Across the three-mile length of the Great Silt Plaza, the air stood so still that the drifting sparks of animal fat smoke rose in straight, unbroken threads toward the ceiling vaults.
Three million mortals held their breath. Ten thousand stone giant statues leaned forward upon their carved stone stands, their stone senses attuned to the black dark rock dais in the center of the vast expanse. The seventy deep-water lengths of upright space between the floor and the mica rosettes overhead hung like a taut parchment drum, waiting for the first touch of the striker.
Then, Yan Zhiqiu sang.
She didn’t force the sound with dramatic volume. She relied upon the ancient breathing discipline of the Yan-Luo marsh-singers. Drawing her breath from the lower belly, keeping her collarbones level and relaxed, and opening the pharyngeal arch at the back of her throat so that her skull cavities acted as natural sound resonators.
Her voice rose into the cool, misty air—a pure, plain mortal soprano, clear as a mountain brook breaking over granite pebbles, rich with the natural warmth of living lungs.
She sang the opening line of the ancient Harvest Song of the Southern Marshes:
The cold mud sleeps beneath the winter snow, The seed remembers what the waters know; Though seventy rivers break their earthen wall, The root holds fast until the rains shall fall.
