The Grace of Kings (15 page)

“I'm telling you,” the man shouted, “I'm a friend of your big boss! Treating me like this is a mistake.”

“Or you could be a spy,” his guards retorted.

The man had struggled the whole way and was out of breath. Kuni tried to not laugh when he saw the man's sweaty face, splotchy with exertion. He had a full, bushy black beard, and beads of sweat hung from the tips of the strands like dew from blades of grass in the morning. He was well muscled, and the guards had lashed the ropes about his arms very tight.

“As I live and breathe. Mün Çakri!” he said. “Are things so bad in Zudi that you've come to join me? I'll make you a captain here.” He directed the guards to loosen the ropes.

Mün Çakri was a butcher who had often drunk with Kuni and caroused about the streets of Zudi with him before he got his job as a jailer.

“Tight ship you run around here,” Çakri said, stretching his arms to get the circulation back into them. “You've become notorious as the ‘White Snake Bandit' for miles around. But when I asked about you, everyone on this mountain pretended to know nothing.”

“It could be that you frightened them with those fists the size of copper pots and that beard—I really think you look more like a bandit than I do!”

Çakri ignored Kuni. “I guess I was asking too many questions, so a couple of woodsmen jumped me and brought me to your lackeys.”

A boy brought out tea, but Çakri refused to touch his cup. Kuni laughed and then asked for two mugs of ale instead.

“I come here on official business,” Çakri said. “From the mayor.”

“Listen,” Kuni said, “the only thing the mayor could want with me is to put me in jail, and I'm definitely not interested in
that
.”

“Actually, the mayor is tempted by Krima and Shigin's call for Xana officials to defect. He thinks he might be able to get a title out of it if he presents Zudi to the rebels. And he wants you to advise him, since you're the closest thing to a bona fide rebel he knows. Because he knew I was your friend, he sent me to come and get you.”

“What's wrong?” Jia asked. “Isn't this the opportunity you've been waiting for?”

“But all these stories people tell about me,” Kuni said, “aren't really true. They're just exaggerations.”

He thought about the deaths of Hupé and the others.

“Am I cut out to be a rebel? The real world is very different from adventures in stories.”

“A little self-doubt is a good thing,” said Jia, “but not excessive doubt. Sometimes we live up to the stories other tell about us. Look around you: Hundreds follow you and believe in you. They want you to save their families; you can only do that if you take Zudi.”

Kuni thought about Muru and his son, about the old Xana mother in the marketplace trying to protect her son, about the widows whose husbands and sons would never return, about all the men and women whose lives the empire had destroyed without a thought.

“A bandit could still pray for a slim chance of being pardoned if enough money is paid,” said Kuni. “But if I become a rebel, there's no way out.”

“It's always scary to do the interesting thing,” said Jia. “Ask your heart if it's also the right thing.”

I believe in the dream I had about you. Remember that.

By the time Mün Çakri, Kuni Garu, and Kuni's gang arrived at Zudi, it was dusk. The gates of the city were closed.

“Open up!” Çakri shouted. “It's Kuni Garu, the mayor's honored guest.”

“Kuni Garu is a criminal,” the soldier atop the wall shouted. “The mayor has ordered the gates sealed.”

“I guess he got cold feet,” Kuni said. “Rebellion seemed good in theory, but when it came time to take the plunge, the mayor just couldn't do it.”

His theory was confirmed as Than Carucono and Cogo Yelu emerged from the bushes by the side of the road to join them.

“The mayor has kicked us out of town because he knows we're your friends,” Cogo said. “Yesterday he heard that the rebels were winning, and he invited us to dinner to discuss plans for his defection. Today he heard that the emperor was finally taking the rebellion seriously and would send the Imperial army shortly, and so he did this. That man is like a leaf dancing in the wind.”

Kuni smiled. “I think it's too late for him to change his mind now.”

