Chapter 58: The Return Road

They returned four hundred and eleven pearls in the first nine days.

It was slow. It was a good deal slower than anyone had expected. The villages of the Southern Border lay scattered across a hundred li of dry, broken, wind-scoured country, in hollows and folds and the lee of ridges, and the people who lived in them were not, as a rule, glad to see a column of gray-clad strangers coming over the hill. They closed their doors. They hid their children. They sent out an elder, with a stick and a stony face, to ask in a hard flat voice what the strangers wanted.

The strangers said what they had come to say.

It was not always easy. In a hamlet called Three Pines, the elder was a one-eyed man of seventy, who listened to the whole of Chen Bao’s halting confession in utter silence, and then said: "Put it on the ground, and go away." In another, a woman threw a bucket of dung. In a third, a young man in a leather apron spat in the face of the first disciple who offered him a pearl, and shouted that he would sooner see his brother in his grave than take his soul back from a Blood-Blade.

He was crying, as he said it.

Li Xuan did not argue. He had not come to argue. He took the young man’s insult and the pearl together, and carried it away, and left in its place a small clay jar of green tea and a note, in the Founder’s hand, that said simply: When you are ready, it will be waiting. And two days later, a boy came running after the procession through the thorn, with his leather apron flapping and his face blotched and furious, and said: All right. All right. But he is going to hit that man first.

They let him.

It was a short blow, and a clumsy one, and the disciple went down in the dust and did not rise. But when the young man helped him up, afterward, with a rough hand under his elbow, the two of them were crying so hard that Gu turned away.

The procession got smaller.

It was a thing that Li Xuan had not foreseen, and that, when he did, he could not at first bear. A disciple would reach his village, and kneel, and give back what he had taken, and the village would take him in. A woman would say: Stay for supper. An old man would say: You can sleep in the barn. A child would take a hand. And the next morning, the column would march on, a little thinner, with a gap in its ranks, and Lu Zhi would be walking beside the custodian with a smaller bundle and a quieter face.

"They are not coming back," Gu said, on the twelfth evening, by the fire.

"No."

"Some of them are staying."

"I know." Li Xuan poked the coals. "I did not tell them that they must return. I told them to go home."

"Boy," said the old Marshal, and there was a very odd note in his voice. "I have fought a great many wars. I have never once won one by sending the enemy to supper."

"It does seem to be effective."

"It is the most insane thing I have ever seen." Gu’s mouth twisted. "I hope you never stop."

They were sitting in a circle, in a hollow, under a bare gray tree, with the stars very large overhead. Yun Tianxiao was practicing the Pass-Sealing Step on a patch of frozen ground with a willow stick, with Gu’s low dry voice correcting him from the fire. Guo Qing was asleep with his mouth open and an empty rice-cake wrapper on his chest. Ye’er sat with her chin on her knees, watching the coals, with the lacquer box beside her and a look of old, grave, thoughtful sorrow.

"Is it always like this?" she asked, in a small voice.

"What?"

"People. Being sorry." She frowned at the fire. "Brother Shen was sorry. Lu Zhi is sorry. But the Master was not. Master Du. He never was." She looked up. "Why are some people sorry, and some are not?"

Li Xuan was quiet for a long time.

"I do not know," he said at last. "I think that it is not a thing that one can be told. I think that it is something that one can only be shown." He gave her a small, tired smile. "I think that some people are shown too late. And some are never shown at all."

"And you?"

"Me?"

"Who showed you?"

He opened his mouth, and did not answer. He found that he could not think of anyone. It had been a cellar, and a broom, and a long, cold, quiet time. And then a girl with a frost-sword, and an old man with a gourd, and a boy with a goat, and an Emperor in a brown cloak who had said I should like to die as a man. It was not, he thought, a thing that he had been shown. It was a thing that had happened, all around him, in a hundred small pieces, while he swept.

"Everyone," he said.

On the twenty-second day, they came to the sister.

It was in a village named Redwater, beside a shallow muddy river, in a low country of reeds and mud-flats and wide gray sky. It was a poor place, a double row of thatched huts, with nets hung to dry. The procession had been a week in the district. Most of the disciples had found their homes and gone. There were scarcely forty left. They walked the last of the road in a long, ragged, subdued file, with Xue Wuya at their head.

He had not spoken in nine days.

He had walked in the front of the column, in his hempen smock, with his broad bare head bent and his heavy hands clasped on the single small bundle that he carried. He had slept little. He had eaten what he was given. He had said nothing. But Li Xuan, who watched him, had seen the way that his thick shoulders had begun to curve, a little, day by day, as a man’s shoulders curve who is carrying something that he has not yet found the right place to set down.

At the edge of Redwater, he stopped.

It was a low gray evening. The reeds hissed in the wind. Down by the river, a woman was kneeling on a flat stone, beating clothes, in the last of the light.

Xue Wuya stood perfectly still.

"Sect Master," said Li Xuan, quietly.

"That is her."

He said it in a voice that did not sound like his own. It was hoarse and flat and hollow, like a voice coming up out of a well.

"That is my sister."

The forty gray-clad men behind him did not move.

He did not look round. He was staring at the woman on the stone, with a stare so fixed and so naked that Li Xuan, seeing it, felt his own throat tighten. She was about forty. She was thin, and gray-haired, and bent, in a patched brown smock, with a cloth tied round her head, and her bare red arms rose and fell in a slow, even, mechanical rhythm, as if she had been doing it for a hundred years.

"I was nineteen," said Xue Wuya.

No one answered.

"She was eleven. Our father had died. There was nothing in the house, and the harvest had failed, and a man in a black robe came to the village, and said that he would take the girl, and feed her, and teach her a trade." The heavy shoulders shook. "I let him. I said yes. I stood in the yard and I said yes, because I was a fool, and I was hungry, and he said that he would take me as well."

"Sect Master..."

"They took her pearl in the first week." He did not seem to hear. "It was the first one that I ever saw. It was a very small one. It was no larger than a pea. They said that it was the smallest they had ever made. They put it in my hand, and said: this is a gift. She will be well. She will live. And they sent her home." His voice broke. "They sent her home. To the river. I did not see her again."

He lifted the small bundle in his hands.

"I have worn it," he said, "against my heart, for thirty-one years. I put it on every morning. I told myself that it was a thing to remember her by." He stared at it. "It was the first thing that I ever stole."

The wind blew the reeds flat. At the river, the woman on the stone had stopped beating her washing, and was looking up, with one hand shading her eyes, at the long gray line of silent strangers on the bank.

Xue Wuya made a sound.

It was a sound that Li Xuan had never heard a man make. It came up from a very great depth, a low, long, tearing moan, like the sound of a great tree splitting in a storm. He fell to his knees in the mud. The bundle fell from his hands. And for a long time, in the wind and the dusk and the silence of forty men, the Sect Master of the Blood-Blade knelt on the muddy bank of a river, with his face in his hands, and wept as though he would never stop.

"Go to her," said Li Xuan, very gently.

"I cannot."

"I think that you must."

"She will not know me."

"No," said Li Xuan. "But I think that she will know the pearl."

He knelt in the mud beside the heavy, shaking man, and took up the small silk bundle, and put it into his hands.

"Go on," he said. "I will be at your back."