If I hadn’t stolen from Zhinu this whole sorry tale would never have started. But I’m a thief, what can I say? The Heavenly Empress made me that way.

“Look what I did,” she said, the day I was created. “See, my subjects, how these beautify our Celestial Heaven. Like lawn ornaments, only they fly.”

Myself, suddenly born, looked to one side and another. All the other birds were preening as much as the Empress. A regular colour parade.

Not me.

“How do I make things pretty, with just my black and white?” I asked.

Steal the beauty, whispered a voice. A troublemaker spirit, or the Empress herself? I suppose she meant for me to fly down and get stuff from Earth, but it’s a long way and I can’t be bothered. Besides, there’s prettifying objects much closer than that. For instance, have you seen Zhinu’s workshop? She is an artiste! There’s plenty to covet right there, and believe me, I do! Even her tools are beautiful. Jewelled bobbins, shuttles of fine gold, tools with the neat curve of a gull’s feather. (Well, they’re not really that. Celestials don’t use human tools. But I have to call them something.)

One day I’ll steal her finished work, something airy, one of her clouds to line my nest. I nearly did it once, but she caught me and held me up to her face.

“How could you?” she asked me, gravely disappointed. “This one’s for Eldest Sister. All my days and hours of work aren’t enough to make a gift beautiful enough for her, but I’m trying! Would you really steal that away from me?”

I wouldn’t. Or not that time, anyway. It really gets me right under the keel-bone when their goddess eyes go big and brim with tears.

So I stole a bobbin. One she desperately needed for her latest project. Didn’t I just laugh when she found where I’d hidden it at Niulang’s place! That bookworm, she’d never given him a second glance and now she was knocking on his door (I’d left clues, that’s half the fun).

I don’t know what their first words to each other were. I was too busy flapping around and dancing from foot to foot saying “I sTole YoUR FavouRitE bOBBin aNd You DidN’T noTIce!!”

By the time I gave up that carry-on they were face to face and Zhinu was all pink and Niulang was pressing a book into her hand. He put his hand on top of hers when he did it too, like he thought she needed help holding it. Insulting, if you ask me. Zhinu is perfectly capable of holding a not-very-heavy book. She has strong hands and her fingers are regular machines when she is weaving.

She took the book and her fingers curved around it in a soft way and she stroked the smooth leather cover, smiling. “It’s beautifully made.”

Niulang kind of blurted, “No, but inside! Inside, that’s what’s important.” He looked alarmed, and rightly so. Zhinu might take the book apart to see how it was made. That would almost be enough to make him angry, and I was tempted to disassemble a book right then and there. I’d never seen what angry Niulang looked like.

 

~*~

 

He caught me hanging around his place a few days later. I’d gone for the books, stayed for the pantry moths. I’m very partial to them. “Take this to Zhinu,” said Niulang, removing me from a jar of millet. Next thing I know I’m fluttering around carrying notes every day.

“Why am I doing this?”

“You started it. Bringing Zhinu to my house. You are a gem of a bird.”

“Gems. Now you talk my language.”

“I don’t have gems, but I’ll immortalise you in poetry if you like.”

I didn’t like. I’m strictly a materialist. But he did have a point. I started all this.

 

~*~

 

“What’s that boy doing hanging around Zhinu?” asked the Empress a few months later, nearly catching me with a beautifully penned note. It was a shame to choke it down, but I did.

“Oh, nothing,” I croaked. Talk about things sticking in your craw.

I belched the note up for Zhinu, later. She read it eagerly despite its garnish of semi-digested caterpillars. It wasn’t the usual, “Your eyes are stars, the moon rises in your face, oh jade-skinned beauty.” Nor even that old chestnut, “You’re not like the other girls.”

Niulang’s note began, “I like the way you weave things as though the little details are the whole point. You put such richness and invention in every corner. But then when you step back, there’s a pattern behind the pattern, and it’s strong and balanced. Your weaving is a lot like you.” And he signed with an initial.

 

~*~

 

Zhinu scratched me behind my neck, where I can’t reach myself. Bliss.

“Now give this to Niulang,” she said. A note to meet her at moonrise by the tea garden bridge. Standard tactics.

“I’m not so invisible as you might like,” I warned her. “A black and white bird is not your best choice for a secret messenger.”

She tapped my beak playfully. “Getting lazy on me?”

I wasn’t actually trying to avoid work, but she wouldn’t realise that. She comes from a manipulative family, and nobody ever says anything without meaning something else by it.

Dare I say, she’s different from the other girls? Out of all of the Celestials, she’s the only one I trust.

Anyway, she popped a beetle in my beak and fastened a tiny gem to my leg.

“Oooh, shiny!” I said, standing on my other leg for a better look. She laughed, then covered her mouth. The Empress always told her she laughed too loud.

Heavenly Empress had a lot of opinions about Zhinu. She was too much this, not enough that. Kindly meant, of course. Any time she cut Zhinu down, she finished with, “I’m only looking out for your best interests, like any tender-hearted mother would.”

Zhinu would listen with her eyes lowered until she could go and cry in private. Nobody wants to be an ungrateful daughter.

As far as I could see, the Empress was only looking to feather her own nest. I’m not the only one who likes shiny things; Zhinu’s weaving gave the Empress and her clique style and luxury they’d get nowhere else. If Zhinu married, the Celestials would lose that. The Empress wasn’t about to see Zhinu’s skills sashay off down the wedding path.

