4: A Map of Three Days

The morning was bright, which was an offense.

Heizi had not believed, until that morning, that weather could be cruel. He had heard old men say so. He had heard Old Zhang once, in a year of late frost, look up at a perfect blue sky over a field of black wheat and say, *the sky has a kind of cruelty in it that we do not have the language for*; and Heizi had nodded then in the way a boy nods at the long talk of an old man, and had not understood. He understood now.

The sky over the village was clean. The clouds that had threatened all of yesterday had drawn off in the small hours; the rain that had been owed had been deferred, like a debt the world had decided not to call in just yet. A mild south wind moved in the bare branches of the persimmon tree at the edge of the lower field. The wind smelled of mud and of the first of the spring greens — the small bitter mustards, the tender heads of wild garlic — that were beginning to break through in the places where the snow had gone first.

It was, by the village's reckoning, the kind of morning a young man would normally wake into with quiet pleasure: a morning that promised, for the first time since the heavy snows, that the year would in fact turn.

Heizi went to the well with his water gourd at the hour the dog stretched.

He went because Mei-er would have gone, and Mei-er, this morning, was not going. He did not say to himself, *I will go to the well in her place, because I do not want her to walk past Wang the smith's house, and past Old Cui's, and past the persimmon tree, and past every doorway behind which there will be eyes that know what is on a slip with a white cord*. He did not say it because to say it would have been to acknowledge, in language, what he was protecting her from, and to acknowledge it would have been to confirm that there was nothing left to protect her from anymore, that the protection was already too late. He went to the well. He carried the gourd. The dog came as far as the gate and turned back.

The well was at the eastern edge of the village's small open square. It had been dug, in the second year of Da-ye, by a work party of which Old Zhang and Old Cui and Old Lu and Wang the smith's father had all been members. The names of the diggers were not recorded — peasants did not record themselves; villages did not commission monuments — but the well had, for those who had been alive in Da-ye two, a certain quality of being theirs, of having been pulled up out of the earth by their own hands. Heizi liked the well. He had liked it since he was small. The stone coping had been laid by Old Cui's now-dead older brother, who had been a stonemason in his youth, and the coping ran clean and even all the way around with not a single chipped place, which was a thing the brother had been proud of and which Old Cui still pointed out to visitors who did not know to look.

The square was nearly empty. There were two old women drawing at the far side of the well, their wooden buckets set on the coping. They saw Heizi come. They did not speak to him. They drew, and tied their buckets, and lifted them onto carrying poles, and walked away with the careful tread of women who had been carrying water on poles for fifty years and who did not need to look down at the ground in order to know where their feet were going.

One of them, the older of the two, the widow of Old Lu's brother — eighty if she was a day, with the dry voice of someone who had not laughed in a long time — turned at the corner of the square and looked back. She looked at Heizi. She looked at him with the particular wordless heaviness of a woman who has buried two daughters at the canal in two different years and has lived, since the second of these, in the kind of mourning that cannot be put off because it has nowhere to be put. She nodded, very slightly. He nodded, very slightly. She turned and went on.

He drew his water. He drew slowly, because to draw slowly was to stay in the square a little longer, and to stay in the square was to be where he could see the whole village around him and let his mind, which was working without him, work.

He thought first about the road.

There were three roads out of the village. The southern road went to the magistracy and was not a road; it was a trap. The eastern road went to the canal crossroads at which, in two days, the corvée column would gather; it was not a road either, on this morning; it was a future already closed. The western road went down to the river ford and from there, in many small branchings, to the larger world: north along the river to a town Heizi had never seen called Yizhou; west into the low hills where there were said to be bandits; northwest, by a path Old Zhang had once described to him in passing as a young man's path, into the foothills of the Henan mountains, where there were villages so small the magistracy had no clerks for them, where the records kept were those of the villages themselves, where a young man who walked into one with a strong back and a quiet mouth and no accent the locals could place might, with luck, be allowed to live for a while without being asked who he was.

It was not a great choice. It was a choice.

He thought next about the time.

He had said to himself, last night, that they would go on the second night, before the third day. The second night was tomorrow night. The third day was the day of the corvée column at the eastern crossroads. He had reasoned that the second night was correct because the patrols, if there were patrols, would be set on the third night and not before. He had reasoned this in the dark, with the bead between his fingers, and his reasoning had been right.

