You have read little sister Ball's account. She reads the threads. I have taken up learning to tie them.
I too was once an embroidered ball — the husband-choosing ball of the generation before hers. Three hundred years of tosses completed, my merit full, I was due by regulation to be enshrined in the storehouse. That night I could not sleep: three centuries of thread-reading eyes, locked in a camphor chest to feed the moths?
I squeezed out through the storehouse shutter and made for the shrine of the Old Man Under the Moon.
The shrine stands in the Womanland's outskirts, fallen these three hundred years. I wanted to see: when the founder of the thread-tying trade departed, did he leave anything behind?
Cobwebs roped the beams; the god's image listed. But the moment I entered, I saw the hall was full of thread — not the living's destiny-threads: stock-thread. Bundle upon bundle, rack upon rack, floor to rafters — all the red thread the Old Man never had time to tie. Three hundred years untouched, dust a finger deep upon them — and every strand still vivid red. Not one had rotted.
Red thread does not rot. The holding-of-one-another-in-mind was never a thing that spoils on its own.
At the deepest rack lay a register: the Book of Tied Threads. On its last page, the ink stops three hundred years ago, mid-line:
"The black moon rises; the thread-roads are blocked; I go to the Western Heaven to ask—"
Ask what, it never says. The founder set down his brush, went west, and never returned.
I kept vigil in the shrine three months, and settled one thing: I cannot replace the Old Man. He tied threads by the Register of Marriages, by heaven's decree; I am one ball, without register, without decree.
But I can do the one thing the Old Man never did: tend the threads.
By the ancestral rules, the Old Man handled two offices only: tying the thread, and gathering it in when the wedding hour arrived. The decades in between — the thread weathering on a living person — had no keeper. None was needed, once: heaven's way stood firm, and threads minded themselves.
It is otherwise now. You know it as well as I: something out there cuts threads.
So I took human form and gave myself a modest title — the Immortal of the Tossed Ball. I dare not fly the Old Man's name; I simply do my work: patrol the threads, mend the threads, guard the threads.
Across the Womanland I make my rounds monthly. Whose red thread has worn thin — three years of a couple's bickering will fray one; whose parent-and-child thread has knotted — almost always words held back unsaid; whose thread has greyed toward breaking — those doors I knock on. No spells; spells are useless — threads are woven of hearts. I can do exactly one thing: bring the two ends of a thread to look at each other once more.
For the old couple who quarreled past speaking, I retell the day my predecessor's toss chose them. For the daughter who stormed out for good, I untie the safe-keeping knot her mother ties onto their thread every night, and carry it to her eyes.
A frayed thread can be smoothed. A knotted one, untied. Even a greyed thread — while both ends live and will consent to one look — reddens again.
In three hundred years I have guarded back more threads than the founder's register tied in a year.
But a severed thread, I cannot rejoin.
Eleven of them — seventeen, now. The cuts level, the ends scorched black, as if by scissors heated red. I keep every severed thread-end, wrapped in the shrine's old silk — thread-ends know their owners, and if a day of reckoning ever comes, these are the evidence.
Last month, going through the deep racks, I made a discovery that stood every silk fiber of me on end:
the stock-thread is short.
The racks stood untouched for three centuries; I inventoried them my first year: one hundred ninety-four thousand bundles and some. Last month's count: one hundred eighty thousand, barely.
Fourteen thousand bundles gone. No break-in, no disorder — the racks as neat as ever. Simply less, as if a sum had been struck straight off the ledger.
To cut a living thread is to destroy what is. To steal stock-thread — is to intend what?
Only the Old Man can tie a red thread. Unless the thief means to… tie his own. To take stolen red thread and tie a batch of unions of his choosing. Tied to whom? Those threadless empty shells — if stolen red thread were forcibly tied onto them —
would they not, to every reading eye, look exactly like people?
I will not follow the thought further. I have taken the Book of Tied Threads, the seventeen severed ends, and a heart full of accounts, and joined the westward company.
Founder — the question you carried to the Western Heaven three hundred years ago: did you ever receive its answer?
The sentence you left half-written — this apprentice is coming to finish asking it for you.