25: Three Brothers

They left the hamlet at the first hour of the second cock, two mornings after the burying.

Wei Lao-han had said, on the day after the funeral: *one more night, lad. The foot. The smith's son's hands. Your own. The road north begins again at the second cock day after tomorrow. I will draw you the next pass on the doorstone tonight in chalk. Da-niang will pack the bundle.* Heizi had not, this time, argued. He had understood, in the long quiet of the day after the weeping, that he no longer needed to argue with Wei Lao-han about days; that the small mathematics of the old man, having failed once, had been rewritten in the new arithmetic of three brothers and a wounded foot and a hamlet that needed, before they went, the small interval of a household closing the door behind them properly.

He used the day for the small work of the household. He helped Wang Er pull the burned thatch off the roof of the eastern house — what was left of it; not much. He helped Lan-gu carry the basins of cold water from the eastern well to the small lean-to behind the burying ground, where the hamlet's dead old women had been laid out. He helped Wei Da-niang sort, in the back of the kitchen, a small jar of mixed grain that the burning had spared but that needed, now, to be combed for splinters of cinder before it could be cooked.

He did the work slowly.

He did it the way Wei Lao-han had been doing his garden work — slowly, by long practiced motions, with the small inner register opened only enough to listen for any new sound on the eastern slope. He kept the listening lighter than the listening had been on the first afternoon. The patrol would not be back today. The patrol would not be back, by the old man's reckoning, in two weeks. The listening was a habit, only; the habit was a thing he was now keeping in himself permanently, like the small running register of where his own four sore places were on his body — except that there were now, after the morning of the burning, perhaps eight sore places, and he was no longer trying to count them all.

He filed each, in the running ledger, without trying to add it to a sum.

That afternoon, Wei Lao-han drew the next pass on the doorstone in chalk.

He drew slowly, with a small piece of white chalk Heizi had not, until that moment, known the hamlet possessed; the chalk had been Wei Lao-han's father's, kept in a small wooden box on a high shelf, used twice a year for occasions of teaching the next pass to a young man on a road. The old man drew a small careful map, no larger than the doorstone itself. He drew the upper pasture path north, climbing out of the hollow. He drew the small fold of country it came down into, two *li* north. He drew the next ridge — higher than this one, less wooded, with a small narrow notch he marked with a tiny cross. He drew, beyond the notch, the long descent into the small flat country at the foot of the Henan hills proper. He drew the dotted line of a small old mule track that ran, within the small flat country, along a low watercourse. He drew, at one place along the dotted line, a small square — a hamlet, smaller than this one, perhaps four houses — with the small character *四* (four) inside it.

"This is the next name," he said. "Number four on the list. The widow's old brother-in-law, with the lame mule. He lives in the four-house hamlet. He is alive — I had word, a month ago, from a peddler who had passed his door. Ask him after the lame mule. He will know."

"Yes, grandfather."

"Beyond him I will not draw. The country beyond the four-house hamlet is country I have not been to in twenty years. The names below the fourth on your list are names you will have to test as Cao Ergou said — like rope of unknown strength."

He paused. He looked up at Heizi.

"Lad. The one thing I will tell you about the country beyond. There are bandits."

"Grandfather."

"Not many. Not yet. But the country is in a shape it has not been in since I was a young man. The corvée has gone on too long, and the rebellions in the eastern marshes have begun to send refugees west and south, and the western refugees and the eastern peasantry are beginning to meet in the foothills of Henan, and small bands of armed men have begun, in the past two seasons, to move along the lower contours of the hills. They are not patrols. They are not magistracy. They are bands of perhaps eight, perhaps fifteen, of starving men with whatever weapons they have been able to pick up, often farmers' tools — flails, scythes, hammers."

Heizi watched the old man.

"Grandfather."

"Yes."

"Are they killing."

"They are killing, lad. Not many. They take what they can from people on the road — food, sandals, the occasional bolt of cloth — and sometimes they kill. Sometimes they kill because the man on the road has resisted. Sometimes they kill because they are starving and the man on the road has more than they have. Sometimes they kill, lad — and this is the worst — because they are men who have been broken by what was done to them, and they have decided, in the broken places of themselves, that the world owes them a small specific cruelty in return."

He paused.

"They are not patrols. The patrols, lad, will write a slip about you. The bands will not. The bands are, in some ways, more dangerous than the patrols, because there is no slip. A patrol you can outrun by going to where it cannot ride. A band you must — you must avoid by being where they are not."

"How will we know where they are not."

"The four-house hamlet's man with the lame mule will tell you. He has the eyes of the hills the way Cao Ergou has the eyes of the lower foothills. Ask him. *Ask*, lad. That is again the third option."

"Yes, grandfather."

The old man stood up from the doorstone. He brushed the chalk dust off his fingers.

That evening Heizi memorized the small map on the doorstone for an hour by lamplight. He went out twice in the night with Wang Er to look at it again, the second time at the second hour of the watch, by the moon. By the second cock of the morning, the small careful drawing was in his head as the burned paper of Old Zhang's list had been, two weeks ago, in his head.

