The Clay-Figure Maker

The rain in Qingyi Town did not let up for half a month, fine and close, softening the whole town to pulp. Zhou Yan came back wading through autumn water that rose to his ankles. Green moss bloomed in the cracks of the flagstones, slick underfoot as someone's skin. He had left the town ten years before to work in the city downstream, and most of what he remembered had gone strange; only the low shop at the mouth of Clay-Figure Lane still stood, a worm-eaten board above the door with half a character for Cui left on it and the smaller words 'clay figures' barely legible beneath. The shop leaned against a branch of the Qingyi River, its damp never lifting, and from far off you could smell the sweet, fishy odor of river mud.

The townsfolk called Clay-Figure Lane the Ghost Lane, saying the figures walked at night. Zhou Yan had believed it as a boy; once, rising to relieve himself at midnight, he had seen a black shape standing at the lane's mouth, and only the next day learned it was Cui Jiu hurrying to finish an urgent figure — a nameless drowned man had drifted down, and a figure had to be shaped before the water rose. The town both revered Cui Jiu and feared him: revered him for holding the water, feared him for being able to shape the living.

His mother had been bedridden three months and sent word that she dreamed every night of Miaomiao beckoning from the river, asking him to come home. Miaomiao was Zhou Yan's sister, who had slipped into the Qingyi at seven. It was the day of the dragon-boat race; the bank was thick with people, and in a moment of inattention the child slid down the stone steps. The current was fast. They dredged three days and found only one embroidered shoe, its red cord snapped, a scrap of rouge still on the heel. The old folk shook their heads and said a water ghost had taken a substitute, that her soul would never reach the temple. The mother would not believe it. She knelt at the River God's shrine and wept a full month, weeping one eye blind, and from then on, every first and fifteenth, she still went to burn paper, the ash dropping into the river and vanishing in a single turn of the water.

Zhou Yan had written little in ten years away, not because he did not think of her but because he had no words once his mother spoke of Miaomiao. This time the message came, and he took leave, carrying two packets of city pastries home; the rain softened them to paste before he arrived.

He went first to the River God's shrine. It was small, housing a statue of the River God with a broken hand, yet the incense burned strangely thick. On either side of the hall stood dozens of clay figures, some to the waist, some fitting the palm, every one the image of a corpse — eyes shut, lips pursed, a dot of cinnabar on the cheek. The blind old woman who kept the shrine told him these were Cui Jiu's water-binding figures, made to receive incense for the masterless, childless souls drowned in the river. A water ghost with a body, she said, rubbing the top of one figure with a withered hand, is in no hurry to come ashore for a substitute. Master Cui's clay remembers people better than the bodhisattva does.

Zhou Yan noticed the water-binding figures were not all quiet. A row of older ones against the wall had cinnabar gone murky from incense smoke, and a few had worn splinters from their fingertips, as if something had clawed the wall in the night. Those are hungry figures, the old woman said; let the incense lapse a few days and they stir. Every household takes its turn to add incense, and no one dares miss — miss a single night, and there is one more pair of wet footprints on the riverbank.

He stood in the shrine a long while and found no figure for Miaomiao. The old woman said Cui Jiu had gone to the riverbed for mud a step too late that year, and Miaomiao's figure had never been made, only an empty name left in the register.

That night he slept in the old house. His mother lay thin, cheekbones high, yet her color was ruddier than the year before, and even the blind eye seemed sheathed in a film of water-light. She held his hand and murmured that Miaomiao was cold, that she needed a clay body to keep her company, and had already asked Cui Jiu to make one; he should fetch it tomorrow.

The next day he went to the shop. Cui Jiu was older, his back more bent, but his fingers were still deft, turning in the cloth curtain caked with dark green river mud as if kneading the sinews of living men. The shop kept no lamp, only an oil bowl; in its murk the figures stood silent, a whole room holding its breath. Cui Jiu brought one out from the inner room, wrapped in old cloth, and when he passed it over, Zhou Yan felt the clay was warm, as if just left its mother.

He unwrapped it. It was indeed a girl-child, with twin topknots, a round face, a small mole on the left cheek — the very image of Miaomiao. Strangest, the clay had not yet dried and wept a fine dew that ran down the cheek like tears. Zhou Yan's heart jumped. Master Cui, why is this clay wet.

Cui Jiu did not look up, only moved the oil bowl into the light. Riverbed mud, away from water, longs for it. I went down myself and took a handful where your sister fell, mixed with the ash of the red cord from her shoe. Clay remembers people better than people remember people. Your mother said she was cold, so I worked in an extra measure of silt from the river's heart, to warm her.

