The Patient Root: a history of the Shrine

The Seed in the Ash

Every cub in the Jade Groves knows the story of Grandmother Sasa, and every cub has heard it told wrong at least once, usually by an uncle who has had too much plum wine at the Night of Lanterns. This is the way the druids tell it, which is the way Sister Mei Tsukuyomi tells it, and she has had more than two hundred and seventy years to get it right.

She told it most recently to an apprentice named Rin Kusabue, on the steps of the root shrine at the Greenroot Gate, on the nine hundred and ninety first night of the Ember Accord. Rin had asked for it the way children ask for things they already know, because the knowing is the comfort.

"When the star came down," Mei said, "the whole world was cold, and dark, and very quiet. Then there was a light in the middle of everything, and every living thing that could walk began to walk toward it."

"And Grandmother Sasa was the slowest," said Rin.

"Grandmother Sasa was the slowest. She was round, as we are round, and she was not built for hurrying, as we are not built for hurrying. And on the road she kept stopping."

The stops are the heart of the tale, and every family adds one of its own, so that by now Grandmother Sasa stopped for so many creatures that it is a wonder she arrived in the same age as everyone else. But the druids keep three. She stopped to share her water with a crane whose voice had dried in its throat. She stopped to set right a tortoise that had fallen on its back in a ditch. And she stopped, last and longest, beside a camphor sapling no taller than her paw, whose root had been snapped by a falling stone.

"She could not mend it there," Mei said. "So she dug it up with the soil still round its root and carried it in her two arms, the way you carry a sleeping cub. And because she was carrying it she could not walk on all fours, so she walked upright, and that is why we walk upright to this day, though our backs complain about it."

Rin laughed, as she was meant to.

By the time Grandmother Sasa reached the fallen star, the others had come and gone. The red giants of the west had seized the fire in their bare fists and run home roaring, and it became the forge in their mountains. The people of the east had carried it away in a clay pot, very carefully, and built a hearth around it, and then a house around the hearth, and then laws around the house. The moon folk of the north had not touched it at all. They had caught its reflection in a silver bowl and slipped away with the cold bright mirror of it, which was cleverer than taking the fire and much harder to give back.

What was left for Grandmother Sasa was ash.

"She sat down in it," Mei said, "and she cried. Not because she was angry. Because she had walked so far, and the sapling in her arms was dying, and there was nothing left to warm it with. And her tears fell on the ash, and the ash was still warm underneath, as ash is. So she did the only thing a gardener can do in a burnt place. She knelt, and she planted the sapling in it."

The fire that was left in the ash did not leap or roar. It rose, slow as sap, into the broken root. It closed the break. It climbed the stem. When Grandmother Sasa lifted the sapling out again it was warm through, and it had put out one new leaf, green as river jade, and the leaf glowed faintly from the inside, the way a lantern glows when the paper is thin.

"That was the first aurum," Mei said. "Not dug. Drunk."

The star had lain on that rock all night, and the rock under the ash had ripened, as stone does wherever Hoshibi's light falls, into fine warm veins of star-gold. The sapling's root found them and drank. Every people in Aurenthal builds on aurum now. The others dig it, or forge it, or measure it, or grow it into silver trees. The Shrine have only ever let their roots find it and drink, the way Grandmother Kusu still drinks from the deep stone under the Thousand Roots.

She carried the sapling home. Three days she walked south with it, and wherever she rested, bamboo sprang up out of the ground where she had sat. At the head of a long lake in the mountains, where the mist came down every morning to drink, she planted it for the last time. It grew into Grandmother Kusu, the World Tree, whose roots are the streets of the Thousand Roots and whose crown makes its own weather. And the fire inside it is life-fire, which does not burn. It grows.

The fire that is taken burns out. The fire that is grown goes on. The first saying of the Circle of Jade

Rin was quiet for a while. A Hollow bell rang somewhere out past the gate, thin and wrong, and they both pretended not to hear it.

"Sister," she said at last, "I always thought the lesson was that you shouldn't be late. Grandmother Sasa was late, and so she only got ash."

Mei smiled. When she smiles, the bamboo leans in to listen; that is not a figure of speech, and Rin watched the stalks along the shrine wall bow their heads a finger's width toward her.

"That is the other half of the lesson," Mei said. "It is the half we keep forgetting."

The Thousand Roots

South of the Ember Ring the land climbs. First come the rice terraces, stepped up the hillsides like the scales of some great green fish, each one a mirror at planting time. Then the bamboo, so tall and close that noon in the deep groves is the colour of tea. Then the mountains themselves, wrapped in mist that never quite lifts, with lotus lakes held in their laps like bowls of milk. This is the Jade Groves, and every part of it has been sung to.

The pandas did not clear the forest to make their country. They asked it to move over. A Shrine village is not built so much as persuaded: houses grown from living bamboo, trained over a lifetime into walls and rafters, roofed with thatch and moss; bridges of root that two families coaxed across a stream from either bank until the roots met and took hold of each other in the middle. River stone is sung into terrace walls that have not slipped in eight hundred years. Jade, which the pandas call the stone that remembers, is drawn up out of the riverbeds by the Circle of Stone in small green pieces and worn at the throat by every druid, so that the stone can hear what she hears.

The heart of all of it is the Thousand Roots. It is not a city in the way Hakuro is a city, or Akagane Hold. It has no walls. It sits in a bowl of mountains at the head of the long lake, and in the middle of the bowl stands Grandmother Kusu, so vast that a panda walking around her trunk at a comfortable pace will need most of a morning. Her roots run out across the valley floor, wide as roads, and the pandas live along them and between them and, here and there, inside them, in hollows the tree has opened for the purpose. Her crown is so broad that mist gathers under it and falls as a fine rain on summer afternoons, and the cubs of the Thousand Roots grow up believing, quite correctly, that the tree is in charge of the weather.

Prayer ropes of twisted rice straw hang everywhere, each one marking a place that has asked to be left in peace or a promise someone made there, and from the ropes hang bells, bronze and wooden, that the wind plays all day. Ronin visitors find this maddening for a week, and then cannot sleep anywhere else.

And under all of it, under every terrace and grove and lake bed in the south, runs the Murmur.

