Cock-Crow, Dog-Thief

Lord Mengchang escapes Qin at Hangu Pass — a thief who barks, a man who crows the dawn early. The court had laughed at the two useless men in his train. The gate opened for exactly them.

No skill is beneath the moment that needs it.

The gate-sergeant wanted a name, a reason, and a look at the boy's face, and the Wu had a false answer ready for two of the three when Dog took the question out of her hands.

He had gone loose and stupid at her side — jaw slack, one eye drifting — and answered in the flat bottomless drawl of the valley three days back: a half-wit nephew, sir, dropped on his head as a babe, I'm taking him to the shrine at the river to be prayed over. He let a thread of drool come, and scratched himself, and the sergeant's face did the thing faces do: distaste, then dismissal, then the small hurry to be rid of an unclean thing. He waved them through without looking twice. A clever boy he would have remembered. A drooling idiot he only wanted gone.

Down the road, out of sight, Dog put his face back on like a man rolling down a sleeve. "He'd have held a clever boy," he said. "Nobody writes down a fool."

The Wu said nothing for a while. She had spent her girlhood among people who ranked the talents — the zither, the bow, the brush, the ten thousand characters — and who would have called what the boy just did beneath contempt: a beggar's trick, a mountebank's. She had ranked them that way too, once.

"There was a lord," she said at last, "who got out of Qin alive because one man in his train could bark like a dog and steal in the dark, and another could crow like a cock and bring a barred gate open before the dawn. His fine retainers, the ones who could quote the odes, had laughed at the pair of them the whole way west." She paused. "The odes did not open the gate."

"What happened to the fine retainers?"

"Nothing happened to them. That is rather the point." She watched him walk — this boy who could be a half-wit or a carter's son or a temple sweep between one breath and the next, and who had just spent one of those faces to buy them a gate. "No skill is beneath the moment that needs it, boy. The trick the whole court laughs at is sometimes the only door out of the country. Carry all of them. The low ones first."