Whatever There Is in Yiling

Jiang Cheng jumped in his seat when the automatic voice announced that the train was approaching Yichang East Railway Station. He checked quickly that he had everything—jacket, shoulder bag, ticket—and then leaned his head back against the window, trying and failing to relax his jaw. The restaurant flyer he’d been worrying between his fingers for the whole journey, to avoid doing the same to his ticket, was in shreds, the ink flaking off the paper onto his damp fingers.

The train had been air-conditioned, but the station wasn’t, and by the time Jiang Cheng was coming up from the underground passageway to the square outside, sweat was already prickling above his brows. At the taxi rank, the drivers were standing outside their vehicles with the doors open, hoping the non-existent breeze would cool them through. He took the first one and asked for the nearest car-rental place. For the kind of searching he had planned, he needed mobility.

He’d imagined himself spending the day like a personable private investigator, casually drawing locals into conversation about anything strange they might have noticed in their hometown, any odd little events that would be surefire tells for him alone. Might as well start with the taxi driver, he thought. Usually they’re chatty. This one, though, just snorted at his overtures and turned up the volume on the jangly pop music playing through his phone speakers.

The rental car stank of the previous driver’s cigarettes. When he opened the door and went to sit behind the wheel, he was hit with the sudden memory of car trips in his childhood, back when his father used to smoke—and later, when he’d supposedly given up the habit, but Jiang Cheng’s mother could always tell when he’d been sneaking it behind her back. The ghosts of tar and nicotine rising up from the upholstery in summer heat, the ice in her voice. Wei Ying trying to convince him, “It already smells so much of Uncle Jiang’s cigarettes, no one will be able to tell if we try one!”

With a glance back at the clerk standing in the office doorway, Jiang Cheng slammed the door, rolled the windows right down, and pulled away.

Okay. Wei Ying was in Yiling, or at least that was the last anyone had heard of him. Yiling District was north of here. Maybe just driving around and looking for any signs of him wasn’t the best plan, but it was the plan he currently had. He fumbled his phone into the holder on the dashboard and called up Baidu Maps.

The sky was hazed over, not so much with clouds as with layers and layers of humidity, just hanging in the air. It blurred out the sun without reducing its heat or brightness at all. Yichang’s mid-morning traffic was light, at least. Jiang Cheng took the provincial road northwest, driving between trees and tower blocks that grew taller and denser before falling away again, replaced by more trees, until the next wave of buildings swelled.

At a large roundabout, he swore and changed lanes abruptly, earning an angry blast of someone’s horn—he hadn’t thought he’d got this far, yet, but suddenly there was a sign for the Yiling Yangtze Bridge, what the hell?

It wasn’t until he was driving unmistakeably southwest on a smart-looking overpass, way above urban Yichang, with Baidu Maps reminding him over and again to make a U-turn at the next opportunity, that he realised the Yiling Bridge was not even in Yiling. The view up and down the broad Yangtze would have been pretty on another day, maybe. A day when the waters were lit up green by rays of sunlight, instead of sulking in greyish brown. A day when Jiang Cheng wasn’t fighting with his mobile phone and chasing after the obstinant, pig-headed, unmanageable brother he hadn’t seen in—

Baidu Maps beeped judgementally at him, and suggested another turnoff instead of the one he’d just passed.

He got back over the river eventually, after a hair-raising moment where he almost kept on the national highway towards the Three Gorges Dam. It had been a couple of years since Jin Ling had asked first him, and then his little uncle, for a birthday trip there. He’d been going through a phase of being wild for engineering projects: tugging on Jiang Cheng’s hand whenever he saw a digger or a big crane, spreading out his picture books of cutaway diagrams all over the floor and copying them out, very seriously, in as many different colours of felt-tip as he could. It had been just their luck that one of his classmates had brought photos from his own family’s trip to the dam into school, two months before Jin Ling’s birthday.

“This Three Gorges sightseeing tour,” Jin Guangyao had asked Jiang Cheng, after weeks of pestering for both of them—and wasn’t that typical, that even when the man had clearly decided against it, it had become a tour instead of a day trip. “What do we think? Too close?”

“Too close,” Jiang Cheng had agreed. They’d taken Jin Ling to the Science and Technology Museum in Wuhan, instead, and although he’d whined and grizzled for the whole journey there, the day had been a success in the end. Jiang Cheng still had a snapshot of a pink-cheeked and beaming Jin Ling, in the centre of a lit-up model solar system, as the wallpaper on his work laptop.

