The Art of War
Authors: David Wingrove
DAVID WINGROVE is the Hugo Award-winning co-author (with Brian Aldiss) of
Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction
. He is also the co-author of the first three MYST books – novelizations of one of the world’s bestselling computer games. He lives in north London with his wife and four daughters.
1 Son of Heaven
2 Daylight on Iron Mountain
3 The Middle Kingdom
4 Ice and Fire
5 The Art of War
6 An Inch of Ashes
7 The Broken Wheel
8 The White Mountain
9 Monsters of the Deep
10 The Stone Within
11 Upon a Wheel of Fire
12 Beneath the Tree of Heaven
13 Song of the Bronze Statue
14 White Moon, Red Dragon
15 China on the Rhine
16 Days of Bitter Strength
17 The Father of Lies
18 Blood and Iron
19 King of Infinite Space
20 The Marriage of the Living Dark
The Art of War
was first published as
The Broken Wheel
in Great Britain in 1990 by New English Library.
This revised and updated edition published in special edition hardback, trade paperback, and eBook in Great Britain in 2013 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © David Wingrove, 1990, 2013
The moral right of David Wingrove to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 9 780 85789 070 2
Trade paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 071 9
E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 423 6
Printed in Great Britain.
Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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CONTENTS
PROLOGUE The Sound of Jade – Summer 2206
PART TEN The Art of War – Summer 2206
Chapter 43 The Fifty-Ninth Stone
Chapter 46 Thick Face, Black Heart
PART ELEVEN Shells – Autumn 2206
Chapter 47 The Innocence of Vision
Book Five
‘Keep away from sharp swords,
Don’t go near a lovely woman.
A sharp sword too close will wound your hand,
Woman’s beauty too close will wound your life.
The danger of the road is not in the distance,
Ten yards is far enough to break a wheel.
The peril of love is not in loving too often,
A single evening can leave its wound in the soul.’
—Meng Chiao, ‘Impromptu’, 8th century
AD
For Rose and Ian
‘A new sound from the old keys.’
INTRODUCTION
C
hung Kuo.
The words mean ‘Middle Kingdom’ and, since 221
BC
, when the First Emperor, Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, unified the seven Warring States, it is what the ‘black-haired people’, the Han, or Chinese, have called their great country. The Middle Kingdom – for them it was the whole world; a world bounded by great mountain chains to the north and west, by the sea to east and south. Beyond was only desert and barbarism. So it was for two thousand years and through sixteen great dynasties. Chung Kuo
was
the Middle Kingdom, the very centre of the human world, and its Emperor the ‘Son of Heaven’, the ‘One Man’. But in the eighteenth century that world was invaded by the young and aggressive Western powers with their superior weaponry and their unshakeable belief in Progress. It was, to the surprise of the Han, an unequal contest and China’s myth of supreme strength and self-sufficiency was shattered. By the early twentieth century China –
Chung Kuo
– was the sick old man of the East: ‘a carefully preserved mummy in a hermetically sealed coffin’, as Karl Marx called it. But from the disastrous ravages of that century grew a giant of a nation, capable of competing with the West and with its own Eastern rivals, Japan and Korea, from a position of incomparable strength.
By the turn of the twenty-second century, Chung Kuo, the Middle Kingdom, had come to mean much more. For more than a hundred years the Empire of the Han had encompassed all the world, the Earth’s bloated population of thirty-six billion contained in vast, hive-like cities of three hundred levels that spanned whole continents. The Council of Seven – Han lords,
T’ang
, each more powerful than the greatest of the ancient emperors – ruled Chung Kuo with an iron authority, their boast that they had ended Change and stopped the Great Wheel turning. But war, famine and political instability, thought to be things of the past, returned to Chung Kuo with a vengeance.
A new generation of powerful young merchants – Dispersionists, formed mainly of
Hung Mao
, or Westerners – challenged the authority of the Seven, demanding an end to the Edict of Technological Control, the cornerstone of Han stability, and a return to the Western ideal of unfettered progress. In the face of assassination and counter-assassination, something had to give, and the destruction of the Dispersionist starship,
The New Hope
, signalled the beginning of ‘the War-that-wasn’t-a-War’, an incestuous power struggle fought within the City’s levels. The Seven won that War, but at a price they could ill afford. Suddenly they were weak – weaker than they had been in their entire history, four of their most experienced members having died in the space of six short years. In their place, the new T’ang were young and inexperienced, while the older T’ang had lost the confidence, the certainty, they had once possessed.
In the long years of peace before the War it had seemed inconceivable to challenge the Seven. But now…
For the Dispersionists, too, it was a costly war. Five years of struggle found them with most of their major leaders dead and more than two thousand of their number executed. One hundred and eighteen of their great Companies had ceased trading – their assets and holdings confiscated by the Seven – while many more, numbering hundreds of thousands, had been demoted ‘down the levels’ for being sympathetic to their cause.
But the War was merely the first tiny sign of the great disturbances to come, for down in the lowest levels of the City, in the lawless regions ‘below the Net’ and in the overcrowded decks just above, new currents of unrest – darker and deeper than those expressed by the War – have awoken. Currents which, inflamed by the ever-mounting burden of population pressures, threaten to tear Chung Kuo itself apart…
PROLOGUE
THE SOUND OF JADE
SUMMER 2206
‘At rise of day we sacrificed to the Wind God,
When darkly, darkly, dawn glimmered in the sky.
Officers followed, horsemen led the way;
They brought us out to the wastes beyond the town,
Where river mists fall heavier than rain,
And the fires on the hill leap higher than the stars.