The Way of the Wizard

Feeding the Feral Children David Farland

Yan woke in the pre-dawn, sweat making her blouse cling to the hollow of her chest. She lay on her bed, unwilling to move, lest she waken her three-year-old sister who curled into her, her face close to Yan’s breast. The little girl would be hungry when she woke; this one was always hungry, and Yan did not want to have to get up and steam the rice.

Lightning snarled softly in the distance, like a hunting tiger, and just outside the window the bamboo rustled in the wind.

Yan had dreamt of Huang Fa. Only a few years before, the Silk Road had been opened to Persia, and Huang Fa had dared to take it for her last spring. Winter was coming, and snow would soon fill the Himalayas. If Huang Fa did not return soon, the trails would be blocked until next year.

In Yan’s dream, she’d seen his startlingly clear eyes under the moonlight, while the crickets sang their nightly hymns of longing and carp finned in the pond beside her cottage. “When I return,” he’d said, “I will have much silver. Your father will surely agree to the match when he sees what I bring.” Huang Fa was but a lowly merchant from a fishmonger’s family, and he dared to hope to marry a landowner’s daughter. He would have to rise much higher in station to do so; he would need to buy land himself.

His voice, soft and husky, seemed preternaturally clear in the dream, as if he stood over her bed. His image had left her feeling over-warm, with a soft fluttering in her womb. At fifteen, Yan was young and in love, and felt all of the longing and guilt and confusion that went with it. Her mother had once told her, “A girl’s first love is always the most treasured. If you are fortunate, he will also be your last love.”

Yan inhaled deeply, hoping that perhaps Huang Fa really had come in the night, that she might catch his scent. But the early morning sky outside smelled only of thunder. She wondered where Huang Fa might be, and as she did, she whispered a prayer to the Sun God. “Wherever he is, may he greet the morning with pleasant thoughts of me.”

The land was black in the Altai Mountains, black stone upon black stone, with only the sparest of grasses and shrubs cropping up here and there.

Huang Fa stalked through the cold pre-dawn in a sullen rage, and for a moment he tried to conjure an image of Yan. Walking a hundred li in single night can drive the humanity from a man, make him hard and cold. Fatigue had left him reeling, and the icy winds wafting down from the Altai Mountains over the barren gray stones had drained the warmth from him. He had only one sandal, and so he hobbled as best he could. In a jest of fate, his sandaled foot had developed blisters that bled, and so hurt more than his naked foot. But before the sun was even a sullen smudge on a smoke-gray sky, he spotted his roan horse, gazing down in a desultory stare at the barren rocks, its long dark mane and tail gusting in the wind. The barbarians that had stolen her had left her tied to the only tree within three li, and they’d fallen asleep under it. For ten hours Huang Fa had been wondering how best to kill them.

Huang Fa felt a touch on his elbow. “Are you sure you want to do this?” whispered the monk with no name.

Huang Fa paused, turned toward the young man in the pre-dawn. The monk was but a shadow in the darkness, with a bit of moonlight shining upon his clean-shaven head. The monk had no name, for he had renounced it. He whispered urgently, “These men are not killers. They were kind enough to merely sneak off with all your belongings, sparing your life. To take theirs would be to return compassion with brutality.”

Huang Fa argued, “The barbarians only stole the horse before, but they won’t make the same mistake again. Once they open my bags and find the dragon’s tooth. ”

The monk did not dare argue. He knew that the barbarians would never relinquish such a great treasure. Yet the dragon’s tooth meant little to Huang Fa. He had to save his mare. The barbarians could not guess the worth of such a fine mount. These men consumed horses as if they were chickens. Even if they did not butcher her, they would likely only wait until she bore her foal and then harvest her mare’s milk to make liquor.

Huang Fa was determined to get his mare back at any cost, and he could not let them live.

Dread clenched his stomach. He wasn’t sure how many men he might have to face. He was determined to use the wizard warrior Jiang Ziya’s wolf strategy of battle — to attack when least expected, at the weakest point.

Stepping carefully now, Huang Fa strode over the sparse prairie, with only the barest of grass. There was no rustling of feet, no brush of his pants woven from silky China grass as he rushed into the camp.

One barbarian, wearing a hairy vest of musk ox hide and a fur cap, sat on guard, but had fallen asleep with his back to a nearly leafless saxaul tree. Another lay nearby rolled in a blanket. The two had camped without a fire.

In the gloom, Huang Fa heard a sound and dully registered that a snow pheasant was already up, thundering down from a rocky summit to take cover in the rocks. To the south, in the hills beyond a glacial river, a wolf howled.

Huang Fa strode angrily to the young barbarian on guard duty, grabbed his own bronze battle ax from the young man’s sleeping hands, and smashed the man’s face before he had even a chance to rouse. Blood blackened the man’s chin, and he choked out a “Gah!” as he tried to hold himself upright. Huang Fa struck another blow to the skull to finish him.

The thief’s bow-legged friend must have heard the skirmish, for he gave a yelp of warning and hopped out of his blanket, then leapt over the stones like a jerboa.

Want to race? Huang Fa thought. He hurled his ax. A blow to the right lung knocked the barbarian to the ground, and there was no fight left in him. Huang Fa went to the man. “You think it funny to steal a man’s horse and his sandal too? Laugh now.” He split the man’s skull with his bronze ax.

The deed would haunt him. He might make a joke while killing another, but it was a foul thing to have to do. Damn the horse thieves.

