Xingbei nursed his wounds at a local inn, where a few silver taels of his dwindling supply gave him a room shared with five other men and a warm bowl of noodles each night.

He had traveled to Chang’an with an envoy of merchants from the village, who were sympathetic when he told them about Qiping’s death. He kept out details regarding her death, just noting that his sister had left him with some business in the capitol.

“I didn’t know you have a sister,” said one of the merchants, who mainly dealt in paintings. “It’s pretty clear you weren’t related to the quiet girl.”

“I had a sister,” Xingbei replied. “I looked up to her a lot in my youth. She and Qiping used to be inseparable.” He said no more and simply watched the dust kicked up by the wagon wheels merge with the grey sky of the horizon.

The merchants were now elsewhere conducting their business, and Xingbei had no way of returning home. He should have taken the mule as his mother had said, but he was worried the poor old creature would perish on the journey; in any case, Yildun needed it to help out on the farm.

The longer he remained in Chang’an, the worse his predicament became. Though Chen Di had slipped him some silver taels as he was escorted from Prince Li Wenrong’s estate, the money he spent keeping himself alive and sheltered in the city was the same money he needed to get home.

The journey to Chang’an took half a month traveling at an easy pace with the merchants. He did not know what the journey back would be like; he barely knew the route back, having been supplied with a faded map by one of the more sympathetic merchants.

His sister would have just purchased an old horse and ridden northwest, but buying a horse meant skimping on rations. Though he would rather starve surrounded by nature than starve surrounded by people, he would rather not starve if given the choice.

Traveling alone was also a dangerous matter. Twice along the road the caravan was threatened by bandits, though both times the caravan managed to frighten them away with a display of weapons, including Xingbei’s inherited bow. A lone traveler, even if he were a skilled archer, was easy pickings for gangs and thieves.

Each day Xingbei remained in Chang’an, worrying about how he would get home, and spent the money meant for the journey home on food and shelter. He was no stranger to handling money, and he knew that he did not have enough money to buy the necessary supplies to get home.

He began to frequent the markets not to look for goods but to look for employment. The shabbiness of his clothes made him an unappealing mark for the hawkers. The first time he walked through the crowded commercial district, the onslaught of bright colors and sharp smells, amidst the heat and din of many gathered people, overwhelmed him, and he stumbled through the stalls as if sleepwalking. Urchins ran past him with little regard for his physical space, and when he counted his money later at night, he realized that he was undoubtedly pickpocketed by some of them.

Seeking something familiar amidst this disorientation, Xingbei’s eyes were drawn to a flash of gold that brought back memories of a winter market day. The same pair of golden wings he saw at the market on the day of his birthday, the day Xingxi returned home and then left forever, was secured at the neck of a foreign woman’s headscarf.

He must have been staring long, because as his eyes traveled to glance at the wearer’s face, he found the woman studying him as well. She was young, the baby fat not yet gone from her cheeks. The square window of her veil, pinned down in front of her ears by golden pins, accentuated the roundness of her face. A long aquiline nose and thick brown eyebrows gave an air of maturity in an otherwise youthful face.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to stare at your veil. You’re just wearing an ornament that I think I’ve seen before.” In his nervousness, his accent became more pronounced, and he worried for a moment that she would not be able to understand him.

The woman rolled her eyes. “These are popular among women in the Levantine,” she said, adjusting the pins self-consciously.

“Unfortunately, we are not gold traders, and we do not have any for sale.”

“I’m not looking to buy. It simply caught my eye and reminded me from home.”

“I can hear it in your speech.” She paused and began to speak in a different language, which Xingbei understood to his surprise. It was his mother’s native tongue, the language of childhood lullabies; he had always thought the language to be a nameless, forgotten like his mother’s clan name. But here was a stranger who spoke it with fluency. Even if some of the words differed, he recognized the cadence, the shape of the vowels in the back of the throat. The girl was asking what his name was.

