The Kingdom of Cart-Slow announced its trouble from a distance: a work-gang of five hundred Buddhist monks hauling a cart of bricks up an impossible grade, in cangues and chains, starved, whipped, dying in harness on a road that went nowhere anyone needed to go.
The pilgrims stopped, and went among the slaves in disguise to learn the shape of it, and the shape was this. Twenty years ago the kingdom had suffered a drought, and the Buddhist clergy had prayed for rain and got nothing, and then three Daoist masters had come out of the mountains, and they had prayed, and the rain had come, real rain, on demand — and a king watching his people starve is not a theologian, he is a customer, and he bought from the vendor whose product worked. He made the three rainmakers his State Preceptors, gave them the kingdom, and let them do as they liked with the religion that had failed him.
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