Chapter Three
Squad Five
Yulin Garrison did not look the way I had built it in my head.
I had built it tall and white-walled and bannered. I had built it the way a child builds a thing she is afraid of — too big to be true, so that when she met the true thing she would have room to be relieved.
What I rode up to on the fourth afternoon was a brown rammed-earth wall the height of three tall men, leaning at the southwest corner where the spring rains had eaten the foot of it. A gate of unpainted pine, scorched at the lintel from a fire someone had not bothered to plaster over. A flag of vermillion silk so old the silk had gone the colour of dried liver. Beyond the wall, the slate-grey roofs of a barracks-keep low and squat as a herder's wo-peng, and behind that, the smoke of forty cook-fires going up into a sky the colour of a tinker's pewter.
There were perhaps two hundred men in the yard outside the gate. Most of them, like me, on horses. Most of them, unlike me, in groups already — twos, threes, fours, a knot of seven all wearing the same straw-coloured cord at the elbow that meant Liutang village, all of us together, all of us alone. The tanner's son spotted his own elbow-cord across the yard within twenty heartbeats and was gone without saying goodbye. The baker's son said, "Bad water, old man — write me a letter sometime," and was already three paces away laughing at someone else's joke before I had finished hearing him.
The tinker did not go anywhere.
He sat on his pony beside my bay mare and looked at the gate as if he were appraising whether it would resole.
"Garrison clerk's inside the first court," he said, without looking at me. "Two yuan to the priest at the door if you want the oath read clean. One yuan if you don't mind him slurring it. No yuan and you wait until dusk and take a cripple's-oath in the dark. The cripple's-oath is the same oath. The priest does not know the difference. The priest knows whether you paid."
"How do you know."
"My third uncle came through this gate in the year of the dog."
"And."
The tinker shrugged. He did not say and he never came back. He did not need to.
He nudged his pony forward. He did not look at me again. Halfway to the gate, without turning his head, he said:
"I'll see you on the inside, xiongdi."
He had said xiongdi twice now. I had not yet earned either. I noted the debt under my tongue, beside Arsulan, beside Shadi, beside the wet of the binding-cloth that had not had a true dry hour in two days.
The conscript yard inside the gate was a packed-earth square the size of three threshing-floors, fenced off from the keep proper by a low pole-rail. A wooden trestle at the south end held the muster scrolls. A pock-faced sergeant sat behind the trestle with a brush in his right hand and a cup of something in his left, and beside him, on a folding stool with his sandals off and his bare feet propped on a brazier, an oath-priest in a vermillion robe so faded I could see the patch where the moths had been at the shoulder.
I tied the bay to a hitch-post. I checked the girth, as if she were going anywhere. I touched the bamboo tube inside my deel, once, the way you touch a god's altar before you walk past it. I went to the trestle.
"Name."
"Qiao Yansheng. Of Qiaojia."
The pock-faced sergeant did not look up. He was perhaps fifty, with a head shaved bald in a way that had not gone all the way down to the scalp — there was a stubble of grey-black on him like the stubble on a winter field — and a long pink scar that ran from the left corner of his mouth down under the line of his chin. He was missing the small finger of his left hand. He wrote my name on the muster scroll in a hand that was old-army neat. He set down the brush. He looked up.
He looked at me. He looked at me. He looked at me.
His eyes were the colour of riverbed mud. They went, in a single slow sweep, from the helmet I had tied too tight at the chinstrap to the lamellar that had been my father's to the kitchen-knife at my hip to the bay mare hitched behind me to the way I was standing with my feet wider than my hips and my hands open on my thighs — and he stopped at the hands.
He had stopped at the hands the way the tanner's son had. The way the tinker had. Hands give it away, the second heartbeat in my chest said, very quietly. Knuckles too narrow. The way you scratch your cheek with the back of your wrist.
I did not scratch my cheek.
I let my hands hang where they were and I did not move them. I waited. I let my face do nothing.
"Qiao Yansheng," the pock-faced sergeant said, not a question.
"Yes, sir."
"You are forty-eight years old."
"Yes, sir."
"You are forty-eight years old."
"Yes, sir."