He asked one of the men for a bow. He took a silk scroll from his sleeve and tied it around an arrow. Then he nocked it and shot it high into the sky. The men watched as the arrow traced out a high arc over the walls and fell into Zudi.

“Now we wait.”

Anticipating that the vacillating mayor might change his mind, Kuni had sent a few men ahead earlier that day to sneak into Zudi before the gates were closed. They spent the rest of the afternoon spreading rumors that the hero Kuni Garu was leading a rebel army to liberate Zudi from Xana and return the city to the revived Cocru.

“No more taxes,” they whispered. “No more corvées. No more killing whole families for one man's crimes.”

Kuni's letter to the city asked for the citizens to rise up and topple the mayor. “You will be supported by Cocru's army of liberation,” the letter promised. If one considered a band of bandits an “army,” and if one ignored the fact that the King of Cocru had no idea who Kuni Garu was, the letter could be considered to sort of tell the truth.

But the citizens did as Kuni asked. Chaos erupted in the streets, and the people of the city, long resentful of the heavy hand of Xana rule, made quick work of the mayor and his staff. The heavy gates swung open, and citizens watched in amazement as Kuni Garu and his tiny band of bandits strode in.

“Where's the Cocru army?” one of the riot leaders asked.

Kuni climbed onto the balcony of a nearby house and surveyed the throng in the streets.

“
You
are the Cocru army!” he shouted. “Do you see how much power you have when you act without fear? Even if Cocru lives on only in the heart of one man, he will still overthrow Xana!”

Platitude or not, the crowd erupted into applause, and by acclamation, Kuni Garu became the Duke of Zudi. A few pointed out that titles of nobility really couldn't be handed out in such a democratic fashion, but these killjoys were ignored.

It was now the end of the eleventh month, three months after Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin first saw the prophecy in the fish.

CHAPTER NINE

EMPEROR ERISHI

PAN: THE ELEVENTH MONTH IN THE THIRD YEAR OF THE REIGN OF RIGHTEOUS FORCE.

In Pan, wine never stopped flowing. Fountains in the floor of the Grand Audience Hall of the palace sprayed and splashed wine of all colors into jade-lined pools. Ditches and ducts connected the pools so that the wines mixed together, frothing and intoxicating the air as those who approached the emperor gingerly picked their way around them.

Chatelain Goran Pira suggested to the young emperor that perhaps the pools could be shaped so that they represented the seas, and the parts of the floor that remained dry could be used to represent the Islands of Dara.

Wouldn't it be fun, he humbly offered, for the emperor to be able to survey his realm from his throne? Just by looking down, he would see the literally wine-dark seas and enjoy the sight of his ministers and generals island-hopping as they tried to walk up to present their reports and counsel.

The young emperor clapped his hands together in delight. Chatelain Pira—really Chief Augur Pira, but he was so humble that he retained his old title, which he said made him feel closer to the emperor—always had such wonderful ideas! Emperor Erishi devoted many hours to drawing diagrams and directing the workmen as they dug up the golden bricks that tiled the floor of the Grand Audience Hall to put in sculpted models of the most important geographical features of the Islands: red coral for the cinder cone that was Mount Kana; white coral for the glacier-capped Mount Rapa; mother-of-pearl for the smooth sides of Mount Kiji, with a giant inlaid sapphire for Lake Arisuso and an emerald for Lake Dako; . . . culminating in a miniature garden of carefully cultivated bonsai trees that stood in for the towering oaks of old Rima. It was much too fun for the little emperor to pretend to be a giant striding across the land, dealing out life and death in this shrunken version of his realm.

When ministers and generals came up to him with reports of troubling rebels in remote corners of the empire, he impatiently brushed them away. Go talk to the regent! Couldn't they see he was too busy playing with Chatelain Pira, a wonderful friend who always warned him not to work too hard and not to neglect having fun while he was young? That was the whole point of being emperor, wasn't it?

