The Grace of Kings (9 page)

“Rénga,”
Crupo said, bowing deeply. “I have brought you a fine horse. What do you and the assembled ministers think of it?”

The boy emperor's tiny figure seemed almost swallowed up by the giant throne he sat in. He didn't understand what sort of joke the regent was playing. He had always had trouble following his old teacher's erudite, complicated lessons, and the boy did not feel close to the man, certain that his teacher found him lacking as a student. Crupo was also such a strange man—the regent had come to him in the middle of the night to explain that he would now be emperor, but then the regent had given him almost nothing to do, telling him to just enjoy himself and play games with Pira and be entertained by an endless stream of dancing troupes, acrobats, animal trainers, and magicians. The emperor tried to convince himself that he liked the regent, but in truth, he was more than a bit intimidated by him.

“I don't understand,” Emperor Erishi said. “I don't see a horse. I see a deer.”

Crupo bowed deeply again. “Sire, you are mistaken, but that is to be expected, since you are young and still have much to learn. Perhaps the other ministers and generals here can help enlighten you.”

Crupo looked slowly around the room, and his right hand stroked the stag's back lightly. His gaze was cold and severe. No one dared to meet it.

“Tell me, my lords, do you see what I see? Is this a fine horse or a deer?”

Those who were more clever and sensitive to the winds of change caught on.

“An admirable horse, Regent.”

“A very fine horse.”

“I see a beautiful horse.”

“
Rénga
, you must listen to the wise regent. That is a horse.”

“Anyone who says that is a deer must face my sword!”

But some ministers, and especially the generals, shook their heads in disbelief. “This is shameful,” said General Thumi Yuma, who had been in the Xana army for more than fifty years, serving even under Emperor Mapidéré's father and grandfather. “That is a deer. Crupo, you may be powerful, but you cannot make men believe or say what is not true.”

“What is truth?” the regent said, enunciating his words carefully. “What happened in the Grand Tunnels? What happened on the Island of Écofi? These things must be written down in the history books, and someone has to decide what should be written.”

Emboldened by General Yuma, more ministers stepped forward and declared that the regent had brought a deer to the Grand Audi­ence Hall. But the pro-horse party refused to back down, and the two sides got into a shouting match. Crupo smiled and stroked his chin thoughtfully. Emperor Erishi looked from one side to the other and laughed. He thought it was yet another of Crupo's strange jokes.

As the months went by, fewer and fewer of those who stood up against Crupo on that day remained. Many were discovered to be coconspirators of the disgraced Prince Pulo, and from prison they wrote—after some convincing—tearful confessions of their crimes against the throne. They and their families were executed. That was the law of Xana: Treason was a taint in the blood, and five generations would pay for the crime of one.

Even General Yuma turned out to be one of the ringleaders in the failed plot—indeed, there was evidence that he had also tried to conspire with the emperor's other surviving brothers. Those other princes all swallowed poison just as the emperor's palace guards were about to seize them.

Unlike the other conspirators, though, Yuma refused to confess even after being shown incontrovertible proof of his guilt. The emperor was utterly devastated by the news of this betrayal.

“If he would just confess,” the emperor said, “I would spare him, considering his service to Xana!”

“Alas,” the regent said, “we tried to help him regain his conscience through the judicious application of physical pain, which cleanses the soul. But he is very stubborn.”

“How can anyone be trusted if even the great Yuma thought to rebel?”

The regent bowed and said nothing.

The next time the regent brought his
horse
to the Grand Audience Hall, everyone agreed that it was a very fine
horse
indeed.

The young Emperor Erishi was at a loss. “I still see antlers,” he muttered to himself. “How can that be a horse?”

“Don't worry about it,
Rénga
,” Pira whispered next to his ear. “You still have much to learn.”

CHAPTER SIX

CORVÉE

KIESA: THE EIGHTH MONTH IN THE THIRD YEAR OF THE REIGN OF RIGHTEOUS FORCE.

Because Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin were the tallest among the group of men sent from the village of Kiesa to fulfill the yearly quota of corvée laborers, they were made cocaptains. Krima was thin and bald as a polished river stone. Shigin had hair the color of straw, inherited from his Rima-born mother, broad shoulders, and a thick neck that reminded one of a reliable water buffalo. Both had the bronzed skin of Cocru peasants who labored long hours in the fields.

The corvée chief explained to the two their duties: “You have ten days to get the corvée team from here to the site of the Mausoleum of Emperor Mapidéré—may he rest his soul. The regent and the emperor are quite annoyed that progress has been so slow on the eternal house for the emperor's father.

“If you are late by one day, you will each lose one ear. If you are late by two days, you will each lose an eye. If you are late three days, you will each die. But if you are late by more than that, your wives and mothers will be sold to the brothels and your fathers and children will be condemned to conscripted hard labor forever.”

Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin shivered. They looked up at the sky and prayed that the weather would remain calm as they led the corvée crew and began their journey west to the port city of Canfin, where they would get on a boat to carry them north along the coast and then up the Liru River to the site of the Mausoleum near Pan. A storm would mean delays.

The corvée laborers, thirty in number, piled into three horse-drawn carriages at dawn. The doors were then locked to take away the temptation for desertion. Two Imperial soldiers would ride with the caravan as escorts until they arrived at the next town, where the local garrison would take over and provide two more guards to the next stop.

The men looked outside the windows as the caravan made its way along the road to the west.

Though it was late summer, when the crops should be ripening, the fields were not golden with grain and few could be seen working. Typhoons this year had been worse than anyone remembered for years, and the crops in many fields had been ruined, rotting in the rain and mud. Women whose husbands and sons were away toiling for the emperor's grand visions struggled to manage the fields by themselves. What crops did survive had been claimed by the Imperial tax collectors. Though hungry men and women petitioned for reprieve, the answer from Pan was always a firm no.