He set the brush down across the scroll. He drank from the cup. The cup was small and brown and smelled of millet-spirit, but more than millet-spirit, and I would learn later that the more was the pickled-plum salt that a regimental sergeant who had once survived a winter on the Black Sand without supply line drank in his cup forever after, because it was the only thing that tasted like water to him. He drank. He set the cup down. He looked at me for a third long beat. He did not look at my hands again. He looked at my face under the helmet's shadow, and his eyes — the riverbed-mud eyes — softened by the smallest fraction of a degree, the way the surface of a frozen pond softens at noon in the third week of spring.
"You are forty-eight years old," he said again, "and you have come a long way on bad water, and your hands are full of orchard work. Welcome to the Tenth Legion. Take the oath. Squad Five. Move."
I moved.
The oath-priest had not taken his feet off the brazier. He read my father's name without lifting his head from the scroll. He did not look at me. I knew, even with my own face turned down at the priest's bare feet, that I had been given a mercy by the pock-faced sergeant — the squad placement had already been decided, the priest's job was only to put a stamp on it.
The priest said: "Repeat."
I repeated.
"By the body of the Black Dragon, by the bones of the nine ancestors, by the lacquer of the Yellow Scrolls, I serve."
"By the body of the Black Dragon, by the bones of the nine ancestors, by the lacquer of the Yellow Scrolls, I serve."
The second heartbeat in my chest did not stir at Black Dragon. It did not stir at nine ancestors. It stirred — once, a small lift of the head, the way a sleeping dog lifts its head at a far sound — at I serve, because it heard the lie in my throat, and it knew the lie, and it did not condemn the lie, and I almost wept on the priest's bare feet. I did not. I bit the inside of my cheek until the salt of my own blood came into my mouth, and the priest stamped his seal on the scroll, and the sergeant said, "Yansheng of Qiaojia, Squad Five, third company, second regiment, Tenth Legion. Step left."
I stepped left.
I had a place in an army.
Squad Five was waiting for me on the lee side of the barracks-keep, on a length of pole-rail where five men were sitting in a row in the cold like five sparrows on a fencepost.
"Fresh fish," one of them said, not unkindly, when I came up.
It was the smallest of the five, but not the youngest. He had a face I would later have to find a careful word for, because the careful word was pock-faced and pock-faced was the squad-name they had already given him before he came to me, but for now what I saw was that the smallpox had been at him hard when he had been a child, and that he had a kind of pug-cheerful face that had survived the pox by deciding to be cheerful anyway. Black hair tied at the nape. Twenty winters, perhaps; perhaps twenty-one. A bow on his back that was a thumb's-width too long for him — he had not yet grown the last hand of height his shoulders promised him — and a smile of crooked teeth he showed all the way to the back molars.
"Pock-faced Liu," he said. "Liu Ban'er, but nobody calls me Ban'er. Sit down, fresh fish. Don't stand at the rail like a horse waiting to be sold."
I sat down at the rail.
The man at Liu's right side was almost a head and a half taller than the rest of them and broad enough across the shoulders that the pole-rail bowed slightly under him. His hands were the size of plates. His face was a soft round thing with a wide mouth and a small flat nose and the slow patient eye of a draft-ox. He looked at me the way a draft-ox looks at a stranger in its yard — not unkind, but committed to a long appraisal.
"This is Little Mountain," Liu said. "Zhang Shan. Blacksmith's son from down at the Yellow River bend. Don't startle him near a horse, he is afraid of horses. Don't ask why, it makes him sad. Don't laugh, it makes him angry. Have I covered it?"
"Mountain," the big man said, agreeably. He nodded at me. He did not say my name. He had not been given my name; I would be Qiao Yansheng to them on a scroll only.
The man on Liu's left was older than all of us. His hair was the colour of an old roof — half-grey, half-still-black, tied back in a wisp at the nape — and his eyes were a very pale grey, almost colourless, the eyes of a man who had spent a great deal of his life looking long distances. He did not look at me when I sat down. He looked at a point somewhere over my shoulder, the way a hunter looks at the second tree past the deer.
"Old Crow," Liu said. "Wu Linfeng. Don't call him Wu Linfeng. Don't ask where he's from. The answer is the Wall, which is not an answer."