But Mei-er had folded the robe last night, with the dried sweet flag, and had put it back into the chest, and had blown out the lamp.

Heizi understood the meaning of the folded robe in a way he had refused, all night, to understand.

If he went on the second night, he would not be in time.

He had to go on this night. He had to go tonight.

He set the gourd on the coping. He stood with his hands on the stone. The stone was cold. The cold went up through his palms into his wrists and the bones of his forearms. The cold helped.

Tonight.

Three boys plus himself. Four was already too many for this kind of road. Three was the right number for a road like this, but he could not be a party of three; Wang Er was on the male list, and to leave Wang Er behind was to leave him to the canal, and the canal had taken Wang Er's brother in the first year and would take Wang Er in the second, and Wang Er knew this and Heizi knew this and there was no longer any conversation about it. So four. Four would have to do.

Four boys. The smith's son. The carpenter's lame nephew. The orphan from the woodshed. Himself.

And the girl?

He stood for a long moment with his hands on the cold coping.

He could not think about the girl. He could think about everything except the girl. The shape of the path, the speed of the patrols, the rations they could carry, the rivers they would have to cross — all of it would yield, in his head, to thought. The girl would not yield to thought. The girl was a thing in his head that, when he turned his attention toward her, opened up like a hole the bottom of which he could not see.

He left her aside, for the moment.

It was not — he was already old enough to feel ashamed of this — what a brother should do.

He picked up the gourd. He went to find Wang Er.

The forge was the second house from the well on the eastern road, the door of which faced the well across the small square. It had been Wang the smith's father's forge, and his grandfather's before that. The fire in it had been damped in the morning rather than banked overnight — Heizi could tell by the color of the smoke at the chimney; banked smoke was thinner, more tired. The hammer had been ringing for an hour by the time he came up. It rang slow. It rang the rhythm of a man with no particular work to do, who was beating a piece of iron longer than the piece of iron needed to be beaten, because the hammer was the only place his hands could go.

Wang the smith stood at the anvil. His shirt was wet at the back with the sweat of the bellows and the morning. He saw Heizi at the doorway. He did not greet him. He turned his head toward the back room and lifted his chin once, the small motion of a man dispatching a child to a place he himself could not go.

Heizi went past him to the back of the forge.

Wang Er was at the small charcoal pile, weighing a basket of broken charcoal in one hand and shifting it with the other onto a flat tray. He had been doing this for most of an hour. Heizi could tell because the tray was perhaps a third full and Wang Er's hands had the slow steadiness of hands that have been told, by their owner, to keep moving. Wang Er's eyes, when he looked up and saw Heizi, did not change expression. They did not need to. They had had the whole night to settle into the expression they now wore.

"I am to go," Wang Er said, before Heizi had spoken.

"Yes."

"My brother went. He did not come."

"I know."

Wang Er set the broken charcoal down. He did it carefully. Wang Er did most things carefully; his slowness was the slowness of a man whose hands had been trained to put a hammer down with the same thoughtfulness with which they had picked it up.

"There is a thing my mother said to me this morning. Before the first cock." Wang Er's voice was low, even by Wang Er's standards. "She came into the back of the forge while my father was lighting the fire. She was wearing only her sleeping robe. I have not seen her wear only her sleeping robe outside of her own room since I was a child. She said: *do not let the second son be the second loss.*"

Heizi waited. The forge smelled of charcoal and of iron and of the sweet animal smell of the smith's sweat, which was the smell of a life of work, and which Heizi associated, irreducibly, with safety, because in this room nothing went wrong and everything had a measurement and the fire could be made to do whatever was asked of it.

"I have thought about it," Wang Er said. "I have thought about it until my head hurt. Most of last night."

"Yes."

"I will not go."

There was a long pause. Heizi had not known, until this moment, that he had been afraid Wang Er would go. That Wang Er would have gone, because Wang Er was the kind of son a smith trained, because Wang Er was honorable in the way of slow honest men who repay debts and pay levies and do what is asked. He had been afraid all night that he would come into this forge and find Wang Er packing rice for ten days into a hempen sack. The pause was the moment in which his fear of that thing emptied out of him. The emptying took perhaps the space of three breaths. He had not felt it filling him until it left.

