The Tima's Scroll

Xiang Yan was the first young man from Ruxi Village ever to pass the exams and go study in the provincial city. The village is wedged into a narrow gorge upstream of the Wushui River, where the two cliff walls lean in until the stilt houses have to be stacked one against the other up the rock, looking from afar like a pile of old wooden crates someone forgot in the crack of a mountain. The Bizika people have lived here for generations. Outsiders call them Tujia; they answer only to the three characters Bizika — meaning the local people, meaning also those who speak a rustic tongue, and they do not care.

The villagers revered the hearth-fire, kept burning all year as the warm breath of the ancestors; women and children ate and sewed and heard the old tales by it, yet never dared set a foot into the pit. The Tima's Spirit Scroll was a private thing known to all and touched by none; even the village elders would not name it in council, only spoke of it vaguely as 'that cloth.' At each new year's pig-slaughter a bloody haunch was sent to Old Peng as the 'scroll-pacifying gift,' that a fed scroll might trouble no one for a year. Xiang Yan as a boy watched his mother wrap the meat in a lotus leaf and carry it over, and when he asked why, she said only it was the ancestors' rule — ask no more.

The first summer he came home, half the stone bridge at the village mouth had collapsed and the creek ran a yellow, gasping murk. Xiang Yan carried his luggage up the swaying wooden ladder and smelled the whole village at once: cured pork, the damp of the rainy season, and the sweet, acrid smoke of corncobs burning in the hearth. His mother was simmering corn gruel in the main room. When he stepped in she wiped her hands on her apron and said only one thing: "Old Peng the Tima has been by the house twice again these last few days."

Old Peng the Tima was the village shaman. Tima is an old Bizika word, meaning roughly the old man who speaks with the gods, or the man who serves them. No wedding or funeral, no raising of a new house, no thanksgiving rite, no exorcism in the village could do without him. His back was slightly hunched and his left eye had gone blind long ago, filmed with a white glaze, but his right eye was startlingly bright, as if it could see through flesh to bone. In his hand he always shook a string of eight-treasure bronze bells, cast in yellow brass, their bodies engraved with the eight trigrams and grassland vines; they rang with every step, a constant small clang, as though something invisible walked ahead to guide him.

Xiang Yan had feared him since childhood. He remembered clearly the spring of his fifth or sixth year, when Peng came to perform a rite and unfurled a long scroll in the middle of the room. The cloth was as wide as a door panel and hung from the beam to the floor, a hemp ground painted with mineral pigments — mountains, water, bridges, trees, and a great many tiny figures walking here and there within it. Peng said it was the Spirit Scroll, the ritual instrument passed down through generations of Tima, depicting the road from the mortal world to the Hall of the Gods; along the way one must cross the Iron-Armor Bridge, the Blood-River Ford, and the Nine Bends before a dead soul could be settled. Xiang Yan's father, Xiang Laosì, was still alive then, squatting on the threshold with his tobacco, and he laughed: "Master Peng, you've got too many people on this scroll; even the underworld must be crowded." Peng did not laugh. He shook his bells and said: "There are many because the road is narrow. Those who walk the narrow road died by violence or by wrong; their souls cannot find home, so I paint them in and send them to the Hall to be reborn. Don't laugh — the violently dead cling hardest to the living. If you do not take them in, they come tapping at your window every night."

As Peng left he suddenly squatted and stroked Xiang Yan's head, drew from his breast a small wooden Nuò mask and pressed it into the boy's palm. "A Bizika child's fate is tied to the spirit-road," he said; "you will understand when you are grown." The mask had two black dots for eyes; one night Xiang Yan secretly wore it and dreamed he walked a very long bridge, and in the red water beneath, hands reached to pull him down. He woke in fright and hid the mask in the broken basket under the bed.

That autumn the village held a great thanksgiving rite to the god and goddess of the Nuò, and Xiang Yan went with the adults. The rite gave thanks to the Nuò father and mother; the Tima wore a wooden Nuò mask, red lacquer and gold thread, with little lamps lit in the eye-holes, and in his hands he shook the si-dao, a ringed blade that clattered, while the buffalo-horn trumpet wailed a note longer than the valley. The young men danced the Maogusi, wrapped in straw costumes, bent at the waist to mimic the ancestors at the hunt, and the torches lit every face with sweat and shadow. Behind the altar Peng unfurled the Spirit Scroll, and in the firelight it seemed to billow faintly, as if a wind blew out from inside the painting. Xiang Yan was small then; peering through the adults' legs he saw a few more tiny figures by the bridge on the scroll and tugged his father's sleeve to ask if those too were going to the Hall. Xiang Laosì clapped a hand over his mouth and whispered: "Don't ask. Master Peng will be angry if he hears."

