The Great Wall had, through a period of centuries of shifting borders and allegiances, integrated itself so much into the rolling hills that Tom did not realize he was standing on its first stone step until Shaodong had pulled him forward. past the first flagstone, then the second, skipping over its lined grooves; Shaodong’s running feet seemed to melt into the cracks by the third, as much a part of the Wall as the Wall had been built for him and his ancestors.

Fifteen minutes later, Tom had found himself alone at a guard-post, admiring an exceptional specimen of Chinese mugwort that had been growing up the Wall and through the window. He reached the second post when Shaodong jumped off its shallow roof and landed in front of Tom, screaming something in dialect; Tom had screamed in English, and then they had leaned against the walls and laughed till their sides shook with the effort.

Tom wheezed with the snickering until the third post, which had previously seemed to be a distant speck into the distance; they had paused to look down and then scrambled up onto its ledge, peering out across the distance. The low-slung hills were of a faded green that reminded Tom of his Slytherin dorm and spoke to him so strongly of home he had to rest his head against the stone before remembering that his soft bed in Slytherin was somebody else’s already; then the hills became nothing more than pretty landmarks rippling gently under and around the great wall, framed by an encroaching blue sky.

“I could fall from up here and feel like I am falling onto my own bed,” said Shaodong quietly, and recited something that Tom cared not to translate. Tom sat against a stony outcrop and closed his eyes, letting the lines of the poem crawl up his spine like a slow dive into waist-deep snow.

“Winter is coming,” said Shaodong in passing. It seemed so too; people were talking of a long, hard season, speaking of sailing to Hong Kong on crammed junks, British be damned; pots of murky soup, golden vats of tea, meat being smoked for keeping, the ever-faster drift of leaves from branches to ground.

Tom, with his pale skin and faint line of freckles reminiscent of a childhood not particular to his own, was being treated as an outsider more than ever. It seemed that in winter, you kept in with your own kind like animals huddling together for more warmth; Tom’s own kind stayed safely in their embassy and regarded Tom as a fine example of a playboy who met his comeuppance.

Whether they genuinely regarded English tutoring a rich businessman’s son already adept in the language as some kind of punishment, Tom had yet to clarify; till then he kept out of their way, the way they maneuvored through the Chinese business district with a certain distaste for whatever native object they happened to brush past.

***

“You already know it,” said Tom in surprise as they sat down in the parlour for their first lesson, Tom with six-year-old level English books spread out around him on the low lacquer table.

“Of course I do,” said Shaodong contemptuously, aiming an admonishing hand at the books to sweep them off.

“So what do I do for four months, pray tell?” asked Tom, surveying the books, among them Grimm’s Fairy Tales for Toddlers.

“I teach you,” said Shaodong, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, “Chinese.”

It was late summer then, dry heat seeping into the walls and under Tom’s fingernails like summer-dirt-to-autumn-sand ; Tom dressed in second-hand vests and white shirts until Shaodong had dragged him, sick with the infinite span of Tom’s argyle and wool, to his own room and thrown several mandarin-collared suits at him, embroidered with little thick black curlicues at the neck, lined with black at its edges. They dripped down to around Tom’s calves like a waterfall of brocade and butterfly buttons.

At dinner, Shaodong’s father commented on Tom’s sudden good taste in clothes, and Shaodong had met Tom’s eyes and laughed as if it were an elaborate joke on both their parts, a Chinese riddle only they had been able to solve, together.

In the courtyard at dusk, they watched the water lotus in the porcelain pots fold up its petals for the day and Tom inquired about any creatures in Chinese mythology like basilisks.

“Basilisks!” said Shaodong, delighted with the play of sibilant hissing in the creature’s name. “Basilisks, basilisks, basissleeskeesies.”

“Once I saw one,” said Tom, about as truthfully as he had told anybody, avoiding Shaodong with his eyes and scrutinizing the way the sun tinged the sky a rose-blush orange, dappling the light over the pagoda roofs and the dragon curving its way around the house’s top.

“I saw a dragon once too,” said Shaodong. “A ghost too, I think.”

Tom turned sharply, about to say that he couldn’t possibly have, because Shaodong was a Muggle.

“The Chinese believe in a lot of things,” Shaodong said casually, ducking his head to point at the servant hobbling to sweep the first leaves of autumn off the steps. “like Ah Su. She goes on and on about how she was almost attacked by a vampire when she was little. But she’s still here.”

“She is your maid?”

“No, she has been taking care of me since I was small. My mother had not much time for me, you see,” Shaodong folded his hands in his lap. “Shopping and playing mahjong takes up a lot of time.”

***

Shaodong taught Tom Chinese through a mostly lazy way of pointing and saying an object’s name; Tom learnt more from loitering around the servants’ quarters and picking up on the fast, relentless stream of words. The first Chinese sentence he uttered in public was to Shaodong’s mother, commenting on her new dress; a black affair with red peonies littering its hem. He had received an hour long, mostly incomprehensible speech on the importance of choosing a suitable cheongsam.

