The Nuo King Does Not Appear

Prologue

Lock-Dragon Hollow is tucked into a fold of the ten-thousand mountains of western Hunan. It is easy to erase from any map, for it was never on a road that mattered. To reach the hollow you first walk seven li of a shaded cliff path, then cross a nameless ridge, beyond which the mist never lifts, as though someone had stopped up the mountain mouth with wet cotton. Even the pedlars who tramp the hills selling needles and thread dare enter only during the Nuo season around New Year, saying they fear they might startle "the god within."

At the mouth of the hollow stand a pair of stone lions, relics of the Daoguang reign, their green stone gone black with rain. Both beasts gape, each gripping a Shunzhi cash coin in its mouth, the square hole turned to the sky—the coins that guard the village. The old folk say these two coins were brought from Jiangxi when the hollow was first settled: while the coins stay, the hollow stays; when the coins go, the people scatter. So for a hundred years no one has dared touch the bronze in the lions' jaws.

The Nuo opera is the life of Lock-Dragon Hollow. In plague, drought, or flood, the Nuo master dons a mask and dances the spirits out of the hollow. This generation's master was called Uncle Chou—Old Chou—a short man, blind in his left eye from a childhood splinter of mountain wood, never wed. At sixty he met a deadly pestilence: first the chickens died, then the pigs, then the people; in half a month seven thin coffins were carried out. Old Chou dug out the Nuo King mask kept at the bottom of his chest—a catalpa-wood base, lacquered seven times with tung oil, black with a red sheen, its brows and eyes painted in raw lacquer mixed with pig's blood, fierce enough to eat a man. The mask had been carved stroke by stroke over three years by his own father, and before its consecration it was soaked forty-nine days in tung oil, so the wood might "know" blood and fire. He put it on and danced the god's play before the ancestral hall for three days and nights; the drumming was so dense you could not count the beats. By the fourth morning the fever had broken, and the hollow lived.

On the night the mask was consecrated, Old Chou took it off, his face white as paper. Asked what he had seen, he said only one thing: "Inside the mask, I heard someone breathing." From then he set a death-rule: when a Nuo master dies, the mask must be sealed in a black-lacquered box beneath the main beam of the hall, and for three years no one may wear it again. His words the village still recalls: "The Nuo King knows its master, and it knows men. Whom it has kept, none may leave."

No one took those words seriously. Hill folk believe in gods and in money, but never in the word "keep" from a one-eyed old man's mouth. Yet because a Nuo master had spoken it, the rule passed down the generations; on the box's three bronze locks, the keys were kept by the old party secretary.

From that day the days of Lock-Dragon Hollow hung upon that mask. Old Chou enshrined it in the hall, forbidding approach, and only on festival days would bring it out to wipe with tung oil. The children were frightened from birth into walking wide around the black box beneath the beam, told a "man-eating grandfather" slept within. Yet children are curious; always some bold one would peek through the crack at midnight and come back saying he had heard, inside the box, a sound very faint, like breathing, like laughter. The elders never pressed it, taking the sound for the echo of the hill wind. All in the hollow knew the Nuo King mask had quelled that plague, and had also quelled some deed no one for generations dared speak aloud—only no one wondered what, exactly, that deed had been.

I. The Passing of Old Chou

Old Chou died on the eighth day of the twelfth month.

The mist that day was thick enough to wring water from. In the afternoon the Nuo drum in the hall sounded of its own accord—two dull beats, as though through a layer of cotton. The villagers said it was the death-drum announcing the master's departure. Sure enough, as dusk fell, Old Chou breathed his last in a rattan chair in his own kitchen, still clutching half a half-eaten glutinous cake.

A-Yan delivered takeout in the provincial capital. When his uncle's call came, he was riding his scooter through cold rain; the word "Uncle" flashed on the screen three times before the line opened, and what came through the receiver was not a voice but the drum's muffled thud-thud, as though across water. His chest tightened; he leaned the scooter to the roadside and rushed for the long-distance station, rain and all.

The road home was three times as long as the way out. The bus wound the mountain road, mist pressed on the window and would not clear, and he kept feeling the back seat was empty yet carried, faint and lingering, the smell of tung oil. A-Yan had spent six years in the city, seen neon, squeezed onto subways, yet the moment he crossed into Lock-Dragon Hollow's bounds, the hill's wet cold crept down his collar into his bones, reminding him of childhood nights his grandfather had hoisted him on a shoulder to watch the Nuo play.

His six years in the city had been another life entirely. The partitioned room he rented looked out on a streetlamp that never went dark, and the grease-smoke from the barbecue stall below could choke a man awake. He had saved to lease a heated room for his grandfather in town, to bring him to comfort, but Old Chou would not leave the hollow for death nor life, saying, "Away from these hills my old bones come apart." Now the old man was truly gone, and that heated room never leased became a hole in A-Yan's heart that would stay empty. He had meant, after this last delivery, to quit and come home for a while—never imagining he would return to take up a man-eating mask.

