12: First Light, First Foot

The light came up over the foothills the way light comes up over a country that has been washed all night and is being shown for the first time.

Heizi crawled out of the hollow under the three pines and stood up and felt, in the small first minute of his standing, the four places his body had become acquainted with overnight that it had not, before, known to consider — the small ache in the muscle below the right shoulder blade where Mei-er's pouch and the second bead and the wrapped jade had pressed against his ribs through three hours of sleep on the wrong side; the dull cold in the joints of both ankles, where the wet had gone in at the stream and had not yet gone out; the tight place at the base of the neck, on the right side, where he had bent his head all night to keep the small sharp lower branch of one pine from his face; the small hollowness in the upper belly that was not yet hunger but was already its lowland cousin, the thing hunger sent ahead of itself to scout the ground.

He took stock of these four places without dwelling on them. He took stock the way Old Zhang had taken stock of the old hip, every morning, as a thing to be noticed once and not twice. The body was the body. The body had places that ached now that had not ached two days ago. There would be more places, in the days to come. He filed the four under the small running register he was beginning to keep, in a part of himself he could not yet name, of the small gradients of his own physical state — the differences between the ordinary tiredness of a long day in the village and the working tiredness of a road and the dangerous tiredness of a man whose body was beginning to fail him. He would, in the years to come, learn to read this register as accurately as he learned to read terrain.

This morning the register said: working tiredness. Bearable. Eat at the next stop. Do not eat now.

He turned to look at the eastern sky. The grey-white pre-dawn had begun to take, at the horizon, the first small streak of pale gold. The sun would be up within the half-hour. The mist had lifted off the slope and was, as he watched, lifting also off the small valley below — the valley they had crossed in the dark, with the bean fields somewhere out at the southern edge of it, and the village beyond the bean fields, and the persimmon tree at the southwest corner of the lower field — and the lifting of the mist was the world drawing back the curtain on a country they had walked through without seeing.

He did not look long at the valley. He had said, last night at the top of the ridge, that he would not turn back. He had kept the promise through the stream, through the slope, through the doze under the pines. He kept it now. He let his eye rest on the eastern light for the space of three breaths and then turned, deliberately, to look north.

North was the foothills.

The foothills, in the new clear morning after a long rain, were a country of small dark folds of earth and bright lighter folds of brush and the sudden white of a flowering blackthorn here and there along the lower slopes. He had never seen blackthorn. The village had not had any. He looked at the small white shapes of the flowering and did not, for one moment, know what they were. Then he understood. *Blackthorn*. He had heard the word from Old Zhang once. The word and the flowering met in his mind. He filed that, too.

In the hollow behind him, Wang Er was rousing the others. Heizi heard the small careful sound of the smith's son nudging Tie-zhu awake — the soft *up, brother*; the slightly louder *Tie-zhu, the foot, the foot first* — and the small startled sound of Ah Si, who had slept the deep small sleep of a small boy who had walked himself empty, and who took a moment to come up out of it.

They came out into the morning.

Tie-zhu came out limping — his bad foot had stiffened in the cold of the night, and the first ten paces were difficult, as he had warned Heizi yesterday they might be, and as Heizi had not, until now, fully understood. The lame boy's face was drawn, but he did not complain. He set his foot down carefully. He moved his weight onto it. He moved on. By the third pace the foot had begun to come back. By the tenth pace he was walking nearly as he had walked through the bean fields. He looked at Heizi once, briefly, with a small grateful exhaustion.

"All right," he said. He did not say *I will keep up.* He did not need to. The walking was the saying.

Ah Si came out shivering. The small wadded coat that had been Heizi's at twelve was big on him. The cuffs were rolled, but the body of the coat hung on him like a robe; the small thin shoulders inside it looked, in the new light, smaller than Heizi had remembered. The boy clutched his bundle to his chest and looked up at Heizi with the large flat eyes of a child waiting to be told the next thing.

