The Watchman’s Call

The twelfth month of the first year of the Deyou era, Lin’an.

Chen Geng, a sixty-two-year-old night watchman, walked the Imperial Way, past the Imperial Ancestral Temple, through Tianning Ward and down Houjing Lane every night. He clapped his wooden watchman’s clappers and called, “The weather is dry, be careful with fire,” then wrote “All is well on the Imperial Way” in his log. He had done this for twenty years.

He had no idea the city was about to fall.

He only noticed that the silk lanterns were going out, one by one; that people moving away pushed wheelbarrows through the night; that the eunuch who refilled the Eternal Lamp at the Imperial Ancestral Temple had increasingly shaky hands; and that one day the night patrol guards simply stopped appearing.

On the ninth day of the twelfth month, someone else struck the bell for the fifth watch. On the fifteenth day of the first month, during the Lantern Festival, Lin’an was pitch-black. On the night before the city fell, on the eighteenth, he made his final round alone.

The city fell. Trumpets replaced the night watch drum. He set the clappers he had used for twenty years on the steps of the Drum Tower. A young man passed by. “Are you still keeping the watch?” he asked. Chen Geng said, “Listen.” The young man listened for a while. There was no watch drum.

“Then you do it.”