The recent matter first; the old story after.
The recent trouble in the Womanland of Western Liang — river-drinkers falling into trance, obeying whatever they are told — was not my river's doing. Someone dosed the headwaters. The corrosion-drug is viciously designed: it mimics the river's native power of sympathetic connection, and twists connection into control. When the medicine-basket boy's company traced the drug-cauldrons upstream, it was I who guided them from beneath the water the whole way.
Why so anxious to clear the record? Because this river has borne the slander of "demon river" for three hundred years, and I will not let it bear one more false charge at the end.
Now the old story. Why one drink of this river quickens a child.
Western Liang is a nation without men. You have told that as an exotic tale for centuries — but have you ever asked: how does a nation without men continue? By this river. A woman come of age drinks one mouthful, and conceives. The children born are all daughters.
Where does the river's power come from?
I am the river's spirit — an old stone of the riverbed, awakened, with a memory longer than the river's own. Here is the source: long, long ago there was war in this land, and the men died to the last — not one generation but three in succession, conscripted, press-ganged, massacred, until none remained. A city of widows and orphaned girls wept at their emptied nation for one entire year.
The weeping fell into the river. A full year of weeping sank to the riverbed.
A river is a living thing. It listened for a year, and it understood: this nation wants to live.
So the river remade itself. It refined ten thousand strands of let me have a child into its own current. And from that day, this river has carried a childless nation's line for three hundred years, and three hundred more.
That is not demon-craft. That is a river being soft-hearted toward a nation of widows.
Foreigners never understood; they composed their leering fables. The pilgrims passing through took it for strange western waters. The famous case of the holy monk who drank by mistake became a teahouse comedy — and no one ever asked: if the river quickens children, what does the river get?
Nothing. The river heard weeping, and the river answered. What heaven's way sometimes cannot hear, water hears.
Now my soft-hearted river suffers two afflictions.
The first is the drug — as told. And the dosers calculated deep: they do not mean to destroy this river but to borrow it — borrow its reach into every household's water, borrow its old nature of entering the body and connecting, to deliver a drug of obedience into ten thousand homes. The case of the silenced palace has its root in the water.
The second affliction is deeper, and I tell it to you alone: the river's vow-force is thinning.
The quickening rests on the year of weeping refined into vows at the riverbed. Three hundred years of use spends it strand by strand — as it should; every vow is repaid in time, and this river will someday return to being an ordinary river. A good bond, concluded well. That does not frighten me.
What frightens me is the present rate. This past decade it thins too fast — not like spending. Like being drawn.
All the world's merit and vow-force is converging on one place; you have heard the accounts all along your road. Now I confirm it: even the little hoard of wishes a river gathered for its widows — it wants that too.
It wants even this.
The boy asked what help I needed. From the riverbed I lifted one thing: a clay urn, sealed around the very first cry of that year of weeping.
It is one sentence, from a young widow who had wept her voice to rags: "If old Heaven won't look after us — then someone had better."
I said: carry it. In the west, when you stand before the collector of vows, open it, and let this river's sentence play for him.
Let him hear exactly what it is he has been drawing away.