Chapter 19: The Garden

Gao Tie wanted to go in with him, and the old door would not let him.

He put his huge hand against the carved moths and it met a wall, though the doorway beside it stood open and dark.

"It opens for the Seat," said Cen Yu. "Wait here. If I'm not out by dark, bring the Abbot."

"If you're not out by dark, I'll bring a hammer," said Gao Tie.

Cen Yu stepped over the sill.

The air on the other side was thick and green and warm, and it hummed.

It was a long valley behind the Hall, walled in by cliffs.

Terraces were cut into the slope, and a wooden frame stood on each one.

Every frame was hung with moths.

They were grey-white, the size of a thumbnail, and folded flat against the wood.

There were thousands upon thousands of them, and the hum was their wings.

The nest is the Garden, the Elder had said in the warm room.

Cen Yu had not understood it until now.

Every wasting cough in the lowlands, every father in every river village, had begun on these frames.

He started down the path.

The moths lifted.

They rose off the wood in a slow grey cloud, and they did not come at him.

They parted to either side of his body and flowed past, as water goes round a stone.

The Mother Gu was in him now, dead and eaten, and every moth in the Garden knew whose blood he carried.

He did not feel afraid, and he noticed that, with a distant interest.

A branch caught his sleeve and tore the skin of his wrist, and he looked at the red line and walked on.

Pain had been his one honest warning for nineteen years.

He had given it up for a chair, and he would have to learn to look at himself instead.

At the bottom of the valley stood a small stone house with a flat roof and one barred window.

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