Author's Note: Based on Pu Songling's Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, and the common Eastern folkloric trope of the fox-wife. The first chapter is set in Qing Dynasty China. Enjoy!
Chapter 1 — Fox in the Bottle
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Yomi sat in his dyed and embroidered changshan with two stubby horns hooked beside his temples that he did not mention, for they were invisible to all but him. Though just a child, he was straight-backed and serious-faced, his chins still round with baby-fat and his hair straight and fine as a doll's, shaved in the Manchurian style with a long queue braided down his back. His lower lip jutted in a pout as he listened with the other aristocratic children of the third-to-fifth level to the marvelous tale of the fox-wife.
"There's something I have never told you," the scholar read. Yomi squirmed, fiddling with the inner sleeves of his robe. "I am the daughter of a fox.'
Yomi was rude enough to blow air through his lips, wanting to be out in the gardens on this balmy summer day trailing kites or pushing over the children of the eighth level. The scholar, Songling Pu, turned up his eyes from his work and blinked at Yomi beneath the fleshy white flowers of the lime tree his chair had been unfolded under, peeved. "Is there something you wish to add, young Bo?"
"What use would there be in telling us this story?" Yomi asked, bold. "We will not fall in love."
"Won't you?" the scholar responded mildly.
"No. I will not love my wife. And she will not be a huli jing."
"Are you so certain?" he asked indulgently, and Yomi bristled at his tone.
"Yes," he said, with all the dignity of any child whose seriousness has been laughed at. His father did not love his mother, a feeling that was mutual for her. There were many things a Manchurian nobleman in China couldn't do, and love as he pleased was well-known to be one of them.
"Love is not something you can look upon with certainty, young Bo. When you are a young man, you will understand."
Yomi sat on his hands and convinced himself he would not, bowing and apologizing for taking the reading so lightly.
Ten years passed as uneventfully as a few days. Confined to the capital with all the nobility, Yomi, serious and straight-backed as he had ever been, grew tall and proud and uninterested in love.
Fate is a capricious force, however, and this stifled young nobleman's luck was about to turn.
Spring had crept over the land after a redolent winter. Flowers blossomed freely on and beneath the boughs of trees. Everything smelled cleaner in spring.
This pond was at the edge of the palace, its garden untended and thus, untamed. Its fecundity made Yomi feel a freedom that soothed him, for he rarely experienced it.
Manchurian rule in China was failing. Soon, Yomi knew, a Manchurian nobleman would no longer be welcome in this empire. Yomi, thinking of rebellions and executions that loomed like the mirage of mist off a waterfall, rubbed his neck idly. He longed to get out. He'd spent eighteen years trapped in the endless pomp of the court. But how to escape? Where to go?
Yomi put it from his mind for the moment, kicking out his legs beneath the bench he sat on overlooking the glittering water, dazzled by the day. He leaned over with his black leather account book on his tired knees, doing minor addition to balance a tedious list of expenditures. No one was here; no one would come.
He was alone. Lines of tension eased from his shoulders at the thought.
"Goat, get me out!"
Yomi's account book splashed into the slimey shallows of the pond and Yomi cursed, hiking up an ink-spotted sleeve to snatch it from the water, watching weeks of hard work and months of records bleed down deforming pages and splatter gray splotches on his white pants.
He shook it furiously and his eyes snapped up to fling a nasty oath at the bastard who'd interrupted his solitude, and stared, open-mouthed.
A bottle of green glass the size of a hunting dog, dimpled sides sandy as though it had washed up ashore after a long trip at sea, bobbed in the middle of the pond, where Yomi was sure it had not been a moment before.
Inside was a creature deformed by the bottle—Yomi saw claws, teeth, and legs, but every last bit of its cavity was filled, and most of his first impression was of mats of off-white fur.
The bottle twirled in the water, and Yomi found himself fixed with an angry golden eye.
"Goat, pick up your jaw and get me out!"
Realizing it was addressing him, and that his jaw hung slack like a country bumpkin's catching a glimpse of the Emperor, Yomi closed his mouth with a click of teeth and pursed his lips. "I am not a goat!" he snapped.
"We may discuss what you are or you aren't, being-that-is-not-a-goat, when you've helped me out of this accursed bottle!"
Yomi stared, and blinked. "What are you?" he asked. The question was unfeigned. It was hard to parse the creature's true shape in the bottle—it looked feline, though its eyes were more canine—but whatever it was, it wasn't moving its mouth to talk. It could not be human.
"Where are we?" it asked.
"What does it matter where we are?" Yomi snapped, irritated by his own fear and discomfort.