“She’s never even talked that much to me,” said Shaodong in amazement and envy. “She’s supposed to be descended from this emperor’s favourite second wife, the prettiest one. What about your mother?”

“well,” began Tom, and stopped because there was nothing more to say.

“Oh,” said Shaodong in a mixture of false sympathy and even more envy. “Well, I’m the descendent of the philosopher Zhuang Zi. He said that he dreamt once, of being a butterfly; but he wasn’t sure that he was the butterfly dreaming of himself.”

Tom laughed, and told Shaodong of some boys in his old school in some smartypants house who thought of that too, and probably couldn’t even order a cup of tea in Chinese, let alone read Zhuang Zi. At the back of his mind, something itched, and it told him mother, mother but something deeper than that whispered love, love. Come quickly.

***

They had kept to the house when the first snow hit with a spattering of hail; sometime during the night Tom had drawn his knees up in his bed, reading some greek classic in chinese that he had filched from a bookshelf in the parlour. He had gone through the first one hundred and fifty pages with the shifting doubt that it was the translated Iliad, then Homer, and was beginning to suspect it was in fact Jane Austen, when the door knocked and Shaodong padded in.

“There’s nothing to do,” muttered Shaodong, curling up at the end of Tom’s bed, knees to his chest, toes companionably sprawled across Tom’s.

Tom put aside Jane Austen in chinese and sat up straighter. “Are you trying to seduce me?” he asked.

“No, I actually like Ah Su instead,” replied Shaodong and studied Tom’s toes. He looked up irritably. “Of course I am, I’m not this nice to all my English tutors.”

Tom stared incredulously at Shaodong for a moment, and then began to laugh at the inconceivable possibility of it all. Shaodong frowned and muttered something about cows and string instruments; Tom settled Jane Austen in between them and flipped open to a mostly blank page.

“English lessons,” he announced, and wrote his name in block letters on the paper. “Tom Marvolo Riddle.” He neatly crossed off every letter as he began to spell out I Am Lord Voldemort. “Read it.”

“I Am Lord -- I don’t understand, that’s not a proper word,” said Shaodong accusingly, voice light but eyes already glued to the coverlet of the bed in humiliation at being put through a child’s game.

“No, it’s a name,” Tom replied.

“I don’t understand,” repeated Shaodong .

“Me neither,” said Tom thoughtfully, his feet brushing Jane Austen to the floor with a loud thump. Shaodong suddenly crept up to Tom on his knees, hands on Tom’s, eyes confused and sad. His fingers lightly brushed against the ridged bone of Tom’s kneecap and for no reason at all, it felt like a scrape of teeth down the muscle of Tom’s bare leg.

Tom had by then put both his hands on Shaodong’s shoulders; and for a moment there was a quiet world hanging in the seconds between their faces, and then there was nothing but the feeling of a comforting diversion of a mouth, a plummet in Tom’s chest to the other side of the world.

***

Shaodong kept his hair long, smooth strands that squeaked and hummed when Tom ran his fingers across one, wineglass-like; Ah Su gathered them in three coils and hooked and weaved them into a single braid that reached to the seventh vertabra from the neck down. Tom had counted each when the snow fell for a consecutive night, brushing the plait over each knobbled bonepiece as he went along, painting down Shaodong’s spine to round his head between Shaodong’s legs; he pulled down hard on Shaodong’s braid until Shaodong’s eyes watered and begged to be kissed to end the wrenching pain in his skull, the wrenching pain dragged from his skin in, from the roots out.

Tom found time, like the immobile afternoons when time was measured by the drip of the leaky porcelain tap in the kitchen, when Shaodong was out inspecting wet, stolen pearls for his mother at secret marketplaces that wrapped up as soon as the sun rose the next morning or at some tutor’s house learning the rudimentary in Humanities and the advanced in the Sciences; Tom found time time to stay completely still on a wooden stool and examine the lacquered chopsticks, repeating chinese phrases and certain words he liked to himself.

Monday. Xing qi yi. Dark green. Cang cui. The nether world. Di fu. To be wronged. Wei qu.

Finding time to be jealous of somebody who he fucked every other night, beneath a red phoenix-and-peony quilt to keep the cold out; jealous of a family and of somebody else he was sure Shaodong was fucking the afternoons Tom wasn’t; the slow boil between Tom’s eyebrows and pounding at his pulse points; he’d like to see a chinese word for that. He’d like to see a word for that in any language, tell him, he’d be happy to know, he’d learn the whole damned foreign language to communicate that to Shaodong.

By the time Tom was done reciting the days of the week and the numbers one to fifty in chinese, some ming dynasty tea set was splintered on the floor. Tom didn’t bother to enchant the pieces back; when Shaodong’s father came back Ah Su was blamed and sent out on the streets.

That night, Shaodong was pinned under Tom, hands-and-knees, Tom rocking into Shaodong with some slow, poisonous rhythm that burned in Tom’s belly and legs, when something banged at the door. somebody jabbered outside in some moutainous dialect, then switched to stilted, clumsy mandarin.

“Ah Su,” said Shaodong instantly, and made to move out from under Tom. Tom pressed him back down, hand scrabbling down Shaodong’s stomach to press into Shaodong’s navel. “Tom?” asked Shaodong.

