Dispersed through the halls of Chuanjiao Monastery, Minghua 123 settled down to sleep. Professor Kang knew the students were distraught over the group’s first casualty, but at the moment he had another duty. He kept vigil on a bench outside the room where monks were wrapping Shen’s body. They would stay for a night at the monastery and hold a funeral for the graduate student.
He tried to read the book on his lap, Tales of the City Gods. While the Legends contained many tales of obscure deities, some long forgotten and no longer worshipped, City Gods did not fall into this sad category. Each city had its own much-venerated City God, the god who protected the city’s boundaries and all who lived within. City God temples were always busy, drifts of incense smoke rising to the murmur of prayers for the city’s prosperity, for the health and safety of its citizens. He turned the pages and found the story he was looking for, “The Nanking City God’s Wife.”
A doctor had an only child, a beautiful daughter. One night she dreamed she had been given in marriage to Nanking’s City God. In the morning the young woman told her family about the dream and they were frightened for her. When she died in her sleep that night, they knew the City God had claimed her as his wife. The good people of Nanking honored her with an altar in the rear hall of the City God’s temple.
He closed the book when the Star sat on the bench beside him. “We’ll leave right after the funeral service,” Professor Kang said. “Right now, the least I can do is show respect while the monks make preparations.”
“Why did Mr. Shen have to stop there?” she said. Her beautiful eyes were haunted and miserable. “If only he’d kept up with our group, he would’ve been safe. Even just another twenty feet closer and he would’ve been safe.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” the professor said. “Heaven charged you with protecting the Library of Legends. We merely follow in the shelter of its slipstream. Shen’s bad luck is not your fault.”
“Tell the students to stay close to the carts,” she said. “Tell them again and again. They must not fall behind.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he repeated. He wanted to hold her hand, give her a pat on the back, some reassuring gesture. But she was immortal, she was a Star. It would be presumptuous to touch her. It was enough for him, it had always been enough for him, that she was in this world. Sitting beside him on the same bench.
THE FIRST TIME the professor had seen Sparrow, she had been on her hands and knees polishing the floor just outside his office. He had opened his door to see a young woman bent over, rubbing the wooden planks with half a coconut husk. It was still daytime, but inside the long hallway with its narrow windows and dark paneling, it was dim enough for him to see her glow.
Professor Kang blinked. He saw Sparrow Chen, the servant girl. He also saw a shining form that conjured memories of perfect, long-forgotten days. His senses swam with visions of trees reflected in clear lakes, the fragrance of magnolia, the quick soft beat of golden feathers flashing between green banana palms. Then she had looked up, her features exquisitely and impossibly beautiful. Unquestionably not of this world.
How does one start a conversation with the supernatural?
“A Star,” she said, in response to his questioning gaze. “From the constellation of the Purple Forbidden Enclosure.”
Professor Kang’s words came out in an awkward rush. When he was a boy in Soochow, he told her, his family had lived next door to a Fox spirit. He had been friends with the Fox until he left for university in Nanking. On another occasion in Soochow, he had been strolling beside a canal early one morning and glanced up to see the figure of the Goddess of Mercy painted on a cloud. As the cloud moved across the sky, she turned her head slowly from side to side, looking down on the city as though she was inspecting it. He had watched until high winds scattered the cloud and the Goddess of Mercy dissolved into the sky.
“Fewer and fewer mortals can see us now,” the Star had said, her smile wistful. “Whether it’s to do with an open heart or random chance, who can say. But then, who’s to know why heaven allows any mortals to see us at all. I’m glad you’re one of them, Professor.”
Kang never pressed her for explanations, never asked what she was doing in the form of a young woman. Nor did he ask her what it was like, her home in the heavens. He didn’t feel entitled to know. Just thinking of the Star, the fact of her presence, filled him with a quiet, incandescent joy. He was a small boy again, in the presence of wonder. He was grateful for whatever the Star chose to reveal but he never presumed to ask.
Over time she shared tidbits of her story. After a while, he patched together the fragments. He consulted the Library of Legends. When he could contain his curiosity no longer, he had to ask.
“Your story,” he said, “it very much resembles the love story of the Willow Star and the Prince.”
The Star seemed relieved. Glad, even. She said she didn’t mind having someone in this life who knew her true identity. Especially since Shao wasn’t allowed to know.
“It’s one of the conditions set by the Queen Mother of Heaven,” she said. “It’s all a game to the gods. Someday Shao may remember who I am, what we meant to each other. Then I’ll be allowed to take him home with me, back to the heavens.”
Professor Kang shook his head. “But to do this through eternity, waiting through so many reincarnations, not knowing if you’ll ever manage to make him remember.”
