Movement I · The Western Zhou

I. The Beginning of Rebirth · Jiang Ziya's Foster Son

In this era of the Western Zhou his name was Lü Shang, and he was the foster son of Jiang Ziya — Lü by clan, Shang by name.

(This was the starting point of the second life — he had only just been reborn into the Western Zhou, this journey barely begun, with no real years behind him yet; every stretch of the road that followed, he would count again from here.)

He remembered choosing rebirth, remembered that he must go back to a far-off antiquity; but memory was like a book of silk soaked in water, with only two or three parts in ten of the writing left. He dimly remembered the neon of modern Hong Kong, the sea wind at West Kowloon, remembered a woman who had died in a fire — as for her name, and how the two of them had met, all of it was blurred. The only thing he could be certain of was this: he must find her.

There was one other thing, more stubborn than memory. A rhymed verse, cut into the bone, impossible to forget — he did not know when he had learned it, or why he had to keep it, only that those lines clung tighter than any name and could not be shaken off. On sleepless nights it rolled on his tongue: "Borrow the waters of the Eastern Sea; sail home two thousand years." He did not understand it — what was the Eastern Sea? And what were two thousand years? He only felt that in these two lines there lay a very distant journey, and a promise he had made to himself. He had tried to bring out the lines that came after, but it was like reaching into the water for the moon: at a touch they broke, and only the first couplet was left, and faintly, at the end, one line — "America, then, stays long and steady; this poem shall be the boat." These lines he did not understand he kept, as he kept the jade pendant Wan had left him, as the only proof he had carried through the rebirth — though he had no notion at all of what it was he had brought with him.

Jiang Ziya aided King Wu of Zhou and destroyed the Shang in the single battle at Muye, and was honoured by later ages as the ancestor of all strategists; *The Six Strategies* was said to be his work. At that time King Wu had newly won the world, and after the king's death the Duke of Zhou ruled as regent, campaigned east to put down rebellion, and enfeoffed the lords, laying the foundation of eight hundred years — Chenyu stood in the midst of it and took it for no more than another ordering after chaos. As Jiang Ziya's foster son, what Chenyu learned was not the arts of war but patience — a man who could wait decades before he hooked King Wen knew better than anyone what waiting meant. In this, master and disciple were of one mind.

After the rebirth he first wandered both banks of the Wei for a full year. That year he had no fixed lodging; he pushed into every market he came to, searched out every village, and treated that thread of scent as his only compass. He carried grain for people and helped mend their roofs, in exchange for a bowl of millet gruel and a straw mat; when the Wei froze over in winter he waded across barefoot, and never felt the skin of his feet split with the cold — a qiongqi's body did not fear heat or cold, and this frame was far harder than the modern man he remembered being. That year, in the last month of winter, he met an old man angling at Panxi: the line straight, the hook bare of bait, sitting on the ice like a stone. He was staring, entranced, when the old man spoke first: "Looking for someone, lad?" He started — and only then realized that he had followed the scent to this place, and that the scent had flickered away in the wind behind the old man. The old man smiled: "I am Jiang Ziya. Those hands of yours are not the hands of an ordinary vagabond." He did not know why, but he told him a little of the person he was seeking. When Jiang Ziya had heard him out he said only: "Come back to the Zhou camp with me. A man like you should have a name and a place; and under my eye you might learn what waiting means." And so he became Jiang Ziya's foster son, and changed his name to Lü Shang.

That year of wandering was the loneliest stretch since the rebirth. He knew no roads and no people; he knew only that scent. Sometimes it grew so faint he could barely catch it, and he would sit all day at some crossing, watching the river break the sunset into pieces, hoping the wind would bring the scent back. He carried grain for people and mended their houses, and got no more than a bowl of millet gruel for it, but he learned how mortals live — how to haggle at market, how to sit by a fire and listen to ghost stories, how to hide the mad business of "looking for someone" behind a wooden face. Once he stayed half a month in a village, and an old woman there, seeing he was alone, sewed him a padded coat and told him, "Don't be stubborn when it's cold." He wore that coat through three winters and would not change it until the face of it had worn shiny — that small human warmth was the first thing he had taken hold of since the rebirth that had not come from blood.

