companionship.â
âHonorable labor and the terms clearly stated,â said the Chinese. âStack tiles, now.â
âYou will not be long unemployed,â Horse-master said. âOx trains go up every few days at this season.â
âI want to leave tomorrow,â Greenwood said.
âCome to my horse yard at sunrise,â Horse-master said, and they drank to it. Greenwood was careful not to win another game, and when they parted for the night he had lost just enough to pay for future favors.
His ten cakes of rice-in-leaves and his five bananas were waiting in a flimsy reed basket. He bore them to the monk, who said, âWhat are you atoning for?â
The oxen were small and humped, the common Burmese beasts of burden. âThese are honest Kachin and a couple of town Shan,â Horse-master said. âThe Kachin have sold some good jade and are heavy with silver.â He hesitated, and his smile went lopsided. In harder tones he said, âIf you walk crooked ways, it will be laid to me; and I will have every Shan in these hills after your head.â
âIf I walked crooked ways,â Greenwood said, âthe Small Blessings would not have come to me,â and he opened his shirt.
âBugger!â said Horse-master. âA Shan like me!â He tugged at his horse-jacket and revealed the edges of his own tattoos. âYou had a Shanâs luck last night. May it be upon you always.â
âThank you, elder brother.â
âThis is not to be believed,â Horse-master said. âWars make prodigies.â
âThey also make good men bad, and bad men good,â Greenwood said.
âAnd which are you?â
âI cannot say. Perhaps my war is not over.â
âThen you will need your Shanâs luck.â
âFor sure I will,â Greenwood said. âSo I will not start by leaving you with half a lie. It is true that I was and am a princeâs bowman, and sell peace of mind. But it is also true that I buy.â
âAnd what do you buy?â
âWisdom.â
âNow, that is costly.â
âI buy it bit by bit.â
âShrewdly said.â But Horse-master was puzzled.
âI seek wisdom everywhere and at all times,â Greenwood said, âand am a teacher.â
Caution settled over Horse-masterâs features. âThen Your Reverence is after all a priest?â
âBy the gods, no! Only a schoolmaster.â Greenwood clapped him on the shoulder; to touch another Shan was to promise him truth. âAt a great university where men and women have sought wisdom for three hundred years and more.â
âWell, I am only a bad Buddhist,â Horse-master said, âbut it seems to me that wisdom is, Do no harm.â
âOr as the followers of Confucius say, âDo not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you.â Yet you took my money with pleasure last night, you great thief.â
Horse-master twinkled, and his answer was ready. âI told you: a bad Buddhist.â
âNext time,â said Greenwood, âI will strive to improve you.â
The wagon train was on the road by midmorning, twelve oxen bearing little cargo: bolts of cotton cloth, bags of ax heads, a sack of knives like machetes, eight kegs of nails purchased perhaps from the itinerant Jew, and two cumbersome iron plowshares. The company was four Kachin, three carrying American M-1 rifles and one a carbine, all festooned with bandoliers; and two town Shan, one with a Lee-Enfield and one with a Springfield. East is East, Greenwood decided, and West is West, and they sure as hell have met. In the aftermath of war Burma was a thirty-caliber society. His companions carried sheath knives as well, and three of them canteens. The Shan were properly turbanned, but the Kachin were turned out like veterans, with a khaki shirt here and a cartridge belt there. They were fine fighters and their women at home were