Chapter Text
The poem arrives painted on paper wrapped around a square piece of silk. The silk carries a heavier burden: a greyish-blue bound book.
The pages inside are made of fine, white paper covered in uniform script.
They tell the story of a heavenly young person who is taken in by their benefactor. That is as much as Yue Qingyuan knows.
He does not have much time for reading in the winter months. Snow falls thickly on the peaks. His disciples come to train with him with scabbing chapped lips and ruddy faces. He sends them away to meet the rising tide of meetings upon meetings and reports that rush towards him like tangled masses of dried lake reeds.
Like the reeds, they block his view of most things beyond the sect, including the gifts and payments which come in return for various disciples’ noble endeavors.
The book gets mixed in with the month’s unwrapped pile of precious stones, lumps of metal, and jangling bags of coins.
Yue Qingyuan mistakes it for small bolt of silk. He lands upon it in search of something to replace Mu Qingfang’s shredded sash, which Mu Qingfang is valiantly pretending not to be bothered by. The silk matches his uniform nicely.
Yue Qingyuan keeps the book.
He finally has time to indulge in some reading nearly a month after its arrival, whereupon he finds himself completely perplexed.
The story is about a young person who is taken in by their benefactor, yes, but every page brings with it a sense of foreboding.
The young person is revealed, within ten pages, to have tried to murder his benefactor years before the story begins.
He is referred to by his benefactor, who narrates the story, as simply ‘Swallow,’ and Swallow, for some reason, lives in the benefactor’s house and tends the benefactor’s scarred, wounded body day by day.
About halfway through the book (and multiple candles later), it becomes apparent to Yue Qingyuan that the benefactor has fallen in love with Swallow, and out of indignation at the condition he has found himself in due to Swallow’s previous rage, has taken from him his left arm and his right leg.
He has replaced these with what he calls ‘shining limbs made of the finest steel’ and called upon a shaman to help him cast a spell over them which gives him command over both so that they come to life by his order and collapse, dead, by the same.
This keeps Swallow by his side night and day, day and night, for Swallow can’t run away with only one leg, can he?
Still, the book goes on.
In its beginning, the benefactor praised Swallow’s lovely appearance: long hair, fair skin, and unusually tall, harrow-hipped build. But over time, the benefactor seems becomes even more infatuated with Swallow’s ever-more run down appearance. He ruminates vociferously on his ward’s rough, calloused palms and the careless way he ties his hair in the morning.
Yue Qingyuan curls his lip as he uncovers, page by page, the benefactor’s infatuation with the thinness of his servant’s clothing. The man practically moans over the bones which gradually rise in Swallow’s shoulders and chest, and refers to what surely is slow descent into starvation instead as one of many signs that Swallow is approaching the peak of his beauty.
The volume ends with the unnamed benefactor calling Swallow away from his chores to wash the wounds he made himself in the benefactor’s body. The last sentence trails off: “Swallow kneels…”
Yue Qingyuan shuts the book and pitches it across the table in his candle-lit room. It falls off the other side of the table with a clatter.
That is not far enough.
Yue Qingyuan stands and takes the book up from the floor. He opens the door leading out into the house’s courtyard and hurls it into the snow.
After reading such depraved filth, he feels like he needs a bath.
In the morning, Mu Qingfang comes to visit and plucks the book out of the snow with his arms full of reports. He lays them on the table first and then lays the book on top.
“Zhangmen-shixiong has been reading, no?” he asks.
Yue Qingyuan would hardly call it reading.
“I heard some of the noblemen in town talking about this volume,” Mu Qingfang says. “They say the writing is nothing like anything they’ve seen before.”
He could say that again.
As much as Yue Qingyuan finds the narrative repulsive, there is no denying that the prose has been masterfully crafted. It eggs one forward despite their revulsion and makes them feel as if they are the one coaxing Swallow closer to them by the rope around his neck.
“It is compelling,” he says diplomatically. “And all yours if you would like it.”
Mu Qingfang graciously accepts this gift and insists that he will come next time prepared to discuss it, which Yue Qingyuan insists he does not have to do.
Still, Mu Qingfang tells him he will, and with that the issue is dropped.
