Chapter 59: Xue Wuya’s Sister

She did not look up when he reached her.

He came down the muddy bank in the failing light, a heavy, shorn, bare-armed man in a gray hempen smock, with a small silk bundle held out before him in both hands, and he stopped a pace from the flat stone where she knelt. She was still beating the washing. She did not stop. Her bare red arms rose and fell, rose and fell, in the same patient, even, wearying rhythm, and the wet cloth struck the stone with a flat slap, over and over, like the beating of a slow dull heart.

"Sister," said Xue Wuya.

The cloth stopped.

She turned her head. She had a thin, plain, gray, tired face, with the faded look of a thing that has been left out in the weather, and eyes that were very pale and a little vague. She looked at him politely, as one looks at a stranger who has asked for directions.

"You are not from the village," she said.

"No."

"We have no work. If it is work that you want." She turned back to her washing. "The men go to the next valley, in the spring."

"I do not want work."

The words came out of him in a croak. His big hands shook so hard that the silk bundle trembled, and he took a step, and stumbled, and went down on one knee in the cold black mud at the edge of the water.

She looked round again, mildly surprised.

"You will get wet," she said.

He did not seem to hear. He was fumbling with the bundle. The silk fell away. In the center of it, on his scarred, trembling, calloused palm, lay a small round pearl, no larger than a pea. It was very pale. It gave off a faint, soft, rosy light, and inside it, very small and very clear, like a thing seen at the bottom of a clear pool, was the face of a girl of eleven, with her hair in two short braids and her front teeth missing.

The woman stared at it.

Her wet red hands slowly came to rest in her lap. Her pale eyes widened. And her mouth, which had been set in a thin weary line for thirty-one years, began very slightly to tremble.

"That is mine," she said.

"Yes."

"That is... I used to have..." She stopped. A look of the most profound, helpless, childlike bewilderment came over her face. "I used to have something," she said. "A thing that I loved. I could not remember what it was. I looked for it, for years, at the bottom of the river. I thought that I had dropped it."

"I took it," said Xue Wuya.

"You?"

"They took it," he said. "I let them. I stood in the yard and I said yes." His great shorn head bowed lower and lower, until his forehead nearly touched the wet stones. "I am sorry. I am so sorry. I have no right to ask... I do not ask. I have brought it back. It is yours. It has always been yours. I have only... I only..."

He could not finish.

A shadow fell across the water. It was a small, dry, brisk old woman in a patched brown robe, with a medicine-box on her arm. Aunt Liu did not say anything. She laid a hand on the Sect Master’s shoulder, once, hard, in a gesture that was not at all gentle, and he fell silent. Then she knelt beside the stone and took the pea-sized pearl from his palm with a pair of silver tweezers, and held it up to the last of the gray light.

"It is very small," she said. "It will need very little."

She looked at the woman.

"I am going to put this in a cup of river water," said Aunt Liu, in her flat, calm, practical voice, "and you are going to drink it. It will taste of nothing at all. It may make you cry. If it does, you need not stop."

The woman gazed at her.

"Is it a medicine?" she said.

"It is a loan," said Aunt Liu, "that is being repaid."

It took a long time to wake her.

It was not like the boy at Stone Fold. The boy had been given a bruise, a small hole, a single quick cut, and it had healed like any wound. This was thirty-one years of absence. It was a wall built a brick at a time, a very long time ago, around a place that had once been alive. When the pearl was dropped into the cup, it did not dissolve. It sank, very slowly, glowing, to the bottom, and lay there, and for a long time nothing seemed to happen.

Aunt Liu said that it was the way with old things. She said that one must be patient.

They sat on the bank, in the dusk, in a long loose ring: the old woman, the heavy kneeling man, the thin gray woman on her flat stone with the cup in her hands, and a little behind them the silent forty in their hempen smocks, and the thin young scholar with his broom. The reeds hissed. A heron stood on one leg at the edge of the water. A few stars came out.

The woman drank.

She did it in small sips, like a child with a bowl of broth. When the cup was empty, she held it for a moment, looking into it, as one looks into a well, and then she set it down on the stone beside her, and folded her hands in her lap, and said nothing.

The silence went on.

It went on so long that Xue Wuya lifted his head. He stared at her. He did not breathe.

"Sister?" he said.

She did not answer. She was looking at the river. It slid by, brown and slow and wide, carrying the last of the light on its back, and a single leaf went floating down it, turning, turning, around and around.

"The river is very loud," said the woman.

"Is it?"

"It has never been so loud." She put one hand to her ear, wonderingly. "I never noticed. I have been sitting beside it for thirty years, and I never heard it." Her voice was low and rough, and not quite steady. "There is a bird in it. A little one. It is singing. Listen."

He listened. There was no bird.

"It is a very small bird," said the woman, and began, very quietly, to cry.

They let her.

It went on a long time. It was not loud. She sat with her wet hands in her lap and her face lifted to the stars and the tears running down her thin cheeks unimpeded, one after another, and she made no sound at all. When it was done, she drew a long shuddering breath, and wiped her face with her sleeve, and turned and looked at the heavy shorn man on his knees in the mud.

