Chapter 2
Springtime grass grows upon the fallen kingdom, its palace buried beneath ancient hills.1
AFTER THE EMPEROR OF LIAO marched south and conquered the city of Shangzi, formerly held by the Chen Empire, the Han people retreated south through Yubi Pass. Capitalizing on their victory, the Liao army swept onward and claimed another three hundred li2 of land south of the pass, including Hebei Prefecture. Runan, a city in the prefecture, had been a thriving trade and distribution center linking the Central Plains and the lands north of the Great Wall—but when it fell to the Liao Empire, the Han people fled west and south. Once the largest city in Hebei, it was now filled with broken tiles and dilapidated houses. Not even thirty thousand families remained.
One of these remaining families was the Duan clan.
The Duan clan was neither too large nor too small. They owned an oil mill as well as a pawn shop, and they dabbled in reselling items to passing merchants. The head of the household had died of consumption before he reached thirty-five, and it was left to his widow to keep things running smoothly for the whole family.
On the eighth day of the twelfth month, the day of the Laba Festival, Runan was bathing in the burnished glow of the setting sun, its bluestone-paved alleys alight as if tiled in gold—when a blood-curdling scream erupted from the Duan clan’s courtyard.
“You stole from the madam?!”
Blows rained down on a muddy child dressed in rags, the housekeeper’s stick thudding against his body. Bruises splotched his face, and one of his eyes was swollen; bloody scratches ran down his arms.
“Say something, you little bastard! You beast!”
The child tried to run, darting behind the nearest building to hide, but collided instead with a servant girl. The impact knocked her wooden tray from her hands, and the housekeeper screamed at him once more.
With nowhere left to flee, the child turned and desperately tackled the scolding woman to the ground, then punched her in the face. When she moved to hit him again, he opened his mouth and bit her.
“Help!” the housekeeper shrieked.
Her cry alerted the stableman, who rushed across the courtyard with hayfork in hand. Unhesitating, he struck the child over the head. The blow knocked him senseless, and he fainted—but the beating continued. The stableman thrashed him bloody, carrying on until the pain itself roused him again, then grabbed him by his dirty collar and threw him into the woodshed. The door slammed and the lock clanked.
The child lay dazed and wounded on the woodshed floor.
“Wontons! Get your wontons!” called an old man’s voice outside. Every evening, the wonton seller Lao-Wang strolled the streets with his goods in baskets tied to a pole across his shoulders.
“Duan Ling!” A child’s voice shouted from beyond the courtyard. “Duan Ling!”
The sound of his name dragged him back to consciousness. Duan Ling’s shoulder had been gouged by the hayfork, and a rivet had punched a bloody hole into his palm. He swayed, nearly staggering as he stood.
“Are you okay?” the child outside yelled.
Duan Ling gasped for breath, his face scrunched in agony. After making an attempt to stand, he slumped back against the wall and forced out an “Uh-huh.” The child outside, reassured, hurried away.
He slid slowly down the wall and collapsed onto his side, where he lay curled up in the damp, dark woodshed. Gray sky was all he could see through the shed’s high window. Fine snow drifted through the air, and among the clouds there seemed to be a sparkle of starlight right at the center of the sky.
A frosty silence rolled in as the evening darkened to night. Thousands of families across Runan lit warm, homely lamps and fires while the snow softly blanketed their roofs. Only Duan Ling was left trembling in a cold woodshed, too hungry to think. Hazy, disorganized scenes crossed his mind’s eye. Sometimes he saw his deceased mother’s hands. At others, he saw Madam Duan’s beautifully embroidered robe, or the housekeeper’s ferocious, scowling face.
“Wontons!” Lao-Wang cried again.
I didn’t steal anything, Duan Ling thought. He squeezed the two copper coins in his good hand a little tighter, his vision darkening. His consciousness was blurred, patchy. Will I die?
Death had always seemed so distant. Just three days before, he’d seen a crowd surrounding a beggar who’d frozen to death under the Bluestone Bridge. In the end, his body had been hauled onto a cart, transported to the city outskirts, and tossed into a mass grave. Duan Ling himself had joined the fun and followed the corpse cart with a few other children. He saw the beggar’s body wrapped in a straw mat and buried in one of the pit’s open graves, next to another that was yet empty. Perhaps, after his death, he’d be buried next to that unnamed beggar.
As the night wore on, cold seeped into Duan Ling’s stiffening body. His shallow breaths became a pale white mist, drifting into the air and mingling with snowflakes. For a confused moment, he thought the snow had stopped and the sun had appeared before him, like a summer morning’s dawn.
The imaginary sun resolved into the light of a lamp shining on his face as the woodshed door creaked open.
“Come out!” barked the stableman.
Another man—whose voice he did not recognize—asked, “This boy is Duan Ling?”
Duan Ling was lying on his side, facing the door. With much difficulty, his muscles spasming, he managed to sit upright. A stranger brushed past the stableman and knelt before him, examining his bruised face.
“Are you sick?” the man asked.
Duan Ling’s mind was hazy with shadows and hallucinations. The stranger produced a pill from his robes and pushed it past Duan Ling’s lips, then scooped him up from the cold ground. Through his disorientation, Duan Ling caught a whiff of the man’s scent. With each swaying step away from the woodshed, he grew warmer—first from being held in the stranger’s arms, and then as the air lost its chill.
A hole had torn in Duan Ling’s worn old coat during the beating, and the reed flowers sewn inside for insulation spilled onto the stranger as he walked.
Dim lights flickered against the dark, lonely night, and the dried reed flowers scattered behind them down the long corridor. From either side came the unrestrained laughter of maidens, underlaid with the rustle of falling snow outside warm rooms. The world continued to warm and grow brighter; Duan Ling seemed to travel from freezing winter to balmy spring, from the dark of night to the light of day.
The world is an inn for all beings, days mere passersby in the face of eternity.3
Duan Ling’s breathing deepened as, slowly, he regained consciousness.
The stranger had carried him to the main hall, which was brightly lit and comfortably heated. Madam Duan lounged on a divan with a piece of scenery-embroidered satin resting loosely in her hands.
“Madam,” the man said.
Madam Duan’s words held a smile as she asked, “Do you know this child?”
“I don’t,” said the stranger—but he continued holding Duan Ling in his arms.
The medicine the man fed him had dissolved on Duan Ling’s tongue. His frozen-stiff core finally seemed warm again, his strength returning. Though the stranger held him against his chest, both of them facing Madam Duan, Duan Ling dared not lift his gaze. He saw only a small portion of the splendid brocade covering the divan.