The coffin rested in the main room. Old Chou lay within, his face covered by a white cloth, and beneath him the black-lacquered box the secretary had taken from the beam. The elders stood in a ring, not weeping, only smoking their pipes in silence, the embers pulsing in the white mist. A-Yan knelt; his hand met the white cloth, cold as the spring behind the hill.

That night no one kept the wake. By hill custom only the wrongly or violently dead are watched; Old Chou had died in his bed and needed none. Yet A-Yan sat in the main room till dawn. The candle cracked; he watched the red-clothed Nuo drum behind the altar, certain its head was rising and falling, as if someone beneath had turned over. He dared not touch it, only turned his grandfather's photograph face-down on the table—in it Old Chou wore reading glasses and squinted in a smile, no trace of any Nuo King.

"Yan-zai," the old secretary spoke, his voice rasping like sandpaper on stone, "your grandfather has passed the Nuo King to you. By the old rule, a master with no son bequeaths his seat to the grandson."

A-Yan would not take it. A man in his mid-twenties, twice in love in the city, who had learned to pay by scanning a code—how could he believe this? He jutted his chin: "I'm no Nuo master. I can't even strike the drum."

But he could not withstand the eyes of the old men filling the room. He knew that look too well—hill folk stake the lives of the living, generation upon generation, on the old rules; whoever breaks them is the hollow's sinner. The secretary thrust the box into his arms: "The box is sealed; you wear it not for three years, you are only a master in name. No harm done." In the end A-Yan took it. The box closed, three bronze locks fell, the keys returned to the secretary's hand.

A rule is a rule. Sealed, it must stay sealed.

II. Dancing at Midnight

A week after the funeral, the strangeness began with Old Fu who kept the hall.

Old Fu was past seventy, hard of hearing, with a habit of rising at night. That night he took a lantern to relieve himself behind the hall, and on his return passed the front hall, where he heard footsteps—bare feet on the bluestone, pat-pat, slow yet even, as if someone were drilling another in step, square and measured, in the empty hall. His hair stood; he pushed the door open. Moonlight laid the floor white; the hall was empty, only the Nuo drum behind the altar, self-covered in red cloth, its head gently rising and falling, as if someone asleep beneath had turned over.

The second night it was Gui-sheng the hog-butcher. He had helped slaughter two New Year pigs and drunk himself asleep on a bamboo couch in his own hall. At midnight he woke with a start to find himself circling the room in his underclothes, his feet working the fine Nuo step, his mouth humming a Nuo tune he had never learned yet which rose of its own from his throat. He fell to the floor in terror; looking down, his soles were caked with wet mud—his house stands two li of dry road from the creek, and this was plainly the red clay of the stream bank.

The third night it was A-Xiu the seamstress. She dreamed she stood at the center of the hall, before a masked man who taught her to lift her hands, to set her feet; she woke standing barefoot in the yard, ten toes purple with cold, the hem of her skirt damp. She said the dream was too real—real enough that she could smell the tung oil on the mask, underlaid with an indefinable rankness.

The fourth night it was Sixth Uncle the ferryman. He slept sound as a rule, yet woke by his yard's water vat, trouser-cuffs soaked, the soles of his feet icy, as though he had just climbed from the creek. He swore the door had been barred at sleep, yet the string of Nuo bells hung behind it had sounded sometime in the night, and on the clapper clung a speck of red clay.

The fifth, the sixth night… every one of the old fellows who had danced that plague-quelling Nuo with Old Chou began, one after another, to dance unconscious around the midnight hour. They remembered nothing on waking, only aching ankles and cold, damp soles. The village doctor felt each pulse—even, healthy, no ailment he could name—and gave the same verdict: "frightened; rest two days and you'll mend."

Gui-sheng went to the doctor, who as usual prescribed a calming draught; but Gui-sheng never filled it. In private he told A-Yan that the one who taught him the step that night was no Old Chou, but a taller masked figure whose hands were cold, cold enough to tighten his own soles. The words spread like weeds through the hollow in a single night. Some barred their doors dead shut; some changed their children's names, afraid of "being marked for the step." Yet the more they feared, the clearer the footsteps came at night—even young men who had never worn the mask woke from dreams of pat-pat in their own yards, though they found no mud when they rose.

III. The Coin and the Road Home

With the first month came something more dreadful.

The left stone lion at the hollow's mouth had lost the Shunzhi coin from its jaws. Old Luo the stonemason climbed a ladder to look; the lion's mouth was clean—no pry marks, no gathered dust, the hundred-year rust-print of the coin still there, only a hollow in the middle, as though the coin had crawled out along the lion's tongue of its own will. Old Luo, who had cut stone forty years in the hollow, said the coin had long grown one with the crevice; short of a chisel it could not simply fall. Yet not a fresh scar marked the lion's mouth.

