1There was a fourth river, farther east than any ship of the black-headed people ever sailed. It ran yellow with the soil it carried, and it broke its banks so often that the people called it a sorrow. North of it, on a smaller stream, stood a city named Yin. A king named Wu Ding ruled there, of the house of Shang.
2The Shang cast bronze as no one else on earth could, and they drove chariots, and they were feared. To the west of them, in the hill pastures, lived a herding people they called the Qiang. The Shang hunted them as other men hunt deer.
3There was a Qiang boy named Tagu. He was ten when the army came into his valley. It was led by a woman. He remembered that all his life: a woman in a chariot, with a great bronze axe across her knees, calling orders in a voice like a horn. She was the king's wife, the Lady Hao. She had thirteen thousand spears behind her that year.
4He did not see what became of his father. He was roped by the neck in a line with others and marched east for forty days. Those who fell were left.
5At Yin the line was sorted, like a herd. The strong men went one way. Tagu did not yet know what that way led to. The women went to the weaving sheds. A steward looked at Tagu's hands, which were small, and sent him to the yard of the bone workers.
6The Shang king did nothing without asking. Should he hunt tomorrow? Would it rain on the millet? Which of the dead was sending the pain in his tooth? He put his questions to his ancestors, and the ancestors answered through bone.
7This was the way of it. The shoulder blade of an ox, or the belly shell of a turtle, was scraped and polished until it shone like a tooth. On the back, rows of small hollows were cut. Then, before the king, a diviner spoke the question aloud and pressed a glowing brand into a hollow. The bone gave a sharp sound, puk, and a crack ran across the front. The king studied the crack and said what it meant. Afterward the question was carved into the bone beside its crack, and the bone was kept.
8Tagu scraped. He scraped ox bones from dawn to dark with a stone, until his fingers bled and then hardened. He was one of twenty boys. He learned the tongue of his captors because he was beaten when he did not understand it.
9The carver of the yard was an old man called Lu. He had cut the king's questions for thirty years, and the fine work had ruined his eyes. He now held the bone a hand's breadth from his nose. He needed a boy to sharpen his bronze points and brush away the dust, and he chose the Qiang boy, because that boy never dropped anything.
10So Tagu sat at the old man's elbow, day after day, and watched the marks go in.
11He was a herder's son. He had been raised to know one sheep from two hundred by the set of its ears. Before a year was out he knew the marks apart, though no one had taught him. There was a mark that was plainly rain, with drops falling. There was the sun, and the moon, and a horse with its mane. He began to see that they were the tongue he had been beaten into, made visible.
12And there was one mark that he saw often: a man standing, with a sheep's horns on his head.
13One evening he pointed to it. "Grandfather, what is that one?"
14Old Lu was silent a moment. "That is Qiang," he said. "That is you."
15Tagu looked at the bone. He could read enough by then. The marks before the horned man were a number, and the mark after it was the word used for ox and pig and dog when they were given to the dead. Shall we offer three Qiang to Father Yi? He looked along the shelf. The horned man was on bone after bone. Three. Ten. Thirty.
16So he knew where the strong men had gone.
17He did not sleep that night, or the next. But a child gets used to anything. He kept his head low and his hands quick. He did one thing more, in secret. In the dust of the yard, with a twig, he began to copy the marks. He could not have said why. It was the only thing in that place that was his.
18He saw another thing, working at the old man's elbow. Lu did not cut the hollows on the back of the bones himself, but he showed the boys how. He was very exact about it: a long groove, and beside it a round pit. Tagu polished a hundred bones and looked at a hundred cracks. The crack always ran the same way. It ran along the groove, and a branch went off toward the pit. It went where the hollow sent it.
19He said so, one day. He had not learned yet to keep his mouth shut.
20Old Lu's hand came down on his wrist, hard. He looked round the yard. No one had heard. "You have eyes," he said, very low. "That is a gift, and it will get you killed. The bone cracks as bone cracks. What the crack means is the king's to say. Now tell me you understand, and never say the other thing again."
21"I understand," said Tagu.
22"No," said the old man. "But you will." He let go of the wrist. Then, since he had begun, he said one thing more. "Look at what I carve tomorrow. Look at the end of it."
23The bone he carved the next day was a turtle shell, and the question on it was a great one. The Lady Hao was with child. The king had asked whether the birth would be lucky. He had studied the crack and given his reading: if she bore the child on such a day, it would be good; on such another day, very good.
24Lu carved the question. He carved the king's reading. Then he left a space, and set the shell aside, and waited. A month and a day later he took it down again and cut a last short line.
25Tagu read it over his shoulder. It gave the day she had borne the child. It was neither of the king's days. Then: It was not good. It was a girl.
26"You wrote that the king was wrong," Tagu whispered.
27"I wrote what happened," said Lu. "There is the question. There is what the king said. And there is what came. The first is his. The second is his. The third belongs to nobody. It is only so." He blew the dust from the line. "My master taught me that the third line is the reason for the other two. Any fool with a hot stick can crack a bone. We are the ones who keep what came after. Some day somebody may lay all the third lines side by side."
