Chapter 4

The winds of Wolf Moon had done with their howling and slunk away. The bitter cold of Ice Moon had glittered in the clouds, while in the palace of Lady Cataract, the Firstborn cheated death yet again. It was there that Mouse had found the help he sought during the great blizzard, and it was the lady who had sent her servants and supplies to the cave. She personally nursed the Firstborn back from the prospect of another reincarnation. She poulticed him, pampered him, fed him with her own hands, and spent an untold fortune on heating. She bullied him into living by sheer power of will.

No sooner could he stagger around on his own feet was he anxious to be off in search of the Bamboo Banner, but Death had breathed on him, and he was far from fit to travel. Shard Gingko suspected that he would never be a well man now, perhaps never live to maturity. Even if the Portal did open next year, as the Firstborn forecast, he might not be alive to see it. He was thin as a rice stalk, his hands trembled, and a feverish restlessness never left his eyes.

Lady Cataract refused to listen to his protests.

“Not in winter in these hills!” she decreed. “When you are strong again and the snow has fled, then you will make far better time. You will arrive as soon. Indeed, if you leave too soon, you will not arrive at all. A man who claims to have lived thousands of years should not be as impatient as a child. Must you relearn wisdom anew in every life?”

No one else would have dared speak to the Urfather like that, but he laughed and yielded to her bullying.

Cataract was old and at times—especially in the evenings—seemed as frail as he did, but her back was straight and her life flame still burned bright, despite many tragedies. She had borne children, all of whom had died. So the servants had told Mouse, who had told Shard, and silk portraits of three handsome young men hung on the wall of her winter parlor. There could be no greater tragedy than an ancestor burying descendants. Although the lady’s husband was never mentioned by name, there were hints that he had not died a natural death and that she bore no love for the late Emperor Zealous Righteousness. Her palace, it was whispered, was all that remained of once great estates. It had been a hunting lodge of some long-dead Emperor, set high in craggy hills beset with waterfalls and forest, although the forests had mostly gone now and the game with them. She lived there year-round in decaying grandeur, kept company by ghosts and equally decayed servants. She was a daunting scholar, able to cap Shard’s quotes, verse by verse, and very often even test the Firstborn, who loved her dearly.

She owned a vast collection of antique books and scrolls, which fascinated both Shard and the Firstborn. Although Shard had no difficulty reading even the oldest, only the Firstborn could read them aloud with the original pronunciation, which was almost impossible to understand, but did make the poetry sound better.

Hare Moon had come leaping and dancing, all eager springtime and impatience, yet still the Firstborn lingered. For the first time since seeing the evidence of massacre at High Abode, he had recovered his previous tranquillity of spirit, the calm courage with which he had defied Sedge Shallows’s persecution. It was almost as if he had decided to wait for something. Not a sign from Heaven, of course. Shard knew the Urfather well enough now to know that he put no faith in those. Or not much. But Hare Moon departed, admitting Fish Moon, and still the Firstborn tarried under the approving eye of Lady Cataract.

One afternoon, Shard dared ease the conversation around to the subject of the Portal of Worlds, which had not been mentioned since that terrible night in the cave, months ago. The three of them were sitting in the water garden, soothed by its gentle murmurs and shaded by trees from a sun already unpleasantly hot. Cherry blossoms came late to the Wanrong Hills, but they had blazed in their brief glory and were now gone. Boisterous rhododendrons were blooming, ostentatious as ever. The hills were green, lambs and foals had been born.

Swathed in a finely embroidered silk gown, which Shard suspected might be almost as old as she was, Lady Cataract was providing tea. She approved of her celebrated guest and even of Shard Gingko. He wasn’t a true scholar, of course, and he was totally eclipsed in the presence of the Firstborn, but she must be so starved for educated conversation that even a clerk of records could be tolerated.

A mere servant, which was how she saw Mouse, was expected to remain out of sight. The Firstborn permitted this discrimination for Mouse’s comfort, not hers. He had told Shard—in one of the very few direct orders he had ever given him—to teach Mouse to write. He had seen what Shard Gingko had missed, that the boy had natural abilities to overcome his lack of education. He had taken to writing as a lark to singing and was learning twenty characters a day. He knew more than a thousand already, and Shard rarely had to criticize his brushwork.

Shard’s clumsy change of topic provoked the glance of tolerant amusement that he now knew so well.

“I was not delirious that night, Grandfather. Wandering a bit, perhaps, but not delirious.”

Lady Cataract raised her painted eyebrows but withheld comment.

“Then you do believe the omens?” Shard said.

