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fromabove, but he did not dare light a taper. Finally the passage took a sharp turn to the right, and then a long gentle curve to the left, and opened to a wide, tall space.
    He pressed down on his cane, stood up to his full height, and lit the torch affixed to the wall. The large, beautifully crafted mahogany box, sitting on its stone stand in the centre of the chamber, seemed to draw the light.
    The Master Carver took a deep breath of the mineral-rich air and thought, First the Fan Kuei ships sail up our coast, then they dare enter the great river. Maybe now is the time.
    When the Round-Eyed barbarians had begun to arrive in the south down by Canton, almost four generations ago, some of the Chosen’s descendants had believed it was the time of White Birds on Water. But the Master Carver of that time had rejected this conclusion. Although the arrival of the British and their ludicrous desire to trade trinkets was a new reality in the Manchu-ruled Middle Kingdom, it was not the appointed time.
    The Long Noses had tried to trade with the Middle Kingdom for many years thereafter but had always been rebuffed. What did these intensely ugly men have to offer China? Their goods were inferior to those readily available throughout the Middle Kingdom. Their manners were appalling, few spoke even the rudiments of the Common Speech, and none could read.
    The Carver flipped open the latches of the mahogany box on the stone pedestal. They made reports like a firecracker in the underground space. He paused and then opened the case. The Narwhal Tusk, now deeply yellowed with age, nestled on its plush purple silk pad. Perhaps his talented son would be the one who wouldhave to make a replica of the Tusk. Hopefully he would be up to the task.
    The Carver leaned down and looked in the first of the three windows in the Tusk: hundreds of Han Chinese men with shaved foreheads and pigtails seemingly dancing with long reeds in their mouths. “What must have seemed fanciful back then is common now,” he said aloud to the empty space.
    The arrival of the pale foreigners’ opium did not begin the Age of White Birds on Water, although it was surely the precursor of change. The Master Carver of that time had indeed readied himself. But although there was noted change in some of the Middle Kingdom, there was no real change here. Not at the Bend in the River, where the black cloud in the sky had led the first Carver. There had even been sightings of a very young, violent, teary-eyed general from Beijing. But not here—not in the agricultural backwater where they had been told—no, promised —that the rebirth would happen.
    Everyone in the Middle Kingdom felt the creep of the darkness that had begun some three or four generations before.
    But Q’in She Huang’s order was to allow the darkness in. To foster it. Just as only the brutality of winter cleanses the earth for the spring’s planting, so the darkness would have to deepen to permit the arrival of the light.
    And the darkness was surely intensifying. The Confucian, who was the nominal proconsul for the district, had lost one of his sons to the drug, and his overly proper wife was so addicted that she once sold herself to a cotton merchant to get the money she needed for her daily pipes. The Confucian, no doubt, thought that the predicted darkness had already arrived.
    But it was not the Age of White Birds on Water. Not yet. There is no darkness here, the Master Carver thought, but the time approaches.
    The Master Carver allowed his fingers to trace the supple firmness of the ivory, lingering on the centre section for just a moment. Only in ivory could such carving exist. Only its malleable density, its exquisite solidity could permit such work. And narwhal was the purest form of ivory in the world—and so very hard to find. Almost thirty years ago he had secured a tusk and stored it away carefully should it ever be needed to produce a replica. Now he wondered