Chapter Eleven
The First Set
The orderly came back on the tenth morning, and on the tenth morning the Bureau secretary asked the first question of the first set.
I was not in the tent for the question.
I was on the south side of the camp at the bow-rack, restringing the bay mare's saddle-bow with a length of new gut Pock-faced Liu had pressed into my palm at the squad-fire before dawn without comment, and I was watching the corner of the prisoner-tent through the gap between the orderly's wagon and the smith's wagon as a man learns to watch a thing he is not supposed to be watching — by the soft fast turn of the eye that does not move the head — and I had been watching the corner since the first hour of first watch, when the secretary in the cinnabar-stripe robe had come out of his own black-canvas wagon and crossed the trampled grass at the small precise pace of a man who has eaten breakfast and washed his fingers and is now going to work.
He had gone under the flap.
The two Vermillion Guard at the flap had stepped to either side. One had set the back of his hand against the inner hem, the way they did. The other had turned his face into the wind. Neither had been told to leave.
I had counted, in my head, to a hundred. Then to two hundred. Then I had stopped counting and gone on stringing the bow.
The cold had given the gut a brittleness it did not have at noon. I had to work it slowly, drawing it through the wax in my left palm, warming it with the small heat of my own hand, then bedding it into the nock. Old Crow, walking past at the second hour, did not stop. He looked at the gap between the wagons. He looked at the bow in my hands. He did not look at me. He said, in the voice that was almost not a voice, "The mare wants water. Walk her to the trough at the third hour."
"Mm."
"At the third hour, boy. Not the second."
He went on.
I bedded the gut into the nock. I drew the small tar-stick along the bowstring at the upper grip. I set the bow down at my knee. I did not look at the gap between the wagons. I held my chest, under the lamellar and the binding-cloth, very steady, in the way I had been doing since the changing of the first watch on the night of the wagons — without breath and then with breath, breath and then no breath, in the long careful ratio of a soldier on the line of march who has decided not to be sick into his own boots.
The bamboo tube against my belly under the under-shirt was very cold. The slip behind the bamboo tube — Wei's slip, the brown square — was warmer because it was paper and paper takes the body's heat faster than the wood.
I had begun, in the past three nights, to know the difference.
He came out at the changing of the second hour.
He came out without the wax tablet in his hand. He had left the tablet inside. He stood at the flap for a count of three with the back of his right hand at his mouth — not covering the mouth, only at the corner of it, the way a man rests his hand at his mouth when he is thinking — and then he walked, with the same small precise step, back to the black-canvas wagon. He did not look at any soldier in the camp. He did not look at the orderly's wagon. He did not look at me.
He went up the step of the wagon. He did not look back at the prisoner-tent. He went inside the black canvas.
The flap of the prisoner-tent did not move.
The two Vermillion Guard came back to the flap. One set the back of his hand at the inner hem. The other looked into the wind. The flap stayed down.
I picked up the strung bow. I put it across my forearm.
I walked the bay mare to the trough at the third hour, exactly as Old Crow had told me to do, and I did not look at the prisoner-tent on the way past.
I did not go to the prisoner-tent at first watch.
Wei had pulled the rotation again. Liu took it. Liu took it without speaking, and without looking at me when he was given the order, and he took it with one boot at three-quarter weight because the cold had got into the old break at his right shin, and he walked into the prisoner-tent at the changing with the bowl of millet on his forearm pinned in the same place I pinned mine — because he had watched me do it for three days and had not, on any of the three days, told me he had watched.
He came out after a count I could not, this time, hold in my head.
He came across the trampled grass to the squad-fire and squatted on his heels at the place beside me he always took, which was on the windward side because Pock-faced Liu was the one in the squad with the wind in him to take the smoke of a fire and not cough, and he set his own tin of millet-water on his knee and warmed his hands on the tin and did not look at me.
He said, into the fire, "He did not speak."
I did not speak.
He said, "He did not eat. The bowl is still there. The water is gone."
