Work Text:
There’s a road just north of Chin, running parallel to a meandering brook which will in time feed into the Neran, tributary to the great Baiyi, a thousand miles to the north-west. It’s an old road. It looks it, too, but in a mundane sense. Old modernity. The asphalt worn grey by the passage of satomobiles and potholed by the rains which sweep down off the Kolau Mountains to the east. Valiant efforts to patch it have led to mismatching textures and materials.
Some ambitious councilman – ambitious because it was not a main road and could not be said to be well maintained – had emplaced a lamp-post. It lasted three seasons, shedding light for the odd traveller, for roaming bands of children, and for farmers still driving moo-sows down to the markets outside Chin, before it flickered – guttered – and failed.
But aged modernity disguised real antiquity. For it was an old road. And it had seen a great deal.
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When Jianzhu the Sage, who was also called the Gravedigger, came to Yokoya, he took the road. It was at that time little more than a trail, created by the action of thousands of cloven feet each year meandering their way down towards the town and the sea.
He stopped on the road, briefly, to consider the brook. It was a brief interruption only, for Jianzhu was not a man given over to sentiment nor to contemplation of nature. Nature was something to be shaped by human hand.
And shape it he did. He came back to the road a year later, and saw to it that it was cleared, and levelled. Earthbenders raised rock from dirt, carved culverts into its flanks. A minor matter of goodwill to the herders and farmers of the region, to earn some measure of loyalty – admixed with healthy fear, for they were concomitant in Jianzhu’s mind – to the sage in the mansion.
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Kyoshi, before her inheritance as the Avatar became known, went upon the road too, with Yun and Rangi. They spread a blanket and ate and wiled away time in the fallow field which bordered it. Yun lifted earth from it for their amusement, and Kyoshi scolded him for the damage and set it back again.
Yun responded by stealing the pips of Rangi’s apple and throwing them at Kyoshi. One found soil and sprouted.
Rangi and Kyoshi would walk that road again, three years later, with heavy tread towards their final confrontation with the thing Yun had become. Neither noticed the first stirrings of the tree they had planted.
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All roads, said Chin the Conqueror, who posterity would name the Great, were of some military value. This one, of raised Yokoyan stone, had more than most. He moved his army towards Yokoya upon it, from the passes out of the Kolaus.
Like Jianzhu, he did stop to consider the brook, and the sapling next to it, and took an apple from it - for it was late autumn. Unlike the sage, he spent some time there, as men and women in green lacquered plate, bearing pikes, tramped through dust behind him.
He was marching against the home of the Avatar. The culmination of fifteen years of conquest and perhaps its highest mark too. For he was not a stupid man and knew what he courted. What had to be courted if final victory might be achieved. He took in the beauty he had come to pacify and went on.
Some days later, the ground shook. Rangi’s tree shed its apples. Chin the Conqueror, who posterity would name the Great, did not come back by that or any other road.
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The road saw decades of peace, marked by the passage of cattle and the beating of rain, which cracked and pitted Jianzhu’s stone. The tree grew, flourished. Children would come from the farming communities to eat from it. Sport was made with sticks to knock down fruit thought ripe which had not fallen.
A man – a boy, in truth, for all he insisted on maturity - called Rustem spent an agreeable afternoon in dappled shade by the roadside composing poetry to a sweetheart. He was the son of a shepherd, but he had his letters and dreamed of more.
Sixty years later, the road saw his funeral cortege, preceded by wailing mourners who smeared their faces with ash – for by his death, he was a rich man.
A magistrate paid for the road to be remade. The years rolled on in fashion bucolic. Until they didn’t.
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A company of New Yokoya militia made their stand on the road. They were afraid. The Earth King had called up his armies and left his court to lead them, but no word of him had come. Rumours said the Fire Navy had taken the mouth of the Baiyi, or worse sailed its length. That Omashu and Gaoling had fallen.
Veterans of the militia, as much as any could claim such title from experience and not simply from grey hair and long beards, dismissed such as folly. They sharpened their blades all the same.
It did not avail them.
Rangi’s tree smelt of scorched flesh for two seasons.
No children came to make sport of the apples after that.
Five seasons later, when an army under Lord Tao Beifong came to the rescue of Chin and the relief of Omashu to the north, they rebuilt the road. The repairs did not last, though the path endured.
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Seventy years later, more soldiers marched on the road. Fire Nation troops, as before, accompanied by hissing, clanking machinery which spewed gritty black smoke to the skies. It gnawed and churned at the road. They were going north to the muster at the mouth of the Baiyi which would carry them to the gates of Ba Sing Se.
They sang as they went, high and clear across the fields.
Lu Ten, who was a prince, stopped under Rangi’s tree. With candles and incense, he made obeisance to the spirits of the foreign land, begged forgiveness for necessary transgression, and asked for his safety in the war to come.
It was not granted.
Two years later, in a hard winter, Rangi’s tree was felled for firewood.
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Thirty years afterwards, Sokka, of the Southern Water Tribe, an inheritor for Rangi’s legacy in some sense, sat upon the stump of the tree and ate with his sister and the Avatar – Avatar Aang, who was the last airbender in that time.
That party returned once again, when the war was over, passing along the road to Chin. Avatar Aang, no longer the last airbender, for a ceremony in the town with his wife. Sokka, who was his brother in law and not just spirit, went too to take a ship to Kyoshi Island.
They did not linger, that second time, nor pay obeisance to the spirits of trees or roads or brooks. The road didn’t mind. It was made to be passed upon.
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Peace was not peace. The moo-sows returned, and trees grew along the road. But its culverts, filled from long neglect, were not emptied. Daofei roamed. Men were assailed on it, and it became disused in time.
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It saw soldiers again. The men and women of the 27th New Yokoyan Volunteers, marching with high steps and spirits to Ikuze in the north-west, there to rendezvous with the armies of Kuvira, who some called the Uniter.
Five hundred strong, in olive green and demi-plate armour burnished to shine in the sun which came through the canopies of trees flanking the fields along the roadside. There was laughter, and song, and wine skins imprudently exhausted early.
The road was there when the 27th returned three years later. There were less than seventy of them, and half those limped. There was no laughter, nor song.
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With the spread of the satomobile, and the creation of the great highway to the east, traffic upon it became lighter. Chin dwindled as New Yokoya grew, until it became, like its brook, a tributary among tributaries.
History never stopped happening. But increasingly, it stopped happening on that road.
Children came back, in time. Rangi’s tree had been felled, but others grew around it. The brook continued its steady flow. The road was as it was, and as it had been, and that was all. For while worlds and lives moved around and across it, where there is life, there is need of a path – and where there is a path, there is a road.