Nu, the Girl of the Black Tortoise

Nu, the Girl, is the tenth of the twenty-eight xiu and the third mansion of the northern palace, the Black Tortoise. Its name means the girl or maidservant, sometimes the Weaver Girl of the folk tale told across this quarter of the sky, identified with stars in Aquarius. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Bat. As one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions it tracks a segment of the Moon's monthly circuit. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, in which the twenty-eight xiu order the heavens into four palaces of seven mansions each, the mansion occupied by the Moon on a given night informing the almanac's reckoning of the day's auspicious or inauspicious character.

Nu's place in the Cowherd and Weaver Girl story, as the Weaver Girl herself in some tellings, sits beside Niu's Cowherd across the same stretch of Milky Way star field that the Arabic manazil, entirely independently, populated with its own ostrich-and-river imagery at Al Naaim a short distance further along the ecliptic in that tradition's own count, another case of two unrelated systems reaching for river and separation imagery in roughly the same visually striking region of sky.