Every day at the tiger hour, before the mist has lifted off the dead channel, my drill begins.
The command passes down; the sand rustles; the bone-ranks rise. Front rank: the soldiers — those who were soldiers in life, their spear-bones straightest of all. Middle rank: laborers, boatmen, caravan guards. The rear rank is the motley one — farmers, peddlers, scholars; hand-bones that held hoes and abacuses and writing brushes now all hold "halberds." Reed stalks, in fact. I cut them myself. One per soul.
Attention. At ease. Present arms. Order arms. Half a li's march along the old channel. Dismissed.
So it has gone, every day, for three hundred years.
Travellers who glimpse us from afar flee with their souls scattered, and the sand-sea now has its legend of ghost-troops borrowing the road. In the Bureau's files I have my entry: Bone General. Gathers bones into soldiery. Intentions unclear. Avoid on sight.
Intentions unclear. Honest of them, at least — unclear it was, and unclear they wrote. No embellishment.
So today, let the intention be made clear.
What the dead fear is not death. It is dispersal.
While the longing still holds together, the dead man is still himself. But the dead of the sand-sea — wind scouring, sand grinding — their longings thin year by year. First the name goes. Then the home. Then what they did with their living days. When all of it is gone, bone is merely bone, worth less than stone: stone can at least pave a road, while bone emptied of longing draws dark things to nest in it.
How does one keep from dispersing? By form.
The motions practiced in life are carved into the skeleton. A spear presented a thousand times, an oar swept ten thousand — that form outlives the name. So I drill them. Not for slaughter — for remembering. In the lift of the halberd, the soldier-bones remember they were soldiers. In the half-li march, the foot-bones remember every road they walked. One circuit a day, and the longing gathers itself in again; the dispersal slows.
In three hundred years, not one skeleton of my ranks has scattered into a haunting. That is my intention. The Bureau may copy it into their files with my compliments.
As for who I myself am —
there I must confess embarrassment. I keep the longings of an entire army, and my own has worn down to an outline. I remember commanding men. I remember a night of snow. I remember a banner going down — and the characters on that banner I cannot recall, try as I will. This frame of mine the Bone-Spirits assembled for me, matching bones by their kin-craft; and at the end of the matching, one bone was left over.
A collarbone. Not mine. The kin-craft could find no owner; discarded, it returned by itself — the same temperament as those nine skulls.
The Bone-Spirits said: General, perhaps it is your fate-thread. Set it in.
Since it was set in, the strangeness began.
This collarbone points.
On ordinary days it behaves. But at drill, when the command reaches westward — dress! — it dips gently in my chest, dips toward the west, like a compass needle. And on eclipse nights, when the roll-calling voice sounds in the storm's eye, it dips hardest of all — wrenching until my whole frame creaks, as if it would tear itself free and fly west alone.
One bone, desperate to return to some place.
Whose is it? Where in the west does its owner stand? And why a collarbone — of all bones, the one the carrying-pole presses cruelest — with a longing hard enough to hold three hundred years?
The day the medicine-basket boy came to watch the drill, every rank stood taller than usual. After dismissal I told him of the collarbone. He thought, and then asked the question that stopped me cold:
"General — you say longing is carved into bone. Then what was this collarbone's owner carrying, in life, to press a longing that hard into it?"
Carrying what?
I do not know. I know only that I can read the bone-shapes a carrying-pole leaves, and the pressure-groove on this collarbone runs deeper than any porter's, any guard's, any boatman's I have ever seen.
Deep as a whole lifetime under the pole. Deep as a load that was never once set down.
So I have left my ranks in the keeping of the River Lord and the Bone-Spirits, and march west with the boy.
The collarbone dips west daily. Good.
I mean to see with my own eyes what burden is riding, even now, on the shoulder it aches to return to.