That year he went farther still. Once, following the scent to a crossing where it drifted very thin over the water, he sat on the bank for three days, watching the passing boats break the sunset apart and piece it together again, hoping the wind would bring it back. There was an old ferryman at the crossing who, seeing him sit there day after day, gave him half a cake and said, "Lad, a man who waits still has to eat." He took it, could not bear to eat it, and passed it on to a small child wailing with hunger by the boats. Another time, lost in the mountains, he fell in with a merchant train, carried goods for two days, and earned a coarse cloth shirt and a whole road of ghost stories — so that later, when he heard Yang Zhi telling in camp about "the ghost women of King Zhou's Deer Terrace," he was able to laugh and join in. On that road he heard stranger tales still: once, in a tribe west of Mount Long, an old man told of bronze gods in the ancient land of Shu with human faces and eyes that stood out from the head, of bronze sacred trees that reached to heaven, and of a "strange god who made images" in old times, who kneaded clay into men and cast bronze into gods, and made ten thousand undying smiths. Listening, he thought it only grotesque, and did not know that the tale would come back to him in fragments, told by another of his own kind, far older, in one place and another. These scraps of warmth that had not come from blood stitched a soul newly reborn, stitch by stitch, back into the human world; and taught him by degrees that beyond the mad business of following a scent there were other ways to live. He even stayed half a month in one village, ploughing for the people there and mending their fences, and the old woman of the village, seeing he was alone, pressed half a sack of millet on him and told him, "Don't go hungry on the road." He carried that sack through three winters, and only when its bottom wore through did he replace it — that much of the plain substance of the human world steadied him, in the end, more than blood did.

The two comrades he was closest to in camp were these: Xu Sheng, a quiet man, who always took the most dangerous watch, one of the best archers in the camp, able to nail a goose in flight at a hundred paces; and Yang Zhi, a joker, who knew horses, and could tell a beast's age and how far it could run from one feel of its teeth, and who loved to tell ghost stories of his home village at night. The three shared a tent. Yang Zhi told of the ghosts of Zhaoge, said that every night on King Zhou's Deer Terrace a woman's ghost could be heard weeping; Chenyu listened and could only find it funny — the dead he had outlived were more numerous than all the ghosts Yang Zhi had ever heard of. The two took this foster son of the general for an odd-tempered man who liked to go off alone, and did not know that every time he went off "alone" he was hunting a scent.

That tent the three shared was the first place after the rebirth that felt anything like a home. When Yang Zhi told ghosts at night, Chenyu would use the darkness to turn that thread of scent over and over at his nostrils, testing it; when Xu Sheng cleaned his bow, he learned to string it and sight along the arrow, and his shooting grew truer day by day — not in order to kill the enemy, but so that one day he might use the skill to keep safe whoever stood where the scent fell. In the daylight drills Jiang Ziya taught him how to array troops and march them; he listened carelessly, but quietly committed one line to memory: "A commander is still and unfathomable, upright and well-ordered." Only later did he understand that for him the words were not about commanding a thousand chariots, but about how to keep one person safe: still, and you can hear the scent; upright, and you can hold on to the person.

What Jiang Ziya taught him was never the martial arts. The old man's hair and beard were white, but his eyes were a hawk's, and he would say to him in camp: "Shang, lad, you are impatient, and that is the worst fault in a man who is looking for someone. In my day I fished at Panxi with a straight hook and no bait, and when King Wen asked me why, I told him — if the fish is meant to take the hook, it will come of itself; a man who should not be waited for must still be waited for. You have a long road ahead of you. There is no hurrying it." Chenyu listened and thought the old man was speaking in riddles. Only later did he understand: on this road of following a scent, what he was looking for had never been "the next one," it was "that one" — and that one could not be hurried. Jiang Ziya also set out for him the plainer truths of *The Six Strategies*: war is the way of deception, but it is also the way of patience; the general who can endure beats the general who cannot. He would hear these words echo again, later, in Li Mu's showing weakness to the enemy, in Han Xin's battle with his back to the river, in Yue Fei's holding his troops still.

II. The Eve of Muye · A Sudden Meeting

The night before the oath-taking at Muye, the fires of the Zhou camp lit the sky and millet wine ran like a river.

At that time the Zhou camp was pitched at the Mengjin crossing, its tents joined for tens of li, its banners standing like a forest. Chenyu's daily task was, on the surface, practice with the bow and attendance at the councils of war; in truth it was another thing: he walked the ramparts one after another, his nostrils faintly working, hunting among ten thousand smells of sweat and horse dung and cooking fire for that one scent that belonged to no one else. It was Wan's scent, cold and clear as a winter river, and mixed among the other smells it was like a fine needle on snow. He had been looking a long while, and not only in the Zhou camp — earlier still, in that first year after the rebirth, he had wandered both banks of the Wei with no fixed lodging, making that scent his only compass.

