Chapter 57: The Walk of Return

The question of what to do with three hundred men who had been caught carrying other people’s lives was settled in the Sect Master’s hall, at a table with a very bad leg, on a cold gray morning in the ninth week of winter.

It was not a long meeting. Yun Zhenyuan did not believe in long meetings. He sat in his plain wooden chair with his big hands folded and his gray head slightly bowed, and listened. The Registrar, Elder Fang, spoke first, in a dry, careful, upright voice, with a ledger in his lap. He said that there were three hundred and four prisoners. He said that they were all, by the standards of the Southern Border’s Covenant, subject to the penalty of death. He said that he had counted the cost of keeping them, which was considerable, and the cost of killing them, which was, in his view, not worth the rope.

"I should be glad," he said stiffly, "if someone would suggest something better."

No one did.

Then Gu spoke. He had been sitting by the wall with his arms folded and his sword across his knees, looking at the floor, and he did not raise his head.

"I held a gate for two years," he said, "with thirty thousand men. I buried eleven thousand. I know what it is to look at a man who has done a terrible thing and to think, there is nothing in him that I can use." His dark eyes lifted. "I was wrong about a good many of them. Not all. But enough."

"They are Blood-Blade," said Yun Tianxiao, rather hotly, from the other side. "They took..."

"I know what they took."

The room was quiet.

"There are eleven thousand, seven hundred and twelve people," said Li Xuan slowly, from the foot of the table, "who are sleeping. I do not think that I can wake them alone. I do not know the road. I do not know the faces. I do not know the villages, or what to say to the mothers." He looked at the Sect Master. "But there are three hundred men who took them. And each of them knows exactly where he went."

Yun Zhenyuan raised his head.

"You would send them back," he said.

"I should like them to carry what they took, and give it home. Each to his own village. On foot. With their own hands." He drew a breath. "And to say what it is that they did. To the one they did it to."

"They will be killed."

"Some of them, perhaps."

"They will run."

"I do not think so." Li Xuan’s voice was very quiet. "They cannot. The pearls will not let them. A man who carries what is not his grows heavier with every step away from the place it belongs. But a man who carries it toward home grows lighter." He paused. "It is only a small trick of the Stair. I wrote it on the ninety-ninth slip."

The Sect Master looked at him for a long time.

Then, slowly, very slowly, something moved in that tired, gentle, weathered old face. It might have been a smile. It might have been the shadow of one that had not yet been born.

"The sect owes you a mountain," said Yun Zhenyuan. "I should like to owe you a little more."

They left on the sixth day.

It was a very strange procession.

It formed in the frozen yard of the First Terrace in the first gray light before dawn, and it was neither a march nor a convoy nor a funeral. It was a long, slow, silent column of men in plain gray cloth, three hundred and four of them, in ragged files, each with a small silk bundle held in both hands against his chest, as a man holds a very young child. They had burned their black-and-red robes in the courtyard the night before. They had been given gray hempen smocks and straw sandals by the sect’s stores. They looked, in that cold light, like something between monks and beggars, shaven-headed, bare-armed, bareheaded, with their breath going up in white clouds and their faces closed.

At their head stood Xue Wuya.

He was a different man. The red beard was gone. He had cut it off himself, with a kitchen knife, on the first night, and sat in the dark for an hour holding the pieces. Without the pearls, his Core Formation had gone like smoke, and what remained was only a heavy, aging, broad-shouldered man with a scarred sullen face and a pair of hands that did not know what to do with themselves. He carried a single bundle. It was a very small one. He held it as though it were burning him.

Behind them, at the gate, the sect had come out to watch.

They stood in their blue robes in the frozen mud, three hundred and eleven of them, and said nothing. A few of the younger ones had been crying. Old Mo had come up the mountain from his post at the foot of the stair, with a sack on his back and a stick in his hand, and he stood at the end of the line with his filmy eyes fixed on nothing, and when Li Xuan came up beside him, he said, quite clearly, to the sky: "Good."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said it is good." He turned his creased brown face. "He told me that you would send them home."

