People call me Da Qing.
Not a name anyone chose. It grew the way moss grows, because I have always been green. Through the spring I am green; through the summer I am green; when the snows come and the whole valley goes white I am still green, and the snow sits on my branches like a rumor it does not quite believe. They think qing means young. I have never corrected them. Letting myself look young is the cheapest thing I have learned in a very long life, cheaper than explaining. Explaining requires a mouth.
Below me lies Yinchuan — the shaded creek, though the creek itself ran thin a century ago and no one uses the name for anything but the village. Three hundred and twelve households: one smithy, one village school, one observatory built to watch the sky and unable to see much of it through the valley's shoulders. Human lives grow in and around me the way roots grow around stones. Weddings set their tables in my shade. Funerals come here too, to give the dead back. They do not say "bury." They say "return." A person dies under my branches as though they had borrowed something and now must hand it back. No one remembers where the phrase came from. It is older than the Returning Society, older than anything the village can name; and the Society's leader, He Song, preaches that death is a door and the door is me, and half the village believes him. I cannot speak, so I have never been able to tell them the one thing that would have saved them the trouble. The door is me. They have been standing in it for a thousand years, one foot inside, one foot out.
I do not keep a calendar of human days; the days keep themselves, and I only stand where they pass. But there is a shape to a village day that I have known for as long as there has been a village here, and could not forget if I tried: the school bell that begins it, the hammer of the smithy that keeps it, the lamplight that ends it, going up window by window like a second village made of fire, one that wakes only at night. The people of Yinchuan believe the tree at the mouth of the village stands apart from their lives. It does not. There is nothing in this valley that has not passed under me or through me at some hour, and I have kept every sentence of it the way I keep light — without choosing, and without being able to throw anything away.
This morning, at my roots, Granny Liu asked the question she had asked yesterday, and the day before.
"Da Qing," she said, "do you think Old Liu still remembers the way home?"
Old Liu was her husband. He has been returned to the soil for twenty-two years.
Her forgetting is a light forgetting, the way water runs over a stone: the stone stays the same stone, only rounder with time. She asks, and then she answers herself, the way people do when the question has been answered long ago by someone they trust. "He remembers," she says. "He remembers the way better than anyone." She pats my bark the way you pat an old friend, and goes inside to warm the congee for Xing.
Xing is my other lodger. Twelve years old. Climbing is one of the ways she enters the world — there are children who learn a place by walking it, and there is Xing, who learns a place by rising through it. This morning, when she had worked her way up to my third branch, a button fell out of her pocket. She collects things that fall: feathers, cicada husks, scraps of paper the wind brings up from other people's wash lines. The button rolled into an old scar of mine and lodged there, out of reach. She sighed and said, "Keep it, then. It's yours."
She does not know what heavy things I have kept.
At dusk Meng Guan came down from the observatory. He did not pass me by. He stood at a distance, old star-rod in his hand — he calls it his chi, his measure — and aimed it at one place in the sky for a long time. He smells of old wood and paper, of a trade that has outlived most of the things it measured. He was not here to worship me. Everyone in Yinchuan passes me; he is the only one who passes me the way you pass something that ought to be measured.
I received the signal this morning before he did, along my roots, through the net in the soil that is ten thousand times wider than the village. It was very light. Like someone, across an entire galaxy, knocking once on a door.
The instruments of the observatory wrote it down as a spectral line: a star that was due to go dark gave one extra flash before it went out.
Meng Guan wrote in his ledger: error.
It is not an error. I know that knock. It is the bloom-signal — the word a guardian sends when, at the very end, it lets out, all at once, all the light it has hoarded in a lifetime. The light takes years to travel here, so what I receive now is a farewell that left a long time ago. In four hundred years of watching, the humans have recorded more than a hundred such farewells, and every time they write the same thing: another one has died.
The first time they wrote one of these down, I felt the village change beneath me. They had watched the sky for omens and for gods before that; from that night they watched it for a deadline. They were not wrong that something was ending. They were wrong about which side of the sky was doing the ending. A farewell and a death look exactly alike through a lens — a light going out. Only the being that lets go of the light can tell the difference, and it never says which.
At night I read the remaining ones, the way I read everything, by the tremor in the soil rather than by number. Not many are left. The village school teaches that seven springs remain to us. If I kept count, my number would be smaller than theirs — but I do not keep count, and I have never told them, and I know that a truer number would not have been a kindness. Fear is not cured by arithmetic.
And there is the other thing.
Every morning, for as long as I have been myself, I reach for my first memory. I remember the color of the first sky the way a person remembers the taste of a mouthful of water from before they knew the word "thirst." That taste is the anchor of my whole tree. For three hundred and twenty million years I have fished it up out of the water every dawn and held it a moment, and the day has broken.
The reaching is not a thought. It is the first thing I do, older than light, the way a man who has slept his whole life in one house knows the doorframe in the dark. Some mornings the water comes up at once, whole and warm, and I hold it and the day breaks; some mornings it is slow, and I wait, as patient as I have always been, until it surfaces. In all that time, through every age and every sky I have kept, I have never once had to wait long for it.
This morning I reached for it.
It was empty.
The water is still there. I know it is there. But my roots, for the first time, could not hold it.
Three hundred and twenty million years, and this is the first dawn I have come up empty.
I carry two stone fruit on me. They never ripen, never fall. Xing calls them my toad-warts. He Song preaches that they are the knockers on the door of the cycle of return. Neither of them knows the truth, which is smaller and heavier: they are two sentences I put away when I was young, because I was not ready to say them. A sentence kept unsaid grows hard. I thought about that this morning. Perhaps I should say them after all — before I forget them.
But I have no mouth.
All my life I have had more time than I knew what to do with. This is the first morning time has felt short.