19: The Hamlet at the Cold Spring

They walked all afternoon and into the night.

Heizi did not, at any point in the first three hours, allow them to stop. They came up out of the contour path into a thin pine wood, and through the pine wood into a grass slope, and over the grass slope into a thicker stand of oak, and through the oak into a small dry dell, and out of the dell at last onto a wider path that ran north — a path that, by the look of it, had been used by mule trains in some other year — and they walked it at the fast even pace Heizi had learned, from the village's old men, was the pace at which a man could go for many hours without breaking down.

Tie-zhu kept up.

That, by itself, was a small near-miracle. The bad foot, on the steep places, took the weight without sound; the lame boy had, somewhere in the past nine days, learned to put the foot down in a particular way that did not announce its lameness even to itself. Heizi had not, in any year before this road, seen the lame boy walk like this. He understood that Tie-zhu had been hiding the full extent of his lameness all his life — that what the village had been seeing, at the carpenter's gate on summer afternoons, had been the carpenter's lame nephew in his everyday courtesy of a slow even step; and that the actual gait, when the foot was needed for a road, was a different gait, which Tie-zhu had been training in private for a decade.

He filed it.

Ah Si fell once, at the fourth hour, on a small dust-hidden root in the dry dell. He did not cry out. He picked himself up. He walked on. Heizi noticed, the next time the boy stepped near him, that the small straw sandals — the ones the carpenter's wife had given him at the noon hour of departure — had begun to fray at the heel of one foot. He filed that too, with the small interior catch of a young man who was beginning to keep, in his head, a register of the brothers' bodies as well as his own.

They ate at sundown, on the move, without stopping.

Heizi unwrapped the courier's white-cloth bundle at the end of his arm as they walked. He broke the larger piece of millet bread into four equal portions and handed them back along the line. He cut the dried meat with Old Zhang's old militia knife into four portions and handed those back also. The single dried jujube he could not, for a long moment, decide what to do with. He thought of cutting it into four; the knife would not cut a dried jujube cleanly. He thought of giving it to Ah Si; the boy was the smallest. He thought of giving it to Tie-zhu; the foot was what was carrying them.

He gave it to Tie-zhu.

The lame boy took the small dark fruit between his fingers. He did not eat it at once. He kept it in his palm for a long time, looking at it, as a small treasure. He held it the way he had, two days ago at Cao Ergou's, held the small wooden stool the old man had set under his foot — as a thing for which there was no language in his life so far. Heizi did not press him. After a quarter hour, when the sun was nearly down, Tie-zhu put the jujube in his mouth, and his face changed, and he kept it on his tongue without chewing for the rest of the long afternoon's last walking.

The first stars came out in the eastern sky.

The path bent down a long slope into a small narrow valley — narrower than the third, with a small swift stream at the bottom of it, and a single thin column of smoke rising at the head of the valley from a place Heizi could not yet see clearly. The smoke was a household's evening smoke, like the widow Shen's; not charcoal smoke. There were people in the valley. Not many. Two or three houses, by the smoke.

Heizi stopped them at the lip of the descent.

"Brothers."

They gathered around him.

"There is a hamlet at the head of this valley. We are going to it. We will ask for a roof for one night. We will say only that we are travelers from the south. We will not say where from. We will not ask for the name of the village from anyone we meet. We will give no names of our own that any of them can write down. If anyone asks me, I am Zhang of the eastern half. If anyone asks you" — he looked at Wang Er — "you are Wang of the western half. You" — Tie-zhu — "you are Lu of the southern. You" — Ah Si — "you are Si. Only Si. No clan."

He paused.

"We will stay only one night. In the morning we will go on, north. We will not say we are going north. We will say south, when we leave. They will not believe us. That is all right. Their not-believing is its own kind of help. But we will not lie to them about hunger. If they offer food, we will accept it. We will repay it later, if we are ever in a position to. For now we will accept it without fuss."

Wang Er nodded.

"And if there are patrols already in the valley," Wang Er said.

"Then we will see them first, by the smoke. There are two columns; you can see them; one is a household; the other I cannot place yet — it may be nothing — but I will look closer in another hundred paces. If the second column is a patrol's fire, we will go around the eastern side of the valley and not enter the hamlet."

They went down.

Heizi watched the second column as they descended. After perhaps a hundred paces it became clearer; it was thinner than a patrol's fire would have been, rising from a smaller compact source — a kiln, perhaps, or a small stone-burner's pile. A patrol's fire on a road was a pyre of dry brush and made a thicker grey. This was the small careful smoke of someone's working trade. He filed it as not-a-patrol and went on.

The hamlet, when they came to it, was three houses.

