The Bone Flute

In Black Bamboo Ravine, the old folk never buried outsiders.

The ravine is a deep crack between two mountains. Long ago, defeated soldiers, famine-fleeing wanderers, broken escortmen died there unclaimed; wild dogs tore them apart and the bleached bones were flung under the cliffs. The ravine's natives gathered those dry bones, chose the clean shin-bones, and ground, drilled, and tempered them into flutes they called bone flutes. In the days of flute-making the cliff-foot rang all day with the thin screech of bone against stone, mixed with a sweet-rotten stink of grave-earth gone to mulch; the ravine's children dared not go near.

On a clear day, from the cliff you could count the white bones below, scattered east and west like a whole village pulled apart and flung on the slope. A gust of wind drew from them not a sound but a faint click, as of turning in sleep. The ravine folk walked wide around; only Old Guan would crouch to pick among them, saying, "This one sings a tune; that one's only fit for the fire."

The old rule: a bone flute is never blown alone. Once blown, every bone on the mountain hears it, and someone must answer, or the breath is never caught. One blow, one answer — the dead get a companion, the living take no curse. Blow without answer, and the white bones of the whole ravine come feeling their way up the sound, demanding a living body to answer in their place.

A-Yan's grandfather, Old Guan, was the last of the ravine's bone-flute players. When A-Yan was seven, Old Guan took him up the cliff and pressed a bone flute to his lips, teaching him the Mountain-Answering air. The tune begins level, but midway leaves an open gap, like a sentence half-spoken, reserved for the far side to take up. "That gap you leave," Old Guan said, "is the seat you leave for the dead." That night when A-Yan finished, the cliff answered faintly, thin as wind through stone. He went cold all over; Old Guan only laughed: "Hear it? Someone in the mountain takes you up."

At seventy-nine, on his deathbed, Old Guan pressed a foot-long bone flute into A-Yan's hand, its yellow body worn bright at the mouth. "There are still bones in the ravine waiting for your answer," he said. "If you hear them, go. If you don't, don't blow."

A-Yan was nineteen and did not believe. He laid the flute on the beam, where it gathered dust.

But the flute on the beam would not rest. The first autumn, he heard a far flute from the ravine floor each night, thin as wind through stone, or like someone breathing his childhood name at his ear. He turned over and called it wind. The next year the sound drew nearer, carrying a smell of rot-wood and wet earth that crept through the window-crack into his quilt, cool against the skin. His mother coughed next door: "Your grandfather's dreaming you. Go answer him." He said he would, and did not move.

The old men who could answer died one by one. Blind Zhang went, Lame Li went, and at last even hale Uncle Jiu. Only A-Yan remained who could blow, and no one at all who could answer.

Only then did A-Yan panic. He tried blowing twice in the night, to answer for the old men, but the moment his lips met the flute every bone in the ravine waited for him to speak first; when he stopped, they all fell silent together, as if holding their breath to hear him breathe. That silence was more terrible than any sound — as if the whole ravine waited on this one living mouth to begin.

That twelfth month brought a great snow that sealed the mountain. On the third night, A-Yan woke to flute-sound — not one, but many, welling up layer on layer from the ravine floor, fine and dense, as if all the white bones were blowing. The tune he knew: the Mountain-Answering air Old Guan had taught him, only its tail-note was missing, left open, waiting for one man to take it up.

A-Yan stepped barefoot to the floor and groped the bone flute from the beam. It was ice-cold against his palm, yet felt like clutching a living wrist, with a pulse. He pushed the door open; snow swallowed his ankles as he walked to the ravine mouth. Snow-slivers struck his face, numbingly cold.

The wind at the mouth was fierce. He raised the flute and blew the missing tail-note.

The whole mountain answered. Not wind — thousands of bone flutes sounding at once, hugging up along the snow and the cliff-face, humming, as if the entire ravine's bones had leaned forward for this one note. A dead-cold hand closed on his ankle and climbed, knee, waist. And he understood Old Guan at last: players grow fewer not for lack of learners, but because every one who has blown and answered stays in the ravine, to answer those who come after.

He finished the note, loosed his hand, and the flute fell into the snow.

When the snow melted, villagers came searching and found only a newly made bone flute, whiter than the rest, as if turned from fresh bone, its mouth still warm.

The village panicked then. In past years they had only seen A-Yan take the flute up the cliff and thought it play. Now the cliff stood empty, yet at night the ravine's fluting was plainly denser, as if awaiting the next willing body. The old sighed: "The bone flute knows the man, not the years." After that, no child of Black Bamboo Ravine at seven was taught that air — yet the air drifts on the wind into dreams regardless.

The Midnight Record: a bone flute must always be answered. When enough have answered, none need return — and the ravine gains one more bone willing to wait.