First, the question you are certain to ask: how can a stretch of the River of Forgetting exist in the living world?
The Forgetting circles the courts of the dead; departed souls cross the Bridge of Helplessness and drink Granny Meng's broth — whose base is Forgetting-water — and only with the past erased may they be reborn. That is the netherworld's procedure. But all waters under heaven interconnect, the dark and the light, and the Forgetting has hairline tributaries that seep into the living world. The pools where it surfaces have an old name in the books: Springs of Oblivion.
In the deep gorge above the Mother-and-Child River lies one such pool. Its spirit is me.
The River Spirit downstream is my near neighbor — she keeps remembering: a whole river of widows' vows, three hundred years of them. I keep forgetting. Two ends of one waterway: one that records, one that releases. The old water-folk called it the balance of yin and yang — neither dispensable.
For three hundred years, this pool has conducted a single trade: the sale of forgetting.
The price is not money. The price is a reason.
Whoever comes seeking oblivion must first tell me, in full, the thing they wish to forget. I hear them out, and rule by the old water-law: what ought to be forgotten, I ladle one cup. What ought not, I counsel home.
What ought to be forgotten? A mother who lost her son, who for forty years has dreamed nightly of the one moment he went under, until she has burned down to a lamp-wick — that moment ought to be forgotten. Not the child: the moment. Only with the moment gone can she remember the child laughing.
What ought not? The betrayer who wants his debt erased for a sound night's sleep — refused. A debt forgotten is a debt repudiated, and this pool is no accomplice to repudiation.
Three hundred years: a thousand-some cups ladled, and three times that number counseled home.
Some curse me for cruelty: she is in such pain — one cup of water, and you withhold it? I answer: pain is of two kinds. One pain is a wound; wounds want healing, and forgetting is one medicine. The other pain is a debt; debts want repayment, and forgetting is flight. This pool heals wounds. It does not abet flight.
I learned the rules from Granny Meng herself. In my youth I followed the tributary down into the dark and worked three hundred years at the bridgehead. Her first lesson: the broth is never free. Before any soul drinks, Granny hears its whole life through — the attachments that can be resolved are resolved at the bridge; those that cannot are entered in the record, for the next life to repay. Forgetting was never erasure. Forgetting is settlement.
Only what has been settled may be forgotten.
Very well. Now the grave matter.
My pool is a living tributary; its floor communicates with the netherworld's waters. For three hundred years its potency held steady as a beam-scale: one cup, one forgetting, to the hair.
Ten years ago, the scale broke.
The water's potency now surges and fades. At its strongest, one drop can blank half a lifetime; at its weakest, a full cup blurs three days. I traced the veins down toward the dark — and what I found kept me on the pool-floor three days before I could rise:
the main channel of the Forgetting has fallen to half its depth.
And on further tracing, worse: the water has not diminished. The water is being diverted. Somewhere upstream, at some unknown hour, a hidden sluice was cut into the Forgetting. And the workmanship of the sluice-gate matches, exactly, the drug-cauldrons above the Mother-and-Child River.
They are drawing the water of Forgetting.
For what? Consider the water's nature: drink, and the past is gone. Now consider your road's gathered clues: the wrongful fire that burns memory into beads; the drug that bends minds; the replaced ones whose pasts are wiped clean —
why do the things moved into stolen shells sit so securely? Because the shells' original pasts have been washed. Washed with what?
With my river's water.
Granny Meng's broth settles the dead's past: that is mercy. The same ladleful, stolen, washing the past out of the living: that is murder — not of the life, but of the person.
The life walks on. The person is already gone.
I have sealed the pool, kept one small cup at my belt, and joined the westward company.
The boy asked what I seek. I said: two things.
The small one: along the road there will be those whose wounds run too deep; by the old rules, where a cup ought to be ladled, I will ladle it.
The great one — I will trace that hidden sluice to its gate, and ask the cutter to his face:
Granny Meng has ladled her broth for ten thousand years, and heard out a whole life before every ladleful.
Of all the ladles you have stolen — whose life did you ever hear?