The Soul-Luring Banner

Luo Jiu learned the craft of making soul-luring banners from his father when he was fourteen.

The lean-to behind the old house stayed stuffed by day with the paper effigies he had fashioned—paper boys and girls, paper horses and sedan chairs—and by night it belonged to him alone. One pane of the window frame was broken, and the wind that slipped through always carried the watery stink of the river shoal, mixed with a sweetness in the paste he could never quite name. The paste was ground from glutinous rice, but his father had taught him to stir in a spoonful of old pig's blood, saying only then would the characters on the banner withstand the night dew and not blur at the first rain. So the room always breathed a warm, fishy-sweet hush, like the hushed morning after a slaughter in the depths of winter, or like someone having poured a jar of honey into the seam of a coffin. The lean-to door stood half-open year round, and at night wild cats slipped in and out across the threshold, scuffing the shredded hemp into a soft rustle; he never drove them off, saying the cats knew how to keep a vigil. Luo Jiu grew used to it; away from that smell, he found he could not sleep.

His father's hands were the hands of a lifetime of paper work—thick at the knuckles, the nails forever rimmed with paste and hemp dust no washing could clear. The lamp by which he taught the writing was a brass cup passed down from his grandfather; its wick turned to the barest thread, the heart of the flame blue, so that the ink characters on the white hemp seemed to float in another layer of water. Luo Jiu was particular about his hemp: only the freshly retted flax from the upper river, its fibers long and drinking ink evenly, so the written name would hold; the lower river's hemp was short and bled too fast, and he would never use it. A good length spread on the table, he would rub it palm over palm to lay the barbs flat before he set brush to it. He called this "settling the soul"—hemp smoothed, and the dead would know the road.

He remembered the night his father taught him to write his first name. The oil lamp was a small bean of light, and the old man's wasted hand closed over the back of his, guiding him stroke by stroke into the weave of the white hemp. The hemp was coarse, all its fibers barbed, and the ink would float on the surface at first, only seeping into the warp and weft once his thumb pressed it down, like threads of blood creeping into flesh. His father said the soul-banner was not like other paper work—others were burned to give the dead their comforts, but the soul-banner was carried before the living at a funeral, to lead the spirit home from the wilds. The name upon it, once written, was a lantern for a life; write it wrong and you would summon not the right soul but some stray ghost to the door. So Luo Jiu never used an ordinary brush for names, only a worn wolf-hair brush with a blunted tip, and when he finished he would hold the banner up to the lamp to see if the name showed through faintly on the other side—only when it did was it "set."

For the first ten-odd years, Luo Jiu was simply the village's honest paper craftsman. When a family lost someone, they would come knocking in the middle of the night; he would rise from bed, cut a square of plain banner by the lamp, ask the dead one's name and style, birth and death dates, and write it stroke by stroke. Before dawn the mourners would carry the banner to the grave, and when the wind caught it the white cloth would whirl; the villagers all said Master Luo's banners were "effective," that the dead came home quiet and made no trouble, that even the wild dogs dared not approach the grave mound. Luo Jiu heard the praise and felt easy in his heart. Those years his hand was steady, his characters upright; all clean work. By degrees he became the only soul-banner master for miles around; even coffin-escorting rites masters from other towns, when a banner puzzled them, would detour to have him set the brush. He liked to work at night, saying the daytime clamor made restless characters that could not hold a soul; only at the third watch, when all was still, did he feel the name drawn out of his own bone, every stroke weighted. Each time he finished a banner and held it to the lamp to read the shadow showing through, a wordless ease came over him—as if by his hand a lost one had been led back from the dark to the door.

The first time he entertained a crooked thought, it was for his wife's medicine.

Luo Jiu's wife had an ailment of the heart; every change of season she gasped for breath, her face going green-white like one of the paper figures he had just glued. It was the twenties of the Republic, and a certain Manager Jin of the silk shop came to town, a pistol at his waist and flesh laid horizontal across his face. Manager Jin's only son was consumptive; the physician said the boy would not see twenty unless he borrowed some years of life. Manager Jin came to Luo Jiu not for a soul-banner but to ask after another matter. He lowered his voice: they said you write names to draw a soul onto the cloth—but what if the one drawn were not a dead man, but a living one?