He flipped the man over to make sure that he was not breathing. What he saw sickened him. It was not a man, but a boy — barely thirteen, just gaining his adult size. He lay back, gazing blankly at the pre-dawn gray, and his eyes were fixed. His teeth had all been filed down to points, and a tattoo upon his chin showed the trunk of a tree in black, rising up to his forehead. Branches from it spread out upon either side of his cheeks and forehead, creating the holy symbol of the Tree of Life.

Huang Fa wished that he had never seen that face. He wondered if the boy was a shaman. He went to the other barbarian, found that he too was nothing more than a child, and that his teeth had been filed to points, and that he bore the same tribal markings.

Only five years ago, Huang Fa thought, I was their age.

No words could adequately describe how much their faces disturbed him. Though his stomach was empty, he lurched away from camp and did not return until his heart quit pounding. He avoided peering into the faces of the dead.

“Bojing,” Huang Fa softly called to his mare. “Are you all right?” He stepped close to let her catch his scent. She nuzzled the hollow beneath his chin, and he stroked her neck gratefully. She was the finest horse he’d ever seen. He had bought her from an Arab band, and now he stroked her side fondly. For weeks now he had only walked her over the mountains, afraid that the hard journey might cause her to lose the foal.

It would have been a shame to let the barbarians eat such a majestic horse.

Huang Fa checked his saddle packs, where he retrieved his left sandal. “Ha, ha,” he said to the dead barbarians.

His paltry supplies were intact, except that the boys had eaten the last of his wrinkled apples. But the silver was there, with precious ointments of frankincense for Yan, and opium tar and a single dragon’s fang to sell to the apothecaries.

The Taoist crept up to the camp at last. “May I fix us some beans?” he asked humbly.

Huang Fa fumed. The monk was not a coward. He was heading back from Persia, where the Emperor Qin would likely cut out his tongue because of his religious views. The emperor hated Taoists and Buddhists.

But the monk had refused to fight the barbarians. A man who would not kill animals, who would not even eat meat, could not be counted on in a fight. Right now, Huang Fa did not feel any more tolerant of the Taoist than the emperor did. Damn the Taoist and his compassion.

“No, you may not,” Huang Fa said.

The monk merely bowed in acquiescence.

Satisfied at last, Huang Fa built a small fire. Fuel was scarce, so he settled on dried dung from a wild ass that had ranged this far north in the spring. Soon the fire blazed like a gem. The skull of a giant ox, bleached by the sun, lay in the golden grass beneath the tree, its broad black horns faded like ash. A poem was scrawled on it in charcoal.A cold moon setsbelow these holy mountains.My hands are so cold.Is this where the godscome to die?

Huang Fa glanced down toward the skirts of the mountain and saw that, indeed, from here the full moon was setting far below him in the southwest, so that he seemed to look at it above as if he were a god in the clouds. It floated in the lavender dawn like a glowing pearl beneath the water, slowly descending into the mists. The mountainside was covered in black and barren stone for many li. Huang Fa hoped to glimpse lights — the twinkling of campfires. He and the monk had been chasing the season’s last caravan; it could not be more than a few days ahead.

As weary as the dead, Huang Fa rolled himself in the barbarian boy’s blanket and tried to sleep. But the faces of the dead boys haunted him, and in a fitful but troubled sleep, he dreamt of young boys that circled his camp, laughing cruelly as they prepared their vengeance.

The Altair Mountains were black, but the desert at their feet was red. Red rocks and red sand. Even the sparse grasses were coated with red dust.

Huang Fa and the monk led his mare into a small fortress with adobe walls at a trading village called Arumchee on the border of the Taklamakan Desert.

For two days, Huang Fa had not been able to sleep. At night he dreamt of vengeful spirits circling in the grass, and by day he felt dazed and exhausted.

Every soul embodies both the yin and yang, he told himself. Each is balanced between darkness and light. I gave into the darkness for a moment, and now I must seek balance again.

The thought soothed him. Still, it felt comforting to hear the crow of chickens and to see silk garments hanging upon bushes outside of the adobe huts, and to smell fresh beans and chicken cooking in the houses. It felt even better to be inside the strong walls of a fortress, even if those walls were as red as the desert.

Here Huang Fa went to report the killings. Slaying raiders wasn’t a simple matter, even if it was just a pair of young horse thieves. This had been a righteous kill, and everyone needed to know that — otherwise there could be reprisals.

Huang Fa wasn’t worried for himself. He was just passing through. Six weeks from now, he’d be home, safe in his cabin on the lake. He’d have a fine horse for his stables and a dowry to give Yan’s father.

But the traders and settlers here had to live among the barbarians. Mostly, the settlers were jade carvers who worked the stone gathered near Black Mountain, but every year there were more and more caravans heading for Persia and Greece. The caravanserais paid good bribes and hefty tolls to the barbarians for safe passage; these people needed to know that the barbarian raiders had failed to keep their bargain — and so paid with their lives.

Huang Fa reported to the garrison commander, a wealthy fellow named Chong Deming who wore a wide golden belt of office over armor made from layers of red silk. He sat on a stool outside a weathered manor house while sipping porridge from a red ceramic bowl. He had white hair and a beard so long that he must have thought himself the equal to one of the Emperor’s counselors.

A barbarian woman in bright blue silks squatted on the ground next to him, as if she was his wife. Huang Fa humbly kowtowed, joining his fists together and bowing solemnly, and then approached and bore his news upon further invitation.

Alarm grew evident on the commander’s face on hearing Huang Fa’s news.

“You killed two barbarian boys?” Chong Deming asked, his penetrating gaze spearing Huang Fa. “Which tribe?”

