people may empty out, but the fire must not break. While the fire holds, a home remains a home. When the fire breaks — then it is truly nothing but a cave.
So I stayed, and kept the stove of Fire-Cloud Cave. Three hundred years.
Sweeping daily; the five fire-carts oiled on schedule; the King's stone bed dusted every morning. At festivals, one small yao set out two pairs of bowls and chopsticks, poured for himself, and told the empty seat the year's news. Three hundred lamps, three rounds a day: one goes out, one gets relit. The people below say Fire-Cloud Cave is haunted — lamplight every night. Some haunting. That is me, keeping house.
When the Bodhisattva led the King away, one sentence of hers leaked out: "When his trials are complete and his merit full, his homecoming will follow of itself."
I have kept that sentence like a deed. Trials complete, merit full, homecoming follows. Could a Bodhisattva's word be false?
The year the black moon rose, all news from the Southern Sea stopped. Cleanly. The tide-sound of Tide-Sound Cave — gone. Pilgrims returning from the Purple Bamboo Grove said the grove still stands, but not a leaf of it makes a sound. On sleepless nights I thought: if something that vast has happened on the Bodhisattva's side, what becomes of my King, one small acolyte among it all?
I added another hundred lamps.
Then, three years ago, on a rainy night, every lamp at the cave mouth leaned inward at once.
I rushed out. At the foot of the steps stood a figure. Rain-soaked, barefoot, every ember of his fire banked out of sight — and I knew him in one glance. That brow. That way of standing. I have dusted his stone bed for three hundred years; how could I not know him?
I shouted: my King!
He looked at me a long, long time, and the first thing he said was: "You're still here?"
I said: the lamps can't be allowed to go out, my King.
He stood in the rain looking at the cave full of lamps, and did not move. Only later did I see clearly that what ran down his face was not all rain.
The King is home. But the King is changed. No mischief now, no burning, few words. The golden bands are gone from his brow — and not removed: removed bands leave their mark, and his brow is unmarked, clean, as if the bands and a whole stretch of the past had vanished together. At night he often sits alone on the cave's crown, facing the Southern Sea, until dawn.
I dare not ask what happened there. I only trim the lamps a little brighter.
The rest you know: Shixuan's people crept into the mountain, coveted the King's samadhi fire, and tried by turns of honey and force to feed him into their furnace. The medicine-basket boy arrived in time, and shoulder to shoulder with the King broke the furnace-array.
In that battle, the King truly loosed his fire for the first time in three hundred years. I watched from the cave mouth and wept outright — not from fear. Because the fire was the old fire. Not one degree diminished.
It was never the fire that weakened. Only the heart that tends it.
The boy's company rests at our cave often now. The King still speaks little — but the stove has started keeping food warm for them. A fire-tender reads these things exactly: whoever the stove keeps food for, the heart has kept a place for.
I still light my three hundred lamps every day.
Only now I keep one more hope alight —
that someday the King will stand before this caveful of lamps and speak, at last, of the final night at the Southern Sea.
Once the lamps have heard it, they can help him carry it.