The Classic of the Great Wilderness: North records me: there is one clad in green, named Ba, daughter of the Yellow Emperor. When Chiyou raised arms against the Emperor… the Emperor sent down his heaven-daughter Ba; the rain ceased; Chiyou was slain. Ba could not ascend again; where she dwells, no rain falls.
A few dozen characters, and my whole life is written. Let me unpack them for you.
I am the Yellow Emperor's daughter. At the battle of Zhuolu, Chiyou summoned the Wind Earl and the Rain Master, and loosed storm enough to drown my father's lines. At the crisis, my father sent me down — my body carries, from birth, the breath of utmost aridity. I arrived; the rain ceased. The rain ceased; the battle turned; Chiyou fell.
In that war, I was the hero.
And then the hero discovered she could not go home. The arid breath, over-kindled in the great battle, had soaked this body through — the cloud-stuff of heaven's gates withers at my approach. I could not ascend again.
And the sentence's crueler half: where she dwells, no rain falls.
Wherever I stand, the clouds unravel and the rain dies. Three days of rest, and the seedlings curl for a hundred li. A month, and the wells show their stones. The ancients revered me first — flood-plagued tribes begged my visits to drive back the waters. Then they feared me — for when the flood withdrew and I did not, flood became drought. And at last, they drove me out.
"The drought-fiend works her cruelty," your poems say. Cruelty. The daughter who went to war for her father and lost the road home — a cruelty.
I make no defense, because the people were not wrong: where I am, calamity is. The injustice is real, and the calamity is real. Both are true at once. That is the bitterest lesson a thousand years has taught me.
So I bound myself with a walking law, three articles:
One: never stay in one place past three days. Two: keep to the roads that drought cannot harm — the great deserts, the salt marshes, the Flaming Mountains; brother Scorched-Earth's ash-fields are among the few places in a thousand years where I have dared linger. Three: where flood strikes, I go; when the flood withdraws, I leave at once, taking no thanks, leaving no name.
A thousand years so. I am perhaps the most-travelled being under heaven — not for the scenery. Because I dare not stop.
Imagine such a life if you can: the world prays for rain, and you are the absence of rain itself. I have heard more rain-prayers than even Tiger Power has sung — and every one of them, at bottom, sings: may she leave us.
Enough. The old matters are told. Now, Cart-Slow.
Three hundred years of drought there, and the whole world repeats: the drought-fiend has settled on the kingdom and will not move on.
Rubbish. My law — three days, then gone — has not been broken in a millennium. I have crossed Cart-Slow exactly twice in my life. Five days in total.
I went to examine that drought. Entering by night, I walked all thirteen of its water-veins — Master Deer Power says the veins are pinched, and he is right. But he cannot know what is blended into the pinching hand:
arid breath. My breath.
Not shed by me — counterfeited. Counterfeited so well that nothing under heaven can tell the difference: clouds scatter before it, springs shrink from it. But I am the original, and my nose knows: my aridity is dryness — earth-born, sun-straight dryness, with a thread of honest noon in it. The counterfeit's dryness, underneath, is rank.
The same base-note as Bifang's strange fire.
It counterfeits my breath — and borrows my name. For three hundred years Cart-Slow has cursed the drought-fiend, and the curses have all landed on it: it took my millennium of infamy for a screen, so the world would forever curse in the wrong direction and never once look toward it.
To steal another's breath. To wear another's name. To hang the blame on the one who has carried blame for a thousand years.
For a thousand years I never argued my case, because the old calamities truly did hang from my body. But this once, the calamity is not mine — and this once, I will argue. Not to clean my name: my name has been black a thousand years; three hundred more would not show.
I will argue because this craft of counterfeit-breath-under-borrowed-name was surely not spent on me alone. The wrongly blamed of these three centuries — mountain sprites, water spirits, the Wind Earl and the Rain Master themselves — would likely form a queue.
And beneath every wrongly hung pot of blame, one of its supply-roads is hiding.
So I travel west with the company. And be easy about the drought-fiend in your column — my law has gained a happy amendment: the company breaks camp and marches every day. I am never in one place past three days.
The drought-fiend who walked alone a thousand years can, for the first time, share a road.
For that one clause alone, I would have come.