Liang down. After that it was the commander’s sister-in-law, Laidi, his brother-in-law, Jintong, and his younger sister-in-law, Yunii. As honored guests, we sat on the carpet. Everyone else stood behind us. The Bird Fairy tried to hide in the crowd, and when Second Sister signaled her to come over, she hid her face behind Sima Ting and stood behind us. Sima Ting, who was suffering from a toothache, stood there covering his swollen cheek with his hand.
The spot where we sat corresponded to the ox’s head, the face directly in front of us. The ox made a point of sticking its mouth up against the chest. Its face was a hanging cliff well over a thousand feet above sea level. Winds swept over our heads on their way to the village, above which misty clouds floated like puffs of smoke. I tried to locate our house, but what I spotted was Sima Ku’s neatly laid-out compound, with its seven entrances. The church bell tower and the wooden watchtower appeared small and fragile. The plain, the river, the lake, and the pastureland were ringed by a dozen or more ponds and populated by a herd of horses the size of goats and donkeys as small as dogs; they were the Sima Battalion mounts. There were six milk goats the size of rabbits, and those were our goats – the big white one was mine. Mother had requested it from Second Sister, who had requested it from her husband’s aide-de-camp, who had sent someone to the Yi-Meng mountain district to buy it. A little girl stood next to my goat; her head looked like a little ball. But I knew it was a young woman, not a little girl, and that her head was actually a lot bigger than a little ball, because it was Sixth Sister, Niandi. She had taken the goats out to pasture, not for their benefit, but because she wanted to see the demonstration too.
Sima Ku and Babbitt had dismounted; their squat horses were roaming around the ox’s head, searching for wild alfalfa, with its purple flowers. Babbitt walked up to the ledge and leaned over to look down, as if gauging its height. Then he looked up into the sky – nothing but blue as far as the eye could see, so no problem there. He squinted and raised a hand, apparently checking the force of the wind, even though the flag was snapping, our clothes billowed, and a hawk was being tossed around in the air like a dead leaf. Sima Ku was behind him, exaggeratedly repeating all his moves. He had the same serious look on his face, but I sensed it was all for show.
‘Okay,” Babbitt said stiffly, “we can begin.”
“Okay,” Sima Ku said in the same tone. “We can begin.”
The soldiers brought up two bundles and opened one of them. Inside was a sheet of white silk that seemed bigger than the sky itself; attached to it were some white cords. Babbitt signaled the soldiers to tie the cords around Sima Ku’s hips and chest. Once that was done, he tugged at them to make sure they were well fastened. He then shook out the white silk and had the soldiers stretch it out as far as it would go. As a gust of wind caught it, the soldiers let go, and it billowed out into a sweeping arc, pulling all the cords taut and dragging Sima Ku along the ground. He tried to stand, but couldn’t, and began rolling along the ground like a newborn donkey. Babbitt ran up behind him and grabbed the cord around his back. “Grab it,” he shouted stiffly, “grab the control cord.” Sima Ku, apparently coming to his senses, cursed, “Babbitt, you fucking assassin -”
Second Sister jumped up from the carpet and ran after Sima Ku. But she hadn’t gone more than a few steps before he was swept over the ledge, bringing an abrupt end to his curses. Babbitt roared, “Pull the cord on your left! Pull it, stupid!”
We ran over to the ledge, even Eighth Sister, who stumbled in the general direction until First Sister grabbed her. The sheet of silk by then had been transformed into a puffy white cloud, drifting along at an angle, with Sima Ku hanging beneath it, twisting and turning like a fish on a hook.
Babbitt roared, “Steady, stupid, steady! Get yourself ready to touch down!”
The cloud drifted along with the wind, descending slowly until it came to earth on a distant grassy spot, where it was transformed into a dazzling white cover over the green grass.
All that time, we stood on the edge holding our breath, mouths open, as we followed the white sheet with our eyes until it touched the ground; then we closed our mouths and recommenced breathing. But we quickly tensed up as we became aware that Second Sister was crying. It suddenly occurred to me that the commander had fallen to his death. Everyone’s eyes were riveted on the patch of white, waiting for a miracle. Which is what we got: the sheet stirred and began to rise; a black object squirmed out from under it and stood up. He waved his arms; his excited shouts reached us on the mountaintop. A roar went up from the ledge.