Ah Su, at least Tom was assuming it was the old arthritic bitch outside, complained stutteringly of the cold, and the snow. He could hear the bitch’s hypothermal shuddering making the whole metal door vibrate and hum. wine-glasses. Tom buried his teeth into the meat of a shoulder.

“Tom?” asked Shaodong, beyond frightened, beginning to shake in the sudden cold that had rushed to fill in the heat. “I need to help Ah Su, Tom, Tom?” Tom smiled, kept his teeth in, rolled his hips against Shaodong and could almost feel those pretty eyes roll back, seeing those eyes through the back of his completely transparent, lie-filled head.

It’s painful now, isn’t it, it’s painful now, Tom wanted to say, but ended up sobbing something into Shaodong’s back and moved in, deeper, aware of something shifting, little by little, in the rushed and frenzied movements spliced into little noises, wails, grunts, skin on skin; Tom was aware of some deeper meaning to be found in some shallow little hormone-driven action, and closed his eyes, and when he came there was hardly any real release to be found in it.

“I think she’s dead, I think she’s dead,” cried Shaodong, bunching up the pheonix quilt with his fists, his fine hair fanning out of his braid loosely. Tom slipped out of the room, disgusted, in a dressing robe, thinking that Muggles really knew nothing of pheonixes and the peacock-like, flaming-red birds on their silk clothes and cheongsams were nothing but ideas; that nobody should deign to imagine glory.

***

At the morning of Tom’s last day with the Zhuangs, he came down in his old wool sweater, the one that had a hole creeping about somewhere around his breastbone. Shaodong regarded him with cold eyes and then ate the rice porridge with quail egg and green onions with eyes firmly on the thick, white stew.

“Are you going anyway for today,” asked Shaodong’s father in his smart Englishman suit, before going out.

“To the Great Wall,” answered Tom, then turned to Shaodong, not caring for the faintly resentful look he received. “It’s my last day before I leave.”

“Mm?” asked the man, and for a moment Tom could see Shaodong deeply embedded somewhere, in the oldened and dried-up features of his father; the same dark eyes shifting about somewhere in the recesses behind the pair Shaodong’s father had, veiny and milky spheres that saw nothing good, and nothing particularly bad. Tom’s heart suddenly filled with a hateful quality he could not describe.

“I think my mother is having an affair,” yelled Shaodong to Tom over the winter gusts, sick of the silence, putting his hands in the hollows of his armpits to warm them. “Maybe with her jeweller.”

Tom pushed back a lock of his hair that was fluttering madly in the wind and noted the victory flags that rippled the same way, on the top of the guard posts.

“Who are you sleeping with, Shaodong?” he shouted.

Shaodong’s face was frightened, before it was replaced by a careful mask of deafness. “What did you say?” he yelled. “I can’t hear you!”

“Who are you fucking, Shaodong?” asked Tom slowly, as if explaining something. “Who’s fucking you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” whispered Shaodong, realizing that Tom was now close enough to kiss, close enough to strangle, close enough to kill.

“Where do you go out in the afternoons, Shaodong?”

“To -- to get the pearls and things for my mother! You know that! I, I take tuition from other people, you know that too!” Shaodong took a step backwards, hiding his trembling hands in the crooks of his arms.

“Oh, so you’re screwing your History tutor as well, is it? What about Geography? Does your Mathematics tutor get in on this as well? I suppose you have jolly good fun with all of them at one go,” shouted Tom. He kicked at a pebble on the floor; it flew up and over the Wall, buoyed by the wind and momentum.

“No! I -- I don’t! I don’t,” Shaodong said lamely.

Tom closed his eyes tightly; there were little hot bursts of red bubbling behind his lids and in his chest. “Forget it.”

“What?”

“Just forget it! I said forget it!” Tom shoved his hands down into his pockets and slithered up the ledge of the Wall, fitting himself into the pocket the two jutting stone slabs. He looked out at the hills; they weren’t green anymore, and the sky was no longer a blue; it was a pale bird’s egg grey, and its weight pressed in on Tom’s throat more vicious than ever.

“Tom! Tom,” said Shaodong, clambering up to face the boy, crouching on his heels to fit into the small space. “I wouldn’t do something like that, you know that,” he splayed willow-thin fingers across Tom’s cheekbones. Tom closed his eyes and braced a curled leg against Shaodong’s side. “You know tha-”

It was easy to push all the strength, all the weight, to his leg. It was easier than even that to push his leg against Shaodong and watch him fall , nails scraping against the Wall first, then the wind sucking him away from any support, then slamming him against the stone in a sudden change of direction. Shaodong landed about fifty feet down. It was the easiest to watch that.

“Like your own bed,” murmured Tom, pushing back his wild locks of hair. All around him, the snow muffled the sounds of the world, turning everything silent. The Great Wall glided across the quiet world like the basilisk, like the Chinese basilisk that used to coil in sleep around him. The sky, though, seemed to lift a little; a little of it’s weight gone from Tom’s shoulders.

End.