The Grace of Kings (7 page)

“You have spilled too much blood.” Rufizo sighed, and his
pawi
, the white dove, cooed.

“I spilled blood to prevent the spilling of more blood,” Mapidéré insisted.

Laughter, as wild as a tornado, as chaotic as a whirlpool, rose behind the emperor. It was Tazu, the shape-shifting god of Gan. He was a lithe figure in a fish-skin tunic decorated with a belt made of shark's teeth.

“I like your logic, Mapidéré,” he said. “I want more of it.” His
pawi
, a great shark, leapt out of the pool at his feet, its jaws opened in a deadly grin. “You have greatly increased my collection of drowned men and sunken treasures.”

The swirling pool at Tazu's feet grew, and Mapidéré scrambled to back up out of its way. Although the gods had promised to not actively aim their wrath at mortals, the great Ano lawgiver Aruano had noted that the promise, like all the laws that bound men and gods, left room for interpretation. The gods were charged by their mother, Daraméa, the Source-of-All-Waters, with the running of the natural world: Kiji governed the winds and storms; Rapa guided the flow of glaciers across eons; Kana controlled the flashy eruptions of volcanoes; and so on. If mortals happened to be in the way of these forces of nature, like Tazu's famous whirlpool and raging tides, then their deaths would not be a violation. Mapidéré had no interest in testing how Tazu, the most unpredictable of the gods, interpreted his own promise.

Tazu laughed even louder, and the great shark sank back into the pool at his feet. But the pool of water stopped spreading as the ground beneath Mapidéré turned into quicksand as black as the famed sands at Lutho Beach. Mapidéré sank up to his neck, and he found that he could not breathe.

“I have always honored all of you,” croaked Mapidéré, his voice almost inaudible as Tazu continued to laugh. “I have always tried only to make the world of men more perfect, closer to the world of the gods.”

Lutho, the god of Haan, a stocky old fisherman whose skin was as dark as freshly solidified lava, lifted his foot off his
pawi
, a giant sea turtle, threw out the fishing net on his back, and pulled Mapidéré to safety. “There is often no line between perfection and evil.”

Mapidéré struggled to breathe. Lutho's words made no sense to him, but that was to be expected of the lord of tricks, mathematics, and divination, whose domain was beyond the understanding of mortals.

“Tazu, I'm surprised,” said Lutho. His old, hazel eyes twinkled with a brightness that belied his apparent age. “I had not expected you to take a side in this coming war. So it's Kiji against the Twins, Fithowéo, and you?”

Mapidéré, now forgotten, felt his old heart clench.
So it's to be war again? Has my life's project been in vain?

“Oh, I can't possibly be bothered with something as restraining as picking a
side
,” said Tazu. “I'm interested only in more treasure and bones for my underwater palace. I'll do whatever supplies me more of either. You can say I'm a neutral observer, like Rufizo over there. Except he wants fewer people to die, and I want the opposite. What about you, old man?”

“Me?” asked Lutho in mock surprise. “You know I never had the talent for fighting and politics. I've always been interested only in Mapidéré's alchemists.”

“Right,” scoffed Tazu. “I think you're biding your time and waiting for a winning side to emerge, you trickster.”

Lutho smiled and said nothing.

Tututika, the ethereal goddess of Amu, spoke last in a voice as calm and pleasant as the flat, tranquil surface of Lake Tututika. The speech of the golden-haired, azure-eyed goddess with skin the hue of polished walnut silenced the other gods.

“As the youngest of you all and the least experienced, I've never understood your appetites for power and blood. All I've ever wanted was to enjoy the beauty of my realm and the praise of my people. Why must we always end up as a house divided? Why can't we just promise one another not to be involved in the affairs of mortals at all?”

The other gods were silent. After a while, Kiji said, “You speak as if history does not matter. You know well how the people of Xana were treated by the other states before Mapidéré's wars. Looked down upon, cheated, taken advantage of, Xana suffered for years and lost blood and treasure until the insults could not be borne. Now that they're finally treated with respect, how can I do nothing when they're threatened?”

“Do not presume to speak of only your history,” said Tututika. “The suffering of Amu was also great during Mapidéré's conquests.”

“Exactly,” said Kiji triumphantly. “If the people of Amu now cry out again for your help as they die, will you stand by and plug up your ears as you enjoy the sunsets on Arulugi Island, no doubt made even more beautiful by the smoke and ashes of burning cities?”

Tututika bit her bottom lip, and then sighed. “I wonder whether we're guiding the mortals or if the mortals are guiding us.”

“You can't escape the weight of history,” said Kiji.

“Leave Amu out of it, I beg of you.”

“War has its own logic, Little Sister,” said Fithowéo. “We can guide, but it cannot be controlled.”

“A lesson that mortals have learned again and again—” said Rapa.

“—but it doesn't seem to take,” finished Kana.