“Rénga,”
Pira said, “what do you think about a maze made of fine fish and tasty meats? We could hang all manner of delicious treats from the ceiling, and you could wear a blindfold and try to make a path through the maze by taste alone.”

Now
that
was another brilliant suggestion. Emperor Erishi immediately set about planning for such a diversion.

If someone had informed him that men were dying every day in the Islands for lack of a cup of rice, he would have been surprised. “Why do they insist on eating rice? Meat is so much better!”

CHAPTER TEN

THE REGENT

PAN: THE ELEVENTH MONTH IN THE THIRD YEAR OF THE REIGN OF RIGHTEOUS FORCE.

Regent Crupo did not enjoy his job.

Chatelain Pira was the one who had explained to the emperor that the best way to honor his father was to build the Great Mausoleum, a house for his eternal afterlife that would be even more splendid than the palace in Pan. Since the emperor's mother had died long ago after displeasing Mapidéré, his father was really the only parent he
could
celebrate. Didn't Kon Fiji, the Great Ano Sage, teach that a child with filial piety always honored his parents to the best of his ability?

But it was up to Lügo Crupo to make that dream real. He had to turn the emperor's childish drawings into real plans, draft the men to make the plans come to life, and order the soldiers to drive the lazy laborers to do their duty.

“Why do you fill the emperor's head with such foolish ideas?” asked Crupo.

“Regent, remember how we got to where we are today. Do you not feel the ghost of Emperor Mapidéré watching over us?”

Crupo felt a chill going up his spine. But he was a rational man, and he did not believe in ghosts. “What's done is done.”

“Then feel the eyes of the world watching, scrutinizing us for signs of devotion. As you said, it can sometimes be difficult for servants to express their loyalty clearly. Think of the monument to Emperor Mapidéré as a complicated way for us to earn tranquility of mind and certainty in our places.”

Crupo had nodded at the wisdom of Pira's words. He made thousands of men into slaves to the memory of the dead emperor and ignored their protests. Sacrifices were necessary in the pursuit of legitimacy.

That early exchange with Pira also established the pattern that would hold between them. He was the regent, holder of the Seal of Xana and the doer of deeds. Pira was the emperor's playmate, the voice that distracted the emperor. Together, they pulled the strings that moved the puppet that was Emperor Erishi. It had seemed like a good deal, one in which he got the better end of the bargain. But lately, he wasn't so sure.

He had craved power, yes, lots of it, and when Pira had come to him with that audacious plan, he had seized the chance. But actually exercising the power that came from the Throne of Xana was not nearly as enjoyable as he had imagined. Yes, it had been fun to watch the other ministers and generals cower before him and pay him obeisance, but so much of the work of being regent consisted of mere tedium! He did not want to hear about harvest numbers, petitions from starving peasants, reports of corvée desertions, and this latest plague, garrison commanders complaining about rebellions. Why couldn't they take care of the bandits in the areas they were responsible for? They were the soldiers, and that was
their
job.

Delegate, delegate. He delegated everything he could, and still, they came to him for decisions.

Lügo Crupo was a scholar, a man of letters, and he was sick of being bogged down by such petty concerns. He wanted to be the architect of grand visions, of new systems of laws, and new philosophies that would dazzle the ages. Who had time to philosophize, though, when people knocked on your door every quarter of an hour?

Crupo had been born in Cocru, back when it was still the strongest among the incessantly warring Tiro states. His parents, propertyless bakers in a small town, died during one of these border skirmishes. He was captured by bandits and taken to Haan, the most learned of the Tiro states, to be sold as a bonded servant, but in Ginpen, the Haan capital, the constables raided the bandits and freed Crupo into the streets.

Boys in Crupo's situation generally did not have much of a future. But he was lucky that as he begged for food in the streets of Ginpen as a refugee, the great scholar Gi Anji, famed lawgiver and adviser to many kings, passed by.

