Movement II · The Warring States

I. The Board of a Broken Age

(Counting from his rebirth in the Western Zhou, he had now been wandering some seven hundred and fifty years; between the last age he had stayed in — the Western Zhou — and this one lay the whole span of the Eastern Zhou and the Spring and Autumn, more than seven hundred years, before he came down at last into the beacon fires of the Warring States.)

All the way from the Western Zhou he had come following the scent, with no fixed dwelling, shouldering his pack and going north on that thread. The scent led him over the Taihang and down into the frontier army of Zhao.

The central plains of this era were no longer the world of the Western Zhou, where the Son of Heaven commanded the lords. The house of Zhou was in decay and the lords had carved the land up among themselves; by the Warring States the world held only seven powers standing against one another — Qin, Chu, Qi, Zhao, Yan, Wei and Han. Qin had grown strong through the reforms of Shang Yang: once the ordinances of ploughing and war went out, the people gave themselves wholly to the fields and the soldiers wholly to dying in battle, and the strength of the state swelled like a snowball rolling downhill, while the six states east of the mountains quarrelled among themselves without end. Though Su Qin preached the vertical alliance and Zhang Yi worked the horizontal, and for a time the diplomats opened and closed the world at will, in the end none of it could stand against Qin's ambition to unite all under heaven. Chenyu understood nothing of these calculations of courts. He could only smell the reek of blood growing heavier — the smell of a great tide about to close, of six states about to die.

Northward all the way from the Western Zhou, he passed through the feebleness of the Sons of Heaven of the Eastern Zhou, through the honouring of kings and the repelling of barbarians and the truce-covenants of the Spring and Autumn, and watched the banners of the lords change crop after crop. Seven hundred years and more: to a mortal a whole chronicle of vicissitude, to him only a few turns of heat and cold — a qiongqi's body did not age, and the years went over him like wind over stone, leaving no mark. He had no fixed dwelling; he carried his pack and followed the scent over the Taihang and across the Yellow River, the scent now thick, now thin, like a lamp adrift in the wind. On this road he saw out the last of "the rites crumbling and the music broken": the Western Zhou order in which the Son of Heaven commanded the lords had long since rotted away, and now whoever had the sharpest dagger-axe and the fastest horse had the say. He understood nothing of courts, but he could read the smell of blood: the heavier the smell of blood, the surer the sign that the great tide was about to close.

Later students of war would group the great captains of this era together as "the four famous generals of the Warring States": Bai Qi, Wang Jian, Lian Po and Li Mu. Each of the four served his own master — Bai Qi and Wang Jian for Qin, Lian Po and Li Mu for Zhao. Famous generals were as stars; Chenyu himself was no more than a guardsman in the tent of one of them. In this era men were also compiling a book of gods and marvels and mountains and rivers: the fangshi of Chu and Qi gathered the strange tales of the four quarters into scrolls, and later ages would call it the *Classic of Mountains and Seas* — though the book was not the work of one time or one man, but was accumulated and added to generation after generation by fangshi from the early Warring States onward, and only in the Western Han did Liu Xiang and his son Liu Xin collate it and fix it in eighteen chapters. Chenyu heard men tell of the god with eyes standing out from his head, of the tree Jianmu that reached to heaven, and of a "Torch Dragon," one-eyed and scarlet, that neither ate nor rested, and for no reason at all he thought of the bronze gods of the west that the old man beyond Mount Long had spoken of in the Western Zhou, and took it all for another of the folk's tall tales. Of the source of those strange tales, some said they had been carried out by men who strayed into the buried land of ancient Shu in the west, others that they had come down at second and third hand from the undying ones left alive in those years — and he did not, of course, know that this book and the old business Zhuo Sheng had buried beneath the basin were one and the same thread.

Before he enlisted under Li Mu he had in fact drifted about the borders of Zhao for a long while. The scent led him first to Handan, then drew him out beyond the passes, like a river that knows how to turn. In the markets of the Zhao frontier he looked after horses for men; on the Qin–Zhao border he escorted goods for merchant trains — all of it to be a little nearer that scent. Once, mixed in among refugees fleeing the war, he heard someone say "the Qin soldiers will be coming again before long," and took the remark up and volunteered for the ranks — he thought that if he was to hunt a scent, he might as well have a proper standing reason to remain in the army. When Li Mu's banner went up, he went. On this whole road of his, from the Western Zhou to the Warring States, he had never enlisted for a king; he enlisted for the person on whom the scent fell.

