27: The Steep Place

The steep place, when they came to it, was narrower than Lu Wen-han's chalk had drawn it.

The chalk had shown a thin path along a face of grey rock, with a small inclined ledge at one place perhaps no broader than a man's foot. The drawing had said: *here, the smith's son carries the lame brother*. The drawing had said it with the small economy of a chalk line. It had not said how the foot would, on a wet morning, rest on the inclined ledge; how the four men's heights of fall on the eastern side would seem to lean, slightly, toward the path; how the wind, at the narrow place, would come across the face of the rock and pull at the cloak of any man on it, with the small steady pull of a country that did not particularly mind, on its long calculus, whether a man on a path stayed on it or not.

They reached the ledge at the third hour of the morning.

Heizi had gone up first. He was the lightest of the three, although by only a small margin; he was the steadiest on the foot in a wet place; he had the small grey rock under his sandal at the village's bean fields' edge as a lifelong habit, and the small grey rock of the western face of the foothills was, in its essential geometry, the same rock as the bean fields' edge. He went up. He came to the ledge. He paused. He looked at it.

He turned and called down.

"Wang Er."

"Yes."

"Take him on your back. The hammer behind. I will come down to meet you halfway. I will take his weight on the steepest step. You will then go under him. You will go across the ledge with him. I will follow."

Wang Er nodded.

The smith's son knelt at the foot of the steepening, in a small flat place where Tie-zhu had stopped to take his breath. He spoke once to the lame boy. The lame boy nodded — once, slowly — and climbed on Wang Er's back. Tie-zhu was thinner than he had been at the village; the carry was, by Wang Er's small grunt of standing, not light but not heavy either. Wang Er adjusted the hammer's sling further down his back to make room. He started up.

Heizi came down to the place above the ledge. He waited for them.

When Wang Er came up to him with Tie-zhu on his back, Heizi reached down and laid his own hand under the lame boy's left thigh — taking, by the small careful arithmetic the three of them had now begun to share, perhaps a third of the weight onto his own arm. Wang Er, freed of the third of weight, took the next two steps slowly. The two of them moved together as they had taken to moving in the past four days — the smith's son's slow even step paired to the small specific lightness Heizi could put under whichever side of Tie-zhu was about to be set on the unsteady ground.

They came onto the ledge.

The wind was at their faces.

Heizi, at the higher side, took Tie-zhu's left wrist in his left hand. Wang Er, with the lame boy on his back, set his right foot — slowly — on the inclined ledge. The foot did not slip. He set the left foot beyond the right. The left foot did not slip. He went, two foot's-widths at a time, across the ledge.

Tie-zhu, on his back, did not look down. The lame boy had closed his eyes at the first foot's-width. The eyes stayed closed for the whole crossing. Heizi, watching, understood that the closing was not from fear; the lame boy had decided, with the small private discipline of a young man whose foot had been failing him for ten years, that whatever happened on the ledge would not be made easier by his looking. If the smith's son fell, the lame boy would fall. If the smith's son did not fall, the lame boy would not. The looking would change neither outcome. The lame boy closed his eyes and let Wang Er do the work.

Wang Er did the work.

He came across the ledge in eight foot's-widths. He stepped, at the end, onto the wider place. He crouched and set Tie-zhu down on the wide place. He stood. His shoulders shook, very slightly, only once. He did not — Heizi saw — look back.

Heizi came across after them.

The ledge was easier without the lame boy. He came across in five steps. He came up onto the wide place. The three of them stood for a long minute breathing. None of them spoke. The wind at the wide place was lower; the rock face curved away to the north, sheltering it.

"Brothers," Wang Er said, at last, in the small low voice he had been using since the funeral.

"Yes," said Heizi.

"That was — that was the worst step."

"For you?"

"For me."

Heizi laid one hand briefly on the smith's son's shoulder. He did not say anything.

They went on along the path.

The path widened, as Lu Wen-han had said, beyond the steep place. It became a small old herder's path the breadth of a man and a half, climbing slowly up the western face of the foothills. The brush along it was thin scrub-pine; the rock under the path was good rock; the morning was clear and the wind was steady. By the late noon they had come up onto a small low ridge — the ridge that the man with the lame mule had drawn at the dotted line in his chalk — and from the ridge they could see, on the eastern side, the small farm of the fifth name.

Heizi stopped at the ridge.

He motioned the brothers down into the brush. He himself went to the eastern lip and lay flat on his stomach, the way he had been taught — by no one in particular, by some accumulating instinct of two weeks on a road — and looked over.

The small farm sat in the lower country, perhaps half a *li* below them, in a small open place at a bend of a small stream that branched off the watercourse they had walked beside last night. It was a small unwalled place — three low buildings, a small fenced yard, a single thin column of smoke from the central building's chimney. Around the buildings, in the open yard and along the path that led down to the stream, men were moving.

