Fengxian Prefecture was dying of thirst. Three years without rain — the fields cracked, the wells dry, the rivers gone to dust, the people eating bark and then not eating, selling their children, dying in the roads — and no demon had done it, no monster held the clouds, no fiend needed killing. The drought was administrative. It came from Heaven, on purpose, as a punishment, and , going up to ask the rain-gods why they would not send water to a starving province, found the reason posted in the celestial offices like a court order.
Three years before, the governor of Fengxian had, in a fit of temper during a quarrel with his wife, overturned the offering-table that stood before Heaven — knocked the sacrificial food to the floor, and let the dogs eat it, an act of disrespect to the powers above that was witnessed and recorded. And the Jade Emperor, offended, had decreed the punishment, and the punishment was ingenious and cruel: he set up in a celestial hall a mountain of rice, a mountain of flour, and a great lock hung on a golden chain, and decreed that Fengxian would receive no rain until a chicken had pecked away the whole mountain of rice, and a dog had licked away the whole mountain of flour, and a lamp's flame had burned through the golden chain of the lock — three impossible tasks, three eternities of pecking and licking and burning, which is to say: never.
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