The Grace of Kings (23 page)

It was now night. As the gates of Na Thion opened, King Jizu knelt in the middle of the road. He held up the Seal of Rima in one hand and a torch in the other. He looked very alone in that circle of light surrounded by darkness.

“Remember what you promised,” he said to the approaching General Namen. “I have ceased all resistance and I am at your mercy. Do you agree that this is so?”

General Namen nodded.

Jizu looked to his ministers, kneeling on the two sides of the main street of Na Thion. They were dressed in their finest formal clothing, as if it were the day of his coronation. The bright colors and fabrics made a sharp contrast against the tattered rags on the commoners arrayed behind them, like the contrast between the calm dignity on the faces of the ministers—they were witnessing a ceremony, a matter of ritual and politics—and the fear and anger on the faces of the emaciated crowd.

The king laughed quietly. “And now, my loyal ministers, you'll get the symbol you wished for. I will await you on the other side.”

He dropped the torch and lit himself on fire. His clothes had been doused with fragrant oil, and the flames quickly consumed his body and the Seal of Rima. He screamed and screamed, and all the men around, from both Xana and Rima, stood as if frozen in their places.

By the time they finally doused the flames, King Jizu was dead, and the Seal of Rima damaged beyond recognition.

“He hasn't lived up to his promise,” one of Namen's lieutenants said. “We can't bring this charred body back to Pan as a trophy and parade it in triumph. Should we slaughter the city?”

General Namen shook his head. The smell of burned flesh nauseated him, and he felt very old and tired at that moment. He had liked Jizu's pale face, his curled hair and thin nose. He had admired the way the boy held his back straight, and the way he looked at him, the conqueror, with no fear in his calm gray eyes. He would have liked to sit and have a long talk with the young man, a man he thought very brave.

He wished again that Kindo Marana had not sought him out. He wished he were sitting in front of the fire in his house, his hand stroking a contented Tozy. But he loved Xana, and love required sacrifices.

There are enough sacrifices for now.

“He has lived up to a promise greater than the one he made to me. The people of Na Thion are safe from the sword of Xana today.”

The densely packed people of Na Thion greeted his announcement with silence. Their eyes were focused on the kneeling ministers, now trembling like leaves in a breeze.

Namen sighed.
War is like a heavy wheel that spins with its own
momentum.

He continued in a toneless voice. “But load all of Jizu's ministers into prison carts; we'll bring them back to Pan and feed them to the emperor's menagerie.”

And the crowd broke into wild, barbaric cheers; their dancing, pounding feet sent tremors through the ground under the feet of the Xana army.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“YOUR MAJESTY”

DIMU: THE FOURTH MONTH IN THE FOURTH YEAR OF THE REIGN OF RIGHTEOUS FORCE.

At Dimu, where the great Liru emptied into the sea, the channel of the river was almost a mile wide. On the north side of the river mouth, across from Dimu, was the city of Dimushi, Dimu's younger, richer, more sophisticated sister. While ships departing from Dimu were laden with the produce of the farms of the Cocru heartland, Dimushi's docks were filled with ships carrying the thousand-hammered steel, lacquerware, and porcelain made by the skilled craftsmen of Géfica, part of the old Tiro state of Amu.

After the Unification, taxes, goods, and people from all over the Islands arrived at Dimu and Dimushi before sailing up the Liru to Pan, the glittering heart of the empire. On both shores, countless water mills churned, powering millstones and workshops that drove commerce along the watery highway. More money flowing through the mouth of the Liru meant more of everything, good and bad. Travelers to the twin cities said that if you wanted good food and honest merchants, you went to Dimu, but if you were in search of beautiful women and nights that never ended, you went to Dimushi.

These days, Dimu and Dimushi stared across at each other like two angry wolves across a ravine. Dimu was where King Huno set up his court, and his ten thousand rebels waited for the chance to cross the river and march on Pan. Dimushi was where Tanno Namen waited with ten thousand Imperial troops, looking for an opportunity to crush the rebels. The Liru itself was patrolled by the great ships of the Imperial navy, a moving wooden wall that separated the two sides. Once in a while, one of the ships would launch a flaming bucket of oil at Dimu, and as the men on shore scattered, cursing, the catapult operators on the ships laughed uproariously.

As the Imperial forces in Dimushi seemed content to do nothing except offer up a low level of constant harassment of the defenses at Dimu, Huno Krima decided to ignore them. After all, he was now King Huno, and he had more important matters to attend to.

Such as his new palace.

Huno Krima might not have known much about being king, but he held as an article of faith that a great king had to have a great palace. A Tiro state would not be properly respected unless it had a palace as grand as—no, grander than—those of the other Tiro states.

And so the soldiers of West Cocru spent their days not in drills, but in hauling wood and stacking brick, in digging foundations and shaping stone.

Faster, higher, bigger!
King Huno berated his ministers and architects.
Why is the progress on the palace so slow?

Faster, faster, faster!
the ministers insisted to the captains and lieutenants, now acting as construction foremen.
You must make the men work harder.

Faster, faster, faster!
the foremen screamed at the soldiers, now pressed into service as laborers. And they were liberal with the use of whips and canes and other methods of amplifying their message.

Some of the soldiers began to wonder why they were “rebels” if what they were doing was pretty much the same as what they had been doing for Emperor Erishi at the Mausoleum or in the Grand Tunnels.

The soldiers' grumbling reached King Huno's ears.

