Prologue

"Do not be afraid, my friends. It is only the wind."

The room itself seemed to release its pent-up breath. Dozens of faces relaxed. Wary eyes drifted away from the rattling unpainted shutters of the hut's single window. Attention shifted back to the slight peasant with the weather-creased face. He looked as if he had just come in from gathering the late season crop of soybeans. He was known only as Lao, "the Brother."

The evangelist held up his book in the room's one bare light and smiled reassuringly. A matriarch in colorful Miao ethnic dress smiled and nodded encouragement for Lao to continue. A girl puckered her lips against fear. Other young people, little more than shadows in the darked, crouched or stood against the walls. Almost thirty people huddled in the tiny room.

"So like us to fear the winds that rattle our lives. We fear spring drought or the summer monsoons that loosen mud and bury fields and houses. We fear the cadre. We fear that we won't be able to feed our children. But there was one who stilled winds with a word of authority. As he did two thousand years ago, that same Jesus can calm the winds of life today and can carry us through each storm."

In response, a particularly heavy gust of rain-drenched cold moved the door against its leather hinges. A strong draft seeped in around it and brought him a moment's relief from the stifling heat of the fire and the packed bodies who squeezed into the room, which served as kitchen, dining, and living areas for a large farm family. With the fresh intake of air, the coals flared. A few elders and a young woman whose limbs already showed the deformity of untreated rheumatoid arthritis squeezed together on the kang, the brick platform that served as bed and fireplace. Others took turns sitting on makeshift benches.

"We are all nervous, but I have only a few more words to say." He spoke slowly, reaching for words in this dialect that differed from his native Mandarin. He had become expert in the varied dialects spoken around China through years of preaching, listening, fleeing, and hiding.

Brother Hu, in whose dwelling they now crowded, had opened the gathering about two hours before. He stood next to the wooden crate on which the Brother was perched.

"We have heard that Cadre Li knows that we are meeting tonight. So far he has given us no trouble. The Brother has come from Hunan Province to preach to us. If anyone wants to leave, we understand."

Apart from the Brother, none knew the cost better than Hu. He had lived in a fine apartment while teaching mathematics at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. That was before he was arrested in a raid on a meeting much like this one. When it was known that he was a Christian, the government had banished him to this village in the western Guizhou highlands.

Hu cared for pigs during the day and taught in the evening, helping some of the village youths acquire the education needed to pass the qualifying exams to be able to go on to school and even college in the city. His own son would be excluded from such an opportunity and might spend his life with the pigs or in the nearby coal mines. In a few years Hu Xiabo would become another work-worn peasant with deep lines scoured into his face from the sanding blasts of the winds off Tibet's limestone mountains. Brother Hu's persecutors had not chosen to send him to the warmer climate of the subtropical rain forests in southern Guizhou Province but to Guizhou's foothills. Though the family enjoyed the delightfully cool summers and the above freezing winters, they struggled to stay warm when the cold, wet winds roared out of the mountains as they did tonight.

Tending pigs was the destiny chosen for the son because the father, a Communist Party member, had abandoned Mao for Jesus Christ. The Party made certain that all of a family paid the price when someone showed a lack of loyalty to the people.

None of the people had left. Perhaps Cadre Li noticed the coincidence that his wife visited her sister on evenings when the Christians were reported to be meeting. Now the cadre's wife hid her own embarrassment by putting an arm around the poorest woman of the village, a widow with no family.

The Brother wiped a bead of sweat from his face. He edged farther from the fire, careful not to fall from his crate.

"The Lord tells us to carry one another's burdens. He has made us brothers and sisters through Jesus' blood. He tells us to love one another as He loved us, to care for one another, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to comfort the grieving, and to lift the fallen as we would do with our earthly brothers and. . . ."

At the door Hu's nineteen-year-old son sprang to attention. "Footsteps. Running."

All that could be heard was the wind and the crackle of a coal that settled in the fire.

The Brother heard them now. No more than one person. The cadre? Not by himself.

Something landed against the door. Someone whispered, "Xiabo, let me in! Hurry!"

Xiabo threw the door open. A young woman, perhaps eighteen, squeezed past. "Get out. Hurry. A truck carrying police have entered the village. The captain's with Father now. Hurry. They will come soon."

