The Wall and the Worm

They call us the Emperor’s worms. We burrow into the mountains, we are crushed by falling rock, and our bodies are left to fertilize the stone. I am Liang, and I have been a worm for three years. My hands, once skilled at shaping wood into ploughs, are now torn and calloused, fit only for lifting stone.

The Wall is not a thing you build. It is a thing that consumes you. It eats your strength by day and your hope by night. It is a dragon of rock and mortar, and we are the flesh it devours to grow.

I was conscripted from my village in a river valley so green it hurt the eyes. The magistrate’s men came, and my name was on the list. My wife, Mei, wept. My son did not understand. I promised I would return before the snow fell. That was three winters ago.

Here, on the northern frontier, the wind has teeth. It carries the dust of the desert and the whispers of the Xiongnu horsemen we are meant to keep out. Sometimes, at night, we hear their drums, a taunting rhythm that reminds us why we are here, freezing and dying.

My friend, Old Han, was a scholar before he criticized a minor official. His body is frail, but his spirit is a stubborn flame. As we mix mortar—a foul brew of mud, rice paste, and our own sweat—he whispers to me.

“The First Emperor fears death, Liang,” he says, his voice a dry rasp. “He seeks immortality. This Wall is not to keep the barbarians out. It is to keep death itself at bay. He thinks if he can build a wall great enough, death cannot scale it.”

I look at the endless line of stone crawling over the impossible mountains. It seems a madman’s dream. “It is a wall of ghosts, Han. It is made of our lives.”

He nods, a grim smile on his cracked lips. “Exactly. And what is more immortal than a ghost?”

Yesterday, a section of the wall we had spent a month building collapsed. A landslide, triggered by spring rains. The foreman, a man with a face like granite, did not even blink. He ordered the survivors to clear the rubble, which included the bodies of the crushed, and begin again. We are less than the stone. The stone is permanent. We are temporary.

That night, I cannot sleep. I climb to a high section of the finished wall, a silent, stone road in the sky. The moon is full, bathing the jagged landscape in silver. I feel a profound loneliness, a speck on the spine of a slumbering giant.

And then I see it. Far below, a tiny light. A campfire. The Xiongnu.

In that moment, I do not see a barbarian. I see a man, huddled against the same cold, warming his hands by the same element of fire. He is looking up at the Wall, just as I am looking down at him. What does he see? A mighty defense? Or a monument to fear?

Old Han is wrong. The Emperor does not fear death. He fears the other. The different. The unknown. This Wall is the physical manifestation of that fear, a scar across the land.

I will die here. I know this now. My bones will become part of the mortar. But as I stand on this cold, hard proof of division, a strange thought comes to me. My son will grow up without me, but he will grow up in the shadow of this Wall. He will be told it makes him safe. He will be told it makes him great.

I pick up a small, sharp stone. In a hidden crevice, where no foreman will ever see, I begin to scratch. Not my name. That is meaningless. I scratch the character for “worm.” And next to it, I scratch the character for “free.”

It is a small, futile act. But it is mine. The Wall can take my body, but it will not have my defiance. The Emperor may be immortal, but so is the will of a worm to leave its mark.