My posting is to stand.
The man who bound me was an old farmer. Good hands: three-year rice straw for the body, grave-mound willow for the frame — every farming family knows grave-willow passes between the worlds, and a straw man raised on it can hold things down. He set his own worn-out hat on my head, dressed me in his own torn jacket, planted me at the field's heart, patted my shoulder and said: old friend, the sparrows are yours now.
He called me old friend. I was minutes old.
In my seventh year of standing, I opened my eyes. Not the two ink dots painted under the hat — real eyes. The old man's lingering warmth, the grave-willow's shadowed breath, sixty years of sun and rain: I don't know which of them completed me. I told no one. I simply stood, and watched.
A scarecrow watching a field was never only watching sparrows.
I watched the old man go from straight-backed to bent. Watched his son take up the hoe, and his grandson take it after. Watched the year the black moon rose, when the whole village knelt on the field-ridges and kowtowed to the sky, and the sky made no answer of any kind. And I watched, these past few years, the footprints on the night ridges grow stranger and stranger.
Then, three months ago, I watched them.
Midnight. No lanterns. Four figures in grey-green robes, hoods drawn low. They entered the field and harmed not one seedling — the crop-wrecking came later. That first night they did a single thing: crouched in the mud, pressing a wooden mold into the soil. Press. Step. Press again. Carved into the mold's underside: a pig's hoofprint.
The second night they came back to fell the rice. They felled it with method, swathe by swathe, like brush-strokes of a talisman drawn on paper. When the rice was down, the leader drew a fistful of black powder from his sleeve and cast a circle of it along the fallen stalks. Where the powder entered the soil, the ground gave a small flinch — the flinch of a living thing taking a needle.
The third night they inspected their "hoofprints," touched up a few, and left. On the way out, the one with the lowest hood paused before me and looked up into my face.
I stood. A scarecrow can only stand.
He looked a long moment, laughed once, and said to the others: just a straw man.
Just a straw man. Quite so. Which is why they did all of it in front of my eyes.
Next day the village erupted; everyone was hunting the boar. Through all the days brother Bristleback carried the false blame, I burned to shout — I saw it! It was no pig! But I could not. For a straw man to speak costs its own years, and the village would only have burned me for a possessed thing.
One small act was within my power. Night after night, I tilted my hat toward the old altar in the mulberry fields.
No one understood. The wind pushed the hat straight again.
Until the boy with the medicine basket crouched in the field counting hoofprints. He counted, stood, swept his gaze around — and it caught on me. On the hat, tilted yet again, stubbornly, toward the altar.
He looked where the hat pointed. He looked at me. Then he walked over, gently set the hat straight, and asked:
"That way?"
Sixty years. The first one ever to ask me.
With everything in this straw body, I tilted the hat back toward the altar.
The rest you know: the altar dug open, the black lines burned away, the one in Cloud-Ladder Cave brought back to himself. When the boy next came to my field he brought the old farmer's grandson's grandson along, and the little one set a brand-new hat on my head.
The boy asked if I would travel with him.
I thought for three days. In the end, I shook my hat no. My posting is to stand — this field has no new keeper yet, and the grey-green robes may not be done with it.
But I sent one message with him, addressed to everything along the western road that stands, and watches, and cannot speak:
Stand fast. Watch closely. Remember everything.
Someday, someone will come and ask.