He followed the scent again, all the way from the command tent to the cook tents behind the central host. Here the scent suddenly grew thick — like a fine thread at last winding round his fingertip. He pushed through the crowd and saw a woman on tiptoe setting a wine jar up on a wooden table. The firelight lit the side of her face; she turned to hand wine to a soldier, and in the instant her eyes lifted, Chenyu's breath stopped.

It was the colour of a winter river at dusk. Clear, cold, and bottomless.

He would know these eyes in the Western Zhou and in every life that followed. But that night he did not yet understand why he knew them. He knew only that since the rebirth this was the first time he had set the scent he had hunted for a whole year upon a face he could see.

The woman was called Wan, a commoner's daughter whose work it was to pour wine and carry food through the camp; she was no daughter of any general's house. She rose each day before dawn to light the fires, boil the millet, warm the wine, and then shoulder jar after jar to the various camps; there was always wood ash at her temple and wine stains at her cuffs, and always the last warm jar she kept for the wounded. Seeing this young general standing dazed at the edge of the tent, she took him for a man gone nervous, and came smiling with a jar of millet wine: "Drink a cup and warm yourself, General. Tomorrow you go out to act for heaven."

Chenyu's hand shook and a little of the wine slopped over. He took it, mouthed his thanks, and drained it in one draught. From that night on he had two reasons for fighting: to destroy the Shang, and to keep Wan safe.

He did not say it outright, and he did not come close and declare himself. From then on he was simply always "by chance" near her: when she carried wine to the forward camp, he was at her side watching over her; when she cleared the tables at night, he silently carried the wood for her. Wan took this General Lü for a quiet, dependable man, a good friend and good companion one could trust, and never imagined that he had been looking for her a whole year.

On the last night without battle before the oath-taking, Wan was warming wine outside the cook tent, and the firelight turned the side of her face warm. Chenyu happened "by chance" to walk past, and she handed him a jar and said, "The General marches tomorrow — don't stint yourself tonight." He took it, and his fingertips brushed the back of her hand; the cold of it made her laugh again: "The General's hands are colder than the night." He looked at her, and very nearly let slip the question "Have you come from a very far place?" — but the words stopped in his throat and went back down. He did not yet know that he would look into these eyes for three thousand years; he took it for a pointless tremor before battle. That night, for the first time, he wrote "keep her safe" into his reasons for fighting, as though cutting, silently, into the haft of his dagger-axe a mark that no one could see. He carried the jar away to where there was no one and did not drink a drop of it — the wine was warm, the woman was warm, and he was afraid that one swallow would swallow down with it this rare warmth that had not come from blood.

Wan's days in camp began before dawn, at the kitchen fire. She lit it, boiled the millet, warmed the wine, moving as efficiently as if she had been trained in arms, and yet carefully: when she poured, the thickest measure always went to the wounded; when she handed over water, she always tested its warmth first. Several times Chenyu saw her go up on tiptoe for a wine jar on a high shelf, and each time, without thinking, he stepped forward to steady the jar's base; she laughed at him — "The General has long arms; you've saved me a ladder" — and he said only, "It was on my way." There were few women in the camp; she also bound the wounded and mended the soldiers' clothes, and her hands were never idle from morning to night. Once, sewing for a soldier who had lost an arm, the man weeping that "mother is still waiting at home for me to come back," she soothed him in a low voice for a long while, and gave him half of her own ration. Chenyu stood not far off watching, and thought that the cold clarity about this woman was not the coldness of someone who keeps the world at a distance; it was like a winter river frozen thin — there was still water beneath the ice, still flowing. He stood so long that he forgot himself, and whether he was watching a person or watching a scent.

Once, when the camp was at rest, Wan pulled him out to watch the falling stars by the Wei. In her village, she said, a wish made where a star falls will come true. He looked at her upturned face, and the wish he wanted to make was "may you remember me" — but he knew clearly that she did not yet truly understand who he was, and that the wish, once made, would come to nothing. That night, for the first time, he changed "keep her safe" in his heart for a heavier word: "stay with her." Staying is harder than keeping safe; keeping safe is for a moment, staying is for a lifetime. And this life of his was exactly a life that could not stop. The falling star dropped into the river like a spark of fire swallowed by water; he watched that small light go out, and suddenly felt that what he had been seeking all this way had perhaps never been some person, but this brief, perishing warmth of "having someone to stay with." But the warmth was too short — too short for him to have cupped it warm before he had to watch it cool.