28"And see what?"
29"I do not know," said the old man. "I shall be dead. That is why it must be carved."
30Tagu was thirteen when the Lady Hao died.
31She had led armies and borne the king's children and held her own lands. She seemed to the city a thing that could not stop. She sickened in the winter. The king put question after question to the bones: which ancestor was harming her, what offering would turn it. Every crack was read as hopeful. She died anyway.
32The king had a pit dug for her near his own halls, deep and square. She would go down in a lacquered box, with her bronze axes and her vessels and her jades. And she would not go alone, for a great lady needed attendants on the far side. There were to be sixteen.
33The steward came through the yards with a tally stick. He stopped at the bone yard. His eye went along the boys and rested on the one with the western face.
34"That one," he said. "The Qiang."
35Tagu had walked the dark road in his mind every night for three years. He had thought he was ready. He was not. His legs would not lift him from the bench.
36Then Old Lu stood up. He was small and bent and he had to tilt his head to find where the steward was. "Not that one," he said.
37"Carver, the lady's household is short by one. He is a Qiang. He is meat."
38"He is my eyes," said Lu. "Mine are finished. Ask anyone in this yard how I work now. Take him, and tomorrow the king's questions go uncut, and the day after, and you may explain to the king why his ancestors have no record of what he asked them."
39The steward laughed. "A Qiang, carve? They cannot speak like men. Find another boy."
40"Bring a bone," said Lu to Tagu. "Carve yesterday's question."
41Tagu had never cut a mark in bone. He had drawn them in dust with a twig, four hundred evenings. He took the bronze point. His hand shook, and then, because it had to, it stopped shaking. He cut the day. He cut the diviner's name. He cut the question, which was about her: Will the Lady Hao be well among the ancestors? The lines were thin, but they were straight, and every stroke was in its place.
42The steward could read. He looked at the bone for a long breath. Then he looked at the boy with something like dislike, as a man looks at a dog that has spoken. He made a mark on his tally and went on to the next yard.
43The household was not left short. Tagu knew that. Someone went down into that pit in his place, a herder's child from some valley like his own, and he never learned the name. He carried that, and it did not get lighter. He had been saved by a twig and some dust and an old man's stubbornness. The other had not had them. That was the whole of the difference.
44He sat at the bench that night and was sick. Lu let him be. Toward morning the old man said, out of the dark, "You are thinking, why me and not him."
45"Yes."
46"There is no why. I could reach one. I reached." He coughed. "I have carved the horned man two thousand times. I told myself I only held the knife. A man can say that for thirty years. Then one of the horned men sits at his elbow and sharpens his points." He was quiet for so long that Tagu thought he slept. "Carve true. That is all I have to give you. It is not enough. Carve true anyway."
47Old Lu died two winters later. He was buried without a marker, like all his kind. Tagu had his bench by then.
48He carved for thirty-one years, under Wu Ding and under the kings after him. He was never free. But the carver of the king's questions is fed and is not beaten, and no steward stopped at his bench again. He cut the rain and the harvest and the hunt. He cut the horned man when he was told to, and each time he felt it. And always he cut the third line. It rained. It did not rain. The king hunted and took nothing. When the reading had been wrong, he did not make it right.
49In his last years he had a boy at his elbow, a captive from the north, who never dropped anything. He taught him the marks. He showed him how the crack runs where the hollow sends it, and he told him not to say so, and he told him why the third line was the reason for the other two.
50The bones were kept. When a shelf was full, they were laid in pits in the earth by the thousand, shoulder blades and shells, each with its cracks and its small thin marks. The house of Shang fell at last to a people from the west. Yin became a field. The river flooded and laid its yellow silt over everything, and millet grew there for three thousand years.
51The farmers of that place turned up old bones with the plough. They took them for dragons' bones and sold them to be ground for medicine. A great many were swallowed so. Then, it is told, a scholar who was ill looked at the bone in his medicine before it was ground, and saw that the scratches on it were writing.
52And here is the wonder. He could nearly read it. The marks of the bone yard had never been lost. They had been handed down, teacher to child, changing a little in each age as a face changes down a family, for a hundred generations without a break. Sun. Moon. Rain. Horse. A child of that country today, shown the old carver's bone, can point to some of them and say what they are.
53They found the pit of the Lady Hao also, whole, with her axes in it and her name cast on the bronze. They knew who she was. They had already read of her on the bones: her armies, her sickness, the child that came on the wrong day.
54And scholars did lay the third lines side by side, as Old Lu had said somebody might. They saw what a boy had seen at thirteen. They had it in the carvers' own hands.
55The horned man is on those bones, many hundreds of times. It is hard to look at. But it is there, because the men who carved did not look away. So the dead of the western valleys are counted. Not one of their names was kept. But no one can say now that they were never there.