Chapter Four
The Bow-Stave
Wang Erlang gave me the chance on the third night after the river-bath.
I had been waiting the way a snared hare waits — not believing the snare will open, only believing that if it opens it will not open twice. I had been waiting with my hand on the small of my back where the kitchen-knife was tied, and with the eye on Wang's mouth whenever Wang was in the room with me, the way a small dog watches the mouth of a larger dog that has not yet bitten but has been baring its teeth at the doorway for a week.
The chance came at the kumis-still.
The kumis-still was a long low wooden shed two hundred paces north of the barracks-keep, set down behind the latrine block where the captain of the garrison could pretend he did not know it was there. It belonged to a corporal of the Second Company who had married a woman from the wall-tribes and had taught her to ferment mares' milk and had then drunk away his pay for nine years on the proceeds. The kumis was sour, hot, half-curdled, and so strong that a single ladle would take a small man's legs out from under him within a quarter of an hour, and the corporal sold it for one qian a ladle, and he did not ask the buyer's name.
I went there on the third night because Wang had been telling the squad for two days that he was going to take little brother Yansheng up to the still and make a man of him.
I had gone, at second watch, to the apothecary tent and asked the legion's hedge-doctor — a slow old man with a grey braid and a hand-tremor — for something for the river-bath cough, and he had given me, without asking, a packet of crushed mugwort and a small twist of huang lian, the bitter root that thickens a man's tongue and slows his thinking. I had paid him three qian. He had said, without looking up from his mortar, "Don't put it in your own cup, soldier."
I had said, "No, sir."
He had said, "Drink water. Lots of water. After. Whoever you're with, get him to drink water after."
I had said, "Yes, sir."
He had not asked my name. He had not asked who I was going to give the huang lian to. He had not asked anything. I would think about that, much later. The apothecary of the Tenth Legion had given small bitter packets to small thin recruits for thirty years, and the apothecary had outlived all of his questions long before I had come to him.
I tucked the packet in my deel against the bamboo tube. I went up to the kumis-still.
The corporal of the Second Company was asleep on a pile of saddle-blankets behind the bar. His wife, a small bright-eyed woman with the high cheekbones and copper-tan skin of someone whose grandmother had come over the Wall, was ladling kumis into clay cups with a sour patience and watching the four men at the long bench by the door.
The four men at the bench were Wang Erlang and three hangers-on — men who drank cheap because Wang sometimes paid for them, men who would, in any fight Wang began, stand a careful step back and let him swing first and a careful step forward and pile on after the first blow had landed. They were not from Squad Five.
Wang saw me come in. His face did a thing — half-smile, half-baring of teeth — that I had been waiting four weeks to see at full strength.
"Little brother."
"Wang."
"You came after all."
"You said."
He laughed. His three friends laughed. The corporal's wife did not laugh. She set a cup of kumis down on the bench in front of Wang, and another in front of the friend on Wang's right, and another, and another. She looked at me. She looked away.
I came to the bench. I sat at the far end of it, on Wang's left, on the side of him away from his friends. Sit on his open side, I had thought in the orchard in the days the conscription scroll had been nailed up. A man who is going to hit you reaches across his own body. Sit so that he has to.
"Sit closer, little brother."
"I'm fine here."
"Sit closer."
I slid down the bench three hand-widths and stopped. He let it stand. He had wanted to push me and I had moved without being pushed, and he had decided, in the small careful way bullies decide, that he could collect on the rest of the push later.
He pushed a cup at me. "Drink."
I drank. The kumis was sourer than I had expected; the alcohol came up into my nose and made my eyes water, and I made a man's noise of acknowledgement in my throat — huh, the small grunt my father made when he drank his medicine — and I put the cup down. The cup was a third empty. A third was enough.
"Again."
"Slow down."
"Slow down? Little brother. You came up here to slow down?"
"I came up because you said."
He pushed the cup at me again. The corporal's wife, behind the bar, made the smallest possible click of her tongue. She refilled my cup. She did not look at me when she did it. She set it down with a small precise tap that said, I see you, and I do not want any trouble in my husband's shed, and I have done what I can.