It sat at the head of the small narrow valley, where the swift stream came down from a fold of rock. Behind the houses was a small flat field — perhaps eight rows of last year's millet stubble, now turned for spring — and beyond the field a small spring bubbled up out of a flat stone slab. The spring was the cold spring. Heizi understood, looking at it in the failing light, that this hamlet had been here because of the spring, and had been here since some long-ago year when a family had decided that the cold spring was worth defending against the loneliness of the country.

He stopped at the edge of the small open ground in front of the houses. He called, low, the way Cao Ergou had told him: *grandfather, we are travelers*.

The door of the middle house opened.

A man came out. He was perhaps fifty. He was thin. He wore the unbleached hempen of a working farmer. He was holding, in one hand, a long-handled iron tool — not a weapon, but a digging fork of the kind men carried on roads at dusk against the small things that came out of the brush at sundown. He held it not at the ready but at an angle that said *I am holding this in case I need to.*

The man looked at the four boys.

He looked at them for a long moment.

He set the digging fork against the wall of the house.

He came forward to the edge of the small open ground. He stopped four paces from Heizi.

"Lads."

"Sir."

"How many."

"Four, sir."

"Where from."

Heizi had thought about this on the path. He did not say *the south*; *the south* was too vague to be believed. He said: "From down the contour. From beyond the third valley. We are walking north."

The man looked at him.

"You did not give a village."

"No, sir. We did not give a village."

The man nodded slowly. He did not press it.

"How long without food."

"We ate at sundown today, sir. Before that, we had been four days on what we could find."

The man nodded again.

"Wait."

He turned and went back into the house.

Heizi stood with the brothers at the edge of the open ground. They did not speak. The first stars had come out fully; a thin moon was rising above the eastern lip of the valley. The cold spring made, at the back of the house, the small patient sound of running water.

After perhaps a quarter hour, the man came back out.

Behind him came a woman — perhaps forty-five, perhaps a little more, not the man's mother but his wife, by the way they moved with each other; a small spare woman with her hair tied back in a single braid. She carried a clay pot in both hands, with a cloth wrapped around the body of the pot to hold the heat. She set it down on the flat stone in front of the house.

"Eat," the woman said. "Sit. The pot is hot. The bowls are inside. Lan, bring the bowls."

A girl came out — perhaps fourteen, perhaps fifteen, slight, in the same unbleached hemp as her mother, with her own hair in a single braid. She carried four wooden bowls and four pairs of chopsticks. She set them down on the flat stone beside the pot. She went back in for a small basin of water for them to wash their hands.

She did not look at any of them. She did her work with the small downcast efficiency of a girl whose father had told her, in the last quarter hour, that the hamlet had received four runaway boys at sundown and that she would help her mother feed them but would not speak.

Heizi noticed.

He noticed her without looking at her. He noticed her in the small running register, in the quadrant where he had been keeping the small details of the people they had received help from on this road — Cao Ergou's wet bright eyes; Widow Shen's not-writing-down of names; the small careful angle of the digging fork at the wall of this house. He noticed: *young girl in the household. Approximately the age of Mei-er. The father is treating her on an old protocol. The mother is treating her on a different protocol — the mother brought her out to do the work of feeding strangers, deliberately, in the open ground, not hidden in the back room. The mother is not afraid of these strangers in the way the father is. The mother has decided something the father has not yet been told.*

He filed it.

The four of them ate. The pot was a hot thick millet porridge with small pieces of pickled radish in it; not the widow Shen's pickled cabbage; a sharper, more vinegared pickle, made differently. The porridge was thicker than they had eaten in days. Ah Si finished his bowl in five minutes and looked at the empty bowl and did not, at the table, ask for more; the woman, without being asked, refilled it. The boy ate the second bowl more slowly, with the small disciplined care of a child who had been hungry for a long time and who knew how to receive a second bowl without choking on it.

When they had eaten, the man — he had been standing at the doorway watching — came forward.

"Lads. You will sleep in the small lean-to behind the house. There is dry hay. There is a wadded blanket. You will not come into the house at night. If you need to relieve yourselves, the small midden is east of the spring; do not go anywhere else; the dogs will bark. Do not light a fire. We do not light fires after the watch hour. The next valley over has eyes."

He paused.

"In the morning at first light, you will go on. I will give you a small bundle of millet. I will not give you my name. You will not give me yours. You will not, in any town you reach in the next month, say where you slept on this night. You will not, if patrols come into this hamlet asking questions in the next ten days, return to it. Do you understand."

"Yes, sir."

"Go. Sleep."

They went to the lean-to.

It was a small low structure of plank and reed at the back of the middle house, built against the slope of the valley wall behind the spring. It had a roof of straw. It smelled of old hay and of the cold water of the spring and of the small clean droppings of a single goat that, in better seasons, the family had perhaps housed there. The hay was dry. There was, as the man had said, a single wadded blanket.