Every day the camp drilled, and he was always "by chance" standing guard outside the cook tent. Wan laughed at him: "You're more stuck to the stove than the cooks are." He said, "It's on my way." In truth he was memorizing her voice — when she hummed, the ends of the tune lifted a little, like the last ripple before a winter river freezes; he was afraid his memory would fail him and he would forget the sound, and so he came every day to hear it once. Once she knocked over the pot of porridge and scalded her hand; he reached for it without thinking, and at the touch of that red swelling forgot that he was supposed to be a man who could not be burned — he drew his hand back, but she only laughed: "The General's hand is colder than mine, then." He said, "It's the training." And got away with it. But that cold was the cold of the qiongqi, and he knew it better than anyone. Once she asked, "Why is the General always beside me?" He answered, "It's on my way." She laughed out loud and told him he was a clumsy talker, and yet what he said weighed more than what anyone else said. She did not know that he never ate the cook tent's food — he lived on blood, and the five grains were only ornament to him; when she now and then pressed a cake into his hand he kept it, and where no one was, quietly gave it to a beggar by the road.

III. The Battle of Muye · Feeding on Red Bloom

In the battle at Muye the army of King Zhou of Shang turned its spears before the line, and Zhaoge fell.

On the day of the oath King Wu stood with the yellow battle-axe in his left hand and the white yak-tail banner in his right, upon the great cart that carried King Wen's wooden spirit tablet, and swore the oath before the allied host. Chenyu stood beneath Jiang Ziya's banner and looked at this patched-together army in front of him: the men of Zhou, and with them the Yong, the Shu, the Qiang, the Mao, the Wei, the Lu, the Peng and the Pu, chariots and horses and banners covering the hills and the plains. The thread of scent in his heart trembled faintly in the wind — Wan was in the rear camp, and yet for no reason he thought of a time very far in the future, and of another woman who would stand beside him like this.

In the melee Chenyu cut down generals and dragged their banners from them, and also, in the confusion, stooped to draw once at the neck of a Shang soldier who had died — red bloom went down his throat, cold and sweet, enough to keep him a day without hunger. When he came on a particularly fierce one he would draw the bloom dry, and that would serve him for three days. This was how he fed in this era, and in the wars of more than two thousand years after it. He was extremely careful, always choosing dead corners where no one could see him, the places thickest with smoke and dust, because he knew: if the Zhou army ever discovered that he "ate bloom," his place as foster son was finished. He kept the eating of bloom hidden through the whole of the Western Zhou.

The chariots at Muye ground through the mud, severed limbs hanging from their wheel hubs. Chenyu carried a long dagger-axe and picked out the fiercest of the Shang. A Shang general swung an axe at him; he turned aside, sent the point of his weapon in beneath the man's arm, and as the general fell from his chariot, stooped and drew at his neck; another Shang soldier thrust a spear at his horse's belly; he turned his wrist to parry and, borrowing the force of it, wrenched the spear shaft away and drove it back into the man's throat, then drew bloom from the wound. The Zhou soldiers around him saw only that this general was "fierce past any mortal," and not one of them saw the instant in which he lowered his head.

By midday a ripple ran through the front of the Shang line: the slaves and the prisoners of war whom King Zhou had conscripted by force had never had any heart for the fight, and now they turned their spearheads about and thrust at the armoured men behind them. The array of Zhaoge was like a cake broken in two. Watching it, Chenyu suddenly understood what his master meant by "waiting" — what one waits for is not the moment, but the hearts of men.

