The Classic of the Southern Mountains holds my family's registry: on Niuyang Mountain lives a beast shaped like a horse with a white head, striped like a tiger with a red tail, whose voice is like a folk song; its name is Lushu; wear it, and your descendants will prosper.
Horse's body, white head, tiger stripes, red tail, a cry like human singing. All correct. Whoever wrote that entry had seen us — or seen our hides.
The fatal part is the last four characters: wear it, and descendants prosper.
Wear the hide of a Lushu, and your line flourishes. On the strength of those four characters, a thousand-year classic became our thousand-year death warrant. Families praying for sons hunted us. Emperors anxious for heirs hunted us. Every itinerant peddler knew the price: one Lushu hide, a thousand gold.
Three thousand years — hunted from the southern mountains to the northern, from Niuyang to Cart-Slow. When I was born, eleven of us remained. Now —
now I will not tell you how many remain. That is our last way of living: no one alive may know how many of us are left, or where.
But my subject is not the hunting; three thousand years of it could not be told in three thousand more. My subject is the truth of those four characters — a truth we purchased with three millennia of our dead.
"Wear it and descendants prosper" was never the hide's power.
It was our song.
The Classic itself wrote it down: its voice is like a folk song. Our cry is not like song — it is song. The Lushu is born with one melody, called in the old speech the Song of Easing — the easing of pregnancy. Beasts with young, women with child, hearing that melody: the womb settles, the birth comes smooth, the infant thrives. In high antiquity we shared our mountains with people, and when a woman conceived, her family walked to the mountain-mouth to ask for a stretch of song. We sang. They bore. That is where descendants prosper came from.
Then — in some generation, by some clever hand — hear the Lushu's song and descendants prosper was recorded as wear the Lushu's hide and descendants prosper.
One character's difference. The song became the skin.
A living kindness became dead merchandise.
We have fled for three thousand years — and the song has never stopped. It is the clan's hardest law, harder than survival itself: whenever you meet one who carries young — human or beast, whether or not her people ever hunted ours — sing.
Sing hidden on the cliff. Sing veiled in fog. Sing from across the river. Time upon time, a laboring woman below the mountain has heard singing drift from the heights, delivered safely, and bowed to the mountain with her newborn, thanking the mountain god. Never knowing that the "mountain god" who sang for her still carries the scar of an arrow her father-in-law loosed in his youth.
Why keep singing? My mother answered that on her deathbed. She said:
"If we stop singing, then those four characters will truly be nothing but hide."
I have drifted now to Cart-Slow Kingdom. The land is deep in drought, and childless year upon year — in parched country, even conception grows scarce. And that corrupt state ceremony burned, among its offerings, the fertility prayers of ten thousand households — every begging-for-children petition in the kingdom, fed to the thing behind the altar.
I sing in the hills outside the city, every night. What reaches the streets is probably only wind.
The night the medicine-basket boy's company broke the grand altar, I sang until dawn in their support — the Song of Easing settles more than wombs; it settles minds. Afterward the boy followed my song and found me. And he did not look at my hide. In three thousand years: the first pair of eyes that did not go to my hide.
He said: so the Classic's line — its voice is like a folk song — is true. Far truer than wear it and prosper.
For that one sentence, I joined the company.
On the westward road my duty is singing: for the wounded; for children who wake screaming; for companions wrestling their heart-demons.
And I carry one private hope, which I will confess:
they say that at the foot of Vulture Peak there is a scripture-hoard, holding the oldest master-copy of the Classic of Mountains and Seas.
I want one look — one look at the most ancient scroll of all, to see whether the character written there is truly wear,
or listen.
One character. Three thousand years of my family's dead rest on that single character.