"The brocade zither, for no reason, has fifty strings; each string, each bridge, recalls a flowering year." When the poet wrote that line, he may not have known he was stating a fact.
The brocade zither is built with fifty strings. And in one that has become a spirit, the fifty strings truly do record one year apiece — not as scores, but as the year itself: the griefs and joys played upon me in that year, the banquets, the partings, all of it seeped into the silk. Touch any string, and its year's sounds come back to life.
I am an old thing of the Womanland's palace. The lacquerer who built me and the musicians who strung me are centuries dead. I became a spirit in the depths of the music-vault, and with no one left to tune me, I tuned myself — year by year, setting in order the ages I had heard.
The "shelter of the Zither Spirit" you met in this chapter — how those who hid inside my sound kept their minds while the corrosion-drug bent everyone else's — is no divine power. It is the old principle: music is medicine; in the ancient script, the characters for the two were one family. With true tone in the ear, the crooked cannot enter. My fifty strings hold centuries of true years — drawn out, they are physic.
Very well. Now, my broken string.
Of fifty strings, forty-nine remain. The broken one is the thirty-seventh — and by my reckoning of years, that string held the year, three hundred years ago, when the black moon rose.
It was not broken by playing. On a night in late autumn of that year, with the vault empty, I heard the snap myself — the thirty-seventh string parting on its own. In that same moment, beyond the palace walls, the black moon first climbed the sky.
When a string breaks, its year is sealed. Every sound stored on it went mute with the break. So when you ask me what happened in the Womanland's palace the year the black moon rose — I cannot remember. In fifty years of memory, that one year is a blank.
A broken string cannot be re-strung. The zither's law: strings are years; broken is broken; a splice is a counterfeit.
I accepted the gap. A gap is also a way of remembering — at least I remember that a year is missing there.
Until, some decades ago, the broken string began to play.
Only on eclipse nights. At the midnight watch, in the vault's deepest silence, that string — parted in two, hanging from its bridge — trembles softly, and gives out the last half-phrase of music stored in it before the break.
Half a phrase. Always the same half-phrase. Like a sentence cut off at the waist, stopped forever at the cliff's edge.
Across dozens of eclipses I have learned that half-phrase to its last grace-note. It is no palace elegy, no folk air. Its mode is ancient past all my vault's scores — until sister Harmonious Music heard it once, and her face changed utterly.
She said: that is the opening of the Music of Even Heaven.
The Music of Even Heaven. The music of the celestial court. No mortal musician has heard it whole; the old books preserve only its name: when the Celestial Emperor feasts the assembled gods, the Music of Even Heaven is performed — nine movements to completion, and heaven and earth are brought into harmony together.
Why did my thirty-seventh string, in the year the black moon rose, record half a phrase of Heaven's own music?
Who, in that year — in the Womanland's palace, or at whatever distance a string's silk can sense — sounded the opening of the Music of Even Heaven?
And having opened — why only half a phrase? A music of nine movements, cut off at the waist by what?
Sister Harmonious Music says her inherited Nine Chapters of Shao lack their ninth chapter likewise. All these years she has played nightly for a phoenix, and been answered instead by a bell in the west. She says: little zither — the gaps in all our music-houses, I fear, are one and the same gap.
The music of heaven broke off, three hundred years ago, at the same measure.
So I travel west with the company. Forty-nine sound strings, dispensing physic down the road: settling minds, stilling terrors, driving out the corroded tones.
And the broken string rides against my body, wrapped in a brocade pouch.
At the Western Heaven I mean to find the performance that was never finished, and ask whoever holds the baton —
the ninth movement: will it be played, or not?
If it will, this broken string of mine volunteers to be the first note of the resumption.
Strings cannot be re-strung — that is the zither's law. But to finish the music that brings heaven and earth into harmony —
that law, I will break.