The second volume arrives just as the first has made its rounds through every peak. The older disciples are captivated by this story. It is so distinct from their usual texts, so magnificently written and baffling in its premise that they can think of nothing else. They being to whisper among themselves in any idle moment about what they imagine will happen next.
The younger disciples complain about being left out from these conversations. Their seniors ignore them, and Yue Qingyuan tries not to let it annoy him.
He has half a mind to burn the second novel and the silk it comes wrapped in before anyone else lays eyes on it, but he resists.
He must admit that he, too, has been plagued with visions of what will happen to Swallow.
He lights a candle and unwraps the volume from its silken skin and sits down to read.
Swallow begins the second volume still kneeling between his lord’s legs. He does not notice the unnamed benefactor breathing in the scent of his hair as he baths the man’s ruined skin with cloth and his own strong, chapped hands.
The benefactor asks Swallow what he thinks of his wasted muscle and flesh. Swallow does not reply.
He tells Swallow that he considers it a gift.
Swallow, again, does not reply.
Later, the unnamed benefactor lays in bed and pleasures himself to his memory of the scent of Swallow’s unwashed hair.
He describes it as smelling of salt, pine and woodsmoke and revels in the sight of it forming eddies along the back of Swallow’s sweat-slickened neck. He is too weak to achieve climax and instead falls back in his bed.
He basks in his wild frustration.
As a reward for unknowingly bringing his benefactor such satisfaction, he brings Swallow a gift the next time they meet: a piece of silver that Swallow may use to buy himself whatever he wants.
Anything, anything, anything at all.
Swallow takes the piece of silver and leaves to spend it in town.
When he returns, his benefactor asks him what he chose to purchase. Swallow tells him: rice and millet. He brought his benefactor the change left over from this purchase. He pours the coins into the unnamed man’s cupped hand and turns away.
The benefactor calls him back and slaps Swallow across the face so hard that Swallow falls to the floor and lays there twisted grotesquely with his metal leg trapped beneath him.
The benefactor tells him he misspent the money. He was not meant to purchase food. People in the village will think that he does not feed his servants now.
Swallow finally speaks, for the first time in both novels.
He says that the unnamed narrator’s understanding of ‘anything’ is different from his own and that he will endeavor, in the future, to ensure their definitions align.
The unnamed narrator then insists that he return the rice and, with the money, purchase something of true merit.
Yue Qingyuan has to stand up and pace while he reads the next part.
He cannot tell if this author lives a life more like Swallow’s or the benefactor’s.
Mu Qingfang is sure to ask next time they speak who in their right mind would literally take rice from a starving man’s mouth. Yue Qingyuan knows he will, and he will be forced to lie and say he couldn’t fathom who would do such a thing.
But he knows exactly who would do such a thing; fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, rich people and poor. People who have known hunger, who have begged for scraps on dusty roads and muddy ones alike, will recognize the unnamed benefactor immediately.
They see him in the faces of those passing by them every day. They see them in thrown coins and the privacy screens of passing palanquins. They hear their laughter at the sight of children flocking their attendants in hopes of receiving even a morsel to eat.
Yue Qingyuan loathes the unnamed benefactor and loathes even more the whispers he has heard among the disciples about how this story reads to them as unrequited love.
He reads on, furious, and endures the shame Swallow does as he picks himself up and agrees to return the rice to the merchant.
The unnamed benefactor nearly vomits with guilt as Swallow bows and leaves him alone in his beautifully furnished room.
He comforts himself with liquor and the artistic, philosophizing friends who come and feast with him.
The next time Swallow appears in the volume, he is working again, this time doing laundry. The benefactor describes the veins protruding from his strong hands; he admires their rawness and the sound of the water splashing and sloshing from his efforts.
He notices, surrounded by the friends from the night before, that the tie keeping Swallow’s hair in place is on the verge of falling apart.
Afterwards, when his friends have gone to their rooms to paint and eat and write, the benefactor tromps painstakingly down the steps to the courtyard where Swallow is working along with several other servant girls.
He asks Swallow to bring him his evening meal in his chambers and soon Swallow arrives, carrying a tray of dumplings and side dishes that he has himself prepared.
