The Marriage Knot - Chapter 4

His sister stayed at the palace for a few more days. When she saw that we were sleeping in separate rooms, she once again assumed the authority of an eldest sister standing in for a mother and physically dragged Ao Ye into mine.

He made himself right at home and headed straight for the bed.

I hurriedly stopped him. After stammering for a long while, I finally explained why.

“Mother said if you lie down with a man, you’ll… you’ll have a baby.”

He laughed so hard he doubled over.

What was so funny? Did he really believe we’d all popped out of rocks?

“Your mother was lying. How could you have a baby just from sleeping?”

He wasn’t fooling me. Mother had also said men would come up with all sorts of excuses to lure you into bed. A favorite was, “Let’s lie on the bed and talk.”

I’d barely finished that thought when he said, “Then surely we can just lie on the bed and talk?”

See? Mother had called it.

He wanted to get into bed. I wouldn’t let him. After a prolonged struggle, we each gave a little.

He could get on the bed. We could talk. But no lying down. We had to sit.

Once seated, he sighed. “People say, ‘If we cannot share a bed in life, may we share a burial quilt in death.’ We’ve done it backward: same burial quilt, separate beds.”

A correction: I was already dead. Being dead was fine. Sharing a bed wasn’t.

He asked curiously, “How did you die?”

“I fell off a cliff.”

“Tsk, tsk.” He expressed some regret, then asked, “What was a girl like you climbing so high for?”

To gather herbs for dye. I used them to color scraps of fabric, then made silk-flower ornaments. Each one sold for two copper coins.

“Silk flowers? What are those?”

He became curious about how they were made and pestered me to teach him. But before he’d finished even half a flower, he decided it was too much trouble and gave up.

I looked at the small white flower I’d finished and sighed. “It would look prettier with some color.”

His interest returned at once. “There’s a kind of jellyfish in the Eastern Sea whose fluid shimmers in seven colors under sunlight. I’ll dye it for you sometime.”

With that, he quite shamelessly appropriated my finished flower.

Immortals who knew nothing of human hardship ought to stay up in the heavens. “Why did you come down to the mortal world?”

“Boredom.” He blew idly at the hair over his forehead. “I’ve played with everything in the Eastern Sea a hundred times over. I wanted something new to pass the time.”

I looked at him enviously. “It must be wonderful being an immortal. No birth, old age, sickness, or death. No worrying about making a living.”

He sighed with a world-weary air. “What’s so wonderful? Apart from our long lives, we have nothing.”

All right, enough. Any more showing off and it would get annoying.

But he went on and on with his humblebragging. “I’m the youngest. Father and Mother have doted on me since I was little. They only have two requirements: don’t fall from immortality, and don’t kill myself.”

“I finally get to play in the mortal world, and that heartless Siming tricks me.”

I was getting sleepy. Without thinking, I leaned against the edge of the bed and kept listening.

“He wrote me a destiny as a frail scholar. Isn’t that just a dig at me for being an ignorant layabout?”

“I told him women were nothing but trouble and I didn’t want a trial of love. Then he gives me a ghost marriage…”

My eyes were too heavy to keep open. He rambled on about plenty of things, but one sentence reached me clearly.

He said I was trouble too.