26: The Lame Mule

The four-house hamlet was no larger than its name.

It lay at the lower end of the small flat country, where the watercourse turned east and ran for a *li* through a narrowing of low stony hills before opening out, beyond, into a wider plain that — by Wei Lao-han's chalk drawing — was not on their road. Their road bent west of the narrowing, climbing out of the small flat country onto the lower foothills of the Henan hills proper. The four-house hamlet sat at the bend, a small grey cluster of low mud-brick houses set in a small open square at the foot of a slope of grey rock.

There was no well. There was, instead, a small stone basin set under a thin trickle of water that came down the slope from a spring higher up and ran, after the basin filled, in a small channel along the back of the houses and out into the watercourse below. The water in the basin was cold and clear and very thin; it would, in a dry summer, perhaps fail; on this morning, with the spring rains still recent, it ran in a small steady drip.

A grey mule, lame in the right hind leg, stood tied to a post outside the southernmost house.

The mule turned its head as the three of them came up out of the flat country path. It looked at them with the slow even eye of an old animal that had seen, in its life, more travelers than it had cared to see and had stopped, some years ago, finding the seeing of new faces of any interest. It blinked once. It went back to its small careful weight-shifting on the three good legs.

Heizi raised his hand. Wang Er stopped behind him. Tie-zhu, third, stopped behind Wang Er. The new broad-heeled sandals had walked the long descent and the small flat country well; the lame boy's foot was, by Heizi's small running register, holding. Tie-zhu had not, since the burying ground, complained about the foot at any point on the road; Heizi understood this was not because the foot was not paining him but because Tie-zhu had decided, by some small private decision he had made on the doorstone of Wei Lao-han's house, that he would not give the foot a voice on this road. Heizi watched the foot anyway. The foot was holding.

"Brothers."

They looked at him.

"I will go in alone. Wang Er, you and the lame brother wait at the path. If I do not come out by the second hour after noon, leave. Take the upper path west. Do not look for me. Walk."

Wang Er did not, this time, argue. The smith's son had begun, since the morning of the burying, to argue less about the small instructions of the road; he had also begun, Heizi noticed, to nod once before each instruction was finished, as if he had heard it before Heizi had said it. The two of them had, by some small accumulating intimacy of the road, come into a working understanding that neither needed to articulate.

Heizi went forward alone.

He came up the small path to the open square. He stopped at the edge of the clear ground. He bowed once toward the southernmost house, where the mule was tied, and called, low: *grandfather, we are travelers.*

The door of the southernmost house opened.

A man came out. He was perhaps fifty-five. He was thin, with a face that had once been broader; the cheeks had begun to fall in. He wore the unbleached hempen of a working man, with a leather strap across one shoulder that suggested the long carrying of small loads. He was barefoot — at the door of his own house, in his own square — and his feet were the long flat working feet of a man who had worn sandals for a lifetime and who, at his own threshold, did not bother.

He looked at Heizi for a long moment. He looked at the path behind. He saw, perhaps, Wang Er and Tie-zhu standing there. He looked back at Heizi.

"Lad."

"Grandfather. We come from the hamlet of two wells. From Wei Lao-han."

The man's face did not change.

"How is the old man."

"The old man is — " Heizi paused. He had, on the path, not yet decided how he would answer this question. He had decided he would, because Wei Lao-han had told him to answer, ask after the lame mule. He had not decided how to phrase the news of the burning. He had not, until standing here, understood that the news would come up at all.

He said, slowly: "The old man is alive, grandfather. The old man is well. The hamlet — the hamlet of two wells lost five houses to a patrol three mornings ago. The hamlet lost two old women to smoke. The old man is alive. Da-niang is alive. The daughter is alive."

The man closed his eyes for a long beat. He opened them.

"Lad."

"Yes, grandfather."

"You were the cause."

"Yes, grandfather."

"How many of you came out of the hollow."

"Four came in. Three came out. The small one — the small one died on Da-niang's doorstone. He killed the man who had put a knife to the daughter."

The man looked at him for a long moment.

"Your name, lad."

Heizi paused.

"Zhang of the eastern half, grandfather."

"Old Zhang's foster son?"

"Yes, grandfather."

The man nodded slowly.

"I knew Old Zhang. We were together at the watch above the Henan border in Wen-di seventeen — together with Cao Ergou, with Wei Lao-han, with the old burner who is now dead a year — there were five of us in that year of the watch, lad, and three of us are still alive, of whom you have met two. I am the fourth."

He paused.

"And the lame mule — yes, the mule is mine. The mule has been lame for nine years. He is older than my own age in this work. The widow Shen used to keep him at her well in winters when the road was bad and I was not on it. She would feed him for me. We are old in our debts, lad."

