Summer came to Qinghe the way it always did — slowly at first, then all at once, the river warming by degrees until the day everyone simply agreed it was warm enough and the children went in.
Wei Liang was eleven and had been swimming in the Qinghe River since before he was old enough to swim correctly, which is to say he had a mostly functional technique developed through experimentation and observation rather than instruction, and which worked sufficiently well that he had never drowned, which he considered an acceptable metric.
He worked on his father's boat that summer for the first time as a real participant rather than an observer. His father gave him tasks with the specific precision of someone managing crew, not teaching a child: coil the rope this way, not that way; watch the colour of the water near the eastern bank because it tells you where the current is strongest; check the net for tears before every pull, every time, because finding a tear before you pull is better than finding it after.
Wei Liang did the tasks. He got faster at them and more accurate. He made three errors in the first week — rope-coiling, net check, misreading a current that cost them twenty minutes of repositioning — and noted all three in the way he noted errors, which was without drama but with commitment to not repeating them. He did not repeat any of them.
His father said very little. He corrected the errors when they happened and moved on. At the end of the first month, he said: "You're a decent crewman." This was, from Wei Jian, approximately equivalent to a formal commendation.
The afternoons belonged to Hao Jin and Lin Shu.
The three of them had coalesced into a group with the natural inevitability of compatible things discovering they fit. Hao Jin brought physical confidence — he could row a skiff alone across the full width of the river, which was impressive — and a loyalty that was total and unspoken. Lin Shu brought the habit of thinking things through before doing them, which was not Wei Liang's strong tendency, and a practical competence that she deployed without announcement. Wei Liang brought the plans, which ranged from reasonable to extremely unlikely, and the words, and the specific talent for making the time between events as interesting as the events themselves.
They swam from the south dock. They explored the section of the western bank that was technically accessible only by boat but that they accessed anyway, through a route involving three borrowed planks and a rope that Hao Jin tied to a willow root. They fished with actual rods instead of hands, with results that were better but still disappointing enough to be funny.
One afternoon in the deep heat of mid-summer, a trader's boat came south along the river — larger than the usual traffic, with goods covered in oilcloth and a crew of four moving efficiently. It was from somewhere north, which you could tell from the style of the boat and the cut of the crew's clothes. It passed without stopping.
Wei Liang watched it go.
"Where do you think it's from?" Lin Shu said.
"Further north than we've been," Hao Jin said.
"Which is everywhere," Wei Liang said. They had all, all three of them, not been anywhere beyond the twenty-li radius that constituted their known world. "I want to know what's at the end of the river."
"The sea," Lin Shu said. "Everyone knows that."
"I know. I want to see it."
"The sea is large," Hao Jin said. He had heard this from his uncle, who had been to the coast once and had returned with a deeply impressed expression and the observation that the sea was very large and also smelled different from the river.
"Most things worth seeing are large," Wei Liang said.
They were quiet. The summer sounds of the river town moved around them — the market, the boats, the children somewhere downstream who were having an argument that had been going on since morning. The sun hit the water and the water sent it back.
A thunderstorm came in the late afternoon, fast and certain the way summer storms come in river valleys. They made it to the south dock shelter just before the rain hit, and they sat under the dock's overhang with their feet pulled up and the rain hammering the river surface into a sheet of white noise.
Nobody said anything for a long time. They didn't need to. The rain said everything and they were just present inside it.
"This is good," Hao Jin said, eventually.
"Yes," Lin Shu said.
"Yes," Wei Liang agreed.
The rain ran south with the river. The town was invisible and very close. They sat in the good silence of people who do not need to fill it.