Don’t blame me for what happened next. I’m suited to hiding in moonlight and shadows, but that doesn’t automatically make me a cheerleader for romantic trysts. I hate night work.

So I was keeping watch in a rather tortuously clipped willow tree next to the bridge, straining to keep my eyes open, with Zhinu below me sighing and dropping pebbles in the stream. She heard Niulang’s footsteps a minute after I did, coming crisp and fast on the swept paths. A young man in a hurry.

I stuck my head under my wing for the next bit, as it would surely go on for a while. But I was startled out of my feathery dreams by a rush of air and silk. It takes a lot to make the Heavenly Empress fly, but there she was, suddenly, dropped into the young lovers’ meeting like an enraged cat. All hair and hiss.

The worst thing about the Celestials’ magic is that it sweeps you up in a haze of light and cloud and then drops you, dazed, into the new order of things. There’s no announcement that you’ll be turned into a goldfish or a rock, and here’s your list of crimes that you’ll wear stapled to your forehead. You find yourself where or what you are, and have to sort yourself out from there.

Which is how I found myself on Earth in a shabby dark hut that smelt of cow-dung. I flapped up to the rafters (yay, I still had wings!) and looked around. I’m not generally welcome indoors, but right at that moment nobody cared. There were three other people in the room, and their attention was all on a woman who was squatting over a pile of cloth and straw that might have been a mattress once.

“Do you have to make such a noise, woman! The gods see fit to send us a child, are you going to cry about it? It’s not like you’ve never done this before!”

That was the man. I disliked him at once. They say first impressions can be misleading, but in this case I was resoundingly correct. A scrawny middle-aged man, hands like knotted branches, a face flushed with everything except rude good health and outdoor living. He was growing the kind of facial hair that doesn’t see failure as a reason to give up.

The third person was a half-grown boy. He looked like he wished himself anywhere rather than here.

Well, that made two of us.

“Stop picking your nose and go see to the cows!” yelled the man, who seemed to be one of those one-volume sorts. It was a relief to follow the ragged-shirted boy outside and see where I’d landed. My head was clearing and I suspected my presence here was a corollary effect; a banishment spell had been cast, but the target wasn’t me. If I looked around, I might find Niulang.

It wasn’t a bad spot. Mountainous, with scattered patches of forest on the heights. I flew up to get an overview. There was a thatchy-looking village a little way down a muddy road. It was surrounded by meadows, which were pleasant and hosted a wealth of fat glossy cows.

No sign of Niulang. He wasn’t standing by a stream in a shimmer of Celestial magic, pondering his fate. Or praying for forgiveness by the village’s little stone temple (he’s not that much of a fool). He definitely wasn’t sitting around the village bar – basically a couple of wooden planks on barrels outside one of the houses. When Mr. Shouty turned up there a few hours later yelling “It’s a boy!” I took my cue to leave. I was out of guesses, so I returned to the first hut, which was a little way out of the village.

Things had quietened down there. The woman was sitting curved around a wrinkly red new baby. Somehow she had the energy to smile at his little snuffling noises. The older boy was stirring up the fire and putting on a pot for tea.

“What are you going to call him?” he asked.

My feathers roused up in a premonitory shiver a moment before the woman said, “I like Niulang.”

“It’s a stupid name,” declared the boy, and repeated it in a mocking sing-song way. “Niuuuuuuuuuuulang! Isn’t that, like, a poet’s name? What’s he gonna do, tell poems to the cows?”

“That’s what your father says.”

The boy caught sight of me then and threw a stone. Who keeps stones in their huts? Lazy sadistic wankpuffins, I suppose. I had just enough magic to turn it into a lizard and drop it in the doorway. Cue more shouting.

I flew back up to Heaven on leaden wings. Part of me hoped Zhinu had been banished elsewhere so I couldn’t find her to tell her the bad news. No such luck, though.

 

~*~

 

“A child?” Zhinu’s lips were trembling.

“A baby.”

“How am I supposed to love Niulang like that?”

“You’re not. That’s the point.”

What Niulang had seen in Zhinu’s weaving, all those months ago, should have warned the Empress that this wasn’t over yet. Anyone who can lay out such big designs can play the long game. But the Empress is, like me, distracted by the nearest shiny things. That’s a big reason the Universe is in such a mess. So while the Empress gloried in her wardrobe (its supremacy now secured), the dutiful daughter lay low and kept to her weaving. Occasionally I helped by adding in some thorns to her work.

The Empress came to complain.

“I’m sure I don’t know how that got in there,” Zhinu said, eyes lowered so she could cut a side-eye at me undetected. l inspected the underside of a wing until she looked away.

Afterwards, Zhinu told me to stop spiking her weaving. “They’re peace offerings,” she said, running her fingers over a brocade of gold and red.

“Peace offerings? Did you do wrong?”

“I knew the rules.” She held a length of transparent silk over her face and brushed it across her lips. “The Empress Mother’s life isn’t easy.” She blew on the fabric, making it flutter. “So I give her some softness.”

“Her life looks pretty sweet to me.”

