The Ants Beneath the Tree

He woke. The sun was still where it had been when he lay down, a little past mid-afternoon. He had thought it was overhead, but no. His servants crouched by the wall, picking up the wine-cups he had knocked over. One of them saw him move and said, "Sir, you have slept a long time. The wine is finished. Shall I bring more?"

Chunyu Fen sat up and looked at his hands. They were his own hands. The hands of a middle-aged drunk, not a governor in embroidered robes. He looked around him. The courtyard was his own. The sour-date tree, his own tree. The wall, his own wall. He put a hand to his head, and it was still a little thick with the wine he had drunk before he lay down.

"How long," he said, "have I been asleep?"

The servant scratched his head. "A couple of watches, sir. No more. You fell asleep just after the second cup."

Chunyu Fen said nothing. He got to his feet, slow, and walked over to the sour-date tree. Twenty years he had lived in this house, and in all that time he had never once looked closely at the tree. Now he knelt. He brushed away the weeds at its foot and looked.

Beneath the roots, under a mat of dry earth, was an ant colony. Not the small careless kind, a few hundred ants wandering about. This was a city. There was a main gate, with a small pebble set in it, polished white. Streets ran between the roots. In the middle rose a mound, and on it the ants who seemed to be the rulers were gathered. The way they moved had the gravity of the court he had left behind.

He brushed the earth a little further aside. On the eastern side of the colony, where the road he had traveled must have run, a raised earthen causeway led up to a higher mound. On the southern side sat a smaller city, with a little palace of its own. Beside it, a small grave, under a sprig of myrtle. He knew, without being told. This was Nanke. And that small grave was his wife's.

He looked for the dead ant that had been his general, the one defeated at Luofeng. He found it lying apart from the others, on its back. He did not touch it.

He sat back on his heels and wept. He wept for the princess, who had been gentle with him. For the children he had loved and would never see. For the twenty years that had been his, and had not been his. He wept for himself too. The disgraced officer who had, in a single afternoon, lived a whole life. And woke to find that the whole of it had been a drunk man's dream.

He covered the ants' city again, gently, with the earth, and he would not let the servants disturb the tree. That night he poured the last of his wine onto the ground. He never bought another bottle. After that he lived three sober years and died in his own bed. On his deathbed he told his children, in a low voice, the story of the kingdom of Huai'an. How a man may spend twenty years ruling a province and be, all the while, no farther from his own courtyard than the length of a shadow under a tree. The children did not understand. But the story was written down, and the men who read it, long after, understood.