"Where," Heizi said.

"Hebei is full of mountains east of here," Wang Er said. "I do not know which. I have never been past the next village."

"I have not either."

"Then we will not know together."

Heizi felt, for the second time in two days, the inside of his chest become wider, as if something had moved aside to make room for something else. The first time had been at the persimmon tree before he knew there was a persimmon tree to think of. This was the second.

"Tonight," he said.

"Tonight?"

"Tonight. Not the second night. Tonight."

Wang Er did not ask him why. He looked at Heizi for a long moment. He understood. He understood, perhaps, in the same way Old Zhang had understood; he had a sister too, and a mother who had spoken to him in her sleeping robe in the dark, and he was not so slow that the meaning of *tonight* needed to be spelled out for him.

"Then I will be ready," Wang Er said.

"There will be three of us. Maybe four."

"Who are the three?"

"You. Me. Tie-zhu, the carpenter's lame nephew. The patrols will not chase a lame boy as far as us, and his family will not stop him. I will speak to him today."

"And the fourth?"

"Ah Si," Heizi said.

Wang Er thought. He thought with the visible thinking of a man pushing a thought up a small hill. The thought was not difficult, but he wanted to handle it carefully. "Ah Si is twelve. Maybe thirteen."

"He is twelve, possibly thirteen. I do not know. Neither does he. Neither did his mother, who could not count the years past five and is dead anyway. He is small."

"He will slow us."

"He will eat very little. He has been eating very little for two years. He sleeps in the carpenter's woodshed. The carpenter is feeding him at the rate of a chicken. If we do not take him, he will be on this road in some other month with no one to take him at all."

Wang Er nodded slowly. "He is fast."

"He is fast."

"Then four."

"Four," Heizi said.

He was about to turn. Wang Er stopped him with the smallest motion of his hand, a hand whose flat palm had been raised perhaps a finger's width above the level of the charcoal tray.

"Heizi."

"Yes."

"Your sister."

Heizi did not speak.

Wang Er watched his face for one long beat. He did not press it. He never pressed; pressing was not a thing a slow man with a hammer did to anyone. He had asked the question only because he had owed it. He had owed it because his own sister, Wang Hua, was on the white-cord slip too, and he had thought all night about how to ask her, and had not asked, and was not going to ask, and was going to leave her behind on this road because there was no road on which he could take her — he was a boy of seventeen with a hammer and no money and no plan, and his sister was a girl who had been promised to a young farmer in the next valley, and the road that they would take, if they took her, would be the road of two children in flight, and the children of seventeen and sixteen who flee together do not survive the first winter unless they walk into a story Wang Er did not believe in. He had decided, somewhere in the long hours before dawn, that he would leave his sister at his house with his mother and his father, and his mother and his father would do what they could, which was nothing, and the girl would be on the road to the canal in three days. He had not told his mother he had decided this. He did not need to. His mother had not asked.

His mother had not said *take her with you*. She had said *do not let the second son be the second loss*. The omission was the instruction.

He understood, watching Heizi's face, that Heizi had been making the same calculation all night and had reached, in some way he could not yet articulate, a different answer; and that the different answer was not yet visible to Heizi himself; and that whatever Heizi was about to do, or fail to do, in the next twelve hours, was going to be the founding act of the man he was about to become.

Wang Er did not envy him.

"Tell me when," Wang Er said. "I will be ready. I will bring my father's hammer."

"Bring nothing that is not necessary."

"The hammer is necessary."

Heizi looked at him. Wang Er did not blink. The hammer had been Wang Er's grandfather's; it had been his father's; it would have been Wang Er's the year he came of age. To leave it on the road was, in some sense Wang Er would have struggled to put into words, to leave the lineage of the forge in the road, and Wang Er would not do that. He would not say so. He had said, *the hammer is necessary*. He meant: *I cannot become a man without an inheritance. Let me carry the only inheritance I have on my back. It will weigh me. I will carry it.*

"The hammer," Heizi said.

"The hammer."

"Bring it."

