Chapter 22: Rain

The rain came on the twenty-third, in the afternoon, and Auntie Tang's niece started her labor in the same hour, which Auntie Tang said afterward was the gods having a joke, and not a good one. Mei saw the weather first. She'd been watching the hills all morning. The air had gone thick and yellow and still, and the swallows were flying low over the water, so low their wings flicked the surface, and the willows on the north bank had turned their leaves over so the pale undersides showed. On the post the water was three fingers over the fifth line, and it had been two at dawn. "Storm," she said to Fish. "By the second hour after noon. A big one." "How do you know?" "Swallows. Willows. My knees." She looked at the hills, where a long plum-dark cloud had come up over the ridge and was sitting…