The Wandering God

39 Goose Claws In The Snow 1/3

雪泥鴻爪
Xuění hóngzhǎo
Goose claws in the snow.
Traces of past events. The fleeting nature of human life.
*~*~*~*~*~*

(Warning: first part of the chapter contains references suicide some may find upsetting.)

Sanli knew he was dreaming, but still he could not wake up.

The prince was in the valley, wandering the well worn paths among ferns and trees. Beneath his bare feet he could feel the cool damp of fallen leaves, with the occasional sharp poke of a twig.

His feet led him through the green maze of the forest, till a courtyard was before him.

It was a courtyard only intended for servants. Humble, and filled with small, single story buildings of stone and crumbling brick. Ferns had taken root in the roof tiles and no one much cared to clean them away. For the servants, as long as the tiles stretched over their heads and kept off the rain, it did not matter what grew above them.

Sanli paused in the entrance to the courtyard, surveying the familiar place. This courtyard was for lower level servants, devoted to cleaning the worn items of the royal family and the superior house servants. There was the large low stone trough where they washed the many linens and clothes of the royal family, there the bamboo poles where they hung them out to dry. On the far side ran the long tables for folding and beside them the many baskets for carrying the items back to where they had first come from.

Usually the courtyard would be bustling, filled with loud voices and servants carrying baskets of clothes and bedding. But this was a dream, and it was empty.

Sanli willed his feet to turn and leave the courtyard before he could enter. He begged his feet to take him away from this place. But they did not listen.

Instead they carried him across the familiar courtyard. Past the washing trough. Past the cracked tile where grass grew through. Past the pillar that the older boys had tied him to with old strips of linen when his mother had been gone one day. At first he had mistakenly thought it some sort of game. Then the boys had begun tickling him. They tickled him till he cried, till shameful wet-warmth ran down his legs, soaking his trousers. Till he begged them to stop. But the bigger boys had continued, laughing at his sobs, till one of the gardeners had cut Sanli free and chased them away.

Sanli's feet carried him away from the hateful memory, along the covered walkway, passing the low peeling red doors that led to the servants rooms. A single room could house families of ten or more.

By comparison Sanli and his mother were lucky. It was just the two of them in their empty room. But Sanli hated it there. No matter how his mother decorated their room and tried to tell him it was their home, he hated it.

I don't want to go there.

Sanli willed himself to wake up. Willed his dream self to stop walking. Neither happened.

It can't be that day. It was raining, and it's not now.

As if in reply, rain started pattering across the courtyard, on the tiles of the walkway overhead. Dripping, pouring off the eaves as though it had been raining for hours.

No, no, no—

Sanli's feet stopped outside the last door of peeling red paint. Characters had been scratched in the wood, the names of past inhabitants. Sanli remembered them all, every last name, every jerkily etched character.

His mother had carved their own names there, when they had first arrived, in her native language. Sanli looked up from the height of his nine year old self, searching for the jovial circular letters of Samhan.