toward the beginning of time, and suddenly they stopped short. A hollow, bodiless voice—one boy later said that it might have been echoing through two hundred miles of bamboo pipe—drifted down to them from the Eye of the Dragon. So strange were the words that every one of the children remembered them perfectly, even though they took to their heels as soon as their hearts resumed beating.
Was it possible that poor Wan, the most important of all sentinels on the most important of all watchtowers, was sending a message to China through the children of the humble village of Ku-fu? If so, it was a very strange message indeed, and sages and scholars struggled for centuries to wrest some meaning from it.
If my illustrious readers would care to take a crack at it, I will wish them the very best of luck.
2. The Plague
My story begins with the silk harvest in the Year of the Tiger 3,337 (A.D. 639), when the prospects for a record crop had never seemed better.
The eggs that Ma the Grub handed out were quite beautiful, jet-black and glowing with health, and the leaves on the mulberry trees were so thick that the groves resembled tapestries woven from deep green brocade, and youngsters raced around singing, “Mulberry leaves so shiny and bright, children all clap hands at the sight!” Our village crackled with excitement. Girls carried straw baskets up the hill to the monastery, and the bonzes lined them with yellow paper upon which they had drawn pictures of Lady Horsehead, and the abbot blessed the baskets and burned incense to the patron of sericulture. Bamboo racks and trays were taken to the river and vigorously scrubbed. Wildflowers were picked and crushed, lamp wicks cut into tiny pieces, and the oldest members of each family smeared cloves of garlic with moist earth and placed them against the walls of the cottages. If the garlic produced many sprouts it would mean a bountiful harvest, and never in living memory had anyone seen so many sprouts. The women slept with the sheets of silkworm eggs pressed against their bare flesh, in order to hasten the hatching process through body heat, and the old ones tossed handfuls of rice into pots that bubbled over charcoal fires. When the steam lifted straight up, without a quiver, they yelled, “Now!”
The women brushed the eggs into the baskets with goose feathers. Then they sprinkled the crushed wildflowers and the pieces of lamp wicks on top and placed the baskets upon the bamboo racks. The goose feathers were carefully pinned to the sides of the baskets, and charcoal fires were lit beneath the racks. (The significance of wildflowers, lamp wicks, and goose feathers has been lost in antiquity, but we would never dream of changing the custom.) The families knelt to pray to Lady Horsehead, and in every cottage the eggs hatched right on schedule.
The Dark Ladies wriggled lazily, enjoying the heat of the fires, but they were not lazy for long. Unless one has seen them, it is quite impossible to imagine how much silkworms can—must—eat, and their only food is mulberry leaves. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the chewing sounds of ravenous silkworms are enough to waken hibernating bears, but sleep would be out of the question anyway. It takes thirty days, more or less, for silkworms to prepare to spin, and there are but three brief periods when they aren't eating: the Short Sleep, the Second Sleep, and the Big Sleep. After the Big Sleep silkworms will die if an hour passes without food, and we worked day and night stripping leaves from trees and carrying them to the cottages in basket brigades. The children were given regular rest periods, of course, but during the thirty days the rest of us were lucky to get sixty hours of sleep.
The old ones tended the fires, because silkworms must have steady heat, and the children who were too young to work in basket brigades were turned out to fend for themselves. In grove after grove we stripped the trees to the bare branches, and then we stumbled in exhaustion to the mulberry grove that belonged to Pawnbroker Fang. That cost us more IOUs, but they were the finest trees in the village. Gradually the silkworms changed color, from black to green, and from green to white, and then translucent, and the oldest family members erected bamboo screens in front of the racks, because silkworms are shy when they begin to spin and must have privacy.
The deafening feeding noises dropped to a roar, and then to a sound like distant surf, and then to a whisper. The silence that finally settled over our village seemed eerily unreal. There was nothing more to be done except to keep the fires going, and if fortune favored us we would pull the screens away in three days and see fields of snow: the white cocoons called Silkworm Blossoms, massed upon the racks and waiting to be reeled onto spindles in continuous strands more than a thousand feet long.
Some of us made it to our beds, but others simply dropped in their tracks.
I awoke on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, which happened to be my nineteenth birthday, to the sound of a soft pattering rain. The clouds were beginning to lift. Slanting rays of sunlight slid through silver raindrops, and a soft mist drifted across the fields like smoke. In the distance I could see the hazy outline of Dragon's Pillow, and nearby on the riverbank some boys were teasing Fang's Fawn, who was riding a water buffalo. I decided that the boys were following her around because the rain had plastered her tunic around small shapely breasts that the pretty little girl didn't have a month ago, and Fawn was enjoying the attention immensely. Bells were ringing from the monastery upon the hill.
I stretched lazily in bed, savoring the smells of tea and porridge from Auntie Hua's kitchen, and then I jerked upright. The boys at the riverbank were staring wide-eyed at Fang's Fawn, who had turned pale as death. She clutched her throat and gave a sharp cry of pain and toppled from the water buffalo to the grass.
I was out the door in an instant. Fawn's eyes were wide and staring, but she didn't see me while I tested her pulse, which was faint and erratic. Perspiration glistened on her forehead. I told the boys to run for her father, and then I picked her up and raced up the hill to the monastery.
The abbot was also our doctor, professionally trained at Hanlin Academy, but he was clearly puzzled by Fawn's sickness. Her vital signs had dropped so low that he had to hold a mirror to her lips to find a trace of condensation, and when he took a pin and pricked her flesh at various pain points there was no reaction. Her eyes were still wide and unseeing.
Suddenly the pretty little girl sat up and screamed. The sound was shocking in the hush of the monastery. Her hands clawed the air, fending off something that wasn't there, and she jerked convulsively. Then she fell back upon the bed and her eyes closed. Her body grew limp, and once more her vital signs dropped to almost nothing.
“Demons!” I whispered.
“I sincerely hope so,” the abbot said grimly, and I later learned that he had begun to suspect rabies, and that he would prefer to confront the most hideous demons from the most horrible corners of Hell.
There had been noises swelling up in the village below the hill, a confusion of sounds, and now we began to hear curses from the men and wails and lamentations from the women. The abbot looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I was out the door and down the hill in a flash, and after that things got so confusing that I have difficulty sorting them out in my mind.
It began with Auntie Hua. She had been tending the fire at the silkworm rack in her cottage and she had smelled something that worried her. When she cautiously peered through a crack in the screen she had not seen a field of snow, but a black rotting mass of pulp. Her agonized wails brought the neighbors, who raced back to their own cottages, and as howls arose from every corner of the village it became apparent that for the first time in living memory our silk harvest had been a total failure. That was merely the beginning.
Big Hong the blacksmith ran from his house with wide frightened eyes, carrying his small son in his arms. Little Hong's eyes were wide and unseeing, and he screamed and clawed the air. The blacksmith was followed by
