The Door at Last

When the last water had turned east, Yu did not rest. He sent riders out to the four quarters of the land, to see what the thirteen years had done. They traveled for weeks, over roads that were still mud, and they came back slowly, with news that was better than he had dared to hope.

In the north, the rivers ran in their new beds, and the hills that had been islands for a generation stood clear. In the south, the lakes had sunk, and the reed beds where people had lived in boats were already green with the grass of dry land. In the east, the riders reached the coast and found the great river entering the sea, not in flood, but in a deep and quiet channel.

They brought back strange small stories. Of an old man, bent before his time, standing on the shore where the water had been, weeping, because he had never believed he would feel dry land under his feet again. Of children who had been born on the hilltops and had never seen a field, who now stood in mud that would, in another year, be wheat.