Chapter Nine
What the Sergeant Wrote
The cold came on the sixth day.
It came down out of the higher plateau on a wind that had a different mouth in it. The wind had been pulling at the wagon-canvas for two weeks from the north-west; on the sixth day it shifted three points east and brought with it the first thin hard scrub of snow, the sort that does not lie but only ticks. The ticking was on the felt and on the lamellar and on the bow-stave and on the harness-bell of the picket-pony, and the silver bells the Confederation drivers had not yet taken off the harness of the prisoner-string — the harness-bells in their strip of red cloth, tied so they could not ring — did one small tight knock under their wrapping each time the wind hit them sideways.
I had a bell, in my head, by the end of the sixth morning.
I rode third-rank that day, behind Liu and Little Mountain and ahead of Old Crow, on the bay mare my mother had braided the journey-knot into the mane of. The mare had begun to like the white grass. The mare had begun, more dangerously, to like the prisoner-wagons; she swung her head toward them at the noon-halt, and Little Mountain, walking at her shoulder, said in the slow patient voice of a man who had grown up with cart-horses, "Mare. They are not your friends. They are not anyone's friends. Look at the road." She did not look at the road. She looked at the wagons. I dismounted and walked her by the bit for a quarter of a li until the wagons were out of her line of sight, and she put her head down and stopped looking.
Old Crow, behind me on the road, said, "She is bonded to your knee. She is not bonded to your wisdom."
"Mm."
"Give her wisdom or take her knees off her."
"Mm."
He did not say it again. He went on. Old Crow had said three sentences to me in the past four days — the orange-peel one, the six chi one, and now the mare one — which, as a count, was the entire body of speech he had given me in two weeks of muster. I had begun to take his sentences the way one takes a sip of mare's milk that has been kept too long in a skin: small, slow, with attention to what is alive in it.
He did not, the seventh of his ten total sentences to me, say what I had heard him not say. He did not say that the third wagon was now at twenty paces from the squad-tents instead of thirty. He did not say that the cinnabar-stripe secretary had been in the prisoner-tent for a half-watch the night before, at second watch, while you slept, fresh fish, against Little Mountain's back, and that he had not asked the prisoner any question yet, that he had only sat on the felt at six chi opposite the prisoner with a wax tablet on his knee and looked at him for that half-watch and then stood up and left. He did not say that the orange-peel itself had not come into the tent yet, and that this was either patience or appetite, and that I could not tell, in the small grim legion-clarity of a man who had been in five Bureau columns in his life, which of the two it was. He did not say any of this.
He had said only give her wisdom or take her knees off her, and gone on.
I gave her wisdom.
That night the wind came in worse and the snow came in worse, and the camp moved its picket-lines in by twenty paces, and Bald Wei pulled me off the prisoner-rotation for the second watch.
He did not say why. He came to the squad-fire at the changing of the first watch and said, "Yansheng. Liu takes the watch tonight. You sleep."
Liu, beside me, said, "Mm."
I said, "Yes, sir."
Wei did not look at me. He looked at the fire. He stayed at the fire for another count of three. He held a small folded square of brown paper between his thumb and forefinger and turned it slowly the way a man turns a coin he is debating spending. He did not unfold the paper. He did not put it down. After the count of three he handed it sideways to me without looking, said, "From the orderly," and walked away into the dark.
I waited until he was past the picket-line.
I unfolded the paper in my lap with the back of my hand over the unfolding so that Liu, beside me, would not see the script.
The paper was a Bureau requisition-slip. It bore the seal of Sergeant Wei. It had been filled out in Wei's hand, in the close clipped administrative cursive of a man who had been signing requisitions for thirty years, with the small loop on the fu radical that gave him away. The slip read:
Squad Five, Conscript Qiao Yansheng of Qiaojia. Stomach-flux, intermittent. Sergeant authorizes solitary tent assignment three nights per lunar month, days fourteen through sixteen, indefinite duration. Tent: spare lambing-felt, eastern end of squad-line. Orderly to deliver bowl of rice-water and bowl of millet-gruel each evening for the duration. Authorization: Sergeant Wei.
I folded the slip back into a small square.
I put the small square into the inner pocket of my under-shirt — the pocket my mother had stitched at the seam of the second rib for the bamboo tube, the pocket that lay against my belly above the binding — and I sat at the fire and finished my millet.
Pock-faced Liu, beside me, said in the small flicking voice he used for the things he would not look at me about, "Fresh fish."
"Pock-face."
"You all right."
"Yes."
"You sure."
"Yes."
He nodded once. He did not push. He picked up his carving-knife and went back to the duck. The duck had begun, over the four days since I had said better, to be a horse again. The horse's head was turned to the wrong side because it was looking back over its shoulder at something. Liu had not, in the four days, said what.
I held the slip against my belly in the pocket through three more mouthfuls of millet, and then I excused myself to go to the latrine.
I went past the latrine.