These, the benefactor takes his time describing: chive and mushroom-stuffed dumplings, a savory bowl of broth, tender tofu, quickly-cooked greens seasoned with ginger and soy, and a small bowl of milled rice with an aroma that soothes the gnawed edges of the benefactor’s soul.
He invites Swallow to taste everything he has presented in case this unfortunate servant is planning a second attempt on his lord’s life.
Swallow dutifully takes a nibble of each of his presented dishes.
The unnamed benefactor asks him how it tastes. Swallow declares dumplings under-salted and rises only to be told to sit back down and keep his lord company while he eats.
Yue Qingyuan has to put the book down for a moment so that he can clench his hands and cool his head.
When he is calm enough to return to the narrative, the benefactor asks Swallow what he spent his money on when he returned the rice.
Swallow then produces from his sleeve a small clamshell filled with a waxy salve. He holds it out to his lord. Their fingers touch as the benefactor takes it and observes the whiteness of the clam and the iridescence of the salve.
He quickly devises that Swallow purchased this to soften his chapped, working hands.
Rage rocks through him like waves in the sea and without a second thought he hurls the thing into the wall so that it breaks into halves and falls, salve-first, onto the floor by the window.
He quickly calms himself and says that Swallow should not smear himself with such goods of such poor quality. If he wishes to refresh himself, he may instead use the oils kept in the lord’s private bathhouse.
Swallow does not reply.
Of course he doesn’t, he is a slave; Yue Qingyuan is not naïve. He knows the disciples will not read this for what it is, however.
They will see a man trying to show another his affection over and over only to be rebuffed by this other’s obliviousness. They will see the benefactor furious at the thought that anything might change even the imperfections of this servant he holds so dear, and they will think, ‘he loves this person.’
The peak lords will not see it so; at least Yue Qingyuan can depend on that—not that he intends to discuss this volume with any of them.
He can’t say why.
Maybe it is because he has known people like Swallow trapped by contracts in noble houses, surrounded by grandeur and worked to the point of illness and starvation.
Maybe it is because, but for happenstance, he would have been drugged and dragged into the same situation.
Swallow spends the next few pages in the volume raising his gaze to his benefactor’s face with eyes bulging with unshed tears. He bows before his lord and asks him never to give him silver again as he is too stupid to spend it wisely.
His benefactor pities him and tells him not to worry; he will choose suitable things for him from now on when he earns a reward.
Nearly gagging with guilt again, he pleads with Swallow to stop his weeping and calls him into his arms. With trepidation, Swallow rises. He folds himself into his lord’s lap, where his benefactor can feel the solid dimensions of his body and finally freely smell his hair.
The book ends with the benefactor failing to gather the courage to stroke that hair, and this time, Yue Qingyuan does not hesitate in throwing open his door and pitching the whole thing out into the courtyard.
It becomes a routine, and a comical one by the estimation of Yue Qingyuan’s fellow sect members. The volume is released; he reads it and flings it out into whatever weather is bearing down upon the courtyard. Snow, rain, hail, sun—he doesn’t care.
It doesn’t sit out there long.
Yue Qingyuan is hardly the only one devouring the story piece by piece.
In volume three, the benefactor discovers Swallow sharing his rations with a new servant and deadens his shining metal arm as punishment.
Swallow wraps it in a sling as one would do any broken bone and goes on about his work in a manner so blasé that his lord tromps around his manor white with fury.
He acts out at his guests who, seeing this side of him for the first time, begin to grow sober in his presence.
By the end of volume four, Swallow has ‘tricked’ him into returning the limb to life.
How?
By making him jealous, of course. That is, by making conversation with the youngest of the benefactor’s friends, who is too naïve to understand the difference between Swallow and the other servants the benefactor has hired to look over his estate.
“They don’t realize our narrator has already claimed him,” Yue Qingyuan hears one of Shen Qingqiu’s disciples telling another as he sees the man out of a meeting.
“Disciple Zheng,” Shen Qingqiu scolds gently. “My apologies, shixiong, they’re all up in arms about this thing these days.”
