arrived at the Jade Pool for the Peach Banquet and found the tables overturned, the wine gone, and the seven fairies sitting in the grass rubbing their arms.
She listened to the whole story without interrupting, which is a thing she is good at, and then she went to the Jade Emperor and asked one question, which was whether anybody had thought of the Emperor's nephew.
The Nephew
His name was , the Small Sage, and he lived at Guanjiangkou with six sworn brothers and a thin grey dog, and he had a third eye in the middle of his forehead, and he was not on speaking terms with his uncle.
He read the summons twice.
Equal to Heaven, he said. Is he really.
He came up the coast with his brothers and stood outside the Water Curtain Cave and had Wukong brought out to him, and the two of them looked at one another for a while with the particular pleasure of men who have finally met somebody their own size.
You're a nobody, said Wukong, opening. I've never heard of you.
You've heard of the woman under the mountain at Taoshan, said Erlang, evenly. My mother. I split it open and got her out.
That is all he said about it. It is more than Wukong has ever said about anything.
They fought on the ground and then in the air, three hundred exchanges, and the sky bruised. Then Wukong looked down and saw the six brothers wading into his monkeys, and his attention went, and Erlang hit him, and he ran.
Seven Bodies
Wukong turned into a sparrow and sat in a tree.
Erlang shook himself out of his human shape and became a kite, wings folded, dropping.
The sparrow fell off the branch and was a cormorant, going up.
The kite dropped its feathers and was a crane, going up faster, snapping.
The cormorant hit the water and was a fish, small, silver, nosing along the bottom of the stream and doing nothing at all remarkable.
Erlang stood on the bank and opened the third eye and could not see him. But the fish, he thought, is watching me, because a fish that is not a fish forgets to be afraid.
He became a fish-hawk, and the fish saw the shadow and threw itself out of the water and was a water snake, whipping into the reeds.
He became a red-crested grey crane, which eats snakes.
And the snake, which had run out of animals that win, went into the reeds and came out as a bustard, and sat on a bare rock in plain view.
Erlang looked at the bustard for a long moment.
The bustard is the lowest bird. It is the promiscuous one, the one that will mate with anything, the one whose name is a word you do not say in front of your mother. No creature that has any standing at all becomes a bustard, and Wukong had become one, in the open, because it was the last thing he could think of.
Erlang did not transform.
He came back into his own shape, took up his pellet bow, and shot it off the rock.
The Temple
Wukong rolled down the slope and went along the ground and got away, and Erlang came after him, and here the chase gets famous.
Because Wukong, out of ideas, arrived at a stream and made himself into a temple.
His mouth was the door. His teeth were the door-panels. His tongue was a bodhisattva. His eyes were the windows. It was a good temple, small, tidy, the sort of shrine you get in a village that used to be richer. He was rather proud of it. And then there was the problem of the tail, and he could not think what to do with a tail on a temple, so he stuck it up behind as a flagpole.
Erlang came round the corner and stopped.
He looked at the door. He looked at the windows. He looked, for some time, at the flagpole, which was at the back, which is not where anybody has ever put a flagpole in the entire history of religious architecture.
I've seen a lot of temples, he said, out loud, to nobody. I have never seen one with the pole behind it.
He drew his blade and said he would start with the windows.
The temple got up and ran.
The Bracelet
They went across two provinces. Erlang could not close and Wukong could not lose him, and above them, on a cloud, and the Gold Star of Venus and Guanyin stood watching the whole thing like men at a race.
Guanyin said she would drop her vase on him.
Your vase is porcelain, said Laozi. If it misses the head it breaks. Also it is my only good vase.
He took off his left sleeve-ring instead. It was called the Diamond Bracelet, and he had made it in the furnace, and it had been to the West and back and had once subdued a barbarian.
It hits whatever I aim it at, he said, and dropped it.
It fell out of a clear sky and struck Sun Wukong on the crown of the head. He went down. He was getting up when Erlang's thin grey dog came in and bit him in the calf, and he fell over the dog, and the six brothers landed on him, and they had ropes through his collarbones before he had finished swearing.
That is how it happened. He fought Heaven's hundred thousand to a standstill and beat every star in the sky, and he lost to a piece of a man's jewellery and a dog.
brought in on a rope, in the afternoon,
with a bite on the leg.
Everyone came out to look at him.
He did not stop talking the whole way up. He told them who he was. He told them what he had done to the Peach Banquet and to the Tushita Palace and to the register of the dead. He told them his title, twice, in full, and then he told them the name of the mountain he was born on and the name of the cave and the size of the cudgel in catties.
Everybody in Heaven now knew every single fact about Sun Wukong.
He did not mention his teacher.