We were on a porch of Zhinu’s apartments in the Celestial Palace. Zhinu looked past me at the jade fields of Heaven, the depths of sky above and below, the divine tracery of clouds whose perfect curves she captured in her weaving, and which reflected her art. “All things depend on everything else,” she said softly. “None of this endures, if the Empress leaves off her work.”

“You mean the Palace?” I said, cocking my head at the glazed tiles, the carvings, the intricate landscape of roofs and pillars. “It looks pretty solid.”

“Heaven and Earth. None of us understands these mysteries completely, not even her. Being depends on so many things. The placement of certain objects, certain numbers. I’m the seventh daughter, you know.”

“You know what I think of that seventh daughter crap?” I flipped my tail around and squirted off the railing.

Zhinu’s words made me think, though. Despite her enormous power, the Empress was so very restricted in what she could do. Zhinu’s carefree life must rankle her sometimes. So she meddled in the little field of things that were safe to meddle in. Things that didn’t hold up the pillars of the world.

 

~*~

 

Time passed. Niulang grew. Zhinu’s weaving took on darker tones, making patterns that were too big for me to take in. I caught glimpses of it sometimes.

“Yes, my daughter made these! Such talent! And so devoted to her work!” the Empress would crow, wearing a cloak whose enigmatic design might be part of an eyelash, or a word, maybe. The whole too big to see, let alone fit on a single garment. She’d get the murmurs of admiration she wanted. But once, when the Court crowd had left, the Empress sat with one of her cronies, her reclusive Aunt Shin. I made myself useful offering them gold teaspoons I’d cached in the rafters. However it wasn’t tea they were drinking, but something sharply alcoholic.

“You must be proud of your little Zhinu,” murmured Aunt Shin. “So artistic.”

The Empress Mother stared bleakly into her cup. “Artistic. And how will that serve her?”

Aunt Shin held out an arm for me to land on. An infrequent visitor, Shin always noticed me. Under her autumn-coloured silks, she had a loamy leaf-mould smell I trusted. “Clever bird,” she murmured, before turning back to the Empress. “What do you think Zhinu’s place is, then?”

“She is my seventh. A perfect daughter, I thought. That’s why it wounds me so much to discover nothing but a frivolous nature.” She fanned out the wide sleeve of her robe, one of Zhinu’s creations, and stroked it, shaking her head. “It’s beautiful. But I need her to be strong.”

“She had the strength to defy you,” said Aunt Shin tartly.

The Queen Empress caught her breath as if stung. “But the betrayal!” she hissed.

“It hurts, doesn’t it? But tell me, how strong are your six obedient daughters?”

Not that obedient, I could have told them.

There was a glaring silence. Then Aunt Shin passed it off with a creaking laugh.

When she’d gone, the Queen sat running Zhinu’s weaving through her fingers as though looking for a meaning in its pattern.

 

~*~

 

As a Celestial, Niulang had been a dreamer, a poetic boy with alabaster skin and fine fingers. Earthbound Niulang grew into a rangy youth with a ruddy complexion. He could heft a calf onto his shoulders, shove a reluctant cow into a milking stall, pitch hay, stack cowhides, or any of a hundred hard tasks he had. He was never short of milk, I suppose, and that’s why he grew so tall. With his long legs and love of silence, he took himself off far into the fields whenever he could, minding the cows. Or really, avoiding his quick-fisted father and mean older brother. His mother snuck him extra food when the others weren’t looking. Her beautiful boy, like a prince of heaven, she’d whisper when nobody could hear. I think Niulang caught her looks of dumb shy pride and understood them well enough.

He was beautiful, no amount of beatings erased that, and his brother hated him for it. And his father suspected Niulang wasn’t his. How right he was.

The Niulang that Zhinu fell in love with still existed inside this boy. I’d perch on the neck of his favourite cow, helping with a tick problem, or watching for wild dogs, and despite the mud and too-thin clothes and cloddish company, he still made up poems.

 

The evening folds its last gold

Around us, and hush!

The late birds, brimful of news

Write ink-winged across the sky

 

I’d like to claim I was a model for that. You know what? I will.

 

~*~

 

Zhinu was distressed to hear how Niulang’s life went, though I painted it in glowing terms as much as I could. “Healthful living. So much fresh air!”

Meanwhile Celestial life wasn’t all peaceful contemplation either. The Empress had her own herd of largely decorative cows to graze the Fields of Heaven and keep things from getting too bushy round the Celestial Palace. Her grand-nephew Shujun was supposed to take care of them. He was more interested in seeing how warlike the bulls could become. At times the royal cowshed was also a lively gambling den as the younger Celestials pitted their favourites against each other. Good times, until one of Shujun’s bulls charged the Royal Aunts as they crossed the fields on their way to pick lotus flowers. Skirts up, parasols flying and some elegant shanks moving faster than they’d done in years. I fell out of a tree laughing.

Shujun was condemned to Earth. As a cow. He could do some real work for once, said the Empress Mother.

As soon as Zhinu heard that, she asked me to get some hairs from one of Niulang’s cows on earth. No sooner said than done, though the cows weren’t into it. They weren’t moulting, so I really had to tug hard.

“What are you doing, you crazy bird!” said Niulang. I bobbed a thank-you bow and flew off with my bristly prize.

