The Grace of Kings (3 page)

Phin bent down and touched his forehead to the baby's. The gesture calmed the child. Phin whispered, “We have only each other now. Don't let what has been done to our family pass into oblivion.
Do not forget.
”

The baby seemed to understand. He struggled to free his tiny arms from the flag wrapped around him, raised them toward Phin, and clenched his fists.

Phin lifted his face to the sky and laughed into the falling snow. He carefully covered the baby's face with the flag again and walked away from the castle.

Mata's frown reminded Phin of Dazu Zyndu's serious mien while deep in thought. Mata's smile was a replica of the smile of Soto, Phin's dead sister, when she ran around the garden as a child. Mata's sleeping face had the same serenity as Phin's older brother, Shiru, who had always told Phin to be more patient.

Gazing at Mata, Phin understood why he had been spared. The little boy was the last and brightest chrysanthemum blossom at the tip of the noble tree formed by generations of the Zyndu Clan. Phin vowed to Kana and Rapa, the twin goddesses of Cocru, that he would do everything in his power to nurture and protect Mata.

And he would make his heart cold and his blood hot, like icy Rapa and fiery Kana. For the sake of Mata, he would learn to become hard and sharp instead of pampered and soft. In vengeance, even a rabbit can learn to become a wolf.

Phin had to rely on occasional handouts from loyalist families who sympathized with the plight of the Zyndu Clan until he killed two thieves sleeping in a field and took their loot, which he then invested in a little farm outside Farun. There, he taught Mata to fish, to hunt, and to fight with a sword, after learning those skills himself under the severe tutelage of trial-and-error: The first time he shot a deer, he vomited at the sight of blood; the first time he swung a sword, he almost cut off his own foot. He cursed himself again and again for how he had luxuriated in his former life of ease and learned nothing of use.

The weight of the responsibility he undertook had turned his hair gray by the time he was twenty-five. Often, he sat alone at night outside their shack, after his little nephew had fallen asleep. Haunted by the memory of his weakness years ago, he brooded over whether he was doing enough, was even capable of doing enough, to set Mata on the right path, to pass on the courage and strength, and especially the yearning for glory, that was the boy's birthright.

Dazu and Shiru had not wanted the delicate Phin to follow the path of war. They had indulged Phin's love of literature and art, and look where that had gotten him. In a moment when the family needed him, Phin had been powerless, had been a coward who brought shame to the family name.

So he locked away memories of the kind words of Shiru and the gentleness of Dazu. Instead, he gave Mata a childhood that he thought they would have wanted. Whenever Mata hurt himself as all children did, Phin forced himself to refuse the boy any comfort until Mata learned that crying was useless. Whenever Mata fought with another boy from the town, Phin insisted that he press on until he emerged victorious. Phin never tolerated signs of weakness in the child and taught Mata to welcome every conflict as a chance to prove himself.

Over the years, Phin's naturally kind heart became so wrapped and concealed in the roles he assigned himself that he could no longer tell where family legend ended and his own life began.

But once, when five-year-old Mata was gripped by an illness that threatened to take away his life, the boy saw through a crack in his uncle's hard shell.

Mata had awoken from a feverish slumber and saw his uncle crying. The boy had never seen such a sight and thought he was still dreaming. Phin hugged Mata tightly—another gesture foreign to the child—and muttered many thanks to Kana and Rapa. “You're a Zyndu,” he said, as he did so often. “You're stronger than anyone.” But then he added in a voice that was gentle and strange, “You are all that I have.”

Mata had no memory of his real father, and Phin
was
his father, his hero. From Phin, he learned that the Zyndu name was sacred. Theirs was a family born of noble blood rich with glory, blood blessed by the gods, blood spilled by the emperor, blood that had to be avenged.

Phin and Mata sold their produce and pelts from hunted animals in town. Phin sought out surviving scholars, family friends, and acquaintances. A few of them surreptitiously kept a cache of ancient books, written in the old logograms unique to Cocru and forbidden by the emperor, and Phin borrowed or traded for them and taught Mata to read and write.