Old Luo said the two lions had been carved by a Jiangxi mason; on the day they were finished, Old Chou's father—the previous Nuo master—had pressed the two coins into their jaws with his own hands and muttered the guarding spell half a night. For a hundred years no coin had fallen, not even when bandits sacked the hollow in the Republic era and toppled the lions to the ground. Now the left one had gone first; Old Luo crouched on his ladder a long while speechless, only the chisel in his grip creaking.

Then those who left began to lose their way. Uncle Tian, who hauls freight, went to town for spring fertilizer by the near road that joins the highway the moment you leave the hollow—sixty li there and back. Yet when dusk found him home, the villagers saw he had entered by the hollow's mouth—he had looped a great circle, crossed three ridges, walked a hundred extra li, and in the end turned in past the lions. Tian said the mist on the road was wickedly thick, and within it he always heard someone behind him matching his walk, pat-pat; he dared not turn, for the sound stopped the moment he did, yet his soles grew ever colder.

When Tian's wife opened to him, his soles were caked in slurry, his trouser-legs frozen stiff, yet his eyes were empty as if something had drawn his spirit out. She would later tell how that night Tian would not enter the main room, only hunkered in the kitchen corner, saying, "There is someone at the door behind me, it presses close the moment I push." Yet the kitchen window faced outward, and that night its paper was clean—no mark upon it at all.

Seven or eight people, one after another, all alike. The one who went to sell mountain goods, the one who fetched a child home from holiday, even the one who only crossed to the next village for a wedding feast—not one could leave cleanly and return cleanly. Lock-Dragon Hollow seemed to hold its departing folk in its mouth, unable to swallow them, unable to spit them out.

A-Yan went to the old secretary for counsel. The old man hunkered by the fire pit smoking, and after a long while spat out: "The Nuo King appears not, and the road stays shut. What your grandfather quelled was no plague, but something else."

"What thing?"

The secretary knocked his pipe on his sole; the ash drifted into the fire, and he watched that red point, and answered nothing.

IV. The Words Inside the Mask

A-Yan fetched the three keys and opened the black-lacquered box.

He meant to see what his grandfather had sealed away. The mask was as before; the seven coats of tung oil on the catalpa base, deepened by years, shone black, and close up bore a sunken smell—not mere tung oil, but laced with old incense ash, and beneath it an indefinable rankness, like the sealed dry well behind the hill when you lift its slab and the air that rushes out, rust and rot.

He turned the mask over and let his fingertips trace the catalpa grain. Where the grain reached the inner brow he found characters. Old Chou had scratched them with a fingernail dipped in something, stroke by stroke, into the wood's inner side—shallow, yet none blurred. He brought the lantern close and read the crooked line:

"The pestilence was no pestilence. A family of three, traveling healers, was buried alive in the dry well behind the hill. What the Nuo quelled was resentment, not plague. The mask is the condensation of their grievance. I wore it, and with my body bore the grievance for the whole hollow, thus we rested thirty years. If you, my successor, wear it, the Nuo King claims its master and keeps you here forever; if you do not, the grievance is loosed, and the hollow's folk must pay the old debt. Choose."

A-Yan's hand began to tremble. He suddenly recalled that in the days before his grandfather's death he had often slipped alone into the back hills, returning with red clay from the well's edge on his boots; asked where he'd been, he would only say, "To see the old place." He recalled too that among the hollow's hundred-odd households not one bore the surname "Heal"—that family of three had left the hollow not even a name, as though they had never come.

A-Yan pressed the mask to his knee and did not move for a long while. He remembered his grandfather's last visit, pressing an old wallet into his hand, filled with years of saved small bills, saying, "The city is cold; buy yourself a thick coat." He had taken it then for the rambling of an old man; only now did he understand it was Old Chou, knowing his time was short, giving all he could. Yet some things a grandfather cannot give, cannot bear in another's stead—such as the debt of the living, pressed under this mask for thirty years. He suddenly wanted to weep, and suddenly feared that if he wept, he would truly don the mask and carry the village's debt upon his own back.

He took a hoe to the back hill. The well was sealed, three blue stones pressed across its mouth, carved with "Tai Shan Shi Gan Dang," the grooves filled with cinnabar. Yet the earth at the rim was loose, as though often someone came to add fresh soil, to press paper money down. He crouched and laid his ear to the cold stone, and from far down the well he heard, very faint, the breathing of three people—one high, one low, one fainter still, like a family asleep against one another.

V. The Choice

At midnight A-Yan called the whole village to the hall.

