The Wall of Storms, page 11
Mimi could hear the sincerity in his voice. He spoke with an accent from somewhere on the Big Island, and his enunciation was courtly and graceful, like the folk opera singers who played the nobles onstage.
“It was thoughtless of me,” the man said. “I offer you my apologies again.”
Mimi turned and set down her bag. “What was so funny about what I said?”
The man kept his expression very serious, and asked, “Do you know the work of any of the sages they quoted?”
Mimi shook her head. “I’ve never been to school.” Then she added, “Well, I know the name of Kon Fiji, the One True Sage, because they have him in the folk operas sometimes.”
The man nodded. “Your question makes perfect sense; I just never paid attention to the pattern you noticed. Sometimes we stop questioning things we take for granted. In fact, ‘ji’ is not a part of the family names of the sages. It is a Classical Ano suffix to indicate respect, roughly meaning ‘teacher.’ ”
Mimi heard no condescension in his tone, which made her feel better. “You know Classical Ano?”
“Yes. I’ve been studying it since I was a little boy.”
“You’re still studying?”
“You never stop studying,” the man said, smiling. “Not just Classical Ano, but also many other subjects, math, mechanics, divination.”
“You understand the gods?” Mimi’s heart quickened.
“I wouldn’t go that far.” The man hesitated, as though trying to figure out how to explain a complicated idea. “I’ve conversed with the gods, but I’m not sure they even understand themselves. It is possible that the more we know, the less we need to rely on the gods. And the gods are also learning, the same as us.”
This was such a strange idea that Mimi was at a loss for words. She decided to change the subject. “Was it difficult to learn Classical Ano?”
“At first. But since all the important books and poems are written in it, my tutor made me work at it. Eventually it became as easy to read the logograms of Classical Ano as it was to read the zyndari letters.”
“I don’t know how to read at all.”
The man nodded, a trace of sorrow in his eyes. “I come from old Haan, where every child had the chance to learn to read. Now that the world is at peace, perhaps that will be true not only in Haan, but all of Dara.”
The vision seemed absurd to Mimi, but the voice of the man was so fervent and hopeful that she didn’t want to make him sad. “What did you think of the debate?”
“I think they were both very learned,” said the man, smiling again. “But that is not the same as wise. What did you think?”
“I think they need to weigh the fish.”
The man was taken aback. “Oh? What . . . does that mean?”
“It’s something my mother taught me. She used to ask me whether I knew why whitefish became heavier over time after you’ve hauled them out of the sea.”
The man closed his eyes, pondering this. “That is indeed puzzling. I would have thought that as the water left the flesh, the fish would become lighter over time, not heavier. Is it something unusual about the structure of the whitefish? Maybe the flesh absorbs moisture from the air? Or perhaps the whitefish, when alive, contains some kind of gas that lightens it, like the Mingén falcon? Or—”
Now it was Mimi’s turn to laugh. “You’re acting just like I did, assuming what someone is telling you is true. Instead, you should be weighing the fish.”
“And what would you find out if you did?”
“Whitefish doesn’t get any heavier over time. It was a story made up by unscrupulous merchants who blew air into the bellies of their fish to make them seem bigger. And when their fish turned out to weigh less than other fish of the same size, they argued that their catch was fresher, which was why they weighed less.”
“How would you apply this story to the debate?”
Mimi looked at the setting sun. “I have to go home before it gets dark, but if you come and meet me by the wharf north of the city tomorrow morning, I’ll show you.”
“I’ll certainly do that. By the way, what is your name?”
“Mimi, of the Kidosu clan. And yours?”
The man hesitated for just a second, and then said, “I’m Toru Noki, a wanderer.”
The next morning, Toru showed up at the wharf at the crack of dawn.
“You’re prompt,” said Mimi, pleased. “I wasn’t sure if you would take me seriously, seeing as how you have the air of a learned man.”
