Ch. 002| The Third Mark of the Pig Hour

By the time the van passed the third unsigned fork, it was already twenty-six past nine at night.

Shen Zhaoye wrote the time in the waterproof notebook. Then, below the figure, he added four more characters:

Mountains bending right.

The driver didn't speak. In the 3-plus hours since getting in at the northern outskirts of Xi'an, the old man had opened his mouth 3 times in all—"Get in," "Don't ask the way," "Wait." That last "wait" had been at an unlit fork after the nameless tunnel, where he'd stopped for about 40 seconds, then started again. Shen Zhaoye didn't know what the old man was waiting for, and didn't ask.

He Sanjin in the passenger seat woke once more. This time he didn't drop straight back to sleep.

"Zhaoye, you smell that?" He Sanjin gave a sniff.

"What?"

"Pinewood ash." He Sanjin wound the window down a 2-centimeter crack. "Someone's burning wood up ahead."

Shen Zhaoye wound his side down 1 centimeter too. The Qinling night wind poured in, the temperature 4 degrees lower than the flatlands, mixed with a faint thread of—it really was the smell of pinewood burnt.

"A village," Shen Zhaoye said.

"Mm." He Sanjin wound the window back up, took out the unlit cigarette from behind his ear, weighed it, put it back. "We're here."

---

At nine forty-seven, the van stopped in front of a brick house.

The driver cut the headlights, left the engine running. From a drawer in the center console the old man pulled out a note, looked at it for 3 seconds, tore it up, stuffed it in his mouth, chewed twice, swallowed. The motion was exactly the same as at Xi'an North Station, as if he'd done this 1,000 times in his life.

"Out," the old man said. "Your people are inside."

Shen Zhaoye got out, swung the luggage bag onto his shoulder. The starry sky in the Qinling mountain hollow was clear past belief; the Milky Way slanted from the northeast corner across to the southwest, bright enough that even the silhouettes of the mountains floated up with it. In the air, besides the pinewood ash, there was a faint trace of mildew, like the smell of wet earthen walls steaming in the night.

The village was small. By Shen Zhaoye's eye, fewer than twenty households. No road sign, no signboard, the phone couldn't pick up a single bar of signal. The only light was a dim yellow bulb hung over the door of this brick house, maybe no more than 15 watts.

He Sanjin knocked. "Uncle Ge. Sanjin."

A cough came from inside, then the sound of slippers.

The one who opened the door was an old man in his 60s. Thin, short, skin the color of years walking the mountains, missing a section of the ring finger on his left hand, the wound looking many years old.

"Come in. I've got the tea ready," the old man said.

He Sanjin glanced back at Shen Zhaoye, then at the driver. The driver wasn't looking at them; he'd already turned the van around and was backing out the way they'd come.

---

The old man was called Old Ge. He Sanjin later told Shen Zhaoye privately that the name was an alias; what his real surname was, no one in the black market asked. But for twenty years, of those running goods through the three provinces of Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Gansu who wanted into the back-range forests of the Qinling, eight in ten had gone through Old Ge. That missing section of his ring finger, the story went, was chopped off in the nineties while he was guiding a Hong Kong merchant and shielding a truckload of raw jadeite. The tone He Sanjin used telling that story, Shen Zhaoye couldn't tell whether he believed it or not.

The brick house had only two rooms. The outer one was the main hall—an Eight Immortals table, four old wooden chairs, a tear-off almanac on the wall and a map of the mountain terrain you couldn't date. The inner one had two bamboo cots and a low table.

Old Ge poured them two cups of hot tea. The bowls were coarse porcelain, chipped at the rim; when Shen Zhaoye took his, he felt the faint warmth of the porcelain heat his palm a little.

"The place you're looking for," Old Ge said. "I can't lead you in."

Shen Zhaoye looked up.

"It's not that I don't want to lead you." Old Ge set his own bowl on the table. "It's that I can't get there. I've run this stretch of mountains over 30 years in my life, and I've never once walked into that gully. My father went in once—came out alive. After that trip he never went in again, and never let anyone else in the village go either. There's a thing the old men in the village pass by word of mouth: that place is called 'the gully you shouldn't walk into.' Past a certain line, you can't go any farther."

"What's the line?" Shen Zhaoye asked.

"A dog's bark," Old Ge said. "People can't hear it; dogs can. You walk along, and the dog following behind you stops. One more bark and it bolts. You force your way forward, the dog won't follow you anymore—and that's when you'd best turn back too."

He Sanjin let out a sigh and lifted his bowl, blowing across it. "Uncle Ge, you said the same thing twenty years ago."

"The mountain was this way twenty years ago," Old Ge said. "The mountain's still this way now."