“Zhangmen-shibo is reading, too,” Ning Yingying points out as her master descends the stairs into the courtyard where she and her fellows are waiting, wrapped up tight in fur-lined winter coats.
Luo Binghe has joined them. He must have returned early from his distant affairs. Yue Qingyuan acknowledge him with what he hopes is a warm bow.
But Luo Binghe seems uncomfortable.
“Are you reading as well, Luo Binghe?” Yue Qingyuan asks.
Luo Binghe glances away. Yue Qingyuan is intrigued by this reaction.
“Aiyah,” Shen Qingqiu hisses. “You’re all incorrigible. All the literature in the world, and you want this romantic garbage.”
“Shizun won’t even let it into his house,” Ning Yingying tells Yue Qingyuan.
“That’s probably for the best,” Yue Qingyuan tells Shen Qingqiu. “But if you have the time, I think you might fight it an engaging read. The author is talented.”
The disciples titter and flush with pleasure at Yue Qingyuan taking their side for once against their beloved Shizun.
Shen Qingqiu rolls his eyes.
“This master will consider it,” he says with obvious intention to do the opposite.
Yue Qingyuan smiles and shrugs at the kids as if to say ‘what can you do?’ which the lot of them appreciate.
He can’t help but notice, however, that Luo Binghe has said nothing at all; he has not even greeted Shen Qingqiu.
“Is all well, Luo Binghe?” he asks. “The demons are not giving you too much trouble in the north, I hope?”
Luo Binghe notices him again and brings out a tight smile and a shake of his head.
“Binghe doesn’t like the story,” Ning Yingying says for him.
“Oh?”
Luo Binghe winces and clears his throat.
“Many such stories are circulated among the demons, Zhangmen-shibo,” he says. “One simply grows tired of seeing the same plots written over and over and over.”
That’s not it, though, Yue Qingyuan was not born yesterday. He raises an eyebrow.
“One could say the same about many things,” he says, “Tell me, what disturbs you most about this one?”
“It’s really nothing.”
“Binghe,” Shen Qingqiu says. “You are in company here. Zhangmen-shixiong also hates this drivel.”
Yue Qingyuan laughs lightly at how easily Shen Qingqiu sees through him.
“Mu Qingfang said you gave him a word for this,” he says.
“Yes. Hate-reading,” Shen Qingqiu says, laying into him with a look.
Yue Qingyuan holds up his hands.
“This one is simply practicing emotions,” he says.
“Is that what we’re calling it now?”
“It is important to remain in tune with all of them, shidi.”
“You don’t like it?” Luo Binghe asks.
“He hates it,” Shen Qingqiu says. “Every time someone gifts him a volume, he pitches it into the garden.”
Luo Binghe’s eyes widen. Yue Qingyuan laughs nervously again.
“One becomes frustrated with characters occasionally; it is the mark of a good author to inspire so strong and visceral a reaction in his reader,” he says.
“I don’t think he is a good author,” Luo Binghe says.
“Oh?” Yue Qingyuan says.
Luo Binghe shakes his head with lines of concern deep in his brow.
“With respect, Zhangmen-shibo,” he says. “I think he might be a diarist.”
Yue Qingyuan arches his neck with intrigue.
“A diarist, you say?” he says.
“Binghe thinks Swallow is the author’s slave,” Ning Yingying says on his behalf.
“Ah, so I am not alone, then,” Yue Qingyuan says.
The group reels back with surprise.
“Zhangmen-shibo thinks so too?” Luo Binghe asks in amazement.
“Perhaps you and I are simply too worldly to appreciate a good romance,” Yue Qingyuan says.
“There is nothing romantic about it,” Luo Binghe declares with far less timidity than before.
“Binghe is also jealous because Swallow reminds him of shizun,” Ning Yingying tsks at him.
“I am not.”
“Are too.”
“I am not.”
Shen Qingqiu rolls his eyes and begins herding his disciples and partner towards the other side of the courtyard.
“Zhangmen-shixiong has no patience for your fictional quibbling,” he declares. “Onwards. Forwards. Homeward march.”
Begrudgingly, the disciples and Luo Binghe obey his wafting arms and begin trekking through the snow towards the main path to Qiong Ding’s main house.