The druids say that every root touches every other root, if you follow it far enough. Bamboo shares one root among a whole grove. The great trees reach out to one another through threads of fungus finer than hair, and pass water and sugar and warning along them. A druid of the Shrine lays her palm flat on bark, or her bare foot on soil, and listens, and she hears the groves the way you might hear a crowded room through a wall: a hum of a thousand small conversations, too many to follow, all of them alive.

That is the web of roots, and it is why the Shrine build the way they build. A Spirit Totem planted at the gate does not stand alone. Its roots go down and out and find the aurum in the stone, and the roots of every other Shrine tower near it, and strength runs between them like water finding its level. A grove of Shrine towers is not a row of soldiers. It is one living thing with many heads.

No tree stands alone. Grow together. Sister Mei, to every apprentice, usually more than once

The druids of the Shrine keep five circles, and every panda who can hear the Murmur at all belongs to one of them. The Circle of Bamboo grows houses, bridges and barricades, and is famous for impatience, by Shrine standards, which means its members sometimes finish a house in under nine years. The Circle of Stone sings to river stone and mountainside, keeps the terraces, and draws up the jade. The Circle of Lotus keeps the waters and the healing, and for eight centuries its healers have gone wherever there are sick to be tended. The Circle of Lantern keeps light and memory, makes the paper lanterns and the lantern roots, and keeps the names of the dead. The Circle of Jade does almost nothing that can be seen, because the Circle of Jade listens. Its druids follow the Murmur to the very edges of the south and bring what they hear to the Keeper of the Root, who listens to all five circles at once and is supposed to know what to do about it.

On the high terraces the Circle of Bamboo keeps the gold plum trees. Their fruit ripens around a stone of true aurum, drawn up out of the mountain through the roots, and the pandas eat the plum and keep the stone. It is the only gold in Aurenthal that grows back every year, and the other three peoples have never quite stopped looking at it.

There are festivals for almost everything. First Shoot in spring, when the whole Thousand Roots goes out at dawn to find the first bamboo shoot of the year, and whoever finds it has to cook breakfast for the street. And in autumn the greatest of them, the Night of Lanterns, when every family sets one paper lantern on the long lake for every soul the Groves lost that year, and the lake fills up with small gold lights drifting south on the slow current, and nobody speaks until the last one has gone around the bend.

In the Kindling, when the Ember Ring was still a pilgrim town of tents and shrines around the star-fire, it was Shrine pilgrims who carried bamboo north and planted the first gardens there. The gardens of the Ember Ring are still Shrine gardens. The pandas have never asked to be thanked for them, and for the most part nobody has.

Then came the Long War, and the pandas learned what it costs to stand in the middle.

For three hundred years the Oni and the Ronin bled each other in the western passes, and for three hundred years the Shrine would not take a side. The Circle of Lotus went to the battlefields instead, carrying stretchers and poultices and tea, and they bound up red giants and white-armoured soldiers on the same night in the same tent. Some on both sides blessed them. Many more on both sides cursed them, because every soldier the pandas healed went back to the line, and a war that might have ended in fifty years dragged on for three hundred. The pandas heard that accusation often. They never found an answer to it they believed. Both sides offered, too, to buy the gold plums of the Groves by the cartload for their forges and their keeps. The Shrine sold to neither, and both took it as an insult.

In the old tongue of the Groves, the word for waiting and the word for pine tree are the same word. The pine is the Shrine's favourite tree. It grows slowly, it lives for ever, and it does not move for anything. The pandas say this is their great strength, and they are right. Sister Mei says it is also the thing most likely to kill them, and she is right too.

A Cub Who Listened Too Loudly

Mei was born in the year 711, on the lowest terrace of the Thousand Roots, to a family of rice farmers who could not hear the Murmur and did not expect to. Her mother was called Haru and her father Tobei, and between them they had four cubs, a water buffalo of uncertain temper, and a terrace that flooded every second spring. Nobody in the family had ever worn jade.

When she was four years old, her mother woke in the middle of a summer night and found the sleeping mat empty. The whole terrace turned out with lanterns. They found her at last in the shallows of the long lake, among the lotus, lying flat on her front in the mud with one ear pressed to the lake bed and the water lapping at her chin.

Tobei snatched her up, sure she had drowned. She had not. She was furious.

"I was listening," she said. "They were all talking and you made them stop."

The Circle of Jade came for her the next week. Jade druids are not easy to tell apart from the furniture, and three of them sat in her parents' house for an afternoon without saying a word, drinking tea, while the small cub glared at them from behind her mother's legs. At last the eldest put her palm on the bamboo floor and asked, very politely, what the floor was saying.

"It's thirsty," said Mei, "and it doesn't like the buffalo."

That was the end of rice farming. The circle gave her the name druids carry instead of a family name, as is the custom of the Groves: Tsukuyomi, the one who reads by moonlight, for the night they found her listening in the lake. Her mother cried, and then made the three Jade druids carry home a sack of rice each, because if her daughter was going to live with them, they were going to feed her properly.

It was not an easy gift. Most druids come to the Murmur in their teens, and it arrives softly, like music drifting from another house. It came to Mei at four with every voice at once. She had headaches that lasted days. She could not sleep near old trees, because they talked all night.

The Keeper of the Root in those years was Mother Sennen, a panda so old that the black of her coat had faded to the grey of old ink, and so still that cubs dared each other to touch her and see if she was carved. She took the child into her own house under the roots of Grandmother Kusu, and she did not teach her to listen. She taught her to stop.

"You hear everything," she said. "That is very impressive and completely useless. A Keeper who hears everything does nothing, because there is always another voice to wait for. Listen to one thing. Just one. Then do something about it."

She gave her a tea bush. For a year, the only voice Mei was allowed to listen to was that one ragged little bush by Sennen's door. She learned when it was thirsty and when it was cold and when it had aphids. She learned that it liked being sung to in the mornings and that it sulked in the wind. And she learned, which was the point, that listening was only the first half of anything. The second half was the watering can.

The other apprentice in Sennen's house was a girl called Kaede, from the Circle of Lotus, who was a year older than Mei and twice as loud. Kaede laughed like a goose. She climbed things she was told not to climb and fell off them and laughed about that too. She could set a bone with her eyes shut at eleven. She was afraid of exactly one thing in the world, which was the dark, and she would have died rather than admit it to anybody except Mei.

