Chapter Two
The Belly Voice
The first night on the road, I learned that the worst lie is the one you tell with your body.
We made camp in a willow-break a li off the road, the four of us, where someone — soldiers, peddlers, the dead — had built a stone fire-pit in some other autumn and walked away from it. The tanner's son lit the fire. The baker's son talked. The tinker spread his oiled cloth on the ground and counted his tools onto it with his lips moving, a small private inventory I understood without being told: if I know what I have, no one else can know what I have. I had been doing the same thing since the village gate, in my head, with my own kit. Bow. Quiver. Twenty arrows. Knife. The four cloth-strips folded against my belly. The bamboo tube tucked into my deel like a secret bone.
I did not get off my horse for as long as I could justify it.
"Old man," the baker's son called, "you planning to sleep up there?"
He had not stopped calling me old man since the morning. He had begun it as a joke about my voice, which sat low in my belly the way I had taught it to over six days in the orchard, and it had stayed because nothing on me had given him a better name. I did not have a beard for him to mock and I did not have a young face for him to envy and I did not have a body shape under the lamellar for him to read in either direction. I was a deel and a helmet and a pair of hands on the reins. He had filled in the rest with old. I let him.
"Coming down," I said, in the belly voice.
I slid out of the saddle with my knees stiff from holding myself wrong all day, and I felt the second heartbeat in my chest take three slow paces under my binding, the way a dog turns three times before lying down. The wolf was somewhere west of the willow-break. I had felt him fall back when the road bent through the wheat-stubble flats — there had been no ridge for him, and he had not crossed open country, and I had ridden two hours wondering if I had hallucinated him on the boundary stone — and then, an hour before sundown, the second heartbeat had thickened in my chest the way milk thickens on the boil, and I had known he was on the ridge again, north and west, keeping pace.
I unsaddled the bay. I knotted her hobble. I checked her near hoof for a stone I knew was not there because I had checked it twice in the saddle, and I checked it again because the checking was something to do with my hands while the other three men sorted themselves around the fire.
The tanner's son was watching me.
He had not spoken twice on the whole day's ride. He had a face like a closed shutter, the outline notes had said somewhere in the back of my head — no, that was not the outline, that was my own thought, a thought I had put away in the orchard and pulled out now and recognized. His face was a closed shutter and his hands were a tanner's hands, raw at the knuckles, the right thumb permanently darkened by the bark-pit. He sat on his heels by the fire and watched the way I unsaddled my horse. He did not watch my face. He watched my hands.
Knuckles wider. Hold the girth-buckle in the palm, not the fingertips. Spit when you straighten up.
I straightened up. I spat. The spit came out wrong — too wet, too far forward in the mouth — and I had to make a small disgusted sound to cover it, and the baker's son laughed.
"Old man can't even spit. What kind of farm did they grow you on?"
"South," I said, in the belly voice. "Bad water."
"Bad water," he said, delighted, the way a small dog is delighted by a thrown stick. "Bad water. You hear that? Bad water. I knew an old man on bad water once. He died of it. You're not going to die of it on me, are you, old man? Because I don't want to bury anyone before Yulin."
"Won't die yet."
"That's the spirit."
The tanner's son had not stopped watching my hands.
I sat with my back to a willow.
I had thought about this part. I had thought about how to sit. A man sits with his knees apart, with his hands open on his thighs, with his weight in his hips. A woman sits with her knees together, with her hands one inside the other, with her weight in her shoulders. I had practiced apart-knees in the orchard until my hip-sockets ached. I sat down with my knees wider than my hips. I rested my wrists on them. I let my hands hang loose. I did not cross my ankles. I did not tuck my feet under me. I made a wide, sprawled, occupying shape on the cold ground, the way the tinker had sat the moment he stopped walking, the way the tanner's son sat now across the fire.
The baker's son sat with his knees up under his chin. He was eighteen. He had not yet learned how to take up the room he was entitled to. I almost envied him.
The tinker passed a clay jar around. Millet-spirit, the kind a village wedding pulls out and then puts back unfinished, sour and grain-rough and warm enough to be a kindness on a cold willow-break night. The tanner drank without speaking. The baker drank and made a face he had practiced for someone else's appreciation, a face that would have worked on his sisters. The tinker drank without looking at the jar.
It came to me.
