A child who ought to be helpless is already a force — an infant who kills what comes to kill him, or a boy grown to a man's stature while still a boy. This is the shape of supernatural growth, and two witnesses carry it from opposite ends of the world with the same uncanny speed.

The Greek witness sits in Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography of the 1st–2nd century CE). Alcmena bears two sons — Hercules, by Zeus, "the elder by one night" — and "When the child was eight months" old, Hera sends two huge serpents to his bed to destroy him. The infant Hercules does not wait to be rescued: he "killed the serpents by strangling them with both his" hands — the strength of the grown hero already awake in the cradle, the whole labouring life foretold in one grip of a baby's fists.

The Chinese witness, in E. T. C. Werner's Myths & Legends of China (published 1922), tells the birth and the growth as one continuous marvel. No-cha is born not as a baby but as a portent: his mother is told she has "given birth to a monstrous freak" and what his father finds is that "A ball of flesh was rolling on the floor like a wheel", which he cuts open with his sword to loose the child inside. The growth then races ahead of nature — "At seven years of age No-cha was already six feet in height." The prodigy is not a single feat but the boy's whole body outrunning the calendar, a hero the world will need arriving before the world is ready.

Both records refuse the slow human clock. One puts a grown man's power in an eight-month-old's hands; the other simply lets the boy become his full size while still a child. If a people imagines its greatest deliverer, why does it so often insist he be dangerous before he can even speak — that the strength arrive first, and the years catch up after?