Chapter 5

Once the amnesty reached every land under the dynasty's rule, the officials of the Youbei exile district drew up their lists, removed people from the convict registry in order, and issued them documents and permits.

They were registered in Shuozhou now and free to settle anywhere in its three commanderies. But they had no land and no property, and their crimes had been so grave that most of their families had long since been beheaded or died, while the collateral branches that remained couldn't keep clear of them fast enough. A few households of unusually deep feeling, on hearing their relatives were pardoned, hurried to buy property in the prefectural city to settle them in. Most, having gained their freedom, were like refugees. For all the vastness of the world there was nowhere to put themselves.

Had Zhu Tong not been a man of conscience, the Zhuo family would have come to the same pass.

Since taking Zhuo Yan's advice and getting so much out of their acquaintance, Zhu Tong had turned all the rage of his own thwarted ambition into a chivalrous streak. He'd come out of the army bold and gallant and set great store by loyalty, and the moment he heard of the amnesty he wrote to his home district and found Zhuo Yan a post as a village teacher, so the whole family could settle at Xingshan Township in Ningshuo Commandery.

The households that had somewhere to go all set out before the autumn cold. The Zhuo family meant to as well. But it was only after one more winter, the harshest Zhuo Siheng had known, and in the April that followed, with the ice half thawed, that they finally began packing to leave.

Because Song Liangyu had died.

She'd had several bouts of cold sickness when they first reached Shuozhou six years earlier, and she went on working at her labor with an ailing body. However strong she had once been, it couldn't hold. In the end she fell ill beyond curing. By the time the amnesty arrived her oil was spent and the wick burned down; hearing the news, she forced herself to hold on a while longer. In that time Zhuo Yan looked everywhere for physicians and medicine — no longer a convict, he could travel outside the labor district — and Zhuo Siheng went the other way to make his own inquiries. Even Zhu Tong wasn't idle, going round every camp to drag out the camp doctors and asking whether any other convict knew medicine well enough to help.

At home only the two daughters were left, caring for their dying mother and a brother still unsteady on his feet.

For all of it, her health couldn't be turned back, and on a winter day of whirling snow she let go.

She was one step from a free life, and she fell outside the threshold. She never entered the reunion and the ordinary daily life she'd hoped for without limit.

With her death Zhuo Yan's hair and beard went white in a single night. Not yet forty, he looked like a withered old man, and he took to his bed too, improving a little only at the end of March, after the new year turned. But his spirit and his body had collapsed for good. He never again showed the ease of the man who had cast a hexagram just to make his wife and children smile.

Zhuo Siheng was in the same anguish.

He had long thought of Song Liangyu wholly as his mother, loving and revering her, and he remembered every bit of the tenderness and encouragement she'd given him — the comfort she'd offered while he carried the weight of the world. In everything he'd imagined of the future, his parents were going to be happy. Now all of it came to nothing.

A mother dead, a father broken, sisters heartbroken, a little brother too young to understand. There wasn't much time left over for his own pain. He had one option, which was to be strong.

He had always been driven, and good at solitude and endurance. So it had been for nineteen years, and with a new body it was the same. In silence he shouldered every part of the move. On the day they left, a fine snow drifted out of April's dull gray sky and the first green of the wild grass shivered in the wind. They loaded everything onto an ox cart, and Zhuo Yan cradled the earthenware jar of her ashes, wrapping it and wrapping it again, and stowed it deep in the innermost trunk.

They had few possessions. Some had come from his aunt, some Zhu Tong had scraped together after the amnesty. One trunk and one woven basket on a single ox cart held it all.

Zhuo Yan stared at the labor hut, no bigger than a cage of mud, feeling somehow that his wife's spirit was still there, and stood in the snow a long while. None of the three children had the heart to hurry him, and Zhu Tong only sighed.

He really felt he'd seldom managed an arrangement this good. Xingshan Township was a fine place, and it was his own home village, where his wife and his old mother and his two daughters still lived. It lay close to the Yanhe Army command in Weizhou, so the court had settled many soldiers' families on the fertile land nearby to farm the military colonies. His father had been in the first cohort to break that ground, and he'd been born there. Xingshan had good hills, good water, rich fields and good produce, and had never produced a soldier ranked higher than a halberd-bearing vice-lieutenant of the lowest grade. The township held nothing but soldiers and their families, the village head was an old veteran come home, and you couldn't scrape up one man in the place who could write his own name.