"The Wall," Old Crow said. He had a voice like a dry leaf turning in a fire. He did not look at me. He did not need to. I had the feeling, from the first second I sat down beside him, that he had already looked at me — across the yard, across the gate, perhaps across the whole of the road from Qiaojia — and that what he had seen, he had already filed away in a place I would not be allowed to look into.
The second heartbeat in my chest sped, then steadied. He saw, the wolf said, very quietly, the way a man says a thing he has been suspecting all afternoon. He saw the shape.
I did not breathe out.
The last man on the rail was the youngest, in years, but he had the kind of face that wears anger the way other faces wear weather, and he had been wearing it long enough that the lines were already starting to set into him. Twenty-five winters, perhaps. A long flat nose, a long flat jaw, a long flat mouth set hard. He had the build of a man who had done one heavy useful thing all his life and was bitter about not having been allowed to do anything else. A wheat-thresher's build. He looked at me the way the tanner's son had looked at me on the road, but without the tanner's son's patience.
"Wang," Liu said, "be a sister."
"Don't call me a sister."
"Wang Erlang. Wang the Second. Don't talk to him before he has eaten in the morning. Don't lend him money. Don't let him lend you money. Don't, very especially, drink with him at the kumis-still. The kumis-still is two hundred paces north of the barracks-keep and downwind of the latrines, which tells you what kind of place it is. Have I covered him?"
"You missed don't bother me, fresh fish," Wang Erlang said.
"I always miss that one, brother, you're right."
Liu turned back to me. He smiled all the way to the back molars again. His pox-marks moved with the smile, and they were not ugly on him; they were a part of his face the way a frost-mark is a part of a windowpane.
"And you," he said, "are."
"Qiao Yansheng," I said, in the belly voice. "Of Qiaojia."
"Yansheng's a man's name. Hold it forever. My grandfather had it. Did you bring a horse?"
"Bay mare, hitched at the rail."
"Good. Did you bring a bow?"
"Yes."
"Good. The sergeant said you'd have a bow. He always knows. You're a quiet one. The sergeant likes quiet ones. We're already short a quiet one." His face flickered, very briefly, with something that was not cheer, and went back to cheer. "There was a quiet one before you. He fell off the Wall last month. Not dead. Broke his leg in three places. Got mustered out. We've been waiting on his replacement. Anyway. Welcome. Squad Five."
"Welcome," Little Mountain said.
Old Crow did not say welcome. Old Crow nodded once at the middle distance and lifted his foot off the lower bar and put it on the ground. It was the closest thing to a welcome he was going to give me, and I knew it, and I took it.
Wang Erlang spat into the dirt.
I will not write down the four weeks of drill the way another writer would, who had not lived through them. I will not list the cold mornings, or the count of push-ups, or the laps the legion made us run around the inside of the wall — though on the second morning of the second week I vomited into a corner behind the latrine after the run, and Pock-faced Liu found me, and he did not laugh, and he did not say a word. He took my arm under his and walked me back to the barracks with one of his pox-cheeked little jokes about how he himself had vomited the first morning and twice on the third. I had loved him before that for being kind. I loved him from that morning on for being kind without making me say thank you.
By the third week of drill, Bald Wei had made me the squad-archer. He had set me at sixty paces from a target the size of a man's chest and made me put six arrows in it in the count of ten breaths, and I had put all six, and he had grunted, and he had said, "Yansheng. Where'd you learn that bow."
"My father, sir."
"Your father shoots better than my father." It was, I would understand only in the eleventh month I knew him, a kind of joke — Bald Wei's father had been shot from a horse at the Wall by a Confederation arrow when Bald Wei was nine, and the joke was that his father did not shoot at all anymore, and the joke was a kindness in the way a soldier offers a kindness, by making the worst thing in his own life into something the recruit can pretend to laugh at — but in that third week I did not know the joke yet, and I only said:
"Yes, sir."
"Squad-archer," he said, to the wall behind me, not to me. "Squad Five. Qiao Yansheng, you draw the squad arrows. You carry the squad bow. You sit at the right hand of the squad bowman in council. You eat second."
