I CHING

Someone is benefiting one. 
Ten pairs of such tortoise oracles cannot be disregarded. 
Endless persistence brings good fortune. 
The king presents offerings to the deity. 
Good fortune. 

Two tortise shells, two rams, two goats, one pure white, one spotless black. Two white doves, two chests of gold, two silk robes embroidered with gold, set off with jet and pearls. Two barrels of wine and two roast hogs given to the people. Two drops of the king's blood and a pure maiden and a youth. Given up upon the alter. The rams are slaughtered and burnt, the kings blood is spilt upon the ground. The goats are milked and thier milk is spilt upon the ground, and they are set to run free among the fields, cavorting and kicking up thier heels. The gold is melted and poured upon the ground. The people are feasted and become drunk. They rip apart the fine silk of the robes, scattering pearls upon the ground. The maiden and the youth strip naked and entwine thier arms around eachother. They are not ashamed. They are fed the choicest meats and thier cups are not ever empty. Thier child will become the next sovriegn.

It is a warm night, and as the people sink into thier revelry and become sated, a gentle rain begins to fall. The rain washes the blood and the milk into the ground. The goats, by habit, return to thier pen, but the doves have flown to the forest a roost among the trees. The gods of the air, thier avitars the raptors, may pluck them at thier will, or wait for thier fledglings to grow as they choose.  Pearls wink in the mud in the fading firelight. Jet beads nestle in the hands of sleeping children. The gold cools, it's underside making a cast of the people's footprints. The hardening metal encases a dove's feather, partialy exposed pebbles. Seeds scattered in the afternoon have become guilded, and will never grow. It will be left to form a winking bald patch in the fertile field, an amorphous waste that will lie untouched untill one child, sleeping this night, will wake in the winter months and sneak from his bed. Shoeless he will dig benieth the frozen earth, his fingers thin and raw, untill moonlight winks back at him from the exposed offering. With stolen tools he will hack of a palm-sized chunk of the precious metal and run with it back to his cold hut, and hide it benieth his pillow. 

A few shivering hours later he will rise before the sun. This time he will wrap his feet in rags and seek the road out of the kingdom. He will walk for three days, hiding in the forest and drinking mealtwater. Finaly, his belly cramping with hunger he will reach a neighbouring city, with a diferent ruler, and diferent customs. This city has cobbled streets instead of mud, and pours gold into the univerity, instead of upon the ground. It's king is chosen yearly by a council of the wise, and it's craftspeople make armour and fine gowns for the ladies and gentlmen to wear. It's towers rise higher than the higest roof in the boy's kingdom, and are made of stone instead of mud brick. It's milk is all churned into cheese, and it's white doves are trianed to carry messages, or slaugtered by the augerers to read the future in thier entrails. The boy wanders the strets, starving, witht he gold beneith his shirt. He is not robbed becasue he looks to have nothing to steal. He walks untill he finds a shop with gold rings and chains behind the glass frontage. There is is a pinch-faced man who sits in the window with glass in his eyes. The boy enters, but the man shouts and chases him out. The next shop the boy enters is the same, and the next. The boy sleeps in a doorway and a lady, wandering home from her night's revels, throws a coin at his feet. 

The next morning the boys buys a bun oozing with cheese, and it is the most wonderfull thing he has ever tasted. He sits in the square eating the bun with tears running down his dirty face. A youth upon his masters buisness stops, and asks him wher he has come from. The boys story pours out like his tears. His parents are dead, he says, and his sister who has raised him loved a young man chosed to be the youth in the sacrifice. He promised to remain true to her but the wine has turned his head. Now he lives in a fine house and will not see her. His sister pines, and will not work. The people of the town shake their heads, and brought her bread fro a month, but she will not rise from her bed. The boy must bring her food and wash her bedclothes. She will not rise. She will not turn her head from the wall. The people shake thier heads and say, what ails her? She is not with child, her life is not over, but his sister will not open her eyes to it. She will not answer to the sound of her name.

The youth says, knowingly, so you have come to make your way in this place? And the boy says, no, i have brought away this gold, to break the spell, to curse the city, to make them pay, and he shows the lump of gold from his shirt.

The eyes of the aprentice light up at the sight. Come with me, he says, and takes the boy and the gold to a shop in a sooty street. There is a woman in the shop, dark-haired and broad, who looks at the boy with a jewlers eye. She turns over the gold and sees the feather of the dove, the pebbles that adhere to it's surface and says, you come from such-a-place? Naming the boys homeland. Yes, he says. She wieghts the lump and says, we must take out ten percent for the wieght of the pebbles. She hands over some coin. Give him no more than three of these, she says to the boy, nodding to the aprentice, who scowls. The two boys leave. The forigne boy hands over four coins into the hands of the aprentice, and then buys two buns, one for each. The aprentice smiles at last and suggests a flagon of wine as well. The two sit for the day in front of the fire, eating buns and becoming drunk. What will you do now? Asks the aprentice?  I will buy shoes, sasy the boy, and then return to my home to see my city laid to waste. Says the boy. How looks your sister? Asks the aprentice.

They sleep that night war in the arms of drunken women, and the next day the shoes are bought, and the boy set back out on his road. The aprentice will join him for the journy, he says. He he will not return to the hard hand of his master after so long an absence.

The return journey seems much quicker to the boy, but as his city appears, low on the horizon, he begins to dread. What if it has fallen? What if what he wishes has come to pass? He thinks of all the bread that was brought to his door, grown from the golden wheat in the feild of gold, and begins to doubt what he has done. He thinks of his sister, unfead, unwashed, her thin face turned to the wall, and his guts begin to knot as they did on the journy out.

The first person they see on the road is a young girl bringing the goats out from her family's pen. She smiles with joy on seeing the boy, and calls him by his name. When she grasps his arm he embraces her, burying his face in her sholder to hide that he wants to weep. She wants to hear where he has been, and who his friend is, and all the news from the neighbouring city. The aprentice takes up the talk, and the boy gains his composure. If the city had fallen, he thinks, surly she would know. Surly she would not greet him so like a brother in good times. 

When the gilr has passed on her way, the boy pulls out his purse. He pours out what remains of the gold and gives half of it to the aprentice that was. He swears him, there in the middle of the morning road, with the city over thier shoulder, to say nothing of the gold he had brought, or of where it had coem from. The aprentice takes the gold and swears, taking on the boys concern but thinking nothing, himself of his anxiety. 

At the door of the boys hut he knocks, as he has never done any time in his life before. This sister opens the door. Her face is washed, and she picks him up in her arms, cursing him and kissing him. She takes them both into the house, and puts before them bread that she has baked, milk that she has milked from the wild goats. The boy looks around, blinking his eyes in wonder. The aprentice gets down upon his knees and takes out a thin gold ring. He says that the boy has told him of her beauty and her pure heart, and he resolved himself to travel to her side and offer her succor in her time of grief. The girl blushes, and raises him up with her hands, and sets befor him wine and asks him where he has come from, and all the ways of his town. She blesses him for bringing her brother back unharmed, but she does not take the ring. 
It is not the way of this city to offer rings with the offer of hears, but whenthe boy becomes a man, and in his turn meets a woman to whom he wishes to make a promise, he has the last of the coins he had traded for his city's blessing set in a ring to give to her, and she likes it for the novelty and the fine work. At the ceremony of th enew young sovriegn he becomes as drunk as the rest, praying in his heart to the gods who have spared him for his crime. And the gods, who care little for gold, lay up stores for the people in the earth.