He stood before the altar with the mask in his hands; the Nuo drum at his left, its red cloth somehow half slipped, revealing the dark-red head. He read his grandfather's words from the mask, line by line, to the roomful of people. The hall was so still he could hear incense ash fall; even the mist outside seemed to hold its breath.

"Those who buried them were your fathers, your grandfathers," A-Yan's gaze swept the faces of the old men, each like bark. "Old Chou bore it for you thirty years. Now he is gone, and the choosing falls to you."

The old secretary spoke first, his voice like a rusted hinge: "Wear it. You are the master; wear it and the Nuo King knows you, the hollow remains, the coin returns, the road opens."

"But then Yan-zai cannot leave," Old Fu quavered. "He must stay in the hall, keep company with that mask, never leave the hollow his whole life."

"What… what if he does not wear it?" Gui-sheng, after a long hold, forced out the question.

A-Yan looked to the hall's mouth. Night mist was seeping in along the hollow's entrance; the lion's empty left jaw, black, waited as though for something to fill it. He suddenly understood his grandfather's word "keep"—the Nuo King was no god at all; it was the grievance of that family of three, which had borrowed Old Chou's body to lodge thirty years. What it wanted was never quelling, but that someone acknowledge the debt, someone bow this once.

The hall was so still he could hear his own heartbeat. A-Yan saw the secretary turn his face away, saw the watery film in Old Fu's clouded eye, saw Gui-sheng bury his head low, looking at no one. These old men had all been accomplices to the burial, and now they pushed the choosing onto a youth just home from the city. He suddenly understood: Old Chou's "one who will bow his head" was never the Nuo King, but these old fellows who had lived seventy, eighty years and never once bowed for their old crime. Yet he would not bow for them—he would have them bow themselves.

He remembered his grandfather grasping his hand on his deathbed, saying neither wear nor not-wear, only, brokenly: "Yan-zai… remember, the Nuo King appears not—not that it will not appear, but that… it waits for one who will bow his head."

A-Yan raised the mask before his eyes. The tung-oil smell struck his face; the line of characters on the inner brow pressed his brow, cold and aching. He closed his eyes, then opened them—

He did not put it on.

He set the mask gently back in its box, closed the lid, dropped the lock. Then he turned to the roomful and said: "The debt is yours; kneel and own it, and that is better than donning a mask. My grandfather carried it for you thirty years. Enough."

Coda · The Keeping

That night, the wind in Lock-Dragon Hollow fell still.

The lion's left jaw remained empty. Yet the next day those who left found the road open and the mist thin; Uncle Tian brought his fertilizer home clean. Only at the dry well's edge behind the hill a small, nameless grave had appeared, its stone a slab A-Yan had set himself, uncarved, with three unlit sticks of incense pressed upon it.

A-Yan did not leave. He said he would stay in the hollow a while yet, to keep watch for that family of three, and for his grandfather. But from then on, at every midnight, the Nuo drum in the hall would sound its two beats of its own, and he would hear, in the depth of night, footsteps behind him—pat-pat, slow yet even, as if someone were drilling another in step, square and measured, in the empty hall.

Slowly life returned to the hollow. A-Xiu worked the Nuo step from that night's dream into the shoes she embroidered for the children, saying, "We must walk regardless; might as well walk pretty." Gui-sheng gave up drink and barred his door at dusk, yet no longer feared the footsteps—he said something lighter, almost a woman's, had entered the sound, as if someone at last walked forward of her own will. Only the old secretary, from that night, entered the hall no more; in his own yard, facing the back hill, he burned one unlit stick of incense each day.

He has never yet dared to turn.

A Note from the Midnight Recorder

The Recorder says: The world takes the Nuo for play, not knowing the Nuo began to quiet resentment, not plague. In the case of Lock-Dragon Hollow, the plague was a lie, the live-burial the truth; that Old Chou with his single body bore the hollow's grievance in their stead was folly, and also great kindness. Yet debt knows no god, only men—a god may bear it for a time, not for all time. That A-Yan removed the mask was to repay the living and to repay the dead; the Nuo King need not appear, for what appears is the shame in men's hearts.

I set down this tale not to frighten the vulgar, but in hope that whoever reads it, hearing steps at midnight, will not turn too quickly. That dampness at your soles may not be the hill's dew; that single pat behind you may be, thirty years on, that family of three, still learning how to walk out of that well.

One may ask: A-Yan did not don the mask, and the grievance loosed—did the hollow's folk indeed pay their debt? The Recorder cannot say. He has only heard that on this night last year snow fell again on Lock-Dragon Hollow, and A-Yan sat alone in the hall, the mask upon the table gone to dust, its box flung open. He never wore it. Yet the pat-pat of steps has spread from the hall into every villager's dream—until the debt is paid, the steps will not cease. The Recorder lays down his brush; just then wind passes the window, as of one learning, still, how to walk out of a well.