From these books and from his memory, Phin told Mata stories and legends of Cocru's martial past and of the Zyndu Clan's glorious history. Mata dreamed of emulating his grandfather, to carry on the legacy of his prowess. He ate only meat and bathed only in cold water. Having no living calf to carry, he volunteered to help the fishermen at the wharf unload their catch each day (and earned a few coppers doing so). He filled small sacks with rocks and tied them around his wrists and ankles so that each step required more strength. If there were two paths to a destination, he picked the longer and more arduous one. If there were two ways to do something, he chose the harder and more strenuous method. By the time he was twelve, he could lift the giant cauldron in front of the temple in Farun over his head.

Mata did not have much time for play, and so he made no meaning­ful friendships. He treasured the privilege of noble and ancient learning, won with so much hard work by his uncle. But Mata had little use for poetry. Instead, he loved books of history and military strategy. Through them, he learned about the golden past that was no more and came to realize that Xana's sins were not limited to what had happened to his family. “Mapidéré's conquest had degraded the very foundations of the world,” as Phin told him time and again.

The origin of the old Tiro system was lost in the mists of time. Legend had it that the Islands of Dara were settled long ago by a people who called themselves the Ano, refugees of a sunken continent far over the seas to the west. Once they had defeated the barbarians who were the original inhabitants of the Islands, some of whom intermarried and became Ano, they promptly fell to fighting among themselves. Their descendants, over many generations and many wars, separated into various states.

Some scholars claimed the great ancient Ano lawgiver Aruano created the Tiro system in response to the chaotic wars among the states. The Classical Ano word
tiro
literally meant “fellow,” and the most important principle of the system was that each Tiro state was an equal of every other Tiro state; no state had any authority over another. Only when one state committed a sin that offended the gods could the other states band together against it, and the leader of such a temporary alliance was given the title
princeps
, first
tiro
among equals.

The Seven States had coexisted for more than a thousand years, and but for that tyrant from Xana they would have existed for a thousand more. The kings of the Tiro states were the ultimate secular authorities, the anchors from which seven parallel Great Chains of Being dangled. They enfeoffed lands to the nobles, who each kept the peace in his domain and administered it like a miniature Tiro state. Each peasant paid his taxes and labor to a lord, and each lord to his lord, and so on up the chain.

The wisdom of the Tiro system was evident in the way it reflected the natural world. In the ancient forests of Dara, each great tree, like a Tiro state, stood independent of the others. No tree held sway over another. Yet each tree was made up of branches, and each branch of leaves, just as each king drew his strength from his nobles, and each noble from his peasantry. It was the same with the separate Islands of Dara, each composed of islets and lagoons, of bays and coves. The pattern of independent realms, each composed from miniature copies, could be found in coral reefs, in schools of fish, in drifting forests of kelp, in mineral crystals, and in the anatomy of animals.

It was the underlying order of the universe, a grid—like the warp and weft of the rough cloth woven by Cocru craftsmen—formed by horizontal lines of mutual respect among equals and vertical lines of downward obligation and upward fealty in which everyone knew his place.

Emperor Mapidéré had eliminated all that, swept it away like the armies of the Six States, like fallen leaves in autumn. A few of the old nobles who surrendered early got to keep their empty titles and sometimes even their castles and money, but that was all. Their lands were no longer theirs because all land now belonged to the Xana Empire, to the emperor himself. Instead of each lord giving the law in his domain, there now was but one law that governed all the Islands.

Instead of the scholars of each Tiro state writing with their own sets of logograms and arranging the zyndari letters in their own fashion, bound up with local tradition and history, everyone now had to write in the manner of Xana. Instead of each Tiro state determining its own system of weights and measures, its own way of judging and seeing the world, everyone now had to make their roads as wide as the distance between the wheels of a cart from the Immaculate City, their boxes as big as could be packed tightly into a boat from the port of Kriphi, the former Xana capital.