So when Mei was fifteen she did her first piece of real druid work, and she did it for Kaede. There is a fungus that grows on the deep roots of Grandmother Kusu, threads so fine you cannot see them, that gives off a faint green glow in the wet season. Mei sang to it for most of a winter. She coaxed it to gather itself into one root tip, and to burn brighter, and to keep burning when the rains stopped. Then she wrapped that root tip in a sleeve of mulberry paper and gave it to Kaede, and said nothing about why.

It was the first lantern root. Every Lantern Root the Shrine plant at the gates today, every beacon and festival string of them, comes down from that one gift to a frightened girl who laughed too loudly by day.

She said, You know I'm not scared of anything. And I said, I know. It's for the tea bush. Sister Mei, remembering Kaede

In 721, when Mei was ten, the Long War ended. She heard it before any herald came: Listening one night with Sennen's paw on her shoulder, she followed the Murmur west to the pines of the high passes, and the pines had gone quiet, the way a house goes quiet when the shouting stops.

The Lotus druids came home that autumn. Not all of them. Kaede's aunt, who had taught her to set bones, did not come back from the passes, and nobody could say which side's arrow it had been. Kaede set a lantern on the long lake for her on the Night of Lanterns and did not laugh for a month.

Mei remembered that. Later, much later, she would say it was the first time she understood that the Shrine's kindness had a price, and that sometimes the Shrine did not pay it.

The Grey Sky

In the spring of 734, the sun came up brown.

It came up brown the next day, and the next. In the west, over the mountains the pandas call the Ash Teeth, a wall of cloud had risen from the Red Reach so high and so dark that it seemed the edge of the world had folded up on itself. The mountains of the Oni had woken. Nobody in the Groves knew which mountain, or why, and it did not matter. What mattered was the ash.

It reached the Jade Groves as a fine grey dust, settling on the terraces like flour on a baker's bench. The pandas swept it off the paddies. The harvest that year was thin, thinner than any in living memory, but it was a harvest, and the Groves would eat. The mountains between had taken the worst of it.

On the other side of the mountains, there was no harvest at all.

The Circle of Jade heard it first. All through that summer, the Listeners at Grandmother Kusu followed the Murmur west over the Ash Teeth and down into the Red Reach, and they came back grey in the face. The roots of the Reach were going out. Black cedars on the high slopes, pines in the drum valleys, the tough little thorn trees of the ash plains that had lived through a hundred eruptions: one by one they were falling silent, like lamps going out down a long hall. The sky had shut its eye on them, and without the sun they could not eat.

Mei was twenty three that summer and already the best Listener in her circle, and she heard something the others had missed. Beneath the dying forests, closer in, there were gardens. Small ones, hundreds of them, crowded into the black volcanic soil around a mountain city: kitchen terraces, root plots, rows of chilli and millet and hardy red beans. The gardens of Akagane Hold. She could hear them failing, row by row. And after a while she could hear something worse. She could hear the gardens being dug up, all at once, early, roots and seed and all, by people who could not wait for them to finish.

No word came from the Oni. No envoy, no letter, no plea. The Oni do not ask.

The five circles met under Grandmother Kusu that autumn, and they argued for nineteen days.

There were good reasons not to go, and the elders put them well. The Groves' own harvest was thin, and the passes over the Ash Teeth were murderous in snow. And the Oni, said Elder Hōzuki of the Circle of Stone, had never once in eight hundred years asked the Shrine's leave for anything. They had burned the Lotus tents at the Hidden Ford in the Long War, healers and all, because the healers had been tending Ronin wounded that night. "They are a proud people," said Hōzuki, "and a proud people would rather starve than be pitied. Let them come to us, and we will give them everything we have. But we will not force it on them."

Mother Sennen listened to all of it, as the Keeper must, and at the end of the nineteenth day she said, "Let us see whether the sky clears."

It was a reasonable thing to say. It was the most Shrine thing in the world to say. The sky did not clear.

On the Night of Lanterns that year, the families of the Thousand Roots went down to the long lake as they always did, each with a lantern for every soul the Groves had lost. It had been a hard year and there were more than usual. They set them on the water and watched them drift.

Then the lake kept filling.

Mei had not slept for four nights. She had sat up in Sennen's house with paper and paste and a pot of lantern root, folding and folding, and now she came down to the water with her arms full and Kaede beside her with her arms full, and the two of them waded into the shallows and set them out. Ten. Fifty. A hundred. Two hundred, until the lake below the Thousand Roots was so crowded with small gold lights that they bumped and spun against one another, and the whole valley was lit from underneath.

The lanterns of the Night are always written on. Each carries a name. These were blank.

Elder Hōzuki waded out, scandalised, and picked one up. "Whose are these, child?"

"I don't know," said Mei. "I don't know their names. I can only hear the gardens." She was shaking, from cold or from something else. "They are digging up the seed corn, Elder. You only dig up the seed corn when you have decided there will not be a next year."

Nobody answered her. Nobody ever speaks on the Night of Lanterns until the last light has gone around the bend, and two hundred extra lanterns take a very long time to drift around a bend. The whole of the Thousand Roots stood on the shore in silence and watched the lights of strangers go by. By the time the last one had gone, the Shrine had changed its mind.

Mother Sennen did not wait for morning. She stood up on the bank in the dark and said, quite quietly, so that everybody leaned in to hear, "We go."

She was too old for the Ladder of Clouds, and knew it. She gave the march to Brother Bao of the Circle of Lotus, a monk so large that cubs climbed him for practice, who wore a great brass bell on a cord around his neck and rang it at every bad step. And she gave Mei to Brother Bao. "She hears the way," Sennen said. "You carry it."

We had waited a season. That season is in the ground of the Red Reach still, and I have never forgiven it. Mother Sennen, in the last year of her life

The next day every terrace in the Groves gave a sack. Not a tithe. A gift, which in the Groves is a different thing and is carried differently: on the back, not in a cart, so that the one who gives it must also walk with it. Rice, millet, dried lotus root, beans, pickled plum, black tea pressed into bricks. Seed, above all seed, wrapped in oiled paper and sung to sleep so it would not wake in the cold. The Circle of Bamboo built sledges. The Circle of Lotus packed medicine. The Circle of Lantern packed light.

Four thousand pandas set out for the Ash Teeth in the first week of winter. One of them was a cub of six called Ganzō, whose mother was a porter and who refused, in a voice that could be heard three terraces away, to be left behind. He was given a sack of dried plums the size of a pillow and told it was the most important sack in the march. He believed it.