“I’ve had some experience with early morning appointments by fishing wharves,” said Toru. “They usually end up teaching me much about the world.” But he didn’t elaborate.
Mimi stood without leaning against her walking stick, which was planted into the sand of the beach. Attached to the top of the bamboo pole was a horizontal crossbeam, at one end of which was mounted an old, small bronze mirror whose center was brightly polished. At the other end was a circular frame made from a thin stalk of bamboo with a banana leaf stretched taut across it.
She adjusted the mirror until an image of the rising sun was reflected onto the banana leaf. She carefully traced its outline with a piece of charcoal.
“You designed this yourself?” Toru asked.
“Yes,” Mimi said. “I’ve always liked to look at things in nature: the sea, the sky, the stars, and the clouds. The sun is too bright to look at directly, so I figured out this way of looking at a reflection.”
“It is very well conceived,” said Toru admiringly.
“We’ll have to do this again at noon. You can come back later or wait nearby. I have to go into the city to sell the grain. It’s our only livelihood, and that can’t wait.”
“Your family doesn’t fish?”
“My father used to,” Mimi said, her voice dipping lower. “But my mother doesn’t want me to learn. He . . . disappeared in the sea.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Toru.
They went into the city, and though Toru offered to help carry the bag of sample grain, Mimi wouldn’t let him (“I’m probably stronger than you”). The man did not insist, which Mimi appreciated. She never liked people to assume that because of her leg, she was less capable than others, and sometimes people had trouble understanding that.
Mimi wanted to try the open market, but Toru suggested that they try the royal palace first.
“The royal palace? But the government usually offers the worst prices.”
“I have a feeling you’ll be surprised.”
Emperor Ragin had given his older brother, Kado, the island of Dasu as a fief and named him King of Dasu. But everyone knew that it was just a symbolic gesture, and King Kado stayed in reconstructed Pan, the Harmonious City, most of the time, leaving his kingdom to be run by the emperor’s bureaucrats like the other provinces administered directly by the emperor. The royal palace used to be King Kuni’s palace, and before that it was the governor’s mansion under the Xana Empire. It wasn’t much bigger than the other houses in Daye, as the city was never a great metropolis like the big cities on the Big Island or even Kriphi, the old Xana capital on nearby Rui Island. Ostentation had never been the emperor’s style, even back when he was just King Kuni.
An acquisitions clerk sat in the yard of the palace, bored out of his mind. Emperor Ragin had a reputation for being frugal, and King Kado’s regent—really the acting governor of Dasu—had given orders to keep the prices offered for grains low. Only peasants with the lowest quality grains, ones that they couldn’t sell to the private merchants, came to try their luck with the government. The acquisitions clerk had had only one vendor approach him all day yesterday, and he expected today to be the same.
Oh, potential vendors! The clerk widened his eyes and took notice. I wonder how bad their harvest has been that they’re willing to come here.
As the clerk examined the two people—the man with his long limbs and open stride, and the limping girl with a walking stick and the heavy bag of sample grain over her shoulder—approaching his desk, he sat up straight and rubbed his eyes.
What is he doing here? He had been in Pan with the regent during the coronation, and he remembered seeing the striking figure of this man standing next to Prime Minister Cogo Yelu and Queen Gin.
He jumped up as though springs had been installed under his bottom. “Er, Grand Sec—er—Imperial Sch—er—” The man is supposed to have refused all titles. How am I supposed to address him?
“The name is Toru Noki,” the man said, smiling. “I have no titles.”
The clerk nodded and bowed repeatedly like a shadow puppet whose tangled strings were being jerked by the puppeteer in an attempt at freeing them. He must have very good reasons for disguising his identity. I’d better not blow his cover.
The girl set the bag on her shoulder down on the ground. “Toru, would you help me loosen the string on the sack? My fingers are a bit numb from holding on to it.”
The clerk watched in disbelief as one of the closest advisers of the Emperor of Dara squatted down like a common peasant to untie the string on the grain sack.