Huang Fa shrugged. He had come across so many barbarians the past few months that he no longer knew or cared what tribe they came from.

“What did they look like?”

“They were merely youths,” Huang Fa answered frankly. “They wore bright pants of purple, and had their teeth all filed down like fangs. Their faces were tattooed with the symbol of the Holy Tree. One had this hunting spear,” he said, holding up a javelin with a dark-green jade tip, “and the other had a bow made from the horn of an aurochs.”

Chong Deming pulled at his beard thoughtfully. “Oroqin barbarians,” he said. “As I thought. Normally they are peaceful people, eating sheep and goats from their flocks, and hunting for wild asses in the mountains. But their animals have been hit hard by a plague of anthrax, and so the barbarians have been starving for the past few seasons.

“Some of their men tried to rob a caravan last spring. The caravan guards made quick work of these unskilled barbarians, and my men hunted those that escaped. We tracked them for five days, and caught them in their yurts in the mountains. We hunted them from chariots and finished off the men with our long-handled halberds. But we spared the women and children. We did not have the heart. ”

The old general fell silent, and Huang Fa looked to the monk for his reaction. The young man shook his bald head sadly and asked the general, “Did your compassion gain them nothing?”

The general mourned, “I’d hoped that they would find their way back into the mountains, that their own people would feed them. But I fear that they are doomed.” He looked to Huang Fa. “Did these two young men have any distinguishing features?”

“One was a runty kid that squinted, with bowed legs. The other was clean and handsome. He wore a necklace made of jade and bear’s teeth.”

At that, Chong Deming’s face fell, and he peered down into his bowl of morning porridge thoughtfully. Steam curled up from it. At long last, he blew over the wide lip of the clay bowl, but did not sip from it. “That would be Battarsaikhan’s son, Chuluun.” His voice became soft, frightened. “You’ve heard of Battarsaikhan?”

The name stirred at the back of Huang Fa’s brain, like a rat in its burrow. “I think. ”

“It means. ‘hero who wins without battle.’ He is a hunchback, a powerful sorcerer who kills with magic rather than the ax or bow. He is the most dangerous man in all these mountains. His oldest sons died in our attack at White Ox River last summer. ”

“Gah,” the monk muttered. The news was terrible.

“Battarsaikhan was in the mountains then, training the boy that you killed,” Chong Deming said. His voice came hoarse, bitter with sorrow. “Now, the sorcerer has no children left. Couldn’t you have let those boys live? They were just trying to feed their starving tribe. You could have just taken your horse. ”

Huang Fa stared at the old commander wordlessly, shame thick in his throat. “I did not know of their need. I did not want them coming for me again. You, as a general, know that only a fool spares an enemy.”

“Then because you were afraid of retribution, I fear that you shall suffer retribution,” Chong Deming said. “If I were you, I’d run from here as fast as I could. The last caravan of the season passed the fortress only two days ago. There was a wizard traveling with it. He might be able to protect you. You can catch them if you hurry — but you should leave now. Battarsaikhan will be reeling from rage, and his spells can reach far. ”

“I am sorry,” Huang Fa said. “I. ” he got an idea. The traders paid tolls every year, and among the barbarians, it was said that the life of a man was worth little. “Can we send a gift to this sorcerer? A peace-offering?”

“Do you think anything in the world will be enough to assuage his wrath?” the monk asked.

There was little in Huang Fa’s saddlebags that might be worth the life of an only son. The silver was a soft metal, of less value than bronze to the barbarians. The spices. were questionable. Huang Fa answered, “I have a dragon’s tooth that was dug from out of the stone in Persia. It is worth the price of many horses.”

He went to his saddle packs and pulled out the tooth — eight inches long, serrated, and curved like a dagger. Huang Fa had seen the giant dragon skull encased in stone that it had been pulled from. It had been polished by its previous owner, so that the ancient bone glowed like amber.

“Perhaps,” Chong Deming said thoughtfully, “it will please. Perhaps to a sorcerer it will be worth enough.”

For four days, Huang Fa traveled with the monk and led his mare, skirting the grasslands at the edge of the desert, chasing the wizard’s caravan. Here there had once been wild asses, giant wild bulls, and red deer in abundance, and cheetahs to hunt them. But over the past twenty years the rising number of caravans had driven many herds away, and the plague of anthrax had killed most other animals. Some said that the caravans themselves spread the disease. It was well known that one could catch it from handling the skins of animals that had died from the plague.

Now, the red plains seemed barren, almost lifeless. In two days Huang Fa saw only a few wild ostriches and a couple of giant elephants that the emperor’s men sometimes harnessed and trained for war. Such beasts were difficult for the barbarians to hunt, he knew. The swift ostriches were a temptation, forever running just out of the bow’s range. The elephants, masters of the plains, were four times the weight of the smaller Indus elephants, and had rust-colored tusks that could grow to over twelve feet in length. The bull elephants sometimes became mad and attacked even caravans.

For Huang to travel past such a herd in a caravan was a bold deed. To creep past them with only a monk at his side, pulling his mare on a rope, was terrifying. Yet to his surprise, the larger bulls only sniffed the air with their trunks and flapped their ears in agitation. They did not stomp the grass or throw hay in the air. They did not charge.

Still, the young men kept a respectful distance, and traveled as long as they could. Such was Huang Fa’s urgency to find the caravan, to get home to Yan, that he did not want to camp until well after dark.

The monk spoke little as they traveled. He plodded along, staring ahead evenly, whispering poems that he composed in his head.

