The Sick Girl

He held the mirror where the girl could see her own face in it. At first nothing changed. The girl's reflection was the reflection of any pale, tired child. Then, slowly, Wang Du saw it: a small, gray shape, crouched beside the girl's left shoulder, like a rat with a man's face, feeding.

He did not startle or cry out. He asked the mother whether the girl had, six months before, gathered wild herbs on the hill behind the farm, and whether one evening she had returned with a small cut on her hand that had not healed. The mother, astonished, said that this was exactly what had happened.

"The illness came in through the cut," Wang Du said. "It has fed on her. It is not too late." He took the mirror and held it, not to the girl, but to the place on her arm where the old wound lay. The gray shape shifted, whimpering, and fled down the arm and out through the palm, and was gone.

He gave the mother a simple recipe: a decoction of gentian and dried ginger, boiled twice, taken warm. It was nothing that a doctor had not known; but the doctors had been treating the symptoms, not the cause. Within a week the girl's color returned; within a month she was running about the farm as she had not run since the autumn before.

After that, there was no keeping Wang Du in the inn. The villagers brought him their sick. A fisherman's child, who had been crying out in the night with a pain that had no place; an old woman whose sight had failed her for a year; a herdsman with a swelling on his neck that no knife would touch. To each Wang Du held up the mirror, and to each he gave, not magic, but the plainest of prescriptions, once the mirror had shown him where the trouble lay.

He never took money. When the villagers pressed gifts on him, he accepted only a bowl of rice or a bundle of firewood. He told himself, and told anyone who asked, that the mirror did the work and he was merely its servant. But the villagers did not believe him. They began to call him Master Mirror, and to bow when they saw him coming.

It was a fine autumn afternoon, as he was leaving the village, that an old farmer caught up with him on the road. "Master," the man said, "you have our girl back. In our house we have hung a small cloth in her name, to thank whatever power walks with you. Do you ask us to pray to the Buddha? To the local god? Or to the mirror itself?"

Wang Du stopped. He thought of the old man in the ruined temple, who had walked away into empty air. He thought of the cloud-and-tiger pattern on the back of the bronze. He shook his head.

"Pray to no image," he said. "The mirror is a thing, not a god. It shows what is there; it does not judge. If you must thank someone, thank the doctor who first found the gentian, and the mother who sat up with your child. I am only the man who happened to be holding the glass."

He walked on. The old farmer stood in the road a long time after he had gone, scratching his head; and then he went home and did as he was told, and for a hundred years after that, his family hung no picture at all, but only, on the girl's birthday, a small unrolled length of plain silk, in memory of a man who would not be thanked.