Midnight Records: The Coins That Ask Fate

Luoyan Ford is a town that has fallen into the water. It sits wedged at the fork of two rivers, hemmed in on three sides by water, with only a narrow causeway on the north linking it to the shore. The townsfolk live off the water and fear it likewise. They fear it so thoroughly that when a child falls in, the mother dares not snatch him out at once; first she must toss three copper coins into the current and murmur, 'Lord of the Pool, forgive — the child meant no harm,' before she will reach a hand. They hold that something dwells beneath the Pool of the Returning Dragon, and that when it swallows a person, it takes the soul as payment.

On the bridgehead of Luoyan Ford I keep a small fortune stall. It is no bigger than half a door plank, bearing a chipped clay bowl, three burnished copper coins, a fate-book of yellow hemp paper, and a wolf-hair brush worn to a stub. The folk at the bridge call me Xie the Nine Hexagrams, saying one cast of mine can settle nine lives. They are half right: what I read is never a living man's prospects, but the day a living man is meant to go.

Ours is a trade bound by one rule — 'read death, never life.' When the living come asking after office, marriage, or children, I refuse to cast. Only those who ask 'is the person still here?' do I consent to read. The reason is a fearful one: the fate-book passed down by my master records every soul who comes to ask his death-day, and the hour he is meant to depart. To recklessly measure a living man's span without his name in the book is to spend one's own reckoning instead. Thus the kin of the water-ghosts of Luoyan Ford, of lost children, of boatmen who went down the river and never surfaced — when the midnight comes they grope through the dark to my bridgehead.

Character-reading and hexagram-casting are a slow craft. To read a character one must split, resolve, add, and subtract; observe its shape, weigh its sound, and read besides the force of the stroke and the bleed of ink on paper. To cast, one uses three copper coins, six tosses to make a hexagram, and judges fortune by the relating and responding lines, the active spirit, and the empty void. This whole method my master taught me stroke by stroke upon his deathbed. Master Pei, by his account, had once sat the imperial exams in a former dynasty; later he fell foul of some trouble, hid himself in the watery countryside, and made his living by divination, taking in a homeless boy — me. He would say often: 'To tell a fortune is not to tell a fortune. It is to recite the ledger of the King of Hell a step ahead of time. Recite it true, and you store merit; recite it false, and you die in his place.'

Let me first tell of an ordinary case. Last winter, the Tuesday Dame of the bridgehead tofu shop brought an old woman to me, saying her grandson had gone down to the river for fish and not returned by half a day. The old woman could not read, so I asked her to make some mark; she pressed a shaky, crooked circle onto the hemp paper. I saw that the circle was solid without and hollow within — like a well, like a sunken whirl. I cast, and got 'Water over Mountain, Obstruction' shifting to 'the Lake' — the active spirit of descendants moved and met a bond. I told her: the boy is not dead; the water struck him senseless and carried him to the reeds at the lower shoal; he will be found before the midnight hour, only his soul is scattered by fright and he will take sick upon return. The next day it was so: the grandson was fished from the reed beds three li downstream, burning with fever, and did not leave his bed for half a month. This was the living turn within 'reading death' — I had read that his destined day was still far, and the kin found heart to search.

But on the night the midnight mist rose from the Pool of the Returning Dragon and the bridge planks grew slick enough to throw back a man's shape, the one who came was no such ordinary client.

I was turning the pages of my book by a hooded oil lamp when I heard, from the far end of the bridge, the sound of someone treading water — step by step, very slow. The comer was a stranger in dress, a blue cloth jacket with sleeves rolled to the elbows, yet about him clung a cold, damp breath. He set a string of cash into the clay bowl and said in a hoarse voice, 'Master, ask after a person for me.'

'Whom.'

'My daughter, Azhi. Three days ago she went down the river on a cargo boat; no living sight, no dead body. The boatman told me the Pool of the Returning Dragon swallowed her. I will not believe it. I come to ask, master — is she still there or not.'

I read death, not life, yet such a search falls squarely within the rule. I bade him write a character. He took up the brush; his hand shook badly, and on the hemp paper he set down the character 'zhi'.