He counted them.

There were eight visible. There were perhaps two more inside; he could not see, but he could hear, from this distance, the small intermittent sound of a voice calling out instructions inside the central building.

The men were not, by their dress, magistracy. They were not, by their movements, soldiers. They wore the unbleached hempen of working farmers, mostly, with patches and additions — a leather jerkin on one, a length of red cloth wound at the waist of another, a single short sword in a scabbard at the hip of a third. Most of them carried farmers' tools — long-handled flails, a scythe with a shortened blade, a wooden mallet. One of them, at the gate, leaned on a short bow.

They were unhurried.

They were, by the look of their movement around the yard — by the small careful unbothered way they came in and out of the buildings, by the small ordinary work of one of them turning a small clay jar over a basin to drain, by the small unhurried walk of the man with the bow along the perimeter — men who had been at this farm for some months. They were not on edge. They were not, on this morning, expecting trouble.

Heizi watched them for a long time.

He filed each of the men as he saw him. The one in the leather jerkin was the largest; he carried himself in the small careful way of a man who had been a soldier once, somewhere; perhaps a deserter from the corvée camps. The one with the short sword was younger — perhaps thirty — with a narrow face and a way of looking around the yard that was, even at this distance, the look of a man who had been broken in some specific way; Heizi understood, watching him, that this was the man Wei Lao-han would have called *the broken kind, who has decided the world owes him a small specific cruelty.* The man with the bow was perhaps fifty, calm, and was — Heizi judged — the band's leader by the way the others' movements oriented around him without quite seeming to.

Behind the central building, in a small lean-to, three figures sat against the wall.

He had to look a long time to see them, because the lean-to's roof shadowed them in the noon. They were, when his eye finally resolved them: three women, of various ages, with their hands tied. The youngest was perhaps fourteen. The eldest was perhaps forty. They had been there, by the small evenness of their seated postures — the way the one in the middle had her shoulder set against the youngest one's shoulder for steadiness — for some time. Days. Possibly weeks.

Heizi closed his eyes for the space of one breath.

He opened them.

He looked once more, slowly, around the yard. He counted the men again. He counted the windows of the buildings. He looked at the gate. He looked at the path down to the stream. He looked at the back of the central building, where there was a small unguarded eastern wall with no door and no window, and a small wooden lean-to with no fourth wall, and a small fenced yard for chickens — empty; the chickens long eaten — and a small flat place where the farm's old kitchen midden had been before the band came.

He filed every quadrant.

He understood — with a small clarity that came down on him at the eastern lip of the ridge — that he could not do anything for the three women in the lean-to.

There were three brothers above the ridge. There were ten armed men below it. There was a leader with a bow. There were three buildings, two of which had men in them. There was no element of surprise that could last more than one beat. There was no plan, by any small mathematics he could run, that ended with the women out and the brothers alive.

He understood this.

He looked once more at the youngest of the three women — the one of perhaps fourteen, who was sitting with her shoulder set against the middle one's shoulder for steadiness — and he took her face into his memory the way he had taken the four-year-old's eyes on the log.

He took her in.

He turned. He came back from the eastern lip, low, on his stomach until the ridge was between him and the farm. He stood when the brush was thick enough to cover his standing.

Wang Er and Tie-zhu were waiting in the brush.

"Brothers."

They looked at him.

"There is the farm. There are ten men. There is a leader with a bow. There are three buildings. There is —"

He paused.

"There are three women in a lean-to behind the central building. They are tied. The youngest is perhaps fourteen."

Wang Er did not, at first, say anything.

Tie-zhu, on the brush, had grown still in the way the lame boy had grown still on the doorstone three mornings ago — the small particular stillness of a young man whose body had gone, at a piece of news, into the inward country where the answer was already known.

"Heizi-ge," Tie-zhu said, after a moment. "Are we — "

"No."

"Heizi-ge — "

"No, lame brother. Listen. Listen to me. I have looked at the farm. I have counted the men. I have counted the buildings. I have looked at every quadrant of the place. There is no plan, by any reckoning of three boys on a ridge above ten men with weapons and a bowman, that gets the women out alive. There is no plan that gets us out alive. We are not — we are not enough."

He paused.

"This is — this is the kind of choosing the old burner spoke of. This is the kind we cannot make."

Tie-zhu looked at him.

"Heizi-ge. The promise."

Heizi closed his eyes for one breath.

The lame boy was right to ask. The lame boy had, at the funeral and at the doorstone and at the persimmon-grave promise that Heizi had made in the inside of his mouth at his sister's grave a lifetime ago, been listening; the lame boy had, in his small careful way, been keeping his own ledger of what Heizi had vowed.