II. Li Mu's Guardsman

In the late Warring States, the pillar that held Zhao up against the Xiongnu and the armies of Qin was the old general Li Mu. The saying ran, "When Li Mu dies, Zhao falls." By then, of the seven powers only Qin, Zhao, Chu and Qi were still standing against one another; King Zheng had taken the throne of Qin and was eating away the six states one by one; the old general Lian Po was in his twilight, and Li Mu had become Zhao's last Great Wall.

Chenyu had come following the scent, and was at first an ordinary soldier on the frontier garrison. The scent clung to a woman of Zhao in the city of Handan, drifting nearer and nearer, until it settled in the neighbourhood of the encampment where Li Mu's army lay — the woman often stood beneath the city gate handing out winter clothes for the army, and had dealings with Li Mu's soldiers. The thought came to Chenyu: if he wanted a proper standing reason to stay beside her, the best way was to enlist under Li Mu. And so he volunteered into Li Mu's tent and became one of his personal guard. From then on what he guarded was no longer Zhao alone, but also that scent, forever adrift in the wind.

The two he was closest to in camp were Xu Lang and Xu Jie: Xu Lang was a fine archer, able at a hundred paces to nail a goose in flight; Xu Jie knew horses, and could tell from one feel of a beast's teeth how many years it had and how many stages it could run. Like him, the two were inconspicuous soldiers in Li Mu's tent. The frontier was bitter and cold; at night the three of them shared one pot of coarse wine, and Xu Lang would always laugh at him: "You're a man silent as a stone, and yet you always take the most dangerous work on yourself." He only smiled and did not answer — he took the dangerous work half for his brothers, and half to forge in himself a set of skills, so that when she was in danger he could stand in front of her.

The first time he smelled the woman's scent was in the sunset at the gate of Handan. He had just come back into the city from a patrol of the frontier when the wind brought him a thread of something cold and clear as a winter river — his whole body went stiff, and as always he followed the scent through the crowd of people, and saw a woman standing beneath the city gate handing out winter clothes. When she raised her eyes, the light in them was the colour of a river in winter. Chenyu stood a long while in the shadow before he went over and silently took the bundle of clothes off her hands. The woman was called Zhao Heng, and was a woman of Zhao; she took this silent guardsman only for someone dependable, a good friend and good companion worth having, and never knew that he had joined the army for her sake.

Zhao Heng's temper was like the wind of Zhao: fierce and straight. At the city gate she handed out the winter clothes with brisk, efficient movements, and her voice calling to people could carry half a street. Several times Chenyu saw her go up on tiptoe to pass a padded coat to an old soldier while she herself wore only a single thin layer, and without thinking he began to pull off the inner garment beneath his armour to give her; she laughed and pushed it back: "You're a guardsman and you're not warm enough yourself." When she handed out clothes the softest always went to the wounded; when she passed water she always tested its warmth first — she and that girl called Wan back in the Western Zhou were like two shadows struck from the same mould. Chenyu stood not far off watching, and that feeling of dawning recognition welled up in him again — these same winter-river eyes again, another her who did not remember him. He had learned better by now: he would not say it outright, and would not come too close; he would only be the one who was always there.

Zhao Heng's temper was fierce, like the wind of Zhao. Every time Chenyu came back from a campaign she was standing at the city gate waiting. Once she asked him: "You risk your life for Zhao — is it for the king, or is it for me?" He answered: "It is for you that Zhao is worth risking it for." She laughed out loud and told him he was a clumsy talker, and yet the things he said weighed more than what anyone else said. He never let slip his own deathlessness, and never spoke of where the scent came from — he only went on being the one who was always at her side.

Once Zhao Heng asked him: "You, guardsman — where is your home?" He thought for a moment and answered: "A very long way south, by the sea." It was what remained in the depths of his memory of modern Hong Kong — the sea wind at West Kowloon, spoken of offhand at a city gate in the Warring States as though it were his native place. She laughed: "A man from the sea — no wonder your hands are so cold." He looked at her, and did not say that it was because he never stayed long among mortals; he put the cold down to the "sea wind." That question and that answer he would repeat, in nearly the same words, in every era that followed, to every woman who was "like" her — he was a man with no home, and so he made a borrowed home of being beside each of them. But a home that is borrowed must in the end be given back; and the day it was given back was the day she died and he walked on alone.