"The last custodian?"

"A poor sweeper," said Old Mo, "and a very good liar." He held out the sack. "Pine-cones. They are for the road. They are very good for fires."

Li Xuan took it, gravely.

No one else was left to say goodbye to. Yun Zhenyuan had come down to the gate, in his faded blue robe, with a small bundle in his hand, and he stood a long time looking at the long gray column. Then he turned to his son.

"You will go," he said.

"Father..."

"You will go with the custodian to the Platform. You will carry the sect’s seal, and the sect’s note, and the sect’s name." He put the bundle into the young man’s hand. It was a small, round, plain bronze seal, black with age, with a single cloud carved on its face. "I have kept it for thirty years in a drawer, because I thought it was too heavy for me." His blue-gray eyes were very steady. "It is not too heavy for you."

Yun Tianxiao stared at it.

"I have a goat to settle with," he said, very hoarsely.

"I should think that you have a great deal more." The Sect Master’s mouth curved. He laid a hand on his son’s shoulder, and then, quite suddenly, pulled him into a rough, brief, awkward embrace. "Do not be killed," he said. "It would upset your mother."

"Mother is dead, Father."

"She would still be upset."

Guo Qing, standing a little way off with a pack on his back and a very large rice cake in his fist, was crying openly and without shame.

The first stop was Stone Fold.

It was four days away, down the long southern road, in a shallow valley between two bare brown ridges, and it was not a village that anyone would have chosen to visit. It was a straggle of low, mud-walled houses around a dry well, with a thin gray line of sheep on the hill and a smell of dung and smoke. Nothing grew there but thorn. A woman beating a mat on a doorstep saw the procession coming over the ridge, three hundred gray-clad men in a long silent line, and dropped the mat, and began to run.

"They have come back," Lu Zhi said.

He was the young man from the stair. He was walking at Li Xuan’s side, in the cold gray light, with twelve small phials in a silk bundle against his chest and a fixed, white, glazed expression, like a man walking to his own hanging. He had not said a word in four days. He had eaten when he was told to, and slept when he was told to, and walked. At the top of the last ridge, he had stopped dead, and looked down, and said in a thin, strange voice: "That is it. That is the house. The one with the green door."

"Which of them is the boy’s?"

"The... the third phial." He swallowed. "It was... I took it in the autumn. From the hill. He was minding his father’s goats. I said that I would only borrow..." His voice died.

"Come," said Li Xuan.

They went down together, with the procession halting behind them on the ridge.

The house with the green door was the poorest of them all. It stood at the far end of the straggle, against the hill, with a broken fence and a pen of three lean goats, and a woman in the doorway. She was thin and bent and not yet old. She had a patched shawl over her head, and her face, thin and brown and drawn with a long, steady, patient exhaustion, was turned toward the strangers with a look of dull, braced, familiar fear.

"We have nothing," she said, before they had reached the gate. "I paid the tithe. I paid the Blood-Blade’s tithe in the spring. I have nothing left."

"We are not tax-collectors," said Li Xuan gently.

She looked at him. She looked at the young man at his side in the gray smock, with the bundle in his arms. And her thin face changed, very slowly, as the face of a person changes who has seen a thing in a dream and finds it standing on her doorstep.

"You," she said.

Lu Zhi dropped to his knees in the dust.

"I took him," he said. His voice shook so badly that it was hardly a voice at all. "The boy. Your boy. I took a piece of him, in the autumn, on the hill. I said that I was only going to take a little. I said it would not hurt. I was told that he would not mind."

The woman did not move.

"He has not been well," she said, at last, in a dry flat voice. "Since then. He lies in the straw. He does not play. He does not speak. He looks at me, sometimes, as if he does not know me, and then he goes to sleep." She drew a long, shuddering breath. "I thought that it was a fever. I took him to the physician in the next valley, and he said that it was a wasting of the spirit, and that there was nothing to be done."