“Luo Xingbei,” he answered, and for a moment wished his mother had given him a second name. Growing up amongst the Qiao, he mostly spoke a central Han dialect, though he learned his mother’s language through listening. Speaking it now to someone other than Yildun, he felt awkward, the syllables stumbling from his tongue before they could turn into words. “My mother is from the northern steppes, and she taught me how to speak this tongue.”

“It is akin to mine,” the girl said. “And that makes us kin by language.”

“I feel bad for wasting your time,” Xingbei said, digging in his pockets for the few taels he still had on his person. “Please, let me buy something from you.” As he peered into the booth, he was surprised to see stacks of silks like those hawked by any Han clothier. The girl had one bolt of fabric in her hand, half of it picked apart into threads.

“With those few taels you couldn’t even afford a prayer mat,” the girl laughed. “But you seem friendless here. Why not join my family for dinner?”

The young woman’s name was Sidra Aladfar. She was born in Persia, but her family had been trading along the silk route for many generations. They mainly dealt in textiles, purchasing heavy silks from the east and unraveling the threads to resell in the west, then returning with richly dyed rugs to sell to the Han.

Xingbei learned this between bites of soft flat bread, which he ate with his hands, split open to scoop up chunks of meat and mashed vegetables. He sat on a rug that reminded him of the one they had at Clear Water Mountain, a rug Yildun and Luo Feiyi had carried with them from the north. That rug burned along with the rest of their house the night Qiao village fell; there was no time to return for something so cumbersome when the humans were given a chance to flee.

He sat between Aram and Amir, two of Sidra’s brothers; two brawny men, one darker than him and one fairer, both with the same striking nose and thick silkworm brows. Sidra sat opposite him next to her mother, whose face was an angular portent of how Sidra would look when she grew old. Though they all sat in a circle, Sidra’s father indisputably sat at the head, his face already ruddy from rice wine. He was a massive man who towered over many of the other merchants in Chang’an, both Han and foreign. He had welcomed Xingbei with a massive bear hug and introduced his family. The two brothers each took Xingbei’s hands in their own, so that when Sidra’s mother was next in line Xingbei reached out his hands expectantly. But her father abruptly grabbed his hands and placed them over his chest. He and Sidra’s mother bowed to each other like frightened birds, and Xingbei’s blush only deepened as he repeated the gesture with a smirking Sidra.

They served him mint tea that cooled his mouth though it was warm and talked merrily among themselves. Though he caught many of the words, the conversation happened too quickly for him to understand. Both brothers kept pushing plates of food towards him. After the bread there was a hearty stew, followed by dried dates and walnuts that made him miss home. Once there was a lull in the conversation, he swallowed quickly and addressed Sidra’s father. As he began to stumble in the language spoken to him before he was even born, and all eyes on the table turned to him, he realized that despite the warm welcome there were still rules of decorum he was trampling all over. “Are you traveling to Anxi by chance?” It was too late to stop talking.

If the senior Aladfar was offended, his face remained jolly as ever. “I will think on it,” he said. “We are first headed further east to Luoyang. It will be a few months before we double back. But it is near sunset, and we are due for prayer.”

The plates were cleared, and smaller mats were retrieved, one for each person. They were fine works of craftsmanship, decorated with what he assumed was calligraphy. Even if they spoke similar languages, Xingbei realized, he could not read its script.

The family knelt down facing the same direction with the father in front, motioning with their hands before bowing their heads upon the mats. It felt improper to leave during such a holy time, so Xingbei knelt with them, hoping the god they prayed to was kinder than the ones he had encountered.

He found his exit soon after, politely refusing to stay and drink with the men. As he stumbled through a series of curtains, he could hear raised women’s voices nearby. It was Sidra arguing with her mother, he realized, speaking so rapidly he had no chance of understanding the context. He only hoped he wasn’t the cause of the argument as he headed back towards the inn.

