23: The Smoke from the Hollow

They had gone perhaps a *li* up the upper pasture path when Ah Si stopped.

The path here was a small steep climb up the western face of the slope above the hamlet, through a stand of young pine. The brush at this height was thin. The morning was clear. The path went up at a long slow angle, switching back twice before a final pull onto the upper pasture proper, which lay another quarter *li* above them.

Heizi was leading. Wang Er was behind him with the bundle. Tie-zhu was third, walking with the foot held in the new careful way, the small carved horse with the dark ribbon tied at its body wedged inside his coat against the ribs. Ah Si was last. The small one had been keeping up; Heizi had been listening for the small sound of his sandal on the path, and the sound had been steady.

The sound stopped.

Heizi turned.

Ah Si was on the path five paces below Tie-zhu. He had stopped. He was looking, not up the path at his brothers, but back, down through the gap in the young pines toward the small flat of the hollow below.

His face was very still.

"Little brother," Heizi said, low.

The boy did not answer.

Heizi came back down past Wang Er, past Tie-zhu. He came down to where Ah Si stood. He looked through the gap.

Below them — perhaps half a *li* by direct line, with the path winding more — the hamlet of two wells lay in the morning light. The small open square with the elm tree. The eight low houses with their pine-bark roofs. The two wells. Wei Lao-han at his door, perhaps. Wei Da-niang at the well. Lan-gu at the eastern edge of the open ground.

At the eastern lip of the hollow — the place where the eastern path came over the ridge that the old man had been checking every quarter hour of every garden day — a thin line of dust was rising.

Riders.

Heizi could not, at this distance, count them. Six. Eight. Perhaps ten. They were coming over the ridge in a slow controlled descent — the unhurried trot of riders who had reached their destination and had no further reason to push their horses. They were coming down the eastern path into the hollow.

In the open ground in front of the elm tree, Wei Lao-han had stepped out and was looking toward the eastern slope. Heizi could see, at this distance, the small grey shape of him with one hand at the elm trunk for steadiness. Wei Da-niang was at the western well still; she had paused with the bucket halfway up. Lan-gu had turned toward the eastern slope and was, very small at this distance, beginning to step backward toward the door.

Heizi watched.

He felt — in his chest, in the small place where the dream had sat for the last hour — the small terrible confirmation of a fact he had known since waking and had not, until this moment, fully allowed himself to know.

The riders were coming early.

Beside him, Ah Si dropped his small bundle on the path.

"Little brother — "

The boy turned to look at him. The small flat eyes were the steadiest Heizi had ever seen them. The boy's small hand was already at the small charcoal-burner's knife at his belt.

"Da-niang," the boy said, simply.

He turned.

He was running.

Heizi shouted — *Ah Si* — but the small one was already four paces down the path and gathering speed. The boy moved through the young pine the way he had moved through Heizi's foster father's bean fields on summer afternoons four years ago — small, fast, the small thin shoulders sliding through where larger shoulders would have caught.

Heizi went after him.

He went after him at the full run. The brush closed on him. The path turned. He gained perhaps a pace, perhaps two, and lost it. The boy was thirty paces ahead. The boy was forty.

Behind Heizi, Wang Er had grabbed Tie-zhu's arm. Heizi heard, faintly, Wang Er shout: *Heizi — wait — we will follow — *

He did not turn. He shouted back over his shoulder, on the run: *Wang Er. Stay. Stay with Tie-zhu. Stay above the path. Do not come down. If I do not come back by the noon — go.*

He did not hear Wang Er's answer. He was too far down the path now. He could hear, ahead of him, the small fast breath of Ah Si going through the second switchback.

He pushed harder.

The path came out of the young pines into a small open belt of grass perhaps a hundred paces above the hamlet. From this belt the hamlet was no longer half-hidden; from this belt Heizi could see clearly. The riders had reached the open ground. They had — perhaps eight of them — fanned out around the elm tree. Wei Lao-han was standing in front of his door. He had — in the small careful way of an old man with old hands — set his hands flat at his sides where the riders could see them. Wei Da-niang had set down her bucket at the western well and was walking toward her husband at a slow even pace, with her hands at her sides also.

Lan-gu was at the door. The door was open. She had, by some quick decision Heizi had not witnessed, gone inside. He could not see her.

In front of the elm, one of the riders was speaking. Heizi could not hear the words. The rider's posture was the posture of a man giving an order — a hand raised, the other on the reins. Behind him, two of the other riders had dismounted. They were carrying small dark torches that Heizi recognized, from a distance and from a single year's worth of observed corvée formations, as patrol firebrands. The torches were not yet lit. They were the small carried matter of riders who had been told, before they came in, that the hamlet might or might not be cooperative.

The rider in front went on speaking. Wei Lao-han nodded. The old man's small grey shape looked, even at this distance, very steady. He was, Heizi understood — with the small cold inward respect of a young man watching an old man do the thing the old man had told him, six days ago, the hamlet had not done since the third year of Wen-di — not flinching. The old man was answering the rider's questions with the small even face of a headman who had not seen four boys this season.

The mathematics was working.

The hamlet would not burn.

