The Wall of Storms, page 22
Zomi shook her head. “You see but the sun-dappled surface of the sea instead of the Hundred Fishes beneath. The examination prizes beauty of expression and fine calligraphy as well as sharpness of argument, but do you not see that these are judgments shaped by habit?
“For years, you and the other judges have studied together and read each other’s essays until you have formed a consensus of what is persuasive and what is pleasing. You have then taught these to your students, who in turn taught theirs, propagating a certain ideal. This ideal is most concentrated in the academies of Haan but thin elsewhere. What you call beauty and grace and suppleness in writing are nothing but the consensus of men who have grown used to hearing each other. When you judge an essay good, it is only because the words seem to you to echo your own thoughts. Even if you cannot see the faces behind the logograms, you pick men who are just like you! I am here because I learned to write as the image in the mirror you so love!”
Ruthi stared at Zomi, eyes bulging and breath labored. “You arrogant, disrespectful child—”
Before he could finish, Dafiro Miro entered the hall. “Rénga! I have urgent news.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FIGHTING FIRE
CRESCENT ISLAND: THE FIRST YEAR IN THE REIGN OF FOUR PLACID SEAS (FIVE YEARS BEFORE THE FIRST GRAND EXAMINATION).
By the time the four of them made their way down the tortuous cliff path back to the hamlet, the place was in chaos.
About a mile distant, a semicircle of gigantic, roaring tongues of flame licked the sky, and roiling columns of smoke drifted over the clearing, obscuring the houses and making it hard to breathe. Even at this distance, the heat was palpable.
A nobleman stood next to Curious Turtle with a retinue of about a dozen men dressed for the hunt. A few carried the tusked heads of boars, whose dead eyes stared at the world in a permanent grimace of rage.
“Get this balloon ready!” shouted the nobleman, who was coughing and gasping for breath. His men scrambled to obey, and it was evident that all of them had just run hard through the woods to get here.
A few yards from them, Elder Comi stood with the rest of the villagers, looking on mutely.
“Don’t just stand there!” shouted the nobleman. “Why don’t you organize the peasants to go fight the fire?”
The villagers looked at him, uncomprehending.
Fighting a forest fire like this is utterly preposterous, thought Zomi.
“Get shovels and buckets and whatever else you can find!” declared the nobleman. “If you concentrate your efforts, you may be able to delay the fire long enough for the balloon to take off.”
The villagers looked at each other, but no one moved.
“Oh, by Tututika’s blood! These savages don’t understand human speech.” He jumped up and down and mimed shoveling dirt onto fire and pouring buckets of water. He raised his voice, as though this would help the villagers understand him. “Go on! Go! I’m the Earl of Méricüso. Are you afraid to die? It’s an honor to die for the life of a great lord!”
Elder Comi turned away from him. He spoke to the villagers in a low but firm voice, and pointed at the cliffs. A few of the young women and men shouted at him and shook their heads. The elder smiled, pointed at his legs, and sat down with some difficulty on the ground in mipa rari. He bowed his head, pointed to the cliffs again, and spoke resolutely.
As Luan and the others ran to join the commotion, Zomi had the eerie feeling that she was watching a folk opera being performed. When she had first been exposed to the operas, she had found the lyrics, with their flowery language and complicated vocal decorations, hard to understand, and she had filled in what was happening by using the expressions of the players and their body language as clues. She could seize the strands of emotion in the air and color in the blanks.
Children, the village is doomed. Houses may be rebuilt and gardens replanted, but people cannot be replaced. Go and escape by the cliff route.
But Grandfather, you won’t be able to make it with your legs.
Do not trouble yourselves about me. Go on. Go!
Zomi felt her eyes grow warm and her throat constrict. She was thinking of her mother, and how she would behave if a fire approached and Zomi couldn’t get away because of her leg.
“You’ll never get the balloon up if you tangle it like that,” Luan calmly told the soldiers, who, being inexperienced with the workings of a hot-air balloon, were making a mess of things.