Once Xu Lang was wounded in battle and Xu Jie caught the plague, and the camp was thrown into confusion. He went to them in the night, sewed up Xu Lang's wound and put wound-salve on it, then sat by the medicine stove and fed Xu Jie decoction after decoction to bring the fever down — mortal ills were treated with mortal medicines, and in all the years he had lived there was not one of them, blade cut or sword wound, seasonal plague or chill and fever, that he had not seen. 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. A Niu of the Western Zhou had lost his true nature that way, and in the end Chenyu had had to finish him with his own hand. He would not, and he dared not, leave these two old brothers as two shadows that had lost their true shape. When the two came round they thought only that the general had sent for a physician, and had no notion that the man who had watched the medicine stove all night had once, at his own wrist, drawn the blade and then laid it down. Watching them come back to life gave him a steadier feeling than living a thousand years longer himself would have done.

Li Mu's camp was sternly disciplined and yet generous to those beneath it. In camp, besides guarding the scent, Chenyu genuinely learned something: Li Mu taught his guard to "make yourself first invincible, and then wait for the moment when the enemy can be overcome" — drilling in riding and archery, building earthworks, patrolling at night, and never lightly opening a war. Xu Lang and Xu Jie often laughed at him for training harder than anyone; he would say only, "Idle is idle." In truth what he was training for was not killing the enemy but protecting someone — he was afraid that the day the Xiongnu or the Qin armies came down on them, his hands would be out of practice and he would not be able to protect the woman who handed out winter clothes beneath the city gate. Zhao Heng saw something of this in him, and took this silent guardsman simply for a stubborn fool.

Beyond the Passes · Li Mu Breaks the Xiongnu

Li Mu held the frontier by a clumsy method: "showing weakness to the enemy." He gave orders that an ox be killed in camp each day to feast the soldiers, and yet year after year held fast behind walls and cleared the fields, forbidding anyone to go out and fight; when the Xiongnu raided, the order was simply to fall back inside the fortifications. The King of Zhao thought him a coward and replaced him, and the result was defeat after defeat, until he had no choice but to ask Li Mu back. Li Mu had one condition only: how he fought, the king was not to meddle. Having his freedom, he bent his head and spent several years training a body of picked horsemen.

The night Chenyu rode out beyond the passes with Li Mu, the north wind was like a knife. Li Mu lured the chanyu of the Xiongnu into a great drive south, and laid ambush on both wings — when the signal sounded, ten thousand arrows loosed at once, and out of the dust the sound of slaughter rose suddenly on every side. Chenyu stood with his dagger-axe at Li Mu's flank and rear; a Xiongnu rider of renown swung a curved blade at him, and he turned aside, sent the point of his weapon up under the belly of the horse, and while the rider was falling stooped to draw once at the neck — enough to serve a day. Another Xiongnu soldier drew his bow at Li Mu; Chenyu twisted round and knocked the arrow aside, pressed half a step forward, and swept the shaft of his dagger-axe across, overturning the archer, man and horse together. In this battle Li Mu feigned defeat to draw the enemy on, closed both wings around them, and took more than a hundred thousand heads; then, riding the victory, he destroyed the Chanlan, broke the Donghu, and took in the Linhu, and the chanyu fled far away and for more than ten years did not dare come near the Zhao frontier. Chenyu stood not far off and watched Li Mu stroking his beard where he stood, like an old wolf that had at last stretched its sinews — and he understood suddenly what "waiting" meant: his master Jiang Ziya had fished for decades, Li Mu had endured for years, and what they waited for was not cowardice; it was that one stroke of ferocity.

After the battle Li Mu clapped him on the shoulder and, rarely, showed a smile: "You, lad — your hands are not those of any common soldier. You're more like a general in hiding." Chenyu only bowed his head. Li Mu did not know that this "general in hiding" was in truth a beast that had lived more than seven hundred years for the sake of one thread of scent. Li Mu went on: "Using soldiers is like keeping a hawk: starve its body, draw in its talons, and when the moment comes, one strike to the vital part." Chenyu carried that saying the whole of the road that followed — later, Han Xin's battle with his back to the river and Yue Fei's holding his troops still were both the same single word, *wait*. Only then did he understand that his master Lü Shang and Li Mu, several hundred years apart, taught the same thing: the one who can endure beats the one who cannot. This was a lesson he would have to go over again and again in the camps of the Han, in Yue Fei's army, in every era in which she appeared — except that by then what he was waiting for was no longer victory or defeat, but that day in West Kowloon, and the chance of meeting her again.

