The Grace of Kings (74 page)

“There is no message from Master Pering,” Luing said, bewildered. “I'm here on the hegemon's orders to discuss fishing rights around Kidima upriver.”

“You are not sent by Torulu Pering?” Luan asked, incredulous.

“No,” said Luing.

Luan sighed, shook his head, and rolled his eyes. He then forced himself to smile. “I have no idea what I'm talking about. I think I'm drunk. Forget everything I said today. It must be this herbal mixture I'm taking for my gout—it's making me very confused. Please excuse me . . . I . . . need to go.”

He got up and hurried downstairs.

Though the smoke from the incense burners continued to hover in fantastic, shifting shapes—flexing rings, pulsing domes, translucent, billowy bubbles—the air in the room seemed to clear, and Luing felt clarity return to his mind. He thought and thought about the day's events and came to a bold conclusion, like a monstrous shape glimpsed through fog. But he needed more evidence.

Servants came to show Luing to his room in the inn. When Luing asked when he would get to speak with King Kuni's representatives about the matter he came to discuss, the servants replied that they had no idea.

The next day, a minor Dasu functionary named Daco Nir came to see Luing. Daco was rude and cold to Luing, and the negotiations went nowhere. When it came time for lunch, Daco handed a few copper coins to Luing and told him to get some food from the street vendors.

“I don't think we'll make any more progress, right? I'm busy for the rest of the day, so I don't think I can see you off at the pier. Have a safe trip home.” Daco disappeared.

Luan Zya, Lady Risana, and “Daco Nir” watched from the window of a warehouse as the small boat of the hegemon's emissary left the docks.

“Your skill is indeed unparalleled,” Luan said to Risana. “He saw exactly what you wanted him to see yesterday.”

Risana inclined her head in acknowledgment. “You're too kind. It was but a parlor trick.” She turned to Rin Coda and smiled. “But look at you! Your face today was so frosty, I could have sworn I heard ice chunks clink in his tea.”

“I've had a lot of practice. When I use that expression, people pay me more to get access to the king.”

Luan shook his head, and all three laughed.

Luing compared his treatment today with his treatment yesterday. The day before, Luan, Kuni Garu's closest adviser, treated him as an honored guest because he thought Luing was a secret envoy from Torulu Pering. But today this minor bureaucrat dealt with him arrogantly and dismissively because Kuni's men had ascertained that Luing was an ambassador from the hegemon. The facts spoke for themselves.

“Hegemon, don't you see that this is nothing but another trick from Garu?”

Mata regarded the trembling figure of Torulu Pering coldly. He had always found Pering untrustworthy.

The man was not a warrior, but an
adviser
, the sort of man who naturally gravitated toward Kuni Garu, who relied on tricks. He had no appreciation for the nobler virtues that could only be understood in battle. Even though Pering had come up with some good ideas, generally, he was meddlesome and often got in the way. Mata was quite willing to believe that he was secretly in league with Kuni Garu, plotting against him.

“Luan Zya was expecting a message from you. Were you going to offer a detailed listing of my order of battle? Were you going to offer to bribe my officers? Were you going to offer to present Kuni my head on a platter?”

Torulu Pering trembled not from fear, but anger. He had served Mata Zyndu loyally all this time, trying to get him to fight smarter, to be more vigilant against the wily Kuni Garu. Yet Mata was falling for such a simple trick, a trick that a five-year-old would have seen through.

“If you really don't trust me,” Pering said, “then please accept my resignation. I would like to go home, to my ancestral farm near Çaruza, and plant yams. I won't serve a lord who cannot tell friend from foe.”

“I accept. Go home, old man.”

Torulu walked along the road, but his mind was all chaos and his heart in turmoil.

He was consumed with grief and anger at his own failure. He had failed to teach Mata Zyndu to appreciate the value of strategy. He had failed to make him see how dangerous and manipulative Kuni Garu was. He had failed as an adviser. For all his service, in the end, he had only earned the dismissive moniker of “old man.”

But Torulu was indeed old, and he was not used to the exertion of journeying far on his own, without a comfortable carriage and a staff of young aides. His stomach ached, and in the heat he felt dizzy, but he was too angry and sorrowful to stop and rest and drink some water. He pressed on.

Men and women rushed by him, telling him to turn around and run. “Bandits are coming!”

Torulu didn't hear them. He was still thinking about what he could have done differently.
Foolish Mata, know that I could have guided you to victory!

The Whirlwind Riders of Dasu rushed by. Carelessly, casually, one of the passing horsemen slashed out, and Pering stopped feeling sorry for himself, stopped thinking altogether. His head flew through the air.

Luan and Kuni toasted each other on the success of their plot.

“Now Mata has no one to counsel him at all.”