Zhou Yan carried the figure home. His mother rose from bed, propped by illness, set it on the low cabinet by her pillow, laid out rice and incense, and murmured Miaomiao, come back. That night Zhou Yan slept in the front room and woke to a faint sound — the scrape of a nail on wood from the figure's side, very soft, like a child fretting against the cabinet edge. He lit the lamp and looked; the figure sat as before, but the tear-track down its cheek was longer than before sleep, nearly to the jaw.

He said nothing, telling himself the clay was not dry and the water ran of itself. Yet for three nights the track lengthened, and on the fourth he plainly saw the figure's mouth curl up — not a smile, but the hiccup of a drowning person breaking the surface. Zhou Yan went cold down the spine and went to Cui Jiu at first light.

Behind Cui Jiu's shop was a narrow door opening on a silted yard. The old folk had told Zhou Yan the Cui family's clay came in two kinds. One was the water-binding figure, made for the masterless drowned, set in the shrine to take their incense and spare them seeking substitutes. The other was the life-borrowing body, made for the living elderly, hiding a thread of a living person's lifespan in the clay so the old might hold on a few years more. The first bound the dead, the second borrowed the living; the family precept set it down plainly that the two must never mix, for mixed, the clay would claim a master and no longer know whether it served the dead or the living.

Yet the more Zhou Yan thought these days, the wronger it seemed. His mother had been sick three months, yet her color was ruddier than before, and even the blind eye held a glimmer. He recalled Cui Jiu's words, clay remembers, and his heart sank — if his mother was held by a life-borrowing body, then what was it that borrowed her life.

He waited until Cui Jiu had gone to the shrine with a figure, then slipped around to the yard and pushed open the narrow door. The yard ran deeper than he had imagined. Along the wall stood a row of wooden racks crowded with clay figures, a hundred at least, every one eyes shut, lips pursed, cinnabar on the cheek, no different from those in the shop. But these figures were gray-white of skin and spare at the knuckle, plainly the faces of the old, and several he recognized — townsfolk long buried. The tallest at the very back, its clay darkened, showed faintly the face of his mother. Zhou Yan's stomach clenched, near to retching.

He leaned close. In the mother-figure's chest was set a small piece of red cloth, and beneath it the clay rose and fell, as if with a heartbeat. The other old figures on the racks each had their cloth too, some red, some gray, some faded to a sorry white, rising and falling by differing degrees, as if each held a different remainder of life.

You should not have come in.

Cui Jiu's voice came from behind, without anger, as if he had expected it. In his hand he carried a fresh bucket of mixed mud, with a few strands of gray-white hair sunk in it, and a dark red film on the surface, as if blood had been stirred in.

Zhou Yan pointed at the row of old figures, voice shaking. These are life-borrowing bodies. You draw lifespan from the living and pour it into clay, to have them guard the dead.

Cui Jiu sighed and set the bucket down. You see it too shallowly. Qingyi Town stands by water; every year seven or eight drown — the masterless, the foreign, those whose shoe is never found. Their souls reach no temple and knot into resentment at the riverbed, dragging a living person down for a substitute, and another the next year, like a plague walking the water. I shape water-binding figures to give that resentment a body to lodge in — fed with incense, it does not want the shore. But a water-binding figure must live, and living takes breath to feed it. One such figure spends three years of a living person's life. The town has many old, with long lives; three years ago your mother coughed blood and should have gone, but I shaped this life-borrowing body and drew her failing years, split into dozens of shares, to feed those masterless children in the shrine. She gained three years, and the town drowned nine fewer young men.

Zhou Yan froze. You took my mother's life to feed those drowned children.

I took the years already failing, and returned a whole shrine's peace. The town knows the account, only no one dares say it aloud. Every Qingming, the cloth at the old figures' chests in the shrine is sent quietly by each family — they would rather spend an elder's years than a grandchild's by the river. Cui Jiu paused, his gaze falling on the mother-figure at the back. But your sister's figure was different. When she fell I had not yet had word; by the time I went for mud, it was too late — her soul had not knotted into resentment in the river. It had been taken.

Taken.

The Qingyi riverbed holds more than water ghosts. Years back a gang of tomb-robbers gouged a sunken coffin from the silt at the river's heart; in it lay a seven-year-old girl wrapped in brocade of an earlier dynasty, a clay sparrow resting on her chest. Greedy, they pried the coffin; the sparrow shattered, yet the girl's body had not rotted in a hundred years. Since then, every girl-child drowned in the river has had her soul taken by that coffin, to be its companion. On the seventh day after your sister fell, I came upon that coffin in the heart-silt — its lid was open, the inside empty, as if a place had been kept for her.

Zhou Yan's fingers went cold. He thought of the figure's nightly curling mouth, of the warm clay. The one you shaped, it is not a water-binding figure.

