Of Mountains and Rivers 16
Chu Huan Felt Like He’d Taken Out Two Dollars, Wanting to Buy a Glass Bead, But They Got it Wrong and, in the End, Brought Him a Pearl
Chu Huan didn’t respond for a very long time. Thinking he fell asleep, Nanshan lifted a corner of the blanket and pulled it over Chu Huan’s body; however, halfway through his action, a hand gently pushed against his wrist.
Between his fingers, Chu Huan carried thin calluses and a gentle strength.
Nanshan was startled; the darkness allowed him to notice Chu Huan’s hands – they seemed to be different from what he imagined.
Chu Huan suddenly wanted to drink. Within just a few short months of staying with the Liyi Clan, he understood the benefits of alcohol.
Whenever he felt tipsy, his heartbeat and blood, like it’d been boiled by a small fire, would accelerate; he’d feel his entire being awaken with life and his spirit permeate throughout his body.
After drinking a little more and the alcohol reached his head, he’d forget where he was. If he gazed into his cup of wine, he’d feel as if he was still young, a kind of delusion where the fabled roc flew ten thousand miles back and away1.
The final stage was drunkenness; by then, there’d be no such thing as happiness, anger, grief or joy – no such thing as Heaven, Earth, men or ghosts. By then, everything would be cast aside to the back of his mind and his body would float in mid-air, becoming as light as a feather. Relying on this perplexing emptiness of loss, he’d sleep for an entire night, carefree and at ease.
But Chu Huan pursed his lips and restrained himself from mentioning it.
Heaven’s movements are ever so vigorous, so humans must ceaselessly improve themselves – since he perceived his own dependence on evasion, he shouldn’t indulge his heart’s meaningless and shameful weakness.
Besides, although Nanshan was lying here, most of his attention was probably on the outside. For some reason, the Liyi Clan was heavily guarded tonight; although it wasn’t convenient for Chu Huan to inquire about the whole story, he couldn’t possibly drag the Patriarch along with him to neglect his duty and get drunk.
He swallowed down his alcohol addiction, but who would’ve thought the words that flowed downstream would float up again?
“I had a friend who was similar to you,” Chu Huan whispered suddenly.
His voice was indescribably hoarse, like sand blown across the surface of a mountainous rock, carrying a coarseness simmered with age. Nanshan involuntarily trembled a little; he tilted his ears, feeling a slight itch.
“He also did things by investing a hundred per cent of seriousness, even when it came to trivial matters like eating and washing his hands. You two are very similar in this aspect. However, it’s only this aspect.” Chu Huan added, “You’re a good friend whereas he was a bastard. Each time we met, he absolutely had to quarrel and pinch a fight against me.”
Chu Huan talked slowly and Nanshan seriously listened without interruption.
Chu Huan paused, then said, “Later, for some reason, he died for me. Before facing death, he made this gesture to me-”
As he talked, he raised his middle finger and made a vulgar gesture; however, his finger seemed to bend down by memories, unable to release its obscenity.
Nanshan repeated the gesture curiously. “What does this mean?”
Chu Huan: “…No, you don’t need to learn it. It’s for cursing others.”
Nanshan debated over his fingers. Even when erecting his middle finger, it was done so in a very righteous manner. Under the obstacle of cultural differences, Nanshan couldn’t comprehend the true essence of a quarrel from a finger. He retracted his hand and asked Chu Huan, “What was his name?”
Chu Huan’s eyes almost gently gazed at Nanshan for a moment. “Ferocious Mammoth.”
Nanshan: “Isn’t it ‘Brave’…?”
Chu Huan shamelessly and unabashedly said, “Oh, from where we’re from, ‘brave’ is generally used to describe good-looking people, while ugly ones are described as ‘ferocious’.”
Nanshan: “…”
He felt he’d reached a new bottleneck in his study of the Chinese language.
Chu Huan’s voice lowered again. If it wasn’t for Nanshan’s extraordinary hearing, he would’ve never heard the other’s words.
Chu Huan lightly said, “I would sometimes wonder, is there a significance behind his death and my survival? I know it’s quite pretentious for me to say this, but people always have to live for something, right?”
As he said this, his fingers curled into a clenched fist, feeling that ring engraved with ‘just teasing you’ wedge between his fingers as if reminding him of the promise he’d personally nodded to in commitment.
