11: The Edge of the Map

The bean fields north of the village were a country Heizi had walked since he could walk.

He had pulled weeds from them as a small child. He had carried buckets of night soil along their edges in the spring of his ninth year, and had been told, by Old Zhang, the small careful proportions of the ash-and-soil mixture that the bean's young root liked. He had laid the small straw rope barriers against the deer in his eleventh autumn. He had, in his thirteenth summer, fallen asleep at the eastern corner of the largest of the three fields and had been found by Mei-er at the hour of the rooster, with a small line of ants making a pilgrimage along the inside of his open hand. He knew the fields the way a young man knew his own arm. He could have walked them blind.

Tonight he walked them with the small dim lantern of a third-quarter moon behind clouds, with the four of them in single file, with the small wet sound of straw cloaks brushing against the bare bean canes that had not yet been pulled up from the previous autumn's stubble. The fields were the village's. They knew the village's feet. They were letting four of them pass without a single root catching at a sandal, without a single low dip of ground turning an ankle, without a single bean cane scraping audibly against a cloak. The fields were, in their own way, helping; or so he felt, although he understood, when he tried to think it as a thought, that he was attributing kindness to a piece of land because his heart needed to attribute kindness to something on this night, and the fields were the nearest thing that would not refuse the attribution.

Wang Er was behind him. Tie-zhu was behind Wang Er. Ah Si was at the back. Heizi had set the order — strongest in front to find the way, second strongest at the rear to keep watch, the smallest in the middle position where two could shield him; he had reversed it for this stretch and put Ah Si at the back because Ah Si knew the bean fields almost as well as Heizi did, having slept along their borders many times in summer, and because Ah Si's small careful step was the one most likely, if any of them stumbled, to make a sound the night would not forgive. The boy was steady. Heizi did not need to look back.

They came to the low ridge at the far north of the bean fields at the hour, by his guess, just past the boar — the night's third watch. The rain had thinned almost to nothing. The clouds were breaking in the east. Not for sunrise — the hour was wrong for that — but for some other thinning, some other unaccountable colorlessness in the eastern quarter that the weather was deciding on by itself.

The ridge was not high. It was perhaps the height of three men. Heizi had stood, as a small boy, at the top of it and looked north and seen the shapes of farther ridges, and he had not understood that those farther ridges were a place a person could go to. They had been the edge of the world.

He led the three boys up the ridge. He went up by the small thin path the village's herd boys had cut over the years — the path the goats took when the village pastured them on the slope above. The path was slick with rain, and at one place near the top a flat stone had moved out of its bedding. He found the stone with his foot. He shifted it back into place, knelt, and pressed it down with both hands. The mud accepted it. He went on.

At the top of the ridge he stopped.

The other three came up behind him.

Wang Er stopped beside him without speaking. Wang Er, on this night, was a slow steady presence at his shoulder, the way a wall was a presence at the back of a man at a fire — the wall did not need to speak. Tie-zhu came up behind, breathing more heavily than the others; his bad foot had slowed him on the slope; he said nothing. Ah Si, at the back, paused on the path several paces below them. Heizi could just make out the small shape of him.

"Up here, little brother," Heizi said, very quietly.

Ah Si came up.

The four of them stood on the ridge in the dark. The rain had nearly stopped. A thin south wind moved past them — the same south wind that had been the wind of the first morning, the morning of the riders, the wind that had carried sand into the wounds and the rice and the eyes of every boy Heizi had not yet been in the world, and that he would, in years to come, learn the smell of in twenty other valleys.

Heizi turned, finally, and looked back.

The village was a small dim shape in the valley.

He could see the smoke of one chimney, which was Old Cui's, who would be up before the others always, even today. He could see the dark line of the lower field, where his sister was buried, where the rain had been falling without rest for hours. He could see the gap in the trees that was his foster father's house, but he could not see the house. He could see, by the small careful shape of the smith's chimney smoke — thinner than usual; banked carefully — that Wang the smith had stopped his hammer perhaps an hour ago and had banked the forge for the night. He could see, perhaps two villages over to the south, a small far yellow point of light that was probably a lamp in a window — some old man unable to sleep, some woman waiting for a child to come home from a road, some sick room with a vigil at the bedside.

He looked at all of it.

He felt, in his chest, the weight of the promise he had made at his sister's grave. It sat in him with the particular weight of a thing not yet paid for. He felt also the absence of the man asleep on the kang in the empty house with the wadded coat across his shoulders and the dog at his feet, who had let him go because his sister had asked it, and who would die in that house in some year Heizi would not be there for, and Heizi knew this without anyone having told him.

