29: The Small Old Shrine

They stayed at the cold-spring camp three nights.

The third night was the night a small old shrine, that Heizi had not at first noticed, made itself known.

It was Tie-zhu who noticed it. The lame boy had, on the second day, walked the small open shoulder above the spring at his own slow pace — without his sandals, in the new slow careful walk he had been training on the upper paths — and had gone, at the second hour of the noon, into a small narrow draw between two outcrops of grey rock. He had come back out, perhaps a half hour later, and had said, in the small low voice he had been using:

"Brothers. There is — there is a thing in the draw. It is — it is small, and it is a man's making, and it is old."

They went together at the third hour of the noon.

The draw was narrow at its mouth. The two outcrops of grey rock at the entrance leaned in toward each other, almost touching at the top, with the narrow gap of about a hand-and-a-half between them at the highest point. The brush at the mouth of the draw was thicker than the brush at the open shoulder; it had not been disturbed, by the look of the small leaves, in many seasons. They went in slowly. Wang Er led, with the hammer's sling brought around to the front under his hand. Heizi was second. Tie-zhu, at his own pace, was third, with the small whittling knife — Lan-gu had, in the end, on the morning of departure, pressed it back into his palm at the door, with the small private remark that *the bird needed it*; he had taken it without protest — at his belt.

The draw narrowed to perhaps three paces wide. The walls of grey rock rose perhaps three men's heights at the inner end. The bottom of the draw, at the inner end, was a small flat place perhaps the size of a small house's floor, with a small shallow pool at the back where water trickled, very slowly, down a moss-streaked face of the rock from some hidden upper spring.

At the foot of the moss-streaked face stood a small old shrine.

It was perhaps two hands' height. It was made of three small flat field stones, set together as a small house — two side stones, and a small flat top stone laid across them. Inside the small house, on the back wall, was a small carved figure of a creature Heizi could not at first identify; the carving was old, with the small surface patina of stone that had been weathered by the small spring's mist for a long time. The figure was perhaps the height of a thumb. It had the small patient seated posture of a Buddhist figure — the legs folded, the hands at the lap — but the face had been worn nearly smooth, and Heizi could not, at this distance, make out features.

In front of the small house, on a small flat stone offering plate, were three small things: a single small dried plum, perhaps a year old; a small folded square of red cloth, very small, no larger than a fingernail; and a single small dark bead, of the kind a woman in the village wore on a thread for the small first month after a child's birth.

The bead was, by the small look of it, the same kind of bead Mei-er had given Heizi at his ninth year. Not the same bead. A different one. But the same kind.

He stood in the small flat place of the inner draw for a long time.

Wang Er, beside him, said, very low: *brothers, this is — *

"Yes."

"This is a small old shrine."

"Yes."

Tie-zhu, at the back, said, with the small steady voice he had had on the doorstone: "Brothers. Someone laid these things here. They laid them here within the last year. The plum is from last summer. The cloth is — the cloth has been here perhaps three months. The bead — I do not know."

Heizi looked at the bead.

He went, slowly, and knelt at the offering plate.

He did not touch the bead. He did not touch the cloth. He did not touch the plum.

He looked at the small carved figure on the back wall of the small house.

"Brothers."

"Yes."

"There is — there is someone who comes to this shrine."

"Yes."

"They come every few months. They lay something. They go."

"Yes."

He thought.

He thought about who, in this upper-hills country, would lay a single small fingernail-square of red cloth and a small dark woman's-bead and a single small dried plum at a small old roadside shrine. The cloth — red — was the small piece of cloth a woman of the country would tear off, perhaps, from the inner lining of a robe that had been her husband's, in some month when she had something to remember. The bead — a small first-month bead — was the bead a mother saved, perhaps, against the year of an infant's first illness, to lay at a shrine for the infant's safety. The plum — last summer's, dry, small — was the small offering of a household that had had only the small dry leftovers of a poor year to spare, and had spared what they could.

The shrine was being kept, by his count, by a poor woman with at least one small child in this country.

She lived close enough to walk to it. She came perhaps every few months. She had, in the past year, not had more than the small dry plum to offer.

He stood up.

"We will not take any of these."

"No," Wang Er said.

"We will not — we will not put anything on the plate. The plate is hers. We have nothing to give a household we cannot find."

"No," Wang Er said.

He paused.

"But we will leave the small thing of our own."

"Brother?"

