Chapter Text
Two of the sisters in the thatched mud house by the river gorge proved very helpful; the other, who’d answered the door, had only stared up into Sun Wukong’s furry face with increasing amusement, and to his indignance promptly burst into laughter before another sister had appeared to put a hand over her mouth. The older two, both with round sunny faces and friendly dispositions, had recognized Tang Sanzang over Sun Wukong’s shoulder and drawn their youngest away before she could speak unwisely in their guests’ presence.
They had traveled long and far enough now that Tang Sanzang no longer balked at the suggestion of sharing quarters with a different sex; fatigue welled up dark beneath his eyes where nevertheless his skin shone soft and smooth as a newborn’s, but he only hesitated a moment before accepting the sisters’ offer to host, and thanked them for their generosity.
For the first time in weeks they ate well and were lent basins for washing their clothes in the current, and after bathing and dining spirits were high all around, even Tang Sanzang’s, no matter how many times they had and would hear again the teachings of frugality which had first become frequent reminders of his after Zhu Bajie’s joining. He did not rebuke Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie’s playful squabbling—more playful on Sun Wukong’s side and more distressed on Zhu Bajie’s—and instead sat shut-eyed to the side of the table with Sha Wujing and the three women who spectated with interest. When Sun Wukong did break away from his games with Zhu Bajie for long enough to spare a heedful glance at their shifu, Tang Sanzang looked nearly serene. There was but one strange crease in his brow, and Sun Wukong needed not his Huoyan Jinjing to recognize that which spoke of some unuttered stress.
Still, for the most part they were sated and sleepy when at last night settled low and cool upon the hot southern country, and the eldest sister, Zheng Yi, had permitted them access to the stables which kept their family’s two horses and had plenty of room otherwise for a couple of weather-beaten travelers. Tang Sanzang would sleep in the house, it was suggested, and his three disciples agreed that it was of course proper for their shifu to rest in better quarters than they. Tang Sanzang was the only one who looked unsure of this arrangement.
“We have only the one spare upstairs,” said Zheng Yi, “and we won’t disturb you in the night, of course—we are not the sort of yao you might have encountered on your journey.”
“Be assured we are well-familiar with monks and their propriety,” said the youngest sister Zheng Ning with mischief, laughing a little at the look on Tang Sanzang’s face, which had gone as trepid as a child’s. “We are but humans with a bit of knowledge, and here the water yao all keep to themselves, rather like your disciple.”
“What our xiao-mei means to say,” said the second sister Zheng Cui, “is that there is no danger tonight, and we could not possibly put you in the stables.”
At her words Tang Sanzang still seemed hesitant, but at length he nodded and gave thanks, and allowed Zheng Yi to guide him to his chambers while Zheng Cui led the rest of them out to the stables where Bailongma had been sent earlier. It blinked at them with clear amusement when Zheng Cui left them to divide up the hay bales among themselves, looking smug in its own stall, and Zhu Bajie glanced over and said, “Oh, shut up, you stupid dragon,” and plopped himself down on a considerable pile of straw and mud.
Privately Sun Wukong thought that if he, the Great Sage, could sleep with the scent of horse manure in his nose for a night, then Tang Sanzang, chosen monk of Buddha, could surely bear it without complaint. It was the moment after his snideness passed that surprised him: the thought that followed, accompanied by a twisting of the chest—a memory of a colder night some months ago, Tang Sanzang’s frail monk’s body, so unaccustomed to the unforgiving climate of the wild, shivering so greatly in his sleep the sound had woken Sun Wukong from his perch. He had crept over quietly then once he understood, and shucked the blanket off Bailongma to put over Tang Sanzang. Bailongma had given a glare toward him, then relented once it realized Sun Wukong hadn’t taken the blanket for himself. Afterward Sun Wukong had sat awake keeping watch over them all, and felt uneasily a strange stirring in his chest, which he hadn’t known what to make of, when after some minutes Tang Sanzang at last settled beneath the weight of the blanket and ceased his shivering and chattering, and fell quiet.
The moon had hung low and milky in the sky, a sliver curving over Tang Sanzang’s sleeping face. Sun Wukong had looked down upon his young mortal shifu and thought of all the harm and darkness yet to be weathered on their path, all the yaoguai turned half-mad with hunger for Tang Sanzang’s delicate blessed flesh, and a startling fury had risen out of an opening within his heart he had never given notice to before.
Two new and unbidden emotions in a night had been too much for even the immovable Great Sage, and he had sat in equal discomfort with both. The following morning he’d put them out of his mind; now again they returned to him as he lay loose and sprawling in his corner of the hay, thinking that it was at least good their shifu had a bed to rest on tonight, in his clean clothes and with a roof over his head, and that there were no errant stones beneath the grass that might leave bruises upon his back like in the wild.
