Pay no mind to this fearsome look of mine. The tusks are for breaking hardpan, the claws for turning ground, and this knotted bulk is for hauling stones off new fields.
I am the Scorched-Earth Brute. The Keep's people named me — and that word Brute began as an insult and ended as an honorific.
I was born in the ash of the Flaming Mountains' first great burning. An ash-spirit is born to exactly one work: farming. Don't laugh. Ash is dead — and ash is fertile. A great fire burns the ten thousand things to nothing, and in what remains lies the nourishment of the ten thousand things. Where others see scorched earth as a wasteland, I see a field that has been gathering strength, waiting to begin again.
My farming differs from men's. Men farm by the sky. I farm by the ash.
Ash of burnt grass and trees is mild-natured: seed it and it lives. Ash of burnt houses carries the breath of hearths: beans thrive in it best. And ground whose ash lies over the bones of the dead must first be dressed with a layer of clean soil in thanks before any hoe may touch it — that is the law: the dead's nourishment feeds the living, and the living must know to give thanks.
Three hundred years ago, when the first fires died, I broke the first field out of the scorch. Three years ago, when the mountains reignited, I hauled three centuries of seed-stock out ahead of the flame-front. Now wherever the fire recedes, I follow, opening the fields back up swathe by swathe. Three-tenths of the Keep's grain comes off my ash-fields.
The Keep calls me Old Brute now, and at spring plowing I drink the first bowl.
There. Formalities done. To business.
The one who farms the land is the first to find the land's disease.
In the years Shixuan's elixir furnace burned, its ash fell on the wind. I farmed the fallen-ash ground as usual — ash is ash; I hold no superstitions. The first season, the seedlings came up in even ranks, and I was pleased.
The second season, something was wrong.
The seedlings all bent west.
Not sun-seeking. A sun-seeking shoot follows the day — east at dawn, upright at noon, west at dusk. These bent west from the day they broke soil, and held west, rigidly. Straighten one, and by morning it has bent back. Straighten it three times, and it dies — as if it would rather die than face any other way.
I dug up a bent seedling's root. Every root-hair reached west — as far through the soil as it could go, fine as hair, dense as a crowd hurrying down a road.
What are they growing toward? Or say it truly — what, in the west, is calling them?
I ran a trial. The grain off the furnace-ash field I dared not feed to people; I fed it to the field-sparrows. The sparrows thrived — lively as ever, but for one thing: after dark, they stopped returning to their roosts. They settled in a row on the field's western fence, heads to the west, and stood so all night.
The direction had passed into the grain itself.
I showed it all to the medicine-basket boy — the bent shoots, the westward roots, the sparrows at their night formation. He crouched in the field a long while and asked: Old Brute, between the ash-fallen ground and the clean ground, how far?
One field-ridge, I said.
He said: one ridge — and east of it the shoots grow easy, west of it they grow possessed. Old Brute, this is no disease of the soil.
There is an order mixed into the ash.
An order. A command blended into the furnace-ash: the soil obeys it, the roots obey it, the shoots obey it — even the sparrows that ate the grain obey it. Every grain of ash off those eight hundred li of coreless fire is a marching order pointing west.
The wind blows east, and the ash falls east. Three years now — how far has it fallen? Past the Flowing Sands? Into the fields of Gao Village? To the shore of the East Sea?
How much of the world's soil is already, quietly, under orders?
I stayed behind. Fields need farming — and these ash-fields are sentries now: the harder the shoots bend, the more urgently the west is calling.
What I sent with the boy is a small bag of seed from the bent shoots.
In the west, find a patch of clean ground, and plant them.
If the seedlings come up straight — bending toward nothing —
it will mean you are standing directly on top of the thing that calls them.