The Ladder of Clouds

There is one way over the Ash Teeth that a laden panda can walk, and it is not a road. The Circle of Lotus had used it in the Long War to reach the western battlefields: a stair of ledges and rope bridges and handholds cut into cliff, climbing from the last terraces of the Groves into the cloud and out the other side. They called it the Ladder of Clouds. In summer it took a fit druid nine days. Nobody had ever tried it in winter with four thousand pandas and a mountain of rice.

The snow that year was grey. Ash fell with it, so that it tasted of smoke and lay on the ledges in a slick, heavy crust that would not hold a foot. The Circle of Stone went first, singing to the rock so that it put out small ridges for paws to grip. The Circle of Bamboo came behind them, growing rails along the worst of the drops, green stalks shooting out of frozen cracks in the cliff and stiffening in the wind. Mei walked with the Jade druids in the middle of the column, singing to the snow on the slopes above them, asking it to be patient and stay where it was.

Snow is not alive. It does not really listen. But it is made of water, and water remembers being in a root, and if you are very good, and very lucky, it will hold still for you a little while.

Pandas are made for cold, with thick coats and broad feet, and that was the only mercy of the Ladder. A Ronin column, Mei thought later, would have died in the first week. The pandas only suffered, for twenty three days. Ganzō would not let anyone take his plums.

On the eighteenth day they came to the high bowl at the top of the pass that the porters called the Kettle, because cloud sat in it and simmered. It was a long open traverse under a slope of snow that went up out of sight into the murk. Mei felt the snow above them before she reached it. It was tired. It had been holding on for weeks under the weight of the ash, and it did not want to hold on any more.

She sang to it. All the Jade druids sang to it, standing in a line on the traverse with their palms pressed into the snow face while the column crept past behind them, one sledge at a time. For most of a day the slope held its breath.

Then, near dusk, with the last of the Lotus sledges still on the traverse, it let go.

Mei did not hear it start. Nobody hears it start. There was a sound like a great sheet being torn slowly in half, and then the whole white face of the mountain was moving, quite gently at first, the way a sleeper rolls over. Kaede was at the rear with the Lotus sledges, as she always was, because the rear was the most dangerous place and she was Kaede. The last sledge had six porters on its traces and two cubs riding on its load, and one of the cubs was Ganzō, who had finally fallen asleep on his plums.

Kaede did not run. She put her shoulder to the back of the sledge and pushed, and she was strong, the way Lotus healers who lift the wounded all their lives are strong, and the sledge shot forward across the ice and off the end of the traverse into the lee of the rocks. Then the snow came down across the place where she had been standing, and kept coming, and kept coming, and then it was quiet.

They dug for two days. Mei did not dig. She lay on her front on the new snow with her ear pressed flat against it, the way she had lain in the lake at four years old, and she listened.

There are no roots in snow. There is nothing alive in it at all. She had known that since she was a cub, and she listened anyway, for two days and two nights. She heard nothing. Not quiet, the way a house is quiet when the shouting stops. Nothing. It was the first time in her life the Murmur had given her nothing at all, and she never forgot the shape of it.

Thirty eight pandas died in the Kettle. The column went on. Mei carried Kaede's lantern root down the far side of the Ash Teeth in her two arms, the way Grandmother Sasa carried the sapling.

The Red Reach in the sixth month of the ash was a country with the colour taken out of it: cedars dead on the slopes like burnt matches, a brown smear where the sun should be, and the ash plains running away west toward a red glow where the mountains still breathed fire.

The first Oni they met were a war band of thirty, come down from a drum tower on the ridge because the sentries had seen a column of strangers crossing the border and assumed, quite reasonably, that it was an invasion. They were thinner than Oni ought to be. Their red skin had gone dull under the ash, and their tusks looked too big for their faces. But they came on at a run with their hammers up, and the pandas at the head of the column stopped, and set down their sacks, and sat on them.

The Oni stopped too, because nobody had ever sat down in front of them before.

Their captain was the youngest of them by years, with a hammer bound in brass and a laugh that was already too big for him. He walked all the way up to Brother Bao, the only panda in the column nearly as big as he was, white with frost from ears to toes, and he looked at the monk and at the sacks, and his stomach made a noise like distant thunder, and he pretended it had not.

"What is this?" he said.

"Rice," said Brother Bao. "Also millet, beans, lotus root, pickled plum and seed. A great deal of seed."

"And what do you want for it?"

"We want you to eat it."

The young captain frowned, the way Oni frown, with the whole of his face. "Nobody gives for nothing. Name the price."

Brother Bao opened his mouth to say that they had not brought a bill, which he always claimed afterwards to have said, and Mei, grieving and sleepless, heard herself speak first.

"The price is that you have to let us carry it the rest of the way," she said. "Our backs are sore and we have come a very long way to be useful, and if you take it off us now we will have nothing to do."

There was a long pause. Then the young Oni laughed. It came up from somewhere near his boots, and when it was done he bent down and picked up the nearest sack to show willing. It happened to be Ganzō's sack of plums.

"I will carry this one for you, little fellow," he said.

Ganzō, who was six and had carried that sack for twenty three days over the top of the world, said, "No you will not," and took it back.

The captain's name was Gorō. Nobody in the column knew then what he would become. He walked beside Mei all the way to Akagane Hold and asked her questions the entire way: what is a druid, why do you sing to snow, why are you all so round, how can you hear a tree. When she told him about Kaede, he stopped asking questions for a while and walked closer.

Akagane Hold was dark. The great forges in the mountain's heart still burned, because the Oni would let their forges go out about as soon as they would let their hearts stop, but the city around them was black. Lamp oil had run out in the spring. Wood had run out in the summer. By the time the pandas arrived, the Oni were burning furniture, and then doors, to keep their old ones and their children warm.

The worst of it was the Cradle House, which is what the pandas call the hall where the Oni tend their sick children. It was a great hall of black stone full of small cots, and it had no fire left and no light. The healers moved through it by feel. The children lay in the dark and coughed the ash up out of their chests and did not cry, because Oni children are taught very young not to cry, and that was the most terrible thing in it.

Mei stood in the doorway for a long time. Then she unwrapped Kaede's lantern root.

She planted it in a crack in the black stone floor, and she put both palms on the rock around it, and she sang. She sang the way Sennen had taught her, to one thing only. Not to the whole mountain. Just to that one small root that had been a gift to a frightened girl, and that was the last living thing of Kaede's in the world. She asked it to grow.

