The official road heading north grew increasingly desolate the farther one went.
Nanxi led the chestnut horse, walking on the cracked yellow earth road.
The sweet, cloying smoke of Lin’an City had long been left behind, replaced by a breath mixed with dust and decay.
The roadside vegetation began to thin out.
The verdant bamboo and banyan trees common in Jiangnan were gradually replaced by low shrubs and withered artemisia grass.
The sky was a transparent gray-blue, cloudless.
The sun glared down directly, baking cracks into the land.
Yet the people on the road gradually increased.
Some were merchants, some travelers, but most were refugees.
At first, Nanxi only saw three or five, hunched over, slowly shuffling with legs like dry branches.
They were mostly in ragged clothes, disheveled and filthy, their eyes turbid like stagnant water.
Some carried tattered bundles, others dragged crude sleds made from tied branches, upon which lay children or elders on the brink of death.
The farther north, the more people.
Eventually, the entire official road was almost occupied by a dense mass of heads.
They walked in silence, with only footsteps, gasps, occasional coughs, and the grating sound of sleds scraping the ground.
No one spoke; even the children’s cries were faint, as if afraid to disturb something.
Nanxi led his horse, forced to slow down, threading laboriously along the crowd’s edge.
His somewhat worn linen shirt stood out among these people—though the fabric was ordinary, it was excessively clean.
Those refugees occasionally looked up at him, their eyes devoid of emotion, only numb bewilderment.
They seemed to have become the living dead.
The air’s scent was complex and nauseating.
Body odor, urine stench, the rot of festering wounds—these smells mingled in the dry dust, steamed by the sun into something viscous and substantial, plastering itself over one’s mouth and nose.
Nanxi frowned but didn’t cover his mouth and nose.
He saw someone lying by the roadside.
It was a middle-aged woman, lying sideways in the dust, motionless.
Her face was toward Nanxi, her eyes still open, pupils dilated, emptily gazing at the gray-blue sky.
A few flies crawled back and forth on her cracked lips.
Her abdomen was slightly swollen, the hem of her clothes stained with dark blotches.
No one stopped.
The refugees detoured around her, like avoiding a stone or a dead log; no one even gave her a second glance.
Nanxi’s steps paused.
His fingers gripping the reins tightened, knuckles whitening slightly.
He thought of Huang Muzhi, the fisherwoman who gathered clams by the sea, humming tuneless folk songs.
If she hadn’t met him, would she have ended up like this, fallen on some unknown road, flies crawling over her eye sockets?
“Young master, have mercy…”
A withered hand suddenly reached out before him.
It was an old woman, her hair almost all fallen out, her scalp covered in sores.
Her eyes were deeply sunken, lips cracked and bleeding.
The extended hand was like a dried chicken claw, nail crevices packed with black dirt.
Nanxi stopped and took out a few steamed buns exchanged in Lin’an from his bosom, placing them in her hand.
The old woman clutched the buns tightly to her chest.
A spark suddenly burst in her turbid eyes.
She dropped to her knees with a thud, knocking her head three times with dull thumps, mumbling incoherently about “bodhisattva” and “benefactor.”
The youth sidestepped and continued forward.
Behind him came the rustling commotion of other refugees; a few gazes landed on his back, carrying greed and appraisal.
But he led a horse, a sword hanging at his waist; those gazes ultimately remained just gazes.
As the sun slanted west, he saw the border pass of Great Zhou.
It was a earthen-yellow fortress, standing between two bald hills.
The walls weren’t high, but the arrow towers were imposing; figures of spear-holding soldiers were vaguely visible on the battlements.
Below the walls, a dense crowd gathered like a swamp.
Nanxi stopped about a li away from the pass.
He found a slightly elevated mound, tied the horse to a clump of dead shrubs, and stood at the top, gazing afar.
The situation at the city gate was worse than he imagined.
Soldiers in leather armor held long halberds, forming a sparse defensive line.
They were driving away refugees; whenever someone tried to approach the gate or knelt below begging, a soldier would step forward and smash with the halberd shaft.
Screams, cries, scoldings mixed into a noisy wave; even from over a li away, it could be faintly heard.
Nanxi saw a young woman holding a child, struck on the shoulder by a halberd shaft, staggering to the ground; the child tumbled out, wailing.
The woman ignored herself, crawling to pick up the child, but took another blow to the back, sprawling in the dust, unable to rise.
The surrounding refugees watched silently; no one stepped forward.
They just retreated, and retreated again, huddling into a trembling shadow beyond the invisible line drawn by the soldiers.
Nanxi’s lips pressed into a straight line.
He untied the reins, mounted the horse, and with a squeeze of his legs, the chestnut horse trotted toward the pass.
The closer he got, the thicker the air of despair.
The refugees, seeing him approach on horseback, automatically parted a narrow path.
Their gazes lingered longer on him; some eyes even ignited with a nearly mad hope, as if he were an official come to save the world, a noble who could take them into the city.
Nanxi didn’t look at them.
He went straight to the front of the crowd, reining in about ten zhang from the soldiers’ line.
“I want to enter the city.”
His voice wasn’t loud, but clear and cold, piercing the noisy background.
The soldiers behind the line were stunned, then burst into laughter.
A burly woman who seemed to be a small leader stepped forward two paces, pointing her halberd shaft at Nanxi, and said coarsely.
“Where’d this pretty boy come from? Didn’t see the notice? Xia dogs are forbidden from entering Great Zhou territory! Scram back to your southern Liang!”
Xia dogs.
After hearing this term, Nanxi’s gaze swept sharply over the woman, then over the mocking soldiers behind her; his hand pressed on the sword hilt at his waist.
“Young master, don’t!”
A hoarse voice suddenly came from the side.
Nanxi turned his head and saw an old beggar sitting by a dead tree below the mound.
The old beggar was truly ancient; that vicissitude wasn’t from wandering but gifted by time—her face wrinkled like cracked bark, hair gray-white and messy, draped to cover most of her face.
She was wrapped in several layers of rags, colors indistinguishable; no straw sandals on her feet, thick mud crusts on her bare soles.
She leaned against that dead trunk, seeming to have sat there for a long time.
Nanxi glanced at the group of women, then rode to the old woman.
The youth dismounted and asked respectfully.
“I wonder what guidance Senior has.”
“Senior doesn’t suit me. Just yesterday, there was also a woman with decent martial skills who wanted to force her way in. She was at the acquired realm, practicing external hard arts—a body of iron cloth shirt, impervious to blades and swords.”
The old beggar raised her withered hand, pointing to a spot under the city wall.
“She thought she could withstand arrows, but what shot down from the wall were qi-breaking crossbows. Three bolts: one through the chest, one severing a leg, the last nailing through her head.”
The old beggar said this, grinning to reveal her few remaining yellow teeth—like laughing, like crying.
“That blood splashed so high. The corpse was dragged to the roadside, stripped naked, just left there. Wild dogs came to gnaw at night; this morning I went to look, just a bloody skeleton left.”
Nanxi’s hand on the sword hilt neither loosened nor tightened.
He just looked at the old beggar.
The old beggar’s turbid eyes looked back at him; that gaze held no pity, no admonition, only calm—she spoke of facts she was accustomed to.
“Young master is a Xia person, right?” The old beggar asked again.