On the third terrace of the Great Silt Plaza, Old Farmer Chen sat beside his wicker basket of damp barley seeds, his gnarled hands resting upon his knees.
Around him, fifty families from the drowned river-plains of Luozhou had gathered in a quiet semicircle. They had built no fire. The floor beneath them was already streaming the clean, twenty-degree warmth of the awakened keel. In their center lay a shallow, box-shaped seed-bed they had fashioned from broken timber planks, packed with three inches of black river silt dredged from the canal margin. In their hands they held wooden pegs, waiting for the elder to give the signal to begin sowing. Their faces were weathered by salt, hollowed by weeks of starvation, but their eyes were fixed upon the black mud with the stubborn hunger of men who have known the earth for ages.
A soft, golden shadow fell across the silt bed.
Chen looked up, his watery, water-damaged eyes widening.
Standing on the edge of the terrace was a tall, broad-shouldered elder dressed in the loose, raw, unwhitened hemp tunic of a royal agronomist. The elder’s body was semi-clear, composed of golden, shimmering light that revealed the fluted columns of the pillared hall behind him, yet his dark shape was firm, solid, and clear. In his left hand he carried a curved pruning knife of sea-bronze. Around his neck hung an eight-sided seed-gauge carved from dry boxwood. His grey hair was bound in a simple topknot secured with a polished…