Glad to find someone whose speech he could actually understand, the nobleman immediately ran over and grabbed Luan by the lapels. “Is this your balloon? Excellent! Excellent! Quick, get it ready to fly.”
“What happened?”
“I came to this benighted valley because I heard that there were boars here with tusks in a pattern no one had captured. Since some of the boars were hiding deep in the woods, one of my followers had the clever idea to start fires to drive them out.”
“Don’t you know how dangerous that is with such a dry spring?”
“The idea worked! I got six excellent trophies. It’s not my fault that the wind shifts so quickly around here. We had to leave behind everything at our camp and barely managed to escape with our lives. Thank Tututika that you’re here!”
Luan shook his head. He and Zomi ran to straighten out the tangled balloon and to start the liquor-fueled stove. As the flame roared to life and the balloon began to fill, the nobleman and the soldiers cheered.
“It is best to start loading the gondola,” said Luan to the Earl of Méricüso.
“But this gondola is so small!”
“Toss out anything that is not necessary for flight. Get rid of the beds, the blankets, the food and water, and anything else you can free,” said Luan, exasperated.
“Right. Right. Good thinking!” said the earl.
As the soldiers scrambled to obey the earl and tore out everything that wasn’t bolted down in the gondola, Luan and Zomi continued to use the bamboo poles to straighten out the balloon so that it could be filled evenly with hot air.
“Mimi-tika,” whispered Luan. “Our first priority is to save Elder Comi’s life. He can’t climb the cliff to escape, so this balloon is his only chance. Later, no matter what I tell you to do, you have to obey, do you understand?”
“What are you thinking?” Zomi’s guard was up. Luan’s tone was too strange.
“Don’t argue! You’re the student. You must obey.”
“I won’t obey an order that is wrong!”
Luan laughed. “Now you sound like a Moralist. It was Kon Fiji himself who said that the duty to the Just and True supersedes all others, even a command from a teacher. I thought you didn’t like Kon Fiji.”
“Even an idiot can be right sometimes.”
“Ha! I dare say Kon Fiji never thought he’d be defended in these terms.”
The earl and his soldiers had finally succeeded in stripping the gondola of everything. They scrambled to pile in. Four of the soldiers sat on the bottom and crossed their arms to form a comfortable seat for the earl. The rest of the soldiers either climbed in and stepped on top of their comrades or hung on to the side of the gondola.
“Careful! Careful! Don’t damage the tusks!” shouted the earl as the boar’s heads were loaded in and carefully held up by the men around the earl. Luan shook his head at the ridiculous scene.
“Who told you that you get to fill the balloon with only your people?”
“The villagers can climb the cliff. That’s what they want to do anyway.”
“Why can’t you climb the cliff instead? You are fit and strong.”
The earl looked at Luan as if he were crazy. “Who knows how long I’ll be stranded on top of that mountain? These trophies won’t be properly preserved if I don’t get them to a taxidermist in time.”
Luan put a hand on Zomi’s shoulder to restrain her. “You have to make room for Elder Comi at least,” he said. The balloon was almost filled, and it strained against the tethering stake on the ground. “And Zomi and I have to be in there to pilot the balloon, unless one of you knows how to fly it. I warn you, fire can do strange things to air currents, and you need an experienced pilot.”
The earl looked at Luan and Zomi suspiciously. “This girl knows how to fly the balloon? I don’t want someone useless in here.”
Luan looked at the cringing flunkies holding up the earl’s muscular thighs and bit back a sarcastic remark. Instead, he simply said, “She’s young, but she’s an excellent pilot.”
The earl’s lips parted in a cold grin. “Then I won’t need you both, will I? Seize her!”
Several of the men hanging on to the side of the gondola hopped down to the ground, grabbed Zomi, and dragged her back to the gondola. Zomi screamed and kicked, but she was not strong enough to overcome the men. Luan rushed over to help, and one of the men unsheathed his hunting knife and slashed at Luan, who stumbled and fell to the ground.