Gi Anji was a busy man and, like many who lived in Ginpen, had learned to harden his heart and ignore the many street urchins and beggars who shouted tales of woe—it was impossible to determine which were telling the truth. But on that day, he saw something in little Lügo Crupo's dark-brown eyes that moved him, a spark of yearning for something greater, not just hunger for food. He stopped and beckoned the boy to come closer.

And so Crupo became Anji's student. He was not one of those bright boys who mastered subjects effortlessly—like Tan Féüji, the precocious son of a famous Haan scholar and Gi Anji's favorite. And he had a hard time adapting to Anji's school.

Anji's favorite method of instruction was to engage in a group dialogue with his students, asking them carefully crafted questions that probed their understanding, challenged their assumptions, and led them down new avenues of thought.

Whereas Féüji could immediately come up with three different answers whenever Anji asked him a question, Crupo struggled to even understand the point Anji made by asking it. Crupo had to work hard for every bit of progress. It took him a long time to learn the zyndari letters and longer still to master enough logograms to read Anji's simpler treatises. Often the master grew impatient with the boy and threw up his hands in despair. Conversing with the bright Féüji was so much more pleasant.

Yet Crupo persevered. He wanted more than anything to please Master Anji, and if that meant that he had to read the same book three times to absorb the meaning, that he had to practice carving and writing the same logograms a hundred times, that he had to sit and work out a parable like a puzzle for hours, he did them all without complaint. He was the very definition of diligence as he squeezed every minute out of the day to study: He read while he ate; he did not play games with the other boys; he sat on sharp pebbles instead of sitting mats so that he would concentrate instead of becoming too comfortable and falling asleep.

Gradually, Crupo became one of Anji's best students. When speaking to kings, Anji often mentioned that of all the young men he had taught in his life, only Féüji and Crupo had understood everything he had to teach them and then gone on into the terra incognita of new ideas.

Once he left Anji's school, Crupo tried to become an adviser to the court of Cocru, his homeland. But while the king treated him with respect, he was never given an official position. Instead, he had to support himself by lecturing and teaching.

In addition to his lectures and pamphlets, Crupo's calligraphy was particularly admired by the literati. In contrast to his carefully constructed essays and tightly woven arguments, he shaped his wax logograms with the sensitivity of a child as well as the passionate abandon of a swordsman, and the zyndari letters from his brush leapt off the page like a flock of migrating wild geese captured in midflight over a still pond. Many imitated his calligraphy, but few could equal or even approach his artistry.

But there was a measure of condescension in their praise of Crupo that rankled. Some seemed almost surprised that a man of such humble origins could be the creator of such creative and artistic words. Behind the recognition there was also an implicit dismissal, as if Crupo's hard work could never measure up to Féüji's natural brilliance.

Crupo was never as famous as Tan Féüji. Tan became the Prime Minister of Haan at the age of twenty, and his essays on governance were more widely circulated and highly regarded than anything Crupo wrote. Even King Réon of Xana, the future Emperor Mapidéré, who had little good to say about scholars of the Six States, said he found Féüji's writing enlightening.

But Crupo thought Féüji's essays insipid. They were so flowery and illogical! All this concern about “the virtuous ruler” and the “harmonious society” and the “path of balance” nauseated him. They were constructed like castles in the air, with soaring rhetoric and lovely turns of phrase, but no care for the foundation.

Féüji's belief in a ruler who ruled but lightly, stepping out of the way of the people, who could better their own circumstances through hard work and their own initiative, seemed to Crupo hopelessly naïve. If the experience of living in the war-torn Tiro states taught men anything, it was that the common people were little better than animals who had to be herded and corralled by strong rulers advised by men with vision. What strong states needed were severe laws administered efficiently and without mercy.

And Crupo knew that all the kings and ministers, in their heart of hearts, agreed with
him
, not Féüji. Lügo was the one who said what they really needed to hear, yet they continued to heap praise and honor only on Tan. His many letters to the Cocru court in Çaruza, offering his services, went unanswered.