"Yes, sir."
"And Yansheng."
"Sir."
"Sit a little wider," he said, still to the wall behind me. "You're sitting like a man with a stone in his boot."
I sat a little wider.
He walked away.
The second heartbeat in my chest gave one long slow proud beat under the binding, and I understood that the pock-faced sergeant of the Tenth Legion, who had a wife dead in Changlin he would not speak of, who drank pickled plum in his cup of millet-spirit, who had not looked at my hands twice in four weeks, knew — knew, the way one animal in a herd knows that another animal in the herd is not exactly the kind of animal it is pretending to be — that I was not what I was pretending to be, and had elected, for reasons I would not understand for half a year, to look at the wall instead.
I did not let myself cry.
I went and drew the squad arrows.
Wang Erlang began to call me little brother on the eighth day of the fourth week.
He did not mean it as a kindness. He meant it the way a man means it when he is older and meaner and stronger and is choosing the youngest available body in the room to be his footstool. He said it at the noon-rice. He said it the next morning at the latrine ditch, when he reached past me to put his shovel down on top of mine and leaned a little of his hip-weight against me in passing, the way a boar leans on a fencepost it is testing. He said it on the tenth day when the squad sat to dice for chores — and he leaned over my shoulder and looked at my dice from above and breathed mutton-fat into my hair and said, very softly, with the soft pleased cruelty of a man who has just found a thing to be cruel about:
"Little brother. You smell sweet."
I did not move.
Pock-faced Liu, across the dice-cloth, looked up.
I could not see what was in Liu's face because I did not let my eyes leave the dice. But the dice did not roll for another long count of three, and in that count I felt Liu look at me, and look at Wang, and look at me again, and decide a thing.
Liu said, in a voice as cheerful as cheerful as cheerful: "Wang. Get your beard out of the fresh fish's neck. He's going to throw."
"I'm not the one going to throw," Wang said.
"No," Liu said. He was still smiling. He was still cheerful. He did not stop being cheerful for one second. "But you're the one who's going to clean the latrine for me tomorrow if you don't sit down, because I am going to win Yansheng's roll for him, and Yansheng is going to win mine for me, and you, brother, are going to be holding the bucket. Now sit down."
Wang sat down.
He sat down because Liu was a smaller man than Wang and a younger man than Wang and an unimportant man at the table of dice, and Wang did not bother to be cruel to Liu because Liu was not interesting to be cruel to — Liu was the wrong shape of prey — but he sat down also because Liu had given him a reason to sit down that did not involve a fight, and Wang, for all his cruelty, was not a fool. Wang was a heavy-shouldered angry man who was looking for the smallest possible body in the room to lean on, and he knew the smallest body when he saw it, and he knew not to make a scene of it on the eighth day of the fourth week, because the small body had not yet had the chance to refuse him.
I threw my dice. I threw badly on purpose. I did not look up. I did not look at Liu.
I felt, on the other side of the cloth, Old Crow's pale eyes resting on my hands for the length of one throw, and then moving away.
The second heartbeat in my chest pressed at the front of my skull. It was not, this time, a comfort. It was a small careful watching, the way a wolf watches at the edge of a yard where a child is being struck.
Not yet, I thought back, with my chest. Not yet. He will give me the chance. He will not stop. He will give me the chance.
The wolf said nothing.
The dice rolled.
The river-bath day came on the fifteenth day of the fourth week.
The Tenth Legion bathed in a bend of the Yulin river two li west of the keep, where the bank was shallow and the bottom was sandy and the wind off the water was so cold that men came out of the river the colour of plucked geese. They had three river-bath days each month. I had got past the first by reporting to Bald Wei with a face the colour of suet and a hand pressed to my belly, and he had grunted and sent me to latrine duty instead, and I had dug for four hours with the bleed running down the inside of my thigh, and I had wept twice into my sleeve because it was a mercy I had not earned and could not afford to keep relying on.
The second river-bath day was now. I could not report sick twice. A man does not report sick twice in a month without the regimental surgeon being called, and the regimental surgeon would touch.
