He Was Not Invited

The trouble with an empty office is that the man in it has time.

Wukong spent his mornings wandering the tiers of Heaven and his afternoons wandering back. He was on first-name terms with the Twenty-Eight Constellations. He had opinions about the traffic at the Southern Gate. Two immortals mentioned to the Jade Emperor, delicately, that if the Great Sage were left idle much longer he would organise something.

So they gave him the Garden of Immortal Peaches to look after.

He asked the gardener how many trees. Three thousand six hundred. The gardener explained: the front twelve hundred bear small fruit, and ripen every three thousand years, and eating one makes a man light-bodied. The middle twelve hundred ripen every six thousand years, and eating one carries you up in broad daylight and never lets you age. And the back twelve hundred, with the purple veins in the stone —

Those ripen once in nine thousand years, said the gardener. A man who eats one lasts as long as heaven and earth. As long as the sun and the moon.

Wukong thanked him and went for a walk in the back twelve hundred.

He came every few days. He would send the gardener and the attendants off on an errand, take off his cap and robe, climb into the highest branches of the oldest tree, and eat the ripe ones. He always ate the ripe ones. He was not greedy about the green ones. He would come down, dress, and inspect the garden, and the attendants would report that everything was in order.

The List

Then the Queen Mother of the West sent out her seven fairies to fill the baskets, because it was time for the Peach Banquet.

They found the trees stripped. They found the branches bare, and old stones in the grass, and a green leaf drifting down, and up at the top, asleep in his own arms, about the size of a coin, a man.

He woke when they touched the branch, grew back to size, and demanded to know who was picking his peaches.

They explained about the banquet. They were very polite. He calmed down immediately.

Right, he said, cheerful again, already brushing himself off. Who's coming?

They read him the list. The Buddha of the West. The Bodhisattvas. The Immortals of the Five Poles. The Star Lords, the Constellations, the Ministers of Thunder, the Dragon Kings of the Four Seas, the Ten Kings of the Dead. The Gold Star of Venus. Laozi himself, down from the Tushita Palace.

He waited.

They finished.

And me, he said.

We don't know, said the eldest fairy, with real kindness, which was the wrong thing to do. We only read out what we were given.

He said a word that immobilised all seven of them where they stood, in the grass, holding their empty baskets, unable to move their eyes.

He left them there and went to find out.

The Party

On the road to the Jade Pool he met the Barefoot Immortal coming the other way, and told him, in a friendly voice, that the venue had changed and the Emperor was receiving guests in the Hall of Perfect Light first. The Barefoot Immortal thanked him and turned around.

Wukong changed himself into the Barefoot Immortal and walked into the Jade Pool banquet hall two hours early, while the tables were being laid.

Nobody was there. There was jade liquor in the jars and dragon liver on the dishes and phoenix marrow and bear paws, and the wine attendants were dozing in a side room. He put them to sleep properly with a spell and sat down at the head table alone and ate the Peach Banquet of Heaven, all of it, and drank until the room went soft at the edges.

Some time later it occurred to him, through the wine, that this had been a serious thing to do, and that he should go home before anybody arrived.

He got the direction wrong.

The Pills

He came through a door and found himself in the Tushita Palace, which is above everything, and which was empty, because Laozi was out lecturing on the Way somewhere and had taken his boys with him.

There were five gourds on a stand by the alchemical furnace, and in the gourds were the golden elixir pills, nine turns of the fire, the great work of the ages, three of which had never been eaten by anybody because there were never enough.

Wukong tipped a gourd into his palm.

He ate them like fried beans. He walked around the room eating them, poured out the next gourd, ate those, and worked through all five, and then stood there in the middle of the Tushita Palace with his mouth full and sobered up completely, all at once, the way you do.

He said, out loud, in an empty room:

This is bad.

He went out through the western gate of Heaven using a concealment spell and dropped down to Flower-Fruit Mountain, and his monkeys came out to meet him, and he sat on his stone chair and said nothing for a while, and then he told them to bring some wine, and they brought coconut wine, and he drank it and said it was thin.

He did not tell them that he had not been invited.

He never tells anybody, for the rest of the book, in a hundred chapters, in front of gods and demons and buddhas, through every argument and boast and rage. It is not in the record. He never once says it.

Heaven Counts Its Losses

By evening the Jade Pool had been discovered, and the Tushita Palace, and the seven fairies had come unstuck and reported, and the Barefoot Immortal had explained about the change of venue, and the whole of Heaven arrived at the same conclusion at the same moment.

The Jade Emperor's face, the text says, went the colour of earth.

He sent a hundred thousand celestial soldiers. He sent the Four Great Heavenly Kings and the Twenty-Eight Constellations and the Nine Luminaries and the Twelve Horary Branches and the Five Quarters Disease Spreaders, and Li Jing commanded them, and they laid siege to Flower-Fruit Mountain with eighteen nets of heaven and earth so that not a bird could get out.

The Nine Luminaries went in first and were beaten back before lunch.

The Four Heavenly Kings went in and were beaten back.

The Twenty-Eight Constellations went in together, all twenty-eight, and Wukong grew to the height of the mountain, and grew three heads and six arms, and turned the cudgel into three cudgels, and by the end of the day the sky over the eastern ocean was full of gods going home.

He came down at nightfall covered in other people's blood and asked, calmly, whether anyone had seen his marshals.

Most of the monkey army was dead. The wolves and the tigers of the seventy-two caves had been taken in the nets and carried off. Of forty-seven thousand, a few thousand were left, hiding in the deep caves, and they came out when they heard him and pressed against his legs.

He counted the ones he could find. He knew all their names. He had crossed every one of those names out of a book, four hundred years ago, with a clerk's brush, on the assumption that it would be enough.

He told them the mountain had won a great victory, and gave orders for a feast, and it was true, and they did.