All sources of loyalty, of local attachment, were replaced with allegiance to the emperor. In place of the parallel chains of devotion forged by nobles, the emperor had put in a pyramid of petty bureaucrats—commoners who could barely write any logograms beyond those in their own names and who had to spell everything out in zyndari letters. Instead of ruling with the best, the emperor had chosen to elevate the craven, greedy, foolish, and low.

In this new world, the old orderly way of life was lost. No one knew his place. Commoners were living in castles while nobles huddled in drafty huts. Emperor Mapidéré's sins were against nature, against the hidden pattern of the universe itself.

As the Procession disappeared into the distance, the crowd gradually dispersed. Now they had to return to the struggle of daily life: fields to harvest, sheep to tend, and fish to haul.

But Mata and Phin lingered.

“They cheer for a man who murdered their fathers and grand­fathers,” Phin said quietly. Then he spat.

Mata looked around at the departing men and women. They were like the sand and mud stirred up by the ocean. If you scooped up a cup of seawater, it would be full of swirling chaos that obscured the light.

But if you waited patiently, eventually the common dross and dregs would settle to the bottom, where they belonged, and the clear water would allow the light through, the noble and the pure.

Mata Zyndu believed it was his destiny to restore clarity and order, as surely as the weight of history pulled everything down to its rightful place.

THE PROPHECY OF THE FISH

CHAPTER THREE

KUNI GARU

SEVEN YEARS LATER.

ZUDI: THE FIFTH MONTH IN THE TWENTY-FIRST YEAR OF THE REIGN OF ONE BRIGHT HEAVEN.

In Zudi, many stories were told about Kuni Garu.

The young man was the son of simple farmers who had big hopes for their children to move up in the world, hopes that Kuni somehow dashed again and again.

Oh, as a boy, Kuni had shown hints of brilliance—he could read and write three hundred logograms before he had turned five. Kuni's mother, Naré, thanked Kana and Rapa every day and couldn't stop telling all her friends how brilliant her little boy was. Thinking that the child had a future as a lettered man who could bring honor to the family, Kuni's father, Féso, sent him at great expense to study at the private academy of Tumo Loing, a local scholar of great renown, who had served the King of Cocru as Minister of Grains before the Unification.

But Garu and his friend Rin Coda preferred to skip school whenever they could and go fishing. When he was caught, Kuni would apologize eloquently and profusely, convincing Master Loing that he was truly contrite and had learned his lesson. But soon he would be back to devising pranks with Rin and talking back at his teacher, questioning his explanations of the classics and pointing out errors in his reasoning until Loing finally ran out of patience and expelled him—and poor Rin Coda, too, for always following Kuni's lead.

That was just fine with Kuni. He was a good drinker, talker, and brawler, and soon became close to all sorts of disreputable characters in Zudi: thieves, gangsters, tax collectors, Xana soldiers from the garrison, girls from the indigo houses, wealthy young men who had nothing better to do than stand around all day on street corners looking for trouble—as long as you breathed, had money to buy him a drink, and enjoyed dirty jokes and gossip, Kuni Garu was your friend.

The Garu family tried to steer the young man into gainful employment. Kado, Kuni's elder brother, demonstrated an early instinct for business and became a local merchant of women's dresses. He hired Kuni as a clerk. But Kuni professed a disdain for bowing to customers and laughing at their stupid jokes, and finally, after Kuni tried to implement a harebrained scheme of hiring girls from the indigo houses as “models” for dresses, Kado had no choice but to fire him.

“It would have boosted sales!” Kuni said. “After the wealthy men saw the dresses on their favorite mistresses, they'd surely want to buy them for their wives.”

“Have you no concern for the reputation of your family?!” Kado chased Kuni into the streets wielding a measuring ruler.

By the time Kuni was seventeen, his father had had enough of the idling young man coming home every night drunk and asking for dinner. He locked him out of the house and told him to find somewhere else to stay and ruminate on how he was wasting his life and breaking his mother's heart. Naré cried and cried and went to Kana and Rapa's temple every day, praying for the goddesses to set her baby on the right path.

