Ember Legion

Four days after Broken-Tooth died, before the sky had fully lightened, Chen Jin brought the pistol up to the mound.

Wen Heng’s words from the day before were still in his ear: ”Bring the pistol up tomorrow. A bowl doesn’t tell you whether a hand is steady. A gun does.” Day four of paying it back. He owed his own hand a straight answer—the three trembles against the bowl’s rim were long gone, but a bowl was soft; it could hold a hand and still not hold a life. The gun had to speak.

The mound was quiet. All down the East Sluice he could hear the sea, the tide coming in layers, as flat as it had been since the king died. He set the pistol on the stone lip of the parapet, slipped the magazine, cleared the chamber, worked the action—once. Loaded, chambered—once. The fingers did not shake.

The hand that had crossed the line on the third day held steady even through work this fine now, no sweat in the nail beds. He dropped to one knee and put three rounds into the old slope beyond the gap, aimed single shots; the hits scattered through the mud at the slope’s foot, one against the next, no drift, no high, no low.

Wen Heng counted beside him, saying nothing. When she was done she took out the little book, opened it, and wrote four characters: day four of paying it back.

”Steady,” she said. ”A bowl doesn’t tell you. A gun does—you were right.”

He did not answer. He settled the pistol back onto his shoulder. The pistol had no number; he remembered that—the afternoon Bi Chengzhang’s pen tip had pointed at him. He did not raise it today, but the weight on his shoulder was not what it had been a few days before—then it had been borrowed, and Wen Heng had said borrowed things get paid back, paid back until the hand stopped shaking. Today it had grown into his own. The gun rode his back, and so did the man.

At midday, the old customs house. Zhou Zhengting spread a stack of registers across the table; the top one had two pencil characters on its cover—”battalion roll”—and the pencil point had paused on the first of them before going on. He had been holding those two characters in for three days.

”The labor register stands, the work roster is in,” he said. ”The ditch-diggers, the reloaders, the machine men, the magazine-stackers, the brick-tearers—every head is on the books. Scattered, they were each household’s labor; formed, they are one battalion’s soldiers. Today we stand the battalion up.”

Chen Jin looked at that ”battalion roll.” The day after Broken-Tooth died, forty-seven people had each copied their own line into the booklet, those who could not write pressing a thumbprint; now those hands were to be gathered under one flag. The flag was new; the hands were old.

”What do we call it?” he asked.

”The Labor Battalion,” Zhou Zhengting said. ”The work is labor, the life is soldiering. Earthworks, reloading, machine repair, wall-building—the bricks on the wall, the teeth of the reloading press, all of them are this wall’s fangs. Fangs in line, and the wall can bite.”

The establishment was read out: three squads under the battalion, plus a wall-mending detail. The reload squad, led by Xiao Mao—it was she who had put the old reloading press back together, and the three-hundred-rounds-a-day base still stood; the barrel of that third cannon up north was still growing under her hand, the hammer-sound drifting over from the north, unhurried.

The earthworks squad, the ditch-diggers folded in, led by the old mason, with the fisherwoman among them—during the famine she had pressed her hand to the granary’s cracked seam to hold the leak (already on the labor register), her hand held straight, the seam not yet healed, pressed hard.

The magazine squad, named for Da Liu—one-handed, sixty magazines a day, and the first line of the work ledger had been his. The wall-mending detail, with Song Laixi as acting squad leader—the signal mallet was in his hand, the wall’s voice was his, and the work of mending wall and sluice fell naturally to him too, the fresh-wound cloth on the grip laid tight against the wood.

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When the establishment was read through, the room went quiet for a breath. Not that no one spoke—it was the first time these men had been read out as one battalion’s soldiers, name against name, like bricks on a wall leaning against bricks. Bricks do not speak; stacked, they are the wall.

Da Liu stood in the doorway, one-handed. When his name was called he pinched the work chit in his breast—still the first one ever issued, the head of those thirty-nine, carried inside his jacket and never traded for another, its edges gone soft with wear. He did not come in to sit.

