The Stone Eyes

The town of Shenxi sits on the water, and the water is called Shenxi too. The creek is not wide, but in midsummer it runs fast, its waves turning white, and beneath the surface it hides several stone-eyes—so the villagers name those whirling eddies that seize a wader's feet, saying they are the unclosed eyes of the long-drowned, still wide open. The townsfolk fear the water and revere it alike; each year around the Dragon-Boat Festival they set out stone beasts at the bridge-head, the pool-mouth, the ferry-bank—lions, tortoises, a stone general—crouching, staring at the current, holding down for the living whatever below wishes to climb ashore.

The shapes of the beasts are ruled by custom. At the bridge-head stands a stone lion, a ball in its mouth that, turning, stills the water; at the pool-mouth a stone tortoise bearing a blank stele, the heavier the stone the calmer the pool; at the ferry-bank a stone ram, head bowed as if drinking the wave that would not let the living cross. Mo the stone-mason used to say the beasts do not calm the water—they take the blame for the living. The drowned below seek a substitute; the beast crouches there and blocks the road to substitution, so the living may step across its shadow. He would not say so young; it was the truth he spat out only in age.

Mo is the last of his kind in town. For forty years he has chiselled stone: steles, millstones, and above all the water-calming beasts. A mason keeps several chisels—the flat to open the face, the round to hollow the eye, the wide to finish the edge. A beast must be given eyes before it can hold the water. The rite of opening the eyes he learned from his master, Shi the Honest-Fool: at the first strike the chisel must be made to chip, flinging a spark of stone that spills a single drop of blood upon the beast's eye—this they call sealing the eye with the mason's blood. The moment the blood falls, the beast's eye comes alive, black and bright, fixing the surface as though it truly knew what lay beneath. Young Mo thought it nonsense; then he saw that wherever he had sealed a beast's eyes, that stretch of water lay quiet for years, and so he believed, taking it for a craftsman's duty, never guessing it was a curse.

Forty years, thirty-seven pairs of eyes he has sealed. The old scar at the base of his left thumb—from that first chipped chisel—is still cold to the touch, as if the drop of blood never dried, still seeping in his bone. His hands: the knuckles coarse as chiselled stone-edges, the palms callused enough to fray hemp, yet on every cloudy, rainy day the ten fingertips turn blue and cold, too cold to hold the chisel, as though the blood were drawn back inch by inch from his fingers, fed to the eyes of all those years.

Shenxi drowns many. The current is one cause; the deeper one is the drowned below, seeking a substitute. A man who perishes in the water cannot leave; he must wait in the current for another to die in his place before he may be reborn. So whenever someone drowns, the villagers dare not speak loudly; they quietly summon the mason to carve a beast at the spot, pinning down what lies below so it cannot climb the waves. As a boy Mo apprenticed under Shi the Honest-Fool; his first alone was a stone toad for a drowned cowherd boy at Wife's Pool, squatting at the bank spitting water. His hand was raw then, the first strike chipped too hard, blood splashed both the toad's eyes, and his master, watching, said only: the eyes are sealed, now it watches the water for you. He did not understand, and understood only later—it was not watching the water for him, but the water watching him.

Wife's Pool lies where Shenxi bends downstream, its colour always greener than elsewhere, green to black, like the upturned bottom of a wok. At its edge stands a stone tortoise bearing a stele, the stone blank, its eyes two bright black stones—sealed by Mo thirty years before. That year, just past the festival, Wan the wealthy house's only son, A-li, was at play in the pool when an eddy took him under and did not give him back. The Wans were the town's great family; at the funeral they bade Mo carve a great tortoise to press the pool, to hold down whatever below would not release him. Mo took the work, chose a block of bluestone cut from the pool's edge, and chiselled half a month. On the night of sealing, the moon was murky; as always he chipped and spilled blood, and in the instant the blood struck the tortoise's eye he clearly saw within it the face of a woman—not A-li, but a wife with an old round knot, her mouth turned down as if she had words unsaid. His hand jerked; the chisel slipped half a measure.

Only afterwards did he learn that the bluestone came from the pool's east bank, where long ago a wife named A-ling had been drowned—her husband's family, vexed that she bore no son, pushed her in on New Year's Eve. The villagers hushed it; they left a mark on the stone, later washed away by the water. Mo then knew he had sealed not A-li's grievance but A-ling's. Yet once the tortoise stood, the pool lay still for years, and A-li's name was spoken no more, as if a stone had gently pressed that drowning down.

Shi the Honest-Fool vanished not long after. Mo remembers well: the seventh night after the tortoise's eyes were sealed, the master said the upstream stone was good and he would fetch a block to keep, shouldered his chisel, and went up the mountain, never returning. The town said he had slipped into the pool, no body recovered, not even a shoe surfacing. Mo took up his master's chisel and all the town's water-calming beasts, and worked thirty years. He had always thought it an accident—until this Dragon-Boat Festival, when he finally tasted the meaning of that woman's face in the tortoise's eye, which had called Shi the Honest-Fool down from the bank, one step ahead of him.

An earlier matter had long unsettled him. The widow Zhou's husband had drowned at the ferry-bank, and she asked Mo for a stone ram to press it. He sealed the ram's eyes; the ram crouched at the landing, head bowed to the wave. Yet from then on, whenever the widow passed the ferry, she felt the ram's eyes follow her; at night, behind her shut door, a pair of black bright ram-eyes floated on the window-paper, quietly watching her bed. She dared not speak of it, only came to ask Mo in a whisper if he had carved it crooked. Mo went to look; the ram's eyes were fine, unmoved. He took it then for a lonely woman's fancy—but now he understood: a beast with sealed eyes knows not the water but the hand that sealed them. The hand was Mo's, and so what the ram knew, from first to last, was him. What the widow saw was merely one pair among thirty-odd stone-eyes that had crossed the water, the wall, the people, and found the man who held the chisel.