They lay down. They covered themselves with the blanket — Wang Er at one edge, Heizi at the other, Tie-zhu and Ah Si in the middle. They slept almost at once.

Heizi did not, for some time, sleep.

He lay listening. The sounds of the hamlet were the small ordinary sounds of a household at the end of a working day — a door's wooden bar lowered into its bracket; a small clay pot rinsed in cold water at a basin; the soft murmur of a husband and a wife talking in a low voice, in the middle house, about something Heizi could not make out. He could make out, after a while, that there were three voices — the husband, the wife, and the daughter. The daughter was speaking. The daughter was saying something more than one sentence long. Heizi could not catch the words, but the cadence of the daughter's voice was the cadence of a young woman speaking back to her parents, with the small steady pressure of a girl who was not, on this evening, going to be silenced about something that mattered to her.

He did not catch the words.

He thought, after a while, of Mei-er.

He thought of how she had spoken, in the back room of his foster father's house, to Old Zhang, in some hour of some night Heizi had not been awake for — the night she had made him promise, a month before the riders, that if her name was on a list, Heizi was to go; the night Old Zhang had promised, thinking he would never have to honor it. The cadence of her voice in his memory, in that conversation Heizi had not heard, was the cadence of the daughter's voice in the middle house tonight.

He listened to the daughter's voice through the wall.

He could not tell what she was saying.

He fell asleep with the small steady cadence still going.

He dreamed, for the first time on the road, of his sister.

He dreamed of her at the brazier, at the moment she lifted the lid and the steam came up between them, and there was a single dried mushroom in the millet, and her face, half-hidden by the steam, was the face that had looked at him the moment after the second slip had been read. The face had in it the thing that comes after fear, in a person who has finished with fear.

In the dream, she said:

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

He woke at the second cock.

Outside, the hamlet was beginning, in the dim grey of false dawn, to rouse — the small wooden sound of a door's bar lifted, the soft step of a woman drawing water at the spring, a single low murmur from the middle house. Wang Er beside him was already awake; the smith's son had been awake, perhaps, since the first cock.

"Brother," Wang Er said.

"Yes."

"The girl. Lan."

Heizi did not answer at once.

"Yes."

"She is Mei-er's age."

"Yes."

"You heard her last night."

"I heard her."

"What was she saying."

"I could not make out the words. I think — I think she was telling them she would not allow them to send us on without giving us something more. I think I heard her say *Mother, we have eight bolts in the chest; we will give them one bolt; they need a bolt for what they will need*."

Wang Er thought.

"That cannot be true."

"No."

"A bolt of hemp is six months' work. They will not give us a bolt."

"They will not give us a bolt. But the daughter argued for a bolt. That is the size of her argument."

Wang Er was quiet for a long time.

"Heizi."

"Yes."

"We must go."

"We must go."

"Now. Before they come out."

"Yes."

They woke the others.

They folded the blanket. They left it where it had been. They picked up their packs. They went, slowly, around the side of the lean-to, into the grey first light, toward the path north out of the valley.

At the edge of the small open ground, Heizi stopped.

He looked back at the middle house. The door was still shut. The smoke of the morning fire had begun, very thinly, at the chimney.

He took the small jade from his foster father's coat — the one wrapped in the soft cloth, with the braid of his foster mother's hair — out of the inner pocket of his shirt. He held it for a moment in his hand. He thought.

He could not give them the jade. The jade was Old Zhang's last instruction, against the hardest year. He could not give it for an unasked-for bowl of porridge.

He thought of what else he had.

He had nothing else.

He thought of the small finished indigo pouch — Mei-er's pouch.

He could not give that either.

He thought of the courier's white cloth, in which the millet bread had been wrapped. He had folded the cloth, last evening, and put it into the inner pocket of his shirt against his ribs. He had not thought, until this moment, of why he had kept it.

He took it out.

It was a clean white cloth. It was not large; it was two hands across; it had been a courier's parcel-cloth, the kind a man's wife packed his bread in for the road. It was clean. It was empty now.

He laid it on the flat stone in front of the middle house, very quietly.

He did not knock. He did not call. He let the cloth speak for him: *we ate. Thank you. Here is the cloth, clean, returned. The road goes on. Do not — do not regret feeding us.*

He went on.

The four of them walked, slowly, in the grey, up the path north out of the valley of the cold spring. Behind them, in the middle house, the door — Heizi heard, although he was too far now to be sure — opened, and the woman of the house came out for water, and stopped at the flat stone, and stood for a long moment over the small clean folded cloth.

He did not turn back to see.