Luo Jiu's hand jerked and nearly overturned the paste bowl. His father's warning rang in his ear, but on the bed his wife was seized by another wrenching fit of coughing, curling into herself. Manager Jin slapped a heavy packet of silver dollars on the table and said: write the name of a dying old loner from the next village onto a fresh banner, recite the rebirth spell his father had taught him—backwards—and the old man's years would pass to young Master Jin, with Luo Jiu himself surrendering three years of yang life as the lamp to light the way. Three years. Luo Jiu reckoned it: he was barely past thirty; surrender three and he would still have life to spare. But he stared at his wife's green-white face, then at the silver, and in the end he nodded.

He wrote that banner. The old loner was called Zhao Shitou, alone in the world, too weak now to work his fields, never meant to outlast the winter anyway. Luo Jiu pressed the three characters of "Zhao Shitou" into the white hemp, and as his thumb ground them down he felt a cold seep in at his knuckles, climbing the length of his arm toward his heart. He recited the spell backwards, blew out the lamp, and heard the river-shoal wind stop dead for an instant, then whip up suddenly, snapping the wet banner like someone clapping in his ear. The next day Zhao Shitou indeed drew his last, peaceful; and young Master Jin's cough eased. Luo Jiu took the silver and fetched medicine; his wife drank it and the gasping settled. For the first time he felt it—that a single banner could truly buy a living man one more breath.

From then on, the business was done on the sly.

The patrons came in every stripe. Timid rich men afraid of death; local gentry wanting to outlast a rival's fortune; mothers quietly borrowing years for a short-lived child. Luo Jiu set himself a rule: he would write only the solitary, the dying, the helpless—never those with children and a full span of years before them. He kept that bottom line, in the end, out of fear of surrendering too much yang life, and of fouling his own merit. With each commission he gave up anywhere from three years to half a year, depending on how much was transferred. He felt his own body grow thinner year by year, his back bent, yet his hand at the work grew steadier. The villagers took him for diligent; they never knew that beneath each banner he made lay a living person robbed of a few years of daylight.

For the first few years he still kept count. Three years on the first, two on the second, a year and a half on the third… but the sound of silver dollars dropping into the drawer was too pleasant, and his wife's medicine could not be missed a single day, so by degrees he stopped counting. And the rule loosened at the seams. Once the Sun family's rice merchant wanted the name of a rival—a man in his prime, with two children at home. Sun offered three times the price, and the go-between said the rival was sailing away next month; if the boat went over, dead was dead regardless. Luo Jiu knew it for a lie, but that year the medicine money ran tight, and he clenched his teeth and wrote the man's name into the hemp. Later he heard the man had indeed drowned on the river, leaving two children to the charity of relatives. He shut himself in the lean-to and sat through the night; the next day he glued banners as usual, only his hand trembled a hair more than before.

There was another time the Zhou scholar of the town came to him. Zhou wanted a teaching post at the county school; his rival was the Chen licentiate, whose essays were finer, and whose aged mother lay bedridden, unlikely to see the autumn out. Zhou, red-faced, said his wife and children lived on that stipend and begged Luo Jiu for "a small convenience." Luo Jiu had no wish to involve men of letters, but just then the lean-to's tiles leaked badly and a single rain could drown his brazier. He hesitated long, and in the end wrote Old Madam Chen's name. Zhou got the post, it is true—yet within two years both his eyes, sound before, went blind, said to be from reading by night. Luo Jiu heard it, murmured a prayer in his heart, and turned back to cutting his hemp.

The commission he remembered clearest was the Liu family's widow, across the river. She was nineteen, seven months with child, her husband drowned on a salt run; she kept two rooms of thatch alone. The Liu family's enemy, Boss He of the river-boat line, feared the young widow would one day contest the docks, and sent word to Luo Jiu for her name. Luo Jiu would not at first—a living girl of nineteen, and with child. But Boss He's price would buy three more years of medicine for his wife and mend the leaking tiles of the lean-to besides. That night he stared at the white hemp a long while, thinking how he himself had once been forced to begin, at gunpoint of silver. In the end he set his jaw and wrote.

The next year the widow bore a daughter, seemingly a blessing, yet she turned yellower by the day, no milk in her, the child kept alive on rice water. Luo Jiu saw mother and daughter once from afar—the woman rocking the baby on the threshold in the sun, her face white as the paper he glued. He turned and walked away, and never went to the west bank again. Later he heard the girl lived only to six, taken by a chill—he never knew if it was his banner's doing, and never dared ask.

