Yildun stoked the flames of the dung fire, watching the horizon for her husband’s return. A pot of stew simmered atop the flames, and Xingxi, her young daughter, sat beside her, playing with an unstrung bow.
With decisive movements of her knife, she slowly skinned the rabbits caught the day before. Skinny little things, all their meat would go into the stew, along with roots and herbs foraged from nearby meadows. She shifted a bit as the baby inside her kicked, cursing that her belly was too large for her to simultaneously ride a horse and draw a bow. If she were able to go hunting along with Feiyi, they may be able to bring down larger game, instead of subsisting on birds and hares.
Not to mention, Xingxi was beginning to grow restless. Already she begged her parents for a bow, and took to climbing haphazardly onto their old donkey, begging Yildun for riding lessons. It amazed her that the child even remembered the experience of being on a horse. Perhaps it had something to do with her demon blood, giving her memories long before human children. After all, she had spent the first two years of her life strapped to her mother’s back as they rode across the northern steppes, her father flying overhead scouting the area with his eagle eyes.
It had just been the two of them for so long. Ever since she found him injured with a broken wing while she was out hunting. There wasn’t much meat on the bird, but the feathers and talons would have fetched a good price with merchants. Enough to buy a month’s worth of grain. As she aimed her arrow at the bird’s chest, however, the bird looked at her with mournful, almost human eyes, and she couldn’t do it. Instead, she lowered her bow and, after some resistance from the eagle, set its wing and held it together with spare leather straps that she used to tie back her hair.
Her grandfather used to tell stories about eagles such as these. Before the Ashina invaded, followed by the Han, her clan would ride across the steppes and grasslands in caravans hundreds strong. The skilled hunters would scout ahead with golden eagles on their shoulders, as faithful as any hunting dog. Behind them, herders led flocks of sheep hundreds if not thousands strong, moving through the countryside like a grounded, hungry cloud.
By the time she was born their numbers had dwindled, their people scattered across nations to which they owe no allegiance. Partially due to politics she did not understand, the clan her family belonged to had lost favor with the larger Khaganate. It was also impossible to maintain flocks to sustain their numbers: the steppes themselves were being carved into farmlands, where tender crops sprouted that their sheep could not graze upon without repercussion. Sheep and oxen raised within pastures instead of the freedom of the steppes pushed their own herds away from the traditional grazing grounds. There was less space for a nomadic people to roam, and so tribes splintered into smaller and smaller groups. By the time Yildun was born, her clan consisted only of her extended family, farming on borrowed land. Tithes were high and their yields were low. So once Yildun was old enough to be trusted with a bow, she spent her spare time hunting the flocks of wild geese her ancestors did, though she rode alone in a pale imitation of hunters before her.
She was interrupted from her reverie by a sharp crack. She immediately turned to check in on her daughter, who held the bow innocently in her hands even though a large red welt was developing across her left cheek. A bowstring had snapped when the child tried to string the bow; Yildun was glad it was simply the string and not the bow itself.
With some effort, she stood up and walked towards Xingxi, keeping as calm as she could, as she approached and assessed the situation. The girl’s cheek was going to bruise, no doubt about that, but luckily the snapped string had missed her eyes. Xingxi was clenching her jaw, trying not to cry, and Yildun admired how tough her daughter was, despite being only five.
“Xingxi, what happened?” she asked gently, bringing a hand up to the girl’s red cheek.
“Nothing,” Xingxi stammered, her lips quivering and tears welling her eyes.
“Xingxi,” Yildun repeated. “I’m not mad that you tried to string a bow. But don’t lie to me when you’re hurt. You don’t have to keep pain to yourself.”
“I want to be strong, though,” muttered Xingxi. “I want to help.” Yildun sighed and gathered her daughter in her arms, pressing the hurt cheek close to her chest. Rocking back and forth, she gently ran her fingers through her daughter’s hair.
