The Grace of Kings (42 page)

“I can understand that. There are many tribes here on Tan Adü as well, and we certainly do not wish to obey only one man.” Chief Kyzen's eyes narrowed. “But to say you love freedom? That seems strange when the men of Dara love to make war on us and make us follow your ways.”

“Not all men of Dara think the same, just as not all fish swim in the same direction.”

Kyzen grunted. “What will you offer in return, if we help you?”

“What do the people of Tan Adü want?”

“If you become one of the Big Chiefs, will you and the others promise to leave us alone forever? To never permit any man of Dara to come to Tan Adü?”

Kuni Garu considered this. Over the years, the dream of conquering Tan Adü never died. The kings and dukes of Cocru, Amu, and Gan had all tried, at one time or another, to pacify this island. Even Emperor Mapidéré sent two expeditions, though nothing ever came of them. He could see why the Adüans were tired of it.

Luan Zya had told him that King Sanfé of Cocru, King Thufi's great-grandfather, had once sent an army of ten thousand to conquer Tan Adü. The Cocru army managed to secure a colony of about fifty miles square and tried to teach the captive Adüans the arts of writing, farming, and weaving, hoping that by showing them the benefits of civilization, they would be convinced to give up their struggle. But the Adüans, while conceding that Cocru's methods and tools produced more food, kept their bodies comfortable against the weather, and allowed them to pass their wisdom on to future generations more securely than talk-story, refused to adopt them, even at the point of the sword. These were men and women who treasured freedom.

“I can promise that, but it won't mean much.”

Chief Kyzen's face hardened. “You're saying your word is worthless?”

“If I become a Big Chief, I can make decrees, and I can perhaps try to persuade the other Big Chiefs to do the same. But I cannot expect everyone to obey an unreasonable decree, not unless I put them all in prison. As long as Tan Adü is here, the men of Dara will want to come. I cannot take that desire to see what has not been seen out of their hearts.”

“Then it is useless to talk to you.”

“Chief Kyzen, it would be easy for me to lie and tell you what you want to hear, but I won't do that. Can you swear that no boy in your land ever wondered what it might be like to live as one of the men of Dara? To dress in fine clothes, to eat from porcelain dishes, to court women who look like no others they had seen? Can you swear that no girl in your land ever thought about what it might be like to live as one of the women of Dara? To wear silk and dyed cotton, to sing and write poetry, to be married to men who are of another race, of another country?”

“There is no such foolishness in the hearts of our children.”

“Then you do not know young people at all, Chief Kyzen. The young often want that which the old detest and fear. The yearning for the new, for something different glimpsed but faintly through legends and shadows, cannot be taken from them—not unless you freeze their hearts and imprison their minds. Yet, you say you wish Tan Adü to remain free.”

Chief Kyzen scoffed at this, but Kuni could see that the chief understood what he was getting at.

“I cannot stop traders from stopping by your shores—they will always risk anything for more profit. I cannot stop men from setting sail for your land—if they believe that just going somewhere that no other men of Dara have been is reward enough. I cannot stop men from coming here and preaching—if they believe that they have a duty to tell you what they think is right and just and to teach you a better way of life.

“But I
can
promise that if I become one of the Big Chiefs, I will not permit my people to come here and perform these acts accompanied by the accoutrements of war. And I will do my utmost to urge the other Big Chiefs to follow my example. If men of Dara come here, they will come to persuade, not to coerce. And so long as you do these visitors no injury, no army or navy of Dara will intercede on their behalf.”

“The soft invasion of your traders and preachers may do far more damage to us than your arms ever would. The lure of your wealth and novel ways and your fantastical
possessions
may prove irresistible to those who are too young to understand their danger. If your men poison and corrupt the hearts of our young, then we are doomed. As you say, the young often want that which is harmful because they lack experience. Many thoughts I had as a young man I would now forswear, and many desires that consumed me as a young man I would now disown.”

“If the freedom and way of life that you so treasure are worthy of your love, then you will win the hearts of your young far more easily than the visitors of Dara can. But the young must be allowed to make their own choices, to live their own lives as grand experiments. They must
choose
to become you. That is the only hope for Tan Adü.”

Chief Kyzen drained his arrack in a single gulp. Then he threw his coconut bowl down and laughed. “It would have been easier for you to just lie to me, Kuni Garu. And if you had promised me exactly what I asked, I would have known that you were unworthy of our help.”

A test.
Kuni glanced over at Luan Zya, and the two men shared a smile of understanding.

Even after Luan retired to sleep, Kuni Garu and Chief Kyzen continued to drink together late into the night, their eyes bright with the recognition of kindred spirits.

They rowed out into the sea in the early morning, before sunrise.

Carved out of a single trunk with outriders, the long wooden canoes of the Adüans each held about thirty people and were surprisingly steady. Dafiro was barely awake and baffled. Were they going to row all the way back to the Big Island?

