You Must Fall In Love

Chapter Twenty

"Christine. Can you hear me, Christine?"

She was standing. Not lying down, standing. She was standing in a field that was wet all around, and there were standing stalks all around her, and when she looked down she realized that she was up to her ankles in mud.

She was in a rice-paddy. She'd never seen one in real life before. She could smell ox-dung and old water, sweat and soil and the stink of rotting plants. The sun was beating hot and dry on her forehead, not hot and wet like in Singapore, and she had to wipe her brow off to stop the salt from getting into her eyes.

"Where am I?" she called out. "Who are you?"

Then the air changed, and her vision cleared, and she saw the woman.

She was old and small, with a head of pure white hair. Her face was gnarled, as hard as Kang's was soft, but her eyes were so clear that they shone like opals. Her garb was black, a robe bound with a sash around her waist, and her fragrance was so strong that it almost sent Christine tumbling hair-first into the muck behind.

It was the heady vapor of rice-wine mixed with the sweet earthy perfume of lotus-seeds. Something like magic flowed from this woman in waves, stronger than anything Christine had ever come across, so overwhelming that it felt like the very earth might turn to pure sunlight from its strength.

"H-How?" she stuttered. "How are you so..."

"It is the blessing of the god," said the little old lady. "It is not my own power."

Her words were in English, but her lips were moving in a way that suggested a different tongue altogether. As Christine glanced down, she saw that the lady's straw sandals were barely skimming the ground, as if she were there and yet not there. The sludge pooled around her toes and not between them, and she was barely sinking.

"You're Ming," she said. "Ming of Liu."

"Ah," said the lady. "That is a name I have not heard for four thousand years."

Her teeth were black and crooked, but her smile was kind. She looked like she had been very beautiful once.

"They call me the Hart Princess now, and lay votives before my shrines, and offer joss and pink peach buns. Or at least, that is what they did. Not many people seem to remember me."

"And do you help them?" asked Christine.

It was a strange question to ask a goddess, or someone she presumed to be a goddess, but for some reason she couldn't bring herself to be scared of this person at all. She was so old and small.

"I ask what I can," said Ming. "But these feeble hands have little strength, and my lord husband is no longer what he once was."

She held up her hands, showing their veined wrinkles, their bulging knuckles and sagging webs. Christine looked at her own, long and full of life and terminally lazy.

"You're not a goddess," she said.

"I did not accept my lord's offer in life," said Ming. "I only came to recognize his kindness after my death. Because of that, I retain my aged shape in immortality, as a reminder of my foolishness."

Foolish? Christine frowned, but discreetly, trying to remember the story. When had Ming ever struck her as foolish? Unkind, yes, but...

"But you didn't want to marry Prince Doe," she said. "It wasn't your fault."

"That was my mistake, Christine," said Ming. "If I had become Prince Doe's consort in my youth, then I would have retained my beauty forever, and achieved true godhood."

"You didn't love him," said Christine. "It's fine."

"I did not say it was worse this way," smiled the old lady. "The regrets of one's life are one's greatest teachers. Cruel, to be sure, and harsh masters, but great teachers all the same. And at any rate, I had little use for my beauty."

Easy to say, when you were beautiful.

But even Christine recognized how unfair that thought was, and so she wiped it out of her mind, pretending that it had never come to her.

"Why are you here, Your Highness?" she asked. "Is this real?"

"It is real as dreams are real," said Ming. "You can tell me why I am here."

Christine wracked her brain for a good five seconds. A cloud came over the sun. Everything became dangerously fuzzy. Her head was pounding.

"I don't know," she said.

"My," chuckled Ming. "My, my. You are amusing, child."

"Then tell me," Christine. "Don't just go around in circles like this, it's..."

"Shouldn't it be obvious? You swore on your ancestors, didn't you?"

"What?"

Ming held up a withered hand. The summer sky shimmered, then darkened all at once, like black blood from a scab. Rain, pouring rain. The mud bubbled beneath Christine's feet, and a fetid pocket came up and burst, sending its stink up her nostrils. She gagged.

The Hart Princess's eyes were calm and comforting, but they gave no hint that the things to come could be prevented.

"Your heart is crusted, Christine Law Siew-Fong; hard and cold as a rock. Only when it begins to bleed will you come to know your true self."

Bleed? Heart? Self?

The air was coming apart in her hands. She couldn't see it, but she could feel it. She wasn't breathing. The mud was coming up her legs. She splashed towards Ming, but the brown slurry was already up to her waist. It was coming so fast.

"You... you can't just say things like that! Wait!"

Ming reached out a hand, standing on the muck as if by martial skill. Christine grasped wildly, floundering and gasping, but instead Ming touched her on the forehead.

"Your enemies are coming, daughter," she said. "Wake up."

Christine burbled something about this being a dream, but then the bony hand sent her under, down into the bitter chunky swirl, right back into her bed with a sweat-drenched scream.