Heizi reached into the inner pocket of his shirt. He took out, very carefully, the small finished indigo pouch his sister had sewn him.

He opened it.

He took out, slowly — without looking at the lock of dark hair, without looking at the small dried millet grain, without looking at the small folded square of pale yellow silk — only the small lock of dark hair.

He held it for a moment in his palm.

He thought.

He thought of his sister, sewing the pouch in the back room on the second afternoon in his foster father's house, with the small needle going in and out of the indigo cotton; he thought of the small lock of dark hair laid into the pouch by her hand, perhaps with the single bead of her foster mother's, perhaps with a single grain of millet from the morning's pot; he thought of the small careful presents a sister had laid for a brother to find on the chest at the foot of her mat at the dawn before the dawn she had walked out.

He thought of the small fingernail-square of red cloth on the offering plate, and of the woman in some unfound house in this country who had laid it.

He did not know, in any reliable way, whose hair the lock was — Mei-er's, his foster mother's, both. He had carried the not-knowing for some weeks now as a small inheritance.

He laid the small lock of dark hair, very gently, on the offering plate beside the small dark woman's-bead.

He laid it not as a marker. He laid it as a small contribution to the small old ledger the woman of the unfound house was keeping — a small additional name, in some small interior register of hers, that she would not know was on her plate but that would, by some small chance, lie there beside her own small offerings for some seasons before the small mist and the rain took it back into the country.

It was the small private burial of his sister he had not been able to give her at the lower field, where her grave had been filled by Wang Er and Old Lu the carpenter while Heizi had stood at the foot. It was not the burial he would have chosen. It was the burial that came to hand, on this afternoon, at this small old shrine, in the upper hills.

He stood up.

Wang Er, beside him, did not say anything. The smith's son had understood, by the small angle of Heizi's shoulders at the offering plate, what was being done; the smith's son had not, by the small low cough in his throat, been wholly steady about it.

Tie-zhu, at the back, was looking at the small dried plum on the plate. He had on his face the small still expression he had had at the carved horse on Ah Si's chest. He bowed once, slowly, toward the small house of stones.

The three of them stepped back.

They did not turn at the mouth of the draw.

They came back out, in the late afternoon light, into the small flat place above the cold spring, where the small fire ring was. They sat down at the ring. Wang Er, after a moment, brought out the small last piece of dried hare from the second day's cooking — a small thin strip he had, by some small economy, kept aside for this kind of moment. He cut the strip into three. He laid one piece in each of three wooden bowls Wei Da-niang had given them at her door, and he poured a small portion of cold spring water into each, and they ate the strip slowly with the cold water.

That night, on Heizi's watch, he sat for a long time looking up at the eastern sky.

He thought of his sister.

He thought of the small lock of dark hair on the offering plate.

He thought of the small unfound woman of the country, and of the small first-month bead her hand had laid down in some month of the past year, and of the small infant the bead had been laid for.

He thought: *the country is full of small ledgers of which I am not the keeper. The road keeps the small unfinished things. And the country, in its long silent way, keeps the small finished offerings that men and women laid down in years before I was on the road, and that lie on small old shrines in small narrow draws between two outcrops of grey rock, and that no one will ever find.*

He thought: *that is — that is the way it is. The country keeps. The keeping is not for me. I am only adding to the kept.*

He filed the thought.

In the morning, the three of them packed their bundles.

They left the cold-spring camp.

At the path's first turning above the small flat place, Heizi paused. He turned, very briefly, in the direction of the small narrow draw. He could not see the draw from the path; the brush had closed; the small old shrine was behind the rock and the brush and would be, by the slow patient measure of the upper hills, behind them now for the rest of their lives.

He bowed, very slightly, in its direction.

He turned and went on.

They walked north.

The country — through the rest of the third week and into the fourth — opened slowly. The paths grew thinner. The pine became thicker. The small old herders' paths began, at certain bends, to be supplanted by paths so faint they were only the small accumulating absence of brush along a contour. By the end of the fourth week they had not, for several days, seen a sign of any other human passage: no fresh ash in any fire ring, no fresh print of any sandal, no small marker of any small offering on any stone.

They had, by then, begun to fall into a kind of life.