He made it, at last, into the uneven chunk of Yichang’s urban area that belonged to Yiling District. There was no particular centre, here; the buildings were lower and closer together than along the river, the tower blocks less shiny. Shops and businesses with brightly coloured signs rattled in the corners of his eyes whenever he turned his head. Just an ordinary city, where ordinary people lived, but it still felt so big.

“So he’s fucked off to Yiling, whatever there is there,” he remembered saying to Yanli, back when Wei Ying had left. “It’s not like he went to Shanghai, or Beijing. It’s not even that far away, more’s the pity! We’ll probably be tripping over him all the time, the inconsiderate asshole.”

Yanli had just pressed her lips together and squinted upwards, in a futile attempt to hold back another wash of tears. Her mascara had already melted into a bruise-black smear underneath each of her eyes. He wished he could go back now and smack himself in the head.

He made himself park the rental car outside a couple of places that, for whatever reason, gave him a pull in his gut, a tension that reminded him of Wei Ying or maybe just of guilt. If he didn’t even try to follow his plan, and it turned out Wei Ying had been right here the whole time, wouldn’t it feel even worse than he did now?

No one in the computer-repair shop would even talk to him, though, once they realised he wasn’t a prospective customer. He only put one foot inside the medical herbs store before realising that it wasn’t Wei Ying he was chasing there, and half-tripping, half-running away.

The hole-in-the-wall stationer with the blinds pulled halfway down seemed like a certain hit; if Wei Ying had ever come within a kilometre of this place, he would have had to become a regular customer. Jiang Cheng almost lost his sense of urgency as he pushed his way into the dim inner shop, between displays of brush pens and teetering piles of xuan paper, cream on ochre on oyster-flesh. After telling him her entire life story, however, the owl-like proprietor denied ever having seen anyone like Jiang Cheng’s wayward brother.

He bought a mechanical pencil for Jin Ling, either as an apology for taking up her time or as a straw to clutch at. It had felt so close.

His mood didn’t improve. When he noticed that his hands were shaking on the steering wheel, as he crawled through narrow streets that seemed to be getting brighter and louder, deliberately more annoying to Jiang Cheng specifically, he realised that he should probably eat something. At the first empty space that looked like it might, sometimes, be used for parking, he pulled in and made a beeline for a nearby noodle bar.

Sitting in the steam of his beef noodles and the intermittent breeze of a swivelling fan, he put in his earbuds and shut his eyes. Just for a moment, just to take a breath. It might have been a mistake: like this, he couldn’t ignore the tiredness that welled up from within him. Jiang Cheng briefly considered leaning his head against the sweating tiles on the wall beside him, but he was just tired, not insensible. He split his chopsticks and pinched a clump of noodles up into his mouth.

Yiling District covered thousands more square kilometres of rural land than this little built-up subdistrict. If Wei Ying wasn’t here—and he probably hadn’t left Yiling altogether; Jin Guangyao had methods of hearing about that kind of development, and he would, most likely, find a discreet way of passing it on to Jiang Cheng. For Jin Ling’s safety, if nothing else. If Wei Ying was in the hills somewhere, plucking tea leaves or tending an orange grove, how could he possibly find him?

There was that summer he’d learned to juggle, mostly as a means of flirting with any and every girl who crossed their path. Oranges were a particularly favoured tool: the display got girls’ attention, and the fruit could naturally be thrown their way once he was done, a parting gift.

“Jiang Cheng, catch!” He’d wanted them to develop a pair routine, but Jiang Cheng had shied away from the obvious danger of it. Once Wei Ying had practised by himself for just a week, there was no way his own reflexes could catch up, and he knew far better than to set himself up for humiliation that way.

“Hey, young man, you lost? New in town?”

He looked up at the stranger’s voice, too quickly to pretend he hadn’t heard. An older man looked down at him: hair slightly too black to look natural, smiling eyes, mouth outlined by a narrow moustache and a pointed little goatee. There was something about him that caught Jiang Cheng’s attention, something familiar perhaps, but he ignored it. His intuition had got him nowhere today.

“No, I’m—” Jiang Cheng tried, but the man was already sitting down across from him, spreading out his own bowl of noodles, tea, chopsticks, napkin and sweet bun as if laying a place for a banquet.