There was another commission that left him with a cold dread afterward. Another west-bank widow, Sun, came knocking with a sallow, wasted child in her arms, knelt on the threshold weeping, said the baby had a strange illness no physician could cure, and begged Master Luo for a banner to lead the child back to life. Luo Jiu's heart softened and he meant to refuse—then thought of Old Ge at the east end, a drunkard who lay about all day and wasted good grain anyway; why not… In the end he did not write the child's name but Old Ge's, and recited the spell backwards. The child afterward rallied; Old Ge drank himself dead in a ditch one snowy night. Widow Sun thanked Luo Jiu's banner to all who would listen, and Luo Jiu, hearing it, only bent his head lower into the hemp. He dared not tell her the extra breath her child drew had been shifted from a drunkard's span.

He could not say how many such names he had written. In drought years the villagers weakened and slipped away one after another, and he would lie awake at night unable to tell which were heaven's drought and which were banners of his own making. Once the village's learned old scholar summoned him for tea and said, half in jest and half in earnest: Master Luo, your banners are effective enough, but have you noticed—these past few years, every solitary household that's had any dealings with you seems to pass sooner than the rest? Luo Jiu's hand on the tea bowl was steady as a rock; he only laughed and said: hard times, sir, when the Lord of Heaven gathers men he does not sort by household. The scholar smiled and asked no more. Luo Jiu went home and added an extra half-spoon of pig's blood to the banner he was finishing, as if to stiffen his own courage.

By his fifties and sixties Luo Jiu's hair was all white, yet his eyes were sharp and his hand did not shake. He had come to treat the work as merely part of the craft, and stopped thinking of the people in it. Merely money, he told himself; all he did was shift a living person's years a little—in the end we all return to earth, a few years sooner or later, what difference? His wife had long since gone, on a snowing night in winter when she could not catch her breath; strangely, her face at the end was redder than in life—and in his private heart he thought perhaps those few years Zhao Shitou had given up had leaked, a scrap of them, to her. His daughter had married out, to the next county, home once a year. He kept the lean-to alone, gluing banners by night, writing names, reciting the spell backwards, while the wind turned his banners year after year like the pages of a ledger no one would read.

Some nights he would sit lost in thought before the racks of banners, feeling like the old water-wheel by the river, day after day turning water from this side to that, never minding whose fields it left. Water, after all, must flow; a lifespan, after all, returns to earth. He soothed himself with this, yet each time he heard of another lonely elder gone, a vague cold would still graze his heart.

He had never reckoned how much yang life he had surrendered. He only knew his memory had failed of late, and that he woke often in the night to find the lean-to unnaturally still, the wind seeming to hold its breath, as if something crouched in the dark, waiting for him to sink deep.

What truly set his teeth on edge was the autumn two years back. A young man named Mo moved into the east end of the village, said to be from out of town visiting kin, and took to squatting at Luo Jiu's door to watch him glue banners. At first Luo Jiu paid him no mind; the lad asked this and that—where the hemp came from, whether anything was mixed into the ink, just how that backwards spell was spoken. Luo Jiu took him for an idle busybody and let nothing slip. But one evening he closed early and turned to find young Mo standing beneath the bamboo rack where he dried his banners, running a hand over a freshly written plain banner, his fingertips lingering on the cloth as if feeling its grain, or measuring it. Luo Jiu barked at him; the lad smiled and drew his hand back and left.

After that, Luo Jiu would sometimes wake at night feeling the lean-to held something more. Not a sound—a smell. Beneath the fishy-sweet reek of paste there was a faintest thread of warmth, like the breath of another person. He lit the lamp and looked all around: nothing. Only the banners on their racks swayed gently in the wind. He ran a thumb over the raised veins on the back of his own hand and suddenly thought: the people whose names he had written these years—not all of them had truly been "dying," not all had been without children. He could no longer be sure. He remembered only the clink of silver into the drawer, and the long exhale of his wife once the gasping eased.

Those years he would fall into the same trance at night—dream or waking he could not say: it was as if countless plain banners drifted in the dark, a name written on each, and when the wind turned them the names crowded to his ear and softly called his surname. Each time he came to himself he would first lay a hand to his chest to be sure the breath was still there. He told himself it was only the fishy-sweet of the paste addling him; after so many years, a man's eyes were bound to play tricks. Yet that thread of another's breath at his neck lingered in the lean-to until dawn more and more often.

After the Beginning of Winter, Luo Jiu took on a strange commission. No one came; word was sent: beyond town at the new burial ground, a patron wanted a soul-banner, would not meet, and had left the silver in the old place—the hollow of the withered willow at the bridge head. Luo Jiu went and felt; sure enough a packet of silver dollars lay within, heavier than any commission he had taken. He supposed some respectable household feared exposure, or perhaps some old patron's descendant was continuing an old bargain. So by the old rule he cut a square of the largest plain banner and made ready to write the name the patron would send.

