2: Two Riders

The riders came at the hour the dog was still watching.

They came up the road from the south on horses that were neither tall nor good but were better than any horse the village owned, and the smell of them carried in advance of the sound. Heizi knew the smell from the few times he had been past the magistracy gate on errands with Old Zhang — a smell of leather oiled in a particular way, of a horse that ate grain and not only grass, of saddle felt soured by long wearing. The smell came in over the persimmon tree and over the courtyard wall, and the dog at the doorway shifted its weight onto its forelegs and lowered its head and did not bark.

There were two of them. The taller rode in front. He wore the brown robe of low magistracy, the cloth of which was unbleached hemp dyed in a single bath, the seams reinforced at the shoulders against the rubbing of armor he was not, this morning, wearing. At his belt he carried a roll of bamboo slips bound with a single cord of red. The roll was perhaps the length of a man's forearm. The slips, Heizi knew without having to be told, were the names of villages, and on each slip would be written, in the small careful columns of the magistracy clerk, the names of those who would not see another spring in this place.

The shorter rider wore the same brown but with a black cloth wound twice about the upper arm, the band of the canal corvée. He carried nothing on his belt but a whip — a short whip with a leather handle worn dark by holding, the kind of whip used for horses but used, also, sometimes, when a man's mood and a peasant's impertinence came together. That was where the eye went.

Heizi watched them from the gap between his foster father's shoulder and the gatepost. Old Zhang had risen and gone to stand at the gate without a word as soon as the hooves came audible. Heizi had followed without being told. Mei-er had stayed in the courtyard, kneeling by the brazier, with the lid set crookedly on the millet pot — a small disorder she would not have allowed under ordinary circumstances. Heizi noticed the crooked lid. He filed it away in the small accumulating ledger of things he was beginning to notice that morning, without yet understanding why he was noticing them, except that the morning had a weight to it, and a person under weight pays attention to what would otherwise pass unmarked.

The headman, Old Cui, met the riders at the well. He was already there when they came in sight; he had been there since before the cock crowed; the village headman in such a morning did not wait to be summoned, because to be summoned was to be one degree more humiliated than to come unbidden, and Old Cui had been a headman for eleven years and had learned the geometry of these humiliations in detail.

He bowed in the way a peasant bows when he expects nothing from the bow but to keep his teeth. The bow went deep enough to be respectful and not so deep as to invite contempt. He held it for two breaths and rose.

The taller rider did not dismount. The shorter rider did not dismount. The horses did not drink at the well, although they had come a long way; they were not to be seen drinking at peasant water, was the rule, although the rule was nowhere written, and the riders knew it as well as the horses did.

"The sons of the village will be required for the canal," the taller rider said. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. The whole village — every door not quite shut, every shutter cracked, every face behind every shutter — was listening, and he knew it, and his voice took its measure from the listening rather than from the man he was speaking to.

"Three from the western half. Three from the eastern. The list is set."

"The list," Old Cui said. His voice was even. He had been practicing the evenness all winter. The riders had been expected since the first thaw.

"The list is set. We will read it. We will not read it twice."

The shorter rider unwound the slips from his belt. He did it with one hand, with the thumb, in the manner of a man who had unwound a great many such slips in his life and had no ceremony left for them. The cord fell. The bamboo opened in his palm with a small dry rustling like the legs of a cricket on a stone.

The names were called in the flat, unmusical way that officials had been calling names for a thousand years.

"Wang Er, son of Wang the smith of the eastern half."

A pause, not for an answer — no answer was required — but for the name to be given its space.

"Lu the second son of Lu the carpenter of the western half."

Another pause.

"Li Da, son of Li the cooper of the eastern half."

A pause.

"Cui Xiao-shi, nephew of Cui the headman."

Old Cui did not move. The reading went on. Two more names, both from the eastern half, both boys Heizi had grown up with, one of whom — the cooper's son — had broken a finger last harvest helping Heizi pull a stuck cart out of the spring mud, and had laughed at his own clumsiness all the way home. Six names altogether.

When the names were read, the air in the village changed.

It was not a sound. It was the absence of a sound.

The women had stopped grinding. The children had stopped scuffing. Somewhere on the slope above the village a goat bleated, and the sound was almost an obscenity. A bird crossed the sky and did not call. The dog at Heizi's feet, which had been low and watchful, became lower and quieter — the way a dog becomes when it understands, in some old wolfish part of itself, that it has nothing to do here, that this is a thing among men.

"Three days," the rider said. "They are to present themselves at the eastern crossroads at the hour of the dragon, three days hence. Each with rice for ten days and a hempen mat. Those who do not come will be entered onto the rolls of the *tao* — the runaways. Their families will pay the levy for two."

