A Hand Stretches for the Stars, Knowing They are Out of Reach

A Hand Stretches for the Stars, Knowing They are Out of Reach

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I arrived in the village on a foggy morning, the air thick and cold enough to allow my drifting mind to forget that this place lay under heaven, seeing instead slate roofs slumbering heavy over their dwellings in some silent nowhere-place.

It was almost empty, and with a sudden thinning of the blood in my heart I suspected it ravaged by plague, or drought, or famine, or the sword in the twenty-one years I had been absent, and my mind summoned the names and faces of the townsfolk unbidden. My heart lurched and the doubts that had been building in my mind began to solidify into a thunderhead. I prayed I had recorded their stories well enough.

Wooden walls creaked in the slow wind, and the restlessness in the centre of my chest that had been growing these past few months lurched like an animal in a cage.

Ahead of me on the street a shape detached itself from the shapes in the mist and stalked towards me with a strange gait.

“Hello?” it called, wariness and fear intermingled. “Who is there?”

“Lady Tianhong, Who Scribes,” I returned, starting a little myself. “Have no fear, I-”

“Oh, goodness,” returned the voice. “The scholar. I recall now. Yes, you said you would be back some twenty years ago. Ah, forgive me.” The sound of a stick thumping packed earth came toward me and the figure of an old woman resolved itself, grey hair tied into a bun above a face creased with a mortal lifetime’s worth of worries.

“Forgive me,” I said, “But where are the others? This place was thriving when I was here last, are- are they all right?”

“Oh, it’s a market day today,” said the woman blithely. “They’ve all packed off down to town.”

I will confess, the relief at seeing the spectre of suffering I had conjured in my mind be dispelled so suddenly took me by surprise. “Oh, heavens,” I said, suddenly needing to lean on a wall. “I was afraid that something had befallen them. It is the mist, it has left me fearful. I apologise.”

The woman laughed. “Things //have// befallen us,” she said. “But we’ve survived.” She gestured with a hand behind her. “Tea? You look cold.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I do not feel the cold but your hospitality warms my heart.”

I followed the woman into her home and sat at the low table as she fussed over the fire heating a kettle. I accepted an earthenware cup of tea measured out from a jar. The woman sat opposite me and quietly sipped her own cup.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing is the matter,” I said, smiling with a serenity I did not feel. “I am perfectly, entirely steady in my mind, body and duties, as I have always been, as I always will.”

A wisp of steam lifted from the cup in my hands and unfurled out into the air. The woman watched me.

“You have the look my granddaughter gives me when she has to decide between honey and cream,” the woman said, electing a smile from me. “Utterly lost.”

I swirled the tea in the cup in my hands, the porcelain clinking against the ring on my forefinger. Heat entered my skin and vanished, leaving me feeling as I always did, whether the sky spat ice or I walked on burning sands. Warm enough.

“I am lost,” I said, and began to cry.

The woman said nothing. She simply watched me, and waited.

“I have been given an impossible task,” I said, watching my tears dissolve before they hit my hands. “For every story I take down there are ten, fifty, ten thousand who go to the graves with their names vanishing into the wind, and though this is how things should be I feel- I don’t know. Every day I find it harder and harder to tell all the stories I need to because every day I take more down, and- I’ve been forgetting things. The exact shapes of faces, family linages I should know, the layout of streets- I got lost last week! Took the wrong left turn, and mistook one family for another! My memory is supposed to be perfect! I’m Lady Tianhong, Who Scribes! It’s what I am! What am I if I cannot scribe?”

A faint wind pushed against the walls, rattling them like wind chimes.

“I don’t know,” said the woman, and shrugged. “I’ve only met you three times. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Because I don’t know,” I said. Partially from a need to calm my nerves, partially a desire to hide my face, I took a sip from the cup.

“And what of the world beyond?” I continued, quieter now. “The places where I do not go? The people who do not have someone to, to write them down so that when they re-enter the cycle they are not lost?"

“You’ll never get to them,” the woman said bluntly. “When they die- poof!” She splayed her fingers for emphasis. “Gone! Never coming back! That’s just how it is. Us mortals have to make peace with living like a fish in the rapids above a waterfall.”

“But you shouldn’t have to,” I whispered. “You deserve every beautiful, confusing moment of your lives cast in immortal gold and hung in the sky like stars.”

“If that were true,” said the old woman scoldingly, “Then we wouldn’t be able to see the moon.”

“I need to tell your story,” I said, hastily putting down my cup. “I need-”

Then there was a finger prodding me in the head. “Young miss,” she said, “You need to do no such thing. I have another story I want you to take down.” She stood from her chair with a mild oath and pulled her shawl over herself tightly before thumping out the door, cane in hand. “Follow me or I’ll thwack you,” she said.

“I’m immortal,” I said, slightly dazed. “I am a hundred and sixty-three years old!”

“Now you sound even more like my granddaughter,” the woman laughed. “I told you to follow!”

Something about her voice bid me to listen, and so I did.

A path wound up the mountainside behind the village, mountain flowers and grasses waving in the light breeze. Soon the thick mist hid the homes below us, though our progress was slow, the old woman testing the path before us with sharp prods from her cane.

On the way up I told her stories, reeling them out from memory, making sure they were ones I had not told before.

“Nearly there,” the old woman would say whenever a gap in my telling appeared. “Nearly there…”

We reached a plateau on the side of the mountain and the woman stopped abruptly, almost causing me to crash into her.

“Here it is,” she said, moving to a fallen log carved into a crude bench and taking a seat. “My favourite tree.”

Before us, clinging with spidery roots to the edge of the precipice, was a pine. Its needles were thin, the trunk barely thick enough to be a bow staff and far too knotted. Its branches were thin and spidery. I reached out a hand to touch its trunk, dark needles scratching harmlessly at my skin.

“It’s a tree,” I said, confused. “Forgive me, but I miss the message.”

The old woman harrumphed. “Maybe I should be the scholar, then. Always seemed obvious to me.”

I closed my eyes, breathed, and looked again.

Then I understood.

“It’s going to fall,” I said. “If the tree grows larger, its own weight will pull it off the cliff.”

“It’s reaching for the stars, like all trees,” said the old woman. “It knows it will never touch them, and even standing as it is on a mountain it is still not enough. And one day it will get too close to the sky, and yes, it will die. But if it had grown with a trunk as thick as two great oaks, if it had spread branches far and thick enough to blot out the sun, tall enough to see from halfway round the world… if it had grown as large and strong and fast as its roots could drink from the earth… it would already be down in the valley below, feeding the woodlice.”

The bark was rough and damp from the mists at my touch. The empty air yawned beneath me and I leaned into the tree, allowing myself to feel the thrill of the threat of falling.

“Don’t try to be everything,” the woman continued. “We’re all doing what we can, gods and mortals and wandering scribes who tell people’s stories.”

“Thank you,” I said solemnly, feeling the wind tugging at my hair as gravity pulled at my robes. “I aspire to one day have your wisdom.”

The old woman chuckled. “Wisdom?” she asked. “I saw you were upset and afraid, and I made up a story to help you find the answer yourself. You really are just like my granddaughter.”

“Wisdom it is,” I returned, a smile coming to my face unbidden.

I left with the feeling of damp bark under my palm held fast in my memory and in my heart.

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