“Accepting help is strength,” she insisted. “I know it’s a wild animal’s instinct to hide injury, but you are not a wild animal. Little girls get hurt and their mothers comfort them. When I was your age, I stole my brother’s knife and tried to help skin some rabbits.” She held out her right hand, where the first knuckle of her index finger was missing. “See what happened?”
Tentatively, Xingxi reached out to feel the flesh grown over the wound, comparing the finger’s length with the others. After so many years, Yildun felt no pain around the scar; it had hardly hindered her desire to use a bow, though she did have to figure out a way of knocking an arrow back with only her third and fourth fingers.
Yildun was determined to be a hunter since she was young. Her hand did not have the dexterity to fashion cloth and leather, and though she was a talented horsewoman, she did not have the patience or foresight to herd sheep well. So, she took one of her cousin’s hand-me-downs and learned how to shoot from her grandfather, while he filled her head with stories of nomadic hunters on the northern steppes, eagle on their shoulder and bow in their hands.
She shared as much of her culture with her daughter as she could, though there was much lost in transmission. The elders refused to teach her generation their native tongue, and kept their own clan name a secret, burned away on some cold winter night. Yildun had to pry the meaning of her own name—a different word for ‘star’—from her grandfather as he was dying, though the name of their clan died as a whisper on his lips.
Did Xingxi feel the same tug of nostalgia when she heard her mother’s stories, or were they already becoming fairy tales in the child’s eyes. As she roamed the steppes with only her mother and father for company, did she feel any connection to her ancestors, this clanless child whose sole inheritances were a donkey, a forgotten language, and the ceaseless, unbound sky?
Xingxi shifted to rest her head on her mother’s pregnant belly, straining her ears to hear the heartbeat of her unborn sibling. “I want to help Father hunt rabbits.”
Yildun reached over to her belt and loosened one of the tassels, which was adorned with a tuft of fur. “You will in time,” she smiled, gathering one of her daughter’s braids in her hair and tying the tassel onto the end. “And I’ll skin them and make you a rabbit-skin cloak.”
“Could we make one for the baby too?” Xingxi fiddled with the tassle, brushing the soft rabbit fur against her face and giggling as it tickled her nose. “We can make a hood with rabbit ears so Father will always know where they are.”
“I’ll always know where who is?” A shadow loomed across them for a second, then replaced by the weather-worn face of Feiyi, her husband.
“Baba!” Xingxi leapt from her mother’s lap into her father’s arms, who lifted her up and flung her into the air. Her laugh rang through the air, her arms spread wide like the bird she was. As Feiyi tossed her higher and higher, her frenzied flapping arms and legs both transformed into fledgling wings, barely feathered but determined to fly.
“You’re getting bigger every day,” Feiyi laughed. “Are you sure our daughter isn’t half plant, Yildun?”
“Not unless there’s some part of your own heritage you haven’t revealed to me, darling,” Yildun teased. “You know I am just as human as they come.”
“Not just any human,” Feiyi grinned. “Great-granddaughter of some great khan, descendent of the steppes themselves.”
“None of that nonsense here,” Yildun scoffed, “lest our child gets grandiose ideas about herself.”
“Our child can grow wings when I toss her in the air, she already knows she is grandiose.”
Xingxi kept on giggling, her featherless arms wrapped around her father’s neck. Smiling, Yildun stood up with some difficulty and walked over to her family. “She should feel pride on her own merits, then. Rather than the false mythologies of her parents.”
Feiyi leaned down and kissed Yildun’s forehead. “What a tale it is,” he whispered, and Yildun smiled despite herself.
She had thought the eagle would be gone once its wing had healed, but a few days after it had flown away, she found a pair of dead rabbits near the place where she cared for it. More rabbits appeared every couple of days, followed by some migrating geese. They weren’t enough to keep her family fed, but it helped lighten the burden of their fields and their flocks. With the steady source of game, young Yildun was able to have some time to herself, which she spent riding her favorite horse and practicing her archery.