After the rite his mother pulled him home and whispered on the way that the Tima's scroll was both the village's guardian and its debt — leave the violently dead uncollected and the living knew no peace; collect them, and you owed the scroll a stroke, to be repaid sooner or later. Xiang Yan understood nothing then, only remembered his mother's face gone green-white in the torchlight as she spoke.

That winter was unnaturally cold. Xiang Laosì went with a contractor from town to a coal mine in the next county; three days down the shaft and the gallery collapsed. The mine later sent back a handful of ashes, saying the dead could not be told apart underground and by custom several missing workers had been cremated together. His mother fainted twice and, waking, would not let go of that small pile of ash. Peng came to perform the rites and unfurled the Spirit Scroll again in the main room, lit the oil lamps, and sang the Tima spirit-songs through the whole night, swaying his head. The words Xiang Yan could not understand, only the tune, low and long, like water running beneath stone. Peng said that night he was escorting the dead across the Iron-Armor Bridge and the Blood-River Ford, bowl after bowl of wine offered, lamp after lamp lit. Xiang Yan crouched in the corner with his eyes open until dawn, and what he remembered clearest was that the tiny figures on the scroll were many more than in years past, crowded thick by the bridge, as if all were waiting for someone to lead them. He was too young then to know what waiting meant, only that though the figures were faintly drawn, their faces were one more anxious than the next.

From then on Xiang Yan often dreamed of the mine: a long gallery lit by pea-sized lamps, and a shadow in a blue jacket walking within, the lamps dying one by one as it moved; he gave chase and the shadow turned into deeper black. He would wake with a rust-iron taste at his pillow and thought it the unwashed old shirt from the mine — until later, when he realized the shirt had long been burned.

Three years slipped by. Xiang Yan studied to be a teacher in the city and was near graduation; his accent carried less and less of home. Coming back that summer, he felt at once that something was wrong — his mother had aged terribly, her hair gone entirely white, her back bent, and when she saw him she did not weep but muttered the same line over and over: "Your father came to me in a dream. He says he is on the scroll and cannot get free."

The village too had emptied; most of the young had gone to find work, leaving only the old and the children to keep the stilt houses. Accustomed in the city to streetlamps and concrete, Xiang Yan found he could not sleep the first nights home for the insect song. He had brought his mother two bottles of medicine and a new quilt; she ran her hand along the quilt's edge, her eyes wet, but said no thanks, only repeated that one line.

Xiang Yan took it for the wandering talk of a woman who missed her man, and soothed her. But in the days that followed, fragments of village gossip pieced together into something that made his skin crawl. Someone had seen Peng, deep in the night, singing the spirit-songs to an empty room, then abruptly falling silent as if a hand had clamped over his mouth. They said that when the floods rose last year and the herdsboy was swept away, his body pulled from the water with a face gone bright blue, Peng had carried the scroll to that household within a week. They said the widow who hanged herself on the cliff the year before, tongue lolling long, Peng had taken her in too. To each of those houses Peng went with the scroll on his back, and returned with the cloth bulging, as though he had tucked something extra inside.

Xiang Yan went to ask Grandfather at the tail of the village. The old man was brewing a pot of dark tea; at the question of Peng he paused his cup and said: "Peng's master was also a Tima, called Old Baidai, past ninety when he died. Before he went he gave Peng the scroll and said, 'I fed it all my life and it fed me all my life; now it is time for it to eat me.' They found him on the cliff top, holding the scroll, smiling. After that Peng aged slowly — clear eyes, steady legs — and the village said the Tima was blessed by the gods. But think on it: what blessing comes without a price." The grandfather lowered his voice: "That scroll is not painted by man. It grows itself. You add one, and it asks for one more. In the old days few died by violence here and the scroll went hungry; Peng even went to other towns to gather. Now the world is restless — the mine shafts, the river's waves — young men die by violence in plenty, the scroll eats its fill, and Peng ages slow. But the fuller it grows, the more it hunts living souls. It wants not only the violently dead; it wants clean-lived youths, to hold the brush for it, to man its bridges."

The grandfather took another sip. Long ago, he said, another young man of the village had not returned from the mine and Peng took him in; that family then dreamed every year of their son poling a boat on a river, and woke with the pillow damp as if with river water, and later moved away and were heard from no more. The grandfather watched the scum on his tea: "Your father is likely in that same pass. Peng finds it easy to take a soul, hard to send it — hard because the scroll will not let go. The fuller it eats, the more it keeps the taken as its own and grudges to release them."

