Batu grinned: “I’m used to combing sheep.”
Que Zhi silently reached out, took the wooden comb from Batu’s hand without a word, his voice low and brief: “I’ll do it.” His movements were gentle and slow, his fingertips avoiding the fine strands as he combed through with patience and indulgence.
Batu glanced at Que Zhi, then lowered his voice and asked Xi Yu: “You two are traveling together? He looks so fierce—not easy to talk to.”
He looked down at the wrist guard on Que Zhi’s arm, then at Xi Yu’s empty right sleeve—the torn edge that had been used to wrap a wound and was now barely pinned together with a brooch—and then looked back up at Xi Yu’s face.
Que Zhi caught the small gesture. He said something in the Shuo language, short and abrupt.
Batu blinked, then replied in the same tongue.
Xi Yu let Que Zhi gently wash his hair clean.
He didn’t know who he was asking—his hair still plastered across his forehead—but his tone was that of a local magistrate passing judgment: “What were you two saying?”
“He asked what I wanted,” Batu said, looking at Xi Yu, speaking Chinese. He scratched his head. “I said I was just trying to comb your hair. Then he said—he knows. He was just reminding me that you’re the one he brought to the grassland, and no one’s allowed to bully you.”
Batu scratched his hair again, looking puzzled at Xi Yu. “But I really was just combing your hair. Your hair really does feel nice.”
Xi Yu pushed his hair away from his face, wrung the water from the ends, and sat cross-legged by the stream.
He looked up at Que Zhi with an expression that teetered between “don’t be so tense” and “maybe scare fewer passersby from now on,”
then turned to Batu: “Ignore him. He just looks intimidating—you don’t need to be afraid.”
“You mentioned the Helian tribe earlier—isn’t the Helian tribe the one that sits between Shuo and the Great Liang?”
Batu tucked the comb back into his robe as he spoke: “Right. The Helian tribe is on the edge of the grassland, near the Gobi side. I came out with my father to deliver sheep—selling them in Liangzhou City. He’s at the market waiting for the sheep buyers, and he told me to take a few sheep out to graze so they don’t lose too much weight cooped up in the market too long. Ended up walking half a day further and ran into you two.”
He pointed toward the foot of a distant mountain. “Our felt tent is over there.”
He stood up, brushed the grass clippings off his knees, bent down to herd the sheep he’d been keeping aside back into the flock, and leaned on his staff as he turned back:
“Where are you headed? The royal court? Then you’ll be passing through Helian territory.
It’s easy to get lost on the grassland without a guide—the grass grows so thick the paths get swallowed up. Outsiders often wander around for days and can’t get out. How about coming with me? I’ll take you part of the way—I have to go back and find my father anyway.”
Batu looked at Xi Yu, his small eyes crinkling into two slits again.
Xi Yu stood up from the stream and handed the cloth back to Que Zhi: “Ask him.”
Que Zhi took the cloth, shook off the water droplets, folded it, and tucked it into his robe: “Ask him what.”
“Ask him how to get through Helian territory. Didn’t you say the Helian tribe listens to neither side—what if he leads us halfway and then robs us?”
His tone was casual, as if asking what was for dinner. He tilted his head, looking at Que Zhi, the corners of his eyes curving as he waited for an answer.
Batu grew anxious and jabbed his staff into the ground:
“I’m not a bandit! My family are proper herders—three generations of herders! Robbing people is what the warriors in the tribes do—I can’t even out-steal a sheep. Last time, a neighboring tribe’s herders lured three of our sheep away, and I chased them for two days and only got one back.”
“Alright. He’s giving us his credentials—seems like a proper herder after all.” Xi Yu turned his face away, the curve of his lips suppressed but not entirely hidden.
Que Zhi said nothing. He just withdrew his gaze from Xi Yu’s profile, and when he turned to Batu, his expressionless face was back in place.
His eyes narrowed slightly—not in scrutiny, but in assessment—weighing whether a man who voluntarily laid out his entire background at their first meeting was genuinely unguarded or simply overconfident.
These two thoughts circled through Xi Yu’s mind at the same time.
He looked away, retied the knot on his empty right sleeve, and said to Batu: “Fine, I’ll trust you. But you’re not allowed to let Khalbala eat my hair anymore.”
—
Batu said there were three kinds of roads on the grassland. One was the trade route—packed down by repeated use, the widest and flattest, but plagued by horse bandits. One was the official road, used by Shuo cavalry on patrol—off-limits to outsiders. The third was the sheep trail.
“Sheep trails are the safest. Bandits don’t rob sheep trails—herders have no money.”
Batu drove his sheep at the front, with Khalbala, as always, leading the flock—the tuft of black fur on his forehead ruffled by the wind, his head held high.
“But sheep trails are hard to follow—deep grass, many forks. Outsiders can’t find them. My father says there are fewer people who know all the Helian sheep trails than those who know all the stars.”
Xi Yu rode on his camel, watching the narrow path trampled by the flock ahead.
It wasn’t so much a road as a faint depression in the grass, snaking back and forth like a serpent.
“Does your father know them all?”
“He knows half. I know the other half,” Batu grinned back at him. “So you’d better stay close, or the grass will swallow you up.”
—
Batu was a talkative man.
At first, he was mindful of Que Zhi’s oppressive aura, stealing glances at him before speaking. But after walking a while and realizing that Que Zhi, aside from occasionally correcting his direction in the Shuo language, had no intention of tossing him and his sheep to the roadside, he let loose completely.
He started by running through every herder he knew, then moved on to praising his own sheep. His Chinese was clearly limited—when it came to sheep breeds, he kept slipping into Shuo, and when Xi Yu couldn’t understand, he’d stop to explain—only to forget where he’d left off.
But he spoke with great earnestness—about wrapping newborn lambs in old robes to keep them warm, about a blizzard year when several died, and how he and his father had crowded the rest of the sheep into the felt tent to sleep with them.
“You sleep with the sheep?” Xi Yu leaned forward slightly on his camel, listening intently.
“Sheep are warm. Warmer than people,” Batu said matter-of-factly. “That fellow next to you—he probably sleeps like a rock. If you touched him in the middle of the night, would your hands freeze?”
Xi Yu swallowed the answer to that question and only remarked that he seemed quieter than yesterday.
Batu leaned half his body out from behind Khalbala’s hindquarters and called toward the figure leading the camel ahead: “Brother Que Zhi is so quiet—how many words does he usually say to you?”
Xi Yu thought for a moment: “From the stream to here, he’s spoken three times total. Once to correct the direction, twice to answer my questions—fifteen characters at most. That’s a lot.”
Batu sucked in a sharp breath and sighed from the bottom of his heart: “That must be suffocating. I spent three years alone herding sheep once. When I came down the mountain and talked too much, my father gave me a beating. Said if I talk too fast, I’ll blurt out all the tribe’s business.”
“Then you probably deserved that beating.”
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