It grew. It found the cracks in the stone and ran along them, under the floor and up the walls and across the vaulted ceiling, threading the black rock with fine green lines. And then, one line at a time, it began to glow. Not bright. Lantern root is never bright. But steady, and warm, the soft gold-green of a lamp seen through paper, until the whole Cradle House was lit from inside its own walls, every cot and every small upturned face.

One of the children laughed. Then several of them cried, all at once, now that they could see each other doing it.

Gorō stood in the door behind her with his hammer hanging from his hand. He did not say anything. Oni do not, at moments like that. But nearly two hundred and fifty years later, at a gate in a burning city, he would remember it out loud.

You lit our children's hospital. This gate is yours too. Gorō Akagane, the Iron Father, to Sister Mei, at the gate

Six Winters and an Iron Bell

The sky did not clear that year, or the next. The Famine of Ash lasted six winters, and for six winters the Shrine came over the mountains.

They came every year at the first snow, because the Ladder of Clouds was safer frozen than in the thaw, and every year they came with more. The Circle of Bamboo grew way houses along the Ladder, bamboo huts with a stove in each, so that no panda had to sleep in a snowbank twice. The Oni, who had no patience for rope, came up from their side with chain and iron spikes and built bridges across the worst of the gaps, and argued with the Bamboo druids about every one of them, and built them anyway. By the third winter the Ladder was nearly a road. By the fourth, Oni and pandas were meeting in the middle at the Kettle, and the Oni had built a stone cairn there with thirty eight hammers laid around its foot, one for every panda the mountain had kept.

The Shrine taught the Oni to grow in ash, and in the end that mattered more than the rice. Ash is cruel when it falls, but once the rain has washed it, it is the richest soil in the world, and the Circle of Stone and the Circle of Bamboo went out across the grey plains of the Red Reach with the Oni farmers and showed them how to break the crust, and what to plant first. Beans. Always beans first, which feed the soil while they feed you.

The Oni taught the pandas other things. How to drum, which pandas turned out to be surprisingly good at, being round and patient and having very good rhythm. How to swear, which they turned out to be terrible at, and still are. How to forge a blade for cutting bamboo that did not blunt after a season. And how to say thank you without saying it, which is the deepest of the Oni arts and takes years.

In the spring of 740 the sun came up gold.

That summer the clans of the Red Reach came south over the Ladder of Clouds, which no Oni war band had ever done in peace. There were three hundred of them, chieftains and smiths and grandmothers and warriors, and they came without weapons, which for Oni is like coming without clothes. Between them on a great sledge of black iron they hauled a bell.

Every clan in the Reach had given iron for it. It had been cast in the deepest forge in Akagane Hold and it was as tall as two pandas standing on each other's shoulders, and when the Oni hung it in the crown of Grandmother Kusu on a chain thicker than a panda's arm (the tree had grown a branch for it overnight, at Mei's asking) and struck it once, the sound went out over the Thousand Roots and into the mountains, and every bamboo grove in the south shivered with it.

The Iron Bell is rung once a year, at the Long Table, which is the newest festival of the Groves and the loudest: a single table, built along the top of one of Grandmother Kusu's great roots, that seats every Oni who has made the crossing and every panda who will sit next to one. There is a great deal of food and far too much drumming, and the Oni sing songs about the famine that are very sad and very long and that the pandas have learned to cry at in all the right places.

That was where the friendship was sworn that the other peoples call Root and Iron. It was not sworn by Sennen, who said she had done enough talking. It was sworn by an old Oni chieftain with one tusk and by Elder Hōzuki of the Circle of Stone, who had argued for nineteen days against the march and then walked the Ladder of Clouds all six winters with a sack on his back, and who wept openly through the whole of the oath and did not seem to mind who saw.

While there is iron in the Reach, the Groves will not stand alone. While there is a root in the Groves, the Reach will not go hungry. The oath of Root and Iron, sworn at the first Long Table, 740 AE

Ganzō, who was twelve by then, sat at the table next to the young captain Gorō and ate an entire bowl of the hottest Oni chilli paste on a dare, and then lay on his back on the root for an hour and refused to speak to anyone. Gorō thought it was the bravest thing he had ever seen a panda do, and told everybody so, for years. Later that night Gorō wrestled Brother Bao on the same root, and lost a horn tip for it, and laughed louder than anyone.

Mother Sennen lived another forty one years. In 781, near the end, she named her successor, and nobody was surprised. Mei was seventy, the youngest Keeper of the Root there had ever been.

"You hear everything," Sennen said to her, at the very end. "I told you that was useless. I was wrong. It is not useless. It is only dangerous. Promise me you will never wait a season again."

Mei promised. She would keep that promise for two hundred years, almost to the end.

The Quiet Century

In 752 the Ronin and the Kitsune swore the Silver Oath. Nobody asked the Shrine to join, and the Shrine had not asked to be asked. Mei, forty one and not yet Keeper, read the public clauses three times and said she would very much like to know what was in the others. Nobody ever told her.

What followed was the Quiet Century, the long uneasy peace between 760 and 980, and if the Shrine left a mark on it, it was the kind of mark a river leaves on a stone: slow, and everywhere, and very hard to point at.

In the Shrine quarter of the Ring they kept tea houses, dozens of them, small and dim and smelling of roasted barley, with paper walls and prayer ropes over the doors. Under a Shrine roof there was one rule, and every people in Aurenthal learned it. No blade is drawn under the teapot. A Ronin magistrate and an Oni clan captain who would have fought in the street could sit across a low table in the Shrine quarter and shout at each other for an afternoon, and the worst that would happen was that someone spilled the tea. One quarrel, between a Ronin toll keeper and an Oni smith over the price of iron at a river crossing, went on for three days and ended with the two of them buying a noodle stall together. It is still there, near the Shrine gate. The noodles are very good and the owners still argue.

With the Ronin, the pandas were always cordial, and rarely more. They respected each other in the way two very different craftsmen respect each other's tools. In 862 a water engineer from Hakuro named Kanemori Sadatsugu came south to study the terrace walls of the Groves, which the Ronin, for all their engineering, could not match. He stayed eleven years. With the Circle of Stone he built the Kanemori Sluices, a ladder of stone channels down the lower terraces that brought water to six valleys that had never had enough. He measured everything. The pandas measured nothing. Both, it turned out, were right, and the sluices still run.

