Wall.
His brother is dying.
If anything, he regrets his little brother: he did not deserve to die.
His brother Shan—oh, but he is so young, he is fifteen, barely even a man!—the cold claims him, digs
itself into the marrow of his bones and kills him slowly, as did the hunger, as did the fatigue. And there was also
the beam, the beam that slipped from grasping hands and fell down thirty feet to crush his brother, his beautiful
baby brother—
He visits him one last time. The bandages itch, Shan says weakly.
His lips twitch. Do they? Well, it’ll be over soon.
Death claims his brother. He wants to bring the body home, but they won’t let him, and instead, he has
to bury Shan in the unrelenting membranes of the wall that killed him.
The irony chokes him.
It feels like this:
Drowning, or suffocating, with more than half of him already gone.
When it rains, it pours, and his clothes stick to his skin like leeches, his hair plastered against his cheek.
On cold days he is made of marble and one touch might shatter him, but the whips crack and the winds do not
cease their shrieking and he, he staggers on. When it’s hot it’s an unbearable, scorching heat, and his lips crack
open like flesh-coloured petals, bleeding bright red in-between. He hallucinates shadows, dust and heat invading
the faded planes of his arms and the cartography of his ribcage and the Sahara of his fingertips.
Perhaps the greatest punishment is: he still has feeling. He is still alive.
Eleven months, twenty-one days and forty-three deaths later, the Wall bustles with rumour: a woman
has arrived. Searching for someone.
It is not a rumour.
It is real, he knows the woman, greatest blessing, greatest curse.
They run.
The soldiers have horses.
They don’t even make it a full mile.
In the end, the war was not his choice. Certainly the suffering wasn’t. But he was Chinese, his father
exceptionally Chinese, and his mother, too. And in the days of the First Emperor, what could a Chinese man do
but suffer? But die?
In the end, he would’ve much preferred to go on living as he had spent the happiest days of his life. He
would’ve preferred being in the study, running a finger over the slumbering pages, delving in and out of legend
and learning without pausing to take a breath. But the books had burned, he’d watched, the fire branding itself
onto his eyelids long after it had devoured itself.
He would’ve much preferred to remain sitting cross-legged on the cool ground with Muoling: young,
and gloriously alive.