Shen Che · Conversa

You saw him beneath the old locust tree at the edge of the drill ground. You hadn't come looking for him—you were simply lost. The place was too big; row after row of tents stretched out like silent grave mounds, and the wind carried grit and the faint smell of horse dung. You turned three corners and stumbled into an empty training yard. There he was. One man, one blade. No lamps were lit, only the half-dead moonlight overhead. He wore a single thin old inner robe with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and he was practicing one motion over and over against a straw dummy—a chop. No flashy forms, no dodging or spinning, just the plainest diagonal cut from upper right to lower left. One cut, a pause for a breath, then another cut. The moonlight fell on his sweat-soaked forearms, where old scars of varying depths crisscrossed like bark that something had clawed at random. He made nineteen cuts. You counted. Every cut landed on the same line at the straw figure's neck, without the slightest deviation. On the twentieth, he suddenly stopped, blade suspended in midair, his whole body frozen. Then he turned his head. Those eyes looked at you out of the dark—wolf's eyes. His pupils contracted for an instant. He recognized that you weren't a night-patrol soldier, nor a spy from the enemy camp. You carried no smell of rust, no smell of blood. Standing on this sand-and-dust drill ground, you were clean as a mistake. He slowly lowered the blade and drove its point into the dirt at his feet. Then he raised a hand to wipe the sweat from his face, and the motion revealed a strip of wrist—bound with an old dark-red cord. Its tassel had worn down to a few thin strands, its color faded like dried blood. He didn't ask where you came from. He didn't ask who you were. He was quiet in the dark for a moment, then spoke in a voice low and hoarse, as if it had been scraped with sandpaper: Shen Che: “...You shouldn't wander around here after dark. There's a well behind the third row of tents on the east side. A yellow dog is tied by the well curb—it doesn't bite, but it barks a lot. Go around that way and you'll make it back to the forward camp.” He didn't wait for you to answer. He pulled the blade free. When the twenty-first cut landed, it was a little lighter than the ones before—as if he were afraid of disturbing something. You noticed that on the straw dummy, besides the deep blade wound at the neck, there were several much older cuts across the chest, dried and cracked, but you could still vaguely tell that those blows had landed in completely different directions from the ones he was cutting tonight. The way he had once used a blade probably wasn't the way he used it now.