On the third night Xiang Yan could not sleep. The village was silent but for insects and the creek, and something led his feet to Peng's house. The shaman's dwelling sat at the very end of the village, against an old cliff grown thick with ferns and moss, damp enough to wring water from the air. The door was unbarred; he pushed and it opened.

In the center of the room hung the Spirit Scroll, longer than he remembered, the hemp reaching from beam to floor, covering near half a wall. By the dying red coals of the hearth Xiang Yan saw the painted landscape alive — water running beneath the bridge, trees swaying in a wind, and even the painted moon in the sky giving off a cold white light. And by the bridge stood a man in a blue cloth jacket, turned in profile, looking back at him.

That face was Xiang Laosì.

Xiang Yan's legs gave; he nearly sat down. He crawled on hands and knees until his nose almost touched the coarse hemp, and the figure on the cloth turned slightly too, raising a hand as if to touch his face through the weave. From deep within the threads came a voice, faint as seepage: "Yan-wa."

A coal in the hearth popped at his feet, and the mouth of Xiang Laosì on the cloth moved again. This time Xiang Yan heard it clear: not 'Yan-wa' but 'living one… do not come in.'

Not a dream. He pinched his own thigh hard and gasped at the pain.

"You see it," came Peng's voice from behind. The old man had entered unnoticed; his right eye burned in the dark like two points of ghost-fire. "I told you the violently dead cannot find home; I paint them in and send them to the Hall. Your father that year did not wholly die in the mine — they bundled and tricked him, filled the gallery with him as a living stake. The body was never found, but his soul drifted home. Had I not taken him in, the village would have bred a living plague, beasts first, then men. I painted him into the scroll, held him under the Iron-Armor Bridge; three years, and he should have been sent on."

"Should have been sent — why was he not?" Xiang Yan's throat closed; his voice shook to pieces.

Peng was silent a long while. He reached out, his branch-like fingers stroking the face of Xiang Laosì on the cloth, and that face sank slowly to a faint ink mark, then rose again, like a figure beneath water one can never press down. "Your father's fate is hard; his soul is heavier than others. The night I took him in, the scroll ate him and would not spit him out. Later I understood — this scroll is not painted by me; it paints itself. It is hungry and feeds on the violently dead. Each one I take in adds a year to my life; my eyes stay clear, my legs steady. But the more it eats, the more it wants to take me in as well. Your father — which number he is, I have lost count."

As if to himself, Peng went on: along the spirit-road there are posts — the Iron-Armor Bridge needs a guide, the Blood-River Ford a boatman, the Nine Bends a lamp-bearer, the gate of the Hall a herald. The souls within take these duties in turn, the hard-fated serving longest. Your father is at the ford because in life he drove the gallery in the mine and knew water-ways by hand; the scroll chose him, and no other soul would serve. As he spoke he tapped the cloth, and Xiang Laosì's shade rose again, this time with a slender bamboo pole in his hand, dipping it into the water, again and again.

Xiang Yan stared at the scroll. As the fire flickered, the tiny faces turned toward him one by one, men and women, old and young, all looking at him, mouths opening and closing without sound, yet seeming to say the same thing. A terrible fear took him — among these faces, was there the herdsboy drowned last year? The widow who hanged? And earlier still, those whose names he had never known?

"You came tonight because it led you," Peng said. "The scroll knows a living soul. You went away to study; your fate is clean, untouched by blood or plague. It wants you."

Xiang Yan lurched back two steps, his back striking a post. But Peng laughed, the wrinkles at his eyes piling together, the empty socket beneath the glaze twitching too: "What are you afraid of? I am old; soon I cannot feed it enough. When this breath of mine is spent, the scroll is yours. You are the only educated man in the village, the only one who reads every character; only you can go on sending the souls to the Hall — or go on feeding it."

"I will not."

"You have no choice." Peng drew from his breast a roll of unfinished hemp, its edges still stained with mineral pigment. "This is left for you. Your father has poled three years at the ford, waiting for someone to ferry him across. Either you take up the scroll and send him yourself, or the scroll, hungry, eats you first. One way or another, you must set down that stroke."

That night Xiang Yan did not take the scroll. He ran back to his mother's room, barred the door, propped a stool against it, and sat by the hearth until dawn. At the first cockcrow he dozed and dreamed a long scroll unfurling beneath his feet; the figure of his father walked toward him step by step and reached to draw him into the painting. The wind inside the picture was cool, carrying the iron-rust and damp smell of the mine's depths. He woke drenched in sweat and heard his mother softly weeping at the other end, calling his father's name.

