Thirteen Years

They built him a house, in the second year of his labor, near the great bend of the river, so that he might have a roof. They brought him a wife — a woman of the Tushan clan — and he married her between two days of digging, and went back to the water the next morning. She bore him a son, named Qi, while he was away at the diggings, and he did not see the child's face for four years.

It is told three times, in the old stories, that Yu passed his own door and did not enter. The first time, he heard his wife inside, weeping in childbirth. His men stopped, and looked at him, and waited. Yu stood for a moment with his hand on the lintel, and then he went on. The work would not wait, and neither would the water.

The second time, a year later, he heard his son Qi crying inside, a small new voice. His men said, my lord, go in, the child does not know you. Yu lifted his hand to knock, and then lowered it. He said the channel was halfway through the mountain, and if the rain came before it was finished, the work of months would be lost. He walked on.

The third time, Qi was a boy of three, standing in the doorway, and he saw his father on the road and ran toward him, calling out a name he had only just learned to say. Yu knelt and took his son's hands — the hands of a child, soft and warm — and looked at him. His men said nothing. After a long moment, Yu rose, kissed the boy's forehead, and walked away down the road.

He did not do this out of hardness. He did it because he had counted, as no one else had counted, the cost of one more month's delay. The water was still on the land. The people were still living in the trees. Every channel he did not dig this season was a family that would not eat next year. He chose the families, a hundred thousand of them, over his own child.

The laborers, seeing their lord refuse his own door, refused nothing themselves. They worked through the rains, when the mud was up to their knees. They worked through the cold, when their hands bled on the rock. They dug the Grand Canal to carry the Yellow River through the plain; they broke open the passes through the mountains; they led the tributaries, one by one, into the channels that would take them home.

There were places where the water did not wish to be led. At Dragon Gate, the river had been blocked for years by a wall of rock, and when they broke it through, the water came down in a roar that shook the earth, and the people fell on their faces, afraid. Yu stood and watched it go. It was, he said, the sound of a river remembering its way.

Thirteen years. His beard grew grey. His wife grew old alone in the house he had built her, and did not complain. His son grew from a baby to a boy who did not know his father. Yu himself grew thin and weathered, a man who looked as though he had been carved from the same hard rock he had spent his life breaking.

And then, in the thirteenth year, the last channel was cut. The last river, finding at last the path that had been made for it, turned and ran east of its own accord. It went down through the plain, through the passes, through the new gates, and out at last into the Eastern Sea, and the sea received it without a sound, and was done.