The villagers rushed over. Without saying a word, Séji ripped open Luan’s leggings to reveal the sickening wound in his thigh. While she ripped strips from Luan’s robe to fashion a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, Képulu rummaged through her basket for leaves that she chewed into a poultice, applied it to the wound, and bandaged the leg.
Meanwhile, the earl’s men maneuvered the screaming Zomi into the gondola. The four “cushions” shifted to make space so that she was directly under the dials and levers for controlling the balloon’s stove, and then they squeezed in and held her legs so that she was trapped next to the earl and his pile of boar trophies.
“Let me go!” Zomi shouted. “I won’t fly the balloon for you.”
The angry villagers shouted and approached the balloon. The earl’s men unsheathed their hunting knives and brandished them threateningly.
“Stop!” Luan shouted to make himself heard above the commotion. There was such a natural authority in his tone that both sides halted. In a calmer tone, he continued, “Mimi-tika, listen, you have to fly the balloon without me.”
“Absolutely not! I’m not leaving here without you.”
“We must save Elder Comi! We can dangle a harness under the gondola to carry him to safety. The rest of us can make our way up the cliffs.”
“You can’t climb the cliffs with your leg like that!”
“Sure I can!” Luan got up. Séji reached out to support him, but he pushed her away, and stood as straight as a crane. “You managed to climb the cliff before with a brace, and I can do the same. Do not underestimate the medical arts of the villagers.”
Zomi still looked skeptical, but she was calming down. Maybe this was a solution after all.
“Hurry, hurry!” shouted the earl. “If you want that old peasant saved, do it now!”
As Luan explained what he wanted with gestures and roughly carved logograms on the ground, the villagers quickly fashioned a harness out of sticks and pelts to support Elder Comi and to tie it to the walls of the gondola.
The balloon was almost completely filled, and the earl’s men pulled in the anchor. The gondola wobbled on the ground, held only by a tethering line.
“Mimi-tika,” said Luan, “we don’t have much time. I have one more lesson for you.”
Zomi stared at Luan in disbelief. She couldn’t understand why her teacher was choosing this moment to engage in another philosophy discussion. And why is he just standing there?
“No matter what else you think of the Moralists, their core belief is right: Sometimes you must do the right thing even if it hurts you. Actions reify ideals. We must never stop striving to do good, to protect the weak and the powerless. This is the charge to all men of learning.”
Zomi nodded, but she continued to stare at the stiff figure of Luan. Having dealt with a weak leg all her life, she was sensitive to the way people distributed their weight on their legs.
“You’re a brilliant young woman, Mimi-tika. You have the curiosity to seek out the terra incognita beyond the bounds of dogma, and you have the quickness of mind to cut through a thicket of confusing questions. But you’re like a raw ball of wax, undisciplined, unshaped, unpurposed. You must apply yourself to the tedium of study, which is like the carving knife, to shape your mind into an intricate logogram for processing ideas. Do you understand?”
Zomi nodded, not really listening. Teacher really is standing like a crane, with all of his weight on one leg.
“Go, go, go!” shouted the earl.
The villagers had finished tying Elder Comi’s harness to the gondola. They backed away from the wobbling balloon, which was being buffeted by strong winds. The smoke had grown thicker and the fires closer. One of the earl’s men cut the tethering rope.
“Get your passengers to safety, and when the fire is burnt out, you can come and retrieve me on the other side of the mountain. Watch the wind currents carefully, and fly as high as you can!”
Zomi put her hands up to the dial and turned the stove output to maximum. As the fire roared overhead, the balloon struggled to lift off.
“Go, go!” Luan gestured at the villagers. When the villagers refused to move, he grabbed a carrying pole from one of them and began to write on the ground.
He’s not even bending down, thought Zomi.
The balloon’s ascent jerked to a stop. Elder Comi’s harness dragged along the ground, failing to lift off.
