Page 84 of A Song to Drown Rivers
A sliver of my soul lingers in the palace. Just a sliver—but enough.
I cannot harm Goujian physically in the mortal realm, but that doesn’t mean I do not have other ways. That night, Goujian falls into an uneasy, painful sleep, and I let all my anger, all my betrayal and my grief pour into his dreams, filling them with dark shapes, images of my face, my gaze cutting holes into his flesh. His eyesfly open, his pillow soaked through with sweat. There is a terrible, tearing pain in his arm where the bones have been tentatively reset by the palace physician, but that is not what woke him. He had felt like there was river water rising to his throat, the taste of it blooming like blood on his tongue. He stares around the room wildly, his uninjured hand gripping the sheets. For a moment he looks half-crazed.
“Xi-Xishi?” he whispers, like he has seen a ghost.
I do not reply, but wrap my phantom hand around his throat, and it is as if somebody has doused him with cold. He shakes all over and spends the rest of the night tossing and turning, remembering his horribly vivid dream of drowning in a river, of the blackness and the cold and the burning in his lungs.
It is the same dream he will have the next night, and the night after that. Drowning without end. Always as terrifying, always as realistic, until he wakes every morning with bloodshot eyes and an uncontrollable tremor in his hands. He flinches at the slightest sound, sees spirits in the shadows. Whenever he passes by the river, he swears he can hear a girl’s weeping. He conceals it well enough in court, but alone, he succumbs to the hysteria, the fear that rattles his very bones.
I am but one of the many who will haunt him for as long as he lives. All those who had died for him, because of him, at his hands.
I will not leave him in peace. I will not let him forget.
Fanli returns to the river.
He carries my corpse in his arms as carefully as someone holding porcelain. It is dusk now, the clouds floating in hazy roseate and violet wisps, the last of the sun’s rays slipping beneath the riversurface. He has brought a shovel and a jug of wine with him. He tears open the crimson seal, tilts his head back, his throat exposed to the cold air, and drinks alone.
“Xishi,” he says, the word soft and half-slurred. He stares down at the broken shadow of my body. Each time, it is like the first: the thunderbolt of agony, the black shock of grief. “You must blame me,” he murmurs, crouching next to me, wrapping his smooth, slender fingers around my withered ones. His dark eyes shine, glossy from alcohol and held-back tears. “I blame myself too. I am afraid—even if we were to meet in the next life, you would not want our paths to cross.”
Don’t be a fool, I wish to tell him.I will meet you again in every lifetime there is.
He seems to be waiting for something. A response. But my corpse lies there, still as ice. At last he swallows and grips the shovel with quivering fingers, then begins to dig.
The dirt is hard and unyielding, littered with rough stones. It is not a job for one man, much less somebody of Fanli’s rank and dignity. The shovel clips the ground only partly, sending up a spray of loose dirt; he has to throw all his weight into the movement. Soon the sun has disappeared entirely, leaving just the faintest impression of light over the distant mountain slopes, the milky moon rising to take its place.
The moon rises white
illuminating your beauty,
your shadow which wounds me
until my heart’s devoured
It is quiet here. The only sounds that can be heard are the repeatedthudandhissof his shovel against the dirt, and the cicadas chirping from the trees, and his muffled exhalations. Sweat dripsfrom his brow. A streak of dirt is smeared over his cheeks; the sight is disorientating, like mud on the petal of a lotus flower. The skin around his palms and fingers has started to part, breaking open against the hard friction, blisters splitting in angry patches of pink and red. Blood trickles from his hands where they’re wrapped around the shovel handle.
When the grave is ready, he stares at the ditch in the earth, his chest heaving.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers again and again as he holds my body one final time to lower me into the ground. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” Until they barely sound like words anymore, just noises of inexpressible pain, harsh, rattling sobs in his throat as he fills the grave, then spills the last of his wine into the dirt.
I can feel the Yellow Springs calling to me now, their currents churning from far, far below. It’s almost time for me to go.
A few yards away, footsteps crunch over the dry leaves.
Fanli twists around and sees a young boy passing through. The boy immediately blanches, his face bone-white with fear. Perhaps his parents had already warned him about Fanli.His mind is not stable, they would whisper at nighttime, in the same breath they tell him about monsters in the trees, murderers roaming the woods.He is a changed man. There is nothing he won’t do because of her.
The boy tenses as if to run, but Fanli raises one hand to stop him.
“You’re not from here, are you?” His voice is rough, like two stones grating together. “The fabric your tunic is made of. It is not yet traded around this region of villages.”
“You’re right,” the boy stammers, stunned.
“Of course I am. Listen, when you leave this place—tell everyone that Xishi lives.”
The whites of the boy’s eyes gleam, and he darts a quick, terrified look at the uneven mound of dirt that marks my grave, likehe is unsure whether to risk his life by pointing out the obvious. “But—but—I’m sorry, it’s only—she is—”
“Tell them Xishi is alive, and with me,” Fanli continues forcefully, a dark warning flashing over his gaze, a look that says:Finish that sentence, and I will slit your throat.“Tell them we are resting together after her mission in the Wu Kingdom. We’ve decided to set sail around Lake Tai, visiting all the places we never could. Tell them she is brave, and honorable, and happy, and finally free. Do you understand?” Fanli says it with such sharp intensity that the boy freezes in his place, swallows hard.
“Y-yes, I—I think so—”