“It’s been interesting,” she said. “I’ve lived among mortals for hundreds of years but still find your obstinacy hard to fathom. I used to think you were stubborn because of your tendency to hope.”
At first, she had found humans’ hopefulness endearing. Valiant even. Now she couldn’t begin to count all the ways they managed to delude themselves.
“When the dragon winds of disaster rush at you,” she said, “you always believe yours will be the one house left untouched by the storm. You invest in one dubious scheme after another, never learning from past mistakes. You trust that a husband might stop drinking or a lazy son finally discover ambition.”
“So have you given up on us,” he’d said, “we mortals and our many failures?”
“Worse than that, Professor.” A wry smile. “I’ve learned to hope.”
THE MONKS FILED out of the room, leaving the shrouded body on the table. They bowed to the professor as they passed.
The Star stood up. “Come with me,” she said. “I have another duty. There’s someone I must find.”
The professor followed her through the monastery’s many courtyards. Plaintive voices and sounds of muffled weeping seeped out from doorways and windows. In addition to the students, Chuanjiao Monastery sheltered other refugees, a constant stream over the past few months, the abbot had told him. The Star continued to the far end of the monastery and entered a small courtyard squeezed between two empty, dilapidated halls. The professor paused beside the first hall and peered inside the door. Stacks of broken furniture and empty crates lined the walls. A family lay fast asleep huddled in one corner, arms and legs thrown possessively over their belongings.
The door to the second hall was wide open. A man wandered in and out, muttering as he walked. His tunic of dove-gray cotton was streaked with ash, his trousers dirty at the knees. Despite his obvious confusion, there was dignity in his bearing. It was hard to tell his age; his face could’ve belonged to an exhausted thirty-year-old or a man of fifty.
“I’m sorry, so sorry,” he murmured over and over to no one in particular. “I could do nothing. So sorry.” The man made a circuit of the courtyard, then went inside the hall and came out to begin all over again.
The Star gestured Professor Kang to stay back.
She stepped in front of the man. He stared back at her with dull, unfocused eyes. The Star put her hands on his shoulders and slowly, his eyes cleared. He stood taller and his plain tunic shed its dirt and took on the unmistakable sheen of heavy silk, lengthened to a long robe with wide sleeves, elaborate bands of embroidery at the hems. Robes of state from another century. He was larger than any normal man, his bearing regal, features transformed by a long, magnificent beard.
“You’re a Star,” the deity said. “Which one?”
“The Willow Star,” she replied. “And you’re the Nanking City God.”
“I couldn’t do anything,” the City God said, his handsome face miserable. “How can I protect the boundaries against machines that fly over walls? I had to leave, I couldn’t bear watching the destruction anymore.”
“You’re not to blame,” the Star said. “Airplanes didn’t exist when the gods made you guardian of Nanking. Where are you going now?”
“I don’t know.” His voice faltered. “I’ve just been following some families from Nanking. Looking after them. They’re going west. That’s all they know. West.”
“West is good,” the Star said gently. “Northwest, actually. The Kunlun Mountains. The Queen Mother of Heaven has opened the Palace gates.”
The City God’s eyes widened.
“It’s time for you to leave,” the Star said. “The Palace gates won’t stay open forever. Can you find your way there?”
The Nanking City God nodded. Then he bowed to the Star, one celestial being to another. As he straightened up, his silk gown shimmered into transparency. He made his way out of the courtyard, the tall figure growing mistier until it vanished altogether.
“There will be other departures,” the Star said, still looking at the spot where the Nanking City God had been. “Animal and guardian spirits. Minor deities. Creatures of protection. It’s long overdue.”
“If so many are coming out into the open I wonder that more people aren’t seeing them,” the professor said. “Well, even if others can see spirits, how would I know anyway?”
“There is one other person at Minghua who can see spirits,” the Star said. “Hu Lian. But she’s not quite ready.”
“Ah,” the professor said. “I did wonder.”
“She loves reading the Legends but to her they’re just part of China’s mythology,” the Star said. “Her mind finds ways to deny what her heart perceives. But perhaps, one day.” She shrugged, a graceful lift of the shoulders.
Professor Kang nodded. One had to be open to gifts from the gods, otherwise a Fox spirit was just an animal, the Goddess of Mercy only a cloud. And a Star merely a servant girl. Beyond plain dumb luck, the professor couldn’t say why he’d been given the gift to see supernatural beings. Yet he sagged under the recognition of what he’d just seen and heard.
China and Japan had been fighting for decades, battles both nations politely described as “incidents.” Now they were openly at war. Professor Kang realized he’d been hoping the gods might intervene. Perhaps not to end the war, but a small miracle of some sort to reduce the suffering.
But now he knew that prayer and pleas would not move the gods. Now he knew there was another evacuation underway.