Chương 10Chapter 10: The Rain-Watcher’s Lamb

Chapter 10: The Rain-Watcher’s Lamb

One year later, the farmers of the valley below Azure Peak had opinions about the sect’s new rain-watcher.

He was lazy. This was established. He could be found asleep on the boundary stones at hours when honest men were in their fields, and he accepted payment for weather-readings in tea, peaches, dried fish, or — the miller’s wife maintained — compliments, which he appeared to value above the fish.

Children followed him at a respectful distance on his rounds, daring each other to be the first to touch the cloud. Old Widow Chen left steamed buns on the boundary stone whether he asked or not, because the year before he had told her, three days early and without being asked, to move her drying peppers under cover. She told the village he dreamed the weather. He told the village, whenever asked, that the weather dreamed him, which they took for modesty and he took for accuracy.

He was also never wrong.

The sect had noticed, of course. Sects notice everything eventually; it is their primary spiritual practice. In the spring, Elder Feng had begun — without announcement, without asking him — forwarding the rain-watcher’s weekly readings to the council, where they were read aloud between the grain reports. In the summer, the Patriarch had sent down a formal request that the boundary readings include the eastern valleys, which were not, strictly, Azure Peak’s affair, and the rain-watcher had replied with a reading for the eastern valleys so precise that the council had spent an entire session not discussing it, in the manner of men walking around a sleeping tiger.

The Patriarch had not mentioned the Ascension Platform in a year. Neither had Qinglan. Some doors, once knocked on properly, did not need to be opened again.

Not once. Not about a shower, not about a frost, not about the hail that came in the sixth month and ruined every orchard in the prefecture except the ones whose owners had taken the rain-watcher’s advice and cut early, at a loss, cursing him — and then had a crop at all, and sent up peaches. Rain fell where he said it would fall, stopped when he said it would stop. The headman of Fen Village had proposed, in council, that he be investigated for sorcery, and the proposal had been defeated by the rice crop.

“You’re a legend,” Qinglan said, on one of her visits to the boundary stones, with the fondness of a woman reading a mediocre poem. “The valley’s youngest elder-track sword instructor has been assigned to check on the sect’s legend, because the legend’s reports are late. Again.”

“Reports,” Shen Mu said, not opening his eyes, “imply events. The weather has been fine, Senior Sister. I’ve written ‘fine’ in very small characters to conserve ink for the sect.”

“You teach the outer disciples on Thursdays now,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t know. Elder Feng told the Patriarch the patrol reports have improved beyond recognition since the rain-watcher started ‘mentioning things’ on his rounds.”

“The patrol reports,” Shen Mu said, with dignity, “were beneath comment, and I commented.”

She settled on the next stone over in the autumn sun. Foundation Establishment, mid-stage now — a year of sealed, heaven-aligned cultivation had put her where six years of blind talent had aimed at, and beyond it; the sect had quietly stopped using the words did not see her, and the disciples who crossed courtyards to avoid her now crossed courtyards to be seen drilling under her, which she bore with exactly the same face as the other thing, serene, unreadable, hers.

Above her shoulder, faithful as a punctuation mark, drifted the lamb.

What remained of Storm Seventy-Seven had not diminished in a year, and nobody — not Elder Feng, not the Patriarch, not Shen Mu in his official capacity — could explain it within any scripture anyone owned. It was a small white cloud the size and shape of a fat lamb, with a face, and it followed the sect’s rain-watcher on his rounds, and it rained, when scolded, on exactly one flowerbed. Qinglan’s, usually. Elder Feng had decreed it a sect treasure, partly from conviction and partly, Qinglan suspected, because decreeing things was how her grandmother processed wonder.

The lamb had moods, after a fashion. On bright mornings it was round and pleased with itself and shed small, harmless rainbows when it shook. Before a genuine storm — a mortal one, unledgered and ordinary — it would grow quiet and dense and press itself against Shen Mu’s ankle like a dog hearing thunder before men could. The disciples had started bringing it offerings of cotton and clean rainwater. Shen Mu pretended not to approve. The lamb pretended not to preen.

“It rained on my peonies again,” Qinglan said.

“It rains on your peonies,” Shen Mu said, “because your peonies are the only flowers on this mountain that anyone has ever talked to like an army. It respects the discipline.”

“Shen Mu.”

“Yes.”

“Three hundred years.” She said it the way she’d said it a year ago, on the summit, when the sentence came down — not as pity. As arithmetic. She was Azure Peak’s disciple; she did arithmetic in public and feelings in private, and only one of those facts had changed. “That’s the term. The whole term. Here.”

“It is.”

“The Bureau could call it done early, for conduct. Song Yun — Shepherd Song — writes that the north mists have never been better fed. Bai He’s feather grew back by winter; she sent the old one down with a note that said for the file, whatever that means. Even the Court sent a commendation this spring, for the hail. For the orchards. Heaven has commended you for peaches, Shen Mu. You could petition.”

“I could,” he said.

He opened his eyes, because some things you say to the sky and some things you say to a person, and sat up on the boundary stone, an unremarkable mortal man in a rain-watcher’s patched coat, with half a broken crook across his knees that the farmers thought was a walking stick.

“I spent a hundred and twenty years,” he said, “waiting for it to be over. Not the shift. The — everything. Standing at a fence I didn’t tend, over people I’d decided not to think about, telling myself the caring was the dangerous part.” The lamb-cloud drifted down and settled, with enormous delicacy, on the top of his head, where it stayed, raining very slightly on nothing at all. “It’s a good fence down here, Qinglan. It’s the same fence. It turns out the pasture’s fence goes all the way around the world, and every bit of it needs a shepherd, and the pay is peaches and the hours are terrible, and I am — for the first time since Lin Xiaoyu was twenty-two—” He stopped. He started again, more simply. “I’m not waiting for it to be over. Petition in your own time, if your sect ever wants its rain-watcher back in heaven. Mine’s here.”

Qinglan looked at him for a long moment, and then she did the thing she had done once before, in an herb shed, a year and a lifetime ago: she almost smiled, the records-office smile, except that now there was something underneath it that hadn’t been there then, and the something was warm.

“Instructor,” she said, “the sect’s storm-drill is on the equinox. The inner disciples are hopeless with lightning. Half of them still try to catch it.”

“You will terrify them,” Qinglan said. “You terrify everyone. It’s your teaching method.”

“My method is demonstration.”

“Your method is standing in a thunderstorm holding a stick and saying, again, in a tone of voice that suggests the lightning has disappointed you personally.”

“And yet,” Shen Mu said, “your patrol reports.”

She conceded the point by not conceding it, which, after a year, he had learned to count as applause. The lamb, sensing departure, began its slow, dignified process of pretending it had intended to move all along.

“Animals,” Shen Mu said, scandalized, standing up and dislodging the lamb, which resettled on his shoulder like a parrot with weather in it. “I’ll bring my stick. Walk with me, Senior Sister — the hour of the goat, and the eastern steps will want their nine minutes of sun. I scheduled it myself. Old habits.”

They walked up the mountain together, the sword instructor and the rain-watcher, and the lamb-cloud drifted along behind them at ankle height, practicing being unobtrusive and failing, the way it had failed every day for a year, to the delight of every child in the valley.

Far to the south that night — past the peaks, past the rivers, where the Demon Wastes began again in the dark — a wisp of cloud the color of ink climbed a fence of woven wind, slow as honey, and spilled over the other side, and began, unhurried, to drift.

On a boundary stone below Azure Peak, a small white lamb-cloud lifted its head out of its sleep, and looked south, with interest.