Wang Er came out last. He had stayed behind to make sure nothing had been left under the pines. He carried his hammer in its sling at his back and the carpenter's old straw rain-cloak rolled and tied at his waist, and he looked, in the new morning, like what he was — a slow strong young man who had not slept the night and who had decided, on the road, that not sleeping was a thing he could do.

"What now," Wang Er said.

Heizi had been thinking.

He had been thinking, in the small space at the edge of his mind not occupied by the four sore places of his body, about the next four hours.

Old Zhang had told him: *walk through the day, low, by the brush along the old stream. You will not show yourselves on the ridges. By the third night you will be eight or nine* li *into the foothills proper.* The instruction had been precise. Old Zhang, in his militia year in Wen-di seventeen, had walked these foothills himself, by some road of his own that he had never spoken of; Old Zhang's instructions were not guesses. Heizi understood — already, by some early morning instinct he was only half-conscious of — that Old Zhang's instructions were the only thing standing between the four of them and the magistracy's slow patrols, and that he was to follow them as if they were the law.

But Old Zhang's instructions had not been written for four boys, three of whom had never been on a road, one of whom had a bad foot, and the smallest of whom was twelve and could not, through any honest accounting, walk eight or nine *li* a day in foothills brush.

Heizi did the small calculation in his head. He did it slowly. He did it in the way he had done, in the village, the calculation of the rows of the lower field — the units of how much grain a row could be expected to yield in a year of normal rain, set against the household's needs, set against what could go to the magistrate, set against what could be saved against the bad year. He did it the way Old Zhang had taught him to do, sitting beside the old man at the threshold step in the spring.

Eight *li* in a day was the pace of grown men with rations. Five *li* was the honest pace they could keep. Three *li* in the next four hours, four in the afternoon, with two long rests for the foot and the boy, would put them perhaps four *li* into the foothills proper by dusk. Three days at that pace was a pinpoint of twelve *li*, not twenty-four. The patrols would not look in the foothills, Old Zhang had said. They would not look in the obvious places. But Heizi had heard, in Old Zhang's small careful voice last night, the small thing the old man had not said, which was *if they look at all, they will not find you in the brush; but if they look hard enough, anywhere is reachable.* The old man had said *they will not look*. Heizi did not, in the new morning, in the new accounting of how slowly his party could really move, fully believe him.

He recalculated.

If they walked five *li* a day for four days, they would be twenty *li* north by the end of the fourth night. The magistracy's patrols, in his understanding from the village's old men, were normally set in concentric circles of eight, sixteen, and thirty-two *li* from the canal route; the village was thirty *li* from the canal; the patrols' outer edge was therefore between two and thirty-two *li* from the village in any direction. The northern arc of patrols would be the smallest, because the canal ran east-west and most desertions went south or east toward the marshes; but it would not be zero.

He did not, at fifteen, have all of these terms. He was working out the geometry by feel, the way a young man feels his way through a question whose proper vocabulary he does not yet possess. He worked it out. He did not show his working. He came to a conclusion.

"We do not stop at the third night," he said. "We push through to the fourth."

Wang Er looked at him.

"You said three."

"I said three because Old Zhang said three. Old Zhang was thinking of four men with grown legs. We are four boys. One of us has a foot. One of us is twelve. The third night we will be inside the patrols' outer arc still. The fourth night we will be past it. We will push to the fourth."

Wang Er thought.

"Tie-zhu," Wang Er said.

"Yes, brother."

"Can you walk a fourth day."

"I can walk a fourth day."

"The foot."

"The foot will walk a fourth day."

Wang Er nodded slowly. He looked at Ah Si.

Ah Si was already looking at Heizi. The small flat eyes had taken in the conversation. The boy did not, before being asked, say anything. He waited until Wang Er had turned to him. Then he said, very quietly:

"I will walk the fourth day, Heizi-ge. I have walked four days before. The summer my mother died, I walked four days from her uncle's hamlet to here. I had no shoes. I will walk the fourth day."

