14: The Saddle Pass

The saddle came up at the third hour after dawn.

It had taken longer than Heizi had hoped. Tie-zhu's foot had stiffened in the cold and would not, in the first hour, take the full weight without a small dry sound from the boy's throat that he had not been making yesterday. Ah Si, walking behind, had begun to flag at the first hour and had — without a word from anyone — taken Tie-zhu's small bundle onto his own back to lighten the lame boy's pack. Wang Er had said nothing about either change. He had, when they came to a steep place, simply gone up first and turned and offered his hand back, and the smaller two had taken it, and the four of them had climbed the steeper places at the pace of the slowest, which was the only honest pace there was.

The saddle, when they reached it, was a low wooded notch between the slope they had been on for two days and the next slope of the next valley. The trees thinned at the saddle. The wind came over from the north through the thinning, with a small different smell in it — the smell of pine and not of oak, of a country higher and drier than the one they had left, of some far blue distance that the ridge above their old village had never offered.

Heizi stopped at the lip of the saddle.

He had told Wang Er last night that they would go *over the saddle slowly*. He took his own instruction. He stopped behind the last fringe of low brush before the saddle proper and crouched and looked north.

The second valley opened below them.

It was wider than the valley they had left. The slopes were less wooded; the floor of the valley was a band of brown winter scrub, with the small thread of a stream running down the center of it. There was no village. There were no fields. There was, at the far southwestern corner of the valley — perhaps a half-*li* below them and another half-*li* across — a thin column of pale grey smoke rising from a small clearing in the brush.

Charcoal smoke.

He recognized it without having ever seen charcoal smoke before. He recognized it because Old Zhang had described it once, in some long-forgotten conversation about wood — pale grey, not white; thin, not thick; rising slowly because the wood underneath was not burning but cooking. Old Zhang had said: *charcoal smoke is the smoke of patience*. Heizi had not understood the phrase at the time.

The smoke was patient now.

He watched it for the space of perhaps a hundred breaths. The column did not change. It rose slowly and lost itself, at the height of perhaps fifteen *zhang*, in the small drift of the late morning wind.

He turned his head and looked at the rest of the second valley. He looked carefully. He had begun, since yesterday's noon, to look at country the way Old Zhang had taught him to look at a field — quadrant by quadrant, slowly, naming each thing in his head as his eye fell on it. He named: *charcoal clearing, southwestern corner. Small stream, center. Bare slope, eastern side, no cover. Low wooded slope, western side, cover. Thicker brush, northern end of valley, narrow exit. No human movement visible. No animals visible at this hour. No second smoke.*

No second smoke. That was the answer to the question he was asking. If there had been a patrol or a second household or another party of walkers in the valley, there would have been a second smoke — a cooking fire, however small. There was none.

He motioned the others up to the lip beside him. Wang Er came up. Tie-zhu and Ah Si stayed lower, in the brush, where Heizi had told them.

"There," Heizi said, very low, pointing.

Wang Er looked.

"The charcoal burner."

"Yes. If he is still alive. If it is still him."

"How will we know."

Heizi thought.

"We will go down slowly," he said. "We will stop at the edge of his clearing. We will not enter the clearing. I will call out — once, only the words *grandfather, we are travelers* — and I will wait. If he answers, we will come in slowly. If he does not, we will withdraw."

"Why grandfather."

"Old Zhang's note said *no woman*. The charcoal burner is alone. *Grandfather* is the address of an old man living alone in the foothills. To call him *Cao-shi* — by his clan name — would be to say we know who he is. We do not yet know we want him to know we know who he is. *Grandfather* is the address of any old man, by any traveler. If he is a different old man — if Cao Ergou has died and another man has taken the hut — he will answer to *grandfather* without being startled. If a patrol has taken the hut — they will not answer to *grandfather*; they will challenge."

Wang Er thought about this.

"You have thought about this before," he said.

"Only this morning. Only in the last hour. I did not have the words for it last night."

Wang Er nodded slowly.

"All right."

They went down.

The slope down into the second valley was less steep than the slope they had come up. It was, however, more open — the brush thinned in places to small grassy clearings, where they could be seen from the valley floor, and Heizi made them go around these places, even at the cost of a longer descent. He watched the column of smoke as they went. The column did not change.

At the foot of the slope, in a stand of low pine that gave them cover, Heizi stopped them again.

"Tie-zhu, Ah Si — wait here. Wang Er and I will go on."

Tie-zhu nodded. He sat down on a flat root, in the way of a lame boy who knew that the offer of a rest was always an instruction. Ah Si crouched beside him. The two of them had developed, over a day and a night, the small wordless habit of staying close, the way two younger brothers stay close in any household.

Heizi and Wang Er went on.

