The Sheep on the Road

Dingbo looked down at the sheep. It looked back up at him with the mild, foolish eyes that sheep have, and it bleated again, and Dingbo did the thing the ghost had told him a living man could do.

He spat at it. Not politely, not as a man spits when he is merely making a point. He spat as a man spits when he means a thing, and the sheep flinched, and for a moment its shape wavered the way a reflection wavers on water.

Then it steadied. The ghost had been right: the spittle hurt it, and it could not quite hold what it had made. But it had made the sheep shape well, and the sheep shape held, in the end, in spite of itself. The ghost was trapped in the thing it had chosen to become.

Dingbo did not waste the moment. He caught the sheep by the wool about the neck, and the sheep did not fight him as a man would have fought, because a sheep's first thought is not to fight. It bleated, and it trembled, and Dingbo tied its legs with the cord from his pack.

He had meant, from the moment the ghost told him it could change shape, to do exactly this. He had not meant to kill it; killing a ghost was a holy business, and Dingbo was no holy man. He had meant to make it useful. He was a practical young man, and a ghost that could be a sheep was a ghost that could be sold.

So he shouldered his pack again, and he took the sheep in hand, and he walked on toward the next market town, which was not far now. The moon was up. The road was empty. He walked with his captive, and the captive walked with him, and neither of them spoke, because the captive could no longer speak in any shape he cared for.

The sheep did try, once or twice, to change back. Dingbo could feel it gather itself, twice, under his hand. Each time he spat at it, quick and ugly, and the sheep winced and settled, and went on being a sheep. After the third time it stopped trying. It had understood the terms.

Dingbo sang, as he walked. He was not a good singer, and he did not care. He had walked out of that wood with a ghost under his hand, and the ghost had told him its own weakness, and the ghost was now a sheep. This was, by any honest measure, a triumph.

He thought, as he walked, about what he would say at market. He would say he had bought the sheep on the road, from a drover who had fallen ill. He would say nothing about the road, or the wood, or the conversation he had had with something that was not a man. Buyers do not want those things. They want a sound animal and a fair price.

The sheep, walking beside him, knew what he was planning. It had heard him reason it out, step by step, in its own hearing. It bleated. It was not, Dingbo thought, an indignant bleat. It was a bleat of admiration. Even a ghost, it seemed, could admire a better trick than its own.

By the time the first light of dawn touched the hills, Dingbo was at the edge of the market town, and the sheep was quiet, and he was ready to sell it. He had walked all night with a ghost, and he had beaten it, and the beating smelled, from where he stood, very like a profit.