The Mirror Walks On

It happened in the spring of the next year, by a bend of the river that bends westward before it turns east. Wang Du had made his camp on a bluff above the water. The night was clear; the moon lay on the current like a blade of silver.

He woke in the small hours, not to any sound, but to a feeling. The place against his chest where the mirror lay was cold. He reached inside his robe. The oilcloth case was there, but it was unfastened. He drew it out and opened it by the light of the dying fire.

The silk inside was empty.

He was on his feet in a moment, calling his servants, striking a light. They searched the camp, blunderbuss and pack, the grass at the bluff's edge, the path down to the river. The mirror was not there. No man had entered the camp; the watchman had not slept; the gate of cordon had not been cut.

Wang Du sat down on a stone by the fire and did not speak for a long time. Then he remembered Su's words on the ridge, and he smiled, a little bitterly, and nodded to himself. The mirror had not been stolen. It had not been dropped. It had simply, in the old man's phrase, walked on.

That night he dreamed. He dreamed that the old man of the ruined temple stood by his fire, and that in his hands, wrapped in the faded silk, was the mirror. "I have taken it back," the old man said, gently. "It has done what it came to do. You used it well. You did not use it for power. That is why you were allowed to hold it as long as you did."

"Where is it going?" Wang Du asked in the dream.

"To the next hand," the old man said. "There is a village in the south where a child is dying, and no doctor will come. The mirror will be on that child's table by the end of the summer. It will be held by a woman who has never heard of me or of you, and she will not know what she holds. That is as it should be."

Wang Du woke at dawn. The fire was out. The river ran below, gray in the early light. He sat for a while, and then he called his servants to break camp, and they went on their way, and he never looked for the mirror again.

He returned, after two more years of wandering, to the eastern capital, and he wrote down everything that had befallen him — the old man, the fox in the east room, the sick girl, the caravan by the watchtower, the meeting with Su, the empty oilcloth case. He called the book the Record of the Ancient Mirror. It was read in his own day, and it has been read ever since.

But the mirror itself was never seen again. Whether it lies, even now, on the table of some quiet house in the south, or has gone back to the dark from which the old man drew it, no one knows. Wang Du, in the last line of his book, wrote only this: that old things are not kept; they are lent, and the lender does not always wait to be thanked.