That night, thirty miles north of Clear-Brook Town in the poor farming settlement of Mud-Ditch Village, seventy-year-old Grandpa Chen sat awake on a pile of damp straw inside his crooked mud hut.
Outside, a late-summer thunderstorm was rumbling across the plains. Every time the wind blew, cold rainwater leaked through three big holes in the rotten thatch roof—drip, drop, plink—landing inside the chipped clay pots Grandpa Chen and his ten-year-old granddaughter, Little Mei, had set out on the dirt floor.
“Grandpa, the west wall is shaking again,” Little Mei whispered, hugging her knees on the dry corner of the straw mat. “Will our house fall down in the rain like Widow Zhang’s hut did last year?”
Grandpa Chen sighed and rubbed his arthritic knees. For thirty years under Duke Tieba’s heavy taxes, the farmers of Mud-Ditch Village had barely been able to keep enough millet to survive the winter, let alone buy timber or fired bricks to fix their roofs. Even though Lord Pei Xuan’s army had liberated the northern plains four days ago and handed out free bags of white flour and salt, how could any lord possibly fix a hundred thousand rotting mud huts across three whole provinces before the autumn rains turned into winter blizzards?
