Chapter 34 – First Stones

The River Fork Academy was finished in the first week of winter. Right on schedule.

The cultivation hall walls had gone up by the tenth day of autumn work, single-storey, running north-south along the river side of the training ground. The clinic building followed, connected by the covered walkway Fen had designed without being asked.

The classroom at the gate end had been complete since before the foundations cured, because Fen worked the way he worked and nobody told him to wait. The last section of plaster dried on the cultivation hall’s interior the morning the first frost came.

Standing at the training ground’s center and turning slowly, it looked like what I had wanted it to look.

The cultivation hall faced the river, the zones laid out from flat practice ground near the water to the hillside impact structures, each space was distinct and legible.

The closest comparison I had from either life was a dojo, which I was thought to appear inviting and homely.

Gao Ren had opinions about everything and was right about most of them. Ru had opinions about everything and was right about the rest. The two of them had spent three weeks arguing which I began to realize might have been their own way of companionship.

His daughter Gao Shu worked alongside them from the first day, carrying stone and mixing composite and asking questions that Ru answered with kindness.

The Wei brothers ran the heavy labor with the same effort that they brought to everything.

Shan Pei managed the timber framing with four of the Luan cousins and finished two days ahead of schedule.

Ma and Tao hauled ridge clay before sunrise without complaint.

Zhao Jun mixed composite every morning without being asked.

When the last wall was plastered and the walkway roof was on, I told Luan Mei we were having a feast.

She said she had already started cooking.

The feast ran into the night.

Ru and Gao Ren stood near each other through most of it and shared a cup of rice win. Three weeks of shared problem-solving had built a grudging respect, or in my eyes, a relationship.

Shan Pei carried Gao Shu on his shoulders until she fell asleep on them, at which point he stood very still for the rest of the conversation as if nothing had changed.

Hao’s youngest child fell face-first into the grass and required consolation from Wei Ru.

The Wei brothers started a stone-skipping competition at the river’s edge that Duan won and made me wonder if Hao had been teaching them.

I sat with Suyin in the midst of the revelry on the low wall and watched the firelight move across the cultivation hall’s new walls.

“It looks good,” she said.

I nodded. “It does.”

She had two cups of rice wine in her hands which she had brought to me without saying she was going to. She handed one to me and kept the other and we both took a sip at the same time.

“Mother would have liked this,” I couldn’t help but say it as I stared a the finished building. It was a very humbly built school but, I couldn’t help but think that Mother would have especially loved the clinical wing.

Suyin looked at the walls and gave a soft smile. “She would have also made sure that everyone was well fed.”

I smiled at the remark because it was true.

“Don’t forget that she also asked me to look after you,” Suyin said inbetween sips.

I stared at my cup as I remembered her last moments and felt my heart sink into my stomach. “Yea…”

“I’m reminding you because I take what she said very seriously, and it’s why I’m telling you to drink up.”

A chuckle escaped my lips at her words. “Is getting me to drink wine your way of looking after me?”

“Yes, it is, because you don’t know how to relax and I intend to teach you how,” She took a sip and gave a refreshing sigh of relief.

She then gave me a once over and touched her cup to mine. “Liang, drink.”

I drank. The wine was good, better than last year’s, which meant Wang Su’s supply lines had reached somewhere with better grain.

The fire in the courtyard had dropped to a steady burn, and Shan Pei was still standing with Gao Shu asleep on his shoulders, talking to Zhao Ping in a low voice so that he didn’t rouse Gao Shu awake. In the distance I heard Hao laughing at something one of his wives had said.

I looked at the cultivation hall’s walls, and in turn I couldn’t help but wonder about the unfamiliar roads on the map that Commander Xu had given me.

“I need your help with something,” I said suddenly.

Suyin raised a brow. “Right now?”

“Yes. It’s something that has been bothering me for quite some time.”

She looked at me. “What kind of something?”

“It’s an area on the map that I can’t place. Come inside and I’ll show you.”

She stood, looked back at the feast, then turned to look at me once more. “You know, when I said that I wanted to make sure you relaxed….I kind of meant more than just drinking.”

“I know, but we can do that anytime,” I said in a casual manner as I walked toward the house.

There was a moment of stunned silence before Suyin follow behind me.

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“I don’t care if that’s the wine talking, I’m still going to hold you to that!” she said in a sing-song voice.

She followed me inside. Her face, when she came through the door, was a deep color of red, and she set her cup down and did not look at me directly.

I spread the map across the table and weighed down the corners.

South of Hekou’s position, below the hill tribe territory, there was a notation I hadn’t seen on any garrison document or administrative chart. A thin line running from a cluster of villages in the Qinghe eastern territories down through a corridor in the southern highlands and back north again. It didn’t connect to any garrison road and it didn’t pass through any named settlement. It terminated near a river confluence two days’ ride south of Hekou.

That’s what I pointed to. “That line. What do you think about it?”

She leaned over the map and the color in her face settled. Wei Suyin had a sharp mind and she was good at putting pieces of information together, it came with her work in medicine.

“That’s not a garrison road,” she said while cupping her chin in thought. “It runs through the hill tribe territory, and it may be near where Shan Pei’s tribe is from if I’m not mistaken.”

I looked at the southern highlands notation. Shan Pei had come from somewhere in that country before the border campaign brought him to Hekou. He never talked much about it and it was out of respect that I had not pressed him.

“If you came north from Qinghe’s eastern villages through the hill country and followed the river system, then you would come out near our position. Someone using that route would bypass every garrison checkpoint on the main road.”

“It might be a road that’s old enough to predate either Lord’s network,” Wei Suyin observed.

“Which also means information moving on that route doesn’t move through Wen’s office either,” I said.

She straightened up from the map. “But we don’t know who uses it, or if anyone still does.”

“No.” I traced the line one more time. “But we know someone who might.”

She looked at me. “Wang Su.”

“He’s been running routes through this region for several years. He knows the roads he doesn’t take as well as the ones he does. That’s how merchants stay alive in contested territory.” I folded the map to the Qinghe border section.