The Grace of Kings (25 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

LUAN ZYA

GINPEN: BEFORE THE XANA CONQUEST.

In high-minded Haan, scholarship had been not just a luxury, but a way of life.

Before the Xana Conquest, in the countryside, next to the broad, reedy tidal flats and rocky beaches, countless learning huts used to sprout up like sand castles; the tutors in these huts, paid for by the state, instructed the children of the poor in reading, writing, and basic proficiency with numbers. More talented and wealthy students went to Ginpen, the capital and home to Dara's most renowned private acade­mies. Many of Dara's greatest scholars spent their formative years within the lecture halls and laboratories of Ginpen's academies: Tan Féüji, the philosopher who elaborated governance into an art form; Lügo Crupo, regent of the empire and a peerless calligrapher; Gi Anji, who taught them both; Huzo Tuan, who defied death to criticize Mapidéré to his face; and many others.

In old Haan, a traveler could stop any farmer walking through the fields and have a conversation about politics, astronomy, agriculture, or meteorology and learn something. In Ginpen, even a common merchant's assistant clerk could calculate cube roots and fill out magic squares with no assistance. In teahouses and wine bars—though the food was plain and the drink merely passable—one could encounter the most brilliant minds of Dara debating matters of political and natural philosophy. Though Haan wasn't the most industrious of the Tiro states, her engineers and inventors created the most sought-after designs for water mills and windmills and made the most accurate water clocks.

But all this changed after the Conquest. Compared with other Tiro states, Mapidéré's book-burning and scholar-burying had dealt a harsher blow to Haan's spirit. The learning huts were no longer funded and fell into disuse; many of the private academics in Ginpen closed; and the few that survived were mere shadows of their former selves, where the scholars were afraid to give true answers and more afraid to ask real questions.

Every time Luan Zya thought of giving up his life's mission, he would remember the dead scholars, the burning books, and the empty lecture halls where accusations from ghostly voices seemed to echo without cease.

The Zyas had served the House of Haan since time immemorial. Just in the last five generations, the Zyas had produced three prime minis­ters, two generals, and five royal augurs at the Haan court.

Luan Zya was a brilliant boy. At five, he could recite from memory three hundred poems by Haan poets who composed in Classical Ano. At seven, he managed to perform a deed that stunned the Royal College of Augurs.

Divination was an ancient art in the Islands of Dara, but no Tiro state was more dedicated to its practice than scholarly Haan. After all, Haan was the favored land of the god Lutho, divine trickster, mathematician, and seer. The gods always spoke ambivalently, and sometimes they even changed their minds in the middle of your asking them a question. Divination was a matter of ascertaining the future through inherently unreliable methods.

To improve the accuracy of predictions, it was thus best to ask the same question multiple times and see what came out as the most common answer. For example, suppose the king wished to know whether the harvest and fishing this year would be more bountiful than last year. To answer the query, the College of Augurs would gather and formulate the question in prayers to Lutho.

Then they would take the dried shells of ten great sea turtles—the messengers of Lutho—and line them up on the black sands of Lutho Beach. Ten iron rods would be heated in a brazier full of hot coals fanned by a furnace, and when the rods were glowing red they would be taken out and pressed against the turtle shells until they cracked. The augurs would then gather and tabulate the directions of the cracks. If six shells cracked in a more-or-less east-west direction and four shells cracked in a more-or-less north-south direction, that meant that the year's harvest and fishing had a three-in-five chance of being better than last year's. This result could be refined further by measuring the precise angle each of the cracks formed relative to the cardinal directions.

For the augur, geometry and other branches of mathematics were important tools.

Luan's father was chief augur, and Luan observed his father's work with great interest as a child. One day, when he was seven, Luan accompanied his father to Lutho Beach, where the College of Augurs was to consult on the answer to an important question from the king. While his father and the other gray-bearded augurs did their work, Luan wandered away by himself and began to play a game of his own devising.

He drew a square in the sand and inscribed within it a circle. He closed his eyes and tossed pebbles in the general direction of the figure and then marked down on a piece of paper the number of times the pebbles managed to land inside the square and the number of times the pebbles also landed inside the circle.

His father came to get him after the ceremony was over.

“What game are you playing, Lu-
tika
?”

Luan replied that he was not playing a game at all. He was calculating the value of Lutho's Number, which is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.

The circle's area, Luan explained, was Lutho's Number times its radius squared. The square's area, on the other hand, was the square of twice the circle's radius, or four times the radius squared. So the ratio of the circle's area to the square's was equal to Lutho's Number divided by four.

If enough pebbles were thrown, the ratio of the number of pebbles that fell in the circle and the number of pebbles that fell in the square approximated the ratio of the figures' respective areas. Dividing the ratio by four gave Luan an estimate of Lutho's Number itself. The more pebbles thrown, the more accurate the estimate.

