13: Watches and the Counting of Stars

The first night under the overhanging rock was the night Heizi learned that he could not, in fact, sleep on a road.

He had slept three hours under the three pines because his body had taken the sleep he had been holding back; he had not chosen the sleep. Tonight his body did not give him the choice. He lay between Ah Si and Wang Er, with the smaller boy's small breathing at his elbow and the larger boy's slow heavy breathing at his shoulder, and he closed his eyes, and he opened them again, and he closed them, and he did not sleep.

He listened.

The country at night was not the village at night. The village had its own nightly round of small sounds — the small periodic shifting of the dog at the doorway, the occasional far cough of Old Lu the carpenter, the wind in the persimmon tree at its summer or winter pitch, the small collective breath of a hundred people sleeping in three dozen close houses. The foothills had no such collective breath. The foothills had: the small running of the stream, two hundred paces below them; the wind in the small twisted oaks; the periodic short call of an owl on a low branch some long way to the north; the small dry shifting of a leaf when an unseen creature stepped on it; the very quiet ticking of the rock above their heads as it released the warmth it had taken from the sun in the afternoon. Each of these sounds Heizi heard and identified and filed.

He did not hear, in the long first hour of his listening, any sound of a man.

He told himself, in the second hour, that he was being foolish — that he was listening for a thing that was not there, and would not be there, and that the listening was a kind of slow self-punishment, a small unnecessary wakefulness that he was inflicting on himself because he had not, on the first night under the three pines, kept his own watch and felt obscurely guilty that Wang Er had done it instead. He told himself this, and the telling did not put him to sleep.

He understood, at some point in the third hour, that the listening was not foolish.

It was the first practice, of an attention he would, by the end of his second decade, hold for whole nights as easily as another man held a cup. The attention was not for a sound that was there; it was for the shape of the silence into which a sound might come. It was the attention a watchman kept at a city gate, the attention a hunter kept at the edge of the bramble, the attention a young commander kept at the perimeter of a sleeping camp. He had not, on this night, the vocabulary for it. He had only the doing of it — the slow careful holding open of an inner ear toward the thinning of the night, the small private discovery that he could, if he willed it, listen for hours without closing the ear.

He could.

He did.

The night went on. The owl moved, at some hour, from its low branch to a higher one — the call came from a different angle. The wind shifted from the south to the southwest, and the small twisted oaks, which had been speaking with their northern faces, began to speak with their northwestern. The stream, two hundred paces below them, sounded a half-tone differently as the moon, somewhere behind a remnant of the day's cloud, set lower toward the western ridge.

Heizi watched it all, from the inside of his closed eyes.

At what he guessed was the hour of the rat — the night's deepest watch — Wang Er, beside him, woke.

He did not sit up. He simply opened his eyes; Heizi could feel, through the small shared warmth, the change of the breath that came with eyes opening. Wang Er did not speak. He turned his head — slow, so as not to wake Ah Si, who lay on Heizi's other side — and looked across at Heizi.

Heizi opened his eyes.

In the dark under the rock, the two of them looked at each other.

"You are awake," Wang Er said, very low, almost not aloud.

"Yes."

"Have you slept?"

"No."

Wang Er thought.

"Sleep," he said. "I will watch from now."

"I cannot."

"Try."

Heizi tried. He closed his eyes. He did not, on the immediate, sleep; but the listening eased — the small unrelaxing inner ear loosened a fraction, because Wang Er was listening also, and the listening had become two people's work — and after some interval he could not measure, he went down into a thin half-sleep, the same thin doze of last night under the pines.

He came back at the hour of the ox. He came back because Ah Si, beside him, had begun to breathe in a different rhythm. He turned his head. The small boy was awake, with his eyes open against the rock.

"Little brother."

"Heizi-ge."

"What is it."

"I had a dream."

"Of what."

The boy was quiet for a moment.

"Of my mother."

Heizi did not answer. There were not, in this country, on this night, any answers. He laid his hand on the small thin shoulder under the wadded coat. The boy did not move.

"Sleep again," Heizi said. "I am here. Wang Er is awake. Tie-zhu is sleeping. Sleep."

The boy closed his eyes. After a while, his breath evened. He slept.

Heizi did not sleep again.

He lay on his back. He looked up at the underside of the overhanging rock, which was perhaps a man's-arm above his face. The rock had small pale streaks in it where the night's moisture had gathered. A small spider lived in a crack near the western edge; he could see, by the very faint moonlight that came in around the rock's lip, the outline of the small webbed funnel where the spider had its retreat. He watched the funnel. The spider did not come out.

He thought about the foothills.

