The Ox and the Magpies

The yellow, lazy heat trickles onto the rice patties still humid with promise. It soaks into the straw hat of a young cowherd and pools onto the shoulders of his favorite black ox, named Ox. They’re sauntering to their favorite creek, where Ox can have a drink, and where the boy can have a bath. It’s their precious creek–not even the village elders know about it.

Ox walks by the boy’s side, bobbing his massive head to his steps, an unnatural rhythm for his bovine body. From the sky, a common green magpie lands on Ox’s wide back. She picks at her pretty feathers. Her red eyes, rimmed in black, gleam in the afternoon like ink for a chop, ready to notarize the day. She watches everything, intently. Ox doesn’t mind her and the cowherd doesn’t notice. The boy’s feet touch the cracked clay, but his thoughts are elsewhere.

The cowherd’s mother has been pressuring him to marry, but every girl she suggests is either a neighbor or his cousin. They are all too close to love. Perhaps he could marry a girl from the village over, someone with a different accent, with different patterns on her tunics, an unfamiliar stitch on the collar. He’d heard of an old man whose five wives were from five different tribes, and he would travel to see them in rotation. The boy wouldn’t mind being a traveling husband, even for just one wife.

The boy ponders, and the cowherd and Ox arrive at their favorite creek, but they are shocked to find that someone is there first. A beautiful girl in the water, a snapping, wooden contraption at her feet. The layers of her silk hanfu soak through to skin. When the drying light hits her face, it reflects like the moon: she is a goddess, the youngest of the Jade Emperor’s seven fairy daughters. Each celestial princess has been given a trade to perfect, to decorate the Jade Palace in magical artifacts. This girl was given a loom. She is a weaver.

Squatting in the grass, the cowherd watches the weaver’s fingers lift the water into the air and into her loom, pulling and pushing liquid into reflective silk. The young goddess weaves the humble into the divine, water into silver, rice husks into gold. She once wove the blood of soldiers into a breastplate of rubies. The uglier the yarn, the more beautiful the cloth.

From his hiding spot, the cowherd’s eyes transfix on the girl’s focused face and diligent fingers, while the wet silhouette of her figure rings at the back of his mind. Witnessing perfection feels much like panic. She is too far to love, but it is worth it to be pulled into her orbit. He would travel the universe, just to watch her work. Just to let her moon face pull him like the tide.

Ox is watching, too. He sees how the boy’s pupils swallow the girl, how they hold her like a pearl. He knows he has lost his companion forever, but he’s not much upset. He is a simple ox, from a simple village, and he agrees with the cowherd’s mother. It’s time for the boy to grow up. Ox nudges his friend out of the grass and into the water. On his back, the magpie flutters and resettles herself. Ox wishes there was a better way to say goodbye, but this’ll do.

The weaver gasps, the unwoven water falling to the creek in sheets of rain. Wet, flustered, and apologetic, the cowherd begs for forgiveness. He didn’t mean to spy on her, he was too struck to move, this being his first brush with the divine. He clutches at the hem of her skirt, drowning himself in a deep bow. Gods do not take well to mortal interruptions. This is surely the end of him, although it’s a lovely way to go.

But the weaver is curious, and she considers the boy. She finds this strange, ugly creature fascinating, so fragile and alive, unlike the hard, gemstone faces of her fellow gods. He is so much more touchable, caressable, possibly the most imperfect thing she has ever seen. Her instinct is to weave him a tunic of light, something warm for this quivering candle flick of a man. She wants to protect him, keep him like a secret stone in her hair, warm and safe and hers alone. With an unexpected fury, she realizes that for him, she would break the world.

She does not report him to the Jade Emperor, because in truth, she wasn’t supposed to leave the heavenly palace in the first place. What better way to escape punishment than to do something so much worse? She kneels down and takes the cowherd’s hand, pulls him up out of the water and to her. Ox wades quietly into the reeds for a drink.

***

When the Jade Emperor finds out, as all-knowing gods are wont to do, the Cowherd and the Weaver are banished to the skies. They are sentenced to two stars, Vega and Altair, where they shine as twin lights on opposite sides of the universe, glimmering, untouched and untouchable, for the world to see. A warning to lovers: It’s not worth it.

But remember the magpie? Go back and find her; she’s there. She was always there. Ox is a simple Ox, but the magpie knew better. She rolled her eyes when the weaver held out her hand. She knew this wouldn’t end well. She could see their cursed future rippling in the water, lovely and inevitable.

Still, when she saw the lovers cursed to the skies, she took pity on them. What did boys and goddesses know about love, anyway? They didn’t know better, the poor pets. She cannot reverse their sentence, but she can ease their suffering, at least for a while. She knows that magpies are jaded, but soft-hearted, and she convinces the others to help. She gathers them, her sisters and brothers, of all colors and sizes, and on the seventh night of the seventh month, they fly into the dark. This night is hot enough to soften the glue between time and space, enough to pry open a space for diligent, clever birds. Together, they build a bridge with their bodies, spanning the galaxy. They fly so hard they churned the space between the lovers into the Milky Way, a stairway between two stars. It’s a temporary bridge, just for the night; the birds have other things to do, after all. But in the middle of the magpie bridge, once a year, the cowherd and the weaver meet as one.