I lifted the cup. I tilted, the way I had practiced, but I did not let the kumis past the lip. I held it on my closed mouth for the count of three. I set it down. The other men were three drinks ahead of me. Wang was four.
"Better," Wang said. "Better, little brother."
His friend on the far right — a thin man with a hare-lip — said, "Wang, this one's a thirsty one after all."
"This one," Wang said, looking at me, "has been a hard worker. This one shoots better than any of us. This one is the quiet pride of Squad Five. Didn't he, brothers?"
The hare-lip said, "He did, brother, he did."
The friend on Wang's other side, the one closest to me, said, "Wang. The boy's drunk enough."
It was the first kindness anyone in the shed had done me, and it had come from the wrong man. I let it land. I did not look at him.
"Not nearly enough," Wang said. "Little brother. Drink."
I lifted the cup. I tilted again. I did not drink again. The corporal's wife came down the bar with a fresh jar. She refilled Wang's cup. She refilled the hare-lip's cup. She came past me. She did not refill mine. She looked at me, once, for less than a quarter of a heartbeat, and her eyes flicked — the smallest possible flick — to the open neck of my deel at my throat, where she had seen a thing I had not been careful enough to hide.
Bind cloth. The white edge of it, where the sweat had stained the lamellar's lining brown above and the cloth had not been stained yet because the cloth was new. A too high wound-cloth — far above any wound a man's chest could have, in the place where a woman bound the swell of herself flat.
She looked back at the bar. She lifted the jar. She moved on. She had not said anything. She would not say anything. But she had seen, and I had been careless, and the wolf in my chest pressed once at the front of my skull as if to acknowledge that he had been right to be on his feet.
I tucked the front of my deel closed with the casual gesture of a man feeling a cold draft.
I waited until Wang reached across the bench for his next cup. When he did, his sleeve passed over my own cup, and I — with the hand that had not, in the orchard, practiced sleight, but had spent twenty years pulling the fast-running thread of my mother's silk-loom out of the shuttle without snagging it — I tipped the huang lian and a thumbnail of the crushed mugwort into Wang's cup as his sleeve passed over.
The whole motion was four heartbeats. The cup he picked up next was his.
He drank. He did not notice. He set the cup down. He pushed mine at me again.
"Again, little brother."
I lifted my cup. I held it on my closed mouth for the count of three. I set it down. He did not look at the level. He looked at my face, for the bait of fear. I gave him no fear. I gave him the belly-voice and a flat dull eye and a slight slowness of blink, the slowness of a man who is two cups in and pacing himself.
He drank his next cup.
He had a sixth cup, after that, and a seventh, and then he stood up to piss against the back wall of the kumis-shed, and he came back walking with the slow patient stride of a man whose feet had begun to lie to him about where the ground was. The hare-lip on the far end was already asleep with his head on his arms. The middle friend was drunk-staring at the far wall. The friend on Wang's near side — the one who had told Wang the boy's drunk enough — was watching me, and was not drinking himself, and had not been drinking himself for the last quarter of an hour, and I understood, with the small slow grim clarity that I would, in the months to come, learn to call legion-clarity, that this friend was not a friend of Wang's at all. That this friend was a man who had been brought up to the kumis-still by Wang the way a butcher's apprentice is brought up to the chopping-block by the butcher — to watch, to learn, to hand the knife.
He was watching me put down a fox.
He did not, when I caught his eye once, look away. He gave me, in the smallest possible move of the lower lip, a nod. He had decided whose side he was on. He had decided it before he had come up. He had been waiting for the cup-trick to land. He was not, I would come to understand, anyone's friend. He was a man who had been four years in the legion and had learned how to read a fight before it broke, and he had read this one, and he had chosen to read it correctly, and he was going to keep choosing to read me correctly for the next eight months.
I would never learn his name. He died at the Iron Gates a year later. I have thought of him a thousand times. Friend on Wang's near side. The friend who decided not to be a friend. I am grateful to him still.
Wang stood up.
He stood up too fast, and the kumis-shed went a half-turn under him, and he caught the edge of the bench with the heel of his right hand and steadied himself, and his eyes went briefly across me and did not focus on me, and he said:
"Little brother. Outside. Now."
"Wang."
