Back then, Que Zhi had crouched in front of him, pressing his palm over Xi Yu’s sand-stung reddened hands. The calluses on his palm were rough and warm.
The wind and sand had raged behind him, but his thumb pressed against Xi Yu’s fingers—not hard, yet as steady as a stake driven into the earth, unmovable.
So he wasn’t afraid.
He had been afraid for eighteen years in the cold palace—afraid of being discovered, afraid of being forgotten, afraid that after Old Zhou died he’d never have a hot meal again, afraid that if his plan failed he’d be dragged back alive and locked up even tighter.
There were too many things to fear. He had grown so accustomed to fear as the backdrop of every moment that even after leaving the palace, he still reflexively opened his eyes at the sound of the night watch drum. But yesterday, he realized he had forgotten to be afraid.
Because someone was standing in front of him.
So this was what “not being afraid” felt like—not the absence of danger, but knowing that when danger came, someone would face it with you. And you trusted him.
This was the first time in his eighteen years of life that Xi Yu had ever experienced such a thing.
He turned the thought over and over in his mind, feeling as if he had discovered some remarkable secret.
“Que Zhi,” he called out.
The man on the camel ahead turned his head.
Que Zhi had changed his robe—the gray one from yesterday, with its sleeve torn by flying stones, was beyond wearing. He’d dug out his only spare from the pack, a dark blue coarse-cloth robe. His collar was still open, sand still clinging to his hair, and beside the thin scar on his cheekbone was a fresh new scratch from a flying stone.
Xi Yu had noticed that scratch that morning when re-bandaging his wound. He’d said, “How do you even manage to get hurt on your face?” but his fingers had been impossibly gentle as they applied a thin layer of ointment along the scratch.
Xi Yu didn’t speak—he just looked at the man before him: dusty, robe wrinkled, hair a mess like a bird’s nest, a layer of grime on his face, the ointment on his cheekbone still damp and glossy.
This was his most disheveled moment—and also when he looked his best.
“Thank you,” Xi Yu said.
Que Zhi paused, and his camel paused with him. “For what?”
“Thank you for not dying yesterday.”
Que Zhi turned his head and looked at him. Those amber eyes were pale in the morning light, like tea diluted with water. His pupils contracted slightly, as if trying to determine whether those words were a joke.
He hadn’t been killed by flying stones in the sandstorm, but now he nearly choked on those words. He opened his mouth, as if to say, “That’s not something you thank someone for,” but in the end, he just switched the reins to his other hand and rumbled two words from his throat: “I won’t.”
“Won’t what?”
“Won’t die.”
Xi Yu smiled. It was the kind of smile that curved his eyes, lifted his lips, and lit up his entire face. His peach-blossom eyes narrowed into two crescent moons, the natural thin blush at their corners catching the morning light like a small blot of rouge bleeding across rice paper. The tear mole beneath his right eye shifted slightly upward with the curve of his brow—like a grain of black sand stirred by the wind across snow.
His chin lifted from beneath his hat brim, the hat now hanging askew at the back of his head, covering nothing—not the smile, not the brightness, not the whole clear sky reflected in his eyes.
Que Zhi watched that smile, his fingers tightening and loosening on the reins unconsciously. Then he turned his head back.
The camel took a few steps forward. His back was still straight, but the small patch of skin at the nape of his neck, near his hairline, had turned faintly red.
Xi Yu saw it.
He was still smiling. When the smile faded, he took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the crisp, dry morning air of the Gobi, then called out loudly: “Let’s go! Today I want to see mountains.”
“There are no mountains in the Gobi.”
“You said yesterday there was no oasis, and then there was. You said yesterday there was no fruit, and we’ll find some in the town ahead too. You say there are no mountains—so today I’m sure I’ll see mountains.”
“The oasis yesterday wasn’t something I arranged.”
“I don’t care. I say there are, so there are. Hyah!”
He gave a light kick with his heel against the camel’s flank. The camel broke into a trot, pulling half a length ahead of Que Zhi.
It was still that one-sleeved green robe, its empty right sleeve billowing backward in the wind, filling with the cool morning air and snapping like a freshly sewn little banner.
Que Zhi watched that fluttering empty sleeve for two seconds from behind, then squeezed his camel forward. He didn’t pull up beside him—just followed, a camel-length behind, his shadow falling just enough to cover the shadow of Xi Yu’s camel.
One behind the other, they left the first fresh set of hoofprints across the newly laid sand of the Gobi.
By afternoon, the Gobi began to change.
The first thing Xi Yu noticed was that the sand beneath his feet had grown harder. Before, it had been loose shifting sand—the camel’s hooves sinking in and pulling back out with every step, accompanied by a soft rasping sound.
Now the hoofbeats were crisper, occasionally striking pebbles and throwing off tiny sparks. Then he noticed that the horizon was no longer an unbroken flat expanse of sand—there were undulations, faint and indistinct, like the sleeping backs of some giant creature beneath the sand. The rising contours were distorted by heat haze, hard to make out, but they were definitely there.
Those rises were darker than the sand—not ochre, but a gray-tinged dark brown, their surfaces dotted with mottled dark markings, like the slow breathing of the earth itself.
He slowed his camel, squinting to see more clearly.
The rises grew closer, clearer. Rock formations. A vast expanse of ancient stone, eroded by wind and sand for tens of thousands of years, protruding from the sea of sand—strangely shaped, some like crouching beasts, some like collapsed palaces, some like mushrooms, slender stone pillars topped with flat boulders that looked as if they might topple at any moment, yet had stood steady for millennia beyond counting.
“Que Zhi!” He reined in his camel, unable to suppress the excitement in his voice. “What’s this?” He pointed at the rock formations, his fingers trembling slightly.
“Wind-eroded rocks.” Que Zhi stopped beside him. His voice was still low, but the end of his sentence lifted slightly, as if catching a spark from Xi Yu’s excitement. “The wind blew away the soft parts, leaving the hard parts behind. They’re a lot older than people.”
Xi Yu didn’t answer.
He swung off his camel, his feet landing on the hard rock, and half-walked, half-ran toward the nearest boulder.
The stone was taller than him, its surface polished smooth by wind and sand, covered in grooves of varying depths like an abstract landscape painting.
He reached out, his fingertips touching the rock’s surface—not rough with sand, but a fine, cool smoothness, worn by tens of thousands of years of wind. Hard and cool, nothing like the stone floors of the cold palace.
The cold palace floor was dead. But this rock was alive—it had stood here for tens of thousands of years, what storm hadn’t it seen? It had watched oases turn to desert, lakes dry into Gobi. It had watched the sun and moon turn, dynasties rise and fall—and it paid no attention to any of it. It simply stood.
Last night, he had been high-fiving wind that was tens of thousands of years old.
“Every hour you calculated in the cold palace, every scheme you turned over in your mind, every step of your escape you painstakingly rehearsed—all of it was to get here, to stand before a rock tens of thousands of years old, touch its grooves, and listen to the wind pass through stone pillars. You made it. You really got out.”
He repeated these words silently to himself, then looked up at the top of the wind-eroded rock. The wind had hollowed out a hole at its peak, and sunlight streamed through the opening, spilling across his face.
Xi Yu closed his eyes, his lashes casting fine fractured shadows across his cheekbones, the tear mole resting quietly in the dark beyond the light.
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