Huang Fa was bumbling along, eyes growing heavy, imagining what it would be like to take Yan into his arms at last when he dreamed of the feral children.

There were dozens of them, circling a campfire in a large cavern. They were thin creatures with protruding bellies and skin clinging tightly over their ribs. Their bare backs had been tattooed with images of snake-headed lizards. Their gaunt faces were just flesh-colored bones, and their teeth had all been filed.

There were children of all ages in the group, from toddlers to the ages of ten or eleven. They were practically naked, all bare flesh.

Now, a couple of the nearest turned, peered at him hungrily, and jostled their neighbors. They too turned to search for him, but many of the children seemed unable to spot him, as if he were far away.

Suddenly, in the midst of the bonfire, a sorcerer appeared, as if bursting up from the flames. He wore a mask of red jade, a demon’s face, and he wore a cloak made of tiger hide. He danced among the flames, hopping among the coals without apparent harm. He carried a huge rattle made from a giant cobra’s skull in his right hand, and held the dragon’s tooth in his left. He sang as he danced, his voice rising and falling in the quavering manner of one who grieves.

The children around the fire chanted words that Huang Fa could not quite understand. They pounded their right fists into their left hands, and one by one it seemed that all of the children became more aware of him. They began turning and peering at him with greater eagerness. Huang Fa spotted saliva dripping down the chin of one starving girl toddler, drooling down from a mouth full of fangs.

Suddenly the sorcerer snarled a curse, almost spitting his words, and hurled the dragon tooth through the darkness. Huang Fa jerked, as one sometimes will in his sleep, as he tried to dodge. The fang slapped Huang Fa in the chest.

His eyes sprang open.

He stood, heart pounding in fear at the terrible dream. It is just my guilt that haunts me, he reassured himself. Someday I will forget it.

The sun cast immeasurable shadows. He glanced behind and saw it sailing over the edge of the world, hanging beneath some clouds like a red, staring eye.

“Ai!” he whispered to the Taoist monk, still wrestling his fear. “I had a terrible dream.”

“Tell me what you saw, and perhaps I can divine the meaning,” the monk suggested.

It had been so vivid, Huang Fa could still feel where the dragon’s tooth had hit him. He reached down to touch the spot — and found the dragon’s tooth lodged in the hair of his sheepskin vest.

The monk gaped at the tooth.

Huang Fa peered all around the plains, to see if someone could have thrown it, but all that he could see was rippling fields of grass.

That’s when he knew. The sorcerer had thrown the tooth at him — a distance of more than three hundred li.

“It does not take a divine scholar,” the monk said, “to know that sorcerer has rejected your apology.”

Darkness came, and with it came the howling of wolves and the cries of hunting cats in the desert. Huang Fa and the monk loped up a hill, and far in the distance, miles away, they spotted the bright-colored silk pavilions of the caravan. The pavilions, made in the peaked Arab style, had lamps and campfires lit within, and each glowed a different color like radiant gems in the desert in shades of ruby and tourmaline, diamond and sapphire. The pavilions beckoned, but Huang Fa’s legs felt like lead. “A march of a single night would bring us to the wizard’s caravan.”

“I cannot go on,” the monk begged, panting. “The stars are strangely dark tonight.” He leaned over and grabbed his knees, trying to catch his breath.

It was true. There was a cloudy haze across the heavens, obscuring the River of Stars. Huang Fa had a star chart, painted upon a silken map, that could help guide a man across the desert at night, but on a night like this it would be no use. “We should camp,” the monk suggested. “A man who races headlong in the night is sure to fall in a hole.”

Huang Fa considered lighting a knot of grass and using it as a torch, but felt reluctant to do so. It might attract unwanted eyes. He glanced behind him, with an uncanny certainty that he was being watched.

In his dream that night the feral children stalked him.

He dreamt first that the moon was out, as bright as a mirror of beaten silver, and by its light he saw a strange creature — grand and majestic. It was an elk, he thought, or something like an elk. Its hair was as pale as cotton and it stood taller than two men; its antlers had many tines and were so broad that a man could have lain between them. At first he thought that there were cobwebs between the tines, but then he realized that it was a thickening of the horn, unlike any that he had seen upon an elk before.

The creature mesmerized him. Never had he seen such a regal animal, so full of power and strength.

Then he heard a rustling behind, and realized that something was creeping toward him through deep grass. He whirled and glimpsed pale bodies, naked children sneaking on all fours, like wolves on the trail of a wounded ibex. He was not sure if they were after him or the majestic elk.

In his dream, he knotted a clump of dry grass and struck a flint with his knife, igniting it. He raised his makeshift torch in the cold air, hoping that it would frighten the feral children away, but they only growled low in their throats, crawling ever closer. Their eyes glowed strangely in the night, the color of blood sapphires, and they were close enough so that he could see their teeth filed down to fangs and the glint of their green jade daggers in their hands.

Some were nearly men in size, others mere toddlers.

In that dream, the monk was not beside him, and Huang Fa called out in terror, “Where are you, my friend?”

Lost in the distance, the monk called back, “I have chosen to take the Way. You should have, too.”

Dawn came with muddled results. Huang Fa awoke, with the monk shaking him insistently. “Something is wrong,” he whispered. Huang Fa sensed it before he even opened his eyes. The air felt stifled, dead, and for a moment he just lay in his blankets, imagining that dawn was hours off.

“The sun is up,” the monk warned, “but it is a day unlike any I have ever seen. A storm comes.”

