The Grace of Kings (66 page)

“I heard a children's song in Haan:

When Haan falls, the people suffer.

When Haan rises, the people suffer.

When Haan is poor, the people are poor.

When Haan is rich, the people are poor.

When Haan is strong, the people die.

When Haan is weak, the people die.”

“Whatever the nobles and kings say they believe in, they always treat the people as mere stones on the
cüpa
board,” Kuni said.

There was no irony in his speech. In his heart, he still thought of himself as a commoner, a man who had nothing to his name and had to beg his friends for a place to sleep.

Luan looked directly at him, his eyes blazing in the reflected light of the bonfire. “King Cosugi did not see anything wrong with the new draft to raise an army to reconquer old Haan territories from North Géfica, the new corvée to rebuild the Palace of Ginpen, the new taxes to pay for a grand coronation.

“I went to the ruins of my ancestral estate and prayed to the soul of my departed father. Though I thought I had accomplished what I promised him on the day of his death, my heart was not at peace.

“As the moon rose, I saw the light illuminate an ancient quote from the Ano Classics, carved into one of the broken lintels: ‘All life is an experiment.'”

“A fitting quote for a scholar of Haan,” said Kuni.

Luan smiled. “A fitting quote for any man or woman of Dara. I understood then that I had been lacking in my vision. I thought my duty was to restore Haan, but Haan is not King Cosugi or the burned-down palace or the ruins of the great estates or the dead nobles and their descendants pining for glory—these are but parts of an experiment at a way of life for the people of Haan, her true essence. When the experiment has proven to be a failure, one must be willing to try new paths, new ways of doing things.

“I could not bear to walk on my old path, a path that did not serve the people of Haan, any longer. That is why I came to you.

“For Mata Zyndu, there is no law but the use of force, no higher ideal than martial glory. And the world he created is a mirror of his mind. When King Thufi died ‘mysteriously' on the way to Écofi, rumor had it that his last words were: ‘I should have remained a shepherd.'

“The rebellion was supposed to usher in a more just world, and yet nothing really changed.”

Kuni looked back at Luan, his heart quickening. “Do you think we are words written on a page by the gods, and that there will always be rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless, noble and commoner? Do you think that all our dreams are doomed to forever fail?”

Luan stood up and walked steadily toward the ocean. His dark figure shimmered through the dancing flames, and his voice blended with the roar of the fire. “I refuse to believe in the futility of change, because I have seen how the lowly dandelion, with time and patience, can crack the strongest paving stone. Lord Garu, will you complete the dream of Emperor Mapidéré, but avoid his mistakes? Can you unite the Islands of Dara under one crown and bring about lasting peace, while lessening the burden of the people?”

Lady Risana had quietly appeared out of the dark night to join them by the fire. Noiselessly, she sat by Kuni and put her hand on his shoulder. Her hands flickered in the firelight, and Kuni again felt a clarity of mind and a willingness to speak difficult truths. He was not perfect; he was not a god; he would accept that.

“I don't know how to answer you, Luan. I've always told myself I loved the people, but how can I speak of love when I can't even raise my own children? I've always told myself I'm a compassionate lord, but how can I speak of compassion when I've killed so many and betrayed so many others?

“I cannot say that I'm a good man, only that I'm a man who tried to do good. I like to believe that the people will remember me fondly, but I also know that the legacies of men cannot be foreseen during their lifetimes. I do not know if I'm the man who will complete the task you dream of, for that is a question that must be asked of our descendants in a thousand years.”

Luan laughed. “Lord Garu, this is why I serve you. The right path is not revealed to us by the gods or ancient sages, but must be found by ourselves through experimentation. You are uncertain, and in your uncertainty you will always seek to ask questions rather than believing yourself to possess all the answers. An ant who rides a dandelion seed will land wherever the seed lands. Men of talent will be judged in the light of the legacies of those they served.”

“
Géüdéü co loteré ma, pirufénrihua nélo
. All life is an experiment,” Kuni said. “We are all swallows flying in the storm, and if we should land safely, it will be due to equal measures of luck and skill.”

In the silence, Risana began to sing an old Classical Ano song:

The Four Placid Seas are as wide as the years are long.

A wild goose flies over a pond, leaving behind a voice in the wind.

A man passes through this world, leaving behind a name.

The three of them sat quietly around the fire, until the flame burned itself out and dawn arrived.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

FIRST STRIKE

RUI: THE SEVENTH MONTH IN THE THIRD YEAR OF THE PRINCIPATE.