In a land as broad and thinly peopled as Shuozhou there wasn't even a county town, and the villages lay scattered. For a literate teacher you had to go to the prefectural seat at Ningshuo City — and what scholar who had clawed his way up out here would come to a poor backwater to be a schoolmaster?

So Zhu Tong thought up a plan that answered both needs. It would settle Zhuo Yan's family and get the township a man of real learning. After the amnesty, once they'd talked it through, he sent word to the village head that he knew a gentleman who could read and write, a man of considerable ability, and the township should clear a house and yard for his family at once. The village head, hearing there was such luck going, promptly sent word back that he'd cleared the largest yard in the township, which had been idle, and had mud-and-tile buildings put up — the large one for the gentleman to live in, the small one beside it for the children to study in. Food and clothing they'd cover entirely, and there'd be no tilling or planting. They only asked that he not mind the isolation or the racket the children made.

With it settled, Zhu Tong felt he'd gained enormous face on both sides. He'd found Elder Brother Zhuo's family a home and the township a schoolmaster. The Zhuo boy would have somewhere to study and might win a degree. The village children would learn a few characters and be able to run messages for an officer instead of going about blind, and one of them might even make something of himself. All of it to his credit.

And who could have known Song Liangyu would never see the good days in front of her.

What Zhu Tong could least bear was children suffering, so he helped all the more. On the day they left he bustled about, and pressed a few coppers and some dry rations on the villager driving the cart, telling him to be careful, look after the old and the young properly, drive slowly, and not just crack the whip at every rut.

He had finished his instructions, but Zhuo Yan was still standing there. Zhu Tong, not wanting them to miss their hour and travel after dark, was about to urge him along, when he heard a trembling voice not far off.

"Worthy Brother Yangu? Is it you?"

Yangu was Zhuo Yan's courtesy name. He woke as if from a dream, turned slowly, and two fresh tracks joined the tear-stains on his face. "Brother Bangning."

A man whose temple hair was likewise white, though his features still held the composure of a man in his prime, came striding up, and the two of them fell into each other's arms and wept.

Zhuo Siheng looked the way the man had come and saw another small ox cart with two or three trunks on it. Beside it stood a thin, frail boy about his own height, his face bluish white, his clothes too light, as if even the snow on his shoulders were more than he could carry. He had been watching Zhuo Yan, and seemed to feel the gaze on him. He turned his eyes back, and the two boys looked straight at each other.

Pupils as black as ink like that were rare. Especially when, expressionless, they were fixed on someone. Inside them lay a deep old well, silent and without a ripple.

"Qing'er, come and pay your respects to your Uncle Zhuo!"

At the call the black-eyed boy broke off the stare first. He went up to Zhuo Yan and bowed deeply, as the younger generation should.

"Is this Yongqing? I remember he was a year younger than Siheng. Look how big he's grown." Something other than grief had been stirred in Zhuo Yan by an old friend, and there was a little strength in his voice. "Siheng, bring your sisters and brother to greet Uncle Gao."

Zhuo Siheng helped his sisters down from the cart, picked up Xiheng, and the four of them made the same greeting to the man his father had called Uncle Gao.

"Good, good." Tears welled in Uncle Gao's eyes, and his withered hand stroked Zhuo Siheng's shoulder. "The first time I saw you, your teeth hadn't come in. A pity the osmanthus-jade tablet I gave you must be long gone. If there's a chance in future, I'll give you another."

Zhuo Siheng didn't know the man, but for his father to be on such terms with him he must be an old friend from court; and since Uncle Gao was also leaving the exile district with a child, it wasn't hard to guess he was another victim of the same case.

"This is your elder brother of the Zhuo family, his given name Siheng. Your Uncle Zhuo carried him in his arms to your full-month banquet." Uncle Gao introduced his son. "Child, this is your younger brother Yongqing. His father and I were of the same cohort, the same examination roll, and served in the same ministry. Friends for a lifetime. If you two have any affinity in future, you must look after each other too."

When adults want children to get acquainted, it means they have something to say in private. Zhuo Siheng understood, so he made the greeting between equals to Gao Yongqing and received his in return. Then he settled his sisters and brother back on the cart under the old felt and walked a few paces off with him.