I had not, in my life, drunk much. There had been one mouthful at my brother's hundredth-day. There had been an inch of warm rice wine at New Year's, three times, when my mother had been in a soft enough mood to allow it. I knew that a man drinks from the lip of the jar and does not wipe afterward. I knew that he passes the jar with the lip turned away. I knew that he does not make a face. I had practiced none of these in the orchard, because I had not thought of it, and I felt the panic open in my chest like a fan opening — and then the second heartbeat, in my chest, gave one long slow beat under the binding, and the panic flattened.
Belly voice. Belly drink.
I took the jar in two hands. I tilted it. I let the millet-spirit hit the back of my throat without touching the front of my tongue — a thing I had learned, of all places, from watching my father drink medicine. I did not cough. I passed the jar to the tinker without wiping the lip.
The tinker watched my hands take the jar and watched my hands pass the jar, and he said nothing, and his face did nothing.
The tanner's son grunted, very low, into the fire. It was the first sound I had heard him make all day that was not a word for his horse.
"All right, old man," the baker's son said. "You earned the second pass."
I had passed something. I did not know what.
I did not sleep.
I lay on my side with my deel for a blanket and my saddle for a pillow and my back to the fire — a man does not turn his belly to the night, my father had said once, of a soldier in some old story, but I was bound across the chest and bleeding into a folded strip of my mother's wedding cloth and I did not have a belly I could turn anywhere without thinking — and I listened.
The tinker slept on his back with both hands across his chest. His tools, rolled into the oilcloth, were under his head. He did not snore.
The baker's son slept face-down with one arm flung out into the cold the way a child sleeps. He muttered. Once, very clearly, he said, Ma, and I closed my eyes for a long count of ten.
The tanner's son did not sleep. He sat against the willow opposite me and kept the fire low, and he did not look at me, and I did not look at him, and we shared the long hours of the dark in the careful blind way that two animals share a watering-hole.
Sometime in the deepest part of the night — the hour my mother called mouse-watch, when even the cock in the henhouse was asleep — the wolf-shadow came down off the ridge.
I felt him before I heard him. The second heartbeat in my chest sped slightly, the way a pulse speeds when a familiar voice comes near a door. Then I heard the snow-crust break, two paces, three paces, four — a creature too big to be a fox, too big to be a hare, too quiet to be a man.
I did not turn my head.
The bay mare turned hers. She lifted her muzzle from the hobble-rope and she made the small low throat-noise she made when something larger than her was nearby and not yet a threat. The tinker's pony shifted in its sleep and put one ear back, then both, then forward again. None of the men woke.
The wolf came to the edge of the firelight.
He did not enter it. He sat down just beyond the reach of the embers, where the orange tongue of the light died into the willow-shadow, and he laid his great head along his crossed paws and looked at me. His yellow eye-rims caught two small fires from the coals and held them. He did not breathe a visible breath. He had no breath to make visible.
Here, the not-voice said. Not a word. A weight at the front of my skull. The same weight as on the boundary stone, a little fuller, a little more certain. Here. With you.
I did not answer aloud. I did not dare to mouth it. The tanner's son was three paces away and not asleep, and I would not — I would not — gamble what I had stolen at the village gate on the breath of a single word. I closed my eyes instead. I let my breath out slow. I tried to send back, with my chest and not my mouth, the only honest thing I had.
Stay where they can't see you.
The wolf's ears moved. A flicker. A canting forward of the right and a flattening of the left, the way a dog acknowledges a command it has chosen to obey because it agrees, not because it has been compelled. He lifted his head off his paws. He looked, once, past me — into the willow-break, at the tanner's son — and his lip lifted from his teeth, briefly, as the cat lifts its lip at a strange dog in a yard. Then he turned. He stepped back into the dark without breaking the snow-crust this time, because he did not need to, because he had only made the sound earlier so that I would know he had come.
The second heartbeat in my chest slowed back to its own pace.
The bay mare set her head down on the picket-rope and slept.
I lay with my eyes open for the rest of the watch and did not weep, because weeping would have been a girl-sound, and I did not have a girl-sound to spend.
Dawn was a grey on the east edge of the willow-break, and then a paler grey, and then the colour of dirty milk. I had been awake all night, and I sat up before the others because a man who has slept well sits up before the others, and I went to the bay mare and I checked her hoof again, and this time I did find a small stone, and I picked it out with the point of my knife with hands that were trembling from cold and from sleeplessness and from the slow thinning of my own blood — the moon is at half, two days more and they will see it on me, my mother's voice said in my head, and I told it to stop and it stopped.