He stepped back from the door.

"Bring your brothers. Come in. There is millet. There is hot water. There is a fire."

Heizi turned and waved Wang Er and Tie-zhu in. They came up. They stopped at the edge of the square and bowed. The man of the house — *Lu Wen-han*, he had said his name was, in the small even way of an old man giving his name only after the asking-for-the-old-man's-news had been honored — went back into the house. They followed.

The house was one room, smaller than Wei Lao-han's main room, with a low cooking fire in a stone hearth at the back. There was a low cot against the eastern wall. There was a small wooden table at the center. There was a small shelf with two wooden bowls and three wooden cups. The room smelled of millet and of mule and of the small clean smoke of a working man's fire.

There was no wife.

Heizi understood this without having to be told. The widow Shen had said *brother-in-law*; the old burner's notes had said *the man with the lame mule*; neither had mentioned a wife at the four-house hamlet. The man's house had the small economy of a man who lived alone — one cup at the table; the cot's blanket folded at one end, no second pillow; a single hempen robe hung on a peg; no kitchen jar for pickled cabbage, only a small clay pot of plain salt.

The man saw Heizi looking. He said, simply: *she died in the bad year.*

He did not say which bad year. He did not need to.

He poured them hot water from a small clay pot at the fire. He gave each a small cup. He cut, from a small piece of dried meat hanging from the rafter — the only piece of dried meat in the house, by the look of it — three thin slices, one for each. He laid the slices on the table. He did not, in the cutting, go thin enough to insult them or thick enough to leave himself nothing for the next week.

The slices were the right thinness.

They ate.

The man watched them eat. He did not speak for a long time. He ate one of the slices himself, slowly, with a small piece of the millet bread he had taken down from a covered basket on the high shelf.

"Lads."

"Yes, grandfather."

"You are going north."

"Yes, grandfather."

"To?"

Heizi paused.

"To the foothills of the Henan hills. Wei Lao-han said — Wei Lao-han said the country beyond is country he had not been to in twenty years. He said I should ask the man with the lame mule about it. I am asking, grandfather."

The man nodded.

"There is the fifth name on your list, lad?"

"Yes, grandfather. Number five — *the small farm at the edge of the bandit road, do not approach in the noon, approach at dusk only*."

"Yes."

The man looked at Heizi.

"Lad. The fifth is dead."

"Grandfather."

"He died this winter. The bandits I will tell you of in a moment took his small farm in the eleventh moon of last year. They did not burn it. They occupied it. He is buried under his own threshold by the bandits' own work — they took his farm, lad, but they are not, in their way, men entirely without manners; they buried him at his own door, with his own blanket over him, and they took his stores and his sheep and his daughter and his small house. The daughter they sold, three weeks later, to a peddler going west. The peddler — I have it from a man who saw the peddler at a small town's market — passed through here two weeks ago. The daughter was alive. The peddler was — was the kind of peddler who would know how to keep a girl alive. I do not know more than that."

He paused.

"The fifth name, lad, is no longer a small farm at the edge of the bandit road. The fifth name is now the bandits' camp. You will not approach the fifth at any hour. You will go around."

Heizi nodded slowly.

"How, grandfather."

"You will go up. Up the western face of the foothills, by a small old herder's path that I will draw you on the floor in chalk. The path is not wide. The path is steep. The lame brother — yes, lame brother, I am speaking of you, do not look surprised that I see you — will walk the path slower than the other two, and there will be one place where you must take him on the smith's son's back, because the path narrows to a man's foot's-width and there is a fall on the eastern side of perhaps four men's heights. Above the steep place, the path widens again. From the wide place you will look down and see, perhaps half a *li* below you, on the eastern side, the small farm of the fifth name. It will look ordinary in the noon. Do not let it deceive you. The men in it are not ordinary."

He paused.

"You will go above the farm in the late afternoon. You will not stop at any place where a fire's smoke could be seen from the farm. You will sleep, that night, behind the low ridge in a small dry place I will tell you of. You will go on, in the morning, north, into the upper foothills of Henan. From the upper foothills there is no clear road. There are paths the herders take. There are paths the charcoal burners take. There are paths the few hermits and monks take, going up to the higher hills. You will use whichever paths you can find. The upper hills, lad — the upper hills are not bandit country. The bandits will not climb above the lower foothills, because the bandits are men who have been broken by the lower country and they will not give up the lower country for the upper. The upper is poorer. The upper has — the upper has the small old hermits and a few small charcoal-burners and the occasional militia patrol. It does not have men with knives at every bend."

He paused again.