“No,” Nanshan unhesitatingly interrupted, “Why do rabbits live? Why do eagles live? Why do squirrels live? And why do snakes live?”
Chu Huan silently looked at him. Nanshan suddenly raised his hand and rested his palm over his eyes.
It may be the copper skin and iron bones unique to the Liyi Clan, but Nanshan was just like everyone else – never afraid of the cold. Even if his palms had just been dipped in cold water, they’d warm up almost immediately.
Through his thin eyelids, Chu Huan felt the temperature of his palm. It was like the scorching sun at noon, but also like the most emerald-green, luxuriant leaf accompanied by a bud, growing at the peak of a plant – it was the vitality imprinted in his mind when he first met Nanshan.
Chu Huan couldn’t help but say, “Can you play that tune for me again? The one you played when I first met you.”
So Nanshan climbed up and, from the corner of Chu Huan’s house, pinched a leaf off from a tree that’d been replanted into the building. He positioned it by his lips. “Using your language, this tune is called ‘The Hill After First Rain’. It refers to the appearance of grass and insects crawling out from the soil together after spring’s first rain.”
Chu Huan: “We don’t usually make such long names.”
Nanshan: “Then what should it be called?”
Chu Huan paused for a moment; suddenly, inspiration flashed across his heart, and he said, “Waking of Insects.”
In late autumn, amidst the osmanthus fragrance, travelled a tune played in a minor key called Waking of Insects.
•·················•·················•
The next day, while it was still dark outside, Nanshan quietly got up and left. Chu Huan didn’t move nor open his eyes; it wasn’t until Nanshan went out and closed his door with a squeak did he slowly turn over and sleeplessly look up at the eight or nine metres tall grey ceiling.
His chat with Nanshan last night still travelled through his ears. Chu Huan wasn’t deliberately reflecting on it either, but Nanshan’s voice was like a thread of silk yarn firmly wrapped around his ears. Whenever he turned to his left, he could hear it from his right ear; whenever he turned to his right, he could hear it from his left ear. It was as if he had to taste a hundred products a thousand times; only after becoming tasteless would they willingly give up.
Chu Huan felt like he’d taken out two dollars, wanting to buy a glass bead, but they got it wrong and, in the end, brought him a pearl.
He reaped a big profit and felt secretly delighted yet also inevitably ashamed.
Chu Huan stayed down for a while. After his mind had slowly settled, he got up and proceeded to exercise as usual.
Every day, before dawn, Chu Huan would walk around the foothills and riversides, run for about four or five kilometres, and then go into the woods and perform a set routine of strength training. It could be considered a form of relaxation for his bones and muscles.
This way, by the time he came back and took a quick shower it’d be just dawn, right when everyone’s coming out and moving about. Elder Sister Spring would also bring him breakfast – Spring was Xiao Fang’s wife, the importance-disregarding Xiao Fang’s wild mother – and although her methods of educating children were slightly out of tradition, her cooking skills were excellently recognised in the clan.
Each time he came out at this time, he’d never encounter anyone, but because there were so many patrols, as soon as Chu Huan came out, two or three night vigils saw him.
Xiao Fang was squatting in a gorilla-like posture on a big tree as a lookout. When he saw Chu Huan, he immediately greeted him warmly, recklessly opening his throat to shout towards him, “My King!”
Shouting like this, it was as if he couldn’t wait to notify everyone how ‘My King came to patrol the mountains before daybreak’. Despite how thick-skinned Chu Huan was, he experienced a moment of regret for giving himself such a nickname.
He hurriedly put up a finger. “Sh-”
Xiao Fang touched the back of his head and ‘hehe’ laughed before leaping down from the tree. Using his native Liyi Clan language mixed with a few Chinese words, he gestured as he told Chu Huan, “I’ll call Spring up to make you some food.”
Chu Huan grabbed him to stop his intrusive behaviour.
However, Xiao Fang’s actions already alarmed many people; a large group of night vigils appeared around them and stood in a circle as they watched Chu Huan with scorching eyes.
Chu Huan truly couldn’t run around the mountains under the watchful eyes of so many people, so he could only withdraw back with pretend nonchalance, close the door, and dejectedly perform push-ups on the iron drying rack in the house.
Halfway through his exercise, his window gently buckled a few times. Taken aback, Chu Huan jumped down and flipped the wooden window up; he looked around but didn’t see anyone. Instead, a snake hung down, swaying, exposing its small face.