He thought of Mei-er, very briefly — not at the persimmon tree, but on the smooth flat stone of last autumn, where she had sat in the late afternoon shelling early beans into her lap and laughing at something he had said and not said again because the laughing had been a clean unbroken thing he had wanted to leave alone. He let himself think it for the space of one breath. He let it go.

He thought of the road.

He turned away from the village.

"North," he said.

"North," Wang Er said.

He did not say, *do not look back, brothers*. He had said it to himself; he would not say it to them. They were each, on this ridge, making their own small parting; he would not push his on theirs. Tie-zhu, beside him, was already not looking; the lame boy had turned his face north some moments ago, perhaps even before reaching the ridge, in the small private discipline of a boy who had decided that for him the work of leaving did not require the further work of looking. Wang Er was looking, briefly — Heizi could see, sidelong, the slight angle of the smith's son's head — at a point in the village that was probably his father's forge. Wang Er would look as long as Wang Er needed to look. Heizi did not hurry him.

It was Ah Si, the smallest of them, who looked the longest.

The boy stood at the edge of the ridge with his small bundle clutched against his chest and looked back at the village for a long time. He did not weep. He had perhaps had no one in the village to weep for; his mother had been dead for four years; his father had died on the canal in some month before Heizi could remember; the carpenter and the carpenter's wife, who had given him the half-bowl of millet on the upper step every noon, had been the closest he had to family, and the carpenter and his wife had given him, this evening before he came to the gate, a small parcel of dried turnip and a pair of sandals new from the bench. He had nothing to weep for. He looked anyway, with the long careful look of a small creature memorizing a terrain it did not expect to see again.

Heizi waited for him.

After a while the boy turned. He did not say anything. He came up beside Heizi and stood there.

"Ready?" Heizi said, very quietly.

"Yes, Heizi-ge."

"All right."

They walked down the far side of the ridge. The mud took their feet and gave them back. The dark, which had begun to thin in the east, did not thin where they were going. The rain, which was the kind of rain that had been owed for a long time, kept falling — light now, almost a mist, the way a rain ended after it had given itself for an afternoon and a night and an evening.

A long way off, somewhere in the village behind them, the first cock crowed.

Heizi did not look back. He had promised himself, at the top of the ridge, that he would not. It was the first promise he had made to himself rather than to a grave, and like the other, it was a promise he would keep.

They walked, in the soft last hour of the rain, toward the small stream above the great willow.

The stream, when they came to it, was higher than Heizi had hoped it would be. The rain of the night had brought it up by perhaps a hand's breadth. He stood on the near bank and listened to the run of it. The bottom, two stones above the great willow, was gravel; he had Old Zhang's word for it; but the gravel was deeper in the water now than it had been three weeks ago.

Wang Er came up beside him.

"Cross?"

"Cross."

"Tie-zhu first?"

"Tie-zhu first. I will go ahead of him to test the bottom. You follow him. Ah Si last; I will come back across for him."

"You do not need to. He can ride on my back."

Heizi looked at Wang Er. Wang Er, in the dark, was a wide solid shape with the hammer in its sling at the back of his neck. Wang Er could carry the small boy across a stream the way a draft animal carried a sack. Heizi nodded.

"All right. Ah Si on your back. Tie-zhu in the middle. I will go first."

He stepped down to the water.

The water at the edge was very cold. He had expected it to be cold. He had not been prepared for it to be the cold it was. The cold went up through his sandal into the bones of his foot in one long fast shiver. He gritted his teeth and did not flinch — Old Zhang had taught him that a man who flinched at cold floors flinched at other things, and the lesson, on this stream bank, was the same lesson — and he stepped into the water fully.

The bottom was gravel. Old Zhang had been right. The pebbles shifted only slightly under his feet, with the small good even resistance of small even stones in moving water. He felt for the second step. The bottom held. He went on, slowly, two paces, three, four. The water came up to his knees. It came up to his thighs. It did not come up to his belt; the stream was narrower than it was deep at this season, and the deepest part was a man-and-a-half across only.

He came out on the far bank.

He turned. He waved Tie-zhu to come.

Tie-zhu came. The lame boy moved into the water with his bad foot first, the way Heizi had told him to. He moved slowly. He did not slip. The good foot followed; the body balanced; the cold of the water made him hiss once under his breath, but he did not stop. He came across in a slow even crossing and reached the far bank and grasped Heizi's hand and stepped up.