Tututika turned her gaze to the forgotten Mapidéré. “Then we should pity this man, whose work is about to be undone. Great men are always misunderstood by their own age. And
great
seldom means
good
.”

The goddess glided toward Mapidéré, her blue silk gown spreading open like the calm sky. Her
pawi
, a golden carp whose sparkling scales dazzled the emperor, swam through the air before her like a living airship.

“Go,” Tututika said, “you have no more time.”

It was only a dream,
thought the emperor.

Some dreams are important: signs, portents, glances of unrealized potential. But others are mere meaningless creations of a busy mind. A great man must pay attention only to dreams that
can
become true.

It had been the dream of generations of kings of Xana to win the respect of the rest of the Islands of Dara. The men of those other Tiro states, closer together and more populous, had always treated remote Xana with contempt: comedians from Amu mocked her accent, merchants from Gan cheated her buyers, poets from Cocru imagined her a land without manners, barely better than the savages who had once lived in Dara before the Settlement. The insults and slights became part of the memory of every Xana child who encountered outsiders.

Respect had to be earned by force. The men of Dara must be made to tremble before the might of Xana.

The rise of Xana was slow and took many years.

Since time immemorial, the children of Dara had been making paper-and-bamboo balloons, hanging candles from them, and then releasing the paper crafts to drift into the dark night sky over the endless ocean, tiny pockets of hot air floating like glowing jellyfish of the skies.

One night, as Mapidéré's father, King Dézan, observed children playing with flying lanterns near the palace, he had a flash of insight: Such balloons, properly scaled up, could change the tide of battle.

Dézan began with balloons made of layers of silk wrapped around a wire-and-bamboo framework. They floated on hot air generated by burning bags full of swamp gas. One or two soldiers, carried up in a gondola, could act as lookouts to spot potential ambushes or reconnoiter for distant fleets. Over time, the use of flame bombs—burning jars of sticky tar mixed with hot oil dropped from the gondolas—gave the balloons offensive capabilities. The other Tiro states quickly copied these Xana innovations.

But then came the discovery by Kino Ye, a Xana engineer, of an odorless, colorless gas that was lighter than air. The gas was found only at bubbling Lake Dako, on the side of Mount Kiji. When properly sealed up in airtight bags, the gas provided enormous lift, and could keep ships afloat in the air indefinitely. Propelled by enormous, winglike oars, these powerful airships made quick work of the passive, unreliable hot air balloons put up by the other states.

Moreover, the airships were deadly to navies, with their wooden hulls and cloth sails. A few airships could decimate an entire fleet caught by surprise. The only effective countermeasure involved long-range arrows propelled by firework rockets, but these were expensive and often proved even more dangerous to the other ships on the surface when they fell back down at the end of their long arcing flight, still burning.

King Dézan had contented himself with merely gaining the respect of the other Tiro states. His successor, the young and ambitious King Réon, decided that he preferred to dream a bigger dream, a dream that no one had dared to voice since the days of the Ano: to conquer all the Tiro states and unify the Islands of Dara.

Aided by the great airships, Xana navies and armies swept from victory to victory. It took thirty years of unceasing war for King Réon to conquer all the other six Tiro states. Even great Cocru, with its famed cavalry and skilled swordsmen, could not stand against him in the field. The last King of Cocru jumped into the sea when the capital Çaruza fell because he could not bear to be a naked captive in Réon's court.

So Réon declared himself Lord of All Dara and renamed himself Mapidéré, the First Emperor. He saw himself as the beginning of a new kind of power, a power that would transform the world.

“The time for kings is over. I am the King of Kings.”

It was a new dawn, but the Imperial Procession remained where it was.

The emperor was still lying in his tent. The pain in his stomach was so intense that he could not get up. Even breathing seemed to take too much energy.

“Send our fastest airship, and bring me the crown prince.”

I must warn Pulo to prepare for the coming war,
thought the emperor.
The gods have prophesied it. But perhaps it can still be stopped—even the gods admit that they are not always in control.

Chatelain Goran Pira held his ear close to the emperor's trembling lips and nodded. But there was a glint in his eyes, a glint that the emperor did not see.

The emperor lay, dreaming of his grand projects. There were still so many things to do, so many tasks unfinished.

Pira summoned Prime Minister Lügo Crupo to his own tent, a tiny, unassuming dome next to the giant Imperial pavilion, like a hermit crab sheltered next to a thirty-year-old conch.

“The emperor is very ill,” Pira said. The hand holding the teacup was still. “No one knows the true extent of his sickness, yet, except for me—and now you. He has asked to see the crown prince.”

“I will send
Time's Arrow
,” Crupo said. Crown Prince Pulo was away in Rui supervising the construction of the Grand Tunnels with General Gotha Tonyeti. Even
Time's Arrow
, the empire's fastest airship, oaring the air nonstop with shifts of conscripted laborers, would take almost two full days to get there and two more to return.