The Wall of Storms, page 58
But after Tenryo had walked about a hundred paces away, just as his soldiers were dismounting from their own garinafins and preparing to rest after a long day of hard practice, Tenryo turned around and tossed one of the flag clubs at Kidia herself.
Everyone knew that Kidia was more like a companion than a mere mount for Tenryo. The garinafin had rescued him from certain death at the hands of the Agon, and she was so favored that Tenryo only drank Kidia’s milk.
No one made a move.
“What are you waiting for?” Tenryo shouted. “Have you forgotten all your training?”
Kidia gazed at Tenryo, her black eyes showing surprise, anger, and then finally fear. She started to beat her wings in an attempt to take off, but Tenryo had ridden her hard that day, and she couldn’t summon the strength for flight or to breath fire.
“Attack! Now!” Tenryo shouted again.
The other garinafin riders shuddered and scrambled to obey. They mounted their beasts and took off, diving at the riderless Kidia. The foot soldiers followed their training and formed a protective formation around Tenryo, raising their garinafin-hide shields to defend their lord against a final, desperate assault.
Kidia died within minutes, her body singed and torn to bloody pieces by a coordinated assault from dozens of garinafins.
Tenryo gathered all the pilots of the garinafins and the squad leaders of his foot soldiers, and ordered one in five executed as an example of the consequences of not following his orders with alacrity. The families of the executed men and women were made into slaves and distributed to the other pilots and squad leaders.
“Never question my orders,” he said. “Never.”
Then he knelt down before the carcass of Kidia and whispered, “I’m sorry, old friend. But unless I tested them with someone I loved, they’d never be as obedient as I need them. I will carry out my promise to you and avenge you and your family. May the All-Father and his faithful servant, Péa of the Winged Beasts, grant you eternal rest in the silver pasture in the heavens.”
Conflict with the Agon flared up again; both sides raided each other across the ever-shifting border between Ukyu and Gondé.
Tenryo’s army gained a reputation as the most powerful fighting force on the scrublands. In border skirmishes against the Agon, they won victory after victory, and people began to whisper that perhaps Tenryo really was the best candidate to succeed his father as pékyu after all.
Pékyu Toluroru summoned Tenryo to his own encampment for a meeting. There was no explanation for what the old pékyu wished to discuss, but rumors spread that Toluroru was unhappy with the way Tenryo had kept most of the prizes from his raiding for his own tribes instead of turning them over to the great pékyu for equitable distribution to all the tribes. Some of Tenryo’s thanes advised the young man not to go, and instead wait out the crest of his father’s displeasure.
“It is a son’s duty to attend to his father,” Tenryo said, “regardless of the consequences. Even if the father demands his son to go to the enemy and be a hostage, what right does he have to refuse the order of the man who gave him life?”
On the day of the meeting, Tenryo left his honor guard at the periphery of the great pékyu’s encampment and approached the central Great Tent by himself. Although the great pékyu had many more men and women under his command milling about the encampment, the discipline and ferocity of Tenryo’s own soldiers and garinafins, lined up in neat ranks some distance away, impressed all the tribes who had gathered to witness this meeting between father and son.
Pékyu Toluroru stood outside the door to his tent. He looked old and frail, and smiled kindly at his son, this son that he had once been willing to sacrifice. As Tenryo approached, he could dimly see through the flap of the Great Tent many warriors assembled within. Some of them had their hands on the handles of their war clubs; others had unsheathed their bone daggers. Far in the back, in the dim light of the interior, Tenryo saw the figures of some of his brothers and sisters, the ones favored by his father.
About a hundred paces from the door of the tent, Tenryo stopped.
“Father, what do you have to say to me?”
“Come into the tent, my beloved son, and we’ll share some kyoffir. We haven’t been spending nearly enough time together.”
“Why are your warriors acting as if they’re preparing for the visit of an enemy instead of a beloved son?”
Pékyu Toluroru’s face didn’t change. “Nonsense. Come into the tent and sit down. We should not be shouting at each other from so far away. Why do you regard your own father with such suspicion?”