It is both a life-borrowing body and a water-binding figure; both at once. Cui Jiu's voice dropped. I drew your sister's soul back from that coffin's edge and sealed it in the clay, spending your mother's life to do it. If this figure holds, your sister's soul rests and the coffin stays empty, and takes no other family's child. But if it does not hold —

If it does not hold.

Cui Jiu did not answer, only set the oil bowl on the rack. The light jumped, and Zhou Yan saw the rise and fall beneath the red cloth at the mother-figure's chest stop. At the same moment, the figure of Miaomiao in his bosom gave, without warning, a very faint drowned cough.

The sound was too small and too real, like a child just pulled from the riverbed, lungs full of river mud, coughing and shaking. Zhou Yan's scalp burst; he all but fled the yard. He pressed Miaomiao's figure hard to his breast, its warmth against his heart, but the cough seemed stamped in his ear and rang all the way to the river.

He ran through the night to the shallow reach below the Qingyi and, by the town's old rite, set the figure facing downstream, hands folded, gently into water to the knees, then scooped three handfuls of river mud to seal its seven apertures, repeating the words his mother had taught: the water is wide, the road is narrow, each goes his own way, do not look back. He crouched on the shoal and watched the figure soak through, the ash of the red cord leaking from its seams and curling into a small dark-red eddy at his feet. Far off, the heart-silt threw a cold white light, and he thought suddenly of Cui Jiu's coffin — lid open, waiting. He finished the three handfuls, his fingers numb with cold, yet always felt something in the water tugging his trouser cuff, soft, once, then again, like a child loath to let go. He thought this sent his sister away, but he had forgotten Cui Jiu's last half-sentence — what does not hold comes back for a substitute.

He reached town near the small hours and, spent, fell on the front-room couch in his clothes. Half-asleep he felt his right wrist grow heavy, as if something had laid upon it, cool yet warm at the tip, not like cloth but like freshly kneaded wet clay. He blinked awake in the waning moon and saw, by the low cabinet at the bed's head, a clay figure standing — not Miaomiao's, but new, its clay still green, its brows and eyes his own. One of its hands rested on his wrist, knuckles distinct, the palm still bearing the whorls of kneaded mud, warm to the touch, plainly with a living person's heat.

He sat up sharp, but the figure did not move, only stood so, a dot of cinnabar on its cheek, eyes shut, lips pursed, like a version of himself just shaped and not yet woken. The oil-bowl light fell on its face, and that face, identical to his, seemed to curve its mouth a half-degree more than before sleep, as if smiling, or as if choking on water.

Zhou Yan did not sleep the rest of the night. At first light he went to break Cui Jiu's shop. The door stood open, the inside empty; the oil bowl lay overturned, the rack's figures all gone, leaving only a patch of dried river mud on the floor, mixed with a few gray-white hairs and the red cloth from his mother's figure, a dark brown stain on it, mud or blood he could not tell. On the wall a line was scratched with a clay finger, blurred by rain, only the first two characters legible: water claims.

He went home to his mother. She slept as usual; the blind eye, in the morning light, had cracked open a slit, holding a grain of water-colored light, dim, like the moon rising off the riverbed. She murmured Miaomiao and turned, sleeping again, her breath even and long, steadier than in sickness.

Zhou Yan looked down at his right wrist — where the figure had laid its hand, beneath the skin a green thread had risen, winding from the wrist-bone to the elbow, as if river silt had seeped into the bone. Pressing it brought no pain, only a cold that pierced. He thought of Cui Jiu's both at once, of the empty sunken coffin at the river's heart, of his own freshly shaped body, of the half-curve at the figure's mouth.

He dug out the old box under his mother's pillow; besides a few scraps of paper ash lay a note Cui Jiu had written years before, stating a life borrowed for three years, to be returned at term. But the date was long past. On the back of the note Cui Jiu had added a line: life borrowed is easy to return, soul borrowed hard to redeem. The substitute the water wants was never the dead, but the living.

Outside, the rain of the Qingyi began again, fine and close, softening the whole town to pulp. Zhou Yan gripped his cold right hand and heard from the river a very faint cough, as if someone had just been pulled up from the water.

Midnight Record note: The old custom of Qingyi Town set clay figures for the masterless drowned in the River God's shrine, called water-binding figures, taking the meaning of lodging the soul in form so it seeks no substitute. Cui Jiu's ruin lay not in clay's power to remember, but in men's willingness to feed dead resentment with living years. The life-borrowing body and the water-binding figure were never to be mixed; once mixed, the clay claims a master and no longer tells dead from living — the living think they have bought peace, not knowing they are the figure not yet finished. The tale of the coffin-girl is common in the strange records of southern water towns, saying a coffin at the riverbed takes drowned girls' souls for companions; true or false is hard to prove, yet each flood season the villagers still fear it. Recorded as warning: the water is wide, the road is narrow, each goes his own way, do not look back.