“What are you scheming so hard about?” said Zhu Bajie. “You’re making me uneasy.”
“Don’t I always, Zhu-xiong,” said Sun Wukong absently. He was thinking in circles; he would come upon one thought and then leap to another, and somehow always loop back around to Tang Sanzang’s face from before, set most peculiarly in distress. “Go to sleep, daizi, and mind your space if you don’t want me biting off your invading limbs while you sleep.”
That night it was moonless and silently dark, and in the stables Sun Wukong kept awake as Zhu Bajie and Sha Wujing took turns shuffling in their sleep and nudging each other’s legs away from their own. Sha Wujing frowned in his slumber and often would go to sleep with his arms crossed over his chest as though posturing for a fight, though recently as the days grew slower and more tiresome and the bite between the three of them had lessened in the wake of larger purpose, he had started to sleep with only his fingers laced over his belly. Zhu Bajie was as restless in dreaming as he was awake, and aside from his fidgety limbs he was also prone to many low and frantic mutterings which Sun Wukong did not care to decipher.
Of them all, it was Tang Sanzang who slept almost as a corpse did, always flat on his back with his hands overlapped and his face smoothed with peace, though separating him from the pale gauntness of corpses was the healthy tint to his skin, the apple flush of his cheeks where a corpse’s were sallow and colorless. Once early on in their journey Sun Wukong had napped carelessly in front of him, and afterward Tang Sanzang had told him not to look so angry while he slept. Affronted, Sun Wukong had argued that Sha Wujing looked a great deal angrier with his heavy brows and scowling face, and Tang Sanzang had replied that he only meant it was Sun Wukong’s mind that paced about fitfully each night, and that his face betrayed this, whereas Sha Wujing’s only appeared so but did not conceal such stress otherwise.
Then it came down and struck him, and Sun Wukong nearly kicked the bales where he lay: indeed, this was the first night in more than a year that their shifu was not sleeping beside his three vigilant disciples, and never was there a week a yao’s path did not cross theirs.
At once he leapt up and hurried quietly out from the stables to look upon the house. The lights had long been blown and each sister gone to bed, and it was with that knowledge that Sun Wukong transformed himself soundlessly, and uttered pleas of forgiveness to their sleeping hosts as he lifted his small swallow’s body to Tang Sanzang’s dark window. His shifu might have approved of his sense to give apology, but at present Tang Sanzang was sat cross-legged on his borrowed bed, and he awoke wide-eyed from his meditation when Sun Wukong nudged through a tear in the screen and landed with a soft tapping of talons on the windowsill.
“Oh,” he said, looking relieved, “you’re but a bird. But what business has a swallow to be awake at this hour?”
Sun Wukong shook out his wings and inclined his head as he thought an unknowing bird would. With any luck his shifu might be too taken by exhaustion to suspect him, and to his gladness Tang Sanzang only peered a lingering moment longer before making to resume his meditating.
Stars glimmering faintly cast down their light and gave suggestion to his form upon the bed. Sun Wukong’s gaze sliced cleanly through the dark and saw Tang Sanzang as he was. He wore a look of effortful focus, and his brow had perspired over the straining hours and shone wetly now in the darkness. Hardly had any time passed before he jerked again, with a slow dawning look of despair, and said, “Could it be the hour of the tiger already? No, but it is yet dark, and I hear no birdsong which would mark the morning.” He looked to Sun Wukong. “How curious that you are awake with me. Are you a yao, little swallow?”
Am I a yao, Sun Wukong thought impishly. Indeed I am, Shifu, the most notorious yao in all the Heavens! he wanted to say, but merely turned and ruffled at his feathers with his beak. Perhaps it would have been better to be a bug, to have scuttled in and hidden low in the shadow of the sill, and carried on his watchfulness like so without arousing Tang Sanzang’s growing suspicions toward the odd wild creature that drew near him. These suspicions were of course only encouraged by Sun Wukong’s regular antics; he supposed he should recognize that in such a sense he had bitten his own tail, and in pursuit of small glees had only limited the range of his own delights.
That acknowledged, he determined that their sensitive young monk of a shifu would not sleep like this. In a breath Sun Wukong was golden-furred and four-limbed again, and Tang Sanzang near tumbled from the bed in his shock.
“Wukong!” he said angrily. “I should have known. Go back at once; this is most improper!” He seemed quite flustered; there was a high and heated blush in his cheeks. “Sneaking about the grounds at night, and women’s grounds at that—I should recite the tightening mantra in the morning after we have embarked, that might teach you better than my words.”
“Shifu, have heart and forgive me!” said Sun Wukong, and went to kneel at the foot of the bed at once. “I came only out of worry for your safety. I would swear on the Heavens, I have no other motive but that I couldn't in this monkey’s heart of mine leave you out of sight where something might steal you away in the night.”
