When asked where her shelter was, she pointed toward a bamboo grove beyond which lay green rice fields, and she kept pointing. In her blank eyes, people saw a witless woman, perhaps born mute, perhaps turned mute out of terror of the carnage that might have claimed her mind. She watched the bandits drive a long bamboo pole through the men's bodies and carry them like pigs on skewers to the river, where they dropped them and then sat and smoked their bamboo water pipes. In the melee, the old woman crawled into a bamboo grove, and from there she watched the bandits hack off older women's breasts and stuff their mouths with the bloodstained flesh. After the Black Flags overwhelmed them, they took with them the merchandise and young women and slaughtered the rest. Most caravans were easy prey to bandits, but not hers. One evening, her group was attacked by the Chinese Hak-kis―Black Flags bandits―and it fought back. They bought cotton and stags' antlers from the Annamese. After breaking up into smaller groups, they went on foot from village to village, peddling salt, sugar, vermicelli, opium, iron and saucepans. It came every winter and stayed until spring.

By and by, they knew that she came from Yunnan in a caravan of 200 mules. Her braided hair hung down her back in a long thick pigtail, and her small eyes were serene and empty. She was clothed in Chinese garments-a small black cap, purple trousers fastened above the ankles showing her thick-soled curved-tipped cloth shoes, and a waist-length grey cotton tunic buttoned on the right side with long, wide sleeves folded back at the ends. Yet every day they watched her come and go, a lone figure under a lone tree. No one knew where she came from or why she chose to sit under the persimmon tree a ways from the market. Merchants came, too, taken by the quality of her wares. All lingered to feel the fibres, long, shiny and light, so light they seemed weightless. From the market that convened every day outside the citadel, someone went out of curiosity to see her silk and became fascinated.

Along the rampart of the old town of Hanoi by the moat green with lily pads stood a solitary ebony persimmon tree and under this tree sat an old woman who sold raw silk.

Pale moon ebony black persimmon