Wei Lao-han came out before the second cock and washed the doorstone with a wet cloth.

The chalk came off cleanly. The doorstone, in the dim grey, was again only a doorstone.

The packing took an hour. Wei Da-niang had set out, on the table, the small bundle she had been preparing since yesterday: a small folded cloth of perhaps four days' millet; a smaller cloth of dried wild greens; two small dried fish wrapped in oiled paper; three small twists of salt; one small clay pot of pickled cabbage, wrapped in a hempen sleeve to keep the lid on. There was also, on the table, beside the bundle, a small new pair of straw sandals — the small careful weaving of an old woman's hands at a winter evening — laid out for Tie-zhu.

The lame boy, when he saw them, did not at first say anything.

Then he said, in the small low voice he had been speaking in since the morning of the funeral: *Da-niang. Thank you.*

The woman did not answer. She bent and fitted the new sandals onto his feet herself. The new sandals were broader at the heel than the village sandals had been; the broader heel, Heizi understood, watching her work, would help the bad foot's outside edge in the next *li*.

Lan-gu, at the door, stood with her hands at her sides.

She had something in her right hand. It was small and dark.

She came forward, very quietly, when the woman had finished. She stopped at Tie-zhu's bench.

"Lame brother," she said.

"Lan-gu."

"This is — this is for you."

She held out, on the small open palm, a small carved wooden bird. It was perhaps the size of a thumb. It had been carved with the same small whittling knife she had used on the horse — the same hand had done it; Heizi could see, in the small smoothing of the wing, the patient careful work of Lan-gu's two days at the back basin. The wood was a different wood from the horse. The horse had been pine. The bird was elm — a small piece, perhaps, of a fallen branch from the hamlet's old elm at the western edge of the square. The bird was painted, very lightly, with a small streak of black along the wing — a piece of charcoal from the hearth, perhaps, smoothed in by a finger.

"It is — " she paused. "It is unfinished. The eye is not done. I will finish it some day. If you come back — when you come back — you can bring it. I will finish it then."

She did not say *if you do not come back I will not have finished it*. She did not need to.

Tie-zhu took the small bird. He held it in his palm for a long moment.

"Lan-gu."

"Yes."

"I will come back."

"All right."

He did not say *I will*. He did not say *I might*. He said *I will*. He said it the way the smith's son had said *I will not let the second son be the second loss* — flat, even, in the small unornamented voice of a young man making a small unornamented promise.

The girl nodded once.

She did not, in the doorway, weep. She had wept, perhaps, in the back basin yesterday, alone, while the rest of the household had been at small work. She had decided, this morning, not to weep in front of the lame boy who would, by the noon hour of his fifth day on the road north, be very far from this hamlet.

She turned. She went into the back of the house.

Wei Lao-han stood at the door.

"Lads."

"Grandfather."

"Go."

He laid his old hand once on Heizi's head — light, gone — and once on Wang Er's, and once, briefly, on Tie-zhu's. He did not say anything else.

They stepped out of the door.

In the open ground in front of the elm, Wei Da-niang stood with her broad warm hands at her sides. She had not, since the morning of the funeral, allowed any of the wet down her face; she did not, now, allow it either. She nodded once to each of the three boys as they passed her. She did not, at the gate of the small open ground, turn to see them go up the upper pasture path.

Heizi did not turn back from the path either.

The three of them climbed the upper pasture path in the soft grey light of the morning before the sun. The pasture path was the same path they had climbed two mornings before — Heizi recognized the small switchbacks, the second of which Ah Si had reached at the run perhaps thirty paces ahead of him; the open belt of grass at the top where Heizi had stopped briefly, in the last morning, to look down into the hollow as the riders dismounted. The belt of grass was empty. The hollow below was quiet. From this height, looking back, the three black-roofed shells were small.

They did not stop in the open belt of grass. Heizi did not let himself look down.

They came over the upper pasture into the small fold of country Wei Lao-han had drawn on the doorstone. They came down into a brown winter-stubbled field; they crossed the field; they came out onto a small old path that ran north along the foot of the next ridge.

By noon they had reached the small narrow notch on the next ridge.

The notch was higher than the saddle pass had been. It was almost bare of trees; only a low scrub at the rim. The wind through it was steady and cold. Heizi stopped them at the lip of the notch. He looked back, briefly — not at the hollow of the hamlet, which was no longer visible; only at the country between, the small folded shape of the upper pasture and the brown stubble and the path along the foot of the ridge — and forward, into the long descent that opened, slowly, into the small flat country at the foot of the Henan hills proper.

Wang Er came up beside him.

"Brother."

"Yes."

"We are three."

"Yes."

Wang Er looked at him.

"Three is not enough."

"It is what we have."

"We will need to be four again, before the year is out. Or five. Or more."

Heizi nodded.