I studied that character a long while. Above 'zhi' is the grass radical; below it, 'stop'. Grass is weed — duckweed and wild grass, rootless and drifting. Stop is to halt — the step comes here and rests. A blade of grass stopped at the water's edge means 'zhi' sunk in water, halted by water. I took up the three coins and cast; they turned thrice in the bowl and settled into 'Doubled Water' shifting to 'Confinement' — water doubled is the abyss; confinement is the prison; the active spirit of wife-and-wealth had fallen into the empty void. The hexagram was plain: the person is gone, sunk to the bottom of the Pool of the Returning Dragon, her very soul confined.

What was strange was the relating and the responding. The relating line was me; the responding line was the dead. In an ordinary reading of the dead, the responding sits over there and the relating stays here, each in its place. But tonight the two lines were entangled — plainly this: that by casting this hexagram I had drawn the drowned soul from the pool's bottom to my own stall.

The man heard, and the waterlight in his eyes scattered all at once; he went soft as if his spine were drawn out, slumping on the bridge planks. He said his surname was Xun, from Xun-family Ferry upstream; his daughter was just sixteen, comely, hired by the town's cargo boat to mend sails, and never came back. I urged him home, saying since the person was gone, keep away from water. He kowtowed and lurched away; his sleeve brushed the lamp flame, and I saw that within his shadow a stretch was missing — as if something had been gouged out of his shadow by another's hand.

The second night, the Tuesday Dame came herself. Her lips trembled; she said that two days before she had seen Azhi board that cargo boat with her own eyes, and the boatmaster had laughed and pressed a sweet into her hand. She came to ask whether Azhi's soul would come seeking her for life. 'Master,' she said, 'at night I keep hearing someone call 'mother' beyond the window — but what daughter have I?' I cast; again the water-confined pattern, the spirit in the void. I warned her not to leave her house these few days; she nodded like a pestle at a mortar, yet still she was found dead in her own water vat — the water in the vat had been coughed up from her lungs.

The third night brought the boatmaster. His face was all brute flesh; he flung two taels of silver into the bowl and said the Xun father and daughter had spoiled his trade, and he wanted me to reckon whether Azhi was truly dead, that he might rest. The hexagram was not yet done when the veins stood out on his neck as though a hand had seized his throat from behind; he toppled backward, eyes wide, and from his seven apertures water slowly seeped, pooling on the bridge planks — near half a gourd of it.

I panicked and turned the fate-book by night. At that turning, the sweat ran down me. Upon the book were the three names — Xun the father, the Tuesday Dame, the boatmaster — fresh ink, yet the death-days entered beneath them were plainly last night and tonight. These pages I had never written. The fate-book was writing itself.

I recalled my master's words: 'The fate-book has a spirit; he who writes men is in the end written by men.' Then I had taken it for talk to frighten a disciple. Now I understood: the book recorded not the death-days I was asked, but the death-days of those who came asking after 'Azhi'. The thing at the pool's bottom was gathering souls through my stall.

I would not believe in ghosts alone; I took my lamp to seek Zhou Bing, the elder who keeps Luoyan Ford's shrine and its yearly rite at the pool. I pressed him for Azhi's whereabouts; he started, then sighed, and drew me into his inner room, closing the door before he spoke.

It turned out Luoyan Ford kept an old custom: in years of flood or plague, a maiden-child was sunk into the Pool of the Returning Dragon, called the 'living sacrifice,' to pacify the water-fiend. The choosing was strict: she must be a fatherless girl born in an intercalary month of an intercalary year, fate laden with water, just sixteen, her birth-hour 'matched' to the pool-god. The chosen household was given a sum in silver, as if selling the daughter to the god. On the night of the sinking, the ritual master led her, all in white, a green stone bound to her wrist, and at the midnight hour thrust her into the pool's heart, while on the bank three years of mourning drums were beaten, beaten until the water's surface bubbled no more.

