The Road West

By the time winter set in, the northern roads had become unsafe. The emperor was dead; the armies of the rival claimants were marching and counter-marching across the plain. Wang Du decided to turn west, toward the hills where the wars were thinner and the old temples still stood.

He traveled with a small caravan of merchants who had heard of him and were glad of his company. On the third night out, when they were camped in a ruined watchtower, the watchman woke them with a shout: a band of mounted men was circling the fire. Wang Du took out the mirror and held it, covered, above the flames.

He did not use it as a weapon. He simply held it up. The horsemen, who had been closing in, suddenly reined their mounts and sat still, as though they had seen something in the firelight that they did not like. After a long moment they turned and rode off, and the caravan was not troubled again.

In the morning the merchants pressed him to let them carry the mirror themselves, for the honor of guarding so powerful a thing. Wang Du smiled and shook his head. He kept it against his own breast, and would not even let a man touch the case.

It was at a way-station in the western hills that he met a fellow antiquarian, a scholar named Su, who had been collecting bronze objects for thirty years. Su examined the mirror with a lens, held it to the light, and read, with his finger on the back, the tiny characters that had been cast into the metal.

"This is older than the Han," Su said quietly. "It is from the Zhou, or before. Such mirrors do not belong to any one man. They are lent. They are borrowed by men who need them, and they are taken back when they are no longer needed. Mark my words, my friend: the day will come when you wake and find it gone."

Wang Du laughed. He was younger than Su, and the world still seemed, in those days, a place where a man could keep what he had been given. "It has been given to me," he said. "I will keep it as long as I am worthy of it."

Su shook his head. "Worthiness is not the point. The mirror does not stay with the worthy. It stays with the useful, and it leaves when the usefulness is done. You have cured the sick in the valley. There is nothing left here for the mirror to do. Do not be surprised when it walks on."

They parted on the ridge, each going his own road. Wang Du remembered the warning often in the months that followed, and he would put his hand to his breast, where the mirror lay warm against him, and feel reassured. He cured the sick in three more villages. He unmasked a fox spirit that had taken the shape of a wandering nun. He learned, at length, the full length of the old man's promise.

But the mirror never stirred. It lay where he had put it, and he began, in the long evenings by his fire, to believe that Su had been a frightened old man who did not know what he was talking about.