The Millet Uncooked

Lu Sheng opened his eyes.

He was lying on the bench by the roadside inn. The old Taoist was still sitting across from him, calm as before, leaning upon his thornwood staff. The other travelers were warming their hands at the fire. And the pot — the pot of millet — was still over the flames, not yet cooked.

He stared. He lifted his hands. They were young hands, smooth and unlined, without the scars of the dikes, without the trembling of old age. He felt his back. He was thirty years old again, or thereabouts, and the road was the same road, and the robe was the same coarse robe.

How long? he whispered. I have lived a lifetime. I was married, and I had sons, and I governed provinces, and I was exiled, and I came home again, and I died in my bed. I am an old man. I have been an old man for years.

The Taoist smiled, and his smile was not unkind. The millet, he said, is not yet done. It has not had time to do more than this. He reached across and took back the porcelain pillow, turning it in his hands, and the two openings had closed again, leaving only a smooth, cool cylinder of celadon.

Lu Sheng sat up slowly. He could feel the dream still clinging to him like the warmth of a blanket that has been thrown off. He could remember the face of his lady Cui. He could remember the cold of the southern rain, and the weight of the edict that had recalled him, and the hand of his wife near the end. He could remember all of it, and none of it had been real.

Then tell me, he said, his voice scarcely steady. Was it all nothing? Was the greatness a lie, and the love a lie, and the children I buried in my dreams a lie as well? What am I to believe of a life that can be finished in the time it takes a pot of millet to cook?

The old man watched the fire. The world, he said, and all the honors and sorrows that men call their lives — what are they but this? A pot bubbles, a dream begins, a man grows rich and grieves and dies, and the millet is still not done when he wakes. We are all, my friend, only travelers by a fire, borrowing a pillow to rest our heads.

Lu Sheng said nothing for a long while. He looked at his young hands, and at the coarse robe, and at the road that stretched away to the east, toward the capital where he had dreamed he would be great. Somewhere in that dream he had loved, and feared, and lost. Those feelings were not lies, even if the events had been.

The innkeeper stirred the millet, and the steam rose and smelled of the evening. The old Taoist rose, settled his faded cap, and shouldered his thornwood staff. He bowed to Lu Sheng without ceremony, as one equal to another, and turned to go.

Wait, Lu Sheng said. Tell me your name, that I may remember the man who taught me this. But the Taoist was already walking down the road, and the dust took him, and Lu Sheng did not rise to follow.

He sat beside the fire and watched the cook the rest of the way. He did not sigh again that evening, nor speak of what he had seen. When the millet was done, he ate it, and it was the best meal he had ever tasted, for he no longer knew what a lifetime of anything was worth.