They moved through the pine at a careful low pace. They came to the edge of the charcoal burner's clearing perhaps a quarter hour later. The clearing was small — perhaps twenty paces across — and at the center of it stood a low round mound of earth, the size of a small hut, from the top of which the pale grey smoke was rising. It was the charcoal mound. Heizi had heard of them but had never seen one. It was a slow buried fire, packed under earth and turf, in which split wood became charcoal over the course of three or four days. The smoke was the slow exhalation of the patient cooking.

Beside the mound stood the hut.

The hut was smaller than Heizi had expected. It was perhaps eight paces square, made of split logs with the bark left on, with a roof of pine bark. The door was a hide flap. The hide had been hung crooked, and the bottom corner of it lifted slightly in the small breeze that came across the clearing.

There was no one in the clearing.

Heizi stood with Wang Er behind a screen of low pine at the southern edge of the clearing. He waited. He listened.

After a long moment he heard, from inside the hut, the small sound of a man coughing.

It was an old cough — not Old Lu the carpenter's slow steady winter cough, but a different cough, rougher, with a wet rattle at the end. A charcoal burner's cough. The cough of a man who had spent thirty years breathing the slow patient smoke.

The man cleared his throat. He spat. He moved — Heizi could hear, faintly, the small wooden scrape of a stool being pushed back inside the hut. The hide flap lifted. An old man came out into the clearing.

He was old. He was perhaps sixty-five, perhaps seventy. He was not tall, and his back was bent — bent in the particular way of a man who had spent decades stooping over charcoal mounds and over split wood. He wore a coarse hempen robe gone almost black with charcoal, and a leather belt, and on his feet a pair of old straw sandals. His face, in the morning light, was the deep brown of a man who had stood beside slow fires every day of his working life. His eyes were small and wet and very bright.

He came out into the clearing carrying a small wooden bowl. He went to the southern edge of the mound. He turned the bowl over and tapped a small heap of ash from it onto the earth. He stood up — slowly, with the small grunt of an old back — and turned to look around the clearing.

His eye went, after a moment, to the screen of pine where Heizi and Wang Er were standing.

He did not start. He did not call out. He looked at the screen of pine for perhaps the space of three breaths. Then he said, in a voice that was rough and low and quite loud enough:

"You have been standing in my pine long enough, lads."

Heizi looked at Wang Er. Wang Er looked at Heizi.

Heizi stepped out of the screen. He stepped out alone. He walked — slowly — to the southern edge of the clearing, and stopped at the edge of the cleared ground, and bowed.

"Grandfather. We are travelers."

The old man looked at him for a long moment. The bright wet eyes took him in. The old eye went to Heizi's hempen sack, to the sandals, to the wadded coat over the shirt, to the cord at the neck where the slip-bow held the wooden bead — not visible, but the cord at his collarbone was — to the face. The eye took perhaps the space of ten breaths to do its inspection. Heizi let it.

"Travelers," the old man said. "You are travelers the way I am the emperor of the Han. How many of you."

"Four, grandfather."

"Show me."

Heizi turned and called, low: "Brothers. Come."

Wang Er came out of the pine. He came out walking slowly, with the hammer's sling visible at his back. Behind him, after a moment, came Tie-zhu, with the bad foot set carefully — Heizi had not realized the lame boy had crept up behind them through the pine, but he had, and was here. Ah Si came out last, smallest and quietest, with his bundle clutched at his chest, and he stopped at Tie-zhu's elbow and looked at the old man with the large flat eyes.

The old man looked at the four of them.

He looked at them for a long time.

Then he said, in the same rough low voice:

"Sit down before you fall down. You — boy — yes, you with the long face — get your foot off it. There is a flat rock to your left."

Tie-zhu, who had been standing on the bad foot, sat down on the flat rock. He looked at the old man with a small startled gratitude.

"You — small one — come over here. There is a hot stone by my door. Sit on it. Your feet are wet through; I can see it from across the clearing."

Ah Si looked at Heizi. Heizi nodded. The boy went, slowly, across the clearing to the hide flap. He sat down on the small flat stone by the door. The stone had been warmed by some interior fire. The boy's small face changed — a small involuntary easing — at the warmth.

"Grandfather," Heizi said. "We do not mean to —"

"Hush, lad. Hush. I have had four of you a week for a month now. The first three groups did not stop. The fourth did. The fifth I could see coming yesterday at sundown — but you went past my notch and slept at the rock under the eastern overhang, and I heard your stream below me at midnight, and I did not climb up to find you because I am old and the slope is bad. You found me yourselves. Good."

He paused.

He looked at Heizi.

"Whose son are you, lad."