Crupo was despondent and consumed with jealousy.

He went to Gi Anji. “Master, I work so much harder than Tan. Why am I not as well respected?”

“Tan writes of the world as it ought to be, not as it is,” Anji said.

Crupo bowed to his teacher. “Do
you
think I am the better writer?”

Gi Anji looked at him and sighed. “Tan writes without concern about pleasing others, and that is why men find his voice fresh and original.”

The veiled criticism stung.

One day, while at the latrine, Crupo observed that the rats in the latrine were thin and sickly. He remembered that the rats he had observed in the granary earlier were fat and lively.

A man's circumstances are not determined by his talents,
Crupo thought,
but by where he chooses to put his talents to work. Xana is strong and Cocru is weak. Only a fool goes down with a sinking ship.

He defected from Cocru and went to the court of Xana, where he rose quickly because Réon thought having another student taught by Gi Anji was the next best thing to getting Tan Féuji himself.

But every time he was consulted, he heard behind the king's words an unvoiced regret:
If only Tan Féüji were sitting here with me instead . . .

Crupo was enraged by the thought that King Réon valued what he could not have more than what he possessed. He was constantly racked by the pain of being deemed only second best, not quite good enough. He worked even harder, trying to come up with ways to strengthen Xana and weaken the other Tiro states. He wanted the king to acknowledge, one day, that
he
was much more valuable than Féüji could ever have been.

After the fall of the Haan capital, Ginpen, Tan Féüji was captured.

Réon was ecstatic. “Finally,” the king boasted to his ministers, among whose ranks Crupo stood, “I will have a chance to convince a great man to join my cause. There are many in the Islands who admire his wisdom, and having him on the side of Xana would be better than a thousand horses or ten fearless generals. He is as exceptional among mere scholars as a cruben among mere whales or a dyran among mere fish.”

Crupo closed his eyes. He would never be able to escape from the shadow of this mirage, this glib man who wrote of ideals instead of truths. Even when what he said was useless, King Réon wanted the prestige of the Féüji name.

Crupo visited Tan Féüji in prison that night.

Knowing how much the king valued this particular prisoner, the guards handled Féüji more like a guest. He was given the room of the prison warden, and the guards spoke to him with respect. He was free to do as he liked as long as he did not leave.

“It's been a long time,” Crupo said, upon seeing his old friend. Tan's smooth, deep-black face was unlined, and Crupo imagined the life of ease he had led, toasted by kings and dukes, never having to scrabble for a living.

“Too long!” Féüji said, clasping Crupo by the arms. “I had hoped to see you at Master Anji's funeral, but I understand you were too busy. The master thought of you often during the last years of his life.”

“Did he?” Crupo tried to clasp Féüji's arms with as much warmth. But he felt awkward, nervous, stiff. After a moment, he stepped back.

They sat down on the soft mats on the floor, a pot of tea between them. Crupo sat at first in the formal position of
mipa rari
, his back straight and tall and his weight on his knees.

Across the table, Féüji laughed. “Lügo, have you forgotten that we've known each other since we were schoolboys? I thought you were here to visit an old friend. Why do you sit as if we're negotiating a treaty?”

Embarrassed, Crupo shifted into the familiar
géüpa
to match Féüji, with his bottom on the floor and his legs crossed and folded so that each foot was under the opposite thigh.

“Why do you look so uncomfortable?” Féüji asked. “I think you're hiding something.”

Crupo started and spilled some tea from his cup.

“I know what it is,” Féüji said. “Old friend, you came to me because you wished to apologize for not being able to dissuade King Réon from his mad vision of conquest.”

Crupo hid his flushed face behind his sleeves as he composed himself.

“And now you're embarrassed because you think an apology inadequate, when Haan has fallen and I am here, a prisoner awaiting execution. You don't know what to say.”