The meal left him truly full for the first time since he came to the capitol. Moreover, eating with Sidra’s family reminded him of the brief camaraderie he had shared with the merchants during their travels. He did not realize how much he missed the spice of human company. Being surrounded by a language similar to his mother tongue made him all the more homesick, however, and his determination to get home was renewed.

Despite the argument he had overhead, he searched the marketplace for the Aladfar stall the next day. They had mentioned they were departing soon, and he could not afford to be left behind. Not just because they were his best chance of getting home; a small part of him wanted to see Sidra again and the gold reflected in her eyes.

When he finally found the stall again, watched over by both Sidra and Amir this time, he was so overjoyed he almost collapsed against the counter. Jostled by the crowd and covered in sweat, he must have looked a sight.

“Hello again, brother!” Amir exclaimed, patting Xingbei on the back. “You look like you crossed a desert to come find us.”

“As you crossed a desert to find me,” Xingbei replied between pants. “Have you made a decision yet?”

“Father has not spoken about it, but I will go ask. At the very least I’ll find something cool for you to drink.” Amir turned, and with a wink towards Sidra left the two of them alone in the crowded market.

Xingbei wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand. Under Sidra’s mirthful scrutiny he had no time to make himself more presentable, so he decided to speak quickly before her brother returned: “Your mother sounded angry with you.”

Sidra’s face darkened. “She was angry at me for bringing a man back home, as if the dinner table is the same as my bed.”

“I’m sorry she was angry because of me,” Xingbei said. “You have shown me nothing but kindness after I stared at you so rudely.”

“Exactly! I told my mother charity was one of the Qu’ran’s core teachings, but she would hear none of it. She’s just focused on the fact that you are a man.”

“I don’t know much about your God, but I assume he values a woman’s modesty.” He gestured towards her veil. “I’m just a country bumpkin but even I know it’s unusual for a woman, especially someone so young and unmarried, to invite strangers to their home.”

“It’s a conversation I have with God,” Sidra said. “If I don’t agree with it, then I won’t do it. That’s my first right as a nomad: to walk away from stories that no longer nourish me.”

“And what nourishes you?”

“Helping you,” Sidra said after a pause. “When you first spoke to me, you looked so sad, as if the whole world had been taken away from you. And yet when you spoke to me and looked at this pin,” she held up the golden wings that had caught Xingbei’s eye what felt like an eternity ago, “you looked like you had found something worth living. It felt like God had sent you to me, for me to help you.”

“Your god sounds kinder than mine.”

“I’ll speak with my father,” she said quickly as her brother returned with a carafe. “We will do our best to get you home.”

-

A full season passed before Xingbei returned to the farm. Spring had passed with all its verdure, leaving a world of green already browning at the edges. The rice paddies were flooded, the sorghum shoulder high and waiting to burst into gold.

Yildun stood in the fields and watched the horizon, as she did every day since her son left for Chang’an. She tended to the planting as best she could with her arthritis, and though there was not enough to sell, there was enough to feed herself in this lonely hut. The chickens’ number dwindled as she thinned the flock, first to get rid of freeloaders that did not provide her with eggs, and then at random while she waited for the wheat and squash to ripen.

It was a warm day like any other when Xingbei returned to his mother. Together they wept tears of joy at the reunion; their emotion was so powerful it called a storm cloud above them and began to drench them in a sudden summer storm.

Once they were safe and dry, Xingbei wearing a change of clothes for the first time in months, he recounted his journey home to his mother.

The Aladfar family was kind enough to let him travel with him, first further east to Luoyang and then on their way back west. Once they had arrived in Anxi, the surroundings were familiar enough that Xingbei took the last day’s travel alone back home. The family planned to stay in Anxi for a few days, refilling on supplies and resting their horses, before they made the longer trek to Persia, where they would spend half a year trading respun silk for thick woven tapestries, and make the journey again come the following spring.