The night the Xiongnu were broken, Li Mu asked him to drink with him. The fire was warm in the tent; the old general raised his cup and, rarely, showed a little drunkenness: "You, lad — your hands are like a general's in hiding, and yet your heart is quieter than any man's." He bowed his head, and did not say that what he was hiding was not a general but a beast that had lived more than seven hundred years for one thread of scent. Li Mu said again: "There are many who can lead soldiers; there are few who can wait. You understand waiting — one day you will be something great." He looked at the fire swaying in his wine cup and thought of the old man at Panxi with the straight hook and no bait — so Lü Shang and Li Mu, several hundred years apart, had both seen that same word *wait* in the marrow of him. Only they did not know that what he waited for was not victory or defeat, but that day in West Kowloon, three thousand years away.

Li Mu could do more than hold the Xiongnu off; he could break Qin too. King Zheng of Qin sent Huan Yi east with the Qin army, meaning to take Pingyang and Wucheng from Zhao. Li Mu laid an ambush at Feixia, feigned defeat to draw the enemy on, and when the Qin army had pushed deep, brought foot and horse out on both wings and surrounded and destroyed Huan Yi's force; Chenyu charged with Li Mu and, in the confusion, stooped to draw bloom, finishing a Qin general in a single pass. When the Qin came again, Li Mu broke them once more at the battle of Panyu, and the Qin general Li Xin withdrew his troops. These two battles were among the few victories of Zhao's last years; Chenyu stood beneath the banner and looked at Li Mu, whose hair and beard were entirely white and whose eyes burned like torches, and thought: this is the general Zhao should have had. And yet he remembered, dimly, that generals like this often die the most unjustly. Sure enough, not long after the victory at Feixia, Guo Kai's slander reached the ears of King Qian.

III. Bai Qi Tofu · The Hatred of Changping

The battle of Changping was the turning point at which Zhao ceased to rise and began to fall. Lian Po was old by then; he held fast behind his walls and would not come out, and when the Qin army could not take him by assault it worked a plot of discord, spreading the word that "Lian Po is easily dealt with, and is about to surrender." King Qian of Zhao swallowed the bait and put Zhao Kuo in Lian Po's place. Zhao Kuo was the son of Zhao She, Lord Mafu; he had studied the books of war from childhood and fought his battles on paper, but had never once been in a battle. He abandoned Lian Po's caution and threw everything forward, and walked straight into Bai Qi's trap of drawing the enemy deep — four hundred thousand Zhao soldiers were surrounded at Changping, their grain gone and their relief cut off, until it came to "men eating men," and in the end Bai Qi buried them all alive. Chenyu heard this account while he was still in Li Mu's tent, and only shook his head: Zhao's Great Wall broke first at the suspicion cast on Lian Po, then at Zhao Kuo's boasting, and last of all in the pit of four hundred thousand wronged souls. He did not know yet that many years later another injustice, of the kind they called "perhaps there was cause," would fall on the head of another man who could not forget "give me back my rivers and mountains."

When the news of Changping reached the land of Zhao, the whole state went into white mourning. Chenyu heard that among those four hundred thousand wronged souls many were farmers' sons like himself, whose lives had been thrown away by Zhao Kuo's single phrase about fighting battles on paper, and all he could feel was the absurdity of it. From then on the people of Zhao paled at the name "Bai Qi"; even a child crying in the night would stop at the sound of it. He stood on the walls of Handan and watched the water of the Yellow River going east, and thought: one defeat can bury the lifeblood of a state, and what buried that lifeblood was a scholar who had never set foot on a battlefield. This truth he would understand once more, in the era when Yue Fei died on a false charge — those who destroy are not only on the battlefield; they are also in the halls of state, in one light, drifting sentence.

Before the siege of Handan, a kind of food was already going round the land of Zhao.

At Changping, Zhao Kuo fought his battle on paper; four hundred thousand Zhao soldiers surrendered to Qin, and the Qin general Bai Qi buried them all alive. The people of Zhao hated him to the point where, from that time on, the two words "Bai Qi" were not spoken. The soldiers and people around Gaoping took to calling square-cut roasted bean curd "Bai Qi's flesh" — scorched with fire and boiled in water and eaten, so that each bite seemed to be chewing on the Qin general who had buried the surrendered. This craft and this mouthful of hatred came down all the way from the Warring States to the present day, and became an intangible heritage that a whole province keeps.

In the market at Handan, Chenyu too once bought a piece of "Bai Qi's flesh." He bit into it: the smell of bean curd mixed with the hatred of the common people, and he could taste nothing at all — and yet, watching the old man who sold the curd mutter "eat you, who buried the surrendered," he thought that what this mouthful "ate" was not only Bai Qi: it was the dignity that defenceless people won back for the four hundred thousand wronged souls of Changping. Many years later this mouthful of "Bai Qi's flesh" would be handed down as an intangible heritage and spread through the southeast of Jin; and the lifeblood of Zhao lived on, in the mouths of generation after generation, on this hatred passed from hand to hand. He understood suddenly: history books grow old, and merit and blame grow faint, but the hatred on the tips of the common people's chopsticks is the most long-lasting thing there is.