Heizi had not known.

He looked at the small boy in the too-large coat and felt, in his chest, the small inward shift of something that had been settling all night. The boy had walked, at eight, four days alone through unknown country with no shoes, on his way to a village he had only heard the name of, because there had been no one left in his uncle's hamlet who would feed him. Heizi had not known. The village had not known. The village had received the boy, in Da-ye seven, as a small thin mouth at the carpenter's gate, and had not asked.

"All right, little brother," Heizi said. "Then we walk."

They walked.

The first three hours were easy. The brush on the slope was thin. The slope was gentle. The morning was clear and cold and bright. Heizi led, picking the way along a small old game path that ran along the contour of the slope, parallel to the stream they had crossed at dawn, perhaps a hundred paces above its bed. Wang Er walked behind him. Tie-zhu walked behind Wang Er. Ah Si walked behind Tie-zhu. They moved in single file. They did not speak.

The country was new to all of them. Heizi watched it as he walked. The trees here were not the trees of the village's lower fields; the soils here were lighter, sandier, and the trees that grew on them were small twisted oaks and an occasional larger pine and the white-flowering blackthorn that he was beginning to recognize at a distance now. The grasses were thinner. The birds were different — a small grey bird with a yellow eye that he did not know the name of called from a low branch, and another, somewhere up the slope, made a long descending whistle that he had never heard. He filed each thing.

He was, although he did not know it yet, making the second map of his life. The first had been the map of the road, in his head, in the village; the second was the map of the new country, written into him as he walked. He would, in the years to come, make many such maps. They would become the foundation of the thing the men he commanded would later call his uncanny ability to read terrain. It was not uncanny. It was only the sustained early attention of a fifteen-year-old who, on the first morning of his exile, did not yet have the leisure to look away.

At the third hour they stopped to drink at the stream. The water was very cold. Heizi made each of them drink only two swallows; more would cramp them on the next walk. He watched Tie-zhu sit on a flat stone and unwrap the bad foot — a small bandage of hempen cloth, wound tight, that the boy's aunt had laid on for him last night. The skin under the bandage was flushed but not bleeding. Tie-zhu rebound the foot slowly, with a kind of practiced solitary care that Heizi had not, in the village, ever seen — the lame boy had been, perhaps, doing this twice a day for ten years in the privacy of his own room, and Heizi had not known.

He filed that.

They walked on.

The first hunger came at midmorning. It came not as a sharp pang but as a small warmth across the chest and a small slowing in the legs. Heizi recognized it. He had felt it many times in the village in lean springs. He let it sit. They walked. By noon the warmth had thickened into the small steady pressure that, in the village, he would have answered with a piece of the morning's flatbread. He did not answer it. He had reckoned the rations on the basis of one small meal a day, at evening; to begin eating at noon was to lose a day at the far end. He kept walking.

Wang Er, behind him, said nothing. Wang Er had been a smith's son and had eaten more in the village than Heizi had eaten; Wang Er would feel the hunger sooner. Wang Er had decided, evidently, in the small private way the smith's son decided things, that he would not ask. Heizi was grateful to him, and resolved — in the same small private way — to remember the gratitude in the years ahead, when Wang Er, in some other field on some other morning, would ask, and Heizi would by then be the kind of man who answered.

At the noon hour Heizi called a halt.

He chose a small flat clearing in a stand of low oaks, where the brush was thicker than the path and they could not be seen from the slope above. He sat them down. He took out the small hempen sack from inside his coat. He took out the millet — they would not eat the millet today; it had to be cooked; he had no fire and no time to make one safely on this slope — and the dried turnip, and the small dried fish.

He cut the turnip into four equal portions with Old Zhang's old militia knife. The knife was sharp. It cut clean. The portions were small. He set the four portions on a flat stone.

He looked at the small dried fish.