"Mm."
"I sat at the back of the tent. I did the watch. He did not move. He did not look at me. I left the bowl. I am leaving the bowl tomorrow night."
"Mm."
He drank the millet-water.
He said, "Fresh fish."
"Pock-face."
"The water-bowl in the tent. There is a chip in the rim on the left side. I think the orderly drops it. You should keep an eye on it. A chipped bowl is a chipped bowl."
I said, "Mm."
I held the chipped bowl in my mouth and I held did not speak in my mouth and I held did not eat in my mouth, and behind all three I held the long quiet shape of a man chained to a centre-pole at six chi of felt with a wax tablet in front of him for half a watch and a question, somewhere in the half-watch, that had got him to stop speaking and to stop eating, and the small wet pin behind my breastbone — the pin I had been carrying since the morning the orderly did not come — set itself one half-turn tighter.
Liu said, without looking at me, "Eat your millet, fresh fish."
I ate my millet.
I ate it the way a soldier on the line of march eats: in even small mouthfuls, taking the heat out of the bowl, not too fast, not too slow, the way Little Mountain across the fire was eating his and the way Wang Erlang at the far edge of the firelight with his back half-turned was eating his and the way Bald Wei, on the windward side of Liu, was eating his.
I did not look at the prisoner-tent.
I did not look at the wolf on the picket-grass.
I did not look at the south side of the camp at all.
I ate my millet, and the second heartbeat in my chest did a careful slow beat at the start of every other mouthful, and at the eighth mouthful — by which time my bowl was three-quarters empty — Little Mountain across the fire stopped eating, looked at me for a long count, pushed his own bowl across the felt, and said, "Yansheng. You eat the rest of mine."
I said, "Mountain."
"You eat the rest of mine."
"Mountain, no."
He said, in the long slow careful voice of a man who had hauled a cot through snow at the changing of the watch and pegged a lambing-felt without being told, "I had two yesterday. I will have two tomorrow. Tonight I will have one. You eat the rest of mine."
I ate the rest of his.
Wei, at Liu's far side, looked at the fire. He did not speak. He had not, on any of the four nights of the lambing-felt, said anything to me at the fire that was not yes or no or tomorrow at first watch. He had not said the slip. He had not said the orderly is well. He had not said go and sit in your tent and breathe. He had said nothing.
He drank his millet-water.
He said, in the small clipped administrative voice he used for ledger-entries, "Squad Five rides the picket tonight. Yansheng on the south. Liu on the east. Mountain in reserve. Crow on the north. Wang at the latrine."
Wang Erlang, at the far edge of the firelight, made the small low huh that he had begun to make in answer to Wei in the past week — not the yes, sir, not the mm, but the small acknowledging breath of a man who had decided, somewhere south of Yulin, that the sergeant had taken him in hand and that the sergeant's word would be enough — and he stood up and went to the latrine.
Wei said, "First watch begins in a quarter, Yansheng."
I said, "Yes, sir."
The south picket was eight paces from the lambing-felt.
I walked it. I walked it for the full watch. I walked it in the cold dark on the trampled snow under the small thin half-moon, with the bow across my forearm at the parade-rest position and the kitchen-knife at the small of my back under the lamellar skirt, and I did not look at the prisoner-tent.
I did not need to look at the prisoner-tent.
The wolf was at the far edge of the picket-rope where the rope made its last small turn before the smith's wagon, and he had been walking the slow careful half-circle around the prisoner-tent for the whole of the watch, with his head down between his shoulders and his ears forward, and at the changing of the half — the second small thump of the relief-drum — the wolf had stopped at the south-east corner of his circle and sat down on his haunches, and his head had come up, and his ears had come forward to one fine point in the air, and his eye had gone past me and past the latrine and past the smith's wagon to the small east-end gap of the prisoner-tent flap where the seam was not quite laced.
I felt him do it. I felt him do it the way I had felt the cold come up out of the higher plateau on the wind on the morning of the sixth day — by the change in the air around my collar-bones, without looking.