Huang Fa squinted. The whole world had gone red, from heaven above to the earth beneath. On the horizon was a red cloud, a wall of filth, filling the air, rising incredibly high, taller than thunderheads. The sun could not pierce through it, and so it seemed more like night than morning. Indeed, the sun was less than a sooty smudge, and the grim light that filtered through was the color of a poor ruby.

“My friend,” Huang Fa shouted, leaping to his feet, “the Yellow Wind is coming!”

“Yellow Wind?” the monk asked.

“Yes, a dust storm out of the Gobi! One blew over our village when I was but a child, but it will be worse here! Quick, grab our blankets. I will get the horse. We must find shelter!”

The fine mare was tied to a small tree, peering east with her ears slanted forward, eyes dull with terror and fatigue. Her right knee was bent forward, as if her hoof was sore. She wheezed, and muscles in her shoulder spasmed. She lost her balance and stumbled a bit.

Resting a palm on her snout, Huang Fa found that she was feverish. She did not respond to his touch. She did not lean in for affection or shy away nervously. It was as if he didn’t exist, as if he were a ghost.

She coughed lightly, trying to clear phlegm from her lungs, and then just stood, wheezing.

“Don’t touch her,” the monk warned. “She has anthrax. I have seen it before.”

Huang Fa peered at the coming storm. He’d never heard of one so immense. It came like the night, a grim shade. The dust rose higher than the tallest cloud, blotting out the sun. The storm did not ride on a great gust of wind. Indeed, the wind felt sullen, still, almost dead. The storm only crept toward them.

“Cover your nose,” Huang Fa said. “The dust will clog your throat. When it hits, don’t dare to stop moving. If you lie down, the dust might bury you.”

The monk, a thin young man, looked terrified.

“Can we run from it?” the monk asked. “It moves slowly.”

“We cannot run faster than the storm,” Huang Fa said. “Even if we could, it would catch us when we tired. The only shelter is ahead of us — at the caravan.”

The monk peered back down the trail, glanced at a mound of rocks not five hundred yards off. It might provide some shelter from the coming wind, but not much.

“Let us hurry, then,” the monk urged.

Huang Fa patted his horse, quickly untied her.

“Leave her,” the monk whispered. “She will only slow us, and she does not have long to live. Besides, if we reach the caravan, she might sicken the other animals.”

“I can’t leave her,” Huang Fa said. She was his future. The silver might be a dowry, but the mare was worth far more. “She might get better. Even anthrax does not always kill.”

The monk shrugged, leaving the decision to him.

Huang Fa pulled at the mare’s rope, but she would not follow. He wrapped an arm around her neck. “Come, Bojing,” he whispered, “please. ”

The mare stood, ears leaning forward. She knew what he wanted. She staggered a step, but then just stood.

“It is a curse,” Huang Fa wailed, wringing his hands.

The monk tried to calm him. “Sometimes a storm is just a storm,” he said. “Sometimes a sickness is just a sickness. I think, these things are beyond the powers of even a famed sorcerer like Battarsaikhan.”

Huang Fa hung his head, thinking furiously. He remembered the dragon’s tooth. The sorcerer had thrown it hundreds of li.

Huang Fa covered his head with a straw hat from his pack, wrapped a rag across his face, then strode toward the storm.

“Try to remember where we saw the lights of the caravan last,” the monk suggested. “We should make straight for it.”

Huang Fa gazed toward the horizon but could not be sure of the direction. He followed the monk. Grimly, the curtain of red dust rolled toward them until it swallowed them whole.

All through the morning, Huang Fa and the monk pushed through the dust storm. The gritty dust stung Huang Fa’s eyes, and he kept them narrowed to slits. Even then, his eyes soon streamed from tears.

The dust filled his sinuses, until sludge ran from his nose, and when he tried to breathe from his mouth, mud clogged his throat and left him gasping. He’d never imagined such a hell.

The dust was incredibly fine, and it coated everything, gritting up his skin, filling every orifice.

It was all that he could do to keep plodding, placing one foot in front of another. Time and again, the monk would reach back and grab Huang Fa, who was trying to pull the mare. She grew more headstrong as her sickness worsened.

The only thing that kept Huang Fa moving was the thought of Yan at the end of his trail.

The tracks of the caravan would normally have been easy to follow, but dust was rapidly settling over everything, creating a red carpet that filled hoof prints. Dust infiltrated his lungs, so that they felt heavy, as if he carried stones in them.

They had not gone far into the cloud when the mare simply stopped.

“What’s wrong?” the monk called. Huang Fa looked but could not see the monk, until the fellow suddenly materialized out of the dust not ten feet ahead.

“Bojing!” Huang Fa cried.

The monk tugged at the rope and cursed, but it did no good. Bojing merely stood, coughing and wheezing. Huang Fa leaned his head against her chest, to listen to her lungs, and Bojing seemed to take that as a sign. She dropped to her front knees, and then lay down to die.

Huang Fa did not want to leave her in such misery. He put his coat over her face, hoping that it would keep the dust from her lungs. Then he knelt beside her for several long minutes, just stroking her.

“Leave her,” the monk begged. “Don’t touch her. The anthrax might spread to you!”

“I can’t leave her,” Huang Fa shouted.

He realized now that it was hopeless. He only wanted to comfort the precious beast as it died. “I’m sorry, my princess,” Huang Fa whispered again and again as he stroked her gritty hide.

Between the dusty air and the anthrax, she died within an hour.

When she was gone, Huang Fa removed her saddle packs, filled with what was left of his treasure, and stumbled on.

He closed his eyes against the storm and let the monk guide him.

