First, read the book correctly. The Classic of the Western Mountains describes me: in form like a crane, one-legged, green plumage with red markings and a white beak; its name is Bifang; its cry is its own name; where it appears, strange fire befalls the town.
One leg. A crane's bearing. Green feathers, red markings, white beak. My cry is my name: Bifang! Bifang! And the town that sees me will suffer strange fire.
Strange fire: fire that should not be. Fire without cause. Fire that burns against reason.
For thousands of years, humanity has read that verse to mean: Bifang is the calamity star; Bifang brings the fire. So every appearance earned me a rout — gongs, guns, talismans, skies full of arrows. Towns burned my portrait to avert disaster. Alchemists prescribed my single leg as medicine, claiming it suppresses fire.
Not one person ever read the verse backwards: when strange fire approaches, Bifang appears first.
I do not bring fire. I smell it. Seven days before a strange fire rises anywhere under heaven, its scent leaks out — that rank smell you have all come to know by now. And my clan's commission, handed down from high antiquity, is this: smell the strange fire; fly to the town; appear; cry aloud. Bifang! Bifang! — is that us calling our own name? No. In the old tongue, those two syllables were:
Beware! Prepare!
Beware! Prepare! — we scream it over and over, until the townspeople shoot at us, until the fire rises, until it is too late. Then we perch on the fallen wall amid the wailing, and fly on to the next town. For thousands of years, generation after generation of Bifang has flown through that curse of a name.
Why never give up? The ancestral instruction is blunt: heaven grew us this nose. Not to cry out would wrong the nose.
Very well. Now you will ask why I have circled the Flaming Mountains for three years without leaving.
Because three years ago I smelled what no Bifang in the length of our clan's history has recorded —
a strange fire with no edges.
An ordinary strange fire is one thread of scent; follow it upwind and you find the town. That night three years ago, the rankness rose from every direction at once — east, west, south, north, above, below. The entire world was leaking that smell. I flew a full circuit of the land: the Flaming Mountains leaking, the Eye of the East Sea leaking, the underdark of the Flowing Sands leaking — even the seams between the paving-bricks of Chang'an, leaking.
The world is one town. And the town is marked for strange fire.
My clan's protocol, thousands of years old, says: fly to the town that will burn, and warn it. But when the whole world is the town — on which wall am I to perch and cry?
I chose the Flaming Mountains, where the rankness runs thickest — these eight hundred li of coreless flame are the great strange fire's first ignition, already burning. I have circled this sky three years, crying every night. The Keep's people shot at me too, at first — until the Holy Infant King stood up for me and turned the arrows aside. He understands my cry. He told the Keep: this is no calamity star. This is a beacon-tower.
Three years, and I have measured the scent thickening. And recently I have changed the direction of my circling —
I have begun looking east.
Because the head of the scent has moved. The great strange fire's flame-front is spreading from the west toward the east — underground along the earth-veins, overhead along the underside of the tribulation clouds. Toward the eastern lands. Toward the places where the people are thickest.
Beware; prepare. I have cried it three years. Now the cry must change.
The medicine-basket boy travels west, and I have folded my wings into his company. In thousands of years of clan history, Bifang warns and never accompanies — I break that precedent.
Because I have finally understood something: generation upon generation, we raced ahead of the fire and cried — and the fire burned anyway. In all our millennia, Bifang has saved towns, but never once put out a strange fire. Because we only ever knew the fire was coming. We never knew where it came from.
This time, the fire comes from the west.
So I will fly with these travellers to the strange fire's source.
And there I will do what my clan has failed to do for a thousand generations:
not cry beware, not cry prepare —
but look the fire-setter in the face, and cry the third word.