Zhou Bing said the maiden sunk this year was none other than Xun Azhi. Her mother died early; her father was a gambler who sold the daughter's birth-chart to the town elders. The cargo-boat tale was only a blind to cover men's eyes — Azhi never boarded any boat; she was seized from the back alley, stone-bound, and sunk alive into the Pool of the Returning Dragon. 'Master,' Zhou Bing clutched his tea, hand also shaking, 'this rule has held above a hundred years, and the town has kept its peace. You are a stranger here — do not meddle.'

Only then did I grasp it: those three who came asking were no ghosts either. The water-fiend had borrowed their shapes, come once to my stall, that it might enter their names into the book of substitutes. What the Pool of the Returning Dragon wanted was never Azhi alone, but a whole list of substitutes; my hexagram was the very brush that hooked the soul. Under cover of the living sacrifice, the fiend added a few substitutes every year, taking their names from whoever came borrowing shape to ask fate — the more urgently they asked, the faster they were taken. Zhou Bing and his kind were not ignorant; they connived. Until the substitute-list was filled, the next to suffer would be the townsfolk themselves.

I took my lamp to the pool's edge. The water was black and thick; on its face floated a whiteness that was neither mist nor breath. By the pool stood a half-collapsed stone niche; within it a faceless clay idol, and before it a broken stele whose characters the moss had long eaten away, leaving only one word legible — 'sacrifice'. I understood suddenly that beneath the niche lay not merely Azhi's wronged shade, but all the maiden-children sunk through the years, gathered into one water-fiend that fed on substitutes each year.

To break the coil I must return to the pool's edge at midnight and cast a hexagram to reverse it. I pocketed the fate-book and took the three coins, and at the midnight hour waded into the reed beds beside the pool. The water rose to my ankles, cold to the bone. I knelt before the niche and threw the three coins — asking where Azhi was. They settled; the hexagram I dared not read closely: Azhi at the pool's bottom, the relating line still me, and beside the responding line a streak of cinnabar-red creeping slowly toward my own line. This cast had entered my own name into the book of substitutes as well.

So it was that my master met his end three years before. He too had come to the pool at midnight to cast, meaning to reverse a maiden's fate; his name fell into the book, and the next day he hanged himself from his trouser-belt at the bridgehead. They said he had reckoned the hour true, laid the fate-book open at his feet, and before the noose went about his neck had cast one last hexagram for the man who came to collect the corpse, saying, 'By the Dragon-Boat Festival next year, the pool will swell.' That year at the festival the Pool of the Returning Dragon indeed broke its banks and flooded half the town's homes. Before he left, my master had penned a line at the book's end: 'A diviner must not read his own fate; to read it is to enter the book.' I had thought him overscrupulous.

I gripped the fate-book, cold through and through. Two roads lay before me: submit, and go to the pool at tomorrow's midnight to stand in for the whole town and turn aside the water-fiend — yet the book would take me all the same, and I would be the next Azhi; or seal the stall at once and cast no more — yet those three names were already in the book, the substitute-list was opened, the soul-gathering would not stop, and the next to come asking would be a living man still.

I dared not go to my death. I tore out the last page of the fate-book and sank all three copper coins into the Pool of the Returning Dragon, weighted the stall's door plank with broken stone, and left Luoyan Ford in the night. I swore I would cast no hexagram and tell no fortune for the rest of my life.

Yet ever since, at every midnight, a copper coin floats up on the water beneath the bridge, face to the sky — the very coin I cast that year to ask fate. I watch it through the window, daring neither to touch it nor to read.

What frightens me most is this morning. I had plainly torn out the last page of the fate-book and thrown it into the stove. Yet as I packed just now, that page lay neat within my traveling bag, the ink still wet, and upon it a line newly written —

'Xie the Nine Hexagrams, tonight at the midnight hour.'

Midnight Records, a note: the watery villages of the south keep the old custom of sinking living sacrifices into their pools, and the trade of divination forbids reading one's own fate — for the reader holds the brush, and when the brush falls, he enters the game himself. The matter of Luoyan Ford I dare not call wholly true; yet the cold of that pool water stays in my bones to this day.