It was there that she met the strange man who always seemed to be where she was going, wandering around on foot as if traversing miles of grassland was an effortless endeavor. It didn’t matter if she went north one day and south the next; he would still be idling atop some hill or tree, greeting her with a whistle and a wave.
It wasn’t long for Yildun’s wariness to transform into curiosity, and she eventually struck up conversation with the man. She greeted him in the Han’s language as that was how he was dressed, while he replied perfectly in her native tongue. It was immensely easy to talk to this man, who listened to her keenly and shared vivid stories of gods and spirits. His name was Luo Feiyi, and he claimed to be a simple wanderer and refused to elaborate further.
The added game from the eagle made winter easier to bear. Meanwhile, Feiyi grew thinner each week, yet refused any food she brought for him. Until one day the eagle brought no game, and Feiyi disappeared. Yildun had set out on horse and scoured the steppes for ten days until she found him nestled within a hollow tree, nearly skin and bone. She was able to hunt down a rabbit and make a stew to feed him. He was so weak that she had to nestle him in her lap and feed him careful spoonfuls. It was the closest she had ever been to him, and so she was able to look closely at the straps of leather holding back his hair. The same leather straps she had used to repair the eagle’s wing.
“My family would have been fine without your help, you know,” she said, both as a young woman in winter cradling a dying man in her arms, and as a mother in summer holding her family in her arms and its newest member in her belly.
Feiyi replied just as he did ten years prior: “You didn’t have to spare me when you found me near death, but you did. And when I recovered, nothing brought me greater happiness than paying you back.”
In the present, Xingxi stuck out her tongue and pushed her parents’ faces apart. “Stop being gross!”
Feiyi and Yildun looked at each other and laughed.
Dinner was a simple affair: Feiyi had caught two pheasants, which they plucked and boiled along with gathered herbs and roots. Yildun was thankful that her husband’s hunt was successful today; they were running low on gruel, and it would be a while before the merchant they traded with stopped by along his route. And like the carnivore she was, Xingxi much preferred the taste of meat over millet.
“What happened to our little one’s cheek?” Feiyi asked after the meal. The girl in question was chasing the donkey in the late light of summer, laughing as she tried to tie ribbons to its mane.
“She tried to string a bow,” Yildun replied. “She wanted to help you hunt.”
“Already so eager to be useful.”
Yildun watched her daughter play for a while, listening to the wind rustle through the tall grass and the fire crackle near them, before she asked, “Do you think she’s lonely?”
Feiyi paused. “I don’t know. I’ve never raised a human child.”
“And I’ve never raised an eagle,” countered Yildun. “Surely you grew up with others of your kind?”
“When I was a chick, yes. But we eagles mature faster than humans. I’ve spent much of my adult life alone. Until I met you.”
“I grew up surrounded by family. Elders, cousins, and eventually nieces and nephews. Until I started hunting, there wasn’t a time when I was by myself. Always some chore to do, someone to watch or someone watching over me. Are the two of us enough for Xingxi?”
Feiyi drew her close and laid a hand gently on her belly. “Soon she’ll have another fledgling to watch over.”
“And will the two of us be enough for them?”
“If you fear our children will be lonely, we can fill the world with little eaglets.”
Yildun scoffed and gave him a gentle shove. “You and I both know that would be impossible for us to raise by ourselves.”
Out in the distance, Xingxi let out a delighted squeal. “Mama, Papa, look! A funny old man!”
Yildun glanced over, expecting to see the donkey decorated with ribbons and grass, but instead saw her daughter casually pointing at an earth-colored spirit barely taller than her with a face like worn roots, stringy white beard, and a gnarled wooden staff in his hand.
She took off immediately towards her daughter, but Feiyi was faster. He rose into the air on wide eagle wings and swooped down on the stranger. By the time she reached them, he was holding the stranger by the scruff of his neck.
“He’s a Tudigong,” the eagle said to his wife. “Just a plain earth spirit.”