The kind of life had a small daily shape. They woke before the second cock. They walked four hours before the noon. They ate at the noon — small portions of millet, supplemented by the wild greens Tie-zhu was now beginning to identify by name from the brush; Tie-zhu, who had been quiet on the road for some weeks, had come into a small specific authority on the upper hills' vegetation that the others had begun, without comment, to defer to. They walked four hours after the noon. They camped in some small flat place by some small spring. They laid snares. By the seventh week they were eating, on three nights of every five, a small portion of meat — usually hare, sometimes a small game bird Wang Er had taken with a stone.

Heizi, in this small slow daily shape, began to find a thing he had not found in any other interval of his life so far.

The thing was the small accumulating skill of a man at his work.

It was not the great work of a road. It was not the great work of a war. It was the small ordinary work of a young man learning, in a country that had received him, the small specific things — how to lay a snare in a hempen cord that was too thick; how to read the wet signs on a slope in the morning to know whether a hare had come down to the spring at dusk; how to bank a fire so that the embers would, by the second cock, still hold a small live coal under the ash; how to walk a slope at the slow pace that did not tire the body and yet covered the ground; how to listen, on a watch, to the shape of an upper-hills silence and tell whether the silence was the silence of an empty country or the silence of a country in which something was, at this hour, awake and watching.

The skill was small.

The skill, he understood — in the small unhurried way one understood things in the upper hills — was the foundation he had not, in his life so far, had time to lay.

He let himself lay it.

He did not, in the small unhurried weeks, write the foundation down. He did not need to. The foundation was in his hands.

By the seventh week, the spring was high. The hares had begun to lose their winter grey. The pines had put out their full year's growth. The cold spring at the small flat place above the slope where the small old shrine was — the small flat place they had, by the small accumulating sense of a camp's belonging, half-named in their heads, although they were no longer there — had been left some weeks behind. They were, by Heizi's reckoning, perhaps fifteen *li* north of it now, in a country that was no longer the upper foothills but the upper hills proper.

The country was beginning to slope down.

It was sloping down, by the small careful reading of the contours, into a wider valley they had not yet seen.

Heizi, on the seventh-week morning, paused at a small rise in the path and looked north.

Through a gap in the upper pines, perhaps three *li* below them, the wider valley showed itself.

It was wider than any valley they had seen in the upper hills. It had, at the bottom, a slow steady stream — the kind of stream that, by the look of the small flat haze above it in the morning's mist, ran year-round. It had, on the eastern side, a single thin column of smoke — high, thin, the small steady column of a hut's morning fire — rising perhaps two *li* off.

A hut.

He looked at the column of smoke for a long time.

He did not, at the rise, hurry. He had learned, by seven weeks in the upper hills, that the upper hills did not reward hurry. He stood and looked.

The smoke was thin. The smoke was the smoke of a banked fire of a small household — not the thicker smoke of charcoal-burning, not the thicker smoke of a kitchen fire at a meal-time, only the thin morning smoke of a household waking. The household was — by the look of the column, which neither faltered nor thickened in the time he watched — competent. The household had laid its banked fire correctly the night before. The household was — he understood — old, or careful, or both.

Wang Er came up beside him.

The smith's son looked.

"Brother."

"Yes."

"That column."

"Yes."

"That is the column the man with the lame mule drew."

"It might be."

"He said three streams and a pine grove."

"Yes."

"There is — there is one stream so far. We have not — "

"We have not yet seen the others. They will be in the wider valley. The pine grove is on the eastern side, by the smoke. The lower contours run along it. The streams come down to it. We will see."

He thought.

"We will go down today. We will not approach the hut. Not today. We will sleep tonight in the upper line of the valley, at the lip. We will look. We will watch. Tomorrow morning at the first cock, if the hut is what the man with the lame mule said, I will go down alone."

Wang Er nodded.

Tie-zhu, who had come up at his own pace, looked at the smoke. He did not, at the rise, say anything for a long beat. Then he said, in the small low voice:

"Brothers. The old scholar."

"Yes," Heizi said.

"If he is — if he is who the man with the lame mule said he is. If he takes us in. If — "

He did not finish.

Heizi laid one hand once on the lame boy's shoulder.

He did not say anything.

The three of them turned, slowly, away from the rise, and began the long slow descent down through the upper pines toward the wider valley with the single thin column of smoke at its eastern edge.

The descent took the rest of the day.

By dusk they were at the lip of the wider valley, in a small dry place behind a thicker stand of pine, where the smoke of the hut — perhaps a *li* below them now, half-hidden in the eastern stand — was visible only as a faint thin white against the soft blue evening sky.

They slept.

They did not light a fire.

They watched.