And so, from chance, Luan derived certainty; from chaos, order; from randomness, a pattern that reached evermore for meaning, perfection, and beauty.

Luan's father was stunned by his precocious son. It was a sign of his intelligence, of course, but also of his piety. Surely the god Lutho watched over this one especially.

In the normal course of events, Luan Zya would have succeeded his father as the chief augur of Haan, and he would have devoted his life to numbers and figures, to calculations and theorems, to proofs and mystical conjectures, to the endlessly fascinating task of approxi­mating the elusive will of the gods.

But then came Emperor Mapidéré.

The Zyas threw themselves into the defense of Haan. His father invented the Curved Mirrors that set aflame Xana ships sighted off the shore of Haan with nothing but the power of the sun. His grandfather designed crossbows augmented with firework rockets that brought down Xana airships that flew too low. Luan himself, merely twelve years old, came up with the idea of layering leather with fine mesh wire to create lighter, better shields that protected many Haan soldiers against Xana arrows.

But none of it ultimately mattered. Xana forces made costly but steady gains on the seas, over land, and in the air, until only the capital of Ginpen was left of Haan. Xana laid siege to it, wrapping it in ring after ring of determined Xana troops, like the women of Haan wrapped their bodies in layers of long silk cloth for the winter dances. Still, Ginpen had its own deep wells and full storehouses. King Cosugi planned to wait out the siege until the other Tiro states sent help.

But the court of Haan was corrupt and rotten from within. Education proved to be no match for avarice. A prince, seduced by the promise of Xana's support in his bid for the Throne of Haan, agreed to open the city gates in secret, and overnight Ginpen fell. King Cosugi surrendered, but not until the Xana invaders had made blood flow all over Ginpen, turning the black-sand-paved streets as red as blood corals, as fresh lava, as the western skies behind the setting sun.

Enraged by the successes of the ingenious military inventions of the Zya Clan, General Yuma, the conqueror of Ginpen, sent a detachment of troops specifically toward the Zya estate as the rest of his soldiers looted and slaughtered the city.

“Lu-
tika
,” Luan's father whispered as he leaned down and touched his forehead to his son's. “Today the Zya Clan will give up many lives to show our loyalty toward Haan, our piety toward the gods, and our contempt for that tyrant, Réon. But for our deaths to be meaningful, a seed of the Zya Clan must be preserved and given a chance to grow. Do not return here until you have driven out the Xana invaders and restored the glory of Haan.”

He called over a loyal old family servant and instructed him to make himself look like a Xana soldier.

“Put a servant girl's dress on Luan and take him away from here. In the chaos out in the streets, everyone will think that you are just another Xana invader with a captive. Get out of Ginpen and keep my son, the last of the Zyas, safe. Now go!”

Luan screamed and cried and begged to be allowed to die with his family as the servant dragged him through the streets. Other Xana soldiers saw a fellow soldier with a tearful, hysterical captive and ignored them. Later, the boy would realize what a great augur his father had been—he had picked a disguise where Luan's terror and loss of control would not give them away.

His father's trick worked, and the pair escaped to safety. But later, that night, in the rural countryside, Haan villagers who thought they were rescuing a captured young girl from a Xana brute killed the servant as they slept.

As the sun rose on the first day of Haan's long captivity, Luan found himself alone among strangers and miles from everything he had ever known.

None of the rest of the family survived the fall of Ginpen.

Luan grew up as the Six States fell, one by one.

Always running, hiding, staying out of sight of the emperor's numerous human bloodhounds, who were eager to sniff out those harboring treasonous thoughts, Luan vowed to avenge his family and the House of Haan. He pledged to fulfill his father's last wish. He swore he would carry out the will of Lutho, and restore balance to this upside-down world.

He was not a man who could lead a charge on the battlefield. He was not a man who could rouse a crowd with impassioned words. How would he fulfill his dream of vengeance?

He prayed fervently and tried, again and again, to ascertain the will of the gods.

“Lord Lutho, is it your will that Haan should rise again and Xana should fall? What must I do to accomplish your will?”

Every day, every hour, every waking moment, he asked the same questions and sought answers in signs.

What did it mean that the field of wildflowers he passed through had more Queen Naca's Lace than butter-and-eggs? Since the former were white and latter were yellow, the respective colors of Xana and Haan, did that signify that the gods favored the empire?

Or perhaps the key was in the shapes of the flowers: Whereas butter-and-eggs reminded one of the curving beak of a Mingén falcon, Kiji's
pawi
, delicate Queen Naca's Lace put one in mind of Lutho's fishing net. In that case, the gods must have meant to show their favor for Haan.