Niulang took it from me with all haste. Half an hour later she’d made a bodgy brown hat using some of the hair. “Give this to Shujun, quickly! Before the Empress sends him down.”

“Shujun wouldn’t be seen dead in this,” I said.

“That strutting fool. Tell him nobody’s going to see him but other cows.”

Shujun was difficult. He was determined to make a statement at sentencing, wearing the kind of finery that would spark murmurs of “what a tragic loss,” and “I wouldn’t mind a piece of that – when’s he coming back?” I got him to stuff the ugly hat under his magnificent headpiece by telling him Zhinu had woven in some memories he’d want to keep once he was a cow, as well as a spell to make sure he landed somewhere on Earth where he’d be well looked after. Which was true, actually.

She’d also woven in instructions. Protect Niulang!

Later that day I flew down to check on Niulang, and was unsurprised to see he had a new calf to look after. It grew into a glossy brown monster that could pull and plough all day. The envy of the whole province, that one. And madly loyal to Niulang.

 

~*~

 

Zhinu’s sisters wanted an adventure. Terribly secret, no-one must know. They didn’t invite Zhinu, saying she was in enough trouble already. I reckon they were recalculating their relationships since Zhinu was disgraced (but still possibly the favourite?) I told Zhinu anyway.

She smiled. “I have an idea. Can you get me some more hair from Niulang’s cows?”

Shujun was glad to see me, the cargomeister of heavenly gossip.

“Zhinu’s up to something. I need some of your hairs.”

“Be my guest,” he said, and just missed me with a thwack of his shitty tail. Mixed messages. I guess Shujun suffered from jealousy: I got to fly off to Heaven at the end of the day, and he didn’t.

While I was off doing that, Zhinu must have done a number on her sisters somehow, because by the time I got back, all they could talk about was visiting Earth in secret and playing shepherdesses and bathing in rivers and feeding chickens. Like, real risky stuff.

Risky if the Empress Mother caught them.

“Wear these,” said Zhinu, handing them each a hairy brown bracelet.

“Ugh, what’s this?” said her eldest sister.

“Magic,” said Zhinu. “It’s not pretty, but it’ll send us somewhere safe away from Mother’s eye.”

So down they went. And to be fair, it was pretty wild for them. Who knew water could be so cold, or grass so prickly, or cowpats so smelly? They had an absolute knockdown shrieking mud-pie fight. They stuck straws in their hair. They rolled down banks until they were dizzy, and chased each other with bramble whips, screaming with laughter. You never saw such a sight in your life. Or at least, never in heaven.

Niulang heard all this because, thanks to Zhinu’s bracelets, guess where our precious demigoddesses landed? Two shrieks away from where Niulang was watering his cows.

“Get a load of that,” said Shujun, plodding into view along the river path. And let out a heartfelt moo. Those girls had been his Heavenly playmates (whenever they could get out from under the Empress’s watchful eye). I don’t know if he’d ever seen them in quite this light though, running around naked and shining with mud, like refugees from some bathhouse of sin. He mooed again, out of lust this time.

The goddesses had noticed him. They wheeled like a flock of mud-swallows and started towards him, but when he pawed the ground and shook his impressive horns, they stopped in a twittering group.

“Oh my!” said one.

“What a big, uh, cow!” said another.

“That’s no cow!” said a third. “Look at its…!”

Shujun snorted.

The girls broke and fled. Shujun heaved into a lumbering gallop. Just then Niulang came loping along the river path and saw what was happening.

“Hai!” He caught up with Shujun and brought his stick down hard on Shujun’s hindquarters. “Hai!” Another yell, and he had Shujun by the tail. The worst way to catch a cow, but Niulang was both strong and fast, and when Shujun turned to shake him off, Niulang grabbed him by the leg and threw him like a wrestler. There was a gasp of admiration from the girls.

During all this, Zhinu had been sitting quietly on a stump, weaving grass stems. Now she stood up. She hadn’t stripped naked like the others, but the mud had dried her silk dress into a terracotta skin that left nothing to the imagination.

“Is that really Niulang?” she said wonderingly.

He turned at her voice, and you could tell that everything vanished for him: the angry beast levering itself back onto its feet, Zhinu’s giggling sisters poised between running or staying, the mud and grass and sky and river. For him, there was just her.

“Do I know you?” He took an uncertain step towards Zhinu. “I feel I’ve seen you before. How do you know my name?”

He was so wonderfully unconscious of his own grace, so careless of his shabby clothes, so admirably self-possessed. He didn’t look away, or bow, or stutter. He had the same wondering look in his eyes as her: here was a mystery, here flights of birds lightening his heart, here the hope he had only brushed with the fingertips of his poetry.

“I feel I’ve waited for you all my life.”

“Oh, Niulang!” Zhinu could say no more. She picked up her little square of grass weaving, shook it out, and it flared out into a shimmering cloak the colour of all nature. When she wrapped it around them both, they vanished.

I could only track them by the bending stalks of the grass as they walked away, side by side, and Zhinu’s broken murmurs of, “Oh my love, I have so much to tell you!”

I circled into the air to give them a bit of privacy. Also, invisible lovers don’t have much entertainment value.