While Chenyu was in Li Mu's army, they boiled bean curd after every victory, and the soldiers gnawed at "Bai Qi's flesh" with curses that carried in them an offering to the dead of Changping. Standing aside, he thought for the first time that the sharpest revenge is not only on the battlefield; it is also on the tips of the common people's chopsticks. This piece of folk cleverness, of "eating" an enemy, he would see once more in the era when Yue Fei died on a false charge — only that time, the one who was "eaten" was Qin Hui.He bit into the piece of "Bai Qi's flesh," and suddenly felt that this hatred in his mouth was the same thing as the red bloom he had drawn on the battlefields of these years — both of them debts that the living win back for the dead. Not one of the four hundred thousand wronged souls of Changping could open its own mouth; and not one of the ones he had guarded — Wan, Heng — could turn back and say "I am still here." The common people chewed hatred into their bellies, and he swallowed red bloom into his; the two looked like different roads, and in the end were the same single thing: *not reconciled*. But the hatred of the common people could be handed down as an intangible heritage, while his own refusal could only rot, dynasty after dynasty, in the cold of the jade pendant at his wrist. For the first time he felt that he, a beast living by a scent, was the same kind of person as the old man chewing bean curd in the market: both of them got through this broken age only by "eating" something.

IV. The Siege of Handan

On that famous night the Qin general Wang Jian drew a great siege ring round Handan. Chenyu stood on the walls with his dagger-axe, overseeing the defence; arrows fell like rain, and he set his own body in front of the ward where Zhao Heng lived. The blood of Qin soldiers splashed over his armour — in the confusion he drew once at the neck of a wounded soldier, enough to keep him a day without hunger; when now and then he met a fierce one, he drew the bloom dry, and that was worth three days. None of his own side saw it.

In the night at Handan, Zhao Heng braved the arrows to bring him a pot of warm wine, and said, "You never eat — at least drink something warm." He took it, and his fingertips touched the back of her hand, and the cold of it made her laugh again: "You, guardsman — your 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. With this era's "likeness" 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. He did not drink the pot of wine; he poured it into the moat. 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.

That night he had crouched over the severed head of a Qin general and, by a secret art, read its memories — the lowest and last way of taking food. What rose in his mind was not military intelligence but a scene in Wang Jian's tent: Guo Kai, the favourite of the King of Zhao, had taken heavy gold from the men of Qin and had already poured slander into King Qian's ear, saying that Li Mu held his army for himself and would turn traitor. Reading this, he went still instead. So the plot of discord had been laid long ago; the ending history had written was beyond even his power to change.

In the night at Handan, firelight and arrows were woven together. In the ward, Zhao Heng was binding the wounds of the injured when a stray arrow broke through the window; Chenyu flung himself forward, knocked the arrow aside with the spine of his dagger-axe, and in the same motion put himself between her and it. She looked up at him, and there was no fear in her eyes, only the calm of long habit: "You're always in front of me." He did not answer; he only pressed her hands back down on the bandage — this guarding of her, begun in the sunset beneath the city gate, had followed her all the way into the fire of a fallen city.

In the night at Handan the firelight turned the city bricks red. Wang Jian's Qin soldiers set up scaling ladders and rams and came surging up wave after wave. Chenyu stood with his dagger-axe before the ward; a Qin arrow grazed his temple, and he turned aside, and the point of his weapon went on into the throat of the man coming at him, and while the soldier was falling he stooped to draw once at the neck — enough to serve a day; when he met a knot of fierce ones, he drew one dry, and that bought him three days' peace. Once a Qin ram drove at the gate of the ward; he leapt up onto its shafts, split the driver down with the spine of his dagger-axe, and then took hold of the shafts with both hands and, with nothing but the strength of his one body, overturned the whole engine — the Zhao soldiers around saw only that "the guardsman" was like a tiger, and no one saw the instant in which he bent his head to draw bloom. What he guarded was not Zhao Heng alone, but that thread of scent in this city, cold and clear as a winter river; while the scent was, the person was.The night the fires at Handan died down a little, Zhao Heng came looking for him at the front of the ward and saw, beneath the plates of his armour, a freshly torn wound. She was not startled; she only tore a strip of cloth and bound it for him. Her fingertips were cool, like the girl called Wan back in the Western Zhou — he started, and only then remembered that Wan had long since turned to earth beneath the jujube tree in the courtyard, and that this one before him would go too in the end. When she had finished binding it she patted the back of his hand lightly and said, "You, guardsman — you always keep me behind you. Who is there to guard you?" He looked at her, and very nearly answered, "No one, and no one needs to" — but the words stopped in his throat and all he said was, "It's what I do." In that moment he understood suddenly: every one of the "like" hers he met on this road would be like this — never asking where he came from, only pushing him forward in front of herself; and he, taking that push from generation to generation, had become the one who forever stood behind. The jade pendant at his wrist glowed faintly in the firelight, as though Wan, somewhere very far away, had nodded.