"Outside."
I stood up. I did not look at the corporal's wife. I did not look at the man-on-Wang's-near-side. I walked out of the shed with my belly-voice still in my throat and the kitchen-knife at my back and the second heartbeat in my chest now louder than the kumis-shed and louder than my own and louder than anything I had heard in twenty-eight days at Yulin.
The cold outside was a slap. The kumis-still was downwind of the latrines, and the wind tonight was off the latrines, and the night was full of the sharp ammonia-smell of a hundred men's piss and a hundred men's evening rice and the half-rancid smoke of the cookhouse, and Wang stepped out behind me into the dark and breathed in deep through his nose as if he were going to make a comment on the air, and then he forgot.
He looked at me. He came at me.
He had meant to grab the front of my deel, I think; he had meant to lift me a half-inch off the ground and walk me three paces and slam me into the side of the kumis-shed and ask me, in a low private voice, why a coward of the cold water was the squad-archer of Squad Five, and what I had under my pants that I had been hiding. He had meant for it to be a private violence — a thing for him to enjoy and me to remember and the squad never to know about, except in the way the squad would know, the way the squad always knew, the way a herd knows when one of the wethers has bullied another.
He had drunk a great deal of kumis and a thumbnail of crushed mugwort and a careful pinch of huang lian.
His hand came across his own body for my deel. It came across slow. Not by very much. Not enough that a sober man would have noticed it. But I had been waiting for it, and I had been waiting for it, and I had been waiting for it, and I stepped to my left as the hand came, and the hand met my deel where my shoulder had been a half-breath before, and Wang's weight went a half-step past where his hand had reached.
I had a wooden bow-stave in my off hand.
I had carried it out of the shed without anyone seeing because no one had been watching my off hand. It was the practice-stave Bald Wei had made me carry for the first two weeks at Yulin while I was getting my shoulder back into a draw — a length of seasoned willow as long as my arm, as thick as my thumb at the grip, and slightly heavier at the bow-end where the unstrung horn-tip was. I had taken to carrying it in my belt the way a man carries a stick to walk a strange yard at night. The squad knew I carried it. The squad did not think anything of it. It was a quiet boy's habit. It was a tic. It was, the squad had decided, the kind of thing the orchard-boy of Shadi did because the orchard-boy of Shadi did not yet know how to be without a tool in his hand.
I brought the bow-stave up. Underhand. Wrist-driven. Not a swing — a quick rising flick, the way you flick a fish off a hook into a bucket, with no shoulder in it. It came up and it met Wang's nose on the underside of the bridge, where the cartilage joins the bone, where my father had once shown me, half-laughing on a winter afternoon, how a man drops a man who is twice his weight with no more force than it takes to crack an egg.
The crack was small. The crack was clear. The crack was the size of an egg.
Wang Erlang stopped moving.
He stood there for the count of two breaths with his eyes very wide and a thin black line of blood already starting down from his right nostril over his lip and into his mouth, and his mouth made a small surprised round shape that I would not have predicted on his face in any conscious arrangement of his features, and he said, in a voice that was no longer Wang Erlang's voice but a child's voice through a child's surprise:
"Oh."
And then he sat down.
He sat down on his backside in the dirt of the alley behind the kumis-shed. His legs folded under him. His hand came up to his face. The blood ran through his fingers. He looked at it. He did not understand what he was looking at.
I stepped back. I tucked the bow-stave behind me, into my belt, in one smooth motion. I did not, at any moment, raise my voice. I did not, at any moment, kick him. I did not look at his face. I looked over his left shoulder, into the middle distance, the way Old Crow looked at the middle distance.
I said, in the belly voice, very flat, very dull, very quiet:
"Don't call me little brother again."
He did not answer. He sat in the dirt. He bled.
I heard, behind me, the small careful sound of the man-on-Wang's-near-side leaning against the wall of the kumis-shed. I had not seen him come out. I did not turn. I heard him exhale, very softly, the way a man exhales when a thing he has been hoping for has happened. He said nothing. He stayed at the wall.
The squad came out of the shed.