Seeing that their sons, frail and pitiable as exile had made them, still had their manners intact and their bearing gentle, the two men felt comforted and guilty at once.

Zhuo Yan looked at the colleague who had once been so full of spirit, now as forlorn as himself with only one child at his side, and understood that his story differed little from his own. Having introduced their children, the two stood facing each other with nothing to say and nothing left but sighs, until Gao Bengu spoke first. "We were exiled here into separate camps and never had the chance to meet. To manage it once before we part isn't to have wasted the friendship. Yangu, you've aged so much."

"Has Brother Bangning found somewhere to settle?" Zhuo Yan asked.

Gao Bengu smiled bitterly. "When your sister-in-law heard of my conviction, she had it out with her family so violently that she was cast out as a married daughter. But there was a distant nephew in that house, a boy whose parents died early and who was raised there, and she looked after him a great deal, as a girl at home and after she married. That boy is now a vice-commandant at the West Victory Army garrison. His merits were slight before, and though he had been asking where we'd been sent, hoping to help, nobody dared tell him. After the amnesty he was promoted again, and only then could he find the right person to ask and learn how we stood. He also learned your sister-in-law had died, and now he means to take me to settle on the border between Rongzhou and Shuozhou."

Thinking that he too had found a home and lost his wife, Zhuo Yan sank back into grief, and it was a long while before he spoke. "To know a kindness and repay it. He's a fine young man."

"That was my thought exactly. Rongzhou borders the Wuliang frontier. I'll still be registered in Shuozhou, but it's a military colony just across in Rongzhou, and the place is desolate. I'm afraid Qing'er's schooling would suffer for it. Yangu, you've no idea — this son of mine is truly made of the stuff of scholars. He may be better than I was at his age." Gao Bengu looked at his son's back and sighed. "Only his health is poor. We meant to set out earlier and were delayed so the illness he was left with could be treated. And by that turn of luck we met you."

He didn't need to ask. For Zhuo Yan to be delayed like this, someone in the family must have fallen gravely ill or died. What happened to men like them was much the same in every case.

"It seems Qing'er will inherit your mantle and win the family another first place." Zhuo Yan was glad for his friend, though he had misgivings. "But if his health is poor, and Rongzhou lies near the northwest frontier, a dry cold place is no good for recovering. What's to be done?"

"I know it. Which is why I discussed it with my nephew and had a travel permit arranged. I'm sending Qing'er to Jiangxiang Academy to study and mend his health. Qingzhou has a mild climate and pleasant country, and the academy has eminent scholars and famous teachers. He won't waste the talent he has."

Zhuo Yan was taken aback. "But Qingzhou and the Rong-Shuo lands are east and west, heaven and earth apart. If father and son part at that distance, when could you ever meet? How could you be at ease?"

Gao Bengu shook his head with a bitter smile. "How could I be at ease? As parents we fret and worry for the rest of our lives. But his body isn't suited to the north. And though I've been amnestied, I was once a convicted official, and leaving my place of registration is no easy matter. I'd rather not add trouble for my nephew, who is pressing ahead in his career and has done us a kindness besides. Why burden him further? Better that father and son each find his own way. Though the mountains be high and the rivers long, there'll come a time to be together again. And if there isn't, that's the time and the fate of it, and I'll accept it."

While the men talked, Zhuo Siheng was struggling to find a way to talk to Gao Yongqing. This newly met brother of his own age kept his mouth shut tight and only watched him quietly, as if announcing a refusal to answer any question at all.

But barging into someone's private affairs to break the ice wasn't much good either. Anyone could see his circumstances were like his own, so why stir up his grief? In his last life Zhuo Siheng had been talkative, well liked and attentive, and seeing that Gao Yongqing's clothes were thinner than the body inside them, he felt a stir of pity and offered without being asked. "Dressed like that you'll fall ill before you're out of Shuozhou. My aunt sent us a few things for the cold. Wait here and I'll fetch one."

He went to the cart, dug out his own padded robe, came back and draped it over the boy's shoulders, and asked as he did, "Where are you going, then?"

"Qingzhou." Gao Yongqing looked down at him straightening the robe, and spoke at last.

