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from doing whatever you want. If you go now, you will be killed, and you’ll have wasted seven and a half years of our time. You will deprive your people of a champion.”
    “I’m good enough now to save the boys.”
    “We didn’t work this hard to save just two boys, but whole families.”
    Of course.
    “Do you really think I’ll be able to do that—defeat an army?”
    “Even when you fight against soldiers trained as you are, most of them will be men, heavy footed and rough. You will have the advantage. Don’t be impatient.”
    “From time to time you may use the water gourd to watch your husband and your brother,” the old man said.
    But I had ended the panic about them already. I could feel a wooden door inside of me close. I had learned on the farm that I could stop loving animals raised for slaughter. And I could start loving them immediately when someone said, “This one is a pet,” freeing me and opening the door. We had lost males before, cousins and uncles who were conscripted into armies or bonded as apprentices, who are almost as lowly as slave girls.
    I bled and thought about the people to be killed; I bled and thought about the people to be born.
    During all my years on the mountain, I talked to no one except the two old people, but they seemed to be many people. The whole world lived inside the gourd, the earth a green and blue pearl like the one the dragon plays with.
    When I could point at the sky and make a sword appear, a silver bolt in the sunlight, and control its slashing with my mind, the old people said I was ready to leave. The old man opened the gourd for the last time. I saw the baron’s messenger leave our house, and my father was saying, “This time I must go and fight.” I would hurry down the mountain and take his place. The old people gave me the fifteen beads, which I was to use if I got into terrible danger. They gave me men’s clothes and armor. We bowed to one another. The bird flew above me down the mountain, and for some miles, whenever I turned to look for them, there would be the two old people waving. I saw them through the mist; I saw them on the clouds; I saw them big on the mountain-top when distance had shrunk the pines. They had probably left images of themselves for me to wave at and gone about their other business.
    When I reached my village, my father and mother had grown as old as the two whose shapes I could at last no longer see. I helped my parents carry their tools, and they walked ahead so straight, each carrying a basket or a hoe not to overburden me, their tears falling privately. My family surrounded me with so much love that I almost forgot the ones not there. I praised the new infants.
    “Some of the people are saying the Eight Sages tookyou away to teach you magic,” said a little girl cousin. “They say they changed you into a bird, and you flew to them.”
    “Some say you went to the city and became a prostitute,” another cousin giggled.
    “You might tell them that I met some teachers who were willing to teach me science,” I said.
    “I have been drafted,” my father said.
    “No, Father,” I said. “I will take your place.”
    My parents killed a chicken and steamed it whole, as if they were welcoming home a son, but I had gotten out of the habit of meat. After eating rice and vegetables, I slept for a long time, preparation for the work ahead.
    In the morning my parents woke me and asked that I come with them to the family hall. “Stay in your night-clothes,” my mother said. “Don’t change yet.” She was holding a basin, a towel, and a kettle of hot water. My father had a bottle of wine, an ink block and pens, and knives of various sizes. “Come with us,” he said. They had stopped the tears with which they had greeted me. Forebodingly I caught a smell—metallic, the iron smell of blood, as when a woman gives birth, as at the sacrifice of a large animal, as when I menstruated and dreamed red dreams.
    My mother put a pillow