He kept certain details about Sidra to himself. While he spent little time with her in private during the day, they often chatted at night while everyone else slept, a curtain separating the men from the women and the rhythmic snores of the others guaranteeing their privacy. He told her of the Qiao in short, bitter chunks, his pillow often stained with tears by morning.

Sidra in turn shared the tale of when she had encountered an ogre in the desert as a child. She had strayed too far and was lost when she spied the ogre in the distance; in a child’s eyes, his large size simply meant he was an adult. She only realized her error as she neared, and by then the ogre noticed her. She greeted him politely as she was instructed to do, and the ogre had given her a piece of dried meat to chew on as he led her home.

“I saw him again a few days later, crouched over the corpse of a traveler, eating meat from a ripped off arm. I was shaking as I greeted him. He smiled, bones and viscera stuck in his teeth, and said to me, ‘Manners does wonders in quelling instinct.’”

On his last day with the Aladfar family, Sidra had instructed him to follow ten paces behind her as she walked through the marketplace. They ended up in a small hidden alley, away from the throng of the crowds, and she took off the golden wings pinned on her veil and handed them to him. Then she took his other hand and brought it to her cheek; his fingers reached beneath her veil and he could feel the soft tresses of her hair.

“I know we will meet again,” she had said.

Xingbei held the pair of golden wings in his hands as he put away his meager luggage. Today he could marinate in the joy of reunion, but tomorrow loomed ever nearer as night set in. His mind was already spinning in circles trying to figure out how to salvage this year’s planting. What he had always done out of responsibility now felt like a burden, and Xingbei realized that he looked forward to the morning less than when he was floating aimlessly in Chang’an.

This life did not nourish him, as much as it fed him, his mother, and Qiping for the past five years.

“We can go,” Xingbei said to his mother once breakfast was finished. “There’s nothing holding us here. No allegiance to country or to people. Just a farm and an empty grave.”

Yildun smiled sadly. “Now I know for certain that you are my son. When faced with annihilation you chose as I did. As your grandfather did as well. Abandon the unnecessary and keep on surviving.”

Xingbei leapt forward and hugged his mother. “Not just to survive,” he said. “To keep going. You told me once that our people were of stubborn, hardy stock.”

“And where are those people now? Qiao or otherwise.”

“You taught me how to survive, Niang. Now trust me and let me teach you how to live.”

Whether it was by chance or an intervention from Sidra’s God, the Aladfars had not yet departed from Anxi. The family departed with the family three days later, with Yildun and Xingbei riding with them in the back of their cart.

It was easy to pack up their life and leave. At least this time it was their own choosing. Yildun looked over at her son, who dried his tears on his sleeve when he saw Sidra and her brothers look away.

“There is no shame in tears,” she said, closing her eyes as they began to sting as well.

“I just don’t know what I’m mourning. I’ve already cried for everyone.”

“You are crying for the land itself. It has nurtured you and loved you, these past ten years. This land where the words spoken are familiar, and the ground smoothed by footsteps made by shoes with similar soles. You cry because you are leaving your family.”

“But you are coming with me, Niang.”

“Have I taught you nothing, Beibei? You may be born of nomads, but nomads know of home too. Better than others, I would say. Home is the people around you, and the earth that supports your every step. As you walk upon the ground, every step changes the shape of the land, and the land changes you. You are the son of nomads,” Yildun concluded, “but don’t ever think that means you don’t have a people, or a homeland.”

Xingbei smiled despite himself, letting the tears fall freely down his face. “Thank you,” he warbled, half to his mother and half to the land itself. His voice wavered as the wind picked up its syllables and scattered it like birdsong. The sun glinted off the pair of wings pinned at his chest, scattering rays of light in seven different hues.

As they crested over the hill, he swore he could see someone standing at the side of the road. Xingbei shaded his eyes from the setting sun and for a moment saw a short old man with a walking stick taller than he was, before the figure disappeared into the earth itself. Perhaps just a stray sapling, Xingbei thought, but he held out hope that his eagle eyes were the one thing he kept when they ripped the demon part out of him.