The fiercest part of the decisive battle at Muye was the chariot fighting. The Shang chariots were horse-drawn, three armoured men to a chariot and seventy-two foot soldiers to it, drawn up like a wall. Chenyu kept his place beneath Jiang Ziya's banner and watched the Zhou chariots come curling in from both wings, hubs colliding, splinters and blood flying up together. The driver of a Shang chariot swung his dagger-axe at his horse's head; Chenyu flattened himself to avoid the blow, flicked his own weapon upward and lifted the driver, armour and all, off the chariot; another Shang chariot came slanting in, and Xu Sheng drew his bow and nailed an arrow into the eye of the charging horse; the horse bolted, the chariot overturned, the men were thrown. Chenyu stooped in the confusion and drew at the neck of a Shang soldier who had fallen to the ground, and red bloom went down his throat. Deep in the fighting he had lost count of how much red bloom he had drawn — this undying body of his was, in the midst of ten thousand troops, the most alive thing there: wounds closed in an instant, strength flowed on without end, like a blade that never needed sharpening again. For the first time he understood that "feeding war with war" was, for him, literally true.

The Shang army broke and scattered, and the Zhou drove straight on into Zhaoge. By the time Chenyu entered the city with Jiang Ziya, the Deer Terrace was already on fire. King Zhou, robed in pearls and jade, threw himself into the flames; in the firelight the tyrant who had once imprisoned King Wen and cut out the heart of Bi Gan was no more than a blackened shadow. Chenyu stood not far off, watching the fire, and thought of something that had not yet happened — many, many years from now there would be another fire, and it would take from him the person who mattered most. He shook his head and drove the thought away.

In the streets and lanes of Zhaoge the firelight and the weeping were woven together. Chenyu followed Jiang Ziya into the city, and the whole way there was red bloom to be drawn — Shang soldiers lying where they had fallen, townspeople running in terror; to him all of it was food. He kept to his rule still: only where no one was, stooping to draw once at the neck, enough to serve a day; if now and then a sworn fighter came at him with a dagger-axe, he drew the bloom dry, and that was worth three days. That night he drew more even than at Muye — partly because of the chaos, and partly because he had suddenly understood: in a broken age blood is never scarce; what is scarce is that one thread of scent, cold and clear as a winter river. He wiped the corner of his mouth and watched the figures fleeing in the firelight, and for the first time felt himself a beast standing aside and looking on: in the same city, the one he was looking for was warming wine in the rear camp, while he, at the front, drew bloom. Two lives, running side by side, neither of them knowing the other.After the fires at Muye had gone out, he once caught, in the streets of Zhaoge, a faint sense that the scent had drawn near for an instant — but when he hurried toward it there was only a woman with a child in her arms, whose eyes were something like Wan's and were not. He stood where he was and watched her go, and suddenly felt that the hardest thing to bear on this road was not the bloodletting of battle, but this suspense of "so nearly, and yet not." That suspense was like an invisible thread, tied to him and holding him up at the same time, so that he could neither let go nor reach. He shook his head and drove the thought away — Wan was still back there in the rear camp warming wine; the suspense of this life had, for the moment, somewhere to rest.In the nights after the fires at Muye had gone out, he would sometimes slip back through the confusion to the rear camp and watch Wan warming wine at the stove. She never asked why there was always, about him, a raw smell that would not wash away; she only saved the last jar for him and said, "The General is back." He sat by the fire and watched the firelight throw her shadow onto the tent cloth, and for the first time felt that what he was seeking on this road had perhaps never been any one person, but this warmth of having someone keeping a door for you. But the warmth was too short — too short for him to have cupped it warm before he had to watch it cool.

Xu Sheng and Yang Zhi charged with him and thought only that the killing had taken hold of him; they never saw that instant in which he lowered his head to draw bloom.

IV. After the War · A Home in Haojing, and a Correction He Could Not Avoid

After the war he settled Wan in Haojing and found her a quiet way to earn her living. He thought that this time, at last, was the end of it.

King Wu fixed his capital at Haojing, and the world began to settle for the first time. In the west of the city Chenyu found a small courtyard and installed Wan in it, and got someone to find her a place in the weaving house. When her work was done each day she would spread nets in the yard and mend clothes, and now and then hum a little tune of Guanzhong. He sat beside her cleaning his dagger-axe, and listening, he thought that this accursed age of chaos had, after all, left one corner warm.