"Good," Heizi said.

Tie-zhu nodded. He could not yet speak; the cold had taken his breath. He turned to watch Wang Er.

Wang Er crouched down at the near bank. Ah Si climbed onto his back. The boy was small. Wang Er stood up with a small grunt. He stepped into the water. He went slowly. The stream came up to his thighs and to his belt, but the smith's son was tall, and the water did not come to Ah Si on his back; the boy's small bare feet, where they hung at Wang Er's hips, kept above the water. Wang Er crossed in five long steps. He stepped up onto the far bank. He set Ah Si down. He shrugged the hammer in its sling once on his back to settle it.

The four of them stood on the far bank, dripping, in the soft mist that had been a rain.

"Up the slope," Heizi said. "There is a place, three small pines that lean together. We will sleep three hours. The hour of the rabbit, we rise."

They went up.

The slope was not steep. The brush along it was the thin late-winter brush of a slope that had not yet leafed for the spring. The small wet branches caught at their cloaks. They went slowly. Tie-zhu, with his bad foot, fell once; Wang Er caught him under the arm and lifted him; Tie-zhu apologized; Wang Er did not answer, only patted him once on the shoulder. They went on.

The three small pines leaned together at a place perhaps a third of the way up the slope. Old Zhang had described them in detail — three young pines, none of them taller than two men, growing from a single slight rise in the slope, leaning into each other so that their lower branches formed a kind of low woven roof over a hollow at their base. The hollow, Old Zhang had said, was dry even in heavy rain. He had slept there once in Wen-di seventeen, when he had been a young man on a road of his own that he had never spoken of.

Heizi found the pines.

The hollow was dry.

They crawled into it on their hands and knees. There was room, just, for the four of them — Wang Er at the upper edge, Heizi beside him, Tie-zhu at the lower side, Ah Si curled between Heizi and the small inner wall of pine roots. The straw cloaks, laid one over each, made a kind of layered roof against what little of the mist still came down.

"Sleep," Heizi said, very low. "Three hours. I will wake."

"You sleep too," Wang Er said. "I will wake."

"Wang Er —"

"I will wake. You have not slept. You are not sleeping last night either."

It was true. Heizi did not argue. He had not argued with Wang Er since they were nine, on a question of who had owned a particular wooden top, and Wang Er, in the way of slow honest men, did not argue twice and did not need to.

"All right," Heizi said. "Wake at the hour of the rabbit. Earlier if you hear anything."

"I will hear nothing. There is nothing to hear in this brush. Sleep."

Heizi closed his eyes.

He had not expected to sleep. He thought, in the first minute of having his eyes closed, of his foster father on the kang with the wadded coat across his shoulders. He thought of the empty courtyard with the rain ending in it. He thought of his sister in the lower field with a bowl of millet filling slowly with rainwater on the head of the small mound. He thought of the way Old Zhang's hand had felt on the top of his own head — once, light, gone — before the parting on the threshold. He thought of the small jade at his ribs, with the braid of black hair, which had been his mother's and had been folded for fifteen years against his foster father's chest, and which lay now against his own.

He thought of all of it, in a small unhurried inward review, the way a man going on a long road thinks of the things he is leaving behind on the night he leaves.

Then his body, which had been awake for two days, took the sleep his mind had been holding back. He went down into a sleep that was not quite sleep — a thin grey doze at the edge of consciousness, in which the small movements of Wang Er beside him and the quiet breathing of Ah Si at his elbow and the small periodic shifts of Tie-zhu's bad foot were not absent but were heard, in the doze, as a kind of slow safe music.

He slept.

He slept for three hours.

When Wang Er woke him at the hour of the rabbit, the rain was finally done, and the eastern sky over the foothills had the grey-white clear pre-dawn light of a country that had been washed clean and was about to be lit, and a single far bird — some early lark, some small ordinary creature of the slope — had begun, somewhere, to sing.

Heizi opened his eyes.

He did not, on that morning, know that he had crossed the edge of his own life. He knew only that his sleeping face was cold, that his body ached in three places, that the small boy at his elbow was still breathing the slow breath of a child who had walked all night and would wake with difficulty, and that there was a long day's careful walking ahead of them through brush they did not know, on a slope they had never seen, into a country that was, for each of the four of them, a country none of them had ever set foot in before.

"Brothers," he said, very quietly. "It is time."

The four of them, in the dim grey, gathered themselves.

The village, at their backs, began with each step from this point on to become a place they had once lived.

It would be twenty years before any of them returned. Only one would.