Kuni drank, but he felt a gnawing sense of regret. Torulu Pering was a capable man who had saved the rebellion at a critical moment, and he deserved better. Kuni was uneasy about how much blood he was spilling in the pursuit of victory. Did the end always justify the means?

He wished the gods would give him a clear answer.

“There are no clear answers,” Luan Zya said.

Kuni realized that he had paused, mid-drink. He laughed weakly and drained the cup.

“To know the future is to have no choice,” Luan continued, “to be words fixed on a page by someone else. We can only do what we think is best, trusting that it will all somehow work out.”

“I know,” Kuni said. “The people think I see a clear path, but I'm stumbling in the dark too.”

“Maybe that's what the gods are doing, as well.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

THE MARSHAL'S GAMBIT

RIMA AND FAÇA: THE THIRD MONTH OF THE FIFTH YEAR OF THE PRINCIPATE.

As Cocru and Dasu were evenly matched along the Liru, Luan Zya and Gin Mazoti presented a plan to Kuni Garu to shift the strategic balance of power.

Up north, Faça and the reconstituted Rima—which everyone assumed was following Faça's lead—had switched their allegiance between Dasu and Cocru several times and thus avoided being invaded by either. Most recently, they had both declared for Mata, given the lack of recent military success from Kuni.

They could become examples for the other states.

Taking only a small force of five thousand, Marshal Mazoti left Dimushi and marched to the coast of Zathin Gulf, close to Rima. There, she said good-bye to Luan Zya, who put on a disguise and, alone, piloted a small fishing skiff toward fog-shrouded Boama, capital of Faça.

Within the territories of old ring-wooded Rima, Mata Zyndu had created six new Tiro states. After a year of warfare, most of the new Tiro states were gone, and all the land was now consolidated under the control of Zato Ruthi, who had been one of King Jizu's teachers when he first arrived at the palace in Na Thion. Later, he had immortalized Jizu's sacrifice to save Na Thion from Namen's army in a eulogy that every child in Rima could recite.

The rise of Zato Ruthi was the result of a series of accidents that was unlikely to ever repeat again. He was a scholar through and through, in the mold of someone who preferred neat books to anything in the messy real world.

As a child, rather than playing with friends, Zato memorized all the numbered sayings of the ancient Ano epigrammatist, Ra Oji. As a young man, rather than carousing with friends in bars, he stayed home and read all the commentaries on the ancient Ano moral philo­sopher Kon Fiji's treatise on an ideal society. Disdaining the civil service examinations because they interfered with the pure contemplation of ideas, he refused to seek gainful employment but journeyed deep into Rima's ancient woods to study in a tiny hut he constructed himself. By the time he was thirty, he was recognized as one of the greatest scholars of ancient philosophy in all of Dara, a rival of Tan Féuji and Lügo Crupo, though he had never studied in the famed academies of Haan.

Tanno Namen spared him when Na Thion fell, and he then traveled between the capitals of the new Tiro states, which Mata Zyndu had created in his beloved old Rima, teaching and lecturing.

As wars destroyed one Tiro state after another, the new conquerors always made a point to seek out Zato to get him to “bless” the new administration as being in harmony with Kon Fiji's moral principles. On some level, Zato Ruthi surely understood that he was being used as a tool of propaganda, but he appreciated the attention that the powerful gave him, and he liked being treated as if his opinion mattered.

The last two Tiro states left in old Rima then went to war, as all along they knew they would. Neither could subdue the other, and as their armies clashed all over Rima, the people suffered.

Then King Shilué of Faça, as was his habit, decided to intervene again in the affairs in Rima and sent his troops to Na Thion to add to the chaos.

As the people of Na Thion suffered yet another military occupation, anger and despair filled the streets. One day, students of the Na Thion Academy took to the streets, demanding that Shilué go home with his foreign army, that the two kings of Rima stop the war, and that the people be left to live in peace.

Idle merchants, who had no business to conduct because of the war; idle farmers, who had no land to till because of the war; and idle workers, who had nothing to do because of the war, joined the students, and mobs of rioters filled the streets. The students led them to the Palace of Na Thion, where Shilué was negotiating with the ambassadors of the two kings of Rima.

The students carried Zato Ruthi on their shoulders, and they hailed him as their leader. “Teacher! Teacher! You've always wanted to build a state in the image of Kon Fiji's ancient virtues. Now's our chance!”

They chanted before the palace, and before he even understood what was happening, Zato Ruthi found himself standing on a makeshift stage in front of the palace, speaking to a crowd of thousands of angry men.

He rehearsed his old themes about the obligations of the ruler toward the ruled, about the importance of restraint and respect and justice and the right to eat, about the need for harmonious relations among all people in a state, and about the injustice of foreign mili­tary interference.