The name, the messenger said, would not be given. Only this: unroll the banner, and you will know who to write.

Luo Jiu took it for a patron's jest, and thought no more of it. On a moonless night in the twelfth month he lit the small charcoal brazier in the lean-to as usual and spread that square of plain banner flat on the table. The coarse rasp of the white hemp came up through his palm, cool and gritty, like touching a bone that had never been warmed. He mixed the ink and tipped in another half-spoon of old pig's blood—the fishy-sweet on his hands these years had been bred of just this. Then he lifted the brush, loaded it with ink, and held it above the cloth, waiting for the patron's name to surface in his mind.

The tip was about to fall.

But at that moment, he saw clearly.

Already sunk into the weave of the plain banner were three characters. Not written by him—the ink was paler than he used, yet the same, welling up from deep in the fibers, pressed stroke by stroke into the warp and weft by someone's thumb, like blood creeping into flesh. He held it to the lamp; a faint shadow showed through on the back, exactly as his father had taught him a name was "set."

He had written other men's names for decades; the craft was so familiar he could do it with his eyes shut. Those three characters were in his own hand.

Luo Jiu.

The tip hung above the character "Luo," a bead of ink trembling on the brink of falling, quivering like a banner corner in the wind. He stared at the name already written, and the hairs on his nape stood one by one. He thought of young Mo's fingers on that drying plain banner; he thought of every solitary, dying name he had written onto others' banners through the years; he thought of the Liu widow's paper-white face, of Zhao Shitou's quiet last breath, of young Master Jin's easing cough, of the river boatman he had written into the hemp and left with two fatherless children. So this business had never been his alone. Someone, too, had learned to press a living man's name into the hemp, to recite the spell backwards, to surrender their own yang life as the lamp to light the way.

And this time, the name written was his—Luo Jiu's.

His hand descended slowly, but did not write. The tip hovered a hair's breadth above the characters; the ink was about to drip, when he jerked his hand back. The bead of ink struck the banner and bloomed a small black stain, falling right across the left stroke of the character "Jiu." He stared at that stain and understood all at once: this banner was not for leading a dead soul home. It was to lead him. The new guest had already arrived, his name long since written; all that remained was for his breath to slacken, the banner to be raised, the wind to turn it—

And just then, the wind outside rose.

The broken window of the lean-to moaned; the banners on the rack whirled all at once, slap slap slap, like someone clapping in his ear. The brazier's flame, beaten by the cold draft that rushed in, flickered between bright and dark, and by its light the two characters "Luo Jiu" on the square of banner shone and dimmed by turns. Luo Jiu sat before the table, gripping the blunted wolf-hair brush, not daring to move. He did not know who had written this banner—the outsider Mo, or one of those whose name he had written long ago and who had since learned the craft, or whether among the lonely dead some one had at last learned to write him back. He only knew that having led others home for the greater part of his life, tonight it was another's turn to lead him.

The wind turned faster and faster, and in the fishy-sweet reek of paste that thread of another's warmth grew clearer, as if someone pressed close behind him, bending also to read this banner. Cold sweat broke along Luo Jiu's spine and his clothes stuck to his back. He tried to cry out, but his throat was stopped as if gummed by that years-old pig's blood, and no sound came. He thought of every name he had written in his life, and of the people beneath those names—the gone, the wasted, the blind, the drowned, the drunk—had they too, on some moonless night, suddenly seen their own name already written on the plain banner? He dared not think further. The brazier on the table gave a soft pop and sank; the room dimmed a notch, and only those two ink-shadowed characters still burned in his eyes.

He tried to turn the banner over, to see if there were other characters on the back. The cloth was ice-cold; the fibers of the white hemp prickled his thumb. The back was blank; only the three characters pressed through from the front, heavy, set—as every banner he had written with his own hand had been set. He reached out to touch those three characters; his fingertips met ink long since dry, and the pressed marks in the weave—a pressure he knew too well, the very force he himself used when the brush fell.

Luo Jiu did not blow out the lamp, nor did he put the banner away. He simply sat, listening to the wind turn the banner again and again, waiting for dawn, or for something else. The brazier's fire sank lower; the fishy-sweet warmth of the room cooled through, bit by bit, as if every soul he had ever led home, in the end, had one that would open toward him. All his life he had led so many souls to their graves; he had never imagined that a banner might open toward himself.

Editor's note from the Midnight Record: The soul-luring banner—when it bears another's name, it is a craft; when it bears your own, it is the reckoning.