He thought about the list of twelve names in the inner pocket of his shirt. He thought about which of the twelve, by the geography of Old Zhang's careful hand, was nearest. The hand had not been a map; it had been only a list with notes; but the order of the names, he understood, was probably the order of the road — Old Zhang would not have written such a list out of order. The first name was *Cao Ergou — charcoal burner — northern slope of the second valley — no woman — will share a hot stone.* The second was *Shen the widow — sister-by-marriage to my brother's wife — third hamlet north — food for two nights only.* The third was a name he could not, in the dim moonlight at the rock's lip last evening, fully read — something with a ban character and what looked like *village headman, foothill of the third valley, do not give your name.*

The first was the charcoal burner. The northern slope of the second valley.

They were, by Heizi's reckoning, somewhere in the southern slope of the first. To reach the second valley they would have to descend the rest of this slope, ford the stream's lower bend, climb the saddle that he could see, in the late afternoon yesterday, from a clear place along the path — a low pass perhaps two *li* further north, between this slope and the next ridge — and descend into the second valley along a small path that, with luck, would have signs of a charcoal burner's presence (smoke; the small bare patches where charcoal mounds had been built; the smell, on the wind, of the slow cooking of wood).

It was, perhaps, a day's walk. With Tie-zhu's foot — perhaps two.

Two days of foothills brush, on dwindling rations, with no fire because they could not afford the smoke, with the small steady pressure of hunger settling in across all four of them. Two days, before they reached a charcoal burner who might or might not be at his hut, who might or might not still be alive — Old Zhang's list had been written on what Heizi understood, looking at the careful sturdy hand, was old paper; the names had been gathered some years ago; the charcoal burner might have died last winter, or moved, or been taken on the canal himself.

Heizi let the thought sit.

He let it sit for what felt like a long time.

He understood, lying under the rock with the small spider's funnel above his face and the small breathing of three boys around him, that the careful certainty he had carried at the top of the ridge last night — the certainty that he had a path, that the path would hold, that the patrols would not look — had been the certainty of a young man who had not yet, in his life, set out on a path of any consequence. The path was, in the daylight, less certain than it had been in the dark. The path was, by the small mathematics of dwindling food and a lame foot and a small boy and an unreliable list, a thin thing with a long way to go.

He let the thought sit. He did not, by the discipline he was learning under the rock, let himself follow it any further than the sitting. To follow it was to begin the long argument he had told himself, on the threshold this morning that already felt like another life, he would not begin yet.

He held the thought at arm's length.

He lay still.

At some hour late in the watch, Wang Er beside him said, very low:

"Heizi."

"Yes."

"There is something in the brush."

Heizi turned his head, slowly. He listened.

For a long moment he heard nothing but what he had been hearing for hours — the wind, the stream, the small dry sound of leaves under unseen feet that he had decided, in the first hour, were the small night creatures of the slope.

Then, perhaps thirty paces below them, on the small contour path they had walked yesterday afternoon, he heard a single sound that was not the night.

It was the sound of a foot setting down on a wet leaf. The sound was the sound of a foot — not a hoof, not a small paw. The leaf was wet because it had been raining all of yesterday; it was the deep wet that took a moment to release the foot, a wetness that small light creatures did not register because they did not have the weight, but that a man's weight did register.

Heizi lay perfectly still.

He laid one hand on Ah Si's small shoulder, very lightly. The boy did not stir. He laid the other on Wang Er's wrist. Wang Er had already gone still beside him. Tie-zhu, on the far side, breathed in his sleep without changing.

Another step. The same wet release.

The step was coming up the path from the south — from the direction they had come from yesterday afternoon. It was the slow careful step of a man who did not know exactly where he was going, who was watching his own feet, who was trying to be quiet. It was not a patrol. A patrol of the magistracy walked in twos or threes on hard boots and did not bother with quiet, because the patrols had no one to be quiet for. This was one man, alone, who did not want to be heard.

Heizi did not breathe.

The step came up the slope perhaps another six paces. Then it stopped.

The man — whoever he was — stood for a long moment on the path some twenty paces below them. Heizi could just hear, beneath the wind, the sound of a man's breath; not loud; the breath of a man trying to hold his breath, and failing only a little. The breath had the small shaped sound of a man tired beyond what tiredness asked of an ordinary breath.

The man stood for perhaps ten breaths.

Then he turned, slowly, and went back down the slope by the way he had come. The wet leaves released his foot in the same unhurried sound. The sound diminished. The sound went on for perhaps a count of a hundred. The sound was lost in the running of the stream below.

Heizi did not move.

He did not move for a long time after the sound had gone.

Wang Er, beside him, did not move either. The two of them lay in the dark with the small breathing of the two younger sleepers between them, and they listened, in the way they had been listening, to the new shape of a silence that had now had a man in it.

After a long time — perhaps a quarter hour, perhaps longer — Wang Er said, very low, almost not aloud:

"Did he see us."

"I do not know."

"He came up. He stopped. He went back down."

"Yes."

"He was alone."