The hare-lip came first, weaving. The middle friend after him. Pock-faced Liu, who had not been at the shed when I arrived but had arrived at some point during the kumis without my noticing, came out third — and Liu took in the picture: Wang on the dirt, the blood, me with my hands at my sides and my bow-stave in my belt — and he understood, the way Liu always understood, in the count of one heartbeat, the whole thing. His face did the smallest possible flicker. He did not laugh.
Old Crow came out behind Liu.
Old Crow looked at Wang in the dirt. He looked at me. He looked at the bow-stave. He looked, finally, at the middle distance.
"What happened, xiongdi?" he said, in his dry-leaf voice, to no one.
"Wang fell," I said.
"Wang fell."
"Wang slipped on a piss-puddle and went down on his face."
Old Crow nodded. He nodded as if I had said something sensible. He did not look at me. He said to the alley:
"Little Mountain. Help Wang up."
Little Mountain came out of the shed, blinking. He had drunk too much himself, but Little Mountain at twice the kumis was steadier than Wang Erlang at none, and Little Mountain bent down and got Wang under both armpits with the kind of unbothered slow gentleness with which Little Mountain did everything, and Little Mountain lifted Wang to his feet, and Wang Erlang did not protest, and Wang Erlang's nose dripped onto Little Mountain's wrist, and Little Mountain said, "Wang, you should be more careful."
Pock-faced Liu, in the most cheerful voice I had ever heard him use, said:
"Brothers, the legion is full of slippery piss-puddles. It is full. We must be careful. Yansheng, come on. We are walking the squad back to the barracks."
He took my elbow. He took it lightly. He did not hold it. He walked me out of the alley with his pox-marked face turned toward the dark, and behind us Little Mountain walked Wang back, and Old Crow followed, and the hare-lip stayed at the shed door because he could not walk anywhere, and the man-on-Wang's-near-side, against the wall, watched us go.
Liu, halfway back to the barracks, in a voice so low I almost did not hear it, said:
"Little brother."
"Don't call me little brother."
He laughed once. It was a soft laugh and there was no cruelty in it. It was the laugh of a man who has, in the count of one heartbeat, decided to love someone.
"I won't," he said. "I won't, fresh fish. Welcome to the squad."
The second heartbeat in my chest gave one long beat, and a second long beat, and a third, and the wolf, west of Yulin in the dark country, sat down at last with his head on his paws.
They marched us out three days later.
We marched out at dawn under the vermillion flag and the slate-grey sky and the slow drum of the Tenth Legion's drummers, and three thousand and four hundred men of the second and third companies went past the broken corner of the Yulin wall in a column four wide, and Bald Wei rode at the head of Squad Five on a flea-bitten roan, and Pock-faced Liu walked beside me with his bow on his back and his crooked grin and his small private flicking gesture at his hip — go on, fresh fish, go on — and Little Mountain walked behind us, and Old Crow walked behind him, and Wang Erlang walked behind Old Crow with a strip of dirty linen across the bridge of his nose and a black-and-yellow bloom of bruise under both eyes that would not begin to fade for two weeks.
Wang did not, after that night, call me little brother again.
He did not, after that night, look me in the face.
He did, after that night, watch my back on march, and pass me his ladle of millet without being asked, and the first time it happened Pock-faced Liu nearly choked on his own swallow trying not to laugh, and the second time it happened Little Mountain said, very kindly, "Wang, that's nice of you," and Wang said nothing, and that was that. The squad had decided what had happened. The squad had decided who was who. Bald Wei had decided to keep deciding to look at the wall. The wolf, on the west ridge of the road north, kept pace.
We marched two weeks.
We marched through the wheat-stubble country, the willow-breaks, the birch-stands, the half-frozen streams — and then through the long brown hills of the second prefecture, where the wind began to smell of something I had not smelled before, a dry-iron smell with the cold under it. We slept four to a felt blanket in the second week when the snow began. I slept against Little Mountain's back because Little Mountain was the warmest body in the squad and the squad had assigned me, by silent vote, to sleep with him so that the orchard-boy did not freeze. Little Mountain breathed slow and deep and even in his sleep and made no demand of me at all.
I did not bleed in the second week. The moon was on the wax. I had two weeks before the next round, and the squad had taken me, and the wolf had taken me, and Wang had taken his lesson, and I almost — almost — let myself sleep.