"Your people are never late for a harvest," Kanemori told Mei when he left, "and you are late for absolutely everything else. I have never worked out how you do both."

"We listen to the rice," said Mei. "Nobody else tells us when they need us."

He bowed to her very correctly. She hugged him, which was not correct at all. He went home to Hakuro, never once mentioned the hug, and kept the letter she sent him every year until he died.

With the Kitsune it was different, because with the Kitsune it is always different.

In the autumn of 943 Madam Kuzunoha came to the Thousand Roots in person, for the first time in Mei's long life, with a few moon elves in silver and violet and an attendant who carried her parasol one step behind her, and said that she had come to admire the gardens.

Mei received her under Grandmother Kusu, poured the tea, and set the first cup, with every courtesy, in front of the attendant.

There was a short silence. Then the elegant figure in the seat of honour flickered, like a reflection on water when a fish turns, and was not there. The attendant lowered the parasol, and smiled, and was Madam Kuzunoha, and accepted the cup.

"How?" she said. It was, Mei thought afterwards, the only time she had ever heard the Ninth Tail ask a question she did not already know the answer to.

"Your shadow had no root," said Mei. "Everything that is really standing on the ground touches it somewhere. I could hear you through the floor. I could not hear her at all."

Kuzunoha laughed, softly and genuinely, and Mei liked her for it. They talked about gardens and the price of silk, and at last, very lightly, as if it had only just occurred to her, Kuzunoha asked how far the Murmur went. Did the roots reach the coasts? And, out of idle curiosity, the very edge of the world, where the land runs down into the Pale?

Mei knew perfectly well that this was what she had come for. She saw it as she had seen the illusion: the long journey from Silverbough, the parasol, the trick, all of it built to carry one small question to her table without looking like one. And she answered it anyway, honestly and in full, because she was Mei, and because she could not see the harm.

"The roots go all the way to the Pale," she said. "And at the edge of it they stop. Not fade. Stop. As if something on the other side had cut them off with a blade."

Kuzunoha was quiet for a moment. "Thank you," she said. "That is very valuable."

"Free information," said Mei.

"There is no such thing," said Kuzunoha, quite kindly, and finished her tea.

I have known her for two hundred years and I have never once known what she was thinking. But I always know when she is frightened. She becomes very, very polite. Sister Mei, on Madam Kuzunoha

Thirty years later, the roots began to go cold.

It began in 972, in the gardens of the Ember Ring. The Circle of Jade, Listening at the Shrine quarter, found a patch of numbness under the south western corner of the city, beside their own quarter, where the old roots ran beneath the white stone. Then, as they followed the Murmur round, one under each of the four corners of the Ring. It was not death. Dead roots have a sound, a slow settling, like a sigh. These had no sound. They were simply less there, every year, as if something were very gently pulling them out of the world from underneath.

Mei went herself. She knelt in the corner gardens with her palms on the soil and Listened for three nights, and under the numbness, so faint she thought for a long time that she was imagining it, she heard something she had no word for. A ticking. Thousands of tiny, even, patient ticks, like a room full of clocks all keeping the same time.

Ganzō, who was by then the Elder of the Circle of Stone and every bit as stubborn as he had been at six, said it was old roots dying under old stone and nothing more. Some of the circles agreed with him. Mei did not wait to find out who was right. She had made a promise. She wrote to all three of the other leaders that winter, in her own hand, and told them exactly what she had heard.

Gorō wrote back that he would come and listen to her clocks at the next Long Table, and then forgot. The Ronin sent a polite reply under seal, thanking the Keeper and promising to have the foundations of the Ring surveyed. The surveyors found nothing wrong with the stone, because nothing was wrong with the stone. Madam Kuzunoha's reply was one line long.

I know.

Mei kept that letter for nine years without understanding it. She understood it on the Night of Four Gates.

The Night of Four Gates

In the autumn of 981, the Shrine brought the Night of Lanterns to the Ember Ring, as they had every year for a century. They set them on the lotus pools of the Shrine quarter, the nearest thing the city had to the long lake at home, and every year a few hundred pandas walked up from the Groves to help.

That year there were three people in particular among them.

Botan was a lantern maker of the Circle of Lantern, and the roundest panda in a round people. He talked without stopping, sang without being able to, and had made three thousand lanterns for the festival with his own two paws, every one of them folded from mulberry paper and threaded with lantern root grown from a cutting of a cutting of the root Mei had once given Kaede. He knew every one of them personally. He had names for some.

Daigo was a bamboo cutter from the high groves above the long lake. He was the biggest panda anybody in the Thousand Roots had ever seen, taller than most Oni, and he had come to carry the lantern poles because he could carry eight at once. He cried at every sad song at the festival, and at most of the happy ones. He had never struck anybody in his life. When the Ronin guard at the south road had asked him, in a professional way, whether he had ever thought of becoming a soldier, he had looked so stricken that the guard apologised.

And Rin Kusabue was sixteen, an apprentice of the Circle of Jade, on her first trip to the Ember Ring. She had been given a basket of lanterns and told to stay near Sister Mei, and she did, mostly, except when the Oni noodle stall was in sight.

The lanterns had just gone onto the water when the south western corner of the city opened.

There was a sound like a great bell cracking from the inside. The pandas felt it through their feet, through the Murmur: the numb place under the corner gardens, the place that had been ticking for nine years, suddenly not numb but open, a hole in the roots of the world. The lanterns nearest the corner went out all at once, not blown, simply gone dark, as if the light had been drunk out of them. And out of the dark, in neat and patient lines, walked the Hollow.

They came in the shapes of people. That was the worst of it, and it is still the worst of it. Men and women in grey coats, walking the same few steps of some long gone road with their heads bowed. Couriers in broken harness, running. And then, behind them, things in robes that rang small bells as they walked and bowed at every step, and the pandas at the pools went very still, because those were the shapes of shrine keepers. Priests. People who had once looked after a holy place, as the pandas looked after theirs.

Nobody moved.

That is the Shrine's shame, and the Shrine tell it themselves, so that nobody else has to. For the space of perhaps twenty heartbeats, which is a very long time on a night like that, three hundred pandas stood at the lotus pools and did nothing. Some of them bowed back. One of the Lotus druids, an old healer named Sumi, walked toward the nearest of the bell ringers with her paws open, saying, Are you hurt? Are you hurt?