“I believe great things happen. If they are messages from Heaven, I wonder that Heaven does not speak more clearly. It may be that our faithful Mouse, with Her Ladyship’s help, balked even the will of Heaven that night. If not, and if the Portal is still due to open, there is one essential sign that has not yet been granted, as I told you. That omen was one that Humble Voice did not know. Only when that event has happened can you be confident that the Portal will open next year.”

He was almost certainly teasing his hostess.

The knife-edge-thin eyebrows rose even higher. “The Portal of Worlds? You are certain, Urfather?”

“No.” Sunlight explained about Humble Voice, his omens, and his own death.

“You told me that the scholar knew of four certain omens,” Shard Gingko said. “I do not recall that you mentioned all four, just the broom stars, the demons, and the, um, change of dynasty.” That was not a topic to discuss outside close family circles, but Lady Cataract smiled approvingly.

The Firstborn drank his tea and reached out to set the bowl on the table. His arms were still as thin as noodles. “No, I didn’t. I dread it as much as I worry about the Portal of Worlds itself, or even more. But it is one I know of my own experience to be a true foreshadowing. I told you that the Portal has never opened while I have been walking the Good Land, and sometimes, when I have been reborn in an area distant from it, I have heard nary a whisper of its happening in my next lifetime, either. But,” he added somberly, “every time I have been reborn just after an opening—and usually in the lifetime after that, even—people have spoken of a great earthquake.”

Lady Cataract crumpled her lips together disapprovingly. “Earthquakes happen all the time, somewhere. There are little ones and big ones. Here, in Wanrong, we get a tremor or two every year.”

“Most earthquakes are quite local, but I mean a Destroyer of Many Cities Earthquake. You have heard tell of the Lotus Moon Quake? Perhaps even of the Fog Moon Quake?”

She nodded uneasily.

“Those truly great earthquakes happen only once in many centuries, but always one comes just before the Portal of Worlds opens. This is the one true sending.”

Shard Gingko shivered. In silence, the hostess refilled his tea bowl. A quake as great as those two might explain some of the dynasty changes that happened around the openings. People blamed the Emperor when Heaven displayed such wrath. He put it into words. “The Bamboo Banner will use a great shaking against the Son of the Sun. The rebels will say that the Golden Throne has lost the Mandate of Heaven.”

“Indeed,” the Firstborn said. “And it is time I continued my quest. The Bamboo Banner will bring even worse disaster. No,” he cautioned, raising a hand to forestall Lady Cataract’s protests, “this time, I mean it. I have enjoyed your hospitality more than any I have met in many lifetimes, my lady. It has restored me as much as I can be restored in this incarnation. Perhaps even restored my faith in humanity,” he added with a smile that belied his words. If he, of all men, ever lost his faith in humanity, he must assuredly go mad. “But now I must be about my business.”

“I was merely going to say that I fully intend to accompany you, Urfather. I have horses ready, and a litter for me. Your servant boy has advised my people on your needs and preferences, but if you wish to travel by litter, also, then that can be arranged. A party of a dozen or so will travel faster than you can alone.”

The Firstborn smiled at her fondly. “My disciple has kept me advised of your nefarious plotting, my lady. Your kindness will certainly be rewarded in the Fifth World.”

“And where we will go?”

“I seek the Bamboo Banner. Scholar Shard Gingko, what is the latest news of it?”

“Just what I told you two days ago, Urfather. That the governor of Kermang was preparing to meet it in battle if it entered his province.”

“Other governors did not stop it, and that news must be at least a month old, so we must assume it is in Kermang and continuing north. The question is where the Imperial Army will try to—”

The tea bowls on the table rattled.

The ground quivered. The air was filled with a strange mutter of no discernible source, like some trouble very loud but far away. Birds swirled up from the trees.

Lady Cataract laughed, a little shrilly. “What did I tell you? But this little shiver is not going to shake down a dynasty.”

For a few minutes, nobody spoke. The noise grew louder. The trembling continued. It came in spurts, less and then more, but Shard watched the tea in the bowls, and how the surface rippled. That never quite stopped. He looked at the pinched face of the boy across from him and saw fear there. Would this sending never end?

Eventually, it did, as it must, but by then, the servants in the house were wailing in terror and even Lady Cataract’s leathery face was pale under her face paint. The birds stopped circling and returned to their perches.

“No damage,” she said, “or we would have heard it.”

“It was far away,” Urfather said. “That is why it seemed faint to us.”

“Oh, how can you, even you, possibly tell?”

“Because it went on for a very long time. Small earthquakes are brief. I have never known one to last as long as that.”

Never? In seven thousand years or more—never?

So the Portal was going to open.