"There is also, in the upper hills — I am told, by a peddler I trust on this point — there is a small old hut at the place where three small streams come together at a pine grove. The hut is — was — the hut of an old scholar of the Henan border country, exiled for some matter I do not know in detail, whom the magistracy has, by report, lost track of for some years now. He has, by what I have heard, taken in walkers in the past. He may take you in. He may not. He has been there at least two winters. He will be hard to find. The three streams. The pine grove. Lad."

"Yes, grandfather."

"If you find him — if he takes you in — the lame brother's foot will heal there for the winter. The smith's son will eat there for the winter. You will read characters there, perhaps, if the old scholar will teach you."

Heizi looked at the man.

"He is an old scholar, grandfather."

"Yes."

"He teaches characters."

"He has, by the peddler's word."

"Has he a name."

The man paused.

"He has a name, lad. The peddler did not give it to me. The peddler said: *the old man at the three streams does not give his name. He answers to grandfather. He answers to nothing else.*"

He looked at Heizi for a long moment.

"Lad. You are fifteen and you have been on this road two weeks and you have buried two boys who were not yours and one who was. I am sixty-five and I have buried more people than I can count. I will tell you, lad, what an old man tells a young one when there is no longer room for ornament. The country we are in is breaking. The Sui — the Sui is going to fall. I do not know in what year. I do not know in what month. But I have seen, in the past two seasons, the small early signs that the country's old men know — the bandits in the lower foothills, the patrols becoming more cruel rather than less, the corvée slips coming down with whitecord lists for women on them, the silver in the magistracy's coffers no longer being silver but being bolts of cloth. The country is breaking. The breaking will go on for years. Lads of fifteen who walk into this kind of breaking will, if they live, become the men who put together what is left after the breaking."

He paused.

"You will be such a man, lad. I see it. The smith's son will walk beside you. The lame brother will walk beside you. You will need others. You will collect them. The road will not, in the end, be a road of three. It will be a road of many. The many will form, by some hand we cannot see yet, into a small ordering of the broken country, and the small ordering will become — in your lifetime, lad, before you are forty — a thing that will stand against, or in place of, what fell."

He paused again.

"You do not need to hear this today. I am telling you because I am sixty-five and tomorrow you are going up the steep place and I will not see you again."

He looked at Heizi.

"Do not let it weigh on you, lad. It is not weight. It is only — only a small message I had, in my old age, the chance to send forward. You do not have to receive it. You have only to walk on."

Heizi did not, at the table, answer.

He nodded.

The man did not press.

That afternoon Lu Wen-han drew, on the floor of his small house in chalk, the small old herder's path up the western face of the foothills. He drew the steep place where Tie-zhu would need to be carried. He drew the small dry place behind the low ridge where they would sleep. He drew, beyond it, the route into the upper hills — a wide soft area, only generally indicated, with a dotted line that ended at a small triangle marked with three short strokes for the three streams and a small crosshatch for the pine grove. He drew it slowly, twice, while Heizi memorized.

When the chalk was washed off the floor, the small house held no record.

That night the three of them slept on the floor of the small one-room house, with the lame mule outside breathing the slow even night-breath of an old animal at a post, and Lu Wen-han on his cot, and the small water of the spring's channel running slowly along the back of the houses and out to the watercourse below. Heizi did not, on this night, take a watch. The man of the house had said, simply: *I am the watch tonight. Sleep, the three of you. You go up the steep place tomorrow. Sleep.*

Heizi slept.

He dreamed, very briefly — at the second hour, perhaps; he could not, on waking, place the hour — of his foster father at the threshold step in the empty house, with the wadded coat across his shoulders, with the dog at his feet. The old man was, in the dream, not asleep. The old man was, in the dream, looking at the road. The old man, in the dream, raised one hand once — light, the small parting gesture — and lowered it.

Heizi woke briefly.

He went back to sleep.

In the morning, before the second cock, Lu Wen-han pressed into Heizi's palm a single small object — a small piece of plain dark jade, no larger than a thumbnail, polished by long carrying. He folded Heizi's fingers around it.

"Lad."

"Yes, grandfather."

"This is for the upper hills. Not for any payment. For the old scholar — if you find him — to know you are mine. Show him. He will know."

Heizi looked at the jade.

He nodded.

He put the small piece of jade into the inner pocket of his shirt, against his ribs, where the small finished indigo pouch and the second wooden bead and the wrapped jade with his foster mother's hair already lay.

He bowed.

The man laid one hand once on the top of his head — light, gone — and on Wang Er's, and on Tie-zhu's. He did not, this time, make a small speech.

The lame mule turned its head, slowly, as the three of them went past. It did not blink. It went back to the small careful weight-shifting on the three good legs.

They began, in the dim grey of the morning, to climb the western face of the foothills toward the upper hills of Henan.