Because this is what history says: King Qian of Zhao fell into the plot of discord, stripped Li Mu of his command, and afterwards ordered him to die. Chenyu knew this death could not be avoided — his rule was not to change history. He could guard Zhao Heng, but he could not guard the fate of Zhao, and still less could he guard his own general. He endured it, and let the record of "Li Mu was ordered to die" come true, and Zhao, on schedule, fell.

On the day the city fell, Zhao Heng died of a stray arrow. He held her, and at last knew for certain: this was not the end either. Every time he thought he had found her, every time he was wrong — they were all only women like her, never truly her, and never remembering.

On the day the city fell, a stray arrow came through the ward and struck Zhao Heng in the breast. As she fell, her hand still clutched half a cake she had meant to give to a wounded soldier. Chenyu threw himself forward and caught her; the blood was already welling from the corner of her mouth, staining that single thin garment — the very coat she had always said was "not warm enough," worn over the inner garment he had not borne to take off and give her. She looked at him, and there was no fear in her eyes, only the calm of long habit, and as she had every time he had stood in front of her, she said softly: "You're always in front of me." And then her hand let go. He held her body while it was still warm, and for the first time hated this undying body of his — he could draw the red bloom of a thousand men and could not carry back one thread of scent about to scatter. He thought of giving her blood to save her, but his fingertips stopped at his wrist: the lesson of former lives had cut too deep, and turning left nothing but a shadow that had lost its true shape. In the end he did not move; he only took that half cake and put it away inside his coat.

The night Handan fell he sat in front of the ward with Zhao Heng's body in his arms until the sky turned light. The rain fell thin and steady, cooling the warmth of her blood inch by inch. He took the bronze belt-hook from her waist — the one she used every day to fasten her clothes, its edges worn bright; like the coat she had always said was not warm enough, it had worn a shine of its own. He tied it at his wrist beside the jade pendant from the Western Zhou, one jade and one bronze, like two "likenesses" from different dynasties quietly recognizing each other on his wrist. He understood for the first time: every time he met one of her, something was added to his wrist; and with each thing added he was a little more a traveller carrying other people's leavings, and a little less a man looking for his own. Out in the rain he was suddenly exhausted beyond measure — on this road everyone he had guarded had gone, one after another, and what was left was only the dagger-axe in his hand and this jade and bronze at his wrist.

At the worst of the siege of Handan, the wife of Lord Pingyuan, who was the elder sister of Lord Xinling of Wei, sent envoy after envoy to beg for help. Lord Xinling stole the King of Wei's tiger tally, killed Jin Bi on a forged order, and led the army of Wei to the rescue; his retainer Zhu Hai, with a forty-pound iron mallet hidden in his sleeve, crushed Jin Bi to death at the head of the army and took command of it. Chenyu saw from a distance that army of Wei come in from the south and cut into the Qin lines, and the Qin general Wang Jian had no choice but to raise the siege and withdraw — the siege of Handan was broken, in the end, by one tally and one mallet of Lord Xinling's. He stood on the wall and looked at Zhu Hai's iron mallet, and thought suddenly: in a broken age, what breaks a deadlock is not only a thousand armies; it is also the nerve of a single hired retainer. And yet though Handan was relieved, Zhao's fate was spent — Wang Jian withdrew but did not go far, and stayed on the border sharpening his blade.

The Death of Li Mu

In the days when Li Mu was stripped of command, Chenyu slipped in once to the outside of the palace wall at Handan. He could hear the old general coughing in his prison, could hear the footsteps of the gaolers, could even hear Guo Kai's soft, limp words of slander in King Qian's ear. He gripped his dagger-axe until his knuckles went white — with his strength, to break the prison and carry Li Mu away would have been as easy as turning his hand. But he had sworn an oath: not to show what he was, not to change history. He could only watch, and watch Li Mu roped by the neck and beheaded, and watch Zhao's last Great Wall collapse before his eyes. That night he crouched in the shadow outside the palace wall and, for the first time, hated his own "keeping." Only many years later did he understand: what that keeping kept was not Zhao, but the line he was forbidden to cross; and behind the line was the person he had not yet met, on that day in West Kowloon.