Reluctantly, Kado Garu took pity on his little brother and took him in. Kado's generosity, however, was not shared by his wife, Tete. She took to serving dinner early, long before Kuni came home. And when she heard the sound of his steps in the entrance hall, Tete would bang empty pots loudly in the sink, indicating that there was no more food to be had.

Kuni quickly got the hint. Though he had thick skin—he had to when he hung out with the sort of friends he made—he was humili­ated that his sister-in-law thought of him as only a mouth that she didn't want to feed. He moved out and slept on the floor mats in the houses of his friends, roaming from house to house as he wore out his welcome.

He moved a lot.

The smell of fried pot stickers and ginger-vinegar. The sound of glasses filling with warm ale and cold beer.

“. . . so then I said, ‘But your husband isn't home!' And she laughed and said, ‘That's why you need to come in now!' ”

“Kuni Garu!” Widow Wasu, proprietress of the Splendid Urn, tried to get the attention of the young man telling stories at the center of the crowd.

“Yes, my lady?” Kuni reached out with his long arm and draped it around her shoulder. He gave her a loud, wet kiss on the cheek. She was in her forties and accepted that she was aging gracefully. Unlike some of the other tavern keepers, she didn't slather herself with rouge and powder, and looked far more dignified as a result. Kuni often proclaimed to others how he was fond of her.

Wasu nimbly ducked out of Kuni's embrace. She pulled him away from the others, winking at the laughing and shouting crowd, who hollered appreciatively. She dragged him into her office in the back of the bar, where she deposited him in a pillow on one side of the desk, and she herself took the pillow on the other.

Kneeling upright and with her back straight in formal
mipa rari
, she composed herself and put on what she thought was a stern face—this discussion needed to be focused on business, and Kuni Garu had a way of changing the topic whenever one wanted something from him.

“You've hosted three parties at my place this month,” Wasu said. “That's a lot of beer and ale and fried pot stickers and fried squid. All the charges were put under your name. Your tab, at this point, is getting to be bigger than the lien on my inventory. I think you need to pay some of it.”

Kuni leaned back on his pillow and stretched out his legs in a modified
thakrido
position, with one leg over the other, the way a man sat when he was with his mistress. Kuni narrowed his eyes, smirked at Wasu, and began to hum a song whose lyrics made Wasu blush.

“Come on, Kuni,” Wasu said. “I'm serious here. The tax collectors have been hounding me for weeks. You can't treat me like a charity.”

Kuni Garu curled his legs back under him and suddenly sat up in
mipa rari
. His eyes stayed narrowed, but the smirk disappeared from his face. Widow Wasu flinched even though she meant to stay firm with him. The man was a gangster, after all.

“Mistress Wasu,” Kuni said in an even, low voice. “How often would you say I come to drink at your place?”

“Practically every other day,” Wasu said.

“And have you noticed any difference in your business on the days when I'm here and the days when I'm not?”

Wasu sighed. This was Kuni's trump card, and she knew he would bring it up. “It's a little better on the days when you are here,” she admitted.

“A
little
better?” Eyes as wide as teacups, he breathed loudly through his nose, as though his ego had been hurt.

Widow Wasu tried to decide whether she wanted to laugh at him or to throw something at the good-for-nothing young man. She settled by shaking her head and folding her arms across her chest.

“Look at the crowd out there!” he went on. “It's the middle of the day and this place is filled with paying customers. When
I'm
here, your business goes up by at least fifty percent.”

This was a gross exaggeration, but Wasu had to concede that bar patrons did tend to stay longer and buy more drinks when Kuni was around. He was loud, told great dirty jokes, pretended to know something about everything—the man had no shame, and could get people around him to relax and enjoy themselves. He was like a bawdy troubadour, a tall-tale teller, and an impromptu gambling hall operator rolled into one. Maybe business didn't go up by 50 percent, but 20 to 30 percent? That was probably accurate. And Kuni's little gang also managed to keep the really dangerous men out of the Urn, the sort who would start fights and smash the furniture.

