The fire had burned low by the time Xu Hao found a question he could ask.
Across from him, Er Bao was still looking at the patch of dirt where he'd drawn three houses and wiped them away. Da Bao had gone quiet. That alone was enough to tell Xu Hao how much the conversation mattered.
He'd spent years reconstructing lives from scorched letters and broken inscriptions. Such records could tell him when a house burned, rarely what the survivors did afterward.
Er Bao's hands lay open on his knees.
"Your family," Xu Hao said carefully. "All gone?"
"Father. Mother. Many others." Er Bao hesitated. "We don't know if anyone else escaped."
Xu Hao glanced at Da Bao. The shorter brother was watching a strip of fish turn black at its edges. He didn't move it from the fire.
Er Bao took up the stick again. He drew a courtyard, a gate, and several buildings crowded within the walls. His explanation came slowly at first, then faster than Xu Hao could follow. Armed men. Night. Fire. Their father ordering them out before the fighting reached the last courtyard.
Da Bao spoke abruptly. His voice rose as he pointed at the gate Er Bao had drawn. Xu Hao caught father, back, and a word that might have meant stay.
Er Bao reached across and closed his hand around his brother's wrist.
Da Bao fell silent.
"Who attacked you?" Xu Hao asked.
Er Bao looked up. "People we cannot fight. Not yet."
"Do you know who they are?"
A pause. "Yes."
That was all he offered.
Xu Hao could have asked again. The historian in him wanted dates, witnesses, the names of the men who had opened the gate. But Da Bao was holding a piece of ruined fish he had forgotten to eat, and Er Bao had drawn the same house twice without seeming to notice.
"I'm sorry," Xu Hao said.
Er Bao nodded. Da Bao pushed the burnt fish away.
For a while there was only the sound of wood settling in the fire.
Then Xu Hao looked down at the fading marks on his wrists.
He had arrived alone, wearing strange clothes, speaking a language neither understood. That explained their suspicion. Not everything else.
"You thought I was sent by them?" he asked.
Er Bao followed his gaze to his wrists. "We didn't know. A stranger near our camp. Strange clothes. No Spirit we could sense. No words we understood."
"I wasn't following you."
"I believe you."
"Now."
Er Bao accepted the correction.
Xu Hao turned towards Da Bao. "And the club?"
The older twin looked up at once, as if he'd been waiting to be invited into a less painful conversation.
Er Bao sighed. "Da Bao thought you would run."
"I might have."
"He thought he could stop you."
"He certainly did."
Da Bao said something earnestly, then made a small striking motion. Xu Hao understood one phrase: not so hard.
"You hit me hard enough that I met this world lying down."
Er Bao translated as much as he could. Da Bao grimaced, touched the back of his own head, and offered a very awkward apology.
Xu Hao was inclined to accept it. He had already accepted the food, the bandage for his heel, and the shelter. Forgiveness, he suspected, would take longer than any of those.
Er Bao was putting away the stick when he said something else. Xu Hao heard his own name, Hibiscus Town, and the word for money.
Da Bao made a sharp sound.
Xu Hao looked between them. "What money?"
"It's nothing we will do," Da Bao said quickly.
Er Bao did not look at his brother. "He should know."
"Know what?"
No one answered. Xu Hao moved his bowl aside.
"Er Bao."
The larger man rubbed the drawing from the dirt and began again, this time with two figures. One was taller than the other. Beside them he drew a little stack of circles, the same sign Da Bao made when counting copper coins.
He pointed to the smaller figure. Then to Xu Hao.
"Before the snake," he said, "we thought we might take you to town."
Xu Hao's shoulders loosened. "That's what I wanted."
Er Bao didn't smile.
"We thought someone might pay for you."
There were enough words in the sentence that Xu Hao first tried arranging them a different way. Pay to guide him, perhaps. Pay for his strange coat. He pointed at the drawing.
"For my clothes?"
Er Bao shook his head.
"For me?"
"Yes."
"To work?"
"Perhaps. For a household. A merchant. We hadn't decided."
Xu Hao stared at him. The fire cracked loudly, and he flinched.
"You were going to sell me."
Da Bao began speaking, fast and unhappy. He pointed at their empty salt jar, the supplies, Xu Hao's coat. Er Bao cut him off with a few words that made the older twin fall silent.
"We considered it," Er Bao said. "We were wrong."
"You fed me for nine days."
"Yes."
"You untied me to eat. You watched me sleep. And all that time—" Xu Hao couldn't find the rest in the local language. He stood and switched to English. "You were deciding what price a human being ought to fetch?"
The brothers looked at him without understanding the words. He almost wished they could.
He walked to the edge of the firelight. The warning line Er Bao had laid around camp was just visible beneath the grass. Beyond it waited a forest in which a man could die without anyone knowing his name.
On Earth, Xu Hao had handled documents recording the purchase and sale of people. Some were horrifying because of the cruelty they described. Others were worse because there was no cruelty in the language at all—only weight, age, condition, and price.
He had never imagined what it would feel like to be discussed in that careful, ordinary way.
Behind him, Er Bao spoke softly. "At first, we didn't think of you as our brother."
Xu Hao turned. "I wasn't your brother. I was still a person."
He made himself repeat it in the few local words he possessed. "Don't sell people. Not me. Not anyone."
Da Bao frowned, not in anger but confusion. Er Bao looked at Xu Hao for a long time.
"I hear you," he said.
