Prologue

P’eng bent over the small fire flickering in its circle of stones and stirred her pot. At last, the mixture of grain and water was starting to thicken into a porridge. Satisfied, she put the spoon aside and stretched her arms into the cool, early air. Then she tilted her head back to watch the smoke rise like a piece of tight, white yarn that unravelled a little at the end and disappeared into the pale sky.

Turning, her head still tilted back, she looked south towards the light node. Yao-chi’s thread—two rays stretching north and south along the sky from the node—was like a taut string with the node strung on it like a silver bead.

“The light’s getting stronger,” she thought. “We’ll be planting the millet soon.”

She took up a wooden bowl, filled it with porridge, then held it above her head. Turning first to one end of the thread and then to the other, she murmured the words she had murmured for as many pulses of the light node as she could remember. Holding it out in front of her, she walked the familiar path that led on to the walls that surrounded the Garden of the Lady. Grass swayed waist-high on either side.

P’eng walked with a kind of patient pleasure. She liked to do this properly —to hold the bowl at the correct angle, to walk in a spirit honouring the lady. Not like Chuan, who hurried on the mornings when it was her turn for the task, bored by having to do it again and again.

Not that the lady ever gave any sign of caring whether the ritual was carried out properly or not.

P’eng had never spoken to the Lady, of course. The daughters of the garden went no further than the semi-circle of bare earth just inside the high wall where the offering stone stood. The lady was simply a hunched shape glimpsed now and then by the hut in the far corner of the garden, or moving among the berry bushes that surrounded the hut—a small, distant figure, yet oddly comforting.

But this time as P’eng turned the corner of the wall, the familiar ritual fell apart. She faltered. The air shuddered around her and a shrill keening sounded in her eardrums. Startled, she stopped and lowered the bowl as she looked around. Far behind her, the thin column of smoke had gone loose and wavery. The air itself seemed to become unstable and unevenly bright. Looking up, she saw that Yao-chi’s thread also seemed to be unravelling, spreading and shaking. Never had she seen such a thing happen. It seemed as though the world itself was dissolving.

The wooden bowl slipped from her fingers and landed upside-down on the path at her feet, mixing the porridge with dust. P’eng sank to her knees and hid her eyes, dizzy with terror.