I went out into the trampled white grass between the squad-tents and the south wall of the camp where the felt of a stand of conscript-wagons made a small windbreak and the snow did not come down so hard. I went behind the windbreak. I sat down on my heels in the dark with my back to a wagon-wheel. I pulled the slip out of the inner pocket.
I unfolded the slip.
I read it again by the small distant orange light of the cookfires reflected off the snow.
I read Sergeant authorizes solitary tent assignment three nights per lunar month. I read indefinite duration. I read spare lambing-felt, eastern end of squad-line. I read rice-water and millet-gruel.
I read Stomach-flux, intermittent.
He had not put any name on me but my muster-name and he had not put any sex on me at all and he had filled out the slip the way a sergeant fills out a slip for a recruit with a chronic bowel complaint, and he had filled it out in the standard administrative cursive of the Tenth Legion as if it were the kind of slip he had filled out for forty other conscripts over thirty years of mustering, and he had not asked me whether I wanted the tent. He had decided. He had walked to the orderly's wagon in the snow at second watch, and he had taken a blank slip from the orderly's box, and he had drawn out his ink-stone and he had written the slip in his own hand at the orderly's lamp, and he had filed the duplicate in the squad's quartermaster ledger so that any captain or junior secretary who came through Squad Five's papers for the rest of this campaign would find Qiao Yansheng of Qiaojia accounted for, three days a month, in a spare tent on the eastern end, with a bowl of rice-water at his cot — and he had folded the original into a small brown square and put it in his palm and walked it across the camp through the snow to my hand at the squad-fire.
He had done this without speaking to me.
He had done this without asking.
He had done this on the third day of the cold, after the night I had come back to the squad-fire across the trampled grass without looking at the orderly's wagon, and Pock-faced Liu beside me had not asked, and Bald Wei, two paces to the right of Liu, had seen me sit down without looking at the orderly's wagon, and had counted, in his head, what day of the month it was, and had walked, at second watch, to the orderly's box, and had written the slip.
I sat behind the windbreak with the slip on my knee and the snow on the back of my neck and I did not weep.
I did not.
I had not wept since the orchard gate. I had not wept since the wolf at the boundary stone. I had not wept on the road, and I had not wept at the bow-stave fight in the kumis-still, and I had not wept on the picket-grass the night the wagons came in, and I had not wept on the first watch the man chained to the centre-pole had said Sky-mother. You sent me a wolf-girl in a man's coat, in a tongue I should not have understood and had.
I did not weep at Wei's slip.
I held the slip until my hand began to shake from the cold. I refolded it into the small brown square. I put the square back into the pocket at my second rib. I stood up. I walked back to the squad-fire. The snow was on my eyelashes. I knocked the snow off with the back of my wrist. I sat down.
Liu, without looking up from the duck, said, "You took a while."
I said, "The latrine was full."
He said, "Mm."
He kept on carving.
I had a father in this column.
I had been told for nineteen years that I had a father at home in the orchard, and the father at home in the orchard had been a man I had loved with the small clear straight love of a daughter who knew her father coughed blood at the second sowing and would not last the third — and I had carried him, on my back, in my chest, across the Long Wall into the white grass, and I had not let him go.
I had also, on the third day of the cold, in the small dark of a snow-windbreak past the latrine, learned that I had a father in this column.
The two were not the same. The two could not be the same. I did not want them to be the same. But the second one was as real as the first, and I had not, until I had read the slip, understood the way that a man could write a daughter back into being on a sheet of Bureau requisition paper.
I would not call him Father. He would not let me. He would, until the morning he caught me at the picket-line the night before the breakout and called me girl — three months from now, in another country, in a worse hour — go on being Sergeant.
I sat at the squad-fire and held Sergeant in the back of my throat next to Pock-face and Mountain and Crow and Wang, and I did not — for the second night running — eat my second half-bowl. Little Mountain pushed it across the felt at me. I pushed it back. He looked at me with the dim warm puzzled eye of an ox who had been refused by a friend.
"Tomorrow, Mountain," I said.
"Promise."
"Promise."
He nodded. He ate it himself. He was a man who, for the rest of his life, would not waste a half-bowl of millet.
The seventh day was the first day of the lambing-felt tent.
I moved my kit at the changing of the second watch in the snow. Old Crow helped me carry the lambing-felt — it was older than the squad-tent, thinner, smelt of two seasons of milk-fat and one season of ewe-blood — and Pock-faced Liu carried my bow-quiver, and Little Mountain, who would not ask, hauled the cot. We set up the lambing-felt at the eastern end of the squad-line, eighteen paces from the squad-tent, in a small lee of the supply-wagons. The wind did not come down so hard there. Old Crow drove the pegs himself. He drove them deeper than they needed to go.
He said, when he had driven the last peg, "Boy."
"Crow."