This girl must be very, very important. The clerk turned the thought over in his head and knew what he had to do.
He barely glanced at the grain. “Excellent quality! We’ll buy everything you have. How about twenty per bushel?”
“Twenty?” Mimi sounded amazed.
“Er . . . how about forty then?”
“Forty?” She sounded even more shocked.
The clerk looked at “Toru Noki” helplessly. This is already four times the going rate in the market! He gritted his teeth. If the regent complained later, he’d just have to explain the situation the best he could.
“Eighty then. But that’s really as high as I can go. Really. Please?”
The girl seemed in a daze as she signed the contract by drawing a circle on the paper with the inked brush.
“We’ll send over the shipping carts in two days,” the clerk said.
“Thank you,” said Mimi.
“Thank you,” said Toru Noki, smiling.
“Good negotiation,” said Toru.
“That wasn’t a negotiation at all,” said Mimi. “Just who are you? That clerk acted like a mouse who had seen a cat.”
“I really am just a wanderer these days,” said Toru. “I’m not lying when I tell you I don’t have a title.”
“That doesn’t mean you aren’t important.”
“Sometimes knowledge can get in the way of a friendship,” said Toru, his tone serious. “I like how we can converse now as equals. I don’t want to lose that.”
“All right.” Mimi nodded reluctantly. Then she brightened. “It’s noon! We should take our second measurement.”
She planted her walking stick into the ground and took out the mirror and the banana leaf and set up the contraption as she had before. The two looked at the image of the noonday sun projected onto the banana leaf. It matched exactly the outline she had traced in the morning.
“As I suspected,” declared Mimi triumphantly. “The sun is exactly the same size at sunrise and at noon. It only looks bigger when it’s near the horizon but actually isn’t.”
“Well done,” said Toru. “It is just as you said: Always weigh the fish. I’ve always believed that the universe is knowable, but your phrasing cuts to the heart of the matter.”
But Mimi felt disappointed. “Their debate sounded so interesting, though. I almost wish the sun did change in size.”
“You can’t build an elaborate house on a bad foundation,” said Toru. “If the basis for their dispute turned out to be illusory, it doesn’t matter how good their reasoning was. There is wisdom in the words of the sages, but one must keep in mind that they didn’t know everything. Models can be helpful in understanding the world, but models must be refined by testing against observation. You have to both experience reality and construct it.”
Mimi pondered Toru’s words. Somehow the veil over the world seemed to have grown slightly more transparent.
Is the world but a model for the ideal in the minds of the gods? Or is the world something beyond the reach of all models, in the same way that what I feel when I gaze at nature cannot be expressed in words?
“That sounds smarter than what both of those toko dawiji said.”
“I can’t take credit for that. It’s a quote from Na Moji, founder of the Patternist school of thinking. I suppose I’m more of a Patternist than anything else, but I think all the Hundred Schools have some wisdom to teach us. They are like different tools for shaping and understanding reality, and a talented craftsman can gain insight into the world and remake it with their aid. I think you have Patternist instincts too, and you have much raw talent. But you have to cultivate it.”
Talent, Mimi thought. The words of her mother came unbidden to mind. Talent is like a pretty feather in the tail of a peacock, daughter. It brings joy to the powerful but only sorrow to the bird.
“What do talent and wisdom have to do with the daughter of a poor peasant?” she asked. “The poor have one path in this world, and the powerful another.”
“Don’t you know the story of Queen Gin? She began as a street urchin, child, and yet she became the greatest tactician in all of Dara by cultivating her talent.”
“That was a time of war, of chaos. Now the world is at peace.”
“There are talents useful in war, and talents useful in peace. I do not know all there is to know about the gods, but I do believe it is not their will that a great pearl lie in obscurity, unable to shine.”
What’s it like to have so many tools of the mind at your disposal that you could dissect reality and put it back together as skillfully as my mother can scale and gut a fish within minutes and turn it into a delicious dinner?
