Thieves of Height

 

A light drizzle outside. Four travelers already at the lodgings, boots off, socks hung up to dry. Large fire, stone hearth. Three attendants, a middle-aged man, his wife, their son. 

“Tell us—what’s the weather like below?”

The teahouse master asks them. 

“Quiet, slow-moving. Green fields. Rice fields. The middle of summer.”

The teahouse master’s son takes a seat on a large stone by the hearth, all the better to listen. The world below, maybe, his favorite story?

“What’re the people like?”

The four travelers take turns describing.

“Kind.”

“Hospitable.”

“Humble.”

“Hard-working.”

The teahouse master’s wife nods, the son doesn’t, the husband and father, the master, doesn’t nod then does. 

“When’s the last time you’ve traveled down the mountain, to visit the village at the bottom,” one of the travelers asks. 

“Thirty years ago.”

“My god—a long time!”

“We came up here together,” the teahouse master’s wife added. “We were teenagers when we married.” 

None of the travelers spoke their minds on this kind of life, how they might feel should they have been made to live it. There was the son nearby listening, watching. Had he been allowed yet to descend? Did he envy travelers who arrived, told their stories, then once warmed and mellowed by tea, gathered their belongings to leave? 

Fire-shadows played about the boy’s face but the face itself expressed no particular emotion. This was his listening-face and he was merely listening.

“Does it get lonely up here?”

“Shhh! Lu-Shan!” the others admonished. So the travelers were not all the same after all. Among them was one who broke etiquette to ask uncomfortable questions, the others helpless to apologize for him by admonishing him. 

The teahouse master’s wife eased back on her heels, said nothing. 

The son hung his hands from his wrists, elbows pressed to knees. 

The master, setting down a tray with a fresh round of steaming tea-pots, waited in the silence between all involved, before turning to answer. 

“It doesn’t. It never has, when we’re together and alone. When visitors arrive and bring news of the world, though, sometimes.” 

Lu-Shan, forgetting his friends’ chiding just a moment before, followed this response to the next impossible-to-suppress question. “Why not leave then? Why not travel down the mountain from time to time?”

“Because I remember what it was like to be there. And the thought alone’s enough to make me even more lonely.” 

Some kind of monk? An amateur renunciate? The travelers could be forgiven for wondering; but in this instance all were considerate enough to ask outright.

The fire flowed upward and the room wobbled with shadows, the teahouse firmly built from logs of mountain pine into rock-face. Outside wind played mournful sounds against the edges of the house, at times loud enough to drown out conversation. 

“Who brings you supplies?” Lu-Shan was curious again. 

The teahouse master poured tea from pot into tiny clay cups, four to the table. 

“Porters from the village.”

“How long have they worked with you?”

“Several generations.” 

“What do they bring?”

“Jugs of water. Caches of dried tea leaves. Provisions for us.”

“How long do they stay per visit, usually?”

“Not long. It takes the larger part of a day, sunup to sundown when the days are shorter, sunup to mid-afternoon, when longer. They rest, have tea, then go.”

“Is that who you get news from the world from?”

“What news?”

Lu-Shan paused, caught on the barbs of the question.

The teahouse master, noting discomfort, softened the reply with elaboration.

“What I mean is: news suggests significance. What might that be? A new governor for the province, a fresh famine to contend with, another war? Those are the broader concerns. But there are the smaller, more personal ones. Any children born in the village since the last visit? Any of its elderly passed into the spirit world since? They’re all the same and come and go as they should, but from up here, it doesn’t quite move a person. The view from up here, so close to the sun, is often that clear. The people below seem very, very small. A man running from one end of a field to another appears to inch across it at the slowest pace. Way up here, we honor the view but don’t enjoy it, and out of respect to those below, certainly don’t pity it.” 

For once Lu-Shan was speechless.

Awkwardly, and maybe even humbled, the others sipped their tea. 

The son rose, walked out of view into the back room of the teahouse. The master’s wife attended to cups and plate, prepared parcels of food for the guests. They wouldn’t be staying much longer, she seemed to know. Words had been spoken, as they always had, following on the heels of too many innocently curious questions, and the guests no longer felt fully welcome. It was a way of life at the mountain’s summit and they were treated to a view of how they appeared from its heights. 

This one of the travelers described while on the way down, a half-hour from earshot of their hosts and their isolate rest-house. 

Once the words had been spoken and the silence had followed, he’d watched the wife to catch a reading of what’d been expressed. No nod but no biting of the lip, no lowering of the eyes but no challenging or meaningful stare either. Just hands holding cloth and wiping-wiping the rims of cups and then hands folding tugs of jerky and biscuit into paper, tied tight by lengths of twine. 

It was a bright day with enormous sky above. Lu-Shan was speaking his mind in all directions and the others would on occasion catch it and give it a shake. 

“What a life! Can you imagine.”

This Lu-Shan repeated throughout the afternoon, the others hearing it at five thousand five hundred feet same as they’d heard it at five thousand, two thousand feet same as four thousand. The land below grew larger and larger and the four in their appalled gossip shrank to the size of the view. Once the path leveled into a dirt trail, berry bushes on either side, they turned to admire the remainder of mountain left behind them. The teahouse wasn’t visible among the grey-blue haze of rock and sky. There were three above, they knew, who subsisted now on what four memories could offer. Did the teahouse master, his wife, his shy, curious, wordless son provide the same? Four strangers vividly among them then sent on their way, tramping down switchbacks to vanish into a perpetual stillness of landscape. 

“Or a porter!” Lu-Shan added. “Imagine. Up, down, up, down. Doing all the hard work to keep them high up there serving tea.”

Having completed one full circuit, the others didn’t think so didn’t think to say, they could. Their not thinking such a thing left them grateful they didn’t have to live it, whistling and joking one to the other, walking into the village they’d departed from just earlier that morning.