“Where’re you trying to get to?” He leaned over to see the screen of Jiang Cheng’s phone and the dispiriting satellite view it displayed. “Huanghua Town, Fenxiang Town? You can’t go wrong if you stick on the national highway.”

Jiang Cheng snatched the phone away, shoving it in his pocket. His unwanted dining companion took a slurp of tea, narrowing his eyes in thought. “No, you’re not on the way to anywhere right now, are you? You’re looking for something.”

“Did I ask for your help?” Jiang Cheng knew exactly what his sister or his father would say about the tone of his voice, but neither of them were here, and that was part of the whole problem. He drank a spoonful of broth, looking pointedly away from the man.

“You didn’t have to ask, you just got lucky,” he replied. “Whatever it is you’re on the hunt for, I can help you find it.” Another gulp of tea. “I’m such an expert in these parts, you know what they call me? Mr Know-It-All of—”

“Of Qinghe,” Jiang Cheng finished, automatically. He looked the man fully in the face for the first time: he did recognise him! How many times had he and Wei Ying made fun of that moniker, after that school holiday they’d spent visiting Huaisang?

“Of Yichang,” Mr Know-It-All corrected him seriously.

“But you used to live in Qinghe, right? I met you there once, me and my, uh, my friends.”

“I commute.” He stared back at Jiang Cheng with an unyieldingly blank face, before it split into a merry grin. “No, no, I moved! I left Qinghe five years ago now, after my wife divorced me, but you don’t want to hear all that, young man!” At last, he started eating his soup. After several mouthfuls, punctuated with cheerful noises, he started to talk again. “It’s good that you met me already! You know how much I can be trusted, right? So you know, whatever you need in Yichang today, Mr Know-It-All can help you out.”

“Right.” Half the broth and more of the noodles were left in Jiang Cheng’s bowl, but he couldn’t eat any more. He twisted open his bottle of Pepsi and leaned back in his chair. The cold air from the fan was making his back tense up. Every time it rotated away from him, though, the sweat under his shirt felt more intrusive.

“Come on, then, just ask away.”

“It’s fine. I don’t need your help.” After a moment, he added, “Thank you.”

“It’s no trouble, young man.” He swallowed the last of his tea. “You shouldn’t be drinking those cold drinks, you know. It’s bad for your health. See, I’ve already helped you!”

Jiang Cheng groaned. Now he’d eaten, he felt restless again. The light in the street outside looked dimmer than it had when he’d entered the restaurant—was it just the cloud cover thickening up, or was the day already fading? He couldn’t see his hire car from here. It would really be better to avoid a parking ticket if he could.

“You’re going already?”

“Ugh. All right, if you really want to help me out: tell me where my brother is.” He was scowling, he knew, and he really couldn’t make himself care about it.

“Your brother?” The man’s eyes sharpened. He didn’t seem put off at all. “I need just a little bit more information for that kind of question. I know a lot of people’s brothers.”

“He’s…” Jiang Cheng hesitated. Obviously, he wasn’t about to tell this guy Wei Ying’s name. It might have been years, but this was not somebody who seemed likely to forget the scandals he’d read about in the local tabloids. “He’s a musician. He’s gregarious. He’s… clever, sharp. People notice that about him.” How true any of that was any more, of course, Jiang Cheng didn’t know.

“And you don’t get on with him.”

“We get along just fine,” Jiang Cheng snapped, and Mr Know-It-All raised his hands placatingly.

“Of course. Let me think a moment.” He picked up his sweet bun between the fingers and thumb of one hand and slowly pulled it in half. “What kind of places he like to hang out?”

“Just tell me the where the weirdest things have been happening round here, lately.” Jiang Cheng shook his head. “Ten to one, that’s where he’ll be, either causing the chaos or trying to study it.”

“Oh, that kind of person,” said Mr Know-It-All, licking red bean paste off his fingers. “There is the new hotel out on the Island of Fools, I suppose. They had all kinds of trouble when they were building out there… some of it the usual kind of thing, of course. The little roads washing out when it rained, never quite the full amount of building materials showing up.” He shrugged. “But there were other stories, too.”

“Like what?”

“They couldn’t keep workers on the site. Normally, if you’re doing a big construction project round here, it’s not too difficult to find local labour, so long as you’re not hiring in the busy season for farming. Wait till after August, then it’s fine. That’s what the hotel company did, but workers kept just walking off, claiming they were too busy at home. Some of them never even gave a reason.”

