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 , 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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