After two hours of steady rowing, the sky in the east turned fish-belly white. Chief Kyzen raised his hand, and the canoes stopped. To the men of Cocru, it looked just like any other part of the sea.

Chief Kyzen took out a long whalebone trumpet and placed the bell under water. Then he blew into it, and the trumpet produced a surprisingly loud sound that could be felt through the hull of the canoes. The music was like whale song, mournful and majestic. A few of the Adüans in the other canoes began to beat the surface of the water with their oars in rhythmic accompaniment.

Just as the sun peeked over the eastern horizon, a great black shadow, shaped like the sleek shell shuttle favored by Gan weavers, rose out of the water a mile to the east, arced across the rising sun, and fell back into the water. A moment later the thunderous boom of the breaching creature reached the men in the canoes.

It was a cruben, the great one-horned scaled whale of Dara and sovereign of the seas: two hundred feet long and as large next to an elephant as an elephant would be next to a mouse. Its eyes were so dark that they sucked in all sunlight like deep wells, and when the great fish exhaled through its blowhole, the fountain shot as high as a hundred feet.

More crubens breached nearer to the canoes: one, two, five, ten. The canoes rocked and the Adüans struggled to keep them from tipping over.

“I'm guessing our ferry has arrived,” said Mün Çakri, and Dafiro realized that his own jaw had been hanging open without his notice.

The Adüans rowed the canoes next to the great floating islands of heaving flesh and glistening armored scales. Duke Garu's men, shocked into silence, sat very still.

As the Adüans scrambled up the sides of the great animals and affixed saddles to the scales on top and attached two reins to the flaps over the crubens' great eyes, Mün explained to Dafiro what he had learned from Luan Zya.

The Adüans believed that the crubens were as intelligent as men, but their long lives, passed in the limitless ocean rather than on tiny dots of land, had almost nothing in common with men. They had their own civilization, as sophisticated as any Tiro state, but their concerns were foreign to mankind's minds and their sensibilities alien to mankind's hearts. The inhabitants of Dara, awed by the crubens' physical presence, only admired them from afar, but the men of Tan Adü had learned to speak to them, after a fashion, over a hundred generations.

The Adüans asked the crubens to perform a small favor for their guest, this Kuni Garu. The great fish considered the request and assented. They sought no reward. What could men give them? They needed nothing. They would do this for their own amusement.

Before Dafiro climbed onto the leading cruben's head to take up the reins, he handed his sword to Huluwen, who sat in the same canoe. “A gift in case I don't survive today,” Dafiro said, hoping that the Adüan understood.

Huluwen picked up the sword, felt its heft, and handed Dafiro his war club, whose thick end was studded with sharp bits of bone and razor-sharp stone flakes. It reminded him of Goremaw, Mata Zyndu's cudgel.

Dafiro held the club tightly in his hand. He wished his brother were around to witness this. Rat would not believe his retelling, but the club would at least corroborate some aspect of his story.

“I'm going to call you Biter,” said Daf. Sure, it wasn't an impressive allusion from Classical Ano, but at that moment, Dafiro Miro felt every inch a hero from the old tales.

Every time Dafiro thought he was dreaming, he bit his tongue and the pain told him that he was not. Every time Dafiro thought he was not dreaming, he looked around, and the sights that greeted his eyes were impossible.

Before him, jutting into the sky like the bowsprit of a great warship, was a twenty-foot-long horn. It was so thick at the base that two men together could not have wrapped their arms around it. The tip of the horn was sharper than the point of a spear, threatening destruction to anything that stood in its way.

Roaring waves dashed against the horn and the barnacle-encrusted forehead below it, breaking into a violent mist that soaked his clothes and sometimes made it hard to open his eyes. Everywhere he looked, sunlight was refracted into rainbows in the salty mist.

The waves divided themselves around the creature they rode on, and from where Dafiro was sitting, he could barely feel them. He felt only the gentle and slow undulating motion of the great mass heaving beneath him, ponderous, forceful, four hundred tons of muscle and sinew.

He was sitting in a saddle clipped to the two scales directly under him, each a foot across. The scales were dark blue and shimmered like rain-slicked obsidian, like the night sky just after twilight. Identical scales paved and covered the heaving, powerful body below him, forward to the brow and the horn, and behind him, for two hundred feet, until they reached the tail, twin flukes fifty feet across. The flukes reared out of the water and then beat down, slapping against the surface with the thunderous roar of a tsunami.

Behind him, in another saddle, sat Duke Garu. He was drenched in water too, and he held on to Dafiro with his arms so that he would not slip from the saddle. Though Dafiro could feel the duke's fear in his tight grip, he also saw on the duke's face the biggest smile Dafiro could remember.