The days in Haojing were slow, as slow as another dynasty. In the mornings she went on duty at the weaving house, and he cleaned his dagger-axe in the yard and aired his armour; in the evenings she came home from her work with fresh blue dye always on her cuffs and an offcut of cloth in her hand, saying she would sew him a case for his dagger-axe. He sat beneath the jujube tree and watched her needle fly, watched the sunlight leak down through the branches and shift across her face like scattered gold. Now and then the neighbour's children came begging for jujubes, and she would gather up her skirt to catch them, give a few to the children, wash the rest and set them on the table, saying, "The General should taste something sweet in this world too." He held a jujube in his mouth; the five tastes had long since gone faint on him, but he was learning to store that sweetness in the eyes that watched her smile. One evening she asked him suddenly, "Is there a home the General wants to go back to?" He was blank for a moment, then answered, "Home — it is a long time since I thought about such a thing." She asked no more, only handed him the finished case, on the face of which she had embroidered a crooked character for *wan*. He kept it, as the first thing on all this road that was truly his, the first that belonged to him as something other than Chenyu.

Once, mending the bloodstained coat he had worn in the war, she let her fingertips pass over the old scars beneath the plates of armour and asked quietly, "All these wounds — who did the General take them for?" He answered, "For the ones I have to keep safe." She asked no more, and only drew the stitches tighter, as though she could sew those wounds shut along with the cloth. The jujube tree in the yard came into fruit; she went up on tiptoe, picked one and pressed it into his hand, saying, "It's sweet — taste it, General." He held it in his mouth and could taste nothing at all — the five tastes had long gone faint in this body of his; and yet, watching her smile, he felt that perhaps he had tasted a little of it after all. It was the first time since the rebirth that being alive had not seemed to him entirely a sentence.

In the third spring at Haojing a plague rose in the market quarter, taking first a few of the women of the weaving house, then spreading through the wards. Wan began with a low fever that would not break, then fell into delirium, and what she called out were southern place-names that stirred faintly somewhere in the depths of his own memory and yet would not come to his tongue — he listened, and his chest tightened, and tightened again. It was not that he had not thought of the blood in his own wrist — but let his blood pass a mortal's throat, and that person is a person no longer. He would not keep her by making her another one of himself. And so all he could do was watch by her seven days and seven nights, laying a cool cloth on her burning forehead, and with the hands that could draw the red bloom of a thousand men, tucking in the quilt for her again and again and wiping away her sweat, with not a fraction of his strength able to help her. On the seventh night Wan was clear for a moment; she drew the jade pendant off her wrist, pushed it into his palm, and said, smiling, "Keep this, General — I don't think I'll be up to the work at the weaving house anymore." He clenched the pendant, and something stopped his throat so that no sound would come. That pendant was warm and mild as water, the first charge he had received since the rebirth from the hand of someone about to go — a charge that had not come from blood.

At dawn on the eighth day, Wan went. Holding her body, still warm, he understood dimly at last: this road was going to be long. The night Wan died the snow fell heavily. He held her and sat in the yard until daybreak, watching the snow fill her cuffs, which still carried the blue dye, as though it were laying over her a white shroud. Xu Sheng and Yang Zhi came to see her off, and were astonished to see this general's eyes red — they had never once seen him moved. He said nothing, and only tied the jade pendant Wan had left to his wrist.

Out of that grief he planted the habit that would hurt him most in all the years to come. A comrade, A Niu, had caught the plague and was dying; before the end he clutched Chenyu's hand and begged him desperately — the child at home had long since lost its mother, and there was no one but him to go back and look after it; he begged for his life. Chenyu had wanted for a long time to have a helper he could rely on, and stood badly in need of a friend to talk to, and so for once his heart softened: he opened a cut in his own wrist and fed his blood into A Niu's throat. A Niu's fever broke, the grey of his face turned moist and living again, and when he opened his eyes the light in them, which had been about to go out, lit once more; he scrambled to his feet and knocked his head to the ground. "General Lü, this life of mine is yours." Chenyu raised him up and said only, "Remember who you are. Don't learn bad ways." A Niu struck his chest. "This A Niu walks a straight road. Dead or alive, I won't fail the General." That was the first turning of all.

He asked A Niu whether he would regret it, and A Niu said no. At first A Niu had nothing in him but gladness, but as the days went on he gradually lost the honest, good-natured temper that had been his. Once he was undying, and leaned on the fact that he could not be killed, he grew proud and overbearing, and went so far as to join with Guan and Cai, meaning to set himself up as a state of his own when the fiefs were handed out. Chenyu's grasp of history was hazy to begin with, with only two or three parts in ten of his memory left to him, and the first "correction" was pure accident — he went looking for A Niu, and the two of them fought by night in the wilderness: A Niu came at him with a spear, he turned aside and drove the point of his dagger-axe into the heart of his old friend; A Niu's body went stiff, and his eyes were full of disbelief. And that enfeoffment, which had been altered, fell by chance exactly back into the shape the histories record. He knelt before the body, and only after a long while understood: killing him had set history "right" again; and most of the turned, in the end, lose the shape they were made in. This lesson grew into his bones from that day on: turn one of your own kind, and sooner or later you must wipe it away with your own hands.

