Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [228]
He nodded. “Even when I first came the village was poor and the village lord was stern and greedy. Drought followed upon drought each year, withering the rice fields and drying out the pond. The young people eluded the greedy lord’s cruel grasp and ran to the cities in search of a better life. Great changes came to China and the village was abandoned. The houses crumbled and returned to dust and the winds came and blew away their dust. Then one year the great Ta Chiang rose and covered the land and there it remained until the summer, when it crept back into its bed and the drought began again. Each winter the Ta Chiang comes closer and stays longer and longer, and very soon all that will be left is the hill with the ancestral hall of the woman Lilin and her children.”
Lysandra thanked him for his story and then she lit the sticks of fragrant incense she had brought with her and knelt on the floor and prayed, kowtowing many times to the spirits of her loved ones.
She said good-bye to the holy man and placed an offering in his bowl. A cool soft wind stroked her pale hair, touching her cheek gently as she turned for one last long look at the temple built by Mayling for her family, glowing like a beautiful scarlet beacon on its hill, and she smiled. “She knows,” she said contentedly to Matt. “She knows I was here to say ‘thank you.’”
The wind filled the sails of the shabby black junk as it pulled away from the riverbank on its return journey, sighing across the flat desolate landscape, carrying away the dust and the earth layer by layer, until very soon nothing would remain but the vermillion temple on the hill.
ELIZABETH ADLER is the bestselling author of Sooner or Later, Now or Never, The Secret of the Villa Mimosa, and other internationally acclaimed novels.
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Copyright © 1992 by Elizabeth Adler
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eISBN: 978-0-307-57468-8
Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press
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