Wei Gu of Duling lost his parents early and wanted to marry young. He had tried again and again, and every match had fallen through.
In the second year of Yuanhe he was travelling to Qinghe, and stopped the night at an inn south of Songcheng, where someone proposed to him the daughter of a certain Pan Fang, formerly of Qinghe, and they agreed to meet at dawn at the gate of Longxing temple.
Wei Gu was eager enough to go early. The moon was still up, slanting. And on the steps sat an old man with a cloth bag beside him, holding a book up to the moonlight and reading it.
Wei Gu crept closer to look at the writing. It was not any script he knew — not seal-script, not clerical, not the tadpole forms of the ancients, not Sanskrit either, and he read Sanskrit.
“Sir,” he said, “what book is that? I have studied hard since I was a boy and there is no writing in the world I cannot read; I can even read the letters of the western countries. But I have never seen anything like this.”
The old man laughed. “This is not a book of this world. How should you have seen it?”
“What is it, then?”
“A book of the dark,” said the old man. “Of the invisible world.”
“And what do you do with it?”
“I am the officer in charge of marriages,” he said. “I keep the register.”
Wei Gu, who had been trying to marry for years, sat down. “And what is in your bag?”
“Red thread,” said the old man. “For tying the feet of a man and wife together. From the moment I tie them — though they are born enemies, though one is in the south and one in the north, though one is rich and one is beggared — there is no power under heaven that can separate them.”
Wei Gu asked, hardly daring: “And who is written down for me?”
The old man turned the pages. “Your wife is the daughter of the woman who sells vegetables in the market north of Songcheng. She is three years old now.”
Wei Gu went to the market at dawn. There was a woman selling vegetables, blind in one eye, with a dirty, ugly little girl of three on her arm.
Wei Gu — who was a gentleman, and proud, and had been refused by great houses — went home in a rage. He gave his servant a knife and told him to kill the child, and the servant struck at her in the market and missed and cut her forehead, and the crowd came, and he ran.
Fourteen years passed.
Wei Gu rose in the world. He was given a post, and his commander, pleased with him, gave him his own daughter in marriage — a young woman of great beauty. And on their wedding night, Wei Gu noticed that she kept a patch of plaster on her eyebrow, summer and winter, and asked her about it.
“My father died when I was small,” she said. “I was raised by my mother’s sister, who sold vegetables in the market at Songcheng. One day, when I was three, a madman struck at me with a knife in the market and cut my forehead. It healed, and I have covered the scar ever since.”
Wei Gu asked for her mother’s sister’s name, and her history, and every particular. And then he told her the whole of it, and they sat in their wedding chamber and did not know whether to laugh or weep.
And the marriage, the story says, was a very happy one — and the temple where he had met the old man is called, from that day, the Temple of the Fixed Marriage.
Two things are worth carrying away from it. The first is the red thread, which has tied feet in Chinese weddings for twelve hundred years. The second is quieter and less comfortable: that Wei Gu tried to kill his wife, and failed, and married her, and she is the one who still has the scar.