There was one more thing to be settled as Zhao fell. An old subordinate, Sima Xian, was gravely wounded in the rout and hung by a thread; before he died he begged for his life as A Niu had, saying there was still an old mother at home leaning in the doorway and watching for him. This was the second time Chenyu broke his own rule to turn someone: his heart softened, and he wanted a helper he could trust, and so he gave his blood and turned Sima Xian into a qiongqi — this was "turning." He asked whether Sima Xian would regret it, and Sima Xian too said no. But once Sima Xian had the undying body his nature slowly changed, and he went over to the Qin camp and altered the outcome of a battle that should have gone otherwise. Chenyu's memory of the history of the Warring States was hazy to begin with — only two or three parts in ten of it remained — and by the time he noticed, the ending of that campaign had very nearly run off its track. He hunted Sima Xian down and, in a night battle, ended him almost without intending it, and the war came back to exactly the shape the histories recorded. Once again he was startled into understanding: it turned out that though he did not know history well, if he killed the right man, history put itself right again; and this man too had lost his true shape in the end — to turn one of his own kind was always, in the end, to have to erase him with his own hand.

Handan had fallen, and Zhao was gone. The sword of King Zheng of Qin had never gone back into its scabbard. In the years that followed, the Qin armies swept the world: Han destroyed, Wei annihilated, Chu broken, Yan taken, Dai captured, and Qi swallowed at the last — the six states turned to ash one after another. Following the scent, Chenyu went south, and watched the banners change on every wall: King An of Han taken prisoner, King Jia of Wei coming out to surrender, King Fuchu of Chu seized, King Xi of Yan fleeing to Liaodong... Zhao Heng, whom he had guarded beneath the walls of Handan, had long since become a handful of yellow earth; and this world was closing into one at a speed he could not read. He understood nothing of courts, but he could read the smell of blood — with each state broken, the smell of blood grew a degree stronger, until all six were black and of the central plains nothing was left but the one word *Qin*. He thought suddenly of what Li Mu had said: "Once Zhao falls, there is no general left in the world worth fighting." And now it seemed it was not Zhao alone that had fallen, but all six states; and the man who could unite them all was sitting in the hall at Xianyang, waiting to play another scene with Xiang Yu and Liu Bang of the next era.

The histories set down plainly the order in which Qin destroyed the six: Han first, then Wei; Chu broken, Yan taken, Dai captured, and Qi swallowed at the last. Chenyu followed the scent south, walking almost on the ash of the six states. When King An of Han was taken he was in the market at Xinzheng; when King Jia of Wei came out to surrender he stood on a bank where the river ran yellow; when King Fuchu of Chu was seized, he heard the firelight over Ying burning all night. With each state broken the smell of blood grew stronger, and the people's wandering deepened by another layer — he could read the smell of blood, and could not read this: why the world had to be made one before anyone would stop. Once he asked an old clerk fleeing south, and the clerk smiled bitterly: "From the struggle for hegemony in the Spring and Autumn to the devouring of one another in the Warring States — five hundred years and more, and the common people have not had one day of peace. What Qin wants is to cut those five hundred years of chaos through with a single blade." Listening, he felt for the first time, toward the two words *united under one*, a complication he could not have named.

The union accomplished, the First Emperor burned the books and buried the scholars. Chenyu passed the outskirts of Xianyang and watched the bamboo slips that carried the teachings of the hundred schools piled into a mountain of firewood; when the flames shot up, he felt that this fire and the fire at the Deer Terrace at Zhaoge in those years were the same flame — what burned in both was the thoughts of men. The scholars were driven off to Mount Li; he mixed among the soldiers escorting the labourers and, in the confusion, stooped to draw bloom, and no one noticed. Once he glimpsed the first shape of the ten-thousand-li wall, with numberless bones piled beneath its footings, like a line laid out of lives. He did not understand why a court should want such a line, but he understood that among those bones were many farmers' sons like himself, whose lives had been thrown away by the one phrase "hold off the Xiongnu." Many years later he would see the like bones again beneath another city wall — only that time it was not the First Emperor who was building, but time. On the night of the coup at Sand Palace he was wandering in the north; he heard that the First Emperor was dead and that Zhao Gao had forged the edict, and took it for another farce of the courts that had nothing to do with him — but the backwash of that farce was that the world fell into chaos again, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang raised their standard, Xiang Yu and Liu Bang rose one after the other, and the banners of Chu and Han covered the central plains once more.