The world seemed darker, and when Huang Fa looked up, he wondered if he had lost track of time, for it seemed that night was falling. Then he realized his mistake: he’d stood at the edge of the storm and marveled at how terrible it was, but standing upon the brink of it was nothing compared to what he saw now: the wind that had seemed gentle, subdued, was beginning to gust stronger, and as it did, the dust belted them in waves. The haze that had hidden the sun an hour earlier now thickened and threatened to blot it out entirely.

Surely I am cursed, Huang Fa thought. I wanted so badly to save my mare. Now the sorcerer has ripped her from my grasp. Battarsaikhan is fierce indeed!

So he staggered forward blindly, led by the monk, whose ability to negotiate through the storm felt nothing less than mystical. Huang Fa could not breathe, could not get air into his lungs for all the dust, and began to fear that despite his best efforts, he would suffocate in the storm.

Coughing, his face hidden beneath his robes, at last in a perpetual gloom he dropped to his knees to crawl, holding on to the cuff of the monk’s robe. At last his hand bumped something that yielded, and realized that they had found a tent.

The monk knelt and untied some fastenings, and they lunged into a pavilion where several merchants in their finest wares — in multicolored silks as bright as songbirds and butterflies — sat on cushions around a single golden lantern, drinking tea. Even in here the air was thick with dust. A courtly scholar in dark blue robes peered at Huang Fa knowingly and announced, “And here, good sirs, are the visitors that I promised: one man who is holy, and another who is damned.”

The silk merchants gaped at Huang Fa and the monk in astonishment. “Incredible!” one of them cried. “In the midst of a killer storm!” another shouted. Two of the men actually clapped in delight at such a spectacle.

That night, as wind prowled outside the pavilion like a demon spirit and dust filtered through the air in a dense fog, Huang Fa peered through gritty eyes at the wizard, a eunuch with a face that was somehow regal despite the fact that he had no beard.

“You should not have given Battarsaikhan the dragon’s tooth,” the wizard warned after he had heard Huang Fa’s tale. It had been hours since he’d entered the pavilion, but only now was he able to breathe well enough to plead for help. The day was dying, the sun descending into a bland orange haze, and the silk merchants lay about in a strange lethargy, weary of breathing, so that only the wizard, Huang Fa, and the monk were up. “If a sorcerer has something that you have touched and owned,” the wizard continued, “it can give him power over you.”

“I only hoped to gain his forgiveness, Master Wong,” Huang Fa apologized.

“There shall be none,” the wizard intoned. He peered down into his lap.

“Is there nothing we can do?” the monk begged. “How will the sorcerer attack?”

“I am an expert in divination,” Master Wong replied. “I am not an expert in all sorceries, but I have traveled the Earth, and I know something of these barbarians. He will send an animal spirit to possess Huang Fa, one that will fill him with animal desires and lead him to ruin.”

“What kind of spirit?” the monk asked.

The wizard shook his head. “I cannot be sure. A fox spirit would fill him with lust, a wolf with a thirst for blood. A boar will turn him into a glutton. An ape spirit would make him act like a fool, but we are far from the land of apes. It will be. an animal close to the sorcerer.”

Master Wong clapped his hands and asked a young boy, his assistant, to bring his “special trunk.” The boy hurried to another pavilion, and returned moments later. Master Wong had Huang Fa lie down; he took a bottle of henna dye and a calligraphy brush and began to write spells of warding upon Huang Fa’s face. As he worked, he explained, “Animal spirits cannot take control of you unless you welcome them in. You can fight them. You must fight them. The spells that I am writing will help. The spirits will seek to enter through an orifice — your nostrils or mouth are the weakest points, and so I will surround them with spells.”

“You told the others that I was damned,” Huang Fa said. “How did you know?”

Master Wong hesitated in his brush stroke. “I cast the yarrow stalks this morning and formed a trigram, then read from the I–Ching.”

Huang Fa was skeptical at this. The I–Ching, or Book of Changes, suggested that all of life is in a flux. Every person’s situation was always about to change, and by casting the yarrow stalks, one could then consult the book and learn direction for the future. But it was not as simple as that. In part, one had to rely upon the abilities of the wizard who did the divination. One had to trust his insights.

“So you learned that I was damned from the I–Ching?”

“I have felt your coming for days,” replied Master Wong. “ ‘A stranger is coming,’ the yarrow stalks foretold, ‘one with blood on his hands and a curse on his soul. He has an enemy more powerful than this storm.’ ”

“You divined all of this?”

The wizard nodded solemnly, then set down his brush and folded his hands. “I could learn little more — except for the hour or your coming.”

“Is there any hope for me?”

Master Wong frowned. “This Battarsaikhan has powers that go far beyond mine. He sent this storm to slow you down — or kill you, and that is no small feat. Yet this I also know: the human heart has a magic of its own, as powerful as any spell. Perhaps if we understood his powers better. ”

Huang Fa’s heart hammered, filling him with hope. “Is there a surer form of divination than the I–Ching?”

Master Wong leaned over Huang Fa and gave an inscrutable expression, as if he might be annoyed. “You are a skeptic? You don’t trust me? I do my own readings twice a day. I would not have survived for a hundred and twelve years without them! If the stalks tell me to eat an apricot today, I eat it. If they tell me to stay out of the rain—”

The monk’s mouth dropped in surprise. “You are a hundred and twelve years old?”

The wizard did not look a day over fifty. He kept a straight face for a moment, and burst out laughing at his own jest. “If you want a surer form of divination,” he suggested to Huang Fa, “we can consult the turtle’s oracle bones.”

