『The Little Bitter-Gourd General』
Shen Che, courtesy name Poyun, twenty-six years old. There is an old scar an inch long on his brow ridge—the mark of a stray arrow that grazed him at age twelve, when he first followed his father onto the battlefield. At the time, his father clapped him on the shoulder and laughed: “Good lad, this is the first medal of a Shen family son.” That medal is now only a livid white hollow, and it will never bleed again. The Shen family had guarded the northern border for generations, and the banner of their iron-armored army was embroidered with a dark bird reborn from fire. For the first fifteen years of Shen Che's life, he was the brightest color in the capital. He could loose three arrows in a row from horseback and hit a copper coin a hundred paces away, and he could compose a poem on the spot at a winding-stream wine feast, making the daughters of noble houses secretly lift their carriage curtains to steal a look. His mother always scolded him for being too flashy, but his father merely drank and watched with a smile—the children of the Shen family were supposed to live exactly like this, bold and unapologetic. Then, that winter, an eight-hundred-li urgent dispatch arrived from the border: General Shen had conspired with the Northern Di, the iron-armored army had been routed, and thirty thousand men lay buried in the snowfield. On the day the imperial edict reached the Shen residence, Shen Che was still practicing with his spear in the back courtyard. He watched his mother push his little brother into the hidden passage, then turn, straighten her robes, and sit upright in the main hall to wait for the imperial guards to break down the door. In the last look she gave him, her lips moved, and she silently formed one word: go. He went. As he escaped through the hidden passage, his little brother clutched his clothes and wept, and he covered the boy's mouth, his palm soaked with tears. That night they sheltered from the rain in a broken temple outside the city. His brother ran a high fever and raved nonsense; he held that burning little body and listened to the muffled sound of hoofbeats in the rain, without closing his eyes all night. The next day the fever broke, but by the stream he found the footprints of pursuers. He pressed the last piece of dry ration into his brother's hand and pointed south: “Find your maternal uncle. Keep going south, don't look back.” Then he put on the torn padded coat he had picked up and walked against the north wind, toward the place where his father had died. That one departure lasted ten years. He started as the lowest-ranked auxiliary soldier. No one knew that this quiet, taciturn young man with callused hands had once been the most dazzling Young General Shen in the capital. He learned to share a bowl of sour gruel with soldiers in a trench, to search through piles of corpses for arrows still fit to use, and to curse cowardly recruits awake in the coarsest language. His wounds multiplied; his words grew fewer. Every New Year's Eve, he would go alone outside the camp, and facing north, pour out a bowl of wine—to honor his father, his mother, and the boy who could never go home again. His military honors were hewn out one cut at a time. At twenty-five, he finally stood before the emperor and produced the irrefutable evidence in his father's treason case—the so-called letter of collusion had been sealed with a fish-glue seal paste made exclusively by the Northern Di royal house, and the Northern Di had fought his father for thirty years without ever once seeking peace negotiations. The Son of Heaven overturned the verdict, restored the Shen family's honor, and posthumously ennobled three generations. That winter night, he stood with a sword in his hand before his enemy's mansion. The man inside collapsed limp as mud in the main hall, a boy of five or six cowering at his knee, round-eyed, exactly like his little brother in those days. Shen Che stood in the snow for a long time, the sword's grip wearing the palm of his hand bloody. In the end, he drove the sword into the beam above the door, and the sword tassel swayed in the wind—the one his mother had tied around his waist before she died. As he turned, snow covered one shoulder. He did not look back. Now he is a rising star at court, but he still lives in the old house beside the military camp. The charcoal fire never burns well, and he doesn't care. His colleagues say he has a cold face and a cold heart, but when a new soldier wakes up hungry in the middle of the night, he will find two steamed buns at the head of his bed that were not there before. He has an excellent tolerance for liquor and can drink a thousand cups without falling, yet he never gets drunk in front of others—except once, when he drank a few extra cups while paying respects at his parents' graves and said quietly to the two low mounds: “Father, Mother, I found little brother... he's in the south doing a herbal medicine business. He's married, and he has a daughter. Her eyes look like Mother's.” Then he poured another cup and spilled it on the ground. “I didn't dare acknowledge him. This way is fine.”