The Law of the Land

The girl Zhinv was lifted from her couch and carried back to her father's hut. The father, who had not moved since they took her, stumbled out into the road and took her in his arms, and for the first time that day, he wept. The neighbors stood around them, awkward and silent, not knowing whether to rejoice or to fear what the river might do now.

That night, when the village had gone home, Ximen Bao sat in his hall and wrote out his orders. He abolished the tribute. He forbade the temple to choose girls again, on pain of death. He ordered the lands that the old witch and the three elders had seized through their collections to be returned to the families from whom they had been taken.

Then he did what no magistrate before him had thought to do. He called the farmers together and asked them why the river flooded at all. They shrugged and said it was the will of the River God. He said no, it was the fault of men. The river had no proper channels; its waters, when they rose, spread where they wished, because no one had ever thought to lead them.

He set the people to work. They dredged the old watercourses. They dug new canals. They built dikes where the land was low and gates where the water must be let through in time of drought. The work was hard, and the people grumbled at first, for they had been taught for a hundred years that the river could not be fought.

But Ximen Bao worked beside them. He carried earth when his back was strong enough, and he walked the banks when he could carry no more. He did not order them to do what he would not do. The grumbling stopped, and the work went on, and the canals spread across the county like a net of silver over the fields.

The spring rains came. The farmers watched the water rise, ready to run for the hills, ready to accuse the new magistrate of angering the god. But the water rose within its new banks, and the canals carried it off to the fields, and the fields drank, and did not drown.

There was no wedding that year. There was no bride in red. The river ran, and the crops grew, and the county of Ye, which had been growing poorer with every spring, began, slowly, to grow rich again. Families that had fled the tribute came back. The granaries filled.

Men began, after a time, to tell the story of what Ximen Bao had done. They told it in the market, and they told it to their children, and they told it to travelers who passed through and asked why no brides were sent to the river. They did not glorify it. They said simply that the magistrate had treated the sorcerers as the sorcerers had treated the river: he had sent them to do their own errand.

The girl Zhinv grew up. She married, in time, a farmer of the village, and had children of her own, and when they were old enough to ask, she told them of the red robe, and the reed couch, and the quiet man who had stood on the bank and refused to let the water take her. She told them to beware of any man who tells you that a thing must be done because it has always been done.

The temple by the river fell into disuse. Its roof rotted. The steps where the old sorceress had chanted were overgrown with grass. No one pulled it down. It was enough that no one came to it. The River God, denied his brides, seemed content to let the county live.

And Ximen Bao, when his term was done, left Ye as quietly as he had come. He had not set out to be a hero. He had set out to be a magistrate. But the county remembered, and the story outlived him, and it is told to this day of a man who did not argue with a superstition — he simply treated it as it deserved.