On the eleventh night, the news came down the column.
Pock-faced Liu carried it back from the officers' fire to our blanket, where Little Mountain was already snoring and Old Crow was sharpening a knife by feel in the dark.
"Brothers," Liu said, quietly, dropping down between us, "they've caught the prince."
"Whose prince," Old Crow said, without looking up from the knife.
"The Khan's."
The knife stopped.
I sat up, slowly, on my elbow. I did not know yet — I would not know for another week — that the news that had come down the column would be the news that would change every other thing in my life. I knew only what Pock-faced Liu told us in his low cheerful voice, with the snow-light from the open tent-flap coming blue across the pox-marks of his cheek:
"The Marshal's outriders ambushed a Confederation column at the Ash Forest, six days ago. They killed forty. They took the eldest son of Yesügen Khan alive with a salt-iron quarrel through his thigh. They're bringing him south to Changlin to be ransomed. He's three days' march behind us. We're to draw guard rotation when he catches the column up."
Old Crow's knife began to move again.
"How long a rotation," he said.
"Two weeks. Maybe three."
"Where will they keep him."
"Quietly. The Marshal doesn't want a parade. One private's tent, one chain to a center-pole, one squad pulls watch. Easier to keep him alive that way. Khan's son's worth more breathing than dead, the Marshal said. They drew lots already. We drew."
Little Mountain, who had not been asleep after all, said into his arm: "We drew?"
"We drew."
Old Crow set the knife down. He looked, for the first time I had ever seen, directly at me. His pale eyes were very pale in the snow-light from the tent-flap. They did not have any kindness in them and they did not have any unkindness in them. They had only the long careful watching of a man who had seen a thing he was not ready to name yet.
"Yansheng," he said. "You'll have the first watch when the prince comes up."
"Why me, sir."
"Because you don't talk. Because you don't drink. Because the sergeant trusts you. Because the Marshal will not want a man in that tent who tells stories at his squad fire about what a Khan's son looks like in chains."
He did not say and because there is a wolf walking the ridge to the west of this column for three days now and I have been smelling it on you since Yulin and I am taking the smallest possible bet to see whether you and the Khan's son are going to find each other faster or slower than the priest's nose can find you. He did not say it. He looked at me for a long count of three. He picked up the knife. He went back to sharpening.
The second heartbeat in my chest gave one long, slow beat.
Outside the tent, in the deep dark beyond the cookfires, somewhere along the ridge to the west of the column, the wolf paced. He had been pacing all evening. He had been pacing a little faster than usual.
He had not, until that moment, broken his pace.
He broke it now. He stopped. He sat down. He turned his great head north — north, into the wind off the Wall, into the country I had not yet seen — and his ears canted forward, both of them, the way a dog's ears cant when it has heard, three valleys away, a sound it has been waiting nineteen years to hear.
I did not understand it.
I felt it. I did not understand it.
I lay back down against Little Mountain's shoulder-blades and I closed my eyes and I tried to sleep, and the wolf, on the ridge, did not move. He sat with his head north. He sat with his ears forward. He sat with the second heartbeat in my chest beating a little quicker than it had ever beat before — not in fear, not in fight, but in the small private listening of a creature recognizing, at three valleys' distance, another beast.
I did not sleep that night.
I lay against Little Mountain's warm wide back, and I listened with the second heart, and somewhere north of the Tenth Legion's line of march, three days' ride into the country I had not seen — somewhere in a column of chains and salt-iron and wagon-horses and tired men — a falcon was riding the wind ahead of its bonded master, and the master himself, knees torn, thigh wept-bandaged, was being led south on a string behind a Vermillion lance, and the master had not yet thought of me, and the wolf in my chest had not yet thought of the master, and neither of us — none of us — knew yet what we were listening for.
We listened anyway.
The wolf on the ridge did not move.
The second heartbeat in my chest did not slow.
I held Arsulan in my mouth, with Shadi, with bad water, with the bow-stave's small clear crack in the alley behind the kumis-shed, and I rode the night out lying very still against Little Mountain's snoring back, and I waited for whatever was coming down the line of march to come.