The two memorials sat on the desk of the , who read them both and asked for an army.
And an old man in the third rank of the court, the , who had been an immortal for a very long time and had watched a great many armies leave and rather fewer come back, stepped forward and coughed.
Majesty. He is a creature born of heaven and earth. Nothing surprising in that. He did not look at the Emperor when he said it. An army is expensive. A summons is free. Bring him up here, give him an office, put him on the payroll. If he behaves, he is ours. If he misbehaves, he is inside the walls and we can arrest him at leisure.
This is the oldest idea in government and it has never once failed to work, and it has never once worked in the way anybody expected.
The Job
They sent the Gold Star down personally, which was flattering, and went up with him on a cloud, which was thrilling, and he came in through the Southern Gate of Heaven past officers in gold armour who did not bow to him, and he decided not to notice.
He was taken to the Hall of Divine Mists. He did not kneel. The court hissed. The Gold Star said, mildly, that the creature was new, and the Emperor said, with what may have been humour, Let it stand. Is there a vacancy?
There was a vacancy in the Imperial Stables.
The office of Bimawen, said the clerk of appointments, reading it out. Keeper of the Horses.
Bimawen, said Wukong, tasting it. That'll do.
And here is the part that gets left out of every retelling, because it is the part that hurts.
He was extremely good at it.
He went down to the stables that afternoon and found a thousand celestial horses, and he counted them, and he learned their names. He worked through the night. He fed them at the right hours and fed them properly. He had the grooms scrub the flags. He had the water changed. He rode the ones that were sulking, and he curried the ones that bit, and within half a month the herd of the Jade Emperor of Heaven, which had been thin and mean-tempered for a thousand years, was fat, glossy, and pleased with itself.
He did not sleep much. He liked it. He worked, for the first and last time in his existence, for someone other than himself, and he was praised for it, and it turned out that being praised was the thing he had crossed two oceans looking for.
The stable smelled of clean straw.
Every one of them knew him.
It lasted about two weeks.
The Party
The under-grooms threw him a banquet to mark half a month in office. He was drinking and enjoying himself and somewhere in the second hour he put down his cup and asked, out of nothing, out of pure cheerful curiosity:
What rank is Bimawen, exactly?
There was a small pause.
It hasn't got one, said a groom.
Meaning what.
Meaning it isn't in the ranks. There's the first rank down to the ninth rank, and then below the ninth rank there's — well. Us. He was trying to be kind. That was the trouble. It's the lowest office there is. They give it to whoever they can find. It doesn't pay. There's no title. If you do it badly you're whipped, and if you do it well —
If I do it well?
They say the horses look well.
Wukong sat with that.
Then he stood up, turned the table over, took the needle from behind his ear, and fought his way out of Heaven through the Southern Gate, and the officers in gold armour who had not bowed to him did not stop him, because none of them had ever been ordered to.
He was back on Flower-Fruit Mountain by nightfall. The monkeys came out and cheered and asked how it had gone up there, and he said that it had gone very well and that the Jade Emperor had made him a great officer.
They asked what the office was called.
Bimawen, he said.
They cheered again, because they did not know either.
He told them a week later, when he could stand to.
The Banner
A demon king came to congratulate him, one of the seventy-two caves, and heard the story, and said the obvious thing.
Why serve a horse-title? You should have called yourself something of your own.
Such as.
Great Sage Equal to Heaven.
Wukong laughed, in a way that was not entirely laughter, and then had a banner cut and raised over the Water Curtain Cave, sixteen feet high, in gold thread on red. 齊天大聖. He gave orders that nobody was to address him by anything shorter.
Heaven heard about the banner in about a day.
The Jade Emperor sent an army after all: the Pagoda-Bearing Heavenly King Li Jing, with the Mighty Magic Spirit and the Fish-Belly General and the Strong-Arm Demon King, and his son , who was a boy of about seven with a lotus body and a very bad temper.
The Mighty Magic Spirit went first and lost an arm.
Nezha went second. He took his six weapons and made himself three heads and six arms, and Wukong looked at that with genuine professional pleasure and said not bad, and made himself three heads and six arms too, and turned one cudgel into three, and they went at each other in the air over the mountain for a long while, and the noise brought half the ocean out to watch.
Then Wukong pulled out a hair, breathed on it, made it a copy of himself to keep Nezha busy, slipped behind the boy, and hit him across the shoulder with the real cudgel. Nezha went home with a broken arm.
Li Jing filed a report requesting reinforcements.
The Title
And the Gold Star of Venus stepped forward again, and coughed again, and said the thing he had said before, with the patience of a man who knows he is right and knows it will not save anybody.
Majesty. He wants to be called something. Call him it.
The court objected. The court said that Equal to Heaven was an insult to the throne, that it could not be permitted, that the thing was a monkey.
It is a name, said the Gold Star. Give him the name and withhold the office. Let him have the title of Great Sage Equal to Heaven, with no rank attached, no salary, no duties, and no authority over anything whatsoever. He will be enormously pleased. It will cost us nothing at all.
And the Jade Emperor, who was tired, said: Very well. An empty office it is.
They built him a residence in Heaven with two attendant departments, Peace and Quiet and Serene Spirit, staffed by clerks whose only function was to have nothing to do. They hung a board over the gate with his eight-foot name on it. He moved in.
He walked around the compound all afternoon reading his own signboard from different angles.
He had no work. He wandered the tiers of Heaven making friends with every star lord and planet officer he met, calling them all brother, and none of them knew what to make of him, and he did not notice that either. He came and went as he pleased through gates that no longer had any reason to stop him.
Nobody had lied to him. He had been given exactly what he asked for.