For more than a year now, the reports from the airships' surveillance flyovers of Dasu remained much the same. Gin Mazoti went on holding her strange war games instead of drilling the soldiers, and Cogo went on building new fisheries, roads, bridges, and other meaningless things that had no military use.

As far as Kindo Marana could tell, Kuni Garu was content to remain on Dasu, more like a gardener cultivating his plot than an ambitious warlord plotting military adventures.

But recently, his spies reported that Mazoti seemed to be up to something. On the southern coast of Dasu, right across the Dasu Channel from Rui, two hundred men were seen building ships. Their progress was slow, as they were shorthanded and among them there was no skilled shipwright. Marana intensified surveillance flights over the site. Mazoti seemed to be pushing her workers hard, and the airships reported witnessing workers being whipped.

A Dasu soldier even defected to Rui by stealing a tiny fishing boat and rowing over. Kindo Marana interrogated the man himself.

“Gin Mazoti is a cruel and heartless woman,” the soldier, whose name was Luwen, told Marana. “She's ordered us to build twenty transport ships within three months. When I told her that this was impossible, she had me strung up by my thumbs and whipped until I fainted.” Luwen lifted his shirt to show the whipping scars on his back, and even Marana winced at the sight.

“She said that if her orders were not carried out, I would be executed on the last day of her three-month schedule. I had no choice but to desert.”

Marana shook his head. Just like a woman, full of wishful thinking and no understanding of the scale of things. Did she think that building a heavy transport ship was like raising a barn? Two hundred men in three months would not even finish two transport ships, let alone twenty. Kuni Garu was a fool to trust his army to this woman, and it appeared that she was capable only of venting her rage on hapless soldiers, not planning logically.

He ordered Luwen be given a good meal and be seen by a doctor.

It was midnight, and the people of the tiny village of Phada, on the northern coast of Rui, were asleep.

A great explosion woke them. As they scrambled out of their houses, they saw a sight that seemed to come out of a myth. A great crater had opened in the ground, and out of the hole, men in full armor emerged, their swords drawn.

Kindo Marana was awoken by his chatelain. The sound of alarm was everywhere.

“Sire, the Dasu army has surrounded Kriphi.”

Marana could not understand what he was being told. How could Mazoti have constructed so many ships so quickly? And even if she managed to do so, how could they have crossed the Dasu Channel unchallenged, as the channel was patrolled by Marana's ships?

He dressed and ascended the city walls to see for himself.

“Kindo Marana!” Gin Mazoti shouted up at him in the torchlight. “Surrender. We have taken over the air base at Mount Kiji. All the other garrisons on Rui have surrendered, and you're alone.”

SIX MONTHS EARLIER.

While Marana's airships crisscrossed the skies of Dasu and his navy patrolled the Dasu Channel, men were hard at work below them, under the sea, beneath the seafloor.

Emperor Mapidéré's vision of the Grand Tunnels had been long abandoned. The half-finished tunnels, deep holes into the earth that terminated at dead ends, could be found all over the islands. Over the years, weather, erosion, and flooding turned most of them into deep wells, mute relics of a bygone age.

The entrance to the aborted tunnel from Dasu to Rui was located several miles down the shore from Mazoti's makeshift shipyard, where two hundred men put on a show that drew the attention of Marana's airships.

Meanwhile, a grain storage depot had been built over the abandoned shaft of the tunnel, and carriages could be seen pulling into the depot and then leaving, apparently to gather more goods from the rest of the island. Marana's airships took note of the activity but attributed it to merely another effort to stockpile grain against a lean year.

The airships could not see that the carriages entering the depot were much lighter than the ones that left it. They were not carrying things
into
the depot but
away
from it. Instead of grain, the carts carried dirt, rocks, and earth excavated from under the sea.

Luan Zya had combed through the strange inventions gathered by Cogo Yelu and found a few of particular interest. One was a method of splitting stone. Water mixed with certain salts extracted from herbs gathered and prepared by the inventor, an old Faça herbalist, could be poured onto stone surfaces, where the paste would seep into the cracks, large and small. After the rock had been stewed in this brine for a while, a second, different solution of salts would then be poured over the rock, and where the two mixtures came into contact, crystals formed.

Like ice in winter, millions of tiny crystals growing in the cracks exerted a force that pried granite and schist apart, and made solid walls of rock as soft as cheese.