"It is colder out here than in the squad-tent. You will feel that on the first night. Do not let it surprise you on the second night. There is a fold of felt at the south-east corner that is open by two finger-breadths. You will see it when you light your lamp. Open it the rest of the way and put your boots through it before you lie down, with the soles toward the wind, and the wind will go past you and not into you. Do you hear me, boy."
"I hear."
He nodded. He brushed off his hands. He turned. He stopped. He did not look at me. He looked at the lambing-felt above the tent-pole.
He said, "Crows had a daughter, once."
I went very still.
He did not look at me. He looked at the felt. He had said crows in the deliberate plural — the small steppe-tongue lilt of his speech that I had begun, in the past two weeks, to hear under his imperial — and he had said had, and he had not, in any other half-sentence I had heard him say in two weeks, used the personal possessive I. I did not look at him.
He said, into the felt, "The sable was not enough."
He turned. He walked back across the trampled grass to the squad-tent. He did not look back.
I stood in front of the lambing-felt with the wind on my left ear and the snow on my eyelashes and Pock-faced Liu somewhere behind me at the squad-tent saying to Little Mountain the fresh fish has a stomach-flux, leave him be, he's not coming to the fire tonight, and I held crows had a daughter and the sable was not enough in my mouth the way I had held the requisition slip in my hand, and the second heartbeat in my chest did not move.
I went into the lambing-felt.
I lit the lamp. I unrolled the cot. I folded the south-east corner of the felt as Old Crow had said. I put my boots through the gap with the soles toward the wind. I lay down on the cot in the lamellar and did not, for an hour, take it off.
When I did take it off, I took off the binding-cloth as well.
I took off the binding-cloth for the first time in eighteen nights.
I lay on the cot in only the under-shirt and the trousers, with the lamellar at the foot of the cot and the binding-cloth folded carefully on the lamellar and the kitchen-knife on the felt within reach of my right hand and the bamboo tube against my belly under the under-shirt where it had lived for one hundred and twenty-two days, and I breathed.
I breathed without the cloth at my ribs.
I breathed without the front-plate at my second rib.
I breathed in the small thin smoke of the mutton-fat lamp, and I let my chest go open as far as it would go, and the second heartbeat in my chest did the long slow opening it had been doing in the white grass on the day we had come up out of the black sand and crossed onto the steppe.
I had, in this tent, three days a month.
I would have, in this tent, three days a month, for the rest of the campaign.
I would have, in this tent, the first private hour I had had since the kitchen flagstone, and I would have it because a man with thirty-one years of mustering had folded a brown square of requisition paper into my palm at the squad-fire without speaking, and I would have it because a man older than the legion had pegged a lambing-felt for me with eighteen-inch pegs and said crows had a daughter into the felt above the tent-pole, and I would have it because the wolf in the white grass had put his paws down, and because the second heartbeat in my chest, on the night of the wagons, had recognized the smell of another bonded, and because I had said it is the binding in the imperial tongue, in the belly voice, into the felt of a tent at six paces from a chained man, and he had pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth to keep from making the sound he was not allowed to make.
I lay on the cot.
I closed my eyes.
I did not sleep.
I let the second heartbeat in my chest do its work, and I let the wolf, somewhere outside the felt in the dark of the white grass twenty paces beyond the squad-tent, do his, and I let the snow tick against the lambing-felt above me, and I let Sergeant and Crow and Pock-face and Mountain and Wang lie in the back of my throat each in his own place, and I let Toghrul lie under all of them at the root of my tongue, unsaid, unwhispered, unshaped against any air at all.
I did not weep.
I held the requisition slip against my belly under the bamboo tube under the under-shirt, and I let the snow do its ticking, and I held a thing that was not weeping but was the close cousin of weeping, the way a coal kept under three layers of ash is the close cousin of fire, and the lamp on the felt at my elbow burned down by half.
The wolf in the white grass twenty paces off lifted his head once at second watch when a Vermillion Guard at the south picket coughed. He set his head down again. He stayed.
Inside the felt across the trampled grass, the man chained to the centre-pole sat against the pole and watched the lamp-flame on the felt of his own tent move with the wind that ticked along the seam, and he did not, on the seventh night, know that I had been given a lambing-felt of my own, and he did not know that I had taken the binding-cloth off for the first time in eighteen nights, and he did not know that I was breathing for the first time in eighteen nights with my chest open and the lamp burning down by half. He knew only that the boy with the water-bowl had not been at first watch this evening, and that the man at the flap had not said why, and that the watch had been taken by a man who walked the way Pock-faced Liu walked, with one boot at three-quarter weight, and that the watch had not spoken when he came under the flap and had not spoken when he set the bowl down and had not spoken when he went out — and that this was, for tonight, all the news he was going to get.
He sat against the pole.
He waited.
I lay on the cot in the lambing-felt and held the slip against my belly, and somewhere south of the camp, behind the third wagon under the black fly, the orange-peel man took an inventory by the small thin light of a Bureau lamp and turned, on his cot, to the second page.