This year the festival brought evil rain. Old Gong had ferried Shenxi fifty years; his youngest, A-xian, sixteen, helped with the pole. Afternoon came with a sudden rain; the boat turned at the pool-mouth, A-xian leaned to catch the pole the waves had torn away, and an eddy drew her under. When they brought her up she lay face down, her nail-beds packed with bluestone dust, as though in death she had clawed at some stone on the bottom. Old Gong wept himself hoarse and came to ask Mo for another beast. Mo agreed, yet did not begin—for when he went over the beasts of past years he found, to his horror, that they had all lost their eyes.

The town's standing beasts numbered thirty-seven, exactly the eyes he had sealed. Yet after that night, when he went to bridge-head, pool-mouth, ferry-bank, every one had dropped its eyes: the blood-scab he had sealed long ago had somehow fallen away, leaving two black holes, empty, yet all turning together toward the Shenxi, like thirty-seven mouths agape, waiting for what lay below to pass the words up. Mo reached to touch the tortoise's eye; his fingertip came away with a fine grey-green powder, and close, it was the water-stale of stone seams, mixed with an iron-sweet—his own blood, dried thirty years, now taken back.

The neighbour Old Shuan spoke of the strangeness too. Those nights he rose and caught sight of the bridge-head stone lion with empty eyes; under the moon the two holes were unnaturally deep, and the lion's head was tilted a little, as if listening to the water's voice. Old Shuan first thought some child had picked them out, and probed with a straw—at the touch the straw shrank back, cold, as if something still lived within the eye, only without light.

Mo sought Old Gong and asked of A-xian's last day. Gong said that the day before she was lost, she had helped at the hillside quarry and moved a half-buried bluestone, heavier than common stone, weeping a little water as she lifted it, cold enough to sting. Mo's heart sank. That half-buried block at the quarry he knew—it was the blank of the river-general his master had meant to carve thirty years before. The master had said the pool needed a great thing to hold it, chose a bluestone raised from the pool's bottom, and chiselled to the general's brows and eyes, then stopped, saying he would wait for an hour that 'suited the eye.' The hour never came; the man went first, and the blank lay half-buried in quarry mud, grass to the waist.

Only then did Mo taste the terrible truth: the drowned below, seeking substitutes, had never sought another's life. A beast's eyes sealed, it pins what lies below—but the sealing blood is a living man's, and the drop fallen, the mason's life-thread is bound to the stone's eye. Thirty years he had sealed again and again, tying himself inch by inch into the rock. Now A-xian had stirred that general-blank; within it A-ling's grievance woke, and following the blood-paths of all those sealed eyes, it had reclaimed, debt by debt, the blood in thirty-seven pairs of beast-eyes—what they wanted was no substitute, but the mason who had sealed them with his blood and given up his life-thread. Shi the Honest-Fool had been taken thirty years before, filling the river-general's vacancy; now it was his turn.

He recalled his master's last unmoored words: in this trade the dread is not hard stone, but stone that knows a man. He had taken it for jest.

On a night of thunder-rain Mo carried his lantern back to the hillside quarry. The rain fell so hard on stone it cracked like another chisel. The half-buried general-blank was changed indeed—the mud washed open, a fine crack on the bluestone's face, weeping water, a cold breath rising from the seam. He set down the lantern, reached to the crack; at his touch came from within a very faint chisel-ring, ting, the very sound of his blood-sealing strike. He took heart, prised with his chisel along the seam, stone flaking away, and slowly a half-finished stone man emerged: the frame of a general, half his armour chiselled, the other half still rough; and most dreadful, the face—brows, eyes, nose, mouth all formed, and they were Mo's own, save that the stone man's eyes were two empty hollows, waiting for someone to seal them.

The lantern's light wavered; he saw at the blank's foot, buried in mud, an old chisel, its wooden haft rotted, its iron head bright as new, as if daily wiped. It was Shi's chisel. Suddenly he understood all: thirty years before, the master had chiselled to this general's brows and eyes, and the face that emerged was his own. What the river wanted for its general was never stone, but the mason himself—seal his life into the stone's eye, press himself to the pool's bottom, hold that breath for a pool of drowned, that the living above might lie easy. Shi the Honest-Fool, having chiselled his own face, went down; and now within the blank another face had risen, to meet him.

In the rain he heard water spreading from the quarry's far end—not the creek's, but Wife's Pool's, lapping, as if someone beneath struck the bank, again and again. He looked down; in the lantern-lit standing water floated many stone-beast eyes, black, bright to blackness, all fixing him, mouth after mouth, soundlessly calling: seal the eye, seal the eye. Among the brightest two he knew the tortoise's A-ling, and his master, Shi the Honest-Fool.

Mo did not leave. He held his chisel and stood in the rain till dawn, and following the half-armour his master left, finished the general's other half. At the last stroke, as ever, he chipped and spilled blood upon the stone man's empty eyes—but the blood would not set; it ran down the seam as if drunk mouthful by mouthful. His hand was too cold to hold the chisel, yet he struck the final blow.

Dawn came, the rain ceased; in the quarry stood a newly carved stone general, its face Mo's own, its eyes empty, crouching in the mud and gazing toward Shenxi. When the townsfolk later sought Mo, they found in his room only an old pair of shoes and that bright-wiped chisel; the man was gone. Some said he had gone to labour in the next county, some that he had moved away years before. Only the general's chisel-marks stay warm; on wet and cloudy days a little grey-green powder weeps from its eyes, cold enough to sting, as if someone within waited for the next man to seal them.

From the Midnight Record: the mason seals the eye with his own life-thread; what the river claims was never a substitute.