You have seen the Womanland's husband-choosing rite in the operas: the festooned tower, ten thousand upturned faces, the embroidered ball arcing from the Queen's hands — and whoever it lands upon is the destined consort.
What the operas never tell: where the ball lands was never the Queen's decision.
It is mine.
I am that ball. Palace-made, wound in ninety-nine layers of five-colored silk around a consecrated concentric knot. Three hundred years of being tossed, and I tossed myself awake.
You think the rite runs on luck? Could luck-made marriages prosper, every one? In three hundred years, the matches made by my hand — by my body — number sixty-seven pairs in the Womanland's registers. Divorces: none.
By what power? By this: from mid-air, I see the threads.
The red threads Elder Paired-Mandarins reads, I read too — but finer. A person's destiny-threads are not one but a sheaf: the thick red running to the fated one; thin pink threads to passing affinities; and the grey ones, the knotted ones — ill fates, wrong turnings. In the three breaths I hang above the crowd, every thread in the square lies open to me.
And the embrace I drop into is always the one whose red thread runs thickest and truest.
The Queens have always understood. Before each toss, every Queen in her generation has dismissed her attendants and spoken one sentence to me. One said: choose me an upright heart. One said: the state comes first — choose shoulders that can bear it. The late Queen was plainest of all: little ball, never mind rank. Choose one who will truly cherish her.
I flew, and landed in the arms of a stable-boy. The court erupted. Twenty years later, that consort took three assassin's blades for his Queen.
That is my trade. And in three hundred years my pride is not the sixty-seven pairs — it is that I have never once betrayed the thread. The thread is heaven's decree; I merely deliver heaven's intent, precisely, into the right arms.
Now, my present grief.
These past years, the rite has been suspended. Not for want of brides — because I can no longer be thrown.
The tower rises as ever; the ten thousand gather as ever. I am tossed into the air, and in my three breaths I sweep the square for threads —
and find almost none.
In the old days a square of ten thousand was a spring meadow of threads, red and pink interwoven till my sight swam. Now I look down and three in ten carry no thread. Not thin threads. Not grey ones. None. Bare — like a patch of ground burned black in a snowfield.
The threadless look ordinary; they chat and laugh. But I dare not fall to them — the ball's law: no thread, no landing. I circle in the air until my strength fails, and drop back into the Queen's own hands.
The city whispers that the ball has lost its power; the Queen weeps over me at night. I could weep harder: I have lost nothing. It is the square that fills, year by year, with things that are not people.
What is a destiny-thread? It is one person's future held out toward another. Only what has a future can grow a thread. The replaced shells hold things that have no future — only assignments. They will never love, never wait for anyone; no thread can sprout from them.
Brother Wangliang reads the shadows; Elder Mandarin reads the severed threads; I read the threadless. Lay the three ledgers together and they are one ledger: the ledger of the replaced.
From memory — for nothing sees a crowd more completely than a ball in mid-air — I have drawn up three years of the rite's threadless ones: positions, dress, retinues. I gave the register to the medicine-basket boy. Two names in it startled the whole company: one serves in the Bureau's Western Liang branch. The other was the late master of rites.
The replaced are not in the marketplace. They are in the halls of state.
So I travel west. The Queen laid me in the boy's hands herself, with the heaviest charge of the journey:
"Three hundred years of my country's marriages were tied by this ball. Take it west — and find what it is that is cutting our future."
On the road I keep my old trade: rising into the night air to read the surrounding country's threads for the company — where threads are, the living are; where none are, they are.
As for myself —
three hundred years of being tossed, and no one has ever once asked: little ball, your own thread — where does it run?
I will not hide it. I have one. Very fine, and golden, and for three hundred years it has slanted, unwavering, toward the Western Heaven.
What waits at its far end, I do not know.
But no one knows the ball's law better than I: where the thread runs —
there the ball must land.