Candle shadows swayed red in the deepening night; over an open book, he pondered long.
A thousand troubles locked between his brows; how much of his heart did his tapping fingers wear away?
Wang Yang had thought of six possibilities for the moment. Weary of thinking, he stood and turned to look. The little table was empty. A-Wu, who should have been practicing her writing, had moved to a corner at some point, with a large bamboo basket before her, and was sorting through something with her head lowered.
"A-Wu, what are you doing? Have you finished your writing?"
A-Wu looked up, her eyes curving into crescents.
"I'm making peng cakes for you, Young Master!"
"What?"
"The day after tomorrow is the Double Ninth Festival! We have to eat peng cakes! I'll pick out the peng grass leaves first, boil them soft and pound them fine, then mix them with rice flour and malt sugar and steam them. They're delicious!"
Eating peng cakes, like ascending the heights, wearing dogwood, and drinking chrysanthemum wine, was a Double Ninth Festival custom of the time. There were two ways to make peng cakes. The first used peng grass leaves, as A-Wu had described, producing green cakes rather like green rice dumplings. But this method required both rice and sugar, and A-Wu had only eaten them once in her life.
The peng cakes people usually ate were made the second way, using neither leaves nor rice, but peng seeds. Peng grass formed seed heads in autumn, its tiny seeds resembling wild rice, and could serve as a staple to stave off hunger. (The Brief Account of Wei recorded that when Bao Chu encountered famine, he "gathered peng seeds, obtaining several pecks each day, and made food for his mother." These were the same peng