The shorter rider rolled the slip. He did not look at anyone in the village. He looked over their heads, at the roof line, at the smoke rising from one chimney and not another, at the persimmon tree at the edge of the lower field. His eye went to the persimmon tree. He looked at it for a moment longer than necessary, and then his eye came down, and Heizi felt the eye on his own face, and the eye passed over him without seeing him, because a peasant boy of fifteen at a gatepost was not a thing the eye of such a man stopped to see.

"There is one more matter," the taller rider said.

He paused. He paused with the small deliberate emphasis of a man who has been instructed to pause, by some superior in some upstairs room of some magistracy yard, where the wording of such a pause had been rehearsed against the impression it would make on listening villages.

Heizi, watching, felt the shape of the next words before they were spoken. He felt them the way a man with a wound feels the weather changing — a low pressure in the bones, which does not announce itself in language. He felt his foster father, beside him, become heavier — the old man growing heavier the way an old tree grows heavier before a wind, all of him suddenly more tightly held in his own roots, his shoulders settling down through his back and into the ground. The dog under their feet became stiller. The world became stiller.

"An order from the canal commissioner himself," the taller rider said.

He let it sit.

The shorter rider began, at the same moment, to unwind a second slip from the bundle at his belt. He did it without hurry. The cord on the second slip was not red. It was white. The white cord was the cord of women's lists.

The village understood, before the rider had said another word, what was on the second slip. There was a sound, then — a single small sound, not a word, made by some woman out of sight in some courtyard down the road, the sound of a person taking a sharp breath and immediately covering her own mouth with her own hand. After that sound, no one in the village made any sound at all.

"The labor camps require women," the taller rider said. "The commissioner's adjutant has reviewed the village register. Six daughters between the ages of fifteen and twenty are to accompany the corvée column. They will serve in the camp kitchens and in such other functions as the camp requires."

The taller rider's voice had not changed.

"The list is set."

The shorter rider held the slip. He read.

"Wang Hua, daughter of Wang the smith of the eastern half."

Wang Er's sister. She was seventeen. She had been promised, last autumn, to a young farmer in the next valley; the betrothal cloth had been exchanged; the marriage was to be at the autumn after this one. Heizi heard, from somewhere down the road, the sound of a man's hand striking a wooden post — once, hard.

"Lu San-niang, third daughter of Lu the carpenter of the western half."

Sixteen. She had a small lameness in one foot, which she had hidden, in the village's kindness, since she was small. The lameness would not save her. The riders did not see lamenesses; the magistracy clerks did not write them down; the canal camp would not honor them.

"Mei-er, foster daughter of Old Zhang of the eastern half."

The third name.

Heizi did not move.

He had not moved for the first two names either, but those were not Mei-er's name, and there was a difference — a specific physical difference, a thing that happened in his chest and in the muscles of his jaw — between the hearing of those two names and the hearing of his sister's. He felt Old Zhang beside him grow heavier still. He felt the dog at his feet press, very lightly, against the side of his ankle, the way a dog presses to remind a man that it is there. He did not look at his foster father. He could not look. To look was to acknowledge, and to acknowledge was to begin to act, and he was not yet ready to begin.

The reading went on. The fourth name was a girl from the western half whose family had moved here two summers ago and whom Heizi had hardly spoken to. The fifth was the headman's own daughter, eighteen, who Heizi heard now through the still air of the village give a single small, surprised laugh — not at anything humorous, only at the impossibility of it, the small cruel comedy of a name being read where she had thought herself safe. Old Cui at the well closed his eyes for a long moment and opened them and did not move otherwise. The sixth name was a niece of the cooper who had been visiting from a hamlet down the river and was, by some perversion of registry, on the village rolls.

Six girls. Three days.

The shorter rider finished. He did not roll the slip. He let it fall — a small theatrical gesture, perhaps practiced — and Old Cui, with the quickness of a man who had been a headman for eleven years, stepped forward and caught it before it touched the ground. He held it in his open hand without looking at it.

"Three days," the taller rider said again. "The hour of the dragon. The eastern crossroads. The girls will travel with the corvée column. They will be issued rations on arrival. Any family that fails to deliver a daughter on the list will be assessed twice the levy and have its rolls reopened next year."

He lifted his reins.

"That is all."

They turned their horses without farewell. They were gone before the dust had settled in the well's stones, which in any case had been wetted by the previous days' rain and did not lift dust the way a dry road did. The hooves diminished down the road to the south. They became a fainter sound, and then a sound that might have been wind, and then not a sound.

For a long time after they had gone, no one in the village moved.

