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PROLOGUE

IT IS AS SIMPLE AS THE NIGHT AT THE CLOSE OF EACH DAY, a black curtain drawn over the countryside, halting progress and productivity. The dark stifles the work, the schooling, the planting, the harvest.

It is as simple as heat and toil and falling into bed, limbs numbed from the workday effort. Of a lifetime spent in that manner.

It is as simple as lying awake after midnight in the stink of coal oil lamps, the muggy embrace of the hot mattress.

It is as simple as waiting for things to get better, and the entirety of a youth spent in that waiting, decades of an existence no different from one’s parents’, indistinguishable from one’s grandparents’.

A people gather themselves for an effort beyond any they’ve attempted before, striving not just for their own benefit, but for their children’s, for generations yet unimagined, for the hope of at last improving their lot.

And they reach.