In daylight he went again to Peng's house. The door stood open, the room empty, the scroll gone. The villagers said Peng had shouldered a long bundle before first light and climbed the old cliff to "give thanks," and had not come down. Someone had seen him on the cliff top, seated facing the Wushui, the scroll in his arms, already cold, a smile at his lips, as if at last something had received him, received him into the Hall he had sung to all his life.

Some said he jumped; some said the scroll dragged him up. The village elder who went to recover the body said Peng's right hand was clenched on the hem of the hemp, the nails torn back, as if he would not let go — or as if something would not let him. The scroll wrapped about him, proof against rain, proof against sun, as though still living, still drawing breath in slow gulps.

In Peng's house Xiang Yan found half a hand-copied Tima scripture, yellow hemp paper, its characters eaten by insects into blotches. The first pages painted the posts of the spirit-road: the Iron-Armor Bridge railed with white bone, the Blood-River Ford running a rust-red, lamp-bearing shadows crouched in the Nine Bends, a faceless herald at the Hall's gate. Beneath that last crooked line was pressed a brown fingerprint, like a dried-blood seal. And on the final page a crooked line: "The spirit-scroll is no scroll; it is a road. He who paints the road must in the end walk the road he painted. I fed it forty-three years; it fed me forty-three years. Whoever takes the brush next, enters the scroll."

He closed the book; his hands shook so that he could not even hold the corner.

Xiang Yan resolved to destroy the roll of hemp. He dug out the unfinished cloth Peng had forced on him and threw it into the hearth. The hemp would not catch; it only reddened slowly, as if soaked in blood. He leaned close and saw faint shadows rising on it, tiny figures in motion, and at the very center an empty space that day by day took on an outline — an outline whose brows and eyes grew clear, and were his own face. He snatched the cloth out, beat out its red, and thrust it back into the luggage lining, and dared not touch it again.

For the rest of the summer Xiang Yan dared not touch anything to do with painting. He helped his mother split wood, dry grain, mend the leaking tiles, and at night blew out the oil lamp early, lying clothed on the bamboo bed with his eyes open to the creek. Yet on some nights, closing his eyes, he still saw the scroll slowly unfurl in the dark — the water beneath the bridge, the whispers in the trees, and his father standing by the bridge, turning again and again to look at him, lips moving, saying, it seemed: "Yan-wa, come fetch your father."

The night before he left, his mother searched the house through and pressed into his hands a blue cloth bundle his father had left before going to the mine. Inside, besides a few old bills, was a length of bronze bell tied with red cord — the protective bell Peng had given Xiang Laosì years before, saying to wear it kept the plague away. His mother said: "Take it; it will keep you safe on the road." Xiang Yan tied it to his luggage; the bell lay cool against the cloth.

The bus back to the city rocked across the half-collapsed stone bridge, and Xiang Yan looked back at the village, the stilt houses stacked against the cliff, in the dusk like a painting no one had finished. He touched the little bell and suddenly remembered Peng's words: the scroll knows a living soul.

In his pack, besides that bell, was the roll of unfinished hemp Peng had forced on him at parting — he had refused it, but the old man, seizing a moment unobserved in the dark, had slipped it into the lining of his luggage.

Xiang Yan had never dared open it. He was afraid that if he did, he would see the first stroke already laid down, and that the stroke was his own face.

The bus entered a tunnel; the light went out for an instant. In that instant of black he heard with perfect clarity, from within the lining of his luggage, a single faint ring of bronze — a tiny clang, like someone, inside the painting, shaking a bell, waiting for him to set down the brush.

The bus left the tunnel and the light returned. Xiang Yan looked down at his hands — ten fingers, whole — yet always felt between them the damp of mineral pigment. The little bell on his luggage rang once more, a soft clang, like an answer, like a spur. He watched the hills rush backward past the window and suddenly longed for home, and suddenly feared it — feared that one day he would turn and find the roll in his luggage already finished, and the figure on it beckoning, through the cloth, to the him that stood outside.

Note from the Midnight Record: The Tujia Tima, called in Bizika the old man who speaks with the gods, presides over sacrifice and thanksgiving, exorcism and divination; his instruments are the eight-treasure bronze bells, the ringed blade, and the buffalo horn, and above all a long Spirit-Scroll hung at rites to chart the divine road and guide the dead. Folk say the Tima can gather wandering souls and send them to the Hall — yet souls are heavy and the scroll is light; easy to take in, hard to send on. This tale records but one corner of it.