The headman Old Cui stood at the well with the white-corded slip in his open hand, looking at it without reading it. His other hand had come up to his beard at some point Heizi had not seen, and was holding the beard as if the beard were the only thing in the world that did not move. In the doorways of the houses, the doors were now opening — the doors that had been not quite shut, easing open another finger's width — so that the women might see, by seeing, what they had heard. The first to come out was Wang the smith, who walked from his forge to the well with his apron still on and his hands black, and who stopped halfway and turned around and walked back to the forge and stood at the door of it with his back to the village and his hands at his sides. He did not strike his post a second time. The first time had been all he had.

Heizi felt his foster father move beside him. The old man's hand came onto the top of his head — once, light, gone again. Old Zhang then stepped out of the gate, alone, and walked to the well, and stood at the edge of the village's gathered silence, and waited for the headman to turn his eyes to him.

When Old Cui looked up, he looked at Old Zhang, and the look between them was not a long look. It was the look between two old men who had known each other since they were boys, who had eaten salt at the same tables, who had carried the same coffins to the same hill in different years. It said only one thing, and it said it in the way only such old looks can: *Do not. Do not yet. Do not yet show what you intend to do, because the village must not see it, because the village will be questioned, and what the village does not see it cannot answer for.*

Old Zhang did not show it. He bent his head, formal as if at a wedding, and turned and came back to the gate.

"Heizi," he said, very low, as he came past.

"Father."

"Inside."

Heizi went inside.

Mei-er was at the brazier still. She had not moved. The lid of the pot was still crooked. She did not look up.

She had heard, of course. Every word.

Old Zhang went into the back room without a word and shut the door — not slammed; shut. The wood made a small, definite sound against the frame.

Heizi stood in the courtyard.

Mei-er, kneeling, lifted the lid of the pot at last. The steam was thinner now; the millet was beginning to cool. She looked into the pot for a long moment, as if reading something in the steam — as if reading, perhaps, the shape of the word *list* in the steam — and then she set the lid back, evenly this time, no longer crooked. She brushed her hands on her skirt. She stood.

She walked to the back door of the house — not the front door that Old Zhang had gone through; the back door, which led out into the small kitchen garden where the early greens were just showing and where, on warm days in summer, she would sit and grind her morning grain. She opened the door. She looked out at the garden for a moment. She closed it.

She turned and looked at Heizi for the first time since the riders had come.

She did not say anything. Her face was the face of a girl whose mother had died when she was nine, whose foster brother had been sleeping in the next room since the same year, who had been the woman of this house for four years, and who had — as Old Zhang had once said — not been raised but forged. The face had a great deal of practice in not letting things show. It was not letting them show now.

But her eyes — her eyes had a thing in them that he had never seen.

It was not fear. He had expected fear. It was not fear.

It was the thing that comes after fear, in a person who has finished with fear because fear is no longer useful, and who has gone past it into a quiet place on the other side, where decisions are made.

He understood, looking at her, that she had already made hers. She had made it before the second slip had been unwound. She had made it, perhaps, in the dream she would not finish telling him. She had made it before she had laid the dried mushroom in the morning's millet pot.

He stepped toward her. He did not know what he was going to say. He opened his mouth.

"Eat your breakfast, little brother," she said, very gently. She picked up his bowl from where he had set it on the bench and held it out to him. "It will be cold soon."

He took the bowl. The millet was warm at the bottom and cool at the top. The mushroom was gone. He did not eat. He held the bowl in both hands as if it were the only thing he could hold.

She watched him for a moment. Then she turned and went back to the brazier and knelt down and began, with her usual care, to bank the embers for the noon meal.

Outside the gate, in the road, the dust had finally settled, and the village had begun, in the way of villages that had heard such readings before, to move. A door opened. A second door opened. Wang the smith's hammer began to ring at the forge — slow, deliberate, the rhythm of a man beating an unnecessary length of iron because his hands had nowhere else to be.

The dog at the doorway lay down, with its head on its paws, and watched the road.

Heizi stood in the courtyard with the bowl in his hands and did not eat.

Behind the closed door of the back room, Old Zhang did not make a single sound.

The morning, which had begun with the smell of salted millet smoke, had become the morning it was going to be. Heizi felt this in his bones the way an animal feels a change of season, and he understood — for the first time in his fifteen years — that there were mornings a man did not get to live a second time, and that this was one of them, and that whatever he was now going to do, or fail to do, he was going to do or fail to do it now.

He stood very still.

The mushroom had been a small, soft, dark sweetness in the middle of the heat. It was gone.

He set the bowl down on the bench, very carefully, beside the place where the blue cloth — folded — would, three nights from now, be set.

He went out to find Wang Er.