Mimi had never envied the children of the wealthy who went to school and learned to read and write, but now she felt a keen hunger whose intensity was painful. She had been given a taste of the wider world out there, a glimpse of the Truth beneath the surface, a hint of the meaning of the speech of the gods. She wanted more. So much more.
Could not such knowledge be turned into silk clothes and white rice? Into servants and carriages and clinking coins that would relieve my mother and me from toil? Into arrogant looks and proud gazes directed at the road ahead instead of at the thronging poor to the sides?
Abruptly, she turned and knelt before Toru and touched her forehead to the ground.
“Will you teach me, Toru-ji? Will you help me cultivate my talent?”
But Toru stepped to the side, avoiding accepting her prostration. Mimi’s heart sank. She looked up, her eyes narrowed. “What happened to that talk about a pearl not lying in obscurity? Are you too timid to dive into the dark sea to retrieve it?”
Toru laughed lightly, but there was a hint of sorrow and bitterness in it. “You have a fiery spirit, and that is a good thing. But you’re also impatient and cannot hold your tongue, which is not always a good thing.”
Mimi’s face flushed. “I thought you were interested in the truth.”
“It is not enough to sharpen a brilliant mind,” Toru said. His eyes seemed to be focusing on something far in the distance, in time or space. “The road you ask me to lead you on is winding and rugged, and it requires knowing when to delay the truth and how to craft it so that it is more pleasing to powerful ears. These are not skills I possess in abundance either. I can enlarge your vision and show you how to pick out the patterns hidden all around you, but there are patterns, patterns of power, that I cannot teach you to read.”
“Is that why you’re roaming the Islands instead of helping the emperor in the Harmonious City?”
For a moment, Mimi was afraid that she had gone too far, but then Toru’s face relaxed, and he stepped back to stand before her still prostrate form and bowed back to her.
“Perhaps it is the will of the gods that we meet, and who am I to defy their wishes?”
Mimi touched her forehead to the ground three times, solemnly, the way she had seen players from the folk opera troupes do when they portrayed students being accepted by great masters. Toru stood in place, accepting the honor.
“You may call me teacher,” said Toru, “but in truth, we will be teaching each other. As the relationship between a teacher and student is one of great trust, it is important for us to know each other’s true names. ‘Toru Noki’ is a name given to me by some friends long ago in a distant land. My true name is Luan, of the Zya clan of Haan. What is your formal name, Mimi-tika?”
The prime strategist of Emperor Ragin. Mimi stared at the man in wonder. And he has just addressed me as though I am his daughter. She couldn’t believe she wasn’t dreaming. “I . . . don’t have a formal name. I’ve always just been Mimi, a peasant girl.”
Luan nodded. “Then I will give you a formal name.”
Mimi looked at him expectantly.
Luan mused. “How about ‘Zomi’?”
Mimi nodded. “It sounds pleasant. What does it mean?”
“The Classical Ano logogram for the name means ‘pearl of fire,’ which was a plant in the Ano homeland across the sea. It was said that the zomi was the first plant to grow from the ashes of forest fires and to bring color to a world deprived of it by destruction. May your fiery nature be as auspicious.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
A DRINKING PARTY
PAN: THE THIRD MONTH IN THE SIXTH YEAR OF THE REIGN OF FOUR PLACID SEAS.
The celebration of the hundredth day after the birth—or in this case, the adoption—of the son of Mün Çakri, First General of the Infantry, was a wild and unorthodox affair. Not only had General Çakri invited everyone from within three blocks of his mansion—there were over three hundred banquet tables, which spilled out of his courtyard and filled most of the street in front of his residence—but the general had personally wrestled five pigs in a mud pen for the entertainment of all the guests.
So much wine and beer was consumed and so many pigs slaughtered for the feast that the butchers and tavern keepers and sauce vendors in that quarter of Pan would reminisce for years about the day they made “real profit.”