"I have brought it back," said Lu Zhi.

He held out the silk bundle in both shaking hands.

She stared at it. She stared at the small red phial that he drew out of the folds, with its wax seal and its warm, faint, living glow. And then her hand came up, very slowly, with a long, white, bony finger extended, and she touched it, and a small gasp, like a cry, came out of her.

"It is warm," she said.

"It is his."

"How... how do I..."

"I do not know." Lu Zhi’s face was working. "I do not know how. I only know that it has to go back to him. I do not know how."

"I do," said Aunt Liu.

She had come up behind them, silently, with her medicine-box on her arm and her seamed old face set in lines of grim kindness. She did not look at Lu Zhi. She looked at the woman, and she said, in a voice that was brusque and steady and utterly without pity or contempt: "Take me to the boy."

He lay on a pile of straw, in the back room, under a quilt of patched sacking.

He was about ten. He was a thin, brown, quiet boy, with a thatch of black hair and long dark lashes, and his hands, lying outside the quilt, were small and gray and still. His breath came very softly. He looked, Li Xuan thought, like a candle that someone had set down in a draft and forgotten.

Aunt Liu knelt beside him. She laid two fingers on his wrist, and her face did not change. She looked at the phial in the woman’s hand.

"The blood, and the breath," she said quietly. "Not through the mouth. Through the heart. Bring me a cup of warm water."

It took a long moment.

Then, at her direction, with a pair of silver tweezers and a steady old hand, she broke the wax seal on the phial, and tipped it, drop by drop, into the cup of warm water. The red threads twisted and glowed. They did not look like blood. They looked like a very small light, swimming. And as the last drop fell, a small clear voice, as thin as a reed, came out of the cup, and said: Mama?

The woman made a sound that Li Xuan would remember for the rest of his life.

"Now," said Aunt Liu.

She put the cup to the boy’s lips.

He drank it in three small swallows. There was a long, long silence. The gray hands on the quilt twitched. A faint, delicate, rose-colored flush came creeping up from the base of the thin brown throat, and spread over the cheeks, and the black lashes fluttered, and lifted.

He looked at the ceiling. He looked at the thin old woman beside him with the silver tweezers. He looked at his mother’s face.

"Mama," said the boy, in a small, rusty, astonished voice. "I had a dream about a goat."

His mother put both hands over her mouth and began to sob.

Li Xuan went outside.

He did not want to stay. He stood in the cold bare yard of the house with the green door, in the thin winter light, with his broom on his shoulder, and looked at the dry brown hills. Behind him, he heard the sound of a boy’s weak voice asking for something to eat, and a woman’s laughter breaking, and breaking, and breaking.

Lu Zhi came out after a little while.

He was very pale. He had not been struck. He had not been cursed. The woman had not so much as looked at him, once, since she lifted her son in her arms. But he stood in the yard with his empty hands hanging at his sides, and a thin, clear, bright track of wetness down his cheek.

"She said," he whispered, "that I might stay till the water boiled. For the tea. She said that I might wash my hands."

"That is a great deal."

"I do not deserve it."

"No." Li Xuan did not look at him. "But I do not think that it is a thing that one earns. I think that it is a thing that one is given, and then spends the rest of one’s life trying to be worth."

Lu Zhi was silent.

A long way off, over the ridge, the gray column of three hundred men stood in the cold wind, waiting, in the stiff, desolate, tentative silence of penitents who have just seen what it is that they must do three hundred times.

He wiped his eyes. He straightened his thin shoulders. And he said, in a voice that was still husky, but a good deal more steady than it had been: "There is a village twelve li east of here. It is called Black Willow. I took something from a widow."

"Then we had better go."

"Yes," said Lu Zhi. "I think we had."