The Shiyou Wind

Shiyou was not a wind at first. She was a woman.

She was wife to You the Third, a silk merchant, and her own name was Shi. You traveled often, gone more than half a year at a time. That autumn he was bound again for the south, and Shi urged him: "The new grain still lies on the threshing ground, and the child coughs—stay ten days more." He found her nagging and hired a boat by night and left.

She stood at the crossing until the boat was lost in the reeds and the sun was down, heedless of the mud on her shoes. News came soon: You's boat met a gale on the Pengli waters and sank with its cargo and its man. Shi did not weep; she only went each day to sit at the crossing, as if waiting. The village said she had lost her wits.

In winter she fell ill and did not outlast the cold. At the last she clutched the kerchief You had left behind and said only: "When I die I shall be a wind, to bar the road of faithless men."

After that a wind rose on the Pengli waters. A trading boat would set out under fair sky, and a headwind would spring up, filling the sail backward, stalling the oars, so the boat could not clear three li and must turn back. Old boatmen named it the Shiyou Wind—You's wife, who would not let the faithless go far. Before crossing, they bowed toward the landing and weighed again the things and the people they meant to leave behind, and only then raised the sail.

One year a young boatman, Qing, meant to run contraband salt and leave his pregnant wife. His boat left harbor and the Shiyou Wind rose and held it turning in place. He remembered Shi's words and at last turned back, reaching home by night. His wife birthed early; he kept her bedside three days, and mother and child lived. Ever after, at the Pengli, he set a cup of clear water on the bow, to tell the wind.

The wind comes each year, and the reeds at the crossing whiten again and again. No one has seen Shi since, but whenever the headwind presses the bow, the boatmen understand: someone will not let you go.