Heizi opened his eyes.

He said, slowly: "The promise was — *I will not leave a girl to that camp.* The promise was specific. The promise was, the road being what it has been, refined: *if she is bound for the camp, and the taking is reachable.* These three are not bound for that camp, lame brother. These three have already been taken. The taking has happened. The reaching — the reaching is not reachable for three of us. The promise does not — the promise does not require us to die uselessly here. The promise requires us to live, and to come back, and to keep being on this road, and to be — by some year ahead I cannot yet see — *enough*."

He paused.

"The promise requires us to remember her face."

He did not say *I will remember it*. He said *the promise requires*. The wording was deliberate. Heizi understood, as he said it, that he was speaking the small new structure of his own thinking out loud for the first time — that he was, at the eastern lip of this ridge, making the small distinction that would be the spine of the rest of his life: that the promise was not about the heroic act of the moment but about the longer act of the years; that the heroic act of the moment was, very often, the wrong act; that a man who made the heroic act of the moment died and did not become enough; that the country was full of small unburied bodies of men who had made the heroic act of the moment and had not become enough.

Tie-zhu looked at him for a long beat.

He nodded.

It was not a happy nod. It was the nod of a young man accepting a piece of arithmetic he did not like.

Wang Er, beside them, said in a low voice: "Brothers. The path."

The path led north along the upper edge of the ridge, into the upper foothills. The path went above the farm without crossing into the lower country. The path was, for the next half *li*, in plain view from the farm's eastern side; if any of the men in the yard happened to look up, in the noon light, the three of them on the upper path would be visible against the sky.

Heizi nodded.

"We go low. On our hands and knees, where the brush is thinnest. We do not stand until the upper bend, where the rock takes us out of their line. We will be moving for half a *li* on our hands and knees. Lame brother — yes, slow with the foot; the brush will cushion you on the bad knee — Wang Er, the hammer flat against your back; do not let it clink."

They went low.

They went, on their hands and knees, for half a *li* along the upper edge of the ridge. Tie-zhu's bad foot, which had carried him over the steep place an hour ago, took the small abrasions of the brush without protest; the lame boy did not, in the half *li*, make any sound. Wang Er, larger and slower, moved with the small careful grace of a smith's son who had been working with the small precise weights of iron at his father's anvil since he was eleven and who could, if he had to, place a hand on a brush root with the same quiet exactness.

They came around the upper bend.

The rock face took them out of the farm's line.

They stood, at last, in a small dry place behind the low ridge — the place Lu Wen-han had drawn — and they sat down for a quarter hour without speaking. Tie-zhu unbound the foot. The foot was scraped along the inner ridge but unbroken. He rebound it. Wang Er drank half a cup of water from his small water-gourd and passed it to Heizi. Heizi drank half of what was left and passed it to Tie-zhu. Tie-zhu drank what was left.

"Brothers," Heizi said, finally.

"Yes," said Wang Er.

"From this place we go on into the upper hills. We will not — we will not look down on that farm again. We will not pass a *li* of this country today thinking about anything but the path. We will think about the women some other day. We will not let the women fall out of our heads, but we will not — for the rest of this afternoon — let them be the only thing in our heads. There is a path to walk and a foot to walk it on. We walk."

Tie-zhu nodded.

Wang Er nodded.

They walked.

They walked through the late afternoon up into the upper foothills. The country changed under them — pine became thicker, the air became thinner, the small old herders' paths multiplied and crossed and were not always clear. Heizi led by the small accumulating instinct he was learning. By dusk they had come into a wide stand of old pine where the ground was thick with last year's needles, and the light, slanting low through the trunks, made the small dust of the needles glow a reddish-gold in the long west.

They camped in the pine.

They lit no fire.

They ate a small portion of the dried wild greens and the salt and a small piece of the dried fish, and they drank cold water from a small spring Wang Er had found at the foot of a great pine, and they slept in turns.

Heizi, on the second watch, sat with his back against the trunk of a great pine, with the small thick cushion of last year's needles under him.

He took the youngest of the three women's faces — the fourteen-year-old, the one with her shoulder set against the middle one's shoulder for steadiness — and laid it carefully into the small interior register he was now keeping for such things, beside the small flat eyes of the four-year-old on the path.

He did not, at the watch, weep.

He had not yet, for the women in the lean-to, anything to weep with. The weeping for them was a thing he was going to have to do later, in some other watch, in some other year, when he had the room.

He filed them.

He listened to the long slow breath of the pine around him, and to the small intermittent call of an owl on a higher branch, and to the small even breathing of the smith's son and the lame boy in the needles three paces off, and the night went on.