The Qinghe River ran south.
It had always run south. It would run south long after the town built along its bank had rotted back into the ground and the ground had forgotten there had ever been a town. The river did not care about towns. It did not care about the fishermen who worked it or the children who swam in its shallows or the merchants who used its current to move goods they would sell for coins that would eventually be lost, stolen, or buried with their owners. The river cared about south. Everything else was temporary scenery.
The town of Qinghe had forty-three families, two docks — north and south, the south being preferred by anyone who wanted to avoid the eyeline of Old Yan's market stall — a temple to a river deity who had not been actively worshipped in two generations but whose roof the town maintained out of habit, three inns of varying quality, and a population that could tell you exactly what the river was going to do six hours from now by looking at the colour of the water near the eastern bank. This was not cultivation. This was just knowing a river long enough to understand its moods.
It was autumn when Wei Liang entered the world, in the fourth hour before dawn, when the mist sat so thick on the water that the south dock had disappeared entirely and the river sounded closer than it was. The willows along the bank had gone yellow. The market vendors would be setting up in three hours. The fishermen were already awake, as fishermen always were, moving around their boats in the dark with the quiet competence of people who had long since made their peace with early mornings.
Wei Jian was not among them.
Wei Jian was standing on the dock — specifically the south dock, the better one — with his hands in his pockets and nothing useful to do. He was thirty-one years old, a fisherman of moderate reputation and genuinely excellent knot-work, and his wife was inside their river-house doing something he could not help with and did not know how to be near without being in the way. He was not a man who was easily frightened. He was, on this particular morning, frightened.
He had been through this twice already. Wei Dong had arrived efficiently, seven years ago, as if the whole thing were a scheduling matter. Wei Shan had taken longer, five years ago, and had announced himself with a cry so indignant it woke the neighbours. Wei Jian had handled both of these events by standing on the dock and listening to the river until someone came to tell him it was over. The dock had served him well. He trusted the dock.
He listened to the water.
Inside the house, his wife Chen Mei was doing the thing she did with most difficult situations, which was to proceed through them with a focused competence that left no room for fear, because she had decided somewhere around age twelve that fear was information and not an instruction, and she had been mostly right about this. She was not unafraid. She was busy.
The midwife, Mrs. Guo — sixty years old, had delivered approximately one hundred and forty children in Qinghe and had opinions about all of them — was doing what midwives do. The lamp was burning. The river sounded close.
Wei Jian stood on the dock. He counted the stars he could see through the mist, which was not many. He thought about the net he needed to repair. He thought about whether the eastern shallows would be worth trying next week. He thought about his wife's face and then stopped thinking about that because it made the standing-on-the-dock harder.
At the fourth hour before dawn, slightly past it, a sound came from the house.
It was not a large sound. It was, in the scheme of sounds a river town produced — boats, water, wind, market mornings, the occasional argument about dock rights — a fairly small sound. But Wei Jian had been waiting for it for several hours and it was the only sound he was listening for and it arrived, and then it stopped, and then it started again, brief and sharp, and then it stopped again.
He waited.
After a while, Mrs. Guo opened the door and looked out at him from across the yard with the expression of someone who has completed a task to her satisfaction.
"Third son," she said. "Healthy. Come in when you're ready."
Wei Jian stood on the dock for another moment. One more, he thought. One more person in the world tonight. He did not know yet if this was frightening or good. He thought it might be both, and that the both of it might take years to sort out.
He went in.
Wei Liang was very small and had arrived with a grievance, which he expressed with some force for approximately two minutes and then abandoned, apparently having made his point. He was examining the middle distance with the unfocused intensity of the newly arrived.
Wei Jian sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his wife, who was tired in the specific way of someone who had just done something considerable and was not yet ready to talk about it. He looked at his new son. He looked back at the river through the window, which was just becoming visible as dawn started somewhere behind the eastern hills.
"Wei Liang," Chen Mei said. She had decided this some weeks ago. She did not ask.
Wei Jian looked at the child. "Wei Liang," he tried.
The child did not respond. He was still examining the middle distance. Something in it apparently required close attention.
"He's alert," Mrs. Guo observed, with the tone of someone noting a weather condition.
"Is that good?" Wei Jian asked.
"Mostly," said Mrs. Guo, and began cleaning up, which was her way of indicating that the interesting part was over and the long part had begun.
The river ran south outside the window.
The mist was burning off.
It was morning in Qinghe, and Wei Liang was in it, and the river did not stop.