I went, the night before, to the latrine. I stayed too long. I made myself retch. I came back out into the cold yard pale and shivering and walking slow, and I went past Bald Wei's window with my hand on my belly, and I did not look at the window, and I did not need to, because I felt Bald Wei see me.
In the morning, when the squad was lining up for the river, Wei came past me at the rail. He did not stop walking. He said, to the air over my shoulder:
"Yansheng. Reporting stomach-flux. Two days. Don't come within ten paces of the cookhouse."
"Yes, sir."
"And Yansheng."
"Sir."
"You've had stomach-flux twice in a month. Eat the ginger-root in the apothecary tent before the next one. Sergeant's order."
"Yes, sir."
He kept walking.
I stood at the rail with the squad lined up behind me and did not turn around. Pock-faced Liu was last in the line. He had heard the sergeant. He did not say anything as he passed me. He only made, with his right hand at his hip where the others could not see, a small flicking gesture — go inside, fresh fish, get warm — and walked on with his bath-cloth over his arm.
But Wang Erlang, third in the line, did not pass me without speaking.
He stopped. He turned. He looked at me at the rail in my full kit with my deel still on, and he looked at the squad's bath-cloths over their shoulders, and he looked, very slowly, at me again.
"Stomach-flux," he said. "Again, little brother?"
"Yes."
"Last month, too. Wasn't it last month."
"Yes."
"Little brother." He stepped one step closer. His mutton-breath came across the cold air. "I don't think you have stomach-flux. I think you're a coward of the cold water. I think you don't want the squad to see what your mother gave you under those pants. Is that it? Is it small, little brother?"
The second heartbeat in my chest gave one long beat. The wolf, somewhere west of Yulin where I could not see him, lifted his head.
I looked at Wang Erlang, in the belly voice, with my face doing nothing:
"Sergeant told you what I have."
"Sergeant," Wang said, and showed his teeth, "tells us a lot."
He did not say it loud enough for Wei to hear. He did not need to. He had said it loud enough for the squad to hear, and the squad — Liu at the back with the cheer dropping off his face for the first time in fifteen days, Little Mountain with his big mouth slightly open, Old Crow with his pale eyes resting on Wang's belt-buckle and saying nothing — the squad had heard him.
Wang held it. He held it for two long heartbeats. He saw I would not answer. He smiled.
"River-bath day's fun without you," he said, and turned, and walked.
The squad followed him. Pock-faced Liu, going last, paused once at my elbow and said in a fast undertone, "Don't mind him, fresh fish, he's the worst on bath days," and then he was gone.
I stood at the rail. I watched the squad's backs walk away across the conscript yard toward the gate. The second heartbeat in my chest was loud now, very loud, the way the wolf's heart had been loud at the boundary stone. The wolf was on his feet somewhere west of Yulin in some piece of country I could not see, and he was pacing.
He will not let it go, I thought, with my chest.
No, the wolf said.
I went inside the barracks. I went to my pallet. I sat down on the edge of it with my back to the wall and my face to the door, and I took off my helmet, and I sat there for a long time with my cropped head in my hands and my breath coming in shallow careful belly-breaths I had not had to practice for two days, and I thought:
The bath is the first thing they will see. It is not the worst thing they will see. The worst thing is whatever Wang Erlang does next. I do not yet know what. He will tell me what, in his own time. I have to be ready for whatever it is.
The second heartbeat slowed. The wolf, west of Yulin, sat down at the edge of whatever stand of brush had been holding him, and he kept watch.
I went and ate the ginger-root in the apothecary tent.
I drank it down in the belly voice. The tincture was bitter and the cold air outside the tent took the bitter out of my mouth in two breaths, and I walked back to the barracks with my hand on my belly, in case anyone was watching, and I knew that the bath-day after this one was twelve days off, and that by then I would have to have something. A better lie. A different sergeant. An accident with a broken finger that kept me out of the river without keeping me out of the bow.
Or Wang Erlang, gone.
I did not let myself think the second thought any further than that. I let it lie under the first thought like a thing under a stone. The stone, once you started lifting it, did not go back exactly the way it had been. My mother had taught me that on the kitchen floor.
I went and drew the squad arrows for the afternoon.
The wolf on the west wind kept pace.