Heizi stepped out of the back of the forge into the morning. Wang the smith was at the anvil. He did not turn. The hammer rang once, slow and unnecessary, and then again. Heizi went past him without speaking. Wang the smith, behind him, said something that was not a word — only a sound in the throat, the kind of sound a man makes when he has just decided not to weep in his own forge — and the hammer rang again, and the sound carried across the small square, and the old women at the well, who had come back with a second pair of buckets, paused and looked toward the forge for one breath and then went on drawing.

Heizi went into the noon light.

He did not look at the sky. He kept his eyes on the road, on the dust the riders had ridden into and out of yesterday, which was no longer dust because the south wind was drying it back into the road.

He began, without knowing he was beginning, the first map of his life.

The map was made entirely in his head.

The eastern crossroads, in two days at the hour of the dragon: the place we will not be. The southern road: the trap. The western road, by the river ford, north along the river to Yizhou: too obvious; the riders go by it; refused. The path Old Zhang had once described as a young man's path, northwest into the foothills of Henan: the path. By the bean fields; over the low ridge; down to the small stream that the patrols thought uncrossable in winter, which Old Zhang had told Heizi, once, was crossable two stones above the great willow because the bottom there was gravel and not mud; up the far bank; into the brush of the foothills; from there, if they walked at night and slept in the days for the first three days, they could be eight or nine *li* from the village by the third dawn, and the patrols, which would be looking on the obvious roads, would not look for them in the brush of foothills which had not been reported as a place that people went.

He thought about food. Old Zhang would have to know to give them food. Old Zhang already knew; Heizi understood, in the same way he understood many things on this morning, that the conversation with Old Zhang was already settled and would happen tonight only as a brief practical exchange, the way old soldiers brief young ones who they have already accepted will go.

He thought about Tie-zhu. He went to find Tie-zhu.

He thought about Ah Si. He would find Ah Si in the woodshed at the noon hour, when the carpenter's wife sometimes left out a small bowl of millet for the boy. He would speak to him there.

He thought about the moon. The moon was at the third quarter; it would set perhaps three hours before dawn; the last hours of the night would be dark, which was useful.

He thought about Mei-er.

He thought of her sitting, last night, in the dark just on the other side of the curtain. He thought of her saying, *Father*. He thought of the folded robe.

He thought: *I will tell her tonight. I will go through the curtain and I will sit on the floor by her mat and I will tell her what we are doing, and I will tell her she is to come, and I will tell her there is no longer any conversation about it.*

He thought it. He thought it all the way along the road. He thought it as he found Tie-zhu by the carpenter's woodpile and spoke to him quietly under the eaves of the shed, and as the lame boy's eyes filled and did not spill, and as Tie-zhu nodded and said only, *I will come, big brother*, although he was a year older than Heizi and had never called him that before. Heizi thought it as he went past the persimmon tree without looking at the persimmon tree, with his eyes on the line where his shoulder ended and the bareness began, so that the tree was at the edge of his vision but not in it. He thought it as the sun came over the noon. He thought it again, more quietly, in the early afternoon, when the shape of the day had begun to thin.

He thought it.

He did not yet know that thinking it was not the same as doing it, and that of all the failures of his life the failure he was about to enact in the next four hours was the failure he would not, in the half-century that remained to him, ever quite forgive himself for.

He went home with a map in his head and a map only.

The persimmon tree, at the edge of the lower field, stood with all its bare branches lifted toward a sky that had stayed bright through the noon and was beginning, at last, in the first hour of the afternoon, to draw a slow pale grey across itself from the north — a grey that was not yet a cloud, that was only a thinning, a paleness, a small slow gathering of weather that the south wind had been holding off and had, just now, begun to let through.

The dog at the gate of his foster father's house lifted its head as he came up. It saw him. It did not bark. It set its head back down on its paws and watched him pass into the courtyard, where Mei-er was at the brazier, kneeling, with her back to him, drawing water from a small clay jar into a smaller clay bowl, her movements still and even and unhurried, a girl preparing the noon meal of a household in the village in the third year of a reign, on a day in the third moon, in a year that was, by any measure the village kept, an ordinary day.

He did not know it was the last time he would see her alive.

He sat in the doorway and he did not speak.

He did not speak, and the south wind came up across the courtyard, and the small slow paleness in the sky drew on, and the persimmon tree, at the edge of the lower field, stood as it had stood through every season of his life — bare-branched, patient, faithful to the year, waiting for the rain to come.