He thought, looking down into the flat country, of the small unfinished elm-wood bird in the inner pocket of Tie-zhu's coat, beside the half-mended seam of the lame boy's belt; of the small charcoal-burner's knife in the right palm under the third row at the eastern end of the burying ground; of the small dark date in the left palm; of the small carved horse with the dark ribbon, set by the lame boy's own hand on the small thin chest under perhaps four hands of earth; of the small bowl of millet, by now full of rainwater and beginning to rot, on the head of his sister's mound at the eastern edge of his foster father's lower field.

He thought of the names in his ledger. He had three now.

Mei-er.

Yan Liu-er.

Ah Si.

He did not, at the lip of the notch, recite them. He did not need to recite them. He carried them.

Tie-zhu came up behind them, walking with the new careful walk in the new broad-heeled sandals.

"Brothers."

"Lame brother," Wang Er said. (It was, since the morning, the small new form of address the smith's son had begun to use for the lame boy; the form of address Lan-gu had used at the door.)

"The path."

"The path is down," Heizi said. "Down the long descent. North along the path Wei Lao-han drew. The four-house hamlet is by the noon of the third day if we walk steady. Ask the man with the lame mule. Then north."

"All right."

They began to descend.

The descent was longer than the upper pasture path's climb had been. The path bent through small stands of low pine, then through a long stretch of bare brush, then through a small stand of birch — the first birch Heizi had seen on the road, the white bark of the trees a thing he stopped, briefly, to put one hand on, in the small unhurried way of a young man who was beginning to keep — without naming it as such — a small running record of the new things of a new country.

By dusk they had come out of the descent into the small flat country.

The small flat country was a flat narrow strip of land between two long slopes — the eastern slope of the ridge they had just descended, and the lower foothills of the Henan hills proper, whose first low folds rose, perhaps three *li* east, in a soft blue line in the late afternoon light. The strip ran north and south, along the low watercourse Wei Lao-han had drawn. Along the watercourse, here and there, were small old stands of willow and a single small marshy place where the water spread for a quarter *li*.

There were no people in the small flat country at this hour.

They walked north along the path until the dark came down. Heizi chose a place in a stand of willow — close to the watercourse, with cover from the western side — for the night's camp. They lit no fire. They ate a small portion of the dried fish and a small handful of the wild greens and a small piece of pickled cabbage and drank cold water from the watercourse. Tie-zhu unbound his foot; the foot was holding; the new sandals' broader heel had taken the strain of the long descent without a new crack.

They slept in turns.

Heizi took the first watch.

The flat country, at night, was a different country from the foothills. The wind was lower. The owls were different — a long mournful call from far off, at the eastern slope, that Heizi had not heard before. The water in the marshy place made a slow steady sound. The brush around them was thinner; he could see further by the small thin moon than he had been able to see, at any night since leaving the village, under any roof.

He listened the way he had been listening since Wang Er had taught him, on the second night, the difference between listening for a sound and listening for the shape of the silence. The shape of the silence here was wide. The shape of the silence had no specific weight in any quadrant; the country was open enough that the quadrants were larger and the silence in them was, on the whole, an open silence, not a held one.

He filed the new shape.

At some hour late in the watch, with Wang Er and Tie-zhu asleep beside him in the willow, he allowed himself, for the first time since the morning of the burying, to think about the small things that had not yet been named.

He thought about Lan-gu's face at her father's door.

He thought about the small quiet line at her temple where the dismounted rider's knife had cut.

He thought about the small unfinished bird with its single black-charcoal stroke, in the inner pocket of the lame boy three paces from him in the willow brush.

He thought: *this is what the road keeps. The road does not keep the boys. The road takes them, by arrows and by coughs and by ropes from the lowest branches of persimmon trees. The road keeps, instead, the small unfinished things — the half-carved birds, the small wooden tigers on flat stones, the folded blue cloths on kitchen benches. The road is full of them. The road is built of them. The road, in a way I do not yet know how to think about, is — perhaps — in some long way — being kept on its course by them.*

He did not, on the watch, write the thought down. He had nothing to write with. He filed it.

He filed it with the other things he had filed since leaving the village, and the small accumulating filing — the small stack of things he was beginning, without knowing it, to make into the structure that would, in years to come, be the inner shape of the man Lao Wen would teach to read, that Li Mi would later see across a council fire, that Li Shimin would later recognize across a campaign tent at the age of twenty-five — sat in him, on the first night of three brothers in the small flat country at the foot of the Henan hills, in the willow brush by the slow steady water of the unnamed watercourse, in the small steady patience of a young man beginning, against his will, to become.

The wind shifted.

The owl called.

In the marshy place, a small waterbird made one short low note and was silent.

Heizi listened.

The road, ahead of them, went north into a country of bandits and patrols and the four-house hamlet of a man with a lame mule.

He woke Wang Er, at the second hour, for the smith's son's watch.

He slept the sleep of a young man whose eyes had not, in the long day, been able to take in everything they had seen, and whose chest was — for the first time in two weeks — light enough to let him sleep at the first lying down.

He did not, on the watch's edge, dream.