“He’s not wrong,” Yue Qingyuan says once the group is far enough away.
“Binghe could be jealous of a moth that lands on my shoulder; it is not difficult to invoke his irritation,” Shen Qingqiu says.
Yue Qingyuan holds his breath.
“Of course,” he says after a moment.
“Ah. Zhangmen-shixiong meant something else.”
Yue Qingyuan waves him off and tries to direct his mind towards anything besides the souring of his molars.
“Let us hope that future volumes reveal our slave to be our hero in disguise,” he says. “Stay warm, Shen-shidi.”
“Will do,” Shen Qingqiu says.
Future volumes do not reveal Swallow to be the hero of the story.
Volume five takes its time, as a matter of fact, reimagining him as a woman. The narrator is gifted a bolt of ethereal silk by one of his visiting friends and becomes entranced with thoughts of how it might be used to outfit his Swallow, who apparently dedicates his few spare minutes a day to darning and patching his thinning robes so capably and neatly that, upon first glance, one might not even notice the patches at all.
The narrator thrusts the silk upon him.
He orders Swallow to prepare a ruqun for a woman approximately his height.
Swallow, however, rebuffs him and says that he knows nothing of garment construction. The silk would be wasted in his hands.
The narrator, infuriated but unable to argue, thereafter goes about creating accident upon accident that tears Swallow’s robes.
His aim is to make Swallow beg him for new clothes, but he is thwarted by the affection the estate’s other servants hold for Swallow.
They take apart his old clothes and mend them into a respectable set reinforced on the inside by cast-off sheets. The volume ends by Swallow arriving in them to serve his lord, smiling only in the corners of his lips.
What an awful sight for his lord.
Yue Qingyuan cheers for Swallow in this moment, though his joy is short lasting. By volume six, the lord has taken ill from the wetness of the season’s weather and lays upon his sickbed being nursed by Swallow and Swallow alone.
Swallow boils medicine for him and sleeps, for once, in the corner of the lord’s room to mind him when he wakes in the night, faking pain to see how quickly Swallow will wake and rush to his aid.
In the light of the cold morning, the lord watches Swallow sleep by his side, holding his hand with a basin beside him of long-cooled water.
The lord reaches up and tucks a few strands of Swallow’s untidy hair behind his ear.
He touches the back of one finger to his cheek.
And Yue Qingyuan hurls the book across the room.
He tells himself he needs to stop reading this rubbish. It’s terrible for his constitution and even worse for his mood. Mu Qingfang has stopped asking him about his thoughts on this or that passage, and taken up Shen Qingqiu’s term of ‘hate-reading’ when he warns others coming to meet with Yue Qingyuan about his poor temper.
Qi Qingqi suggests a book of poetry and several novels about her preferred topic, political chaos, which Yue Qingyuan politely declines.
He promises everyone he will not longer be reading the volumes that arrive to his door and respectfully, he asks that anyone who catches sight of them to remove them from the stack of reward-offerings before they make it to him.
His juniors lock arms in support and do a magnificent job of defending their leader until late in the season when Mu Qingfang comes to visit without anything but a look of concern on his face.
“Shixiong, there’s been a request from the southern villages,” he says. “They came together and wrote a letter asking for the sect’s assistance.”
Yue Qingyuan takes the letter held out to him and opens it.
“What’s all this?” he asks.
“A few children have vanished,” Mu Qingfang says. “Their families say they were offered work a few hours farther south. They all accepted and went to work and haven’t been seen since.”
“Stolen and sold?” Yue Qingyuan asks.
“It is hard to say,” Mu Qingfang says. “But no contracts were drawn up and no one compensated if they were truly taken to be sold. The families are worried. All the missing are girls too young to be married. I know this is out of our usual territory, but—”
But nothing.
The families reside in the villages within the sect’s duty of care. It is not their fault that their daughters have been spirited away slightly farther south.
“Send Qi Qingqi and Shen Qingqiu to gather more information,” he says. “Tell Shen Qingqiu to speak with the families and Qi Qingqi to investigate the towns beyond the border for any sort of strangeness.”