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“No. You don’t stop shitting and pissing,” she said. “It’s the same with the blood. Let it run.” (“Let it walk” in Chinese.)

To console me for being without family on this day, they let me look inside the gourd. My whole family was visiting friends on the other side of the river. Everybody had on good clothes and was exchanging cakes. It was a wedding. My mother was talking to the hosts: “Thank you for taking our daughter. Wherever she is, she must be happy now. She will certainly come back if she is alive, and if she is a spirit, you have given her a descent line. We are so grateful.”

Yes, I would be happy. How full I would be with all their love for me. I would have for a new husband my own playmate, dear since childhood, who loved me so much he was to become a spirit bridegroom for my sake. We will be so happy when I come back to the valley, healthy and strong and not a ghost.

The water gave me a close-up of my husband’s wonderful face—and I was watching when it went white at the sudden approach of armored men on horseback, thudding and jangling. My people grabbed iron skillets, boiling soup, knives, hammers, scissors, whatever weapons came to hand, but my father said, “There are too many of them,” and they put down the weapons and waited quietly at the door, open as if for guests. An army of horsemen stopped at our house; the foot soldiers in the distance were coming closer. A horseman with silver scales afire in the sun shouted from the scroll in his hands, his words opening a red gap in his black beard. “Your baron has pledged fifty men from this district, one from each family,” he said, and then named the family names.

“No!” I screamed into the gourd.

“I’ll go,” my new husband and my youngest brother said to their fathers.

“No,” my father said, “I myself will go,” but the women held him back until the foot soldiers passed by, my husband and my brother leaving with them.

As if disturbed by the marching feet, the water churned; and when it stilled again (“Wait!” I yelled. “Wait!”), there were strangers. The baron and his family—all of his family—were knocking their heads on the floor in front of their ancestors and thanking the gods out loud for protecting them from conscription. I watched the baron’s piggish face chew open-mouthed on the sacrificial pig. I plunged my hand into the gourd, making a grab for his thick throat, and he broke into pieces, splashing water all over my face and clothes. I turned the gourd upside-down to empty it, but no little people came tumbling out.

“Why can’t I go down there now and help them?” I cried. “I’ll run away with the two boys and we’ll hide in the caves.”

“No,” the old man said. “You’re not ready. You’re only fourteen years old. You’d get hurt for nothing.”

“Wait until you are twenty-two,” the old woman said. “You’ll be big then and more skillful. No army will be able to stop you from doing whatever you want. If you go now, you will be killed, and you’ll have wasted seven and a half years of our time. You will deprive your people of a champion.”

“I’m good enough now to save the boys.”

“We didn’t work this hard to save just two boys, but whole families.”

Of course.

“Do you really think I’ll be able to do that—defeat an army?”

“Even when you fight against soldiers trained as you are, most of them will be men, heavy footed and rough. You will have the advantage. Don’t be impatient.”

“From time to time you may use the water gourd to watch your husband and your brother,” the old man said.

But I had ended the panic about them already. I could feel a wooden door inside of me close. I had learned on the farm that I could stop loving animals raised for slaughter. And I could start loving them immediately when someone said, “This one is a pet,” freeing me and opening the door. We had lost males before, cousins and uncles who were conscripted into armies or bonded as apprentices, who are almost as lowly as slave girls.

I bled and thought about the people to be killed; I bled and thought about the people to be born.

During all my years