“Maybe they really were busy.”

“Oh, they started bringing them in from further and further away, and they still couldn’t keep 'em. Took twice as long as they’d budgeted for.”

“That happens in big projects all the time,” he scoffed. “I should know.”

“You know, the strangest thing wasn’t the people going missing,” Mr Know-It-All said, fixing him with a beady eye. “The strangest thing was the people who were there, but shouldn’t have been.”

“What?” Jiang Cheng asked, and then felt like kicking himself. He’d been drawn into this tall tale just like he was supposed to be.

“They say that if you walked around the site of the hotel in dusk or darkness, you’d see figures in the distance that disappeared when you got up close. And if you really thought about it later, you’d realise, they couldn’t have been there, because… they weren’t wearing modern clothes.”

If there was a shiver down his spine, it was purely because of the fan. There was no other reason. “Nonsense,” Jiang Cheng said brusquely, and then, unable to help himself, “Where did you say this place was? ‘Fools’ Island’?”

“Yu-ren-dao,” he confirmed, drawing out the syllables. “The Island of Fools. Look up Ma’an Hills Forest Park.”

Jiang Cheng was already typing into the maps app. The green hills and curling rivers zoomed across the screen, too far. “No, this can’t be it,” he said, under his breath. Was he really disappointed that a ghost story in a noodle shop hadn’t led him to Wei Ying? “This is in Changyang County. He has to be in Yiling.”

Across the table, Mr Know-It-All was still talking, gesturing with his hands as if performing to a greater audience than just Jiang Cheng. For him, every idle conversation must be an opportunity to pick up more easy marks. “You can get out there with the bus, the 702,” he said. “It’s a nice day trip, or a weekend getaway even. Not that I’d personally stay in that hotel. You interested in history? There was a famous battle in those hills—you can read about it in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The Battle of Xiaoting.”

Jiang Cheng’s head shot upwards so fast, he could feel the pang of a muscle that was going to give him agony later that evening.

“Xiaoting,” he repeated numbly. It was mostly to cover over his shock with the semblance of conversation. His thumbs were already typing the pinyin into the search bar of his browser.

[Battle of Xiaoting. Also known as: Battle of Yiling.] Baike blithely informed him.

Wei Ying, he thought, you fucking nerd. It couldn’t just be a normal place where normal people live, farmers and miners and noodle-shop employees. It had to be a fucking third-century battleground.

Mr Know-It-All of Qinghe and Yichang had finally stopped talking and was giving him a curious look.

“How much do I owe you?” Jiang Cheng stuttered.

“Owe me? Don’t be ridiculous.” He craned his neck to follow Jiang Cheng as he stood and shoved past the wooden chairs around their table. “If you want to stand me another cup of tea, I won’t say no. Otherwise, you just say hi to your brother for me.”

He had just enough presence of mind to scan the QR code taped to the counter on his way out of the shop. “A tea for the gentleman over there,” he said, enduring the eloquently raised eyebrows of the teenage girl behind the register, and then he was out without a backwards glance.

In his second stroke of luck of the day, his hire car was still parked where he’d left it, free of tickets and not even blocked in by the vehicle of an angry local. He typed in his destination and wedged his phone in the holder, and then he reversed out onto the road, holding up a gaggle of school-aged boys who jeered at him with exaggerated pique.

From here to the Island of Fools was a good two hours’ drive. The sun would be setting by the time he arrived, lighting the hazy sky up with orange and throwing the shadows of trees across the fractal inlets of the river, across the soil where dead men had lain for eighteen hundred years. Was Wei Ying raising their ghosts or sending them back into the cycle of reincarnation, he wondered. Would he be able to explain himself to Jiang Cheng—and would he even bother?

He rolled the windows down again before he turned onto the regional expressway, and let the noise of the wind and traffic drown out the other questions in his mind. Yanli and Zixuan, his father and mother, were all far beyond confessions from either him or Wei Ying, and Jin Guangyao wasn’t the type to ask; he just knew things. The only person Jiang Cheng still owed an explanation to, for this senseless journey to seek out the person who’d destroyed all their lives, was Jin Ling. He hoped it would be years—healthy, peaceful, growing years—before Jin Ling was old enough to demand it.