The Curse and the Morning

The ghost did not stay gone. Dingbo had half expected as much. Ghosts, he was learning, are not like debtors: they do not let a wrong expire. They come back to it, the way a man comes back to a song he cannot finish.

It came to him that night, in the room where he slept. It was not the sheep this time. It was the man again, the plain-faced traveler he had met on the road, and it stood at the foot of his bed, and it did not bother to be quiet about it.

You have used me shamefully, it said. You have taken my shape, and my price, and my quiet hour on a winter road, and you have sold me for coin that clatters in a living man's pocket. I should have your breath now, as I meant to have it then. I have come for it.

Dingbo sat up. He was not in the least surprised to see it. He had, in fact, been half expecting it, and he had spent the afternoon, at the market, thinking about what a ghost says when it comes back. He was ready.

And yet, he said, reasonably, you did not get it then. I told you on the road what I meant to do, and I told you how I meant to do it, and you came with me anyway. You walked into the market with my hand on your wool. You let me sell you. A man sells a thing that lets itself be sold; a ghost sells itself when it is vain.

The ghost stopped. It had not thought of it that way. It had thought of the road as a trick, and the market as a theft. It had not counted the walk to market as part of its own choice. But Dingbo had counted it, and the counting had been fair.

And besides, Dingbo said, you came back. You did not have to. You could have gone off and walked another road and forgotten me. Instead you spent the day in a sheep pen, and then you came here in the dark to threaten a man who has already outwitted you once. What does that make you? It makes you, said Dingbo, a ghost with a grievance. And I have no fear of a ghost with a grievance. I have sold one already.

The ghost did not speak for a long moment. The room was cold, and it was very quiet. Then it did a thing that Dingbo told the tale for the rest of his life about. It laughed. It was a soundless laugh, and it was not a kind laugh, but it was a laugh all the same, and it was, Dingbo thought, the first honest thing the ghost had done.

You are the worse man I have met in a hundred years, the ghost said. And because I cannot make you afraid, and I cannot take your breath, and you have outwitted me twice now, I will do the one thing that is left to me: I will leave you alone. You have earned it. Go on being the boldest fool on your road, and when you are dead, come and find me. I shall be waiting.

It was gone. Dingbo lay back down, and he did not sleep for the rest of the night, but he was not afraid. He had beaten a ghost, and the ghost had admitted it, and the admission was the sweetest coin he had taken that day.

He lived to be an old man, and he told the tale wherever he went. He never claimed he had been braver than he was. He said only that he had talked to the thing on the road, and that it had talked back, and that between two talkers, the one who keeps his head is the one who keeps his life. The road, he would say, is full of ghosts. Most of them are not terrible. Most of them are just very, very vain.