The wolf rose.
He took two paces toward the prisoner-tent.
He stopped.
He did not take a third pace because the third pace would have put him across the rope between the picket-line and the prisoner-tent and visible, in the moonlight on the snow, to the Vermillion Guard at the flap. He held himself at the second pace. He held his head down between his shoulders. He held his lip not lifted but ready to lift. He held his weight on his front paws.
He waited.
I held the bow across my forearm.
I waited.
The half-watch went. The wolf stayed at the second pace. The Vermillion Guard at the flap did not turn his head. The wind ticked against the laced seam at the south-east corner of the prisoner-tent. The lamp inside burned the same steady yellow it had burned at the beginning of the watch. The seam did not move.
At the third half of the watch the flap opened.
A man came out.
He came out without the cinnabar-stripe at his cuff. He came out without the wax tablet. He came out with nothing in his hands, and his hood was up, and his step was the same small precise step the secretary had used in the morning, and he passed between the Vermillion Guard at the flap without looking at either of them, and he crossed the strip of trampled grass to the black-canvas wagon, and he went up the step, and he went inside.
The flap of the black-canvas wagon closed behind him.
The wolf at the rope dropped his weight back from his front paws. He let his lip down over his teeth. He sat back on his haunches. He turned his head, finally, and he looked at me.
He looked at me for a count of three.
He put his head down on his paws.
He stayed.
I held the watch to the end.
I came off at the changing. Wei, at the squad-fire, took the bow and the spare quiver and gave me back the small tin cup of millet-water he had warmed in the embers. He looked at me. He looked at me longer than he had on any of the four nights of the lambing-felt. He looked at me the way a sergeant looks at a man who has come off a picket holding something in his face whether he knows it or not.
He said, "Tent."
"Sir."
"Sleep. Or do not sleep. Either way, in the tent."
"Yes, sir."
He took the cup back when I had drunk the water. He said, very quietly, "Yansheng."
"Sir."
"There will be a long quiet tomorrow. Hold it."
I said, "I hear."
He nodded.
He did not say anything else.
I did not go into the lambing-felt at once.
I stopped at the corner of the supply-wagon where the windbreak was, and I stood with my back against the wagon-wheel in the dark, and I looked across the trampled grass at the small yellow square of the prisoner-tent flap-light where the seam at the south-east was not quite laced.
He was in the tent.
He was sitting against the centre-pole. He was, I knew, not eating. He was, I knew, holding himself the way a man holds himself when a junior secretary has sat opposite him for half a watch with a wax tablet and has asked, somewhere in the half-watch, the first question of the first set — a question to which the secretary already knows the answer, calibration, only calibration — and the prisoner has answered it, or has not answered it, and has watched the secretary write either way, and has known that the writing was the question.
He was holding Yansheng under his tongue.
He was holding the soldier with the water-bowl against the inside of his front teeth.
He was holding the wolf-girl in the man's coat in the bone-cup of his throat where I had been holding Toghrul for four nights.
I did not, that I knew, hear him through the felt at this distance.
I did, that I knew, hear him.
The small wet pin behind my breastbone did one half-turn looser.
I crossed to the lambing-felt.
I went inside. I did not light the lamp. I sat on the cot in the dark in the lamellar with the binding-cloth still on under it, and I did not take any of it off, and I let my back rest, very carefully, against the centre-pole of my own tent — the lambing-felt's centre-pole, which was thinner than his and softer with age and did not have a chain-ring at its base — and I held my own shoulder-blades against the pole the way I had felt him holding his shoulder-blades against his.
He did not know I was doing it.
I did it anyway.
I held my back against the pole for a count of one hundred. I held it for a count of two hundred. At the third hundred I stopped counting. I held it as long as it took.
