The Fellow Traveler

Song Dingbo was a young man of the kind the old tales like to call bold without being wise: quick on his feet, quicker still in his head, and with a great deal more curiosity than was strictly safe for a man who walked the roads alone after dark.

He was on his way home one evening, his pack on his shoulder and his mind on his supper, when he overtook another walker coming the other way. The other man was a little shorter than Dingbo, and wore a plain cloak, and he stepped out to pass with the small courtesy of the road.

But when he drew level, he stopped. You are Song Dingbo, he said, and Dingbo, who had not expected to be known on so lonely a stretch of road, stopped too, and looked at him more closely. The face was ordinary, the kind of face you meet a hundred times and never remember.

We have not met, Dingbo said. The other man shook his head. Not yet, he said. I know of you, though. And he smiled, the way a man smiles when he is about to say something he has been looking forward to saying for a long time.

They walked on together. The other man was good company, and Dingbo, who liked good company, did not say no. They talked of the road and the weather and the price of grain in the next market town, and the stranger answered every question readily, and laughed at Dingbo's small jokes, and never once asked Dingbo where he lived.

It was that, in the end, that made Dingbo uneasy. A man who walks with you for an hour on a lonely road and never asks your name, or where you are going, or what your trade is, is not a man walking with you. He is a man walking toward something, and you are part of the way.

Dingbo said nothing. He is a brave young man, but bravery in this kind is mostly a matter of keeping your face still when you have understood. He kept his face still, and he walked on, and he began, very quietly, to think.

The road dropped now into a little wood, and the light went. The stranger walked on unhurried. Dingbo noticed, and he noted it without showing it, that the stranger did not step on the fallen leaves. He did not crush them. He walked above them, an inch, and it was not a thing a man does, however light his step.

Dingbo's heart beat faster, but his pace did not change. He was, by his own later telling, not afraid. He was interested. He had heard the old tales like every boy, and he had always supposed the ghosts in them were either very terrible or very stupid. He was about to find out which kind he had met.

So you are a ghost, he said at last, as casually as one might remark that the road was wet. The stranger stopped, and looked at him, and did not trouble to deny it. I am, he said. And you, Song Dingbo, are a living man, and I have walked beside you for an hour because that is how my kind is made to feed. I mean to have your breath before the moon is high.

Dingbo considered this. He did not run. He thought, instead, about what he knew of ghosts, and what they were good at, and what they were not good at. They were good at frightening. They were not, he had always suspected, very good at being tricked. He smiled at his companion. Then I am very sorry for you, he said. Because I do not intend to die on this road tonight.