V. The Duke of Zhou's Eastern Campaign · The Rebellion of the Three Overseers

King Wu died, King Cheng was a child, and the Duke of Zhou ruled as regent. Guan Shu, Cai Shu and Huo Shu — the Three Overseers — had been charged with watching over the surviving people of Yin, but they would not submit to the Duke of Zhou; they spread it about that the Duke "would do the boy no good," and then joined with Wu Geng, the son of King Zhou of Shang, and brought in the eastern states of Xu, Yan and Pugu, and rose in rebellion all at once. Guanzhong was shaken, and Haojing cried out for help.

The Duke of Zhou took King Cheng's command and campaigned east, and Chenyu went out through the passes with the old troops of Jiang Ziya. On this march he had no Wan and no A Niu, only the two old brothers Xu Sheng and Yang Zhi. The eastern campaign was harder than Muye: the rebels held their cities to the death, and the Zhou struck at Yan and trampled Shang, and it was three years before it was settled. At the foot of the walls Chenyu took his dagger-axe and charged the line, drawing bloom in the confusion, and still no one noticed.

The hardship of the eastern campaign fell first on the feet. Once the Zhou host was past the passes, everything it crossed was country newly submitted; the roads were long and blocked, and grain and weapons were often short. Chenyu marched by day and slept by night with the old troops of Jiang Ziya, and wore through three pairs of shoes, while the skin of his feet split with the cold and no longer hurt him — the worth of this body showed itself only in wartime. On the nights of the assaults he kept to the old method: in the confusion as the Zhou soldiers climbed the scaling ladders, he stooped and drew once at the neck of an enemy soldier who had fallen, enough to serve a day; when he met a fierce commander he drew the bloom dry, and that was worth three days. Among the rebels of the Three Overseers there were many who had been armoured men of the Shang royal house, their plates heavy and thick, and it could not stop this "blade that never needed sharpening." Once, slipping into the rebel camp, he read the memory of a subordinate general, and learned that Guan and Cai had promised the eastern tribes "land carved off and a title granted," and that most of the soldiers were farmers driven into the rising. When he had finished reading he could only find it pitiable — on this road he had seen too many lives swept up against their will, like the soldiers of Zhao in the pits at Changping, like the men who had surrendered beneath the walls of Handan, and he could never tell who deserved to die and who to live.

Shangyan was the hardest nail in the rebels' line. The walls were high and the moat deep, and the Zhou attacked for months without taking it. One night Chenyu slipped into the city, felt his way to the sleeping tent of the rebel general, drew once at his neck, and read out of him the strength and the weakness of the defences; back in camp he offered his plan, and the Zhou broke into the city by way of the watercourse. On the day the city fell he watched the fires rise, and was suddenly very tired — on this road, everyone he had kept safe had gone, one by one, and what was left to him was only the dagger-axe in his hand and the jade pendant at his wrist.

When the revolt had been put down, the Duke of Zhou enfeoffed on a great scale: Kang Shu in Wei, the Grand Preceptor, Jiang Ziya, in Qi at Yingqiu, the Duke of Zhou himself in Lu ... The eight words "enfeoff kinsmen, to fence and shield Zhou" fixed the foundation of these eight hundred years. Chenyu stood before the terrace of enfeoffment and watched his white-haired master receive his fief and go east, and suddenly understood: Jiang Ziya had fished all his life, and what he had hooked was not King Wen but an age in which no one under heaven would have to fish anymore. In the last year of the eastern campaign Yang Zhi died of a stray arrow, and Xu Sheng, badly wounded, left the army and went back to Guanzhong. The night Yang Zhi went, Chenyu sat a long while before his body — this brother who loved a joke, who knew horses, who always told ghost stories of his home village at night, whose last words had been, "General, next life I'll share your tent again." He made no answer, only led up the horse that Yang Zhi had most loved to stroke, and watched it lower its head and nuzzle the hand that had gone cold, then raise its eyes to him, with something like tears in them as well. Before Xu Sheng left, Chenyu saw him out through the passes; the two of them said nothing the whole way, and at the place where they parted Xu Sheng clapped him on the shoulder: "General, you are like a man waiting for someone who will never come." He smiled and did not answer. Watching Xu Sheng limp away into the dust of Guanzhong, he suddenly felt that on this road the people beside him went one by one, and what was left was only the dagger-axe in his hand and the jade pendant at his wrist. And the warmth of that pendant would cool a little more with every day — cool into the one piece of the human world he still carried with him on the whole of this road.