Chu Huan: “…”
Hang on, why is it here again?
The small venomous snake looked pleased with itself as it slithered around his window. It stretched out its head and probed it around. As if confirming the terrifying Patriarch wasn’t there, it boldly made its way in. It attempted to use its vicious triangular head to rub against Chu Huan’s head but, as a result, was once again seized by its vital point.
Chu Huan was slightly confused – did this cold and clingy long worm think of itself as a lovable puppy?
The venomous snake’s tail even coquettishly and perseveringly coiled around his arm until Chu Huan pried open its mouth.
“It’s not like you can’t come,” Chu Huan jerkily said in a low voice, using the Liyi Clan’s native language. He wasn’t familiar with the pronunciation, so his words were intermittent, jumping out one after the other. “But you have to let me pull your teeth out.”
The venomous snake’s action showed it truly understood human words. Upon hearing this, it was suddenly terrified and immediately pretended to be dead, letting its tail hang straight down.
After Chu Huan jumped from the cliff, he found himself morbidly obsessed with things like ‘vitality’ – to be honest, if this wasn’t the case, he would’ve already killed this nuisance. Forget about the kittens, puppies, and bunnies – who could possibly stand seeing a snake rolling around them every morning after they open their eyes? In this remote and desolate place, where people had to rely on horses to come in and out, if he really got bitten, where’d he get the antidote from?
Chu Huan rudely threw the snake out the window.
The venomous snake felt a blow to his self-esteem, so it silently climbed up the tree by his house entrance and coiled around a branch in a fit of pique; it even scooped a nest of bird eggs to eat.
But it was probably just like what Chu Huan worried about – it truly didn’t have much space in its head to place a brain. It didn’t take long for the little venomous snake to wipe clean its memory and become amnesic. Not only did it forget its hate, it even smugly came back with a bird’s egg in its mouth to flatter him.
Chu Huan: “…”
It was with good reason that people don’t reach out and slap the face of a smiling perso- Snake. The other had rushed over, its heart filled with love, to send a gift, so Chu Huan couldn’t just swat it out the window; however, as a ‘fragile human stabbed through with a tree branch’, Chu Huan begged to be excused from the raw bird egg the venomous snake had sucked in its mouth. He carefully squeezed the egg and scrutinised it before feeding it back into the snake’s mouth.
The small venomous snake looked pleased with itself as it enjoyed the delicacy, feeling as if it understood the human just a little more. It slithered around the window into Chu Huan’s house. Seeing that Chu Huan didn’t object, it stopped attempting to coil itself around his body; instead, it wandered to a corner to coil around a broom. It rested its triangular chin over the broom tip and silently watched Chu Huan perform his morning exercise.
Sleeping with a beautiful man on the same bed whilst sharing a pillow, completing indoor exercises, and making a surreal human-beast friendship… Chu Huan truly felt he’d spent a meaningful day.
And this meaningful day had just begun.
After breakfast, ‘Glistening Cliff’ student Dashan brought another young fellow to find him, pulling along several horses carrying many things behind them. Chu Huan rummaged and found the cargo filled with everything – there were homemade preserved meat, some pickled foods, alcohol, and a few small wood-carved crafts.
The men who usually herded or patrolled around the mountains all had some skills in this area to pass time.
The Liyi Clan’s life necessities were all self-sufficient. He heard that, for a teacher, Nanshan once passed through many places in the county – who knew how much effort he made before he finally, after many difficulties, successfully made an application? The subsidiary product was a poverty-reduction fund targeted at remote, minority group districts; it wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. Several times a year, a few people would be sent out to sell things that couldn’t be considered capital and could raise some pocket money, which could be used to buy some outside products.
It must've been an order from Nanshan for Dashan to walk over to Chu Huan and say, “We listen to you.”
He looked like a primary school student who’d just learnt a few foreign words facing a foreign teacher. Who knew how many times he turned over the words he prepared to say in his heart? As soon as he said it, he relaxed as if he’d unloaded a burden.
But after relaxing he tensed again, lest Chu Huan reply and he couldn’t understand or respond.
Fortunately, Chu Huan was a fellow sufferer who could empathise with him as he’d also learnt a foreign language when he was younger and could understand how he felt. He spoke no nonsense; just patted Dashan’s shoulder and said, “Let’s go.”