The bobbing golden eye, its color clear and glowing even through the green of the glass, narrowed. "I am called different things in different places, being-that-is-not-a-goat. In the islands of Nippon, I am called kitsune. In the rivers of Korea, I am a kumiho. In the rolling hills of Ireland, I am a fairy, for things are most distorted there. In the middle kingdom, I am a huli jing. In the great desert, I am a jinni. In the balmy princedoms of India, I am a—"
"You are a huli jing?"
There was a pained sibilant hiss from the animal's snout. It took Yomi a moment to read it as laughter. "In my own way. I prefer kitsune, personally. My locale has led me to be so inclined. Now get me out. Surely you know what it means for a huli jing to be in debt to you, even if only in stories from your dam."
Yomi did know. In fact, the part of Yomi that could look calmly on an execution—the man who had ingratiated himself already with the tax collectors, a young man already learning the world through his impulses tempered by a cruel and curious mind—was the part which breathed through him now.
He paused thoughtfully, the account book dropping to the water from fingers numb with excitement with a wet slap that didn't succeed in catching his attention.
"Leverage, my boy," a pimp had once said to Yomi, when he asked him how he kept his whores so well-controlled. "Give them a reason to stay, but give them a reason not to go, too."
Leverage, he thought.
"The legends say you cannot break a promise." The words came out slow and careful, perfectly enunciated.
There was a quiet after that. The sun shone on the ripples in this strange bottle. The pond glimmered. The being trapped within it never blinked. "This is so," a voice said at long last, ringing cold and sharp as a blade slashing into a shield.
Yomi couldn't sense the anger, though he guessed its existence.
But what could control him, Yomi thought?
The answer was in a story told to him as a boy on a stifling summer day. A wife's obedience to her husband was fundamental. A bond of that sort would not be broken.
And Yomi knew he would have power.
He waded into the water. His hand jerked out and grabbed the bottle by its neck, ignorant of the slime on his calf-skin shoes or the water soaking into his changshan. The huli jing's prison, for so Yomi imagined it to be, was larger and heavier than he'd anticipated, and he struggled to hook his other arm around the side, where he felt clinging grains of sand chafe his skin. A single yellow eye burned into his, the other covered by an ear or a tail, unnaturally bent.
"I won't let you go," he said. "I won't ever let you go, if you do not swear to grant me this request." His eyes glittered. "But promise to be my obedient wife and I will let you out now."
The silence then held every hope and desperate dream of escape from drudgery and uncertainty that Yomi had ever felt. The Manchurian rule was failing; soon, a rebellion would take his life from him. This was assurance of a way out; this was assurance of power. He couldn't breathe, waiting for the fox's answer.
"So be it," it said, grim as if reading a funeral rite. Eager, Yomi began to rip at the bottle's cork. He'd almost undone it, when something occurred to him.
"Will I give anything up?"
"Your mortal life, not-a-goat. Your country and your family." But Yomi saw none of those as valuable, and didn't stop trying to pry open the cork. "And one precious object, which I will keep for you."
"What?" Yomi asked, but it was too late. The cork sprung free in that moment and a shockwave blasted Yomi from his feet, splashing him back into the shallows of the pond. Shards of glass, hot as if newly-blown, struck and cut into Yomi's skin. His eyes were closed, shielded by his arms, and relieved groans sounded behind him, a strange sound like growling and bones twisting.
Yomi opened his eyes, and screamed. Hysteria pulsed through his veins.
It wasn't a grotesque monster that made Yomi scream. No horrific vision greeted his sight.
It wasn't what he saw that made him cry out. In fact, it was what he didn't.
A hand clamped on his elbow and dragged him stumbling from the water. Long arms wrapped around him, oblivious to Yomi's frantic keening. A voice, several octaves lower than the one that had spoken from the bottle, purred in his ear. "Come now, husband. I have chosen the use of your eyes as the precious thing to take. Had you not been so greedy, had you been altruistic, I could have taken your hair, or something equally harmless. Your presumption induced punishment. Do you remember the colors of the flowers, not-a-goat?" it whispered. "Hold on to them. You will never see them again."
Yomi shook, groping backwards. Something rough and stony (the bench?) caught him behind the knees and he fell hard, rolling over to moan into wet dirt. There was nothing around him, nothing, not even black.
"Quite pitiful, my groom." It seemed unmoved by his plight. Yomi's eyes stung from tears, as though he were but a child, but though he felt the pain and the wet dribbling down his cheeks, he saw nothing. "Come. Our nuptials await."
"Who are you?" Yomi sobbed, shivering from his damp clothes, pressing his hands to his face and feeling them smear his tears without seeing.
"I am Youko Kurama, a five-tail of Kurama mountain, husband, where we will return. Come," the wicked voice sneered. "I know the way."
For Yomi there was the sense of a rush of air, and then nothing. The young nobleman was gone.
To be continued.