It was nothing new, and there was nothing special to the way he spoke, but the crowd roared and clapped, and he felt as though he was being lifted on their voices, on their strength of will. And his words became more fiery in response. He called for the people to tear the palace down, to usher in a more harmonious and just Rima.

Shilué and the ambassadors trembled in the palace, but Shilué shrewdly saw an opportunity. He pressed the two kings of Rima to not only agree to a cease-fire, but to abdicate their thrones and to support Zato Ruthi as the king of a unified new Rima.

“The people have spoken,” he said, “and they are not calling for either of your names.”

In reality, Shilué thought that Zato, being a mere scholar with no experience at administration, would be an easier puppet to control from Boama than either of the two kings, and he made it clear that Faça's troops were ready to “support the people of Rima and their choice.”

Thus did Zato Ruthi become the King of Rima.

Marshal Mazoti called on King Zato to surrender three times. Each time her messengers were rebuffed but returned with earnest letters addressed to Mazoti from Zato:

It is known to every child of Dara that all Tiro states are equal, and none can claim lordship over another. King Kuni has breached this principle, which was set forth by the infallible Aruano and approved by the wise Kon Fiji. The hegemon will surely punish King Kuni for these violations of the moral principles governing relations among states.

Even worse, King Kuni has made a woman into a soldier and elevated her above men. This is at odds with the principles governing harmonious relations among the sexes that Kon Fiji so eloquently explained centuries ago. Rima hopes that King Kuni will soon recover from his errors and apologize for his mistakes. It is the only way for Dasu to be restored to honor.

Mazoti rolled her eyes. The words from Zato were as musty and stale as the old books that no one read. Coming from anyone else, the words would have been understood as sarcastic insults, but Mazoti knew that Zato was completely serious. He genuinely believed that there were “moral principles governing relations among states” and didn't see them as the codification of the robber's logic employed by strong states seeking to impose their will on weak ones.

As Mazoti's troops wound their way through tree-canopied Rima, they encountered no resistance. The woodsmen and hunters were told that Kuni Garu's soldiers would leave civilians alone unless they took up arms against them. They stood silently in front of their cottages or moved off the trails as Mazoti's army marched south through the thick forest.

Sometimes a soldier would exchange a knowing smile with a woodsman standing by the side of the trail.

War was fought mostly for the benefit of the nobles, and it was best if it could be fought quickly so as to bother the common people the least. King Kuni at least seemed to honor
that
principle.

The Dasu army came to a small and shallow river about fifty feet wide. It was now spring, and the river, swelled by the melting of winter snow, ran cold and fast. Mazoti could see the defenders of Rima on the other side. They were not stationed at the shore, however, but stood about a mile off.

“Why are they so far off?” one of Mazoti's aides-de-camp asked. “It's not as if they are holding a hill either. There's no tactical advantage to their position.”

Mazoti saw the black flags of Rima waving in the distance. The one in the middle was extra large, with golden borders.

“King Zato is with them. That would explain the bizarre location of Rima troops. Kon Fiji wrote in his books that it is not moral to attack an army while it's still fording a river. The defenders must give the attackers enough room to cross the river and set up its formation on the other side so that the fight will be fair.”

“Kon Fiji wrote about military tactics?”

“That old fraud wrote about lots of things he knew nothing about. But we should thank him. Since Zato is such a faithful disciple of everything Kon Fiji taught, we'll have a safe crossing.”

Five hundred of Mazoti's men crossed over first and set up defensive lines on the other side of the river, just in case the Rima forces did attack. To avoid being swept away by the swift currents, the rest of the troops linked their arms and held on to one another as they forded the river. At the deepest part of the river, the water covered their chests. Officers and soldiers alike worried that the defenders might decide to charge when the bulk of the Dasu army was still on the north side of the river or in the middle of the crossing. They would be defenseless in the water.

But true to Marshal Mazoti's words, King Zato's men stayed where they were and watched Mazoti's army cross without harassing them.

“Unbelievable,” the aide-de-camp said in wonder as the soldiers laid out their gear on the grassy banks to dry. The Rima forces still made no move.

The officers around King Zato were ready to pull their hair out.

“Sire, we must attack now, before Mazoti's troops complete the crossing.”

“Nonsense. We outnumber her forces three to one. Besides, she's a woman. Kon Fiji wrote that an army imbued with righteousness would defeat an army steeped in immorality. How can attacking the enemy before they are ready to defend themselves be righteous?”

“Sire, we must attack now, before her men put their armor back on.”

“You wish to besmirch the name of our army? What would King Jizu, the Pure-Hearted Ruler, say of your plots? No, we must wait. Besides, look how she's gathering her soldiers into formation! Kon Fiji taught us that when there's a river around, one should never set up the infantry so that the soldiers' backs are against the river because they will have no room to maneuver. We gave them plenty of space to properly form up, yet Mazoti is lining up her men against the shore of the river.