The Old Man and the Mirror

In the last years of the Sui, when the roads were unsafe and the provinces were falling apart, there lived a scholar named Wang Du. He was not a man of ambition; he loved old things — broken bells, inscriptions on stone, the rusted seals of offices long abolished. He traveled not to seek office but to see what remained of the world before it was all burned.

It was in a ruined temple among the southern hills that he met the old man. The temple roof had fallen in; the Buddha was headless. The old man sat on a broken step, warming his hands over a small fire, and he did not look up when Wang Du entered.

"You are looking for old things," the old man said. It was not a question. Wang Du, who had said nothing, sat down beside him and shared his dry cakes.

The old man reached inside his robe and drew out a small object wrapped in faded silk. He unwrapped it, and Wang Du caught his breath. It was a bronze mirror, no larger than a man's palm, cast in a pattern of clouds and tigers that he did not recognize. Its surface was not bright like a modern mirror; it was dark, almost black, and yet it seemed to hold a light of its own.

"This was cast," the old man said, "long before the Han. It does not show the face a man wears in the street. It shows the face he wears when he is alone. Hold it to a fox, and the fox forgets to be a woman. Hold it to a sick man, and you will see where the illness sits."

Wang Du reached out, and the old man closed his fingers over the mirror and did not let go. "It has been with me a long time," he said. "It is tired of me. It wants to walk with a man who will not use it for power. Will you promise me that?"

Wang Du promised. The old man pressed the mirror into his hands, wrapped it again in the faded silk, and rose. He walked out of the temple without looking back, and Wang Du, calling after him, found that the path outside was empty. He never saw the old man again.

That night, in a wayside inn, he unwrapped the mirror and held it up to his own face. It did not show him his own features. It showed him, for one strange moment, a younger man he had once been, and then a road he had not yet walked. He wrapped it up again, his hands shaking.

He traveled on. The mirror rode against his chest, wrapped in silk and oilcloth, and he did not take it out except when he was alone. He had promised the old man not to use it for power, and he meant to keep his word; but he had not promised not to use it for mercy.

It was a week later, at an inn in a town called Fengxiang, that he first heard the stories. The innkeeper, a nervous man with a scar across his cheek, leaned across the table and asked him, in a low voice, whether he was traveling alone. When Wang Du said he was, the innkeeper shook his head and said, "Then you will not sleep here tonight. No one who has slept in the east room has woken without a story to tell."