Honghui forced himself to pay attention,

but half his mind back at the river,

imagining the king swimming across,

the horses following him,

a sight Honghui would have given much to see.

CAMP

A brutal day,

and Gan exhausted,

mud, dirt, brick-dust clinging

to his hair, his pants, his jacket,

in his nose, his boots, under his nails,

so that when they got back to the army campsite

and found Leong already there,

their tent up,

he would have hugged him,

save that Leong was decorated not merely with dirt,

but also with a spattering of blood

from his patients.

King Xau went into the tent,

and Gan, a giant of a man,

bent almost double to follow him.

Dao outside, condemned to sentry duty,

five guards and the king inside:

a cramped confusion

of blankets, water bottles, weapons,

men taking off their boots,

the sharp smell of sweat, of feet,

the wavering light of the lantern.

Gan, out of the cold wind, boots off,

chewing a stick of unidentifiable smoked meat,

looked to Leong: “The girl?”

Leong shrugged. “Dead.”

No more than Gan had expected

when he’d lifted her out of the rubble,

a scrawny thing, all skin and broken bone.

Twelve days since the earthquake,

they weren’t searching for more survivors.

No more than Gan had expected,

but his appetite gone.

He abandoned the stick of meat,

looked for King Xau’s boots to clean,

but the king already scraping them himself.

King Xau,

dirty and smelly as the rest of them,

nodded to Gan,

“You did the work of three men today.”

“Not enough,” said Gan,

before his wits caught up with his tongue,

before he added, “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

“You’re right,” said the king. “It’s not enough.

Our whole army would not be enough

to do what needs to be done.”

A truth that Gan had been avoiding

since they arrived that morning.

The city of Jian-Jian leveled;

thousands without shelter, food, clean water;

winter not yet over.

(And the girl he’d found in the rubble,

the girl who’d demanded, “What took you so long?”

then clung to him so tightly

he had to pry her fingers loose

when he got her to Leong,

that girl now dead.)

“Our whole army,” the king said quietly,

“would not be enough,

but that does not diminish what you did.

We have never seen anybody exert

such sustained strength.”

Tired as Gan was,

a flicker of pride

at the king’s words.

He took the stack of blankets,

handed one to the king,

one each to the other guards,

took one himself, lay down, shut his eyes.

AFTERSHOCK

A dry clear chill day

in the ruined city of Jian-Jian,

its thousand bells buried with its buildings

beneath brick and mud and wood and stone,

even the great city walls largely reduced to rubble

by the earthquake two weeks earlier;

the stench worse than a battlefield,

putrefying corpses buried with the bells.

King Xau walked, cautiously, across the rubble,

accompanied by three of his guards and three soldiers.