"Yes."

"Was it a patrol."

"No. A patrol would have been two or three. They would not have walked quietly. He was one man, and he was tired."

"Then who."

"I do not know."

Heizi thought.

He thought slowly, in the dark. He thought about the man's step and the man's breath. He thought about the small sound of the breath — the kind of breath a man drew when he had been walking for many hours on a road he did not entirely know, when the hunger had begun to thin him. He thought about the time of night — the hour of the ox; no one was on a road at the hour of the ox unless he had a good reason; the only people on a road at the hour of the ox were patrols and runaways. And patrols did not walk quietly.

So a runaway.

Heizi let the thought sit. He let himself, for the first time, consider that they were not the only four boys on the road. That, in the wide brush of the foothills, on this same night, there were others. That the riders had read out names in other villages this week too. That girls had hung from other trees, and brothers had left other gates, and old men had laid out other small parcels of millet and turnip and old jade in soft cloth, and the foothills were full — dispersed, hidden, single — of small parties of frightened young men picking their way north or east or west into a country they did not know.

The thought was not, exactly, a comfort. It was a recognition.

He understood, at the rock, in the dark, with Wang Er silent beside him, that the road they had taken was not their road alone. It belonged to many. It always had.

"Wang Er."

"Yes."

"Tomorrow we may meet other walkers."

"Yes."

"We will not call out to them. We will not approach. We will let them pass, and we will pass them. If they call to us — if they ask for water, for food — we will give what we can, and we will not stop. We will not let them follow us. We will not follow them. We are four on a road. We will be four still tomorrow night."

Wang Er was quiet for a long moment.

"And if it is a girl," he said, finally.

Heizi did not answer at once.

He thought of the promise he had made at his sister's grave. He thought of the small specific wording of it, in the inside of his mouth: *I will not leave a girl to that camp. Not one. Not while I am alive.* He thought of the small low fence the promise had drawn around a small private piece of his soul.

The promise had been about girls bound for a camp.

The promise had not, on its face, been about every girl on every road. He could not, on this road, with these brothers, with this food, with these legs, save every girl in the foothills. The promise was specific; the promise was a small fence, not a wide one.

He thought.

"If she is alone," he said at last, "and she is not bound for the camp — if she is going north herself, by her own road — we will give what we can give and we will pass. If she is bound for the camp, or has been taken, and the taking is reachable — then we will not pass."

"How will we know which."

"We will ask her."

"And if we cannot afford the answer."

"Then we will ask her anyway."

Wang Er was silent again for a long moment.

"All right," he said.

They did not speak again that night.

The owl moved from the higher branch back to its low one. The moon set behind the western ridge. The eastern sky began, at some hour Heizi could not place, to grey. The small spider in the funnel above his face came out, briefly, to inspect the lip of the funnel, and went back in. The small breathing of Ah Si beside him kept its slow even pace. Tie-zhu, in his sleep, made one small sound — a half-word, indistinct, the kind of word a boy says in a dream of a place he has not seen — and was quiet again.

When the dim grey of dawn came along the eastern ridge, Heizi sat up under the rock.

He had not slept since the hour of the ox.

He was tired in a way he had not been tired in his life; it was the tiredness of a young man who had used himself, for the first time, in a way that asked everything; and it was, in a specific small way he was beginning to understand, the tiredness he was going to have to grow into. He filed the tiredness, the way he had been filing other things, in the small inner register that was teaching him, by walking and listening, the country of his own body.

He woke the others.

They came up out of sleep the way they had come up yesterday — Tie-zhu slowly, with the careful first work of moving the foot; Ah Si suddenly, with the small startled face of a child waking in a place that was not the woodshed; Wang Er, who had not been more than half asleep all night, sitting up at once.

The four of them gathered themselves in the dim grey.

The morning would be the second day on the road. The second day would, by Heizi's reckoning, take them perhaps to the saddle pass, perhaps over it, into the second valley by the third night. The charcoal burner — if the charcoal burner was still at his hut — would feed them. The charcoal burner — if the charcoal burner was no longer there — would have left, perhaps, the small signs by which a man could read whether the hut had been visited recently by other walkers, by other patrols, by other boys on other roads.

That was the plan.

Heizi did not, on this morning, share the plan in full. He told them only: *we walk to the saddle. We take the saddle slowly. We sleep in the second valley tonight.*

Wang Er nodded. Tie-zhu nodded. Ah Si nodded.

They began to walk.

Behind them, under the overhanging rock, the small spider in the funnel watched them go, in the small careful patience of a creature for whom four boys on a slope were neither a meal nor a threat, only a small interval of warm motion in a country that, from the inside of a funnel, kept its long unbroken pace.

The day before them was the day they would learn that a single man, at the hour of the ox, walking quietly up a contour path, could change the shape of every night that followed.