Chapter 1: The Field

Ti Mo woke with wheat in his mouth.

Not wheat. Wheat chaff. The dry, papery kind that clung to the tongue and refused to swallow. He spat it out and stared at the sky. Gray. Overcast. The sort of sky that promised rain and delivered dust.

He did not know where he was.

He did not know how he had arrived.

He knew his name. Ti Mo. He knew he was thirty-four years old, though his back felt older and his knees felt younger, which suggested an average somewhere in the middle. He knew the word for wheat and the word for sky and the word for the particular gray color of the clouds overhead. He did not know the name of this field. He did not know the name of the country. He did not know why he was wearing black robes with silver embroidery that shifted pattern when he looked at it directly, then pretended it had not shifted when he looked again.

The robes were comfortable. That, he approved of.

His hair was darker blond, going white at the temples in a way that suggested he had been worrying about something for a very long time. Or possibly not worrying at all. Some people went white from boredom. Ti Mo suspected he was one of them.

He sat up. The wheat bent around him in a perfect circle, as if he had fallen from nowhere and pushed the stalks outward on impact. There was no road nearby. No buildings. Just wheat, hills, and the faint suggestion of smoke to the east.

In his sleeve, he found a brush.

It was old. Older than his memory, which was saying something, since his memory appeared to start approximately twenty minutes ago. The handle was smooth bone, yellowed with age, and the bristles were stiff and dark. They smelled of pine soot and iron. When he touched them, his fingertips itched.

In his pocket, he found an inkstone. Small. Fit in his palm. It had no markings, no maker's seal, nothing to identify where it had come from. It felt familiar in a way that annoyed him. He disliked familiarity in objects. Familiarity implied debt. It suggested that somewhere, somehow, he owed someone an explanation for his presence.

Ti Mo stood. The wheat reached his knees. His boots were black leather, scuffed at the toes, broken in perfectly. Someone had worn these boots for a long time. Possibly him. He could not be sure.

He walked toward the smoke.

The walking took an hour. Ti Mo did not rush. Rushing was for people who knew where they were going. He did not qualify. He observed the wheat. He observed the insects. He observed the way his shadow fell slightly to the left of his body, as if the sun were uncertain where to place him.

The village appeared gradually. First a fence. Then a chicken, which looked at him with the flat suspicion all chickens reserved for the unexpected. Then houses. Mud brick and timber, roofs of thatch or tile, nothing higher than two stories. The sort of village that appeared in the middle of nowhere and stayed there out of stubbornness.

The villagers stopped when they saw him.

Ti Mo understood their reaction. He was wearing black robes with silver embroidery. His eyes were the wrong color, gray-blue with green around the irises, the sort of eyes that belonged to seafarers or madmen or foreigners from places no one had visited. His hair was blond going white. In a village of dark-haired farmers, he looked like a fallen emperor or a very tired ghost.

A child pointed. A woman pulled the child back. A man with a hoe stepped forward, not aggressively, but with the slow caution of someone who had never needed to use the hoe as a weapon and was hoping not to start today.

"I am a scribe," Ti Mo said.

The words came out naturally. He had not planned them. He did not know if they were true. But the brush in his sleeve felt right when he said it, and the inkstone in his pocket grew warm, and the villager with the hoe relaxed a fraction.

"We have no need of letters," the man said.

"Everyone needs letters," Ti Mo replied. "Even the dead. Especially the dead. The dead cannot speak for themselves. Someone must write their names, or they are forgotten by morning."

The villager frowned. "You want to write for the dead?"

"I want to work," Ti Mo said. "The dead are quiet employers. They do not argue about wages. They do not care where I came from. I find this comforting."

The villager looked at the brush in Ti Mo's hand. Ti Mo did not remember drawing it from his sleeve. It had simply appeared, as familiar as a finger.

"The funeral house is at the edge of the village," the man said finally. "Talk to Elder Feng. If he says yes, you may stay."

Ti Mo nodded. He did not smile. Smiling at strangers was a promise, and he was not in a position to make promises. He walked past the villagers, through the narrow street, past the staring children and the suspicious dogs and the old woman who made a sign against evil as he passed.

He did not blame her. He was foreign. He was strange. He had appeared from a wheat field with no memory and a brush that did not belong to him. If he had been the one making signs, he would have made two.

The funeral house was small. Low roof, smoke-blackened walls, a door that hung slightly crooked on leather hinges. Inside, it smelled of incense and old wood and the particular coldness that preceded death. A man sat by the brazier, wrapped in blankets, counting copper coins with fingers that shook.

"Elder Feng?" Ti Mo asked.

The elder looked up. His eyes were cloudy. His face was a map of lines that suggested he had worried about everything for a very long time. He took in Ti Mo's robes, Ti Mo's eyes, Ti Mo's brush, and he did not flinch. The old did not flinch. They had seen too much to be surprised by a foreign scribe in a wheat field.

"You want to write the dead?" Elder Feng asked.

"I want to work. The dead happen to be available."

"You look expensive."

"I am free. I have no use for money. It is just metal with delusions of importance."

Elder Feng laughed. It was a dry sound, like wheat husks rubbing together. "The corner is yours. There is a mat. There is water. There is rice once a day, twice if someone dies who had money. You will write the records. You will write the names. You will not steal from the dead. The dead notice."

"I believe you," Ti Mo said.

He took the corner. The mat was thin. The water was cold. The walls were close and the ceiling was low and the only window faced the cemetery, where wooden markers stood in uneven rows like teeth in a poorly kept mouth.

Ti Mo sat on the mat. He examined his brush. He examined his inkstone. He looked at the cemetery through the window and tried to remember if he had ever written a dead person's name before.

Nothing came.

Not a memory. Not a face. Not a single name from before the wheat field.

He was empty. Not broken. Just unwritten.

The thought should have frightened him. It did not. Fright required a future to fear, and Ti Mo had no future. He had only the corner, the mat, the brush, and the dead who did not care where he had come from.

Outside, the sun set. The wheat field turned gold, then gray, then black. The stars came out, unfamiliar constellations that Ti Mo did not recognize. He watched them until his eyes grew heavy.

He slept with the brush under his pillow.

Tomorrow, someone would die. Someone always died. And Ti Mo would write their name, and in writing it, he would belong to this world for one more day.

The inkstone grew warm against his hip.

Ti Mo did not dream.