Which wasn’t true of Shujun. He literally hightailed it down the river after Zhinu’s sisters. I mean, his tail was up like a flag. How their tails fared, I don’t know. They disappeared into the forest and I was too distracted by a really maggoty dead sheep to follow them. I think everyone had a good time though. For a few days afterwards, the Celestial daughters walked around with a kind of bowlegged preoccupied look and there was a lot of silent giggling in corners that made the Empress narrow her eyes at them. That all changed when the Empress realised Zhinu was gone. The mother-of-pearl doors of the Celestial Palace were not built for the amount of slamming that went on then, and did nothing to cut out the screeching and hair-pulling.

While human hair was being pulled (an excellent high-tensile component for nests, making me the ultimate winner in this conflict), I quietly collected up the cow-hair bracelets Zhinu had given her sisters. Without them, nobody could find where on Earth Zhinu and her sisters had gone. You’d think the Empress would have taken note of where she’d banished Niulang, but she’d gone the lazy route and done her usual half-pie effort, a spell that looked impressive but didn’t give her much control.

At least, that’s what I thought at first. But lately I’d been watching the Empress closely. She never really relaxed. Even alone, she held herself like somebody carrying a burden, something large and fragile as porcelain. No room for error. I could see how the small stuff slipped past her sometimes.

 

~*~

 

That should have been the end of the story. Zhinu and Niulang, together, in love, making babies. I missed the moment when Niulang introduced Zhinu to his family. Obviously he warned her things would be different. Mud, cows, terrible in-laws. She missed her studio. You’d think a Celestial Being would outshine all the local girls at everything but at first, she couldn’t work with Earth fibres at all. She’d make something and feel so proud of it: a bedcover or a sash that no mortal woman could hope to equal. Fine and beautiful as a spiderweb. Then it would fall apart and people would shout that she was cheating them. Meanwhile, the crushed-looking local girls would shyly offer up their wares, lumpy trousers and mud-coloured shirts, and the knowledgeable hands of their buyers would run over them approvingly, “Ah, we’ll get some good wear out of these.”

So although Zhinu and Niulang were in love, still there were a lot of tears and solitary walks in the fields under the guise of taking Shujun to the river.

A couple of times when I flew in to see how they were doing, I laughed because Niulang and Shujun had ploughed the symbols for “Fuck you” into the fields. You could only see it from the air, or Heaven. Asking for trouble. But it made Zhinu laugh, and that’s what was important. Niulang must have been bitter to learn of the Celestial life he’d lost, but being reunited with Zhinu and learning about his true nature made up for a lot. It hurt his heart that he couldn’t give Zhinu a better life.

That all went by-the-bye when Zhinu had her children. That was something she’d never have had in Heaven, and she adored them. I liked perching on the rafters to watch her tending them and playing with them, and when I could trust them not to pull my tail-feathers, I joined in. Niulang’s Earthly mother would watch us and smile if her husband Shouty-face wasn’t looking. She generally looked gobsmacked, wondering how her son had found such a divine creature. It did her the world of good when she realised that there were a thousand things about baby-care that she could teach Zhinu. So shy her hands shook, but she’d do it anyway, leaning across Zhinu to adjust a baby’s wrappings so it didn’t overheat or chewing up mouthfuls of food for them before they had their own teeth.

Zhinu would look at her with a little serious kink between her brows, wondering what she’d missed. Then she’d get it, and give Niulang’s mother a radiantly grateful smile. Niulang’s mother would freeze for a second, then smile back. As time went on, the little frozen pause got shorter and shorter. It gave me that feeling like when you fluff yourself into your feathers and make yourself into a warm ball. All of them together, Zhinu, Niulang, the children and Niulang’s mother, were like that warm ball.

Then Niulang’s older brother married into the local tavernistocracy, and his father the Yellblock died of, I don’t know, yelling, so everything was sweet as could be.

It couldn’t last.

 

~*~

 

Even somebody as busy as the Empress was bound to put two and two together eventually, and find it added up to a certain bird being less of a spectator and more of a participant in the drama of Niulang and Zhinu. A lot of birds make a lot of flaunt out of their gaudy feathers, but try to put them on the spot and they’re all “Hey, nothing to see here, just a bunch of leaves and maybe a bird. Oops, gone. Don’t talk to me.” Whereas I’m a real open-air strutter, a walking news headline, Bird Alert! Read All About It in black and white.

In other words, I’m too visible.

I really loathe her magic. Like she’ll put down a jewelled sandal and some mortal goes to admire it and it imprisons them in a teahouse made of claws. This time it was a golden fan with silk tassels accidentally-on-purpose dropped under the willow tree where the Empress and her sisters like to gossip and play mahjong. They say magpies chatter, but really!

Anyway, they all floated off in a waft of Celestial perfume, I dived down to pick up the pretty fan and its spars separated out and grew into bars around me. I was just a bird in a gilded cage. What a dick move.

The Empress came back a lot less gracefully an hour later. I wasn’t too graceful then either. I’d tried to knock my cage over and roll it towards some leftovers. No steering. All I managed was to dunk myself in the edge of the pond. From there I was forced to watch ants mobilise to carry away the rice I’d been aiming for. Them and their irritating work songs. By the time the Empress arrived I was less bird and more angry damp mop.

“Gracious ornament to the Celestial branches,” she cooed, feigning surprise. “What are you doing there?”

“You called me a lawn ornament once,” I muttered.

“It was a figure of speech.”

