In the third dry year, the village did what villages do when they have run out of ordinary ideas: it sent a child.
Not because a child would succeed. Because a child would ask plainly, and the village had run out of plain questions.
Her name was Idi and she was eleven, and she walked north for four days with a clay jar tied to her back, and on the fourth evening she reached the place where the rain was being kept.
It was not a palace. It was a shed.