"My foster father is Old Zhang of the eastern half of —"

"Stop. Do not say the name of the village. Not aloud. Not in this clearing. The wind here is small but the wind sometimes carries. You are Old Zhang's. The name of the village is your business. Old Zhang knew me in the militia in Wen-di seventeen. We were together at the watch above the Henan border. He stood the watch with me on the night the small hill was taken, and he spoke afterwards, and his speaking is why I was not put on the rolls of the dead. He owes me nothing. I owe him my old age. His list is on you?"

"Yes, grandfather."

"Show me."

Heizi reached into the inner pocket of his shirt. He drew out the wrapped paper. He unfolded the cloth. He unfolded the paper. He held it out, walking slowly, to the old man.

The old man took it. He held it close to the wet bright eyes. He read it twice — the lips moving slightly. He folded it again and handed it back to Heizi.

"Cao Ergou. That is me. I am the first name. I am still alive. Some of the others — I will tell you. Number two, the widow Shen — yes, alive last winter; I do not know about this winter; you will ask in the next hamlet for the widow's well, and you will not say her name first. Number three — yes, I see he has not written the name; he was right not to write it; that man is alive but is being watched, and you will not go to him, you will go around. Number five —"

He went down the list, slowly, talking in the rough low voice. Heizi, beside him, listened with the kind of attention he had not, in his life, learned to give to any spoken thing — the attention of a young man whose survival, and the survival of his three brothers, depended on the words of an old man at a charcoal mound. He memorized the small notes the old man added — *do not go in winter, the dog there is bad; do go if your foot is hurt, the woman has a hand for feet; do not stop in the third hamlet if you see two grey horses tied at the southern fence, that is the sign the magistracy's man is in residence*. He memorized them. He filed each one.

When the old man was done, he looked again at the four of them.

"You will eat with me tonight. You will sleep on my floor. Tomorrow morning you will go on. I will give you a small bag of millet — not much; I am old and I am poor — and a pinch of salt, and I will give you a piece of the dried pork I have been keeping for the winter, and you will take it because to refuse it is to refuse a kindness, and I have no other kindness to give, and you have a road. Tomorrow you will walk the contour east of the small stream until the second bend; at the second bend you will leave the stream and go north over a low place between two pines that have been split by lightning some years ago; I will draw you the place in the dirt later. You will come, by the third dusk after tomorrow, to the widow Shen's well. You will say to her: *the old burner sent us; the old burner asks after the cough*. She will know. She will give you a bed for two nights. You will not stay a third."

He paused.

"Now. Get the small one off the stone before he falls asleep on it and burns himself. We have wood to bring in before sundown."

Heizi bowed.

"Thank you, grandfather."

"Thank Old Zhang. He is the one who saved my life. I am paying it back forty years late, lad, on an old man's small ledger. I am glad to pay. Get to work."

That afternoon they brought wood for the old man — Wang Er with the heavier loads, Heizi with the medium, Tie-zhu sitting on the flat rock and carving small kindling slivers with Old Zhang's old militia knife (which Heizi had loaned him for the work), Ah Si carrying the smallest sticks slowly across the clearing to the woodpile beside the hut. The old man watched them work, sitting on a low stool, smoking a small clay pipe — the first pipe Heizi had ever seen used — and he did not speak, but every now and again he made a small approving sound in his throat at one boy or another's careful stacking.

By dusk, the woodpile beside the hut was a third higher than it had been at noon.

The old man fed them — small thick disks of millet bread baked on a flat stone over a low fire inside the hut, with a small slice of the dried pork on each, and a small clay cup each of a thin warm soup made from a wild root the old man called *yu-ma* and which Heizi had not seen before. The food was the most Heizi had eaten in two days. He made himself eat slowly. Ah Si finished his portion in five minutes and sat looking at the empty bowl until the old man, without comment, slid him a second small disk of bread that had been on a different plate, and the boy ate that too, more slowly.

That night the four of them slept on the floor of the hut, on a layer of dry pine needles the old man had spread out for them, under a single old hempen blanket each which the old man took down from a beam. The hut smelled of charcoal and of pine and of the old man's pipe and of the small sweet smell of the *yu-ma* root.

Heizi lay on his back. He listened to the four breaths around him — Wang Er, Tie-zhu, Ah Si, the old man on his low cot in the corner. The old man's cough came once in the early hours and stopped.

The hut was warm.

Heizi understood, lying on the pine needles, that this would be one of the small handful of nights in his life he would remember in detail in his old age — not because anything large had happened in it, but because of the smell of the pine needles and the slow patient breathing of an old man who owed his life to a foster father Heizi would never see again, and who was paying the debt forward, on a small ledger forty years old, to four boys who had come up out of his pine at the third hour of a morning he had been expecting them.

He slept that night for the first time on the road.

He slept well.