And he took his shifu’s hands in his careful clawed ones, and over his shifu’s face there flashed the strangest look, a curious shifting across surprise and relief and affection, and after some silence Tang Sanzang said, “It seems it was again I who misunderstood you, Wukong. I am sorry. I have slept poorly these past days in this humid climate, and did not mean to wrong you so.”
“Then why does Shifu not sleep tonight?” asked Sun Wukong. “The house keeps out the undesirable heat, and once we leave this place it will be grass and rock for our beds again. Though we may chance upon an inn if Guanyin is feeling generous; I will keep my eyes sharp for one.”
“Silly monkey,” said Tang Sanzang, and he gripped Sun Wukong's hands where they held his. “You are right, of course. It seems I have grown rather unaccustomed to such solitude in these years of travel, though I know you and your shidi are but a shout away, and there is no distance you have not crossed to rescue me from evil.” He lowered his eyes. There was a rare look of shame wrought upon him like a shadow. “But my greatest sin is that I have kept you awake in my own unrest.”
Joy was most inappropriate toward his shifu's inner sufferings, but Sun Wukong nearly leapt up with it anyway: that he had been right in his presumption, and that Tang Sanzang had wanted and needed him, and Sun Wukong's absence had been a weight on his heart and mind that anchored him still to this world.
He gathered himself and smiled. “Nonsense, Shifu, nonsense. This old monkey is long-lived and could live three years more without a blink of sleep!” He sprang quickly to the window and pushed it open, and swung with ease onto the sill where he arranged himself comfortably, one leg crossed high over the other. “I shall gladly keep watch until morning.”
Tang Sanzang appeared to find this arrangement agreeable, but still he did not relax and said conflictedly, “And then what will the good women of this house say when they find you here come daybreak?”
“Oh, but that you are a good and virtuous monk, and I a devoted disciple who wouldn’t leave my shifu to the darkness alone,” replied Sun Wukong simply. “Sleep, Shifu, and worry not for what hasn't come.”
This at last seemed to ease Tang Sanzang enough, and he made no further protests, and after a shorter bout of consideration laid himself to sleep beneath the thin covers of the bed. Soon after they returned to silence, and the stray sounds of night crept in once more to be heard. Sun Wukong settled himself against the frame and peered out at the shimmering blanket of stars, and thought idly of lonely Chang'e and her rabbit, and to where she vanished on moonless nights such as these. To escape Zhu Bajie's lechery, he would joke, when often on their trek clouds swept in and blotted out the sky, but then not one of them knew what moved the Goddess, and perhaps it was on nights she could not be seen that she would mourn her Hou Yi.
“I am glad,” came Tang Sanzang's voice, murmured softly from the bed as though already half in sleep. In all shadow there was but the light from his lidded eyes, two points like stars gleaming out through the darkness at Sun Wukong. “I would meet Guanyin once more and kowtow to them in gratitude for sending you to me.”
Sun Wukong was carelessly delighted and said in equal hush, “Ah, so Shifu recognizes my virtues after all?”
“I recognize that Guanyin has given me an honest creature.” Now Tang Sanzang did stir briefly to gaze back at him. “You have been brutal and unrepentant, and most heedless of my teachings, and you are yet my strange and dutiful eldest disciple, and I dismay at your leavings as I exult at your returns. A most unseemly thing, this grain of earthly desire in me,” he said sleepily, with a note of wonder. “There is still much for me to learn of the world after all.”
And it was far too long and steadily a length that he held Sun Wukong's gaze, for then Sun Wukong the Monkey King and Great Sage Equaling Heaven felt suddenly a terrible spearing pain in his chest, and it took the breath from him in a long shuddering manner and he turned away in haste.
“Ah, but I must rest now,” said Tang Sanzang, “or else the sun will be up and we shall be leaving.”
“Do however you like,” said Sun Wukong.
His face felt yet hot, but he looked back when he was sure Tang Sanzang had closed his eyes once more. In the deep night the face of his shifu was drawn and pale, but his eyes were shut truly and the dark lashes unfluttering as at last his weariness drew him down into slumber. To himself Sun Wukong thought: I will ask the three sisters to hold us for another night, so that we leave only when you are better rested for the journey ahead.
Even as he decided so, this fierce and persisting fondness unsettled him. He knew not what drove him to such lengths if not the gratitude he held still toward Tang Sanzang for freeing him from Wuxing Mountain, but then no gratitude he knew of was characterized with such aches and pains, and none burned in him as even the Sanmei flames had not. So it was this new and puzzling mystery Sun Wukong turned over in his mind as the night went on peacefully, until the stars receded and the darkness was broken by the first sweet notes of birdsong, the hours passing on finally into dawn.