Heizi felt, in his chest, the small loosening of a thing that had been held tight for the past quarter hour.

Ah Si, on the path forty paces below him, did not see.

The small one was running. The small one had no view, from his place on the path between two thicker stands of young pine, of the open ground in front of the elm tree. The small one had only the thin column of dust on the eastern ridge, which was settling now, and the small distant impression of riders in the hollow, and the certainty in his chest that Wei Da-niang was alone at the western well being held under by someone with a knife.

The small one was running.

"Ah Si!"

Heizi shouted it. The boy did not stop. The boy did not, perhaps, hear; the wind was at Heizi's face and the boy was downwind.

Heizi went on at the full run.

The path came down out of the open belt of grass into a final stand of pine at the western edge of the hollow. Heizi came through it. He came out — perhaps fifty paces from the western well, behind a low screen of brush — at the moment Ah Si reached the back of Wei Da-niang's house.

The boy did not stop at the back of the house.

The boy went around it, fast, low, with the small charcoal-burner's knife in his hand.

The riders, in the open ground in front of the elm, were dismounting.

The headman's negotiation had — Heizi saw — gone past the place at which a refusal could be retracted. Wei Lao-han had said something the rider in front had not liked. The rider in front had given a single short order. The two men with torches were lighting them, slowly, at a small pot of coals one of the dismounted riders had brought. The other riders — five or six — had dismounted and were drawing knives.

It was not, Heizi understood — with a small clarity that came down on him as he stood behind the brush — that the old man had flinched. The old man had not flinched. The old man, in the small calm voice of a hamlet headman, had said the small even thing he had planned to say. The mathematics of *not flinching* had nothing to do with the patrol that had ridden in this morning, because the patrol had not, this morning, come to find out whether the hamlet had hidden the boys. The patrol had come knowing, by a different report on a different road in a different week, that the hamlet had hidden the boys; and the patrol had come not to ask but to make an example.

The mathematics had been the wrong mathematics.

Wei Lao-han knew it now, watching the torches catch.

Wei Da-niang knew it. She had stopped, halfway across the open ground, at the small distance at which a woman could no longer reach her husband. She did not run. She stood in the open ground with her hands at her sides.

Lan-gu, inside the small house, had begun to scream.

It was the first sound Heizi had heard from inside any building in the hamlet since the riders had come over the ridge. The scream was high and clear and short. It did not, after the first second, repeat. Something inside the house had stopped it.

Ah Si reached the back of Wei Da-niang's house.

He did not, this time, go around it. He went in. He went through the small low back door — the same door Heizi had pulled open six mornings ago to let the cold spring water out of the back basin — and he was inside.

Heizi, behind the brush at the western well, could not see what happened inside.

He could see, after a moment, the small bright movement at the front door — the front door of the house pushed open from inside — and Wei Da-niang stepping back from the open ground, called back by some small frantic motion at her own door, and then Lan-gu coming out — pushed out, by a small thin pair of hands at her back — into the small clear space between the door and the open ground; and behind Lan-gu, in the doorway, Ah Si, with the small charcoal-burner's knife in one hand and Lan-gu's small carved horse with the dark ribbon in the other, the horse held up like a small banner in the boy's small fist.

Lan-gu had blood on her face. Not much. A small bright line at her temple, where someone — one of the riders — had been inside the house with her in the moment before Ah Si had come through the back door.

Heizi understood, watching, that the boy had killed a man.

The boy had — somehow, by some small unimaginable convergence of a twelve-year-old's small fast body and a dismounted rider's surprise and the small charcoal-burner's knife in the boy's hand — gone into the back of the house and come behind a man who had Lan-gu against a wall, and had used the knife on the man, and had taken the small carving from the wall where it had been hung, and had pushed Lan-gu out the front door because the back door was now blocked by the body of the man.

The boy was, for one moment, framed in the doorway, with the knife and the horse.

Heizi shouted.

It was not a word. It was not anything. It was the unworded shout of a fifteen-year-old who saw, in the same instant, that his small brother had become — for the space of one breath — a man, and that becoming a man for the space of one breath was, on this morning, going to cost the small one his life.

The rider in front of the elm tree had, at the front-door scream, turned. He had seen the boy. He had seen the knife. He had seen the small still-living face in the doorway. He had — in the small reflex motion of a Sui rider with a short bow at his saddle — pulled the bow off the saddle in two beats.

Heizi started to run.

He came out from behind the brush at the western well and ran across the open ground toward the front of the house. He was fifty paces away. The rider was thirty.

The rider drew. The rider loosed.

The arrow took Ah Si in the chest.

The boy did not, at first, fall. The arrow went in — Heizi saw, with the small terrible specificity of a young man looking at a thing he would carry the rest of his life — at the place where the small charcoal-burner's knife had been hung from the straw loop at the boy's belt; the arrow had gone through the loop and into the boy. The boy looked down at the arrow. He looked up. He looked at Heizi running across the open ground. He smiled — a small half-smile, the small smile of a boy who, after all, had understood this would happen, who had been ready for it since he had stopped on the path a quarter hour ago. He held up, very briefly, the small carved horse with the dark ribbon, the way one holds up a small thing for a brother to see.