She looked at him for a long time.

"You were thin," she said.

His face crumpled.

"You were thin, and you had a very bad haircut. Mother cut it with the sheep-shears." Her pale eyes were clear now. They were very clear. They were quite sharp, and quite sad, and unmistakably his own. "You had a gap in your teeth. You were nineteen." She said it in a tone of wonder, as if the word were a stone that she had been carrying and had just been allowed to set down. "You are a very large old man."

"Sister..."

"You are late."

He went rigid.

"I waited for you," said the woman, quite quietly, "at the river. Every evening. For ten years. I did not know what I was waiting for. I only knew that it was a thing that should have come, and had not." She drew a breath. "And then, after a while, I forgot that I was waiting. And then I forgot that there had been anything to forget."

"I did not know," said Xue Wuya. "I did not know, Lan’er, I swear it..."

"I know that you did not." She tilted her head. "I think that you knew a very little. I think that you knew, at the bottom, and did not look. That is what is wrong with all of us." She reached out, and laid one cold, wet, red hand against his cheek. "I am so very tired of being angry. I do not think that I shall be."

He made a noise like a wounded animal and put his head down in her lap.

She sat with her hand on his shorn skull and her eyes on the dark water, and for a long time did not speak.

"Was I the first?" she said, at last.

He could not answer.

"Was I the first one that they took?"

"Yes."

"Then I am glad," said the woman, very softly, "that it was me."

He lifted his face. It was wet, and wrecked, and entirely naked, and she looked down at it with a terrible, tender, weary, sisterly exasperation.

"Because if it were anyone else," said Xue Lan, "I do not think that you would ever have come to give it back."

They did not go on that night.

The woman would not hear of it. She put the forty strangers up in a long drying-shed by the river, among the nets, with a pot of fish soup and a heap of straw. She put the old woman in her own bed, and the thin scholar in the loft, and the girl with the black box in a corner by the stove, wrapped in a quilt that smelled of smoke. She did not seem to find it in the least extraordinary. She had the look of a woman who has been asleep for thirty years and has woken up very hungry.

It was late when Li Xuan went out.

He walked down to the water in the dark. There was no moon. The stars were thick and cold and white, and the river ran black under them, murmuring. A little way off, on the flat stone where she had knelt to do her washing, two figures were sitting very close together, a thin one in brown, and a large one in gray. They did not speak. They were only sitting, side by side, looking at the water.

He did not go nearer.

It was Gu who came up behind him, quietly, in the dark, with his old sword at his hip and his hands in his sleeves.

"They have been there since supper," he said.

"Yes."

"I should like to hate him." The Marshal’s voice was low, and very dry. "I find that it is a great deal of work. I did not think it would be."

"I know."

"It is the damnedest thing, boy. I could have killed him, on that stair. I should have enjoyed it. I should have thought it a very clean piece of work." He was silent a moment. "And now there is a woman on a stone with her hand on his head, and I would sooner cut off my own sword-arm."

"Yes."

"Is this what it is?" said Gu. "The whole of it? The thing you are doing?"

Li Xuan did not answer at once.

A fish jumped in the dark, and fell back with a small round plop. The stars shook in the water, and were still.

"I think that it is only what I know how to do," he said. "I do not know how to hate a thing. I know how to carry it, or to return it. It seems to me that there are only two kinds of debt. The kind that one repays, and the kind that one keeps." He drew a slow breath. "And I should rather repay."

"It would be a great deal easier to keep."

"Yes," said Li Xuan. "I have noticed."

They stood side by side in the dark, an old man and a young one, and listened to the river.

In the morning, Xue Wuya did not come with them.

He stood on the bank in the gray hempen smock, with a boat-pole in his hand, and a thin woman at his side in a patched brown dress, and he did not look at the column of forty strangers drawn up on the muddy road. He had been given a boat. It was a long, flat, shallow, much-mended thing, black with age and smelling of tar, that had belonged to a man who died of the cough two winters before, and it lay at the water’s edge with its nose in the reeds. He had spent the night, the woman said, rubbing its planks with fish oil, and scraping the barnacles, and talking to it under his breath.

"I shall carry people across," he said, in his hoarse rough voice. "The river is wide here. There is nothing for twenty li. It will be a... it is a useful thing." He cleared his throat. "I am not very good at it yet."

"He fell in twice," said Xue Lan serenely.

"I did not fall. I was pushed."

"He was pushed by a rope."

Gu made a small strangled noise and turned to look at the sky.

The Sect Master stood very straight. He looked at Li Xuan across the mud, with his square scarred face quite naked in the cold light, and said: "I have no right to anything. I do not ask it. But I should like to say..."

"There is no need."

"I should like to say that it is the first time in thirty-one years," said Xue Wuya, "that I have slept."

Li Xuan inclined his head.

He held out his hand, and the big, scarred, shaking fist closed on it, and held it for a long time. And then the column moved on, down the road along the river toward the south, in the first rays of the sun, and behind them, a heavy shorn man and a thin gray woman stood on the bank and watched them go, and waved, and waved, until the reeds closed between.