Instead, the corvée quotas and taxes had been increased. The new Emperor Erishi had halted work on the Grand Tunnels, but he wanted to build a new palace of his own, and he expanded the design of the Mausoleum time after time to prove his filial piety.

The men stared blankly as they passed the corpses of starved men and women abandoned along the side of the road: skeletal thin, rotting, stripped of all their possessions, even the rags that constituted their clothes. There was famine in many of the villages, but the garrison commanders refused to open up the Imperial granaries, reserved for use by the army. Everything that could be eaten had already been eaten: some resorted to eating boiled bark and digging for grubs from the ground. Women, children, and old men tried to walk to where there was still rumored to be food, but sometimes they collapsed by the side of the road, their bodies without the strength to take another step, and their empty, lifeless eyes stared into an equally empty sky. Once in a while, a baby, still alive next to its dead mother, mewled with its last ounce of strength.

Young men, those who were not drafted for the corvée, sometimes escaped into the mountains to become bandits, and there they would be hunted down by the Imperial army like rats by exterminators.

The caravan rolled on, past the dead bodies, past the empty fields, past the desolation of abandoned huts, toward the port of Canfin and thence, the splendor of Immaculate Pan, the Imperial capital.

The caravan passed through the square in the center of a small town. A half-naked old man stumbled about, shouting at the carriages and pedestrians.

“Mount Rapa can be heard to rumble deep within for the first time in fifty years, and the Rufizo Falls have dried up. The black sands of Lutho Beach have turned red with blood. The gods are displeased with the House of Xana!”

“Is what he says true?” Krima asked. He scratched his bald head. “I had not heard of these strange signs.”

“Who knows? Maybe the gods really are angry. Or maybe he's just mad with hunger,” Shigin said.

The soldiers riding with the caravan pretended not to have heard the old man.

They had also come from peasant families, and they all knew people like that back in their home villages in Rui and Dasu. Emperor Mapidéré had left many widows and orphans across Dara, and even the home islands of Xana were not spared. Sometimes, the anger built up so much that people had to scream out their treasonous thoughts just to keep on breathing. Maybe not all of them were really
crazy
, but it was best for everyone involved to pretend that they were.

The Imperial Treasury may have paid their salaries, but that didn't mean that the soldiers forgot who they were.

The rain continued relentlessly for the fourth day. Krima and Shigin stared out the window of the inn and then put their faces in their hands in despair.

They were in Napi, still about fifty miles from the port of Canfin, but the roads were too muddy for the carriages. And even if they somehow made it to the coast, no ship would agree to set sail in this weather.

Yesterday was the last day when they still realistically had a chance of making it to the mouth of the Liru River and sailing up to Pan before the deadline. Each minute that passed meant a worse fate awaited them and their families. Whether the Imperial judges interpreted the laws in accordance with the letter or the spirit didn't matter—in neither was there mercy.

“It's useless,” Krima said. “Even if we get to Pan, we'll end up as cripples or worse.”

Shigin nodded. “Let's pool our money and at least get a good meal for today.”

Krima and Shigin obtained permission from their guards to leave the inn to go to the market.

“There are so few fish in the ocean this year,” the fishmonger told them. “Maybe even the fish are afraid of the tax collectors.”

“Or maybe they are just scared of the hungry mouths of all the starving men in Dara.”

But they paid the obscenely high price for the fish and then paid more for some wine. They used up all their money. Dead men had no use for copper coins.

“Come, come”—they gestured to the other men back at the inn—“even sad men, even men who are about to lose their ears and eyes, have to eat, and eat well!”

The men nodded. This was true wisdom. As corvée laborers, life was simply one whipping after another, and you could only be scared for so long before you decided that filling your belly was more important than anything else.

“Who among you is a good cook?” Krima asked. He held up a large fish by the mouth: silver-scaled, rainbow-finned, as long as his arm. The men felt their mouths water. They hadn't eaten fresh fish in so long.

“We are.”

The speakers were a pair of brothers, Dafiro and Ratho Miro, sixteen and fourteen, barely more than boys really. Pan kept on lowering the age when men would be available for the corvée.

“Your mother taught you how to cook?”

“Nah,” said Ratho, the younger brother. “After Pa died in the Grand Tunnels, she spent a lot of time sleeping and drinking—” But his older brother shushed him.

“We're good cooks,” said Dafiro, staring at every man around him and his brother in turn, daring anyone to make fun of what his brother had just said. “And we won't steal any of the fish for ourselves.”

The men avoided his eyes. They had known too many families like the Miros. They were good cooks because they had to cook for themselves as children or starve.

“Thank you,” Krima said. “I'm sure you'll do a great job. Be careful when you clean the fish. The fishmonger said that the gallbladder in this kind lies shallow.”

The others remained at the bar of the inn and drank. They hoped to drink until they forgot what was going to happen to them when they did finally get to Pan.

“Captain Krima! Captain Shigin! You've got to come and see this!” the Miro boys shouted from the kitchen.

The men got up on their unsteady feet and stumbled for the kitchen. Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin lingered behind for a moment and gave each other meaningful looks.

“This is it,” said Shigin.

“No way out now,” agreed Krima. And the two followed the rest of the men into the kitchen.

Ratho explained that he had sliced the fish's belly open to clean it, and what did he find in the fish's belly? A silk scroll filled with zyndari letters.

Huno Krima Will Be King.

The laborers stared at one another, their eyes and mouths wide open.

The people of Dara had always believed in prophesies and divina­tion.