He fell.

He fell forward, slowly, onto the doorstone of Wei Da-niang's house. Lan-gu, on the path, screamed once more — a different scream this time, lower, the kind of scream that came out of a girl who had just understood what a small boy had given her — and went to her knees beside him.

Heizi came across the open ground at the run.

The rider in front had nocked another arrow. The rider was looking at Heizi. The rider drew. Wei Lao-han, in the open ground, stepped forward into the path of the arrow — a small old grey shape of an old man stepping in front of the bow with his hands at his sides — and the rider, startled by the old man, missed the loose. The arrow went into the dust at Heizi's feet. Heizi did not stop. He came up to the doorstone. He dropped to his knees beside Ah Si.

The boy was alive.

The small flat eyes were open. The small thin chest moved, once, twice. The boy looked up at Heizi.

"Heizi-ge," he said.

His voice was very small.

"Yes, little brother. I am here."

"Da-niang."

"Da-niang is alive. Lan-gu is alive. You did it. Little brother. You did it."

The boy moved his small left hand, very slowly. He put the small carved horse with the dark ribbon into Heizi's hand.

"For the lame one," he said.

"Yes."

"And the date — in my coat — for Da-niang."

"Yes, little brother."

The boy's eyes did not close. The small thin chest moved once more. It did not, after that, move again.

Heizi did not, on the doorstone, weep.

He did not weep because behind him the second arrow had been nocked, and the rider in front had let the old man go, and the rider was now looking at him, and the small short bow was raised; and weeping was a thing for some other hour.

Wei Lao-han, in the open ground, stepped forward again — a second time — between the rider and Heizi.

"He is mine," the old man said, in the small clear voice of a hamlet headman speaking to a magistracy rider in the third year of a reign. "The boy is mine. The dead boy is mine. They are all mine. You will not — sir — you will not loose another arrow on a body in my hamlet."

The rider looked at him.

The old man was unarmed. The old man was sixty-five. The old man's hands were flat at his sides where the rider could see them. The old man was, by the small ancient law of the country, in the right; the dead boy was on his doorstone; the doorstone was his.

The rider lowered the bow.

He turned to the men with torches.

"Burn it," he said.

The torches went up.

The first torch took the pine-bark roof of the house at the southern end of the square, where Wei Lao-han's neighbor — a thin man Heizi had seen at the western well twice in the past five days, name unknown — had been standing in his own doorway. The thin man stepped back inside; Heizi did not see him come out. The second torch took the eastern house, a smaller place, where two of the hamlet's older women had been at their morning porridge.

The riders mounted.

They rode out, slowly, in the same unhurried trot they had ridden in. They went over the ridge at the eastern lip. The dust rose behind them and settled.

The hamlet was burning.

Heizi stood up from the doorstone with the small carved horse in his hand.

He looked at Wei Lao-han. The old man had not moved from his place between the rider and the boy. The old man's face was very still.

"Grandfather."

The old man's hand came up briefly and gestured at the houses. *The fires.* Then he looked at his wife.

Wei Da-niang was at her front door. She was, very slowly, lowering herself to the doorstone beside the small body of Ah Si. She set herself down at the boy's head. She laid one of her broad warm hands on the small thin shoulder. She did not, on the doorstone, weep either.

Heizi turned. He went, at the run, across the open ground toward the burning houses. He worked — for the next hour, with what hands he had — at the small old village work of pulling smoke-stunned people out of doorways, of dragging brush away from walls, of beating, with a wadded coat, at the corners of thatch where the fire had not yet jumped. Wei Lao-han worked beside him. Wang Er — who had, in spite of Heizi's instruction, come down with Tie-zhu by the second cock — worked beside them. The hamlet's thin neighbor came out, alive, at the second hour of the morning, with a small burn along his arm and his face black with soot. Two of the hamlet's older women did not come out. One of them was carried out, by the fourth hour, dead but unburned, by smoke alone.

Three houses, in the end, did not burn through. Five did.

Lan-gu, at the doorstone of her father's house, sat for the entire morning beside Wei Da-niang and the small body of Ah Si.

When Heizi came back to the doorstone, finally, in the late noon, with his hands and his face streaked black, with a small burn along the back of his left wrist where a falling thatch had taken him, he sat down on the doorstone beside the small body.

Lan-gu looked up at him.

She did not say anything.

She handed him, very quietly, a small dark date — the one the small body had been carrying, in its coat, against its chest.

Heizi put the date in his palm.

He looked at the small carved horse in his other palm — Ah Si's last gift, *for the lame one* — and at the small dark date — *for Da-niang* — and at the small still face of the small one between him and the girl, and at Wei Da-niang's broad warm hand resting on the small thin shoulder.

He did not weep.

Not yet.

Above the hollow, in the bright cool noon light, the column of smoke from five burning roofs rose slowly into a cloudless sky, and the wind, which had been from the south all morning, turned at last — slowly — to come in from the north, and carried the smoke south down the contour path, in the small unhurried way of a country that was not, on this afternoon, in any hurry to forget what it had seen.