He Sanjin grunted through his nose. "Uncle Ge, I've heard this from you 3 times."

"You've heard it 3 times; I've said it three hundred." Old Ge nudged the bowl an inch closer to him. "Every man who goes into the mountains has to hear it. In these thirty years I've seen ones who heard it, went in, and came back. And ones who heard it, went in, and didn't. I'm not telling you not to go. I'm telling you to hear it out before you go."

He Sanjin took the cigarette down from his ear, rolled it once between his fingers, tucked it back. Said nothing.

Shen Zhaoye opened the hard-shell waterproof notebook and set it on the table. "Can you give a direction?"

"Southwest." Old Ge raised a hand and pointed. "Over the second mountain hollow, past the dry gully, and you reach the broken stone pillar."

"Broken stone pillar?"

"That's what the old folks call it," Old Ge said. "It's not a pillar—it's a broken stone column. It stands at the head of the gully, half of it fallen into the ground, half still standing. No one in the village can say what dynasty the thing's from."

Shen Zhaoye wrote down these few words: Southwest. Second mountain hollow. Dry gully. Broken stone pillar.

Then he looked up and asked a technical question: "Any spring nearby? Or an old well?"

Old Ge paused, glanced at He Sanjin.

"Interesting question," Old Ge said. "Under the broken stone pillar there used to be a spring. When my father was small he'd still go there for water. Later it dried up. Folks in the village say it dried up sometime in the Republican years—but my father said, the year that spring went dry, my grandfather died too."

"How did your grandfather die?" Shen Zhaoye asked.

Old Ge looked at his bowl, didn't answer right away.

About 10 seconds passed.

"He died in that gully," he said. "The body never came back. Only one shoe came back."

Old Ge stopped a moment, then added a line.

"The shoe was embroidered. We Ges don't embroider that kind of flower; it wasn't my grandfather's shoe. But there was foot-bone inside it."

Shen Zhaoye's pen paused half a second beside the three characters for "broken stone pillar."

He Sanjin took another sip of tea. This sip went slower than the last. Shen Zhaoye had known him ten years and knew what that slowness meant—he was working a sum.

"Is the shoe still here?" Shen Zhaoye asked.

"It is," Old Ge said. "It's set in the shrine, together with my grandfather's other remains. The old folks in the village say the shoe is 'a thing the mountain gave back'—you can't throw it out. Throw it out and the mountain comes to collect from you."

"Can I see it?"

Old Ge looked at him for 3 seconds.

"Tomorrow, once it's light. Yes."

---

The third mark of the Hour of the Pig.

Shen Zhaoye thought of this time later. Not because he'd checked a watch, but because just after Old Ge finished saying "only one shoe came back," from over at the village shrine outside came a muffled thud—like something inside the shrine had toppled, or like some kind of metal had touched stone.

"Plenty of rats in the shrine," Old Ge said.

"Which way does the shrine face?" Shen Zhaoye asked.

Old Ge lifted his head slightly.

"West."

Shen Zhaoye's expression didn't move; he took a sip of tea.

He knew, by one of the most basic rules of the Fenjin craft: if a village shrine doesn't sit facing south, it has an origin. A shrine sitting east-facing-west is, nine times in ten, a "warding gate" pressing down on something. What it wards isn't evil, isn't ill fortune—it's a breath-vent, the outlet of some current of energy flowing underground.

While his grandfather lived, Shen Zhaoye had copied out this rule at least ten times.

He took the dragon-seeking compass from the luggage bag, set it on the table, the face's true north toward the shrine outside the door.

Old Ge glanced at the compass, said nothing.

He Sanjin glanced at the compass, finished his tea, got up to dig through his plastic bag for cigarettes.

Shen Zhaoye waited half a minute.

The needle deflected five degrees counterclockwise—the breath-vent reaction was a fifteen-degree wide swing; this time it moved only five.

By the reading in the Fenjin craft, five degrees is called a "still deflection." It means this place's breath-vent isn't in an "open" state, but isn't fully sealed either. It's a kind of "half-shut" between the two.

Shen Zhaoye recorded the five degrees in the notebook, then filled in the date, time, and place.

When the pen reached the time field, he stopped.

Not 22:31.

His grandfather had set down a rule for notes—records of vaults sited, compasses measured, tombs entered: the time field is always written in old hour-marks, never clock readings. His grandfather's reasoning was that the clock measures minutes and seconds, the old hour-marks measure the rhythm of the earth-veins. The Shen family walks the earth-veins; the records must align to the earth-veins' time.

By the Shen family's reckoning, one hour-mark is two hours, one quarter is 30 minutes. The Hour of the Pig begins at 21:00; the third mark of the Pig Hour is around 22:30.

