Chapter 22 — The Night-Quelling Idols Reveal a Mystery

head and crouched on a stone plinth, both hands resting on its knees, two wings carved from its back, as though it were just about to take flight. The statue at the northern corner was an old man with a turtle's shell, holding a whisk—but the whisk was carved as a snow-white serpent, its body swimming out from the handle and coiling around the shell-backed elder, its head lifted, gazing far away. The statue at the western corner was a woman, a plumed crown on her head, a tiger crouching at her feet. This woman-statue was strange as well: an eye had been carved in the center of her brow, and within that eye a bird's nest, and in the nest three small birds. And the statue before him, at the village's eastern corner, was a dragon-headed grotesque with an herb basket on its back, and in the basket several plants. The Blind Elder wanted him to study this statue closely, but Shen Mu had seen it more times than he could count, and had even clambered over it in mischief; he truly did not see what there was to look at. "Shen-er, can you lift this statue?" the Blind Elder asked, seeing him somewhat inattentive. "No." Shen Mu shook his head. The statue was far too heavy, heavy beyond what stone should be; a block of stone a man's height and a bit more weighed only a thousand catties or so, and with his present strength Shen Mu could bear a thousand catties with ease—yet these four statues he could not shift a hair. The Blind Elder, patient as ever, said: "Do you know why the statue is so heavy?" Shen Mu shook his head again. "I don't." "The statue is not heavy at all. Not in the least." The Blind Elder said, his face calm: "What is heavy is not the stone, but the thing the stone was carved into." Shen Mu was puzzled. Was the thing carved from stone not stone as well? The Blind Elder said: "Take this: you learn painting and calligraphy from the Deaf Elder. The pictures you paint and the characters you write are nonsense, not worth a copper. But the characters he writes and the paintings he paints cannot be bought with ten thousand taels of gold! Both are paper and ink—why is his painting worth more?" Shen Mu half understood; but it was true that there was an extraordinary spirit and rhythm in the Deaf Elder's paintings, far beyond his own. The Blind Elder raised his bamboo staff and pointed at the statue: "If these statues had come from an ordinary man's hands, they would weigh nothing at all. But the one who carved them is of far too great a provenance, and what was carved is more frightening still—so the weight of these statues can no longer be judged by common sense. To carry one statue is the same as..." His face turned strange, and after a moment he said: "...the same as carrying a god on your back!"