1: The Salt and the Smoke

The smell of salted millet smoke hung over the village before the sun came. Heizi knew the smell before he opened his eyes; he had known it since he was small enough to be carried in a sling on his foster father's back, since the year of the bad water when half the village's children had been carried that way because their mothers had been too weak to walk and Old Zhang, who had no wife and no children of his own that summer, had carried other men's babies up and down the path between the well and the houses for two months without ever once being thanked, and without ever once expecting to be. It was the smell of the day beginning. On bad days it was the smell of the day not beginning, when the millet was thin and the salt thinner, and a household ate its morning meal in the kind of silence that had nothing to do with politeness.

He sat up on the *kang*, the brick bed-platform under which a small banked fire had burned slowly through the night. The kang was warm where his back had pressed it and cold where the night had taken it. He moved across the warm part toward the cold part, and then over the cold part to the edge, and put his bare feet on the earthen floor. The floor was so cold it hurt the bones of his ankles. He did not flinch. Old Zhang said that a man who flinched at cold floors would flinch at other things, and Old Zhang said it as if these other things were only the matter of a few years' patience away.

Old Zhang was already at the doorway, lacing on his straw sandals. The sandals were old. The straw was the third weaving of the same straw. Old Zhang had taught him last autumn how to unweave a worn sandal and reweave its strands into a new one, and how to tell the third weaving from the second by the way the heel cup sat against the foot. Old Zhang had taught him many things in this manner, never as lessons, always as small remarks made in passing, the way an old farmer remarks on a cloud or a wind.

The light through the oiled paper of the window was the color of weak tea. Tea was a thing the village did not drink; the headman Old Cui had a small clay jar of compressed leaves he had bought from a passing peddler in a year when his nephew was being married, and had used it twice and then put it away, and Heizi had once seen the jar on a shelf and had asked Mei-er what it was. Mei-er had said, *it is the color of poor men's wishes*. She had said it the way she said many things, half-laughing, half-not, in a voice that always made him look at her face for a long moment afterwards.

"There is water in the gourd," Old Zhang said. He did not turn his head. "The tax men come today."

Heizi went to the gourd. It hung on a hook by the door, an ordinary peasant gourd of the kind used in every house in the valley. He drank only a swallow, because two swallows would mean another trip to the well before midday, and the well was a long walk in the cold mud, and Mei-er would already be drawing for the household.

"Who from?" he asked.

"From the magistrate's house. Two riders. They will not stay."

"They never stay."

"No. They never stay."

Old Zhang's voice was even in the way of men who have learned not to say what they think when there is nothing to be done about what they think. He picked up a hoe and stepped out into the courtyard. The dog made a soft sound, not quite a bark, and the old man's hand passed across its head once, and was gone, and the dog watched him go with the particular attention old dogs paid to old men whose movements they had memorized.

Heizi sat on the edge of the kang and listened to the village wake.

Somewhere a child cried, and was hushed. Somewhere a man coughed for a long time, and was not. The cough belonged to Old Lu the carpenter, who had coughed every winter Heizi could remember and would, the village understood without saying so, cough through one or two more before he stopped. The hush of the child belonged to the smith's house — three babies had been born in that house in the past two years and only one had lived past the second month, and the one that had lived was as quiet as if it had learned, in the womb, not to draw attention.

The air smelled of smoke, and of salt, and, faintly, of horse. The horse was a cleaner smell than the village's own animals — the village had two oxen and a donkey and the headman's pony, and none of them smelled like this. The riders had come early, then. They were already in the headman's yard.

He pulled on his shirt. It had been Old Zhang's shirt and was patched at the elbow with cloth that did not match. The cloth had come from the inner lining of his foster mother's old wedding robe, which Old Zhang had cut up the year she died because the moths were taking it and he had said, *better cloth on a living back than a dead memory*. Heizi had been four then, and had not understood. Heizi was fifteen now, and understood differently each year.

He pulled on his trousers. Both items had been washed three times this winter and would not last another. The thread at the seat had begun to give. He had asked Mei-er to mend it twice. She had said, *I will mend it when you stop growing*, and they had both pretended this was a joke, and he had not asked again.

He thought, without thinking it as a thought, of how far winter still had to go. The third moon was beginning. There would be cold yet. The persimmon tree at the edge of the lower field was still bare. The wheat in the high terraces had not yet shown.

In the courtyard, Mei-er was setting the morning's millet onto the brazier in a clay pot. The brazier was small and old and had been her mother's. She knelt by it the way she knelt by all small things — straight back, hands resting on her thighs, the kind of stillness in the body that suggested either great patience or a refusal to be hurried, or perhaps both, since in a peasant girl's life these were two faces of the same coin.