"Has your father been teaching you to read too?"

"I've memorized a great deal. I've never seen what a book looks like." His voice had the fragile timbre of a boy's, like the fine snow falling then. Even with the dry rasp roughening it, you could hear the clear tone underneath.

"Neither have I." Zhuo Siheng finished settling the robe and smiled at him. "If you study hard where you're going and make something of it, then someday we'll sit the examinations together and go back to the capital. And bring our fathers to be reunited too."

Gao Yongqing's black eyes stirred at last, and in the moment they flickered he nodded quickly. Then he straightened his collar and bowed. "Thank you, Elder Brother. Yongqing won't fail this promise."

"You don't have to be so formal." Zhuo Siheng waved a hand. "We're friends. Having a pact, something to work toward. I've actually never talked to anyone my own age before. You're the first. If I've got the etiquette wrong, please don't mind it."

Gao Yongqing still didn't smile, but his face had softened, and he nodded obediently.

From a distance Zhuo Yan saw his son putting a garment on the boy, generous and sincere and attentive, and felt greatly consoled. Then he thought how these past weeks he'd been little better than a walking corpse. And how was losing his wife not losing a mother for Siheng too? Guilt overflowed into his face.

Gao Bengu saw it and understood, and patted his shoulder. "There's no need to explain our family affairs. What happened can be guessed. I've been through it too. I know how you feel. When Qing'er's mother died I wanted nothing more than to follow her and be done with it all. But if you and I can't rouse ourselves, who looks after the children at our knees? And if anything happened to them, how could the mothers who are gone not be pained? They'd never rest easy. You must see the sense of it. You're no longer raising your children only out of your own love for them. It's for the whole bond of the marriage, and so they can stand on their own after you and I are gone. Yangu, remember it. Don't sink into grief any longer."

His friend's words, and his son's thin silhouette and tired smile, at last touched a heart Zhuo Yan had thought burned to ash, and a flame kindled in it again. He nodded hard, as if making a promise, and held back his tears.

In the end they had to part, reluctant as they were, each for the far ends of the earth and his own place to land, and Zhuo Siheng said goodbye to Gao Yongqing. Frankly the boy had said very little, but he was the only friend of his own age Zhuo Siheng had made in all that heavy time, and the promise gave him a sense of mission besides. Once at Xingshan Township he must study hard and never let his brush rest.

They watched the Gaos go, and then the cart carrying the five of the Zhuo family left two faint ruts in the snow, running away south.

Zhuo Yan took Xiheng from his second daughter. This youngest son had always been quiet and easy, and seldom cried. Holding him, he said gently, "Hui'er looks to be wearing three or four layers. Was that your eldest brother's doing?"

Huiheng had scarcely heard her father speak first in all this time. She was still grieving her mother, but being shown this concern filled her eyes with the excitement of a child who feels cared for. "Brother looks after us very well. He wouldn't let me wear too little and catch cold. Only it's so many layers I can't bend my arms."

"Me too!" Ciheng lifted her short arms to demonstrate, happier still that their father was talking to them unprompted. "I wouldn't put them on, and Brother went on and on until my ears hurt!"

Zhuo Yan saw how well his daughters had been looked after, and that it was he who had failed in his duty by drowning in grief. The look he turned on Zhuo Siheng held guilt, tenderness, pity and admiration together, and out of a tight throat came the words he'd been wanting to say. "It's been hard on you. Your father has done badly."

Zhuo Siheng's eyes went hot. So long as his father rallied, all of it was worth it. Through these weeks he had mourned Song Liangyu, and he had worried just as much over his father sunk in sorrow. Hearing this, he knew his father had decided to go on leading them, and he made himself smile. "Why say something that puts such distance between us? We're one family. Family means leaning on each other and getting through the hard places together."

Zhuo Yan nodded, holding back tears in which joy and sorrow ran together, and a loving smile surfaced on that prematurely aged face. He touched each of the children's chilled cheeks in turn and brushed the melting snow from their temples.

April in Shuozhou was still snowing. The world was white, and yet a faint green hid in the woods along the road and in the grass. Nature had met this late frost through no fault of its own, and still it fought back and held nothing back in showing how it thrived. And in that same season the ox cart carrying the Zhuo family rumbled on toward Xingshan Township.