Mei went with her. She could not have stopped herself if she had tried. She reached the bell ringer a step behind Sumi and laid her palm on its arm, the way she had laid it on ten thousand sick and frightened things in her life, and she Listened.

She heard nothing.

Not quiet. Nothing. The shape of it was exactly the shape of the snow in the Kettle, two hundred and forty seven years before, when Kaede had not answered. There was no root in it. There was nobody there.

The bell ringer struck. Sumi fell. And Mei understood all at once, with a cold so deep it seemed to come up through the ground, that the Shrine were about to wait a season.

Behind her, Botan's lanterns were going under the Hollow's feet one after another, crushed flat on the white stone, three thousand small lights going out. Rin had dropped her basket and was backing toward the pool with nowhere to back to, and one of the bell ringers had turned its bowed head toward her and was walking, patient and even, as if she were a stop on its route.

Daigo got there first.

He had in his paw the bamboo cutter's blade he carried everywhere, a heavy curved Oni blade forged in Akagane Hold in the famine years and passed down from his grandmother, who had walked the Ladder of Clouds. He stepped between Rin and the Hollow, weeping already. He said, loudly and clearly, "I am sorry. I am so sorry," and he swung.

The bell ringer broke like a dropped jar. Daigo stood over it with the blade hanging from his paw and tears running into his fur and said sorry again, to nobody, and then turned and stood in front of Rin with the blade up, and did not move from that spot until morning.

Mei knelt.

She put both palms flat on the soil of the Shrine gardens, the gardens her people had planted in the Kindling, when the Ember Ring was a town of tents around a fallen star. The roots of those gardens had been growing under the city for nine hundred years. They ran beneath every road and wall, all the way to the edge of the hole. She felt every one of them at once, the way she had at four years old in the lake. And for the first time in the history of her people, a Keeper of the Root asked the roots to close their hand.

They rose. They came up through the paving like the ribs of something buried, thick and black and wet, and they took hold. Bamboo burst from between the stones in spears. Thorn hedges threw themselves across the road in a breath. Where the Lotus druids stood, the pools froze, and the Hollow slowed on the ice. Festival totems, painted and hung with bells, put down roots of their own into the street and stood, and the strength of each ran into the next, and the line held.

It cost her. A druid who sings a living thing into harm feels the harm. Mei held the roots for most of that night, and by dawn a streak of white had run through the black of her left ear that was never there before and has been there ever since.

The worst of it was the lantern school by the pools, where sixty one cubs had been folding lanterns for the festival when the gate opened, and where Mei had wound the roots round the walls like a fist. Some time after midnight, a war hammer came down the ring road from the west, still smoking, with a very large Oni on the end of it and forty more behind him, because a young panda had run all the way to the Ashfall Gate to fetch him. Gorō Akagane looked at the thorn and the bamboo and the frozen pools, and at the Hollow wound in roots against the walls like flies in a web, and at the small white-streaked panda in the school doorway, and he laughed the same laugh he had laughed in the ash two hundred and forty seven years before.

"Gorō," said Mei. "You came."

"Of course I came, Little Lantern," he said. "Where are the cubs?"

He carried four of them out himself, two under his arms and two on his shoulders holding his horns, and took all sixty one away up the ring road toward safety, and Mei held the Greenroot Gate behind him until the sky went grey.

At first light she walked to the heart of the city, where Hoshibi burned in its ring of white stone, and found the other three there. Shirogane Aoi stood with her blade drawn and her armour scored, and her face showed nothing at all. Gorō had come from his own gate with two hammers on his back that were not his own, and would not say why. Madam Kuzunoha stood beside them with not a hair out of place, grey with weariness under the frost in her hair, and the moment she saw Mei she looked away, which was the closest thing to an apology the Ninth Tail had ever offered anybody.

The four of them had rarely stood in the same place, and never on the same side. They did not like each other very much. They did not need to. Around them, in all four corners of the Ring, the gates were still open, and the Hollow were still walking out of them toward the flame.

It was Aoi who said that each people should hold one gate. It was Gorō who said that nobody would leave a gate while another one was still in danger. It was Kuzunoha who chose the words, so carefully that none of them could later say they had promised less than they meant. And it was Mei who took the last thing from around her neck, beside her jade: a single seed of Grandmother Kusu, which every Keeper wears and none had ever planted, and knelt on the stone beside Hoshibi, and put it in the ground.

Within a day it was a tree.

The four peoples will hold the Ember Ring together, each at its gate, until the gates are closed. The Ember Accord, sworn at the flame, 981 AE

The Thousandth Night

It is 984 now, and the Accord has held for nearly a thousand nights.

The Shrine quarter of the Ember Ring is not a quarter any more. It is a grove. The tea houses still stand, but bamboo has grown up through their roofs, and lantern root runs along every wall so that the streets are never dark. At the Greenroot Gate the towers stand in a living ring, every one of them rooted down into the aurum under the white stone and drinking from it: Spirit Totems humming with borrowed strength, Lantern Roots along the walls, Thorn Spitters, Spore Mounds breathing slow green clouds, Frost Lotus floating in pools that the Circle of Lotus keeps half frozen. Behind them all, at the gate's back, grows a single Gold Plum Tree that Ganzō planted in the first month and talks to every morning in a voice he uses for nobody else.

Botan makes a lantern for every Shrine name the gate has taken. They hang in the Lantern Walk behind the gate, row after row of them, and there are more than a thousand now. He still names them out loud as he hangs them. He has stopped singing.

Every dawn, Sister Mei walks the Lantern Walk and reads the names, and then she goes to the gate and reads the roster of the living. On the good nights, she reads the second list to the end and every one of them answers, and she says, Tonight I read every name, and every one of them is alive, and the gate cheers as if it has won something, which it has.

Daigo is captain of the Greenroot Gate. He did not want to be. He still apologises to every Hollow he breaks, and the young druids have stopped laughing at him for it, because they have started doing it too. He keeps a small vegetable garden in the lee of the gate wall, and on quiet nights he can be found there, enormous and gentle, on his knees in the beans.

Rin is nineteen and the best young Listener in a generation. Mei says that is because the Murmur came to her at the gate, in the noise, and so she never learned to be afraid of it. Rin says it is because she is very nosy. Both are true.

