Chapter Six
First Watch
I did not sleep.
I lay against Little Mountain's broad slow back and counted the watch-changes by the small soft pad of the relief-drum and the wind-shift over the felt seam at my left ear, and I held not yet in my mouth like a coin under the tongue. Pock-faced Liu coughed in his sleep. Old Crow did not. Wang Erlang ground his teeth twice. The second watch went. The third watch went. Somewhere in the fourth watch the wolf on the picket-grass got up off his belly and walked a slow careful half-circle around the tent and lay down again with his head pointed south, toward the wagons, and I felt him do it the way I felt my own ankles cold under the felt — not by looking, only by knowing.
By first watch I had already put on my boots.
I had put on my boots in the dark, with my hands at my sides and my breath even, while Little Mountain slept and Liu coughed and Wang Erlang dreamed his bad dream. I had wrapped the binding twice around my chest because tonight I would be inside walls and the heat would betray me before my voice did. I had hung the kitchen-knife at the small of my back under the lamellar skirt. I had touched the bamboo tube where it lay against my belly under my under-shirt — a thing my mother gave me from her mother — and I had not taken it out.
I went out of the squad tent into the cold black hour before dawn.
Bald Wei was standing at the fire. The fire was three coals. He had been waiting for me.
He looked me up and down once. He did not speak. He put a tin cup of millet-water into my hand and pointed with his chin at the south side of the camp.
I drank the millet-water. It was warm. He had heated it himself.
He took the cup back. He said, very quietly, "Six chi. No word. No eye. Bowl of water on the chain-side. Out by the changing of the watch. Yes."
"Yes, sir."
"If he speaks to you, count silently to eight before you do anything at all. Eight is a long count. Eight is long enough for the wrong word to die in your throat."
"Yes, sir."
"Go."
I went.
The prisoner-tent was on the south edge of the camp, separated from the squad-lines by a long strip of trampled white grass and the rolling clank of the night-smith's anvil. Two Vermillion Guard stood at the flap. They had been told. They did not speak. One held the flap aside with the back of his hand. The other looked past me at the salt-pan in the dark and did not look at me at all, which was the kindness of his trade.
I went under the flap.
The smell hit me first.
The smell hit me before the lamp-light did, before I had straightened up under the felt, before the flap had even fallen behind me. The smell came across the tent at me in a thick close wave — wet fur, woodsmoke, salt-iron, blood, clean wool, a man unwashed for some days but kept alive — and under all of it the other smell, the wet-fur-and-woodsmoke smell of a person who carries another animal inside their chest, the smell I had been smelling on myself for nineteen years and not known.
The second heartbeat in my chest did the long slow opening it had done in the white grass.
I closed my hand on the tent-pole. I shut my eyes.
I counted to eight.
When I opened my eyes I was inside the tent in the small yellow circle of one mutton-fat lamp, and the man chained to the centre-pole was sitting against the pole with his good leg drawn up and his bad leg out straight in front of him on the felt, and his head was tipped back against the pole and his eyes were closed.
He had not opened his eyes when I came in.
I stood with my back to the flap. I made my breath go small. I counted, because Bald Wei had told me to count, and because the count was now the only thing I had between not yet and whatever would come after.
I counted to eight.
He did not open his eyes.
He did not open his eyes, but the long line of his throat where his head was tipped back against the pole — the line of his throat under three weeks of dirt and one livid bruise the size of a thumbprint under his jaw — moved once, a small swallow, and his chest moved, and his nostrils, which were the most aristocratic feature of his face and the only feature I had ever seen on a man that I would, in this hour, in this country, have called beautiful — his nostrils moved once. Twice. Three times.
He was scenting the tent.
He was scenting the tent the way the wolf on the picket-grass had scented the wagons.
The second heartbeat in my chest did one fast beat.
I made it stop.
I made my breath go smaller. I put my hand on the kitchen-knife at the small of my back under the lamellar. I crossed to the chain-side of the tent — to the side opposite the centre-pole, six chi away by the floor-mat's edge — and I set down the wooden bowl of water I had taken from the orderly at the flap, and I did not look at his face.
I did not look at his face.
I straightened up. I stepped back. I turned to go.
He opened his eyes.
I felt it before I saw it. The felt of the tent went very slightly tight on its ropes, as if a wind had moved across it, though no wind had moved. The lamp-flame did one small dip and did not recover. The smell — the wet-fur-and-woodsmoke smell — changed. It did not strengthen. It attended. It turned its head, in the back of my nose, the way the wolf on the picket-grass turned his head.
And then he spoke.
He did not speak in the imperial tongue.
He spoke in a tongue I had been told all my life I did not know — a tongue with an open vowel at the front of every line and a soft hissing breath at the back of the throat, a tongue my grandmother had whispered once over my cradle and never since, a tongue the peddler from the north had said three syllables of into my palm before he had let go and gone white. He spoke it low. He spoke it in a voice like a man waking up from a long dream and finding the dream was the truth and the waking was the lie.