She was sixteen, and Heizi was fifteen, and she was not his sister by blood, but she had pulled a thorn out of his foot when he was eight and had laughed at him for crying, and that had settled the question between them forever. The thorn had been from the spiny acacia at the edge of the persimmon field. The thorn had gone in nearly to the bone. He had been brought home on Old Zhang's back, weeping, and Mei-er — who had been nine, and not much taller than he was — had taken his foot in her lap and had heated a needle in the brazier flame and had eased the thorn out in three small movements that made him scream each time, and had laughed at him each time he screamed, and at the end she had wiped the wound with rice wine and had kissed the top of his foot the way one kisses a small child to make him stop crying. He had stopped. He had also fallen in some small and silent way that was not love, because they were children, but that was, perhaps, the foundation a love would have stood on, if either of them had been the kind of person who allowed such things to be named.

"You look like a sparrow that woke up wet," she said.

"You look like a girl who did not sleep."

"I did not. I dreamed."

"Of what?"

She lifted the pot lid. The steam came up between them, smelling of millet and of salt and of the small dried mushroom Old Zhang had thrown into the pot — a thing he did rarely, because the mushrooms were saved for sickness. Heizi looked at the mushroom in the steam and did not understand for a moment why it was there.

"Of riders," she said. "Two of them."

He looked at her. She did not look at him.

"What kind of riders?"

"The kind we are about to see."

She set down the lid. She moved on her knees a quarter-turn, so that she could reach the wooden bowl on the bench. The motion was practiced. She had been the woman of this house since she was twelve, the year the bad water took her mother and Old Zhang's wife in the same week — they had not been related; they had simply drunk from the same low pool downstream of where the magistrate's auxiliary horsemen had watered their mounts on a long ride through. Mei-er had taken up the morning brazier the day after her mother's burial, and had not put it down since. Old Zhang, watching her over the years, had said only — once, to Heizi, when Heizi was perhaps eleven — *that girl was not raised. She was forged.* He had said it as a smith would say it, with no judgment in the word, only an observation about the heat at which a piece of iron has been worked.

Heizi did not answer her. He picked up the wooden bowl Old Zhang had carved him in his ninth year and held it out for the millet. The brazier smoked. The bowl had a shallow scar along one rim where a young Heizi had once tried to chip a notch into it with a knife — to mark it as his — and had been caught, and had been struck once across the back of the hand by Old Zhang, and had cried, and had never tried to mark a thing as his again. The scar was the only mark on the bowl. He had kept it.

"What did the riders do, in the dream?" he asked.

"They read names from a list."

"They always read names from a list."

"Yes," she said. "But in the dream, my name was the third one."

She poured the millet. The steam rose. The dog watched the road. Outside, beyond the courtyard wall, the morning was beginning to fill with that particular thinness of sound that came in the village when something was being waited for: the loom in the carpenter's house was silent; the smith's hammer was not ringing; a child somewhere had begun to cry and had been hushed faster than usual. The village was holding its breath the way a man holds his breath when a snake passes near his foot. The snake might pass. It might not.

Heizi looked into the bowl. The millet was a little thicker than usual. He understood, then, why the dried mushroom was in it.

"Sister," he said.

"Eat."

"Sister, your dream —"

"Eat," she said. "It was a dream. It will be the same dream tomorrow morning. Eat the food while it is hot. Old Zhang has not eaten yet either; do not let it cool before he comes back from the headman's yard."

She would not look at him. He understood, watching the side of her face, that she had not finished the dream — that there was a fourth and a fifth thing in the dream which she had not told him and did not intend to. He understood also, in the way one understands a thing slowly while looking at the ordinary surface of a person one has known a long time, that she had laid the dried mushroom in the pot herself, in some moment before he had come down off the kang, because she had known what she had dreamed, and she had wanted, on this morning, to put a small unnecessary good thing into the bowls of the two men in her household, and she had not told them she was doing it, and she would not tell them.

He ate.

The millet was hot. The mushroom was a small, soft, dark sweetness in the middle of the heat. He chewed slowly. He did not look at her.

In his life afterwards — in all the years and in all the rooms and in all the camps and on all the roads he had not yet seen — he would remember the taste of that mushroom in that millet on that morning more clearly than he would remember the taste of the wines of three dynasties' courts. He did not know yet that he would. He only knew, sitting on the edge of the kang with the bowl in his hands and the dog in the doorway and his sister's face turned slightly away, that the morning had a weight to it which he was not yet old enough to name.

Outside, in the road, hooves came up out of the mud — soft, then sharper, then the click of a shoe on the flat stone at the well. Two horses, the second following the first by the length of a polite man's pause. The headman's gate creaked.

The dog at the doorway stood up, and lowered its head, and watched.

Mei-er, kneeling by the brazier, lifted the lid again, looked once into the steam, set it back. Her hands did not shake.

"Eat your breakfast, little brother," she said. "There will be a long day."

Heizi ate. The mushroom was gone. The salt was the salt of every morning. Outside, the riders came up the road and stopped at the well, where the headman was already standing in the cold with his hands open at his sides, and the village, around them, listened with the kind of listening that does not move a single shutter or a single door.

The smell of salted millet smoke hung over it all, and the dog watched, and the persimmon tree at the edge of the lower field stood with all its bare branches lifted toward a sky the color of weak tea, and the wind, when it came, came from the north and brought no rain.

Yet.