Yildun growled and brandished the cooking knife she had strapped to her belt. “What are you doing near my daughter?”
The Tudigong gave a few helpless kicks before relenting. “Nothing malicious madam. As your husband says, I am merely a humble steward of the earth, and I couldn’t help but hear your conversation.” Annoyed, Feiyi lifted him further off the ground. Tudigong gave another yelp before continuing. “Pardon the eavesdropping, but I may have something that would interest a couple such as yourself.”
“Speak quickly,” said Feiyi. “I hear Tudigong are quite tasty when boiled.”
Xingxi whined, and Yildun moved to place her body between her daughter and the Tudigong they were holding hostage.
“A place,” continued Tudigong. “South of here. If you follow the Long River to Clear Water Mountain, there is a village founded by a celestial phoenix and a dragon prince. A phoenix and a dragon in love,” he emphasized. “They wish to create a haven for, well, couples like yourselves. And children like your daughter. A place where you are safe to love.”
“And how do you know of such a place?” Feiyi asked.
Tudigong puffed out his chest and looked confident for the first time. “Because I am the Tudigong of Clear Water Mountain, and Lady Tangyou and Lord Luming have tasked me with finding those who may be interested. Now, may I request you let me down, my lord eagle?”
With a sigh, Feiyi let the Tudigong go; not too roughly as to drop him, but rough enough that Tudigong let out a grunt as he hit the ground. Brushing his robes, he gathered his staff in his hand and tapped the earth thrice. “Please consider the offer,” he said, before melting back into the earth.
Yildun thought on Tudigong’s words all evening, long after the fire was put out and Xingxi was put to bed. “What do you think of Clear Water Mountain?” she asked Feiyi.
Feiyi thought awhile before he responded. “I can hardly begin to imagine it,” he admitted. “All this time, I thought our love was unique. I thought our children would be the only ones of their kind.”
“What made you think we were exceptional?”
“Because you are exceptional, my love.”
Yildun rolled her eyes, no longer bothering to correct her husband’s hyperbole. “I think it would be good for Xingxi to grow up with other children like her. She’s starting to grow so rowdy now, it would be difficult to watch her while taking care of the baby.”
“Are you sure you will be alright, leaving the steppes?”
She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath of cool night air. The wind rustled through the grass, tugging loose strands of hair free from her braids. “What is a daughter of nomads to do, if not to roam?”
After she had left her family with nothing but her horse and her bow, Yildun cried every night for three years. The decision, however, was easy to make. Her family had ample hands to help, and often when she came home with empty hands she was just another mouth to feed. Staying there would mean slowly fading away until she was absorbed into the Tang empire, her clan name already lost in the tongues of dead elders. It was a fate she refused to accept. Instead, she chose freedom: to step out on the plains nameless, atop a horse with bow drawn and eagle resting on her shoulder. Even if their future together ended in oblivion, she would rather chase the fleeting dream of her nomadic roots than to disappear entirely.
Perhaps this was just another verse in the song of their lives. Both dreams and circumstances changed, and the best anyone could do was heed the winds and follow where they led.
In the morning they broke camp. As she packed away the tent and tied the pots and pans to the side of their horse’s saddle, Yildun’s vision suddenly became blurry. She rubbed her eyes, trying to dig out the particles of sand the wind blew in. She would not let her family see her crying.
The journey south took most of autumn. The three of them followed main trading roads for as long as possible, until they reached the mountain range. After that, Feiyi scouted in the skies to find the safest paths through the mountain, until they found the clear river that fed into the lake in Clear Water Mountain. By the time they reached the purported village of gods, demons and mortals, frost nipped at the ground and Yildun was almost due.
Xingxi is written 星西. Luo Feiyi is written 罗飞衣. Yildun is based off the Turkish name Yilduz; her background is based of the Gokturks in the north that were at war with the Tang dynasty, though I don't go into full detail. I apologize for any historical or cultural inaccuracies.