It wasn't agreement. Not quite. But he hadn't argued that Xu Hao should be grateful to have escaped being sold.
"I need to be alone," Xu Hao said.
He didn't know the word for alone. He pointed towards a flat stone and went to sit there.
Neither brother followed.
* * *
At dawn, Xu Hao woke before Da Bao could begin his customary argument with the cooking pots.
He sat for a while with the blanket around his shoulders. His walking stick lay where he'd left it. Nobody had taken his shoes.
He could leave.
It brought little comfort.
He went to the stream, washed his face, and followed the bank until the camp disappeared behind the pines. The water ran south for a little way, then turned sharply between two walls of rock. Beyond the bend the banks were crowded with thorn bushes. There were hoofprints in the mud, some nearly as broad as his hand.
Xu Hao stood there listening.
No voices. No distant wagon wheels. The only movement was the water and a beetle climbing an exposed root.
He had no money, no map, and a stick that had failed to impress a wild boar.
He was still angry. He was also still lost.
When he returned, Da Bao was sitting outside the shelter with two parcels of breakfast. He held one out and waited.
Xu Hao took it. "Thank you."
The giant seemed ready to say something. Whatever it was, he abandoned the attempt and pointed towards Er Bao, who was mending a leather strap near the fire.
Xu Hao sat beside him. For several minutes he held the leather straight while Er Bao worked the needle through it.
"I went down the stream," Xu Hao said.
"I saw."
"You didn't stop me."
"You told us you wanted to be alone."
"And if I kept walking?"
Er Bao pulled the thread through. "I'd tell you which way leads to Hibiscus Town. I would ask you not to go alone. But I wouldn't tie you up."
Xu Hao watched the needle pass through the leather.
"Promise?"
Er Bao met his eyes. "Promise."
He could not know whether the promise would hold. But it was the first answer either brother had given him that did not depend on whether he was useful to them.
Er Bao tied off the thread. Then he said, "You saved Da Bao."
"The snake?"
"Yes."
"I shouted. Anybody would have."
"No." The big man set the strap down. "Not anybody."
He pointed to Da Bao, who had begun trying to coax a flame out of damp kindling. Then to himself.
"Twins," he said.
Xu Hao looked at them both. Da Bao was shorter, louder, and blessed with a remarkable talent for losing footwear. Er Bao was so large that Xu Hao still found himself stepping back when the man stood too close.
"Twins?"
Er Bao nodded. "Da Bao is older."
Xu Hao laughed once before he could stop himself. "Of course he is."
Er Bao did not join in.
Instead, he took Xu Hao's hand and placed it against his chest. Beneath the cloth, his heartbeat was slow and steady. He held up two fingers, then folded them into one.
"One life," he said. "Two bodies."
Xu Hao frowned.
Er Bao drew two figures in the dirt. A line connected them. He touched one and then the other.
"If he dies, I die. If I die, he dies."
Xu Hao looked towards Da Bao. The older brother was crouched over the kindling, blowing so hard that ash scattered into his own face.
"You mean the snake could have killed both of you."
Er Bao nodded.
The memory returned with sickening clarity: two heads rising from the undergrowth, Da Bao turning too late, the shout tearing out of Xu Hao's throat. He hadn't known the price of the danger in front of him. He hadn't even known the brothers' names.
"You didn't need to know," Er Bao said. "You warned him anyway."
Xu Hao withdrew his hand.
It would have been easier if Er Bao had told him this yesterday, while trying to win his forgiveness. Instead, the man had waited until Xu Hao came back of his own accord.
"I still think what you planned was wrong," Xu Hao said.
"So do I."
"And I can't promise I'll forget it."
"I haven't asked you to."
That was an answer he could live with for now.
He picked up the loose end of the strap again, and Er Bao resumed sewing.
* * *
By midday, Da Bao had recovered enough courage to approach with an invitation to go fishing.
Xu Hao looked at the stream, then at the giant's feet.
"Both boots today?"
Da Bao held up one enormous thumb. "Both."
"An encouraging development."
He stayed to finish the strap, and later helped Er Bao hang strips of meat where the wind could reach them. The work was simple. He found he was grateful for that.
Towards evening, Xu Hao returned to the question he'd been avoiding.
"When you go to Hibiscus Town," he said, "may I go with you?"
Er Bao examined the meat rack. "We'll talk about it when we're ready to travel."
"That's not a no."
"No."
"And until then?"
"You can stay with us. Until you decide otherwise."
Xu Hao looked towards the stream. He wasn't ready to call the place home. He wasn't even certain he was ready to trust them with his back turned.
But he'd watched Er Bao give him a choice and leave it alone. He had seen Da Bao sit through an entire breakfast without asking him to forgive anything.
"For now," Xu Hao said, "I'll stay."
Er Bao nodded, accepting the words as they were.
A shout rose from the stream.
Da Bao emerged between the pines carrying a fish in one hand and a boot in the other. The boot was wet, green with weed, and unmistakably the one he'd lost the previous day.
He lifted it high in triumph.
Xu Hao stared.
"You went back for the boot?"
Da Bao beamed. "Found it!"
"The fish too?"
"Caught that first."
"Wonderful. At least someone in this family is making progress."
Er Bao's hands stopped on the meat rack.
Xu Hao heard himself a moment too late.
Family.
Da Bao looked from him to his twin, then down at the miserable boot in his hand. For once, he had no clever answer.
No one corrected Xu Hao.
Er Bao went back to his work, though there was a smile on his face that he did not seem interested in hiding.