The fish was perhaps four fingers long. It was wrapped in oiled paper. Old Zhang had been keeping it, for some other day. Heizi understood, looking at it, that Old Zhang had given it to him as the household's only piece of meat — that the household had had this small dried fish in some upper rafter through three lean months, against some emergency; and that the emergency had come; and that the old man had laid it in his foster son's pack without ceremony.

He cut the fish into four equal portions.

The portions were each the size of a fingernail.

He set them beside the turnip on the flat stone.

"Brothers," he said. "This is the noon."

The four of them ate, slowly. The turnip was salty and sweet, the way turnip kept in salt and sun went. The fish, on the tongue, was an extraordinary thing — the small dense oily salt of a sea-fish that had come, perhaps, by some peddler from the coast some autumn; Heizi had eaten dried fish only once in his life before, at his cousin's wedding three summers ago. Ah Si put his portion of fish in his mouth and held it on his tongue without chewing for a long time.

When they had finished, Heizi tied the sack again. He counted, in his head. Six days of millet, three of turnip, one fish, divided four ways. They would need to find more food before the third day.

He did not tell the brothers the count.

They sat for a quarter hour. Tie-zhu unbound and rebound the foot. Ah Si fell asleep sitting upright against an oak trunk, with his small bundle in his lap, in the small instant naps of the very young walking very far. Wang Er did not sleep. He sat with his back against another oak, with his hammer's sling at his side, and he watched the slope above them for a movement that did not come.

After a quarter hour Heizi nudged Ah Si gently awake.

"Come, little brother."

The boy nodded. He stood. He shouldered his bundle. He fell in.

They walked on through the afternoon. The slope steepened. Tie-zhu's foot began to give. Heizi adjusted the pace without speaking. He chose softer ground where he could; he chose flatter contours where he could. By the time the western light began to turn the small flowering blackthorn across the slope a warm pale yellow, they had covered, by Heizi's estimate, perhaps four *li* from the three pines, and Ah Si was walking on the rim of his strength.

He called a halt.

He chose, this time, a hollow under an overhang of grey rock — a small dry place, nearly invisible from above, with room for the four of them to lie down close. He set Ah Si down first. The boy curled up with his bundle as a pillow and was asleep before Heizi had finished unrolling the carpenter's old rain-cloak over him.

Tie-zhu sat with his back to the rock. He unbound the foot again. The skin was raw. The foot would not, Heizi understood, walk a fifth day; perhaps not a fourth.

Wang Er sat beside Heizi.

"The boy is finished," Wang Er said, very low, looking at Ah Si.

"For tonight, yes."

"Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow we walk slower."

"And the patrols."

"The patrols will not find us in this brush."

Wang Er nodded slowly.

Heizi reached into the inner pocket of his shirt. He took out the small flat object Old Zhang had given him last night, the one wrapped in the soft scrap of dark cloth, the one Old Zhang had said: *Take it. Open it on the road. Not before.*

The road was now.

He unwrapped it.

Inside the cloth was a small flat folded paper. Inside the folded paper, written in the careful sturdy hand of a man who had once been a militia clerk, was a list of names — twelve names — of villages and hamlets in the foothills of the Henan border, with notes beside each, in a small cramped hand: *food for two nights / sister-by-marriage / will not turn you in*; *charcoal burner / no woman / will share a hot stone*; *old soldier of the Wen-di militia / will speak with you of the road*; *Buddhist hermitage / Ah Chou the gatekeeper, do not call him by his old name*.

Heizi read it twice.

He looked up at the dimming sky.

He folded the paper. He wrapped it back in the cloth. He put it back in his pocket against his ribs, beside the pouch and the second bead and the jade.

"Brothers," he said, very quietly, to Wang Er and the sleeping boys, "we have a road."

The first dark of the evening came down over the foothills.

Far to the south, where the village was, the dark came down also, on a courtyard with a wadded coat across an old man's shoulders, and on a small low mound at the eastern edge of a lower field, and on a persimmon tree whose lowest branch held nothing at all.