Babbitt’s face was bright red; the tip of his nose shone, as if smeared with oil. After tying his cords around him and strapping the bundle onto his back, he stood, limbered up his arms, and walked slowly backward. We couldn’t take our eyes off him, but he was oblivious to his surroundings, eyes straight ahead. After he’d backed up a dozen yards or more, he stopped and closed his eyes; his lips were moving, as if he were uttering a charm. The charm completed, he opened his eyes and took off running. When he reached the spot where we were standing, he dove into the air, body straight, and began falling like a stone. For a moment, I was caught up in the illusion that he wasn’t falling, but that the ledge was actually rising, along with the ground below. Then, all of a sudden, a pure white flower, the largest I’d ever seen, blossomed in the blue sky over the green grass. A roar greeted this big white flower as it drifted along, with Babbitt hanging steadily beneath it, like the weight on a scale. He hit the ground in a matter of seconds, right in the middle of our little herd of goats, which fled in all directions, like frightened rabbits. Suddenly, the big white flower collapsed in on itself, like a bubble, covering Babbitt and the shepherdess Niandi.
Sixth Sister shrieked in alarm as a layer of white closed in around her. When her goats fled in all directions, she gazed up into the pink face of Babbitt, as he hung beneath the white cloud. He was smiling. A god descending to the land of mortals! Or so she thought. As if in a trance, she watched him fall rapidly toward her, her heart filling with reverence and ardent love for him.
The rest of us stuck our heads out over the ledge to see what was going on down below. “This has sure been an eye-opener,” said Huang Tianfu, who ran the coffin shop. “A god. I’ve lived seventy years, and I’ve finally seen a god descend to the land of mortals.” Mr. Qin the Second, who taught at the local school, stroked his goatee and sighed. “There was something special about Commander Sima the day he was born. When he was my student, I knew he was headed for big things.” Mr. Qin and Proprietor Huang were surrounded by township elders, all of whom were praising Sima Ku in similar language but different tones of voice and marveling over the eye-popping miracle that had just occurred. “You folks cannot imagine how many ways he differed from the others,” Mr. Qin said loudly to drown out the discussion around him and make a show of his special relationship with Sima Ku, a man who could fly like a bird.
A shrill noise sliced through the air from somewhere beyond the crowd; it sounded a bit like a little whelp crying for the nipple, but even more like the cries of gulls circling boats on the river, which we’d heard many years earlier. Mr. Qin the Second’s laughter stopped abruptly; the look of mirthful pride on his face vanished. We all turned to see where that strange noise had come from. It had, we discovered, come from Third Sister, Lingdi. But little of what made her “Third Sister” remained; when she uttered the strange, shrill noise that sent chills up our spines, she’d transformed almost completely into the Bird Fairy: her nose had hooked into a beak, her eyes had turned yellow, her neck had retreated into her torso, her hair had changed into feathers, and her arms were now wings, which she flapped up and down as she climbed the increasingly steep hillside, shrieking as if alone in the world and heading straight for the precipice. Sima Ting reached out to stop her, but failed, coming away with only a torn piece of cloth. By the time we snapped out of our bewilderment, she was already soaring through the air below the precipice – I prefer the word
Second Sister was the first to cry. The sound was disturbing. It was perfectly natural for the Bird Fairy to fly off a precipice, so what was she crying about? But then, First Sister, whom I’d always considered sneaky and cynical, began to cry. Inexplicably, even Eighth Sister, who couldn’t see a thing, joined in. Her cries sounded a bit as if she were talking in her sleep and were filled with the passion of someone seeking permission to vent her emotions. One day, long after the event, Eighth Sister confided in me that the crunch of Third Sister hitting the ground sounded to her like the shattering of glass.
The excited crowd was stupefied, faces frosted, eyes glazed. Second Sister signaled a soldier to bring over a mule, which she mounted by grabbing the animal’s short neck and swinging up onto its back. She dug her heels into the mule’s belly, sending it into an uneasy trot. Sima Liang ran after the mule, but was stopped by a soldier before he’d taken more than a couple of steps. The soldier swept him up in his arms and sat him on the horse his father, Sima Ku, had just ridden up on.
Like a routed army, we headed down Reclining Ox Mountain. What were Babbitt and Niandi doing under the white cloud at that moment? As I rode my mule down the mountain path, I racked my brain trying to conjure up an