The king thundered and raged at the ungrateful men, who refused to see the difference between laboring unwillingly for a tyrant like Emperor Erishi and fervently contributing to the glory of their liberator and their new country. The men who were whispering such things were clearly spies of the empire, here to sow the seeds of dissatisfaction and dissent and to spread lies and propaganda. They must be rooted out.

Trusted officers, led by the captain of the guards, were assigned by the king to form a special secret unit whose members would walk through the camps at night, listening for those who dared to speak against the honor of King Huno and West Cocru. They wore black kerchiefs tightly fastened by a knot in the back of the head as an addition to their uniforms, and those that the Black Caps accused of treason were never heard from again.

The more traitors the Black Caps caught, the more afraid King Huno became. It seemed that the empire had spies everywhere. He would stare for minutes at trembling ministers who had forgotten to properly address him as “Your Majesty.” He would ask one man to spy on another, only to tell the other one an hour later to spy on the first. How could he be sure that the Black Caps themselves had not been infiltrated by Imperial spies too?

The solution was obvious. He gathered a few men that he especially trusted and gave them the authority to spy on the Black Caps. These men wrapped white kerchiefs knotted at the backs of their heads to signify their elevated level of trust. The first man they accused of treason was the former captain of the guards, leader of the Black Caps—the result disappointed King Huno, but he thought it made perfect sense. Just as a fish rots from the head down, corruption started at the top. Of course the captain of the guards would betray him.

So the Black Caps watched the people, while the White Caps watched the Black Caps. But who was going to watch the White Caps? This troubled King Huno greatly. He thought and thought and came up with the Gray Caps.

Every solution seemed to create a new problem, and King Huno fell into despair.

During the nights, men began to run away from the camps in Dimu—first a trickle, and then, gradually, a flood.

“Maybe we should run away too, Rat,” Dafiro whispered to his brother. He was careful to do this out of the hearing of anyone else. One could never be sure who was a Black Cap in disguise. “Before we are also called traitors.”

But Ratho shook his head. He still remembered the thrill of the moment he plunged the knife into the Xana soldier, the first man that he ever killed. King Huno was the one who showed him that he could stand up like a man and take back the life that the empire was going to grind into dust with the same carelessness as the empire crushed stones for the foundation of the Mausoleum. King Huno promised that men like Ratho would be able to bring down the empire and avenge his mother and father.

Ratho would not forget that.

The camps at Dimu still had room for ten thousand men, but more than half the bunks were empty at night.

“Why is the palace still not done?” King Huno raged. “I told you to hurry. Hurry!”

None of the ministers dared to tell him that there were now not enough soldiers to maintain the construction schedule. Press gangs roamed the surrounding countryside, forcefully conscripting any men who still hadn't run away. Deserters who were caught were executed in front of those who remained to instill lessons in loyalty, but this seemed to only make the problem worse, not better.

Finally, even the sentries posted on the banks of the Liru had to be pulled back into the city to work on the construction of the palace, the only project the king cared about.

“General, lookouts sent aloft in battle kites report counting smoke from cooking fires in front of only one out of every ten tents at dinnertime.”

“It's time,” General Namen said.

In the dead of the night, while King Huno's soldiers slept the sleep of exhaustion and fear, five thousand Imperial infantry silently floated across the Liru on shallow-bottomed transports, landing a few miles up the river. As they marched toward Dimu, the Imperial navy began to bombard the shore with an intensity never before seen by the defenders. The bright arcs traced out by the tumbling buckets of flaming oil were like meteors that lit up the sky, and in their flickering light, swarms of arrows screamed toward the camps where King Huno's last soldiers lay sleeping.

It was a rout, pure and simple. Half of West Cocru's soldiers died before they were even fully awake or had put on their armor. The other half tried to put up some resistance and found that they should have spent their days practicing with swords and bows, not chiseling stones and sawing lumber. But it was too late for regret.

King Huno grabbed his scepter and the smooth new jade Seal of West Cocru. He leapt into his carriage and screamed at his driver to hurry. They had to get out of Dimu right away and go back to Çaruza, where King Thufi would have to give him command of the rest of the rebel forces so that he could avenge this humiliating defeat.

It's not fair,
he fumed. The righteous hatred that his men shared for Xana should have made them invincible. The only explanation was that his troops had been betrayed by cowards hidden within their ranks. He lost only because the Imperial general, that decrepit and crafty Namen, had too many dirty tricks and spies. He needed not only the Black Caps and the White Caps and the Gray Caps, but also caps of every hue of the rainbow.

“Faster, faster,
faster
!” he barked at his driver.

The driver was a man in his thirties. The tattoos on his face showed that he had been a convicted felon under the laws of Xana. Instead of whipping the horses as King Huno had expected, he let the horses trot along leisurely and turned around to face the king.

“My name is Théca Kimo, from the Tunoa Islands.”

Huno looked at him blankly.

“I was one of the first to heed the call for rebellion in Napi, to join you and Duke Shigin,” said Théca. “You and Zopa Shigin shared a drink with me that night, after we won.”

“Do not speak of Shigin as though he were my equal—”

But Théca interrupted him. “My brother fell sick ten days ago, but his hundred-chief wouldn't let him rest because everyone had to work on your palace. He fainted in the noon heat, and a foreman whipped him until he died. Did you know about this?”

King Huno had no idea what this man was babbling about, but he caught another mistake in his manners. “You must say ‘Your Majesty' when you speak to me. Now hurry up and get me out of here.”

“I don't think so,
Your Majesty
,” Kimo said. He yanked on the reins so that the carriage lurched to a sudden stop, tumbling King Huno out of his seat. Then with a swift stroke of his sword, Kimo severed Huno Krima's head from his shoulders.