“There’s too much weight!” shouted the panicking earl. “Cut off the harness.”
“No!” Zomi said. “We have to save the elder. Why don’t you ask one of your men to jump off? They’re much heavier and they can climb the cliffs.”
“How dare”—but realizing that Zomi was necessary for them to get out of the maelstrom of scalding winds buffeting the balloon, the earl swallowed his curse—“you can’t possibly think a wild peasant’s life is worth more than one of my servants.”
“Then toss your boar’s heads out! The six of these must weigh more than the elder.”
“Absolutely not! They are the whole reason we came here.” The earl gave the men around him a meaningful look, and one of them swung his hunting knife quickly and severed the lines tying the harness to the gondola while the rest held on to Zomi to prevent her from doing anything.
“Damn you! I will ki—” One of the men slapped her hard to choke off any more outraged words. Zomi was momentarily stunned.
The gondola tumbled crazily as the balloon finally lifted off.
Zomi recovered and looked below through the tangle of arms and boar’s heads and the earl’s hateful face. Elder Comi struggled out of the remnants of the harness while some of the villagers ran over to help him. And Luan, still standing in the same place, continued to write on the ground with his pole as the rest of the villagers watched. The carrying pole’s awkward length meant that he had to carve the logogram in broad strokes, and even from the height of twenty feet, Zomi could see what he was writing.
It was a single logogram composed of three components:
A river flowing. A volcano. A stylized outline of a flame.
The Flow. The red volcano, the symbol of Lady Kana, goddess of fire, ash, cremation, and death. But skin-of-fire? What’s that?
“I have to pilot the balloon,” Zomi said to the earl, and then coughed uncontrollably. She sounded frightened. The smoke had grown so thick by now that it was hard to see the sky. The roiling columns twisted about in complicated patterns, marking the chaotic air currents that made the gondola swing about wildly so that all of the earl’s men had to hold on for dear life.
Thinking that the girl had finally come to her senses, the earl nodded for his men to let her go. Zomi adjusted the dial so that the flame was lower, slowing the ascent of the balloon.
“What are you doing?” the earl asked, alarmed.
“Wrestling a pig, of course.” Zomi grabbed one of the heads and slammed it into the earl’s face, aiming one of the tusks at his eyes. As the earl screamed and the men in the gondola scrambled to protect him, Zomi turned the dial all the way up, causing the gondola to jerk suddenly, tossing the men in the gondola into a jumbled heap. She scrambled over them and climbed over the side of the gondola and let go.
“Mimi!” Luan cried out.
Though she tried to roll as she made contact with the ground, she heard the bones in her left leg snap and felt the sharp stab of pain a moment later. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t even breathe.
Luan dropped his pole and tried to get to Zomi, but his leg collapsed, and he fell to the ground. Séji and Képulu rushed over, ripped the now useless harness from around her leg, and worked quickly to set the broken bones and stabilize the break with splints.
Zomi finally managed to recover enough from the fall to suck in a lungful of air. She screamed with the pain.
Overhead, the balloon continued to ascend as the men hanging on the outside of the gondola screamed, digging their fingers into the wicker with every ounce of strength. The earl’s curses came to them in a hailstorm that grew fainter as the balloon continued to rise, twisting about in the hot winds.
Luan crawled over to Zomi on his hands and one knee, dragging the useless leg behind him.
“How could you do such a stupid thing as to jump from the balloon? Why don’t you ever listen to me?”
“Because you lied!” Zomi screamed back. “You couldn’t even walk, but you told me to get in that balloon to fly that pig to safety. And he dropped Elder Comi anyway!” As Luan sat up and tried to cradle her, she slammed her fists against his chest, on his shoulders, at his arms.
“It is the duty of the learned—”
“You lied! You were going to send me away and die here! My father abandoned me for duty, but I will never abandon someone I love for duty, no matter what the Moralists say. I won’t.”
