Chapter 306: Her Country

The dry ground ended at the post and did not come back.

By the middle of the morning the track was a raised line of mud with water on both sides of it, and the bamboo had given way to grey trees standing in their own reflections. Nothing moved except insects. The heat came down and sat on the water and the water gave it back.

Qingluo stopped after an hour, took a flat tin out of her sleeve, and put a wad of green leaf into her own mouth first. Then she held the tin out.

“Under the tongue, not chewed,” she said. “It’ll go numb from the jaw down and you’ll hate it. Spit it out when I spit mine.”

Xuan took the leaf and put it under his tongue. His mouth went cold within twenty paces and his teeth stopped feeling like his own, and he decided that asking what it was would be a worse use of the day than not knowing.

[ I can tell you it isn’t killing you,] Mira said. [ That’s the entire report. There’s no panel for a leaf.]

‘You’ve got a bestiary.’

[ I’ve got a bestiary, which covers things with a heartbeat, and it’s been no use to me since the post.] She sounded genuinely irritated about it. [ Every dangerous thing in this country is a plant, a pool or a smell, and I can’t read any of them. You’re going to have to do this the old way.]

‘Which way is that?’

[ You listen to the short woman and you do as you’re told.]

At noon she stopped at a pool of water so clear he could count the stones in it, took his wrist before he’d moved, and held it.

“That one,” she said. “Look at the edge.”

There was a grey line around the pool where the stones were paler than the ones under the surface. Beyond that he had nothing.

“The water’s clean.”

“The water’s empty. Nothing lives in it, nothing grows at the edge, and nothing has drunk from it since the rain.” She let go of his wrist. “The house calls this sort sweet water, which was somebody’s idea of a joke about two hundred years ago. Half a cup will have you on your back in an hour.”

Forty paces on, she crouched at a brown pool with a skin on it and a dead frog turning at the edge, filled a tube, ran a strip of cloth through it and watched the colour.

“This one you can drink.”

“The one with the frog in it.”

“The frog is the reason. Things live in it, which means nothing in the ground under it is strong enough to stop them.” She stoppered the tube and put it away. “Clear water in this valley means something upstream is winning.”

He filled both skins from the brown pool while she watched him do it, and drank, and the water tasted of leaf mould and was perfectly fine.

By the middle of the afternoon he had stopped asking.

It went like this: she walked, and he walked where she had walked. Twice she took them twenty paces off the line for no reason he could see. Once she stood still for a full minute in front of a fallen trunk, then stepped over it in a particular place and told him to put his foot exactly there.

He did it. It was not a comfortable way to spend a day.

He had been, for four years, the most dangerous thing in any place he happened to be standing. Down here he was a man who couldn’t tell which puddle would kill him, being led along a mud bank by somebody who came up to his collarbone, and the only thing his entire art was good for was carrying the bags.

‘This is a very strange feeling.’

[ It’s called being out of your depth, and I’d stop enjoying it if I were you, because we’re not even at the bad part.]

He made his one mistake at the fourth hour.

The track narrowed and a stand of reeds had grown across it, and he did what he’d have done anywhere else in the world and pushed them aside with the back of his hand.

“Stop walking,” Qingluo said, without looking round.

“It was a reed.”

“It was a reed with a red edge on the stem. Give me the hand.”

The hand had already gone stiff from the knuckles to the wrist by the time she had it. She turned it over, looked at the line across the back of it, and made a noise that was more interested than worried.

“How bad?” he said.

“You’ll lose the hand for about six hours and get it back. If it had been your face I’d be more entertaining about it.” She had a cloth out and something on the cloth, and she wrapped the hand tight enough to hurt. “The stem doesn’t need to break the skin. It’s on the outside of the plant and it goes through sweat.”

“You could have told me that.”

“I did tell you. On the second morning, at the post, when I told you not to touch anything.” She tied the cloth off. “You heard me and you filed it as advice.”

She was right, and he had, and he shut up about it.

After that he stopped moving his own hands. He put them where she said, he stepped where she stepped, and when she stopped he stopped without asking why, and somewhere in the middle of that the day got easier.

The thing came out of the reeds an hour later, on the left, moving fast and low, and it was the size of a pig and had too many teeth for its head.

Xuan killed it without thinking. Cloud Step, one turn, Awakening Dragon from the low guard, and the animal went past him into the mud with its neck open and did not get up.

He was still cleaning the blade when he realised she hadn’t moved and hadn’t spoken.

“That was a mud hog,” Qingluo said. “It eats roots. It was running away from us.”

There was no good answer to that, so he didn’t make one.

“And now there’s a dead animal bleeding into water that runs the same way we’re walking.” She came up beside him and looked at it. “Whatever’s downstream of here spends tonight at that carcass instead of asleep, and we’re downstream of here.”

“How much does that cost us?”

“An hour, maybe. We go around and camp high.” She was already turning. “I’m not angry at you. You did what you’re for. It’s just that this is the one country where what you’re for is usually the wrong answer, and the wrong answer arrives very fast with you.”

“When is it the right one?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “You’ll get about four minutes of it and I’ll need every second.”

They came up out of the wet at dusk, onto a spur of higher ground with trees on it that were still alive, and that was where she stopped and let him look.

The land in front of them fell away in a wide bowl half a mile across, and nothing grew on the sides of it. The trees at the rim were standing and dead, bark gone, branches bare. At the bottom, a long way down, water lay in a flat brown sheet with no edge to it.

There was no birdsong. He had not noticed it stopping.

Air came up out of the bowl in a slow drift, warm on his face, and it carried a smell that was sweet at the front and had something underneath it that made the back of his throat close.

“Breathe out,” Qingluo said. “All the way out, and then a small one in. Don’t take a big one to make up for it.”

He did what she said, and it worked, and the closing feeling let go.

She sat down on a root and took her hat off, and her hair was stuck to her forehead, and it was the first time all day she had looked tired.

“We camp here,” she said. “We go down at first light, because it’s coolest then and the air off that water is heaviest at noon.” She pointed at a pale line about a third of the way down the far slope. “That’s the shelf. That’s where we work.”

Xuan looked at the shelf, and at the brown water below it, and at the dead standing trees, and understood that he had absolutely no idea what he was going to be fighting.

“You’ll tell me tonight,” he said.

“I’ll tell you tonight, and you’re going to want to argue with the plan.” She put the hat back on over her eyes and lay down on the root. “Wake me when the food’s hot. You’re not to touch anything while I’m asleep.”