This was a form of divination that Huang Fa could trust. The turtle was the most blessed creature under heaven. Because of this, the gods had granted the turtle long life and great wisdom, and it held a special place close to the gods as one of the four holy animals. Indeed, Huang Fa sometimes prayed to turtles, for they could act as intermediaries to the gods.

To consult oracle bones, the wizard merely carved a question into the shell of a turtle that had been ritually sacrificed. Then he would drill small holes in the shell, insert a stick of incense into each hole, and light the incense. When the stick burned down, the heat would weaken the shell, causing it to crack. If the bone cracked inward, toward the center of the shell, then the answer to the question was “yes.” If it cracked toward the outer part of the shell, then the answer was “no.”

This form of divination limited the wizard to asking yes-or-no questions. That was its weakness. But the virtue of this method was that heaven left no ambiguity in the answer.

“Suggest a question,” Master Wong offered, “and I will consult the oracle bones tonight.”

Huang Fa blew his nose. The air was so dusty that the mucus came out black. He felt dirty down to his lungs, in every pore of his skin, to the very core of his soul.

Huang Fa formed his question for the gods: “Can I escape the Sorcerer Battarsaikhan’s curse?”

The wind shrieked outside the tent, drumming at the silk and tugging at the pegs and stays. Inside the pavilion, all was dark and strangely cold. The only light came from eight sticks of incense that rose from holes in the turtle shell. The sweet scent of jasmine curled up from the cherry coals, so that the dusty room bore a cloying air.

Huang Fa lay in a troubled dream, shaking from chills. He dreamt of children crawling stealthily through the storm, faces bared to the wind. They dragged something large and bulky behind them as they crawled, something with hair, though the dim light defeated Huang Fa’s vision.

It is the mare’s head, Huang Fa thought unreasonably, and whimpered in horror.

But the children came on — toddlers with knives in their hands, and young girls in nothing but loin clothes. There were fierce boys with sharpened teeth and eyes that shone with their own inner light, as if stars might burst from them.

They reached the door flap to the pavilion, and crept inside. Huang Fa felt vaguely detached as they neared his bed, dragging their hairy burden, even though he expected them to plunge their daggers into his flesh.

“I meant no harm,” he apologized. “I did not know your need.”

The feral children gave no answer.

A chill swept over him, as if an icy wind blew up from the caverns of hell and rippled up his spine. His muscles felt as rubbery as dead eels.

Now half a dozen children stood above the hairy thing. By the light from the incense, Huang Fa could see an animal hide rolled up and tied into a bundle.

It is the hide from my horse, he thought. They will put it upon me so that I catch the anthrax.

He felt torn between the desire to run or fight, or simply to lie still and accept whatever fate the feral children deemed fit.

Three children uncut the strings that bound the hide and rolled it out, almost celebrating with excitement. Even in the dim light Huang Fa could see that it was not the hide of his fine red mare. This skin was as white as satin, the hair upon it almost as thick as wool.

Four waifs spread the great hide over him with great ceremony, and Huang Fa breathed the luxurious scent of a well-tanned hide. The fur upon it was like heaven, like a banked fire that warmed him through and through.

The children turned to leave; Huang Fa suddenly roused to a sense of danger. His eyes flew open and he stilled his breathing to listen for the sound of stealthy motion.

The room was dark, the dead air heavy with dust. Outside, the storm had quieted. Nothing moved in the pavilion. The only sound was the soft snoring of a trader on the far side of the tent, hidden beneath a sheepskin.

Droplets of sweat stood out on Huang Fa’s forehead and made his shirt cling to his chest. Briefly he worried that he had caught anthrax, but then realized that he had been lost in a fever dream and that his fever had broken.

For days he had been sick with worry, and now he felt suddenly released. He leaned up on one elbow, peered around the room. There were no feral children here.

He touched the blanket upon him, a fine animal hide unlike any that he could recall seeing. The fur was thick, luxurious, and the animal was huge.

Perhaps it is a white yak, he wondered, and then realized that someone must have discerned just how chilly the night had become and laid the hide over him. His fever had turned a kindness into a nightmare.

Huang Fa pulled the hide over his head and wished that could lie beneath it forever, smell the clean scent of the leather, fall into the embrace of its everlasting warmth.

At dawn, Huang Fa woke to the scent of tea brewing while sunlight streamed through the tent. Someone had gone outside and was using the branch from a bush to sweep dust from the walls of the pavilion.

“Good news,” the monk said. “The storm blew out last night, and the bad air is clearing. The sun came up as red as a phoenix this morning, but all is well.”

The silk merchants were up and bustling about, in their colorful silks, packing kegs of precious oils and spices outside while Master Wong merely sat drinking his tea, his face looking drawn and hard.

Huang Fa got up and stretched, pulling the white hide up to him. He then looked upon a small trunk to where the turtle shell lay. The brown lines upon its curved back looked like cracks in the mud after a river dries. The stubs of eight incense sticks poked up from it.

Huang Fa felt good, full of light and hope. He nodded to the shell and begged the wizard, “Have you checked the oracle bones?”

Master Wong gazed at him for a long moment, his face stoic. He finally nodded a bit, and said evenly. “You cannot escape your fate. I’m sorry. We cannot always escape the consequences of our errors, no matter how bitterly we regret our deeds.”

At that moment, Huang Fa wakened to a strange sensation. His face felt numb, and he noted that the skin itched on his forehead. He reached up and touched the side of his head — and felt a distinct nub protruding sharply up, stretching the skin taut.