What he wrote was:

The third mark of the Hour of the Pig

That done, he set the pen down, picked up the bowl, took another sip.

The tea had gone cold.

---

Old Ge put them up on the two bamboo cots in the inner room.

He Sanjin was snoring loudly 3 seconds after he went down.

Shen Zhaoye didn't lie down. He set the miner's headlamp to its lowest setting, sat at the low table, and spread open the Dragon-Stirring Fragment, First Half. The few pages his grandfather had turned to most often—he could find them with his eyes shut.

Page seven, lower-right corner. His grandfather had drawn a line of small writing in red pen:

The shrine runs reverse, the stele bears no character, the earth breeds damp, the breath is half-shut.

Four signs.

The shrine running reverse that Old Ge had spoken of, he'd confirmed with his own eyes just now. The breath half-shut, he'd measured just now with the compass. The remaining two—the stele bearing no character, the earth breeding damp—he couldn't make out inside this brick house.

Shen Zhaoye dimmed the miner's headlamp another notch, took up the No. 6 sapper spade, and gently pushed open the inner-room door.

The outer hall was empty now. Sometime or other Old Ge had gone into his own partitioned room, and the light was out too.

Shen Zhaoye went out.

The village at night was quieter than before. The Milky Way in the starry sky had drifted by 1 hour. The Qinling wind blew down from the mountaintop, past the two rows of pines at the village's tail, and struck the flagpole before that east-facing-west village shrine—the flagpole gave a muffled thud.

Shen Zhaoye walked up to the shrine.

The shrine was very small. Three bays, tiled roof, a kerosene lamp hung under the eaves, the wick pressed to its lowest, the flame less than the length of half a matchstick.

The tiles were the gray pottery tiles of the late-Qing-to-Republican turn, chipped at the edges in many places—but mended in the wrong spots. They should have been mended along the two lowest rows of the drainage curve; in fact they'd been mended on both sides of the main ridge. Shen Zhaoye knew that any shrine pressing down a warding gate is never re-tiled from the drainage curve—it's re-tiled from the main ridge. That was a rule of the craft.

There was a couplet on the shrine doors. The ink had faded past reading; Shen Zhaoye tilted the miner's headlamp upward at an angle.

The upper line was six characters, the lower line six, the horizontal banner four. The banner was symmetrical at both ends with a break through the middle—as if scored by someone's fingernail, scored hard, splitting the original banner into two halves.

The scoring was new. Three years at most.

The shrine doors were shut.

Before the shrine stood a stone stele, half buried in the earth, half exposed, about knee height on him.

There were no characters on the stele.

At least, not at first glance.

Shen Zhaoye crouched, took the miner's headlamp in hand, and shone it across from the side at a slant.

The stele's face had been deliberately ground smooth by someone. Ground very flat, very clean. But whoever did it wasn't careful enough—with the side light raking across, you could see some extremely shallow remnants of strokes.

Shen Zhaoye looked for about 1 minute.

The remaining strokes pieced together into two characters. He'd seen this pairing in the index notes of the Dragon-Stirring Fragment, First Half, but had never seen it actually carved.

Those two characters had only one reading in the Fenjin craft:

Emperor's Gate

Shen Zhaoye pressed his fingertips lightly to the stele's face.

The stele was limestone. Its surface temperature was three degrees lower than he'd expected—and the cold had a direction, drawn up from underground, not blown by the night wind.

When his fingers left the stele's face, the pads left behind a small patch of damp. Not dew. Dew would coat the stone surface evenly; that patch under his fingertips was something the stone itself had seeped out. It took 3 seconds to dry.

Old Ge had said there was once a spring under the broken stone pillar, gone dry in the Republican years. A spring drying doesn't mean the water-vein is cut—the water seeps up along the stele's veining, all the way to the surface, where it's frozen in place by the night's temperature.

The earth breeds damp.

The fourth sign, confirmed just now too.

Four of four.

Shen Zhaoye recorded the characters, the time, the shrine's facing, the stele's height, the earth's temperature, item by item, into the notebook.

That done, he stopped the pen on the last line.

Thought a moment.

And drew a single straight line connecting this village shrine, Old Ge, this character-ground stele—all of it, from the top of the notebook page down—to beside the two characters he'd written on the previous page.

"Emperor." "King." "Vault."

He filled in one character in the middle.

"Emperor." "Gate." "King." "Vault."

Shen Zhaoye closed the notebook, dimmed the miner's headlamp a notch, and looked toward the shrine doors.

The shrine doors had never been opened.

【Ch. 002 End · brick house in a small mountain village in Guanzhong → the stone stele before the village shrine】