First, two corrections to three hundred years of hearsay.
One: my name is not Raksasi. "Raksha-woman" is a surname the operas pinned on me — so the audience would know the villainess on sight. I am Princess Iron Fan, an earthbound immortal of orthodox cultivation: Jade-Cloud Mountain, Banana-Leaf Cave, one banana-leaf fan, and the charge of wind, rain, and fire-season on behalf of the people of this land. The farmers hereabouts have called me the Iron Fan Immortal for centuries. Only the storytellers call me Raksasi.
Two: the affair of the borrowed fan was not wholly my wrong. Sun Wukong wanted the fan to cross the mountain; I refused it because I had lost my son — my Red Boy newly taken by Guanyin to the Southern Sea, the flesh cut from a mother's heart, and the man responsible standing at my door asking favors. Would you have lent it? The operas dispatch that grief in half a line, and recast my fan as a prop for spite.
Enough. The old ledger closes there. Now, the fan.
The banana-leaf fan is no weapon. It is a thing of the world's own spirit-root: a single numinous leaf from behind Kunlun, older than the parting of chaos, and its holder can settle wind and still fire. It knows the origin of every fire under heaven — earth-fire, sky-fire, karma-fire, heart-fire. To fan them is not to press them down with wind but to persuade them with reason: fire, you are burning in the wrong place. Return to your station. Fire hears reason. Therefore fire goes out.
Three hundred years ago I severed the fire-root of the Flaming Mountains with forty-nine strokes. It remains the most satisfying merit of my life: within ten years, eight hundred li of scorch had turned to farmland, and the people below raised a shrine to me while I yet lived.
Three years ago, the mountain burned again.
I took the fan up the slope. The first stroke fell — and the fire did not stir by a thread.
The shock of that, you cannot imagine. The banana-leaf fan has never once failed against fire — a fire may be vast, but reason does not lose. I steadied my spirit and fanned again.
The fire stood unmoved. And on the leaf of the fan, a character surfaced.
Pale gold, as if branded there — gone within a breath. On the third stroke it surfaced again, a shade clearer.
I have since tried seven-times-seven, forty-nine strokes. Forty-nine strokes, and the fire never bowed an inch. The character surfaced forty-nine times, deeper at each showing.
What character, I will not say. The Bull King asked; I did not tell him. My son asked; I did not tell him either. Not for lack of trust — but the character is too heavy. Before I dare speak it, I must first understand why it appears on my fan at all.
But I can tell you what the fan itself said. The fan persuades fire by argument: where you came from, and where you must return. Against this new fire, forty-nine strokes came to nothing — and it was not the fan's reasoning that lost.
It is that this fire cannot answer where do you come from.
It has no origin. Or rather: its origin has been erased at the root. A fire with no origin can be neither persuaded nor sent home — my fan stands before it as a magistrate's writ stands before a man whose every record has been burned: nowhere to take hold.
And the character on the leaf is the numinous leaf's own answer to me. It cannot identify the fire's origin — but it has identified the hand that did the erasing. That character is the hand's name. Or part of its name.
So now you understand my three years. The Bull King wipes his seven bowls; I meditate upon one character.
The fan rests enshrined above the cave's spirit-spring. Three incense sticks daily: one to question the fire, one to question the character, one to question myself — Iron Fan, you have governed wind and fire-season for centuries; now the season has been usurped. Are you afraid?
Afraid. To deny it would be a lie. And when the fear has passed through me, the incense goes up, and the meditation resumes.
The day the medicine-basket boy came to parley, I broke my rule and let him view the fan once. He could not read the character — as expected; it is no script of the human world. But in the instant the Taibai-sending saw it clearly, the whole sending shuddered.
Old Star-Officer. You know this hand too. Don't you.
The outcome of the parley you know: the old Bull marches west with the company, and I hold the Flaming Mountains. Not for lack of will — the fan cannot leave this ground. Though it cannot quench the new fire, while the fan weighs on this mountain, the fire cannot outgrow the diversion channels. If I go, the mountain truly boils over.
At parting, I broke half a leaflet from the fan's rim and sewed it into the boy's collar.
The leaf knows the hand. Draw near it, and the leaf-tip burns.
Child — when the leaf-tip burns, do not reach first for your weapon.
Look first, and look well, on my behalf — whether that hand, after all this time, can still close.