“Sister,” Kuni said—now he was turning on his charm for her—“we need to help each other. I like coming to the Urn with my friends—we all have a good time. And we like bringing you more business. But if you can't see the benefits of this arrangement, I'll take my act elsewhere.”

Widow Wasu gave him a withering look, but she knew she wasn't going to win this one.

“You better tell such good stories that all those Imperial soldiers get totally drunk and empty their pockets.” She sighed. “And say something nice about the pork pot stickers. I need to get rid of them today.”

“But you're right that we should reduce my tab a bit,” Kuni said. “Next time I'm in here, I'm expecting that my tab will have already been cleared. Do you think you can make that happen?”

The widow nodded reluctantly. She waved Kuni away, sighed, and began to write off the drinks that Kuni and his gang were so happily consuming at the bar.

Kuni Garu stumbled from the Splendid Urn on unsteady legs, but he wasn't really drunk yet. Since it was early in the afternoon, his closest friends were still at work; he decided that he would kill some time by wandering the main market street of Zudi.

Though Zudi was a small city, the Unification had nonetheless changed its complexion substantially. Master Loing had lectured to the boys about the changes disdainfully, lamenting that his students couldn't appreciate the virtues of the simpler Zudi of his youth; but since this new Zudi was all Kuni had known, he made up his own mind about it.

Emperor Mapidéré, in a bid to keep the old Tiro nobles from plotting rebellions in their ancestral domains, stripped them of any real power and left them only with empty titles. But that wasn't enough for him. The emperor also divided the noble families and forced some members to relocate to distant parts of the empire. For example, a Cocru count's eldest son might be ordered to resettle—taking his servants, mistresses, wives, cooks, and guards with him—to Wolf's Paw, away in the old territories of Gan. And a Gan ducal clan's side branches might be told to pack themselves up and move to a city in Rui. This way, even if the hot-blooded younger nobles wanted to make trouble, they would have no influence with the local elites and could inspire no sympathy in the local populace to join their cause. The emperor did the same with many of the surrendered soldiers and their families from the six conquered Tiro states.

While the resettlement policy was very unpopular with the nobles, it did have the benefit of enriching the lives of the ordinary folk of the Islands of Dara. The resettled nobles craved foods and clothes from their homelands, and merchants traveled all over Dara, transporting products that seemed exotic to the local populace but were eagerly purchased by the exiled nobles, who yearned for a hint of home and their old ways of life. In this manner, the scattered nobles became teachers of taste for the commoners, who learned to be more cosmopolitan and ecumenical.

Thus Zudi played host to exiled noble families from all over Dara, and they filled it with new customs, new dishes, and new dialects and words that had never before been heard in the city's sleepy markets and sedate teahouses.

If you were going to give marks for Emperor Mapidéré's performance as an administrator, Kuni thought, the improvement in the diversity of Zudi's markets definitely had to be counted as a positive. The streets were filled with vendors selling all manners of novelties from across Dara: bamboo-copters from Amu—ethereal toys with revolving blades at the end of a stick that could be spun rapidly until the contraption took off into the air like a tiny dragonfly; living paper-men from Faça—the paper cutouts would dance and leap like the veiled dancers on a tiny stage when you rubbed the glass rod in the ceiling with a silk cloth; magic calculators from Haan—wooden mazes with tiny doors at every branch that flipped as marbles rolled through them, and a skilled operator could use them to compute sums; iron puppets from Rima—intricate mechanical men and animals that walked down an inclined slope on their own power; and so on.

But Kuni paid the most attention to the food: He loved the fried lamb strips native to the Xana home islands, especially the hot and spicy variety from Dasu. He found the delicate raw fish served by the merchants from Wolf's Paw delightful—it went especially well with mango liquor and a dash of hot mustard grown in Faça's tiny spice estates nestled in the deep shades of the Shinané Mountains. He salivated so much as he admired the snacks on display from the various vendors that he had to swallow a few times.