The second invention that Luan Zya selected was a way to pump air with a hand-cranked bellows into a sealed tank of water until the water, under great pressure, shot out of a hose. The pressurized stream of water could be focused to strike at any surface with great force. When this water was brought to bear on the rocks softened with the mixture of salts, the rocks crumbled like wet sand.

The combination of these two inventions allowed tunneling through deep rock at speeds that were impossible to conceive. Best of all, it required no use of firework powder, and so was safe and undetectable by surveying airships.

For six months, the Dasu army toiled in secret, completing the dream of Emperor Mapidéré to build a path between Dasu and Rui that went under the sea.

RUI: THE SEVENTH MONTH IN THE THIRD YEAR OF THE PRINCIPATE.

The shipyard was only a decoy,
Kindo Marana thought.
I was fooled by a simple trick.

He had always been a careful man, but he was too focused on what could be seen and measured, what could be marked down in the notebooks of scouts flying over Dasu. He had been caught by what lay beneath the numbers, hidden by the appearance of super­ficiality, under the ocean waves.

He imagined the Dasu army emerging from beneath the sea, an endless stream of men erupting onto the surface like a fresh lava flow. It was a trick that he himself had used on Wolf's Paw against the hesitating General Roma. Mazoti was not above copying her enemy's successes.

It felt like an unworthy loss, as though someone had taken advantage of a loophole in the tax code.

Luwen, the surrendered Dasu soldier, made his way next to Marana.

“We were both fooled,” Kindo said. “You were just a pawn in her game. She whipped you not because she needed you to work harder, but to hide her real plans.”

Luwen grinned at him. Marana looked back, and his face fell as he finally understood.

With one quick stroke, Luwen lopped off Marana's head. Then he leapt from the wall, holding aloft the head by its hair.

The Dasu soldiers below the wall had been prepared and caught Luwen safely with a taut cloth stretched out on poles. Mayhem and confusion reigned on the walls of Kriphi, and commanders still recovering from the shock of King Kindo's death debated whether to immediately surrender or try to negotiate for better terms.

Marshal Mazoti walked up to the man getting off the stretched canvas trampoline.

“Welcome back, Daf.”

Daf cracked a smile. “How hard it is to foresee how life will turn out. Back when our corvée gang joined the rebellion, my brother and I thought we'd never be whipped again.”

Mazoti clasped him by his arms. “Lord Garu and I will not forget your sacrifices. I hope your wounds have healed.”

News of the conquest of Rui by Dasu ripped through the Islands of Dara like a tsunami. Mazoti was only the second opponent to ever triumph over the great Kindo Marana. The other Tiro states, already craving war, began to fight, intuiting that the hegemon would be distracted by the Dasu victory and not pay attention while they fought over more territories.

Zyndu immediately ordered King Cosugi of Haan and King Théca of North Géfica to increase their vigilance and send out their navies to aid the remnants of Marana's navy in a blockade of Dasu and Rui. He did not bother sending out a messenger to demand an explanation from Garu. What was there to explain? Garu, the man he once thought of as his brother, had rebelled against the hegemon. It was proof of his original treachery at Pan; he was a betrayer through and through.

Dasu still had no navy to speak of. Rui was also much farther away from the Big Island than Dasu was from Rui, so Mazoti's tunneling trick would not work a second time. Just like Mata Zyndu was once trapped on Wolf's Paw, he would now trap Kuni on Rui. It was still an island prison, just a bigger one.

But he would go visit Kuni's family.

Mira wandered the streets of Çaruza aimlessly. She browsed at the market stalls—she had enough money to buy anything she wanted, but nothing appealed to her. She was simply stalling for time, not willing to go back to the palace. At least here, in the streets, with the right dress, she could be anonymous and pretend to be just another Cocru lady of sophistication, instead of—

Instead of what?

She was angry with herself, with Mata, with the courtiers and ladies-in-waiting and the countless servants who surrounded the hegemon. Since coming back from Pan to Çaruza, her position had grown only more awkward. What was she? She still oversaw the preparation of Mata's meals and tidied his bedchamber, but minis­ters and couriers called her Lady Mira. Mata had not asked her to come to his bed, and yet everyone seemed to assume that she already visited it with regularity.

I suppose I should ask to go home
.

But she never made such a request. Now that she had seen the world, had become used to being in the company of kings and dukes and generals, she wasn't sure if she could tolerate the cold glances of the villagers back home, who would still speak of her as being “from away.”