The tinker was up. He had been up before me; I had only thought I was first. He was rolling his oilcloth. He looked at me over the top of his pony's withers and he said, in a voice that was a question pretending not to be:
"You ride before you ate, last night."
"Wasn't hungry."
He nodded as if this were a sensible answer. He bent back to the cloth. Then, without straightening, without looking up, he said:
"Yulin Garrison's a hard place to be not-hungry. You'll want to start eating, xiongdi. Bad water or not."
Xiongdi. Brother. He had given me a kinship word. It was the first one I had been handed on this road, and it had been given without his looking at me, in the way the steppe peddler in my mother's yard had refused to look at me when he counted out the coppers, and I understood that the tinker had done it on purpose, and I did not understand yet what kind of purpose.
"I'll eat," I said.
He nodded. He rolled his cloth.
I did not look at the tanner's son. The tanner's son was already on his horse.
We rode the second day in a slow rain.
It was the kind of rain that did not wet a cloak but greased it, until the wool stiffened along the shoulders and the water ran down between the plates of the lamellar and into the binding-cloth at my chest, and the binding-cloth, soaked, gripped tighter — which would have been a mercy, if it had not also begun, by the third hour, to chafe a wet red ring around my ribs, the kind of ring my mother had warned me about when she had folded the strips and said, change them, child, change them dry every night. I could not change them dry on a road with three men a horse-length away. I rode through the chafe. I let the cold work on the burn.
The baker's son began to sing.
He sang the seven-hour song of a hauler's caravan — one for the wheel, two for the axle, three for the lash, four for the curse, five for the wine you do not have, six for the wife you do not have, seven for the mother that does not have you — and the wet flat country of the willow-flats spread out around us and the road bent slowly, slowly north under his small bright voice, and the tanner's son did not sing and the tinker did not sing and I did not sing because I had not, in the orchard, practiced singing in the belly voice, and the song was a woman's range when the baker's son sang it.
But I hummed.
I hummed the way a man hums when he is tired and bored and has heard a song so many times in his life that his throat does the work without his asking. I hummed in the lower register. I hummed six for the wife you do not have on a bass-note my father had used to sing it on. I hummed seven for the mother that does not have you and felt the chafe at my ribs and felt the second heartbeat in my chest and felt, also, for the first time on the road, the small terrible thing that was going to be the truest thing I learned in this war: that disguise was not silence. Disguise was the right noise at the right pitch at the right time. Disguise was knowing which of your sounds, of the dozens you had been born with, were the sounds a man made too — and singing only those.
The baker's son turned in the saddle. He looked at me.
"Hah," he said. "The old man has a voice on him after all."
"Bad water," I said. "Bad voice."
He laughed. He kicked his horse forward to ride beside me. He was harmless and he was loud and he was, I thought with a kind of cold clarity I had not earned, the most dangerous of the three. He was the one who would make me say more than I should. He was the one whose chatter I would, one day soon, mistake for friendship, and would tell a thing to that I had not meant to tell. Hide knowing, my mother's voice said in my chest. Hide kind.
"Where's south for you, old man? Down by the salt-foundry country?"
"Past it. Apple country."
"Ah, apples. My father trades with apple country. Qiaojia, Liutang, Shadi. Which?"
The second heartbeat in my chest gave one long beat.
Qiao Yansheng of Qiaojia, the headman had read, with his eyes on the brush. The name was on the conscription roll. The name would be on the muster scroll at Yulin Garrison. The name would be called at oath-taking. There was no use in lying about the name of my village; there was every use in not letting this boy know whose village I was from before he saw the name in writing. Because a baker's son in apple country trades with bakers and tanners and saddlers, and a baker's son might, in a week, in a month, in a year, send a letter south to a sister or a cousin who might know a Qiao Yansheng of Qiaojia, and who might know also that the Qiao Yansheng of Qiaojia was fifty-one years old and lung-rotted and had a daughter named Yulan.
"Shadi," I said.
The baker's son's face did not change. "Shadi, hah. The sour pears? My father curses the sour pears. He says nobody buys."
"They don't."
