Autumn rain fell on the old post road through Azure Province. Pei Jing had spent seven days on the road from the basin and reached the Cloudford fork on the eighth morning. Yellow clay clung to the hem of his gray robe, and water ran off his bamboo hat. The air smelled of wet slate and pine needles.
Where the road forked, he found a granite marker leaning into a ditch. Briars covered the base. He snapped the stems with his bare hand and wiped the lichen away with his sleeve. The old characters were shallow but still readable. The worn date below them placed the marker in his great-grandfather’s time, more than a century ago.
Cloudford, ten li.
Pei Jing remembered standing at this fork when the road was clear and the ditch ran with irrigation water. The track had seemed endless to him then. Now bamboo grew in the ruts, and young trees stood where the Black Tiger Gang had once collected two coppers from every fisherman on his way to market.
Somewhere between those two visits an emperor had died without an heir and two warlords had fought across the eastern river basins until their men had nothing to eat but roots. Families had raised children, buried parents, and turned over the same soil year after year. Pei Jing could remember where he had been for much of it. A few hours of practice here, a few there. Most of the days that had made him strong…