Within seconds, the congregation had grabbed their coats and scarves and were passing into the night. Only their clothing whispered. In less than a minute, the make-shift church was a lonely hut once more.

The Brother quickly wrapped his New Testament in oiled paper and stuffed it in his knitted hat. He ducked into his heavy quilted coat. Hu held his scarf for him.

"Xiabo will lead you out."

"Just set me on the path. I will find my way." The Brother tossed the scarf around his neck.

"Xiabo knows the area."

"I have chased pigs through every li of it," the young man said with a confident grin. "I never thought that could be a blessing."

"Blessings come wrapped in strange colors," the Brother said.

"Outside the Tibetan breeze flowing down Guizhou's mountains tickled his face with cold fingers, drying the sweat instantly. He silently thanked God for the clouds that had made him late earlier.

Again His protective hand.

Xiabo slipped past and led him at a quick but stealthy trot from the back of the hut. A twig cracked loudly under Xiabo's feet, and both men immediately froze and dropped to a crouch. There were no answering sounds. Hu Xiabo started again, and now the two slowed enough to brush feet lightly over the ground in front of them to avoid more dry limbs.

Xiabo passed downwind of the family's three ugly black sows. The younger man paused at a loud grunt as the animals shifted in their sleep. The breeze carried the rank odor of the tiny pig barn.

The sow settled down, but more disturbing sounds came from the central area of the village. Someone yelled. Heavy thuds of someone pounding on a door shattered the stillness.

"It has started," Lao whispered.

"They will be at our hut soon. They would be there now if Li had told where we were meeting," Xiabo replied. The two loped off, abandoning silence for speed. A gun was fired in the village. Xiabo glanced back but kept trotting.

They heard frightened murmurs from the peasants cowering behind the door of a hut as they passed.

The ground rose sharply.

"We follow the ravine here to the top."

"After that?"

"I will show you when we get there."

"No, it is safer for one than two. Go home before someone sees that you are missing."

The young man stopped and relaxed.

"Cross the road. About thirty meters west there is another ditch. Follow that into the brush to the dilapidated hut."

"I know the way from there. God go with you."

The younger man pressed his hand before disappearing in the direction from which they had come.

Sounds of turmoil increased in the village as the Brother started up the ditch. He could make out wails, pounding on doors, yelling, screaming babiesóthe sounds of fear. It twisted his own guts. It would be worse for them if he were caught near here. How bad it would be for him, he could only guess. He had always known that his preaching could cost him his liberty, if not his life. His long years on the road were quite unusual for an evangelist-teacher. A preacher's career was measured in months, even weeks. Then these servants were trucked off to suffer on China's western frontier, or they disappeared into the laogai, China"s infamous reeducation-through-labor camps. Some had been executed as examples.

Scenes of these martyrdoms were burned into his memory.

The Brother paused to breathe and to knead a stitch of pain in his side. He despised the fear within, but it pushed him on.

Resuming his climb up the ravine, he felt along the embankment with his hands. Stones rolled beneath his feet. A large stone clattered against another, bounced, and dislodged a hail of pebbles.

From above him and to his right, a gun fired. The bullet whistled past his head.

He threw himself to the ground.

"What do you think you are doing?" an authoritative voice yelled.

"I heard something, sir, from that area near the ditch."

A flashlight clicked on. The beam swept across the ditch.

The Brother huddled against the mud with his face pressed into it, his eyes squeezed shut. His fingernails dug into the dirt. Silence, stillness and prayer gave him the best chance. Cold pebbles embedded themselves in his cheek. The muted odors of soil, dead grass and ancient pig manure washed from the fields seeped into his nostrils.

Help me to be faithful. Give me courage, Lord, and strength to finish my race.

Even with his eyes shut, he could tell that the flashlight had been shut off.

He waited with every nerve stretched toward his potential captors. At least his size made him a smaller target.

"No one fires without my orders. Is that understood? And no smoking," the officer said.

The Brother lay against the freezing dirt for ten minutes before pushing himself upright, his body stiff with cold. He shoved his glasses farther onto his nose, but he could hardly feel them. Rubbing his hands together offset the numbness enough so that he could feel his way up the embankment.

He had to reach cover before dawn.