The Journey Home

When Chunyu Fen reached the capital, it was not the king who received him. Three officials met him instead, grave-looking men. They were polite about it, very formal. They asked after the revenue of Nanke. They asked about the river dykes, whether they were holding up. They asked about the death of the princess. They asked who he had kept company with these past two years. He answered as well as he could. And before the questions were done, he knew. His account had already been decided.

They did not arrest him, though. They put him in his own house in the capital, the one the king had given him when he married, and told him to wait. The days went by. The king never sent for him. The friends who once crowded his halls? They all turned out to have pressing business somewhere else.

A month passed. Then the king sent for him. Not the great hall this time. A smaller room, and the king sat there alone over a cup of wine. He looked older than Chunyu Fen remembered. Older. He gestured his son-in-law to a seat.

"I have told you before," the king said slowly, "that you came to us by a road that no man knows. I have kept you, these twenty years, because my daughter loved you. She is dead. The court has its opinions. I am an old man, and I cannot, much longer, set my own will against the will of my ministers."

He paused. "Your people are waiting for you," he said. "On the other side of the road you came by. They have been waiting for twenty years. It is time you went home."

Chunyu Fen protested. His children were here. His wife was buried here. He had governed the province for twenty years. The king shook his head. The children, he said, would be taken care of by their grandfather. The priests would tend the wife's grave. The road stood open, and it was time to go.

The same two messengers who had brought him to the city took him out of it again. Dark green robes, same as before. The little people stood in the streets and watched him go. He looked back from the gate. The walls of Huai'an, and the towers above them, were already fading in the light.

The road back turned out shorter than the road out. The banks that had towered over him on the way in sank low on either side now. The sky, which had been the color of bronze, opened up to the plain color of afternoon. The messengers rode one on each side of him, the way they had before, and said nothing. This time he did not ask where they were taking him.

Then he saw it ahead of him: the gate of his own small courtyard, on the southern edge of the city. The weeds had grown taller than he remembered. The sour-date tree stood in the middle, just where it had always stood, branches heavy with green leaves. Far off, a cock crowed.

The two messengers pulled up their horses. The elder one spoke, very politely. "This is as far as we go. The knight will find his own door." He bowed. His companion bowed too. Chunyu Fen opened his mouth to thank them, to get one last question out. And as his mouth opened, the two small men and their small horses were gone. He stood alone, on his own two feet, in his own courtyard, under the sour-date tree.