VI. Leaving

The Western Zhou was done. He took the jade pendant Wan had left him, and went toward the Warring States.

He looked back in the direction of the city of Haojing; the snow had not yet melted. On this road, from the Western Zhou to here, he had learned three things: first, that the scent would lead him to someone "like her," and never to someone who "was her"; second, that however deep the feeling of a mortal, it is no match for a plague, an arrow, or the end of a dynasty; third, that turning one of his own kind looks like keeping a person, but what it keeps is only a shadow that has lost the shape it was made in, and in the end he must wipe it away himself. These three lessons had been written out for him with their lives, by Wan, by A Niu, by Xu Sheng and Yang Zhi. He tied the pendant a little tighter and walked toward the Warring States — where there was another who would be "like her," waiting for him to be wrong about her once more.

This time he was determined to be more patient than the last — his master had taught him, after all, that if the fish is meant to take the hook, it will come of itself.

The red thread lay ahead of him, and he did not yet know that all those he met on this road were, in truth, one and the same soul. He knew only that tomorrow he would begin again to hunt the scent, and have no fixed lodging again, and at some new city, by some new well, meet her suddenly once more — and then discover, once more, that it was not her.

VII. The Interval · From the Western Zhou to the Warring States

The Western Zhou finished, he shouldered his pack and became again that beast that lives by following a scent. This time there was no one at his side — Wan had become the earth beneath the jujube tree in the yard, Xu Sheng had gone back to Guanzhong, Yang Zhi had died of a stray arrow, A Niu had been ended by his own hand. The eight-hundred-year foundation still looked sound, but he could already smell that the wind was about to turn: the house of Zhou was weakening, and sooner or later the dagger-axes of the lords would break through that skin of "enfeoffed kinsmen."

He followed the scent east, and then north. This interval of emptiness was, for a mortal, an entire Spring and Autumn; for him it was no more than a few turns of cold and heat — a qiongqi's body does not age, and the years are only wind passing over stone, leaving no mark. He walked through Luoyi after King Ping moved the capital east, and watched the majesty of the Son of Heaven decay a little more each day; he walked through the time of Duke Huan of Qi and Duke Wen of Jin, who honoured the king and drove back the barbarians, and watched the lords go out beneath the banner of "driving back the barbarians" while what they practised was annexation; he walked through the covenant to lay down arms, and saw the two great powers clasp hands and speak of peace, then turn around and sharpen their blades. The rites were crumbling and the music broken; he understood nothing of courts, but he could read the smell of blood: when the smell of blood grows heavier day by day, that is the sign that the great tide is about to close.

Through the years of the interval he still lived off war. At the musters of chariots in the Spring and Autumn, at the raids on border towns in the early Warring States, he mixed among the ranks and stooped to draw bloom in the fighting, and no one noticed; when the wars died down he shouldered his pack and wandered, city after city, post station after post station. Once, by the well of some city, he thought he caught the scent drawing near for an instant, and hurried toward it, and found only a woman selling silk — not her, never her. He stood where he was and watched her go, and suddenly felt that the hardest thing to bear on this road was not the bloodletting of battle, but this suspense of "so nearly, and yet not." That suspense was like an invisible thread, tied to him and holding him up at the same time, so that he could neither let go nor reach.

For more than seven hundred years he walked on alone through the faintness of the Eastern Zhou's Son of Heaven, through the honouring of kings and the repelling of barbarians in the Spring and Autumn, watching the banners of the lords change crop after crop, watching the character for *Zhou* on the city walls wear thinner and thinner under the wind. Until at last the scent led him over the Taihang and down into the frontier army of Zhao — where there was another who would be "like her," handing out winter clothes beneath the city gate, waiting for him to be wrong about her once more. And this time he had learned better: he would not say it outright, and would not come too close; he would only be the one who was always there.

*The end of this movement. Continued in Movement II · The Warring States.*