Of the three title-bearers, I rank last — and look least like a Grand Immortal.
Brother Tiger Power inherited the rain altar; brother Deer Power, the infirmary — honest incense, both. What did I inherit? A cauldron.
The great oil cauldron in the back court of the Three Pure Ones' Abbey. Three hundred years ago, the old Goat Power died in it — he summoned a cold dragon of the North Sea to shield him, and sat unharmed in the rolling oil; Sun Wukong saw through it, had the Dragon King recall the beast, and in one breath of honest heat, the Grand Immortal was rendered to the bone.
No one has dared touch the cauldron since. The abbey has collapsed three times. The cauldron remains.
I am a mountain antelope cultivated to human form, come to Cart-Slow along the Power-lineage road. The old shrine-keeper showed me three inheritances; the first two were claimed; at the last he pointed to the cauldron and said: this one, no one has accepted in three hundred years.
I asked: accept it to do what?
He said: the cauldron is waiting for something. Accept it, and you will learn.
I accepted. And on the first night I understood him —
the oil has not cooled in three hundred years.
There is no fire. The ash in the stove-pit beneath has hardened to stone. Yet the oil stays warm, as if lately off the flame. Stranger: whenever someone lies beside the cauldron, the oil's surface raises a soft film of bubbles.
The city came to know this, and Cart-Slow now keeps a judicial custom found nowhere else: when a great case cannot be decided, the parties are brought to the abbey's back court to repeat their testimony with a hand on the cauldron's rim. A lie spoken, the oil bubbles — infallible, a hundred trials out of a hundred. The people call it the Trial of Oil.
So I, Goat Power, became the cauldron's magistrate. In thirty years, no verdict rendered by the oil — from murder down to boundary-stones — has ever been overturned.
You ask the principle? I cannot give it. I can only report, exactly, the three strange facts thirty years of cauldron-keeping have taught me.
First: the oil weighs lies. The same falsehood from a child raises two bubbles that smooth away; from an official with his hand on the rim, the oil can boil half a foot high. The cauldron seems to know how many people each lie can harm.
Second: there is a coldness at the base. The oil is warm — but lay your palm low on the outer wall and you find a thread of cold that bites to the bone. The old Goat Power once summoned the North Sea's cold dragon, and at first I took this for the beast's lingering breath. Then, three years ago, word came from the East Sea: the cold dragon line of the North Sea has been silent since the black moon.
The cold at the cauldron's base is no cold dragon. What it is, I do not know. I know only that these three years, that thread of cold has been climbing. Inch by inch.
Third — this spring: the oil no longer answers only the lies spoken at its rim.
Some nights, with the back court empty, I hear the oil from the front rooms. I run out: the surface churns as at full boil, a thousand bubbles, and no living soul anywhere near.
No one lying at the rim — which means the cauldron is answering lies told far away.
How far? I have kept correlations. The night the capital posted its new-policy proclamation, the oil rolled till dawn. When the grand altar of the false ceremony performed its rites, the oil rolled three days. After the altar fell I expected quiet — yet on the fifteenth of last month the surface rose without wind and boiled as it has not boiled in three hundred years —
and only later did we learn: that night, in the western sky, the moon was eclipsed.
A lie-judging cauldron, boiling in answer to the eclipse. Beneath that black moon — who is telling a lie of what size?
The medicine-basket boy came to see the cauldron, and I told him all three strangenesses. He pressed his hand to the rim and stated his own history: the oil lay still. The Taibai-sending "spoke" something too: still the oil rested.
Then the boy leaned over the surface and asked it, softly:
"Three hundred years ago — did the pilgrimage's merit ever come home?"
The whole cauldron leapt boiling to the height of a man.
None of us spoke. No one had lied — the cauldron had heard the question, and on the world's behalf, boiled the great lie up for us to see.
I have entrusted the cauldron to the Oil-Cauldron Imp and joined the westward company. Before leaving, I ladled one cup of the warm oil and sealed it in a porcelain flask against my chest.
In the west, when we stand before the one who tells that lie, I will pour this cup on the ground at his feet —
and let him watch with his own eyes how a cup of Cart-Slow oil catches fire in his presence.