Tenryo took Langiaboto, the battle axe he had taken from his childhood companion Diaman Aragoz, off his back. He had tied a fox tail to the end of the handle. Spinning in place to add momentum to his outstretched arm, he heaved it at his father. Everyone in the encampment followed the axe’s graceful arc of flight across the space between them.
And as one, Tenryo’s garinafin riders took to the air, while his foot soldiers rushed ahead to join their lord. Toluroru stumbled back and Langiaboto landed with a loud thud at the foot of the old chief, whose face held a look of utter disbelief. But before he could give any order, tongues of flames descended from the sky. The old chief was incinerated instantly, and the Great Tent engulfed in a fiery inferno.
The garinafins circled overhead while Tenryo’s guards surrounded him, looking fearlessly at all the stunned men and women in the encampment.
The only sounds that could be heard were the crackle of fire and the screams of those trapped within the Great Tent.
And then, a shout began among the crowd. “The pékyu is dead! Long live Pékyu Tenryo Roatan!”
And this was how Tenryo Roatan became the Great Pékyu of the Lyucu, and a new era arrived for both the lands of Ukyu and Gondé.
“Pékyu Tenryo is a ruthless and dangerous man,” said Luan Zya.
“He is. Though the stories about him have grown ever more elaborate, turning into legends full of embellishment, yet it is undeniable that he is a leader of unsurpassed vision.”
After securing his position as the leader of the Lyucu, Tenryo turned his attention to waging war against the Agon in earnest. By fighting only with a dedicated professional force using his new tactics and employing the rest of the population for support, he was able to overcome the much larger numbers of the Agon.
The day came when Pékyu Nobo knelt before him.
“When I lived in your home as a hostage, did you ever think such a day would come?” asked Tenryo.
Nobo shook his head. “Such is the way of fortune. The All-Father favors who He will. You have the allegiance of the Agon. I pledge that in my lifetime we will no longer wage war against you.” There was no shame in submitting to the stronger. Such was the way of the scrubland.
Tenryo laughed. “Do you think I’m so foolish as to repeat the mistake you made? If I leave you and yours alive, who knows what will happen in ten years? In twenty? Shall I wait until I am infirm only to kneel before one of your children in a repeat of today’s scene?”
Nobo looked up at him, his face pleading. “Do you intend to massacre us even though we have surrendered? The All-Father will not contemplate such an act of senseless evil.”
“Do not invoke the name of the All-Father,” said Tenryo. “Do not blame your failure on the All-Father, just as I do not attribute my success to Him. It is only the weak who think that the gods care about the affairs of men; the strong know that they make their own path in this world, and the gods always favor those who triumph.”
Nobo looked up at him, shocked by these words of sacrilege.
Tenryo’s guards, who surrounded the pair, looked on impassively. They showed no reaction to Tenryo’s speech because the pékyu had not told them to attack anyone. Like an ant colony, their mission was simply to obey. Until Tenryo made up his mind and told them what to do, all they needed to do was to wait and listen.
“When my father sent me to you so that my life could guarantee his safety, where was the All-Father? When I spilled the blood of your son to save my life, where was the All-Father? When I committed patricide to seize the reins of power, where was the All-Father? Every winter, hundreds of men and women die because of lack of food or shelter; where are the All-Father and His son, the Merciful Toryoana of Healing Hands? Every summer, families starve as their cattle fail to make it across the parched landscape to the next watering hole; where are the All-Father and His daughter, Aluro of a Thousand Streams? In battle, both your warriors and mine invoke the names of the All-Father and Diasa, His club-maiden, to aid their cause; who do you think they listen to?”
Nobo said nothing. These were ancient questions that he had never dared to ponder, trusting that the shamans would have the right answers.
“The All-Father, the Every-Mother, and their children do not care, no more than you or I care about the fate of the ants when we dig into their nests for a meal of mushrooms. I can only conclude that there is no good or evil in the eyes of the gods. All that they care about is success or failure. If I am mighty, I am good. If I am weak, I am evil. That is all.”
He stepped up to the figure of Nobo and crushed his skull with a single blow from Langiaboto, the Self-Reliant.
All the sons and daughters of the House of Aragoz were made to kneel in a row before