![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The Zhu family’s second daughter, who was more or less ten years old in that parched Rooster year, was thinking about food as she followed the village boys towards the dead neighbor’s field. He had held the divine light of the Mandate of Heaven for eleven years, and already there were ten-year-olds who had never known anything but disaster. ![]() The present ruler of the empire of the Great Yuan was not only emperor, but Great Khan too: he was tenth of the line of the Mongol conqueror Khubilai Khan, who had defeated the last native dynasty seventy years before. The worthy ruler’s dominion is graced with good harvests the unworthy’s is cursed by flood, drought, and disease. As with any two like things connected by a thread of qi, whereby the actions of one influence the other even at a distance, so an emperor’s worthiness determines the fate of the land he rules. Knowing the cause of their suffering, the peasants cursed their barbarian emperor in his distant capital in the north. All around there was nothing but the bare yellow earth, cracked into the pattern of a turtle’s shell, and the sere bone smell of hot dust. Zhongli village lay flattened under the sun like a defeated dog that has given up on finding shade. ![]()
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