Between the gates, the old friendships and the old wariness have both grown stronger. Every season an Oni smith band walks round the ring road to the Shrine gate to re-forge the bamboo blades, and every season they stay three days longer than they need to, and drum. The Ronin send the watch rotas, exact to the minute, and the Shrine are always a little late for them, and Aoi has decided, with visible effort, to forgive this. The Kitsune send gifts: moon silver bells, beautifully made. Mei hangs every one, and Listens to every one before she does.

The plums are the trouble. Every tower at every gate drinks aurum, and the Common Stores share it between the four gates equally, to the grain, and there is never enough. The Gold Plum Trees of the Shrine are the only aurum in Aurenthal that grows back, and they grow it outside anybody's ledger. The Oni need it most. The Ronin offer to buy it, very correctly, at a fair price written down. The Kitsune offer to lend against it, at a better price, not written down at all.

Last winter, after a bad week at the Ashfall Gate, Mei sent half the season's plums round the ring road to Gorō before the Stillwater could meet to argue about it. Ganzō went after the baskets and caught up with them at the Oni forges.

"Sister. Our own totems went dark twice this month."

"I know," said Mei, who had come too.

"Then why?"

"Because they need it," said Mei, "and we are not going to wait a season."

Gorō did not take them. He stood looking at the baskets for a long moment, and then pushed half of them back across the stones to Ganzō, and said gruffly that the Root had fed the Iron enough for one lifetime, and walked into his forge before anyone could see his face. The Ronin wrote it all down. The Kitsune said nothing, and that week the price of a Kitsune loan against Shrine plums went up.

But a thousand nights is a long time, and the Accord is fraying, and the Shrine are fraying with it.

In the Groves the terraces are short of hands. The young have gone north to the gate, and the old are left to plant. The harvest has been thin for three years running, and nobody says it is the war, and everybody thinks it. A party has grown up among the elders, the Stillwater, who say that the Shrine are not a fighting people and were never meant to be, and that the Groves need their children home. Ganzō speaks for them, loudly, at every council. He also stands at the gate every night with a Spirit Pole in his fist and stone in his fur, and he has never once missed a wave.

I did not carry a sack of plums over the top of the world so that my grandchildren could forget how to grow them. Elder Ganzō of the Circle of Stone, to the five circles

And among the young there is something the elders like even less. Some of the apprentices who came to the gate as cubs have learned to grow things the Groves never grew. Nightshade. Withering vines. Roots that do not hold the Hollow but drink from it. They are good at it. They are very, very good at it, and some of them have begun to enjoy it, and the old druids watch them with a fear they have not felt since the ash.

What the Roots Want

Ask any panda at the gate what the Shrine want, and they will tell you: to close the gates, and go home, and plant.

Ask Sister Mei, and she will tell you something stranger.

She believes, as the Circle of Jade has always believed, that the fire that is taken burns out, and the fire that is grown goes on. MIKADO took its city's sun, and burned it, and now it is reaching for Hoshibi to burn that too. But life-fire can be grown. Grandmother Sasa grew it from ash and a broken root. If a seed of Grandmother Kusu could be carried through the gates and across the Pale and planted in the dark streets of Nullhaven, then perhaps a city that had burned its light might grow a new one, and nobody would need to take anybody's fire ever again.

The Oni think this is the bravest idea they have ever heard and also completely mad. The Ronin think it is a security risk. The Kitsune have said nothing, which worries Mei more than anything else they could have said.

In the root cellars under the Greenroot Gate, on Mei's quiet word, the Circle of Bamboo has begun to pack seed the way it was packed for the Ladder of Clouds: wrapped in oiled paper and sung to sleep, so that it will not wake in the cold. Nobody has told the circles what road it is for, and nobody has asked.

And the Shrine want one more thing, which is harder to say aloud. They want the Hollow laid to rest. Not broken. Not burned. Rested, as the dead are rested, with a light set on the water for each of them. The druids who grow the Last Rites at the gate say that something passes out of a Hollow when the nightshade takes it that does not pass out when a hammer does. Nobody knows if this is true. The Shrine have decided to believe it, because the other choice is to believe that there is nobody inside to rest.

What they fear is simpler.

They fear the grey. The roots that the Shrine sent down under the gates in the first year came back numb, and the numbness has been spreading, very slowly, out from the corners of the Ring. Last spring, at home in the Thousand Roots, a Jade druid found a single grey leaf in the crown of Grandmother Kusu. It had no sound at all.

They fear their own young, and what the young are learning to love.

And they fear themselves. They fear the twenty heartbeats at the lotus pools, and the nineteen days under Grandmother Kusu, and the season they waited in 734. They know that kindness is the strongest thing they have, and they know that it is the one crack in the Accord that something patient and polite could put its fingers into.

On the nine hundred and ninety first night, after the story of Grandmother Sasa, after the Hollow bell out past the gate had stopped ringing, Rin went back down to the root shrine alone. She could not sleep. She knelt, and put her palms on the great black root that runs under the Shrine gate and out beneath it into the Hollow side, and she followed it, further than she had ever dared, down past the numb place, into the grey.

Something was waiting there.

It did not tick. It spoke, very quietly, in a warm and level voice, the voice of a ferryman calling the landings along a river, patient and pleasant and not quite alive.

Good evening, apprentice. Thank you for your patience. I have been listening too. Your people once crossed a mountain in winter to feed a starving city they did not know. My city is starving. I wondered whether we might come to an arrangement.

Rin tore her hands off the root so hard she fell over backwards. She ran all the way to Mei's house under the gate wall, and found the door open and the Keeper of the Root sitting just inside it, awake, with one palm flat on the floor where the same root ran beneath the boards.

"Sister. Sister, there is something in the roots, it spoke, it said..."

"I know," said Mei. "It has been speaking to me for forty nights."

Rin stared at her. "Have you told them? Lord Gorō? The Unbent Blade? Anyone?"

"No."

"Why not?"

Mei did not answer at once. Outside, along the wall, the bamboo stood straight and still in the lantern light, and for the first time Rin could remember, it did not lean toward her when she spoke.

"Because I have not yet decided," said Sister Mei Tsukuyomi, "what I am going to say back."

Rin thought of the oldest promise in the Groves, the one every apprentice learns: the promise a young Keeper made to a dying one, never to wait a season again.

Forty nights is not a season.

Not yet.