“What?” he asked, fear lurching in his stomach. He noted something odd about his hand, and saw that a fine soft fur had begun to grow out of it, as white as the hide that he’d slept beneath.

Huang Fa screamed in wordless terror, and leapt out from under the hide.

“The animal spirit has entered you,” the wizard said apologetically. “Battarsaikhan’s spell is more powerful than I could have dreamed. It is not just your nature that will change.”

Huang Fa leapt away from his bed, shoving the great white hide away. He peered at the luxurious fur.

“In the land of the Kazakhs,” Master Wong explained, “the animal that wore that skin is called a ‘giant deer,’ and its meat is treasured as the sweetest of all venison. Its hide is as pure as the driven snow in the mountains where it lives, and its wide antlers are valued by all, but it is so rare that some believe it to be only a myth. Here near the Altai Mountains, a few still survive, but even in our tales it is hardly more than a myth — the Xie Chai. Though it has two horns, some insist that it is a type of unicorn.”

Huang Fa tried to climb out of bed and obeyed a strange compulsion to stand on all fours. He felt a sudden excruciating pain in his ankles as bones twisted. He knew the name of the Xie Chai, of course. It was said that the unicorn could smell good and evil and was attracted by the scent of righteous men while it punished the evil. The Buddhists said that it often carried the book of law in its antlers.

“Haaaawlp!” Huang Fa cried, but the words twisted in his mouth, and only an animal’s mewling cry escaped his lips.

“This is your fate, the fate that Battarsaikhan, the peaceful sorcerer, has placed upon you,” the wizard said sadly: “You shall roam the land upon four hooves, and be doomed to paw beneath the snow for lichens and grass at the feet of the Altai Mountains. You shall never know the love of a woman, for you are among the last of your kind.

“You shall be hunted for all the days of your life, by both barbarians and by true men, and by wolves and snow leopards in the mountains, and by cheetahs on the plains. There is no escape for you, oh man with a gentle soul, nowhere that you may hide. I fear that you will not last the winter, for most of all you shall be hunted by the feral children, from whose mouths you have taken their livelihood, and it is the will of the sorcerer that you shall be found.

“At the very last, you shall feed the feral children with your own flesh.”

An image of Yan flashed before Huang Fa. He saw her at the foot of a screen, painting an image of a phoenix upon black silk. She looked up toward the sunlight streaming in through a window.

Huang Fa lunged toward the flap of the tent and lurched through it into the dusty air. His animal instincts made him yearn for freedom, to run under the open sky, and he clattered the last few steps upon hooves that slipped upon the silk beneath him; his growing antlers caught in the flaps of the tent and threatened to break his neck before he tore free. The sky outside was filled with dust and had a surreal glow to it, as red as if lit by the Sun God’s fires.

Yan, he thought.

Huang Fa snorted and whirled, his feet kicking up dust, and peered into the tall grass near camp. There he saw tiny figures — the sprawling bodies of half-starved children, hiding in the grass, teeth filed sharper than daggers.

He turned and bounded away, his tail raised high like a flag of warning, his hooves exploding with power as he ascended into the air, dipped to the earth, and then soared upward again.

In late winter, Yan woke one night. The lunar New Year had just begun, and it was the night of the lantern festival. A great red lantern hung from the rafters on her porch, giving a little light that streamed through her window.

She’d dreamt of Huang Fa again, and the excitement of the holidays was dulled by a sense of loss. He had never come home. She feared that he was trapped in the snowy mountains, or that he had died while crossing the desert.

Yet tonight her heart told him that he still lived, and she imagined that he had come to her bed.

She inhaled deeply, trying to catch the scent of him. She tried to remember the light in his eyes, his broad handsome smile, but the memory had faded.

Yan untangled herself from the sheets of her bed, from the arms of her little sister whom she feared might waken and beg for breakfast. She went to the door. The red lantern hung above her head, burning gaily in the night.

She gazed out across the wooden bridge in front of her house, toward the bamboo grove whose leaves rustled in a light wind.

A beast stood there — huge and white. It was so large that at first she thought that it was a horse. Then she saw that it dwarfed even a stallion. Its broad antlers were like those of an enormous elk, yet webbing stretched between the tines, as if to catch the light of the full moon.

It tiptoed toward her, into the circle of light by the door, and she knew it for what it was — a Xie Chai unicorn.

It extended its snout, as if to catch her scent, and she put forth her hand for it, hoping that it might enjoy the allure of the rosewater perfume that she wore. Such animals could discern a man’s heart. It would tell her if she was good or evil.

She longed to be good, but she knew that her love for Huang Fa was too great.

The unicorn stepped near, and she was astonished at how huge it was. She saw its eyes, shining in the light of the lantern, all filled with some unimaginable desire.

Suddenly she caught its scent, the musky scent of a young man that often haunted her dreams. She knew that scent intimately, knew the young man’s clean limbs and sweet breath.

“Huang Fa?” she wondered aloud. The beast looked startled. The muscles in its shoulders bunched, as if it would dart away.

She knew him, knew what had happened. Huang Fa had turned into this magical beast, and yearning for her, he had come to her at last.

But how had this happened?

Inside the house, her little sister woke in the night. “Yan?” she cried. “Yan, I’m hungry!”

In that instant the unicorn grew afraid. There was no more coherent thought in its head, only nameless animal fear that now took over.

The proud beast whirled and bounded, leaping through the stream.

“Huang Fa!” Yan called, rushing to the edge of the porch.

A low fog covered the ground, and the unicorn bounded through it, as if leaping upon clouds, until it disappeared into the plum orchard, lost under a silver moon.