“It was not.”

She took out a fan matching the one that lured me into this mess and fanned herself. “So hot today. Maybe you’re wise to take a dip and cool off.”

When the Empress smiles, her eyes stay wide open watching to see how deep her barbs go before they cut you.

When she snapped the fan shut, my cage got magically smaller. She flipped her fan open and shut a few more times and my cage kept shrinking. First the bars crushed my feathers then they squeezed me.

“What do you want?” I croaked.

She snapped the fan shut one more time, with feeling. “Tell me where Zhinu is.”

“I have no idea.”

“Enjoy your swim.” And she punted me further out into the pond. It wasn’t a floating cage and I would have drowned if it hadn’t landed on a submerged log. No way of telling whether the Empress had magicked it to happen that way. Surely if she wanted to find out where Zhinu was, she needed me alive. Trouble is, you could never be sure.

She went tripping off like a Goddess half her age. Petty cruelty is invigorating I suppose. I should know.

Some ducks came past for a good laugh. Magpie in a cage, wet, stuck in the middle of a pond.

“Ha ha, I’m sure,” I croaked. “Perverts. I see what you get up to in the reeds when you think nobody’s looking.”

They were dibbling around for some insults that weren’t limp as waterweed when some of my magpie friends flew over.

“Look at this golden cage!” I shouted.

“Shiny!” they agreed, circling down.

“But frustrating!” I said. “Too heavy! See if you can get a flock together to mob it. Everyone a winner. Gold nests for all!”

So they did that, and it was a merry party indeed. We’re Celestial birds after all, and our combined magic was enough to rip that thing to shreds.

Everyone a winner except me, who landed on a branch to dry myself off only to have it turn into a snake and carry me to the Empress in its jaws. I suppose she’d been watching the whole time.

She was on her throne. “Your life in Heaven could become very unpleasant,” she said. The snake demonstrated by swallowing down a bit more of my hindparts. I’ve always loathed snakes. I didn’t know they were such toadies, though.

When there was just my beak left, I finally cracked and told her where Zhinu was. “With Niulang.”

 I did get a tiny bit of pleasure from watching her turn spectacularly red. But then she forced me to tell her where on Earth they were, and when I did, she went off like a thundercloud. Everything in Heaven went dark, rain chundered down, the wind got up and there was lightning. The snake barfed me up in fright.

A wild storm, and not just weather, but a riding of Celestial soldiers. Down, down they spiralled, into the world below.

I staggered into the air and hid in a yew tree. No way I could show myself again till I’d moulted into a new coat. I wasn’t just filthy. I wished I wasn’t me anymore. A lousy snitch.

 

~*~

 

The soldiers brought Zhinu back. She’d got feisty on Earth, and she was beside herself, fighting the soldiers like a wild thing.

“Look what Earth has done to you!” spat the Empress, pulling at Zhinu’s peasant clothes. The soldiers had to hold her mouth to stop her spitting back. Zhinu bit them.

“You’re like an animal,” said the Empress. “Lock her up!”

Day and night, Zhinu screamed and beat at the doors and windows of in her apartments. Nothing would silence her.

“You’ll never sleep another night in peace until I see Niulang and my children again!” she shrieked at the Empress.

I couldn’t sleep either. Guilt weighed me down lower than an earthworm. Even after the Empress banished her to Vega, Zhinu’s wailing came down to us when the wind was in the East. A kind of eerie lost sobbing that made me sleek my feathers down flat, and made the Empress fan herself harder as though she could wave all that pain away.

 

~*~

 

I went down to see Niulang as soon as I could trust my snake-fouled wings again. He was incredibly stoic. “Your mothers had to go on a trip,” he told the children. “She has noble relations, and we can’t keep her all to ourselves. She’ll be back, don’t worry.” And he made them warm milk and millet with shaking hands, and went out the stall to weep into Shujun’s hairy back.

Shujun was a bit red-eyed and rough-coated too. I perched on his manger and asked what was going on.

“I can’t stand it,” he said. “They’re so miserable. These poor kids. Niulang keeps a brave face around them, but look at him!”

Niulang, his head buried in Shujun’s pelt, was moaning quietly and rocking from one foot to another as though the ground hurt and every bit of his body was wrong.

“I can’t hardly eat, thinking of that meddling bitch up in Heaven,” said Shujun. “She can’t see a scrap of joy without wanting to crush it.”

I stabbed my beak into the manger a few times. Soft wood, falling apart like everything on this Earthly plane, but Niulang and Zhinu had made it their paradise. I was so angry.

“How much magic have you got, Shujun?”

“A bit.”

“Enough to get back to Heaven?”

“No.”

We stared glumly at each other, Shujun chewing his cud and occasionally turning his head to butt Niulang in a sympathetic way. Even in his misery, Niulang gave Shujun comforting scratches between the ears.

“Are you sure?” I asked Shujun again. “Maybe we can sort of pool what we have…”

“No.” There was a long pause. “Or….Yes. But not in this body.”

“What do you mean?”

“I could go back to Heaven. But somebody would have to…” there was a very long pause. Shujun looked at me with one eye, then the other. I did the same. Whatever we were considering, it looked bad with either eye.

“Somebody would have to kill me,” he finished.

I clacked my beak shut on my enthusiasm. “Oh. Well.”