He said, and the words went through the binding-cloth and the lamellar and the kitchen-knife at my back and the bamboo tube at my belly and stopped, finally, at the second heartbeat in my chest where they had been intended:
"Tngri-eke. Si nadur chinu-aar nigen ünegen-bürkii ele'tegülüged irgüülbe — er-ün debel-tür."
Sky-mother. You sent me a wolf-girl in a man's coat.
I understood every word.
I should not have. I had never been taught the tongue. I had three syllables of it from a peddler and a name I had not known was a word and a grandmother who had died when I was four, and yet the sentence came into my head whole and translated, the way a song one's mother sang in the cradle comes back at thirty years old whole and translated, every consonant in its place, every meaning landed.
I did not turn around.
I did not turn around because Bald Wei had said do not look at the colour of his eyes, and Pock-faced Liu had said do not let him be a person, and my own mouth was full of not yet, and the second heartbeat in my chest was doing the long slow opening that meant home, and if I turned around now I would walk the six chi across the tent and lay my forehead against the chain on his throat and weep in a language I had not been told I knew, and Bald Wei would hang in the morning, and I would hang beside him, and my mother in Qiaojia would never know.
I did not turn around.
I bent at the waist. I pretended to adjust the bowl of water that did not need adjusting. I let my face be the face of a quiet boy who had not heard barbarian noise because he did not speak barbarian. I straightened up. I walked to the tent-flap. I lifted the flap with the back of my wrist. I stepped out into the cold black hour before dawn.
I stood outside the tent for one long count of three.
I did not let myself shake.
I walked back across the strip of trampled white grass to the squad-fire.
Bald Wei was at the fire. He looked at me. He looked at my face. He said nothing.
He poured another tin cup of millet-water. He gave it to me. I drank it. He took the cup back.
He said, "Yes."
I said, "Yes."
He said, "Tomorrow at first watch. Again."
I said, "Yes, sir."
He turned and walked back into the dark toward his own tent.
I sat down at the fire. The fire was four coals. Pock-faced Liu came out of the squad tent half-dressed with his hair on the wrong side of his head and squatted beside me and yawned. He said, "Fresh fish."
"Pock-face."
"He talk to you?"
"No."
"Good," Liu said. "Good. That's good. You did good, fresh fish." He patted me on the shoulder. The pat went through the lamellar onto the binding-cloth onto the chafing-ring, and I did not flinch.
He yawned again. He stood up. He went to piss against the wind on the east side of the squad tent.
I sat at the fire. I did not let myself shake. I made my hands lie open in my lap. I made my face be the face of a boy who had stood guard for a half-watch and seen nothing and was now waiting for the porridge.
Inside the felt, somewhere behind me across the strip of trampled grass, the chained man had closed his eyes again. I knew he had. I knew he had closed his eyes against the centre-pole the moment the flap fell behind me, and I knew his chest had moved once, very slowly, in the way the chest moves when one has been holding the breath for a long time without knowing it, and I knew — without any kind of seeing — that he had not slept again, that he had sat against the pole until the camp came alive at fourth-watch dawn, and that he had not opened his eyes again because he could not afford to open his eyes again, because the next person under the flap might not be the wolf-girl in the man's coat and he could not afford to look surprised.
He had said the sentence into a tent he believed was empty of speakers.
He had said the sentence as a prayer.
He had not, the second heartbeat said in me, expected me to understand.
The relief was in my chest like cold water in a hot mouth.
He had said the sentence as a prayer to his sky-mother. He had said it the way a drowning man says the name of a god into a salt mouth. He had not said it to me. He had said it because of me, and he had said it in the language of his mother because the words for what was just sent into this tent did not exist in the language of his captor, and he had not — he had not — known I would understand.
He did not know. He still did not know. He had said the sentence with the certainty that the boy who set down the water-bowl had not heard.
This was a thing.
This was a thing I could hold for one day.
For one day, the man chained to the centre-pole did not know that I knew, and I knew that he had said it, and the second heartbeat in my chest had a coal under three layers of ash for the morning.
The squad ate millet at fifth-watch dawn.
Wang Erlang did not look at me. The yellow-plum bruise under his eye had gone the brown of late autumn. He passed me the salt-pot without being asked and did not speak. Wei sat across the fire with his hands cupped around the second tin cup and his eyes on the south side of camp. Old Crow ate beside him in the small slow way he had of eating, three grains of millet at a time, his pale eye on nothing in particular and his ear, I knew, on the south side of camp.
Liu, in the small flicking voice that was the one he used for the worst things, said: "Sergeant. The prisoner."
"What about him."
"He hasn't been eating."