When my legs began to cramp I lay down on the cot in my lamellar and I closed my eyes and I let the cold of the lambing-felt's seam at the south-east corner — Old Crow's gap, the gap with my boots set through it sole-to-the-wind — do its small ticking, and I held the long quiet in my mouth in Wei's voice, and I held hold it in my mouth in Wei's voice, and I held I have not said anything in my mouth in the third voice — Toghrul's voice, the new voice, the voice from the bandage-night — and the three voices lay in my throat each in his own place and did not, in the dark of the lambing-felt, ask anything of each other.
The lamp in the prisoner-tent across the trampled grass burned the same steady yellow all night.
The wolf, where the rope made its last small turn, slept once and woke once and slept again.
At the changing of the third watch, in the small hour before dawn, the orderly came across the trampled grass in the dark and went under the prisoner-tent flap with a bowl of fresh millet and a bowl of fresh water and a strip of clean wrap for the inside of the thigh, and he came out a quarter of a half-watch later with the strip of clean wrap untouched in his hand and the bowl of millet still full on his forearm and the bowl of water gone, and he walked back to his wagon, and he set the bowl of millet on his box, and he sat down at the lamp.
He covered the bowl of millet with a square of clean cloth.
He set the square of clean cloth in place with the flat of his palm.
He left his palm on the cloth for a long count.
Then he lifted his palm, and he put out the lamp, and he lay down.
The third wagon at the south of the camp, behind its fly of black canvas, was quiet. The lamp inside was out. The man inside, the man with the small precise step, was, I had to assume, asleep — or, more likely, lying in the dark on his cot with his eyes open, turning the wax tablet on its small leather strap in his right hand the way a man turns a coin he is debating spending, considering what he had seen the prisoner do at the question he had asked, and what he would ask tomorrow at the second set, and what he would write in the corner of the tablet in the small thin Bureau cursive, to be sent south by fast rider, copy to the chrysanthemum seal, about the soldier whose mother had taught him a military knot.
I lay on the cot in the lambing-felt and held the binding-cloth at my chest open one finger-breadth with the back of my wrist, and I breathed in through the open finger-breadth, and I held the breath, and I let it out.
I did not sleep.
I held the long quiet.
When the first soft pad of the dawn-drum came at the changing of the third watch, I sat up on the cot and put my hands flat on my knees, and I held them flat there until they were warm enough to hold a tin cup of millet-water without shaking, and then I went out to the fire.
Wei was at the fire.
He gave me the cup. He did not put it into my palm the way he had been giving me the cup for ten mornings — across the felt at his knee, with the rim turned outward — but with the tin held between the pads of his thumb and his index finger so that, when I took it, my fingers had to close around his at the rim, and at the small place where the rim of the tin had been warmed by his palm I felt the calluses of his right hand under my fingers for a count of one, and then he opened his fingers and the cup was mine and his hand went back to his knee.
He had done it on purpose.
He looked at the embers.
He said, into the embers, "Yansheng. Today the orderly takes the morning bowl. You will take the evening bowl. The secretary will not be in the tent at first watch tonight. He will be in the wagon. You will go in. You will set the bowl down at the six chi. You will say nothing. You will come out. Yes."
I said, "Yes, sir."
He drank his own cup. He said, "Hold the long quiet. He has been holding it without you for one day. He will hold it better with you in the room."
I said, "Yes, sir."
He nodded.
He set his cup down.
He looked at the embers a long time, and then he said — in the small low voice he had not used at the squad-fire before, and would not, I would understand later, use again at the squad-fire until the night before the breakout when he would catch me at the picket-line and call me girl and not mean to — "Yansheng. The cold gets into the chest of a — into the chest of a soldier who has come down the line without his second under-shirt. Pock-face has a spare. He will not need it back. Take it."
He stopped.
He did not finish the sentence he had started before the into. He did not need to.
The small wet pin behind my breastbone did one quarter-turn looser.
I said, "Yes, sir."
He said, in the same small low voice, almost to himself, almost to the embers — and not to me, because to say it to me would have meant to look at me, and he would not, on the morning of the tenth day, look at me — "Good."