“Yes. Well.”

“You weren’t planning to live forever as a cow, were you?”

“I suppose not. My joints hurt. Getting old will suck, I can tell already. But still, I’m afraid…”

I jumped up and down, croaking. “Afraid? You, who were the darling of the brave young Celestials, their chief and captain in mischief? You, always the daring one, the one who made the girls swoon with your fearless tricks?”

“Uh. Yes. I was, I suppose.”

“And now you’re a cow. Not just a cow, but a bull, the very symbol of courage and fortitude!”

“Er…”

“And you won’t actually be dead!”

Another long silence, broken only by Niulang’s sighs.

“It might hurt,” said Shujun. I stared at him until he gave in. “I hope I can remember how to talk,” he muttered. Then he leaned around and gave Niulang a head-butt that nearly knocked him over.

“Steady,” said Niulang, leaning against Shujun’s flank.

“No, you steady!” said Shujun directly to him in human speech. “Because what I’m about to tell you will come as a great shock.”

Understatement of the year. Niulang clapped his hands tight to his chest as though his heart was going to jump out, and his jaw went slack. “What???”

“I am also a Celestial. Shujun, in fact. You knew me once. Though you didn’t think I was worth talking to.”

Niulang yanked at his hair. “No, no more of this! Zhinu’s told me how I had another life in Heaven, I knew other people, and I’m sure I offended many of them, and that’s why I’m here on Earth. But I don’t remember any of it!”

Shujun rubbed his head against Niulang again, but this time it was more of a “let’s be all good mates together,” gesture. “I’ve got nothing against you. I used to think you were stuck up, but you’ve been nothing but kind to me since I came to Earth.”

“Well. You were like my best friend. That family I was born to were so…” He sniffed and wiped his face on Shujun’s back.

“Mean,” finished Shujun. “So,” and here he did something that amazed me: he knelt down his front legs as if bowing. Proud, handsome Shujun! “Here’s what we need to do. I can’t get back to Heaven in this body. As a spirit, I can take you up to Heaven to see Zhinu.”

Niulang stepped back. His eyes travelled up and down, seeing a fine beast in its prime, a mountain of red muscle, the envy of the whole province. But also a talking cow, and a Celestial. He put his head in his hands. “I don’t know how to judge in these things. You’re my friend! Even as a cow! I don’t think I can…” He glanced at the axe leaning on the wall, and shuddered.

“You have to.” Shujun lowered his neck.

Niulang took some convincing. When he finally did it, it was so quick that even though I was waiting for it, I fluttered off my perch, shocked by the bright arc of iron, the dull thud, the great beastly sigh of Shujun’s last breath as a cow. He fell hard and piecemeal, front legs going out, then hind, then over on his side. Niulang stood over him, eyes shut, trying to breathe.

We waited. Nothing happened. Evening came in. The stall became suffocatingly dark, a dense space reeking of blood and straw. Finally Niulang went inside, tear-blind, halt-footed, touching the walls for balance.

 

~*~

 

Next morning when the children discovered Shujun’s body, their cries undid Niulang’s last reserves of stoicism. He sat with them in Shujun’s stall, sobbing with them. “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” he whispered.

Children move so fast through their lives. After an hour they were all cried out. They left Niulang staring at the space between his feet and went outside.

“Let’s make him a funeral,” said the girl. They wandered around picking flowers. Every now and then something would remind them of their situation, and they’d cry again. But then they’d get to work again, encouraging each other.

“He’d have liked these,” one would say, holding up a spray of flowers, or grain.

“He’ll look fine with this,” said the other, holding up a pretty stone.

Niulang watched dully as they loaded Shujun’s corpse with flowers, weaving them around his magnificent horns and placing a wreath over his massive shoulders. Last of all they placed the pretty rock between his eyes. They stood back to admire the effect.

“He looks fit for Heaven,” said Niulang, choking back a sob. “You’re such good children. I’m sure his spirit feels honoured.”

The next thing we knew, the walls of the stall were shaking. Everyone looked around. Was it an earthquake? Was it the wind? There was a wind, a giant wind that came in and out of Shujun’s nostrils, which flared wide and red. One, two, three, snorting breaths and then he opened his eyes!

He sprang to his feet, and you could tell that even though he was still cow-shaped, he wasn’t a cow anymore. Cows rock themselves up, surging their weight up against gravity. This cow wasn’t troubled by gravity at all. He flicked his tail brightly and nudged his head at Niulang, who was crammed into a corner holding his children tight.

“Come on,” said Shujun. “Hop on my back!”

 I guess when you’ve seen a dead cow come to life, you might as well throw caution to the winds entirely. The children shrieked with excitement, took Niulang by the hand, and helped each other scramble onto Shujun’s back. I flew out the door and Shujun followed me, as he’d done on many other mornings. Only this time, when I fluttered up into the sky, he was right behind me, thundering through clouds that rolled out of the way then curled back to cover our tracks.

“I know where Zhinu is,” I cried. Shujun gave a sort of roar. Niulang was weeping with joy, or the wind stinging his eyes. Up, up we went. I started to see patterns in the grey clouds that made a tunnel around us. Niulang saw them too, and held up a hand so the mist poured through his fingers like silk. Zhinu’s silk.