"He'll eat."
"He hasn't eaten since they brought him in."
"He'll eat when he's hungry."
"He'll eat when he's hungry," Liu said, in a way that meant we both know that isn't true, and shrugged, and ate his millet. The squad ate. Old Crow set his bowl down empty. Little Mountain, who had eaten three bowls, said, "Yansheng, you don't eat enough."
"I ate."
"You ate one bowl."
"I ate enough."
"Eat another."
"Mountain. I ate enough."
He pushed a half-bowl across the felt to me anyway and went on chewing. I did not push it back. I ate another half-bowl because Little Mountain was the kind of man one did not refuse millet from.
Wei stood up. He brushed off the lamellar at his thigh. He said, without looking at me, "Yansheng. Walk with me."
I stood up. I went with him.
He walked me out past the picket-line into the white grass. The sun was up over the salt-pan; the white grass at this hour was a colour I had not had a word for. He stopped at twenty paces. He turned to face me. He looked at me for a long count of five.
He said: "You heard him say something."
I did not answer.
The second heartbeat in my chest did not move. It did not move because there was nothing it could do that would not give me away. The wolf on the picket-grass, fifty paces off, lifted his head and put it down again.
Wei said, again, in the gentler version of the same voice: "You heard him say something, Yansheng. I am not blaming you for hearing. You are not deaf. He spoke. You heard. That is not what I am asking."
I made my face do nothing.
I said, "Sir."
Wei looked at me.
He looked at me long enough that I understood — in the small grim legion-clarity — that he had known the moment I came back to the fire. He had known by my face. He had known by the way I had drunk the second cup of millet-water without looking at the cup. He had known because Bald Wei had watched men come out of prisoner-tents for thirty-one years and had a calibration on his eye for what quiet looked like before the second day and what quiet looked like after.
He said: "Steppe-tongue?"
I said, "Sir, I don't speak it."
"That is not what I asked."
I made the count of eight. I made it in front of him. I made it visible. I let the count be on my face, the way one lets the count be on one's face when one is a young soldier deciding whether to lie to the only man in the world who has been kind to one without asking anything in return.
I said, "He spoke. I don't know what he said."
Wei said, "Mm."
He looked at the white grass. He let me have the look. He let me have it for a count of five.
He said: "Yansheng. If he says it again — or anything in steppe-tongue — and you find that your ear understands what your tongue should not — do not let your face know. Do you hear me. Your face does not know. Your face has never known. Your face is the face of a quiet boy of forty-eight years from Qiaojia village who does not speak the barbarian tongue and never has and never will. Whatever your ear is doing inside your face — your face is doing its own work. Do you hear me, soldier."
The second heartbeat in my chest beat one slow beat.
I said, "Yes, sir."
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
He said, in the smallest possible version of his voice, into the white grass and not into my face: "I have a daughter."
I did not know what to do with that.
He did not seem to want me to do anything with it. He said it the way a man clears his throat. He turned and walked back toward the camp without looking at me again. Halfway to the picket-line he stopped, and without turning, he said: "Yansheng."
"Sir."
"Eat more. You are too thin."
"Yes, sir."
He walked back into the camp. I stood in the white grass for another count of three. The wolf on the picket-grass, fifty paces off, lifted his head and let it down again. The second heartbeat in my chest did not move.
Bald Wei had not known what he had said. Not exactly. Not the language. Not the line. He had not known Tngri-eke; he had not known ünegen-bürkii; he had not known er-ün debel-tür. He had known only that something had been said to me in the tent, in a tongue, and that I had come out of the tent with that something in my face whether I knew it or not.
He had told me, in his way, what to do.
He had told me, in another way, I see.
He had told me, in a third way that was almost too small to be a way at all, that he had — somewhere south of the Wall, in some village I would not be told the name of — a daughter, who he had not put in the column when the conscription scroll had come for his house, and who he had instead, presumably, hidden in a kitchen, or married off in a hurry, or made a wreath for and laid in the earth, and that this was the reason he saw what he saw in me, and that this was the reason he would not say it.
I walked back to the squad-fire and I did not tell anyone.
I held Arsulan in my mouth and Tngri-eke under it like a coal under ash, and I sat down at the fire and finished my second half-bowl of millet, and Little Mountain nodded at me as if to say yes, that's right, that's how a man eats, and Pock-faced Liu, who was carving a sliver of pine into something that would be either a horse or a duck and had not yet committed, did not look up.
Tomorrow at first watch. Again.
Inside the felt across the strip of trampled grass, the man chained to the pole closed his eyes and did not open them, and he did not know that I knew, and I held that knowledge in my chest like the warmest thing I had carried since the kitchen flagstone, and the wolf on the picket-grass put his paws down in the white grass and lay flat to the ground and did not move.
He did not need to.
Neither did I.