chapter 2

I did not want such a person to become my child’s father.

I had planned it all long ago: my husband had to be a dead man. If he lived and returned home after the war, he might not still want a child of uncertain parentage and a wife like me.

Only a fallen soldier was safe. I would continue his family line; he would give me a name and a place in the household registry.

Chen Shitou died anyway. I never even saw his body.

An officer spread a collection of belongings across a table. They had been left by soldiers who had died in the latest battle after asking to be named as the baby’s father. I could choose one.

“Wu Daniu, twenty-five, from Guangshan Village in Cen County. Personal savings and death benefit: thirty-seven taels.”

“He Er, fifteen, from Xiaxi Village below Jiao Mountain. Personal savings and death benefit: thirty-two taels.”

He continued down the line.

“Chen Shitou, seventeen, from Taoli Village in An County. Personal savings and death benefit: twenty-two taels.”

He introduced each small pile in turn, reciting the names of men who would never return as though it were the most ordinary task in the world.

I listened for a long time before I heard Chen Shitou’s name. He had left less money than the others.

Still, I pointed to his pile. “My lord, I’ll choose this one. A man called Shitou—Stone—sounds honest.”

And honest he had been. In all my eight months there, he was the only one who had apologized to me and called me “Miss.”

One day I would be buried beside him. I would not be getting a bad bargain.

If we were to share a grave, I ought to have ashes to bury. Smiling ingratiatingly, I asked, “My lord, he’s my husband now. May I take his ashes home? It would give my parents-in-law something to remember him by.”

At last, a flicker disturbed the officer’s calm eyes. “At least you have some conscience. The bodies are piled behind the hill. You’ll have to ask the kitchen soldiers to burn him separately. One tael. Go if you’re willing to pay it.”

One tael was dear. I would never have spent that much to cremate my father. But to cremate my child’s father, I would.

I set the tael of silver on the head cook’s table. He gave me a curious look.

“No business for three months, and the first customer I get is a woman. You’re that pregnant girl from the army brothel, aren’t you? Picked yourself a dead husband?”

They cooked for the army in ordinary times. Cremating bodies was merely a profitable sideline. Only brothers who had survived life and death together would pay to burn a fallen comrade and carry his ashes home. They saw only a few such jobs in an entire year.

Men had always been the ones to hire him. I was the first woman. As we walked to the hill, many soldiers watched in silence. Some followed and helped me search for the body without asking for a coin.

As they turned the corpses, one began to weep. “Lucky bastard. A woman will bear his child and even pay to take him home. When I die, I wonder how many pieces of me will be left, and whether any of them will make it back to my family grave.”

“Bah! What are you crying for? Once you’re dead, what difference does it make where you lie? Have some spirit. Pray you go home with every limb still attached.”

“I don’t want to go home if I die. My mother never cared for me anyway. Bury me behind this hill, and at least my brothers will be here to talk with me.”

“But I want to go home. My mother is still waiting for me to come back and take a wife.”

That was what an army camp became after a great battle: stifled with grief and terror. Some men released it on the training field. Others released it on us.

The head cook was used to it. Listening to the weeping, he searched with practiced hands and soon dragged out a corpse drenched in blood.

I knew soldiers in the vanguard died badly. Only when I saw him did I understand what it meant for swords and arrows to have no eyes.

Chen Shitou’s left ear was gone. Most of the soldiers lying there were missing the same ear. The Beirong were said to cut them off and count them as proof of merit.

His left eye was gone too. An arrow had once lodged there; now only a hollow remained. There were similar holes in his right chest and lower leg. Yet the wound that killed him must have come from a blade. A deep gash split his abdomen.

The cook turned his face toward me. “Look carefully. Same as the portrait. I haven’t given you the wrong husband.”

I nodded, dampened a handkerchief, and washed Chen Shitou’s face clean. Then I dressed him in clean clothes.

The army owned only so many suits of armor. Armor was stripped from the dead for another man to wear. Burning him in nothing but an under-robe would have been undignified.

The sobbing behind me grew louder. Someone muttered, “Maybe I’ll treat those women better next time I enter their tent. She has more loyalty than you’d think.”

Inwardly, I spat. I showed Chen Shitou loyalty because he had never touched me. Had it been any other man, I would have taken the money and left. Soldiers suffered, yes—but were women like us not pitiful too?

I was leaving. Andai was dying.

I slipped the overseer a hundred copper coins and begged him to let me take her outside to die.

Andai was a prisoner. There was no registry to strike her from and no other paperwork to trouble with. He weighed the purse in his hand and agreed.

I spent several dozen more coins hiring a cart. Andai was too weak to walk.

We avoided the noonday sun. For once, we traveled openly beneath the light. I took her to the northernmost edge of Tongcheng, the place nearest her homeland, so she could look toward it one last time.

The spring wind carried the scent of flowers. The furrow between Andai’s brows eased, and she smiled at me.

“Sister Dani, this is wonderful. I’m going to die.”

We stopped on a small earthen rise. A grave had already been dug there. Yingzhi had arranged it. Unable to leave the camp, she had paid for this last gift instead. It was the closest burial ground to Beirong.

Andai watched the sunset and asked me one final question.

“Sister Dani, why do people wage war? Just so more people can keep dying?”

I had no answer. Perhaps Yingzhi would have. She had read books, unlike an untaught village girl like me.

But Andai no longer needed an answer. Slowly, forever, she closed her beautiful eyes.