Then we were in the bright sky of Heaven, soaring above hills, trees, water, and the Palace, all sparkling with essential perfection.

“We need to go to the Over-Heaven,” I exclaimed, and up we went, to where the sky darkened and the stars showed. Darker and darker, and one light growing: Vega, where Zhinu had her exile’s house. Beautiful as the moon, but distant, cold and white and sad. We could make out Zhinu, tiny-tiny, standing on the edge of her star palace, arms held out.

Shujun’s hooves roused an echo in the Heavens. Space rang like a gong. It’s not empty. I can’t tell you what it’s full of. Stuff that tells on you, I guess, or reports back to the Jade Emperor and the Queen Empress.

The echoes doubled around us, and suddenly we weren’t alone; the Empress was beside us, rushing on one of her golden clouds, neck and neck. Her face was set in a grimace.

Neck and neck, or maybe Shujun was ahead by a whisker.

The Empress reached into her hair and loosened it so it flagged out behind her and stars fell out on every side, new ones. Something glittered in her hand. So shiny! I swooped in close, my beak already half open to grab whatever it was. A hair pin, so bright!

Then the Empress plunged the hairpin into the being-and-nothingness that is hers to control, and the sky split apart. Stars, stars everywhere, like a torrent, beautiful and terrible as the Empress’s tears. Strange that it was the Empress that was crying, but true. I saw her. She had her head turned away from Niulang and especially from Zhinu but I, who fluttered around her like a lost soul, saw it.

“You can’t have her!” she shouted. The edge of her cloak knocked me off balance as she swept up Niulang and the children. Then they were gone, wrapped in a spill of night and diamonds and pearls. I flopped down on the edge of the star palace at Zhinu’s feet. The sky boiled around us, furiously black and white. Shujun was swept away, mooing.

Zhinu picked me up and held me to her breast.

“I’m sorry,” I said. Though I was as much mad as sorry. None of my schemes had worked.

“You don’t have to apologise. Like I said before, I knew the rules. Even when I was laughing and rolling in the mud.”

“She doesn’t need to be so cruel to you.”

Her eyes darkened, lost in memory. “Sometimes I felt that way when I had to discipline my children. Did I need to make them cry? It made me wonder what it might feel like to have my mother’s responsibilities.”

We watched the sky settle. A river of new stars separated Vega from the upper Heaven. Zhinu put a foot to the nearest one, but it was no stepping stone. This was a hostile pour of white light, and Vega hung in it, a weird outlier with its house of diamond floating on a diamond rock. Diamond trees in a garden of gems. Zhinu hated it.

When everything settled down, I flew out to look for Niulang. He was exiled to Altair, far to the West on the other side of this new Milky Way. His memory of being a Celestial had returned, so he was suspended between two lives, haltingly showing his children around their weird floating palace. It enthralled them and terrified them.

Shujun fetched up on the shores of the lower Heaven, no longer a cow but a half-drowned youth. His friends welcomed him back, but he was never the same. More serious.

Heaven suffered under shapeless rainy clouds that put the Celestials in a bad mood.

“I’ll take them to Zhinu. She’ll fix them up,” I offered. The Empress unbent enough to nod once. So that became my job. An endless task, until I roped in my friends and family and the entire Magpie clan. We ferried up the unwoven floss of Heaven’s skies, Zhinu wove them into clouds for Heaven, and we took them back down. Lovely curly clouds.

And one day, the Empress looking up at Zhinu’s clouds saw them come together and show the pattern she’d woven into them. Saw the generosity and forgiveness they represented. Saw that they made a bridge between love and duty. Fell to her knees and wept.

I brought her what I could to cheer her up. A feather. A jewelled bobbin I stole from Zhinu once. The Empress did create me, after all, to meddle and to mend in my own way. For the first time ever, she laid her narrow-scented hand on me, and was gentle.

“I can’t undo what I did,” she said. “To destroy the Milky Way would undo the balance I must keep.”

“Give Zhinu one day a year with Niulang and her children,” I said.

“But how? They can’t cross the river of stars I made.”

I hopped up on the balustrade, cocked my head at the sky. Maybe it was easier to see for us who make nests, and weave things made to hang in the air. “Zhinu’s clever. She didn’t just weave a message. She wove a thing.”

The Empress dabbed at her eyes with one of Zhinu’s silks. Maybe it helped her see more clearly. “A road! How did Zhinu get so strong?”

“Fighting you,” I said, and prepared myself to fly from her temper.

But she merely nodded and kept staring at Zhinu’s cloud road. “Astonishing. But can it stretch across the Milky Way?”

“With help, it might. Let me try.”

She nodded, and I flew off to gather up all the Magpie clans.

It was a flying beyond flying, all of us a storm of wings, black and white, our hearts lifting with pride and beating as one, faster and faster. We caught hold of Zhinu’s woven clouds with our feet, lifted them higher and stretched them out all the way between Vega and Altair. We kept the bridge up, while Niulang and Zhinu and the children ran, ran, ran into each other’s arms. All our wings together, we hindered the fleeting moon to stretch out this one long night of joy and love.

Once a year isn’t enough. Zhinu’s not done with her weaving, though, and I’m not done with my meddling. One day we’ll all link wings with her patterns and make a bridge that lasts forever.

The world will change. You’ll see.