to me from the cliff. I slam my cheek against the rock, and tears cascade down my face, falling to
the earth like my baby brother. More and more of my weight presses against the cliff until it feels
horizontal, and I open my eyes to find myself lying on the slope.
There are no tents, no cooking fires. No laughing children. The cliff is far away to my right.
The gods have started to pull the sun down behind the ridge, and the air is tinged a deep blue. My
horse is nowhere to be seen. I am alone.
And yet his face was so real. My brother’s face, the face from my memory, the face that
drifted through my mind for sixteen years. I push back my matted hair and tilt my head up
towards the Heavens. The sky is a rich blue, much as it was every night in the desert right before
the gods drew a black veil across the ether and flecked it with stars. Only here, black shapes pierce
the night on all sides, and I am trapped in this netherworld, between my memories and my guilt.
When the army attacked our tribe several weeks after Chuluun’s death, when they dragged me
down the slope, my parents stood silently and watched. They never knew I tried to stop him. They
had screamed at me, shouted that I was his big sister and that I had failed him. In a way I did fail,
for though I tried to stop him from climbing, I couldn’t.
I hear voices, and I look behind me and see lights moving around the bend. I can just make
out people on horseback moving towards me in the growing darkness, drawing loaded carts
behind them. I sit up, staring at the approaching procession, scrutinizing them. The tribe coming
up the slope towards me – my tribe – is real, and I can hear their voices.
It is interesting how easily Heaven and Earth intertwine in a world where time stands still.
Out in the desert I was suspended between Ningxia and the mountains, between two of my pasts.
But here, with the rock faces towering above me, shattering the eternity of the sky, time is forced
to flow once more. If only it could flow backwards, if only the gods could toss the sun from west
to east and erase the last sixteen years. If only they could wipe my brother’s death from the stars.
As the blurred flames of my tribe move ever closer, it seems a thousand scimitars are waving
in a distant torchlight. The burning orbs reach towards the sky like they would rather be floating
stars, and I know deep in my heart that they are not reaching for me, but for my brother, grinning
at us from the Heavens. Waiting for the torches to find me, I lean against the shattered slope and
whisper the words I hope will be carried over the mountains, across the desert and into the sky.
“I tried.”