V. Jing Ke · Farewell at the Yi

After Zhao fell he took with him a bronze belt-hook of Zhao Heng's and looked south over the nothingness.

In these years the world had rushed on toward its endgame. He heard that something had happened at the Qin court which shook the lords: Dan, the crown prince of Yan, had sent the assassin Jing Ke into Qin with the offering of a map as his pretext; when the map was unrolled to its end the dagger appeared, and in the end it came to nothing, and Jing Ke was executed in the hall itself. The lines on the bank of the Yi — "The wind soughs and sighs, the waters of the Yi are cold; the brave man goes out and does not come again" — went round every wineshop of the six states. Qin was furious at it, and pressed the destruction of Yan all the harder. Chenyu heard it out and only shook his head — another man who had thought to shake history, already written, with his single strength; like himself in those years, unable to change a fraction of it, and paying for it with himself.

Jing Ke was a man of Wei by birth. He loved reading and the sword, and drank with Gao Jianli in the market; when the wine was warm in them they sang in answer to each other, and then wept. Prince Dan honoured him as a high minister and plotted with him the killing of the king of Qin; Qin Wuyang went as his second, a boy who had killed a man at thirteen and whom no one dared look at crossly, and who yet, at the last, went pale and trembled with terror on the steps of the Qin hall. When the map was unrolled to the dagger, Jing Ke chased the king of Qin about a pillar; the medicine bag and the raised dagger-axe both missed, and in the end his left thigh was cut through, and the dagger he threw struck the bronze pillar; he had eight wounds on him, and died leaning against the pillar, laughing and cursing. Hearing it out, Chenyu felt a kind of respect for this assassin — he could not change history, but he dared to throw his one body against it; and if he could not move it, he would dash himself dead against it. That obstinacy made him more of a man than any number of generals and ministers who "knew which way the wind was blowing."

The wind on the bank of the Yi still carries that farewell. Later, passing the Yi, Chenyu stood at the crossing where they had seen him off, and watched the reeds go white-headed, and felt a kind of envy for Jing Ke — at least Gao Jianli had struck the zither for him, at least Prince Dan had believed that he could do it. While on this whole road of his there was no one he could entrust even so mad a thought as "kill the king of Qin" to. He shook his head and drove the thought away, and set out toward the Han.

The red thread ran on ahead; and still he believed that the women of every era were only "like" her. He set out toward the Han.

VI. The Interval · From the Warring States to the Han

After Zhao fell he carried Zhao Heng's bronze belt-hook and walked alone through the unification under Qin. This interval between was, to a mortal, a few short decades; to him it was like a stretch of road with the women taken out of it — Wan in the Western Zhou, Heng in the Warring States, both gone; the jade and the bronze at his wrist were the only proof left to him that he had truly met them, and not dreamed them.

Following the scent south, he walked the imperial highways of the First Emperor, and saw the cart-axles made one gauge and the writing made one script, and saw too the fire of the burning books and the pit of the buried scholars; he walked past the heaped white bones at the foot of Mount Li, and watched the ten-thousand-li wall brick living men into itself inch by inch. Through the years of the interval he still lived off war: at Julu where they smashed the cauldrons, at Hong Gate where they danced with swords, at Gaixia where the songs of Chu rose — 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, following the scent. In a broken age the scent drifted wildly, like a thread crumpled by the wind; he chased it a long while before, near the encampments of Liu Bang, King of Han, he caught a faint sense of it settling to earth.

At the tail of the struggle between Chu and Han he stood in the wind at Gaixia and heard the songs of Chu on all four sides sing a conqueror into a ghost. He did not understand why Liu Bang had won; he could only read the smell of blood — when the smell of blood reached its height, that was the sign that a new dynasty was about to be founded. He walked toward that scent, not knowing at all that the one on whom it fell this time would be a great fellow who wielded a long spear; and that that man would be the first of his own kind he had kept by his own hand since the Han, and the brother who, for two thousand years after, would stand shoulder to shoulder with him longest. At the end of the interval the beacon fires of the Han were already in sight — and this time he would not be walking alone.He touched the jade and the bronze at his wrist, and thought suddenly: the man with the spear whom he would meet on the next stretch of the road might, like Wan, like Heng, go far away from him in the end. But this time it would be different — that one would be undying, and would stand beside him, and walk the two thousand years to come with him. He set out toward the Han and, for the first time, there was a companion's shadow at his feet.

*The end of this movement. Continued in Movement III · The Han.*