He stood outside the threshold, as if sitting down would make him no longer ”Da Liu who digs” but ”Da Liu of the battalion,” and he had not yet figured out how to wear that name. Chen Jin looked at him once and did not call him inward. Some flags are raised to be seen, not hung on a wall; Da Liu standing there was more a flag than Da Liu sitting would have been.

The boy in the magazine squad—the one who had traced his own name three times before he dared go on—sat among the stackers now, his back straighter than that day, his eyes never leaving Da Liu at the door.

Xiao Mao had not come—the machine shop could not spare her; the third cannon’s barrel was a furnace-fire short. As Zhou Zhengting read the reload squad, a hammer-stroke came in through the door, from the north, unhurried, unlike any other sound in the city. Chen Jin knew that sound. It was a sound of growing, not of burning.

The fisherwoman sat, her hand held straight, the seam not healed, pressed hard, the thimble-ring still printed into her finger roots. The old mason’s hands no longer shook; his own line came out crooked, not one stroke retraced—crooked, but not one stroke traced over someone else’s. Wen Heng sat in a corner with the medical record copy (the one handed over the next day) and looked up long enough to say: ”The battalion stands, but the man who lost an arm goes on the rolls too—don’t leave him off.” Zhou Zhengting said the labor register already held him; she nodded and wrote a separate line in the little book, no more words.

The silk-vested councilman took notes beside them. Bi Chengzhang had not come; in his place one of his enforcement men carried a stool into the corner and said the committee was ”observing the muster”—not taking the seat of honor; the stool sat in the corner, like his master’s dog-eared Article Seven: the man absent, the mark present.

Zhou Zhengting pushed the establishment volume across. ”Filing by the control order, both signatures, both registers. Article Seven’s liability, the establishment item—we take one layer off it today. The battalion stands, the establishment is filed; if he asks, he asks from the commanding general.”

The junior officer flipped through, found no fault in the characters. Before leaving he asked one thing: ”Who commands the battalion?”

”The commanding general, concurrently,” Chen Jin said. ”I took the seal, the bronze seal one size larger than the command seal, and the battalion comes to me too. Audit grain, audit ordnance—start from the commanding general, don’t circle round to the soldiers.”

The junior officer noted it and left. The stool he did not take; it stayed in the corner, empty, as if kept for Bi Chengzhang—the man absent, the seat kept.

Chen Jin paused one step outside the customs house door and thought of Da Liu standing outside that threshold for the better part of a morning. ”The battalion stands three days late,” he told himself. ”Three days sooner, and Da Liu would not have been standing outside—he’d have been sitting in, by rights.” The fourteenth time he had counted a debt, set down beside the empty lines of the battalion roll, next to Lei Changgeng’s column—those eleven blank lines (Chapters 30, 31) that the standing battalion could not fill either; no one was fit to fill them.

At dusk Chen Jin walked his round to the machine shop up north. Xiao Mao was fitting the third cannon’s barrel, wrench at her belt, hammer coming down one stroke at a time, the furnace fire on her face. This fire was not the fire on the wall the night Broken-Tooth died—that night’s fire was burned out, throwing the figures on the wall-top and the bug husks into relief; this fire was growing, throwing a cannon still growing into relief.

”How much barrel left?” he asked.

”One furnace-fire short,” she said, hammer not stopping. ”The iron is in the city; the cannon is growing. When the fleet comes (the countdown of Chapters 32, 33—seven days yet), this cannon can speak for the North Wall.”

He did not go in. He stood in the doorway a while. The hammer-sound from the machine shop, the cough of the reloading press (that old machine, one cough and it gasped half a day), the chisel-sound of bricks mended on the wall—three sounds braided together, a noise the city had never made before. Not the noise of a bug-tide, not the noise of gunfire. The noise of human hands growing.

He turned and walked back. The wind off the mound carried those three sounds with him all the way, and did not let go until the foot of the customs house.

At night Chen Jin turned the battalion roll to its last page. Eleven blank lines—Lei Changgeng’s column had stood empty (Chapters 30, 31), and now the battalion kept it too; no one was fit to fill it. Below the blank lines he wrote one line: The Labor Battalion, day one.

The pistol rode his back, numberless. The panel sat in his pocket, unopened all day. The sea came in from behind the shoal, layer upon layer, unhurried.