The old case first, and cleanly. I am that Jade Rabbit Spirit of the classic: fled the palace without leave, abducted the princess of India, took her place — all to await the pilgrim monk and wed him, to steal his primal yang. Sun Wukong saw through me; the Star-Lord of the Moon herself descended; I was taken home.
There was a private grudge in it, and the classic records that too: the true princess had been, in her former life, the immortal maiden Su'e of the Moon Palace — who once struck me a single blow. I nursed the grudge, and when she reincarnated, I followed her down to repay it.
One slap, remembered across a lifetime, pursued into the mortal world. Laugh at my pettiness if you like. The Moon Palace is too quiet — quiet enough that a single slap can roll itself into a three-hundred-year snowball.
After the Star-Lord led me home, I served my sentence in the Vast-Cold Palace: ten years pounding medicine for the whole court, forbidden to pass the gates.
In the seventh year of the sentence, the black moon came.
Of that night, the pounding mother and daughter have told the fall. I will tell what I saw — because in all the Moon Palace, I alone was outside at that hour.
A punished rabbit sleeps badly. My habit was to slip along the wall-foot and out through the drainage culvert, to crouch on the moon's far side and watch the stars. An old vice — the very route of my famous desertion was that culvert.
So when the cover closed, I was outside the cover.
And I saw it with perfect clarity: not fog, not cloud, no celestial weather. The thing was alive. It seeped in slowly from the deep beyond the sky, like ink dropped into water — or like… like a mouth, closing from behind, taking the whole moon slowly in.
Holding it. Not biting. Not swallowing. Holding — as one holds a sweet in the mouth. Or a lozenge of medicine.
The moon is the world's greatest apothecary; the pounders have told you. Clear-Radiance settles souls — the one thing the foul things of this darkened age hate most.
Hold the moon in the mouth, and the radiance cannot scatter down. The world's nights lose their medicine. Nights without medicine breed savage dreams, disordered hearts, swelling grievances —
every grievance-harvester, memory-burner, and name-caller you have traced on this road has flourished beneath the black moon like crops in rich soil.
Hold the moon — but why not destroy it? I watched from outside the cover a full night, and understood: it cannot. Within the moon stand the Star-Lord's sanctum and the sediment of ten thousand years of radiance; to break it outright would maim them both. So it holds — steeping the moon's brightness in its own darkness, inch by inch, the way cold water steeps a bar of red-hot iron.
The day the brightness goes fully cold, it wins.
But turn that around: so long as the brightness inside has not gone cold — so long as someone in there still pounds, still keeps the watch, still strikes the pestle on the old measure —
it has not won.
I watched until near dawn, then followed my falling kin down to earth. In three hundred years I have never returned to the clan-ground below Vulture Peak — a deserter rabbit has no face to show the law-keeping kin. I have lived alone on Moonview Crag in the Womanland, and at every eclipse, listened from afar to the pounding shifts of mother and daughter.
Listened, and wept. And after weeping, written out once more, from memory, everything I saw that night. Three hundred years; several hundred copies; hidden in the crag-cave — always with the feeling that this testimony from outside the cover would, someday, be needed by someone.
The medicine-basket boy found me by the Pounding Rabbit's directions. Mother and daughter sent one message with him: your name was struck from the rolls — but your place, the clan has kept for you.
That one sentence, and I wept on Moonview Crag until the moon went down.
I gave the company all several hundred copies. The Taibai-sending read them page by page, and asked me a single question:
"The direction that mouth came from — do you remember it?"
I remember. I will remember it for the rest of my existence.
It did not seep in from nowhere. It came from the west. Along the roof of the tribulation-cloud canopy, out of the deep places west of Vulture Peak itself.
The sending heard this, and was silent a long, long time.
So I travel west. The deserter rabbit, three hundred years late, has reported back for duty.
As for Su'e's single slap — I let that go long ago. If her reincarnation lives well somewhere in the human world, carry her one message from me:
elder sister — it was my pettiness, all those years ago.
And on the day the moon shines again — by the drainage culvert of the Vast-Cold Palace, my treat: one true full moon, watched together.