Speaking Bones, page 57
Cogo lowered his hands, took a step back into his assigned place at the head of the column of ministers, and stood with his eyes looking straight ahead, his expression unreadable.
Zomi, whose place was next to Cogo’s, was puzzled by the enigmatic exchange between the Prime Minister and the empress. Some kind of understanding seems to have been reached between the two, but what? And why did Cogo choose this moment to highlight the most awkward political fact in all Dara? Empress Jia’s unwillingness to hand over the Seal of Dara to the emperor grows daily more untenable, but surely it’s a mistake to confirm this tension within the House of Dandelion in front of the Lyucu envoy?
Unseen by anyone else in the Grand Audience Hall, Lady Soto, ensconced within the small changing room behind the dais, peeked out at the unfolding scene. It was her habit, as Jia’s confidante, to secretly attend court this way. There was a time when Jia sought her advice after each session, but these days, she seemed to retreat more and more into herself. Sometimes Soto thought she didn’t know her old friend at all anymore.
The empress turned back to Noda Mi almost as an afterthought, waving again to dismiss him.
Noda bowed. “There is just one more thing.”
Every pair of eyes focused on the man. One more thing?
Slowly, methodically, Noda took out from his voluminous sleeve a small cloth bundle. This he unwrapped to reveal a jade tablet. With both hands, he lifted the cloth, with the jade tablet still at the center, reverently high above his head. Once again, he locked eyes with the empress.
“My dear friend Doru Solofi, once also a Tiro king during the Principate, died at the Battle of Zathin Gulf. I understand that he is buried here in Pan, in the cemetery honoring those who died during the… creation of Ukyu-taasa. I’d like a chance to visit his grave to pay my respects, and to leave this tablet carved with his royal name as a token of our friendship. Ah, all power appears mere fleeting vanity in the face of death and defeat.”
Empress Jia nodded and waved again impatiently.
Keeping his eyes on the empress, Noda Mi backed away, still lifting the cloth and jade tablet high above his head. When he finally reached the entrance of the Grand Audience Hall, he turned and walked away.
* * *
Taking turns, members of the Inner Council examined the square of cloth Noda Mi had handed to Empress Jia.
It was Zomi’s turn.
Most of the surface was dominated by a drawing. A cliff loomed over the sea, and from the top of the cliff dangled a large cage. The cage was divided into ten levels, and each level was packed full of people. Small figures in the margin indicated that each level contained one hundred prisoners, for a total of one thousand prisoners in the cage.
She could hear the other ministers of the Inner Council cluster around the chest that Noda Mi had given to the palace guards, containing “presents” from the Lyucu. Already, she had an inkling of what was in the chest.
Above the cliff, the cage was connected, through a block and tackle, to a thick set of cables that ended at a set of harnesses attached to three garinafins. The crudely drawn garinafins strained at the weight and seemed to be walking backward to lower the cage slowly.
“O gods!”
Behind her came cries of horror and revulsion. Retching. Dry heaves.
“Are these ears and noses?”
“Barbarous!”
Resolutely, she forced herself to keep her eyes on the cloth. She would not look at the chest.
The bottom of the cage was packed with stones, and Zomi could almost hear the despondent cries of the prisoners as they were lowered, inch by inch, toward the cold and merciless embrace of the sea.
Her hands shook as she glanced over the figures at the bottom of the drawing, a table of calculations. How long it would take to load the cage with prisoners; how long it would take to drop the cage from the top of the cliff into the sea; how long it would take for everyone in the cage to drown; how long it would take to empty the cage—there was an inset illustration showing the clever mechanism at the side of the cage that allowed all the corpses to be dumped into the sea with minimal work; how long it would take to pull the cage back up to the top of the cliff so the cycle could start again.
“Can you tell if the ears and noses were cut off from corpses or while the victims were still alive?”
“What difference does it make?”
“If we can determine how the victims died, we may know more about how seriously to take the threat….”
The debating voices behind Zomi hushed as the chest was taken away; the stench of death and decay was replaced by the fragrance of incense from braziers rushed in by servants; without realizing it, someone gently took the cloth out of her trembling hands.
The calculations showed how many prisoners could be processed in an hour, a day, a week. This was an optimized engine of slaughter, designed to kill as many native captives as possible in the shortest amount of time.
In her mind she was back on Rui, more than a decade ago.
“Nooooo!” howled Zomi Kidosu. “Mother! Mother! O gods!”
Than Carucono held on to her even tighter.
The scene before her was incomprehensible. Her mother, burning; her mother, dying. She had promised to give her mother a better life, and this was what she had done.
Where a hundred people had scrambled and struggled for life a moment ago, now only a hundred smoldering pyres remained. The charred but still sizzling bodies maintained the poses of the last moments of their lives: a mother shielding the body of her child, a husband interposing himself before his wife, a son and daughter trying to cover the body of their mother—all three were now fused into one smoldering corpse.
The Lyucu had perfected their engine of death. Instead of wasting valuable garinafin fire breath, they now relied on inexhaustible water. Instead of a hundred, they could kill a thousand with a single gesture.
She could understand now why Noda Mi had been hesitant about presenting his “gifts” and the drawing in open court. Yes, the assembled ministers and officers would have torn him apart from limb to limb, even though an envoy was supposed to have diplomatic immunity.
An inhuman howl filled the air, a howl of rage, of despair, of utter incomprehension in the face of evil. It wasn’t until the pain of tearing at her own throat punctured her awareness that she realized that the howl was coming from herself.
* * *
The debate among the Inner Council grew ever more heated, with each side accusing the other of cowardice, rashness, greed, pride, and every other sin known to gods or humankind.
It was clear that Noda Mi’s boasting of the prowess of Lyucu warriors was nothing but a smoke screen. The real threat was the ability of the Lyucu to kill as many of the inhabitants of Unredeemed Dara as possible before succumbing.
Should Dara give in and grant peace to the butchers or press on and accept the deaths of hundreds of thousands?
Empress Jia listened to the arguments but said nothing, her face an expressionless mask carved from stone.
Zomi was equally silent. She stared at the evil contraption sketched on Noda Mi’s square of silk while the arguments raged on around her, like the incomprehensible murmurs of the gods in her youth.
Finally, Prime Minister Cogo Yelu stepped into the fray. “The welfare of the people of Dara must be our guiding light,” he said.
The room quieted, waiting for him to elaborate.
“When Emperor Ragin served as the Duke of Zudi by popular acclamation, he once had to defend the city against the army of the illustrious Tanno Namen of Xana. Namen’s practice was to drive civilian refugees before his men as shock troops and living shields. The duke persuaded his friend, Mata Zyndu, to open the gates of the city to let in as many of the refugees as he could, despite the fact that the refugees were not his charge, and the action put the entire city at risk.”
The ministers of the Inner Council nodded. The acts of Kuni Garu, as the founder of the Dandelion Dynasty, were constitutive acts, and weighty as precedent.
“When Emperor Ragin first tried to liberate Unredeemed Dara, he achieved great initial success,” Cogo continued. “But then he fell into a trap at Naza Pass, and his only route of escape was to board his airship. Pékyu Tenryo drove defenseless peasants to surround the emperor, staked them to the ground, and threatened to burn all of them alive. The emperor stayed to save them, despite the fact that some of the civilians had collaborated with the Lyucu, and despite knowing that his action would make him a hostage, threatening the security of all Dara.
“In both cases, the emperor was guided by compassion. The people of Rui and Dasu are also the people of Dara, even if, as some of you have pointed out, they’ve collaborated with the Lyucu, some willingly, some not—”
Zomi suddenly spoke up. “Prime Minister, Noda Mi’s threat isn’t credible.”
Everyone turned to her. “Wh-what?” stuttered Cogo.
Zomi pointed to the sketch on the silk cloth. “My job is to weigh the fish. The Lyucu are not engineers, and they have devastated the industrial foundation of Unredeemed Dara. Every piece of intelligence we have points to a consistent pattern in which they have refused to adopt our expertise in construction and engineering, and I do not believe they’re capable of building such a machine of death. They are better at tearing down than building up.
“A killing cage like this is a highly challenging piece of machinery. But the drawing here seems to contemplate simply scaling up an ordinary cage, with no structural modifications needed to sustain the weight of the prisoners or to bear up under the stresses of repeated elevations and immersions. I do not believe this represents a real machine at all, but only the imagination of an evil mind with no understanding of what it takes to realize that vision.”
Voices cried out in the aftermath of her speech, some in relief, some in disbelief. Zomi seemed to have recovered fully from her earlier loss of control. Facts were the straws she clung to, rebuffing all doubts with explanations of why the killing machine was infeasible.
Jia and Cogo exchanged a long, meaningful look.
Cogo turned to Zomi. “How can you be so certain? Your farseers didn’t anticipate that the Lyucu would adopt fire arrows either, to the consternation of the emperor.”
“That…” Zomi was at a loss for answers. Her knowledge of Unredeemed Dara was necessarily incomplete.
“The Lyucu also adopted novel armor for their garinafins, suggesting that they have in their employ native smiths with skill for invention. How can you be sure that these collaborators haven’t overcome the engineering challenges, even if Noda’s sketch doesn’t show a feasible design?”
Zomi knew that Cogo had a good point. Yet, she persisted stubbornly. “We cannot attribute to the enemy such expertise with no evidence. It’s improbable that they—”
“The ingenuity of evil shouldn’t be underestimated,” said Cogo. “Can you say, with absolute certainty, that they cannot construct such a machine? Not just unlikely, but impossible.”
“I… cannot,” conceded Zomi.
“Even if there’s only a minuscule chance that the threat is real, we must behave as though it were completely real. Besides, even if they have no such evil machine, as the chest of ears and noses shows, the Lyucu have other ways of killing—perhaps less efficient, but workable enough.”
Zomi discarded the mask of cold rationality. “But a peace treaty with the Lyucu is the worst decision possible right now! How can you contemplate letting the lives of all the men and women who have died to get us this close to victory go to waste? How can you imagine leaving the enslaved population of Rui and Dasu groaning in their chains? How can you—”
“Zomi, the troops who have sacrificed their lives to get us to this point will not have died in vain. Because of our advantage in arms, we can demand concessions, including better treatment for the enslaved population—”
“That is not the right reasoning!” Zomi shouted. “For us to back down because the Lyucu threaten harm to those in their power would encourage them to repeat the tactic again and again. We can’t just make enslavement tolerable; we must end it!”
“But the price you speak of… Zomi, what of Emperor Ragin’s compassion? What of—”
“There are more forms of compassion than the examples you cited. Emperor Ragin broke the peace with the Hegemon in order to end all strife when he had the advantage, instead of inviting another round of slaughter in ten, twenty years. If we’re to imitate the emperor, then let’s imitate the emperor at Rana Kida, not Naza Pass. We must not think only of those alive today, but also the countless who have yet to cross the Veil of Incarnation. We cannot allow future generations to be born and live in bondage. The interest of the few must yield to the interests of the many, and if we must sacrifice some to secure a lasting peace that is just, so be it.”
For some time, Cogo simply looked at her, and when he continued, his voice was as anguished as she had ever heard it. “You’re talking about the deaths of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. You speak of weighing the fish, but how do you weigh the lives of those who must die for your sense of justice? You speak of the welfare of future generations, but how many of those living now are you willing to kill—”
“We won’t be doing the killing! The Lyucu will!”
“How can you evade responsibility by such a legalistic dodge? The chain of causation cannot be severed when the consequences of our decision are so clear and present. The Lyucu will carry out their threat if we don’t yield. Are you willing to sentence hundreds of daughters to watch in chains as their mothers are burned alive to satisfy the Lyucu’s twisted definition of a victory? Are you willing to condemn thousands of fathers to drown while their sons are conscripted to be living shields for the Lyucu? Will the hypothetical happiness of millions unborn always outweigh the deaths and suffering of those already here in the mortal realm?”
Zomi thought back to the moment when she had watched helplessly as her mother was incinerated by garinafin breath in Naza Pass. What would she not give for Kuni Garu to have yielded a moment sooner, so that her mother could have been spared? Her vision blurred and her voice died in her throat, leaving only an inchoate moan of rage.
Empress Jia looked at the assembled ministers.
“Poti Maji told a story of how once Kon Fiji bought all the fish from a fisherman next to the beach….”
The members of the Inner Council were confused, but they knew that the empress never told a story without a point. They listened.
* * *
All the fish in the barrel were still alive. Kon Fiji rolled the barrel back to the edge of the sea, tipped it over, and watched as the fish slithered into the water and swam away.
Onlookers pointed at the old master and laughed at his foolishness.
“Master, you haven’t saved them,” said Poti Maji. “These are lumber-fin groupers, notorious for being slow and dim-witted. The fisherman will only go out and catch all of them again. Look, he is already preparing his boat and net.”
“Then I’ll wait here for his return, so that I can buy them from him again,” said Kon Fiji.
“But why?” asked Poti Maji.
“Perhaps he will change his mind about making a living by killing. Perhaps some of the lumber-fin groupers will get away. The future is full of possibilities.”
Poti Maji shook his head. “Master, even if he decides to leave this trade, someone else will take his place. Even if some of the fish escape, others will be caught.”
Kon Fiji smiled and held Poti by the shoulders earnestly. “I know that you’re right, but I can’t help what I do. It’s my nature.”
Later, Poti Maji wrote the following in his commentaries on Morality: “The One True Sage believed that in the heart of every person, from the meanest criminal to the most elevated sage, from the three-day-old babe to the elder on their deathbed, there is a core of compassion and yearning to do good. By following his faith, he accepted the possibility that his actions would sometimes appear foolish or dangerous, but he persisted and never gave up his optimism. By studying Moralism, we aim to change human nature to be closer to the Master’s nature.”
* * *
Empress Jia finished her story and waited.
“The Lyucu are hated and cruel, but we cannot let hatred be our master,” Cogo Yelu said. “If we press ahead with a conquest without regard for the people in their dominion, then all of our hands will be stained with the blood that flows. The Lyucu are taking advantage of us, much the way a rat takes advantage of a man who dares not toss his shoe at the rat lest it strike the delicate vase it shelters behind, yet we have no choice but to acquiesce. To do otherwise would be contrary to our nature.
“In war, we must resist the impulse to become more like our enemies.”
A vote was taken, and when Zomi’s turn came, she abstained.
The tally was overwhelmingly for peace.
“Thank you, Lords of Dara,” said Empress Jia, looking relieved. “Let the Seal of Dara be moved by compassion for the people.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT WHAT VALUE DEFEAT?
OFF THE COAST OF RUI, NEAR KRIPHI: THE EIGHTH MONTH OF THE ELEVENTH YEAR OF THE REIGN OF SEASON OF STORMS AND THE REIGN OF AUDACIOUS FREEDOM.
Phyro read over the message from Pan again.
“There must be some mistake,” said Puma Yemu. “How could there be a cease-fire?”
“The Lyucu must have sent a delegation to Pan behind my back after they secured the promise of a delay from me.”
“But why? We’re on the verge of total victory here.”
Phyro paced across the quarterdeck of the city-ship. “Bring me my field desk. I’m going to write to Zomi Kidosu for clarification. I must find out what lies the Lyucu have told. It isn’t too late to fix the situation.”
Just then, an aide-de-camp rushed up and saluted. “Rénga, the Imperial envoy has informed all the military monitors of the cease-fire. There is a great deal of confusion among the captains and officers.”