"Bad apples, bad water, bad voice. Old man, I'm beginning to think you don't have anything good on you."
"I don't."
He laughed again. The tinker, half a length behind us, did not turn. But I felt him hearing me. He had given me xiongdi in the willow-break and I had given him Shadi on the road, and Shadi was not Qiaojia, and the tinker was a man who watched hands and listened to mouths, and he had heard me lie.
The wolf on the ridge to the west, where I could not see him, gave a long slow press at the front of my skull. Good, the not-voice said. Good.
I rode on.
That night the rain stopped and the cold came down hard, and we made camp in a stand of birch at the head of a thin stream, and I bled.
I bled through the strip at my belly and into the second strip I had folded inside the first, and the second strip was not enough — it was never going to be enough, the moon was almost at half-and-rising and the bleed was going to be heavy for two more days and I had only four strips total and no water hot enough to wash them and no privacy long enough to dry them — and I crouched behind a birch with my back to the fire and the bay mare drawn up between me and the firelight as a screen, and I changed the cloth with hands so cold I could not feel the knot I was tying. The wet ring at my ribs had begun to weep. I could feel the binding-cloth and the wedding-cloth sticking to me where the lamellar's seam came down.
I burned the used cloth.
I had thought about this, too, in the orchard. I had practiced. The trick was to fold the cloth around a fist-sized stone, weight it, and drop it into the fire under the cover of putting on more wood — the stone kept the cloth from rolling out as it burned, and the smoke from a cloth on a stone smelled like a wet boot, not like a woman. I had practiced with sheep's-blood cloths in the orchard. My mother had wept the first time she had watched me practice it. She had stood at the orchard fence and wept silently with her fist in her mouth, and I had said nothing, and we had not spoken of it again.
I put the cloth on the stone. I tucked it under the new wood. The smell came up. Wet boot. I had been right.
The baker's son said, without looking up, "Old man's burning his sock."
"Old man's socks," I said, in the belly voice, "are not your concern."
The tanner's son, from the other side of the fire, gave a single short bark of a laugh.
It was the first sound he had made at me — not at his horse, not into the fire — and it had been a man's laugh at a man's joke, and I had earned it without meaning to, and the second heartbeat in my chest gave one quick proud beat under the wet binding, and I did not let my face do anything at all.
In the third grey-blue hour before dawn, when I had again not slept, I heard the wolf.
Not on the ridge. Not in the firelight. Inside my chest. He gave a single low half-sound, not a howl — a kind of hum, the way a sleeping dog hums against your hand when you scratch its ear — and I understood, the way you understand a thing said in a language you have only just learned to dream in, that he was telling me the day was coming. That I had survived the night. That the road was still north.
Two more days, I thought back, with my chest. Two more days to the garrison and then I will not be the only thing they are watching.
Two more days, the wolf agreed.
The tinker, across the fire, rolled onto his side. His eyes were open. He had been awake. He had been watching me, I understood, through three-quarters-closed lids, the way one watches a snake one has decided is harmless but has not yet decided is a friend.
He blinked. He said nothing. He turned his face into his arm and went back to pretending to sleep.
I tightened the binding under my deel. I tied my mother's red cord at my waist — three loops, a tucked end, a finger-tap for the road-spirit, the journey-knot. I led the bay mare out of the birches. I mounted up before the others. I rode out onto the road in the half-dark.
The wolf came down off the ridge to walk three paces behind the bay mare's near hind hoof. He kept three paces. He did not close. The bay mare knew. She did not shy. She did not snort. She walked the road north with her ears canted back to listen to what walked behind her, and she did not break stride, and I sat in my father's saddle in my father's armor in my father's name and I felt — for the first time since the kitchen flagstone — almost steady.
It would not last. I knew that. The garrison was two days off, and the oath was after that, and the squad was after that, and the long road of being a son in a man's army was after that, and somewhere on the steppe past the wall there was a war and a wagon and a captive and a priest who would smell the wolf on me through clean wool, and I knew none of this yet by name. I knew only the road and the wolf and the second heartbeat. I knew that the binding was wet. I knew that xiongdi had been given. I knew that Shadi was a lie that would, eventually, ask to be paid for.
I held the lie under my tongue with the name. Arsulan. Shadi. Bad water. Bad voice. The cold morning came up. The road bent.
The wolf walked behind me, three paces back, and did not break the snow.