Leaving the hall of Master Water Mirror (水鏡先生), Liu Bei (劉備) came down the mountain path at dawn.

The dawn air entered his lungs, cold. Yesterday's dust upon his brow he had washed off in the yard of the thatched hall. But the two epithets that had entered his forty-seven years, Wolong (臥龍, Wolong) and Fengchu (鳳雛, Fengchu), were not washed off. They remained.

Midway down the path, Liu Bei stopped and turned the two characters inside his mouth.

Wolong.

A sleeping dragon. Not a standing dragon, not a leaping dragon, a dragon lying down. That single verb was strangely firm. Standing is a place someone has set up; leaping is a single moment. But lying down is a long waiting. That the strength gathered in waiting is the very strength that reaches the farthest place when it at last rises — this, forty-seven years had come to know.

Around noon, Liu Bei reached the north gate of the magistrate's office at Xinye (新野).

Guan Yu (關羽) and Zhang Fei (張飛) were already waiting there. Their faces were flushed. After buying their elder brother a pause of time at the Western Garden in Xiangyang the night before, they had turned through the south gate and ridden through the night to reach Xinye first. Liu Bei dismounted. Zhang Fei opened his arms wide and embraced his brother's back.

"Brother. Are you unharmed?"

"Yide (翼德). Yunchang (雲長). Last night's rhythm held only because of the pause of breath the two of you bought for me."

Guan Yu clasped his hands in greeting. Within his eyes, something that had not been there yesterday had entered. He did not speak of it, but Zhang Fei noticed.

In the guest hall, before his two brothers, Liu Bei slowly unfolded the tale of last night's mountain hut: Master Water Mirror, the zither, the two epithets, and the line that he must walk there three times. And the fact that the real names behind the two epithets had not yet entered his own mouth.

Zhang Fei folded his arms.

"Brother. Walk there three times, you say. Who is this man, that he turns a man away that many times?"

"Yide. Who he is, I do not know yet either. Only, where he is lying down, I had a single guess upon the mountain path this dawn."

"Where?"

"Somewhere upon a thatched cottage (草家) in Nanyang (南陽) of Jingzhou (荊州). At this hour, perhaps, with a summer fan in one hand and a winter fan laid down beside him, he is setting his brush aside for an afternoon nap."

Guan Yu smiled quietly beside them. Zhang Fei's eyes widened a little.

That afternoon, Liu Bei sat alone in the west room and unfolded a single map. It was the full map of Jingzhou. Upon a strand of Nanyang stood a small hill, marked with three characters: 臥龍崗 (Wolonggang, The Ridge of Wolong).

Liu Bei laid a finger upon those three characters. The finger did not leave, for a long while. Last night, before crossing Tanxi (檀溪), when the hoofbeats of Cai Mao's (蔡瑁) five horsemen had chased him, what he had felt most nearly was not fear but something else — a sense that he was missing something. This afternoon, upon that sense, the three characters of Wolonggang had come to sit.

Liu Bei took up the brush and beside the three characters added three smaller characters.

第一步 (The First Stride).

"Yunchang, Yide. The first of the three strides, I will set it down within this year. Before then, quietly find out, the two of you, whose cottage this dot in the south belongs to."

Guan Yu bowed. Zhang Fei first kept his mouth shut, and then slowly nodded.

Evening at Xinye brought a large late-autumn wind. Two or three times the wind-bell at the corner of the roof rang. Between its rings, through the window of the guest hall, the three characters upon Liu Bei's desk — Wolonggang — remained a long time.

Tonight, inside Liu Bei's mouth, one of the two epithets was quietly choosing the shape of its name. The name had not yet entered. Only the place where the name would enter was, today, already prepared upon his desk. That prepared place, in the three characters of Xinye's afternoon, was already, from far, recognizing a brush somewhere upon a Nanyang cottage's afternoon.

The afternoon nap of a man lying down, and the afternoon fingertip of a forty-seven-year-old man, in two seats eight hundred li apart — were tilting, at the same hour, toward the same single name. Neither man knew of the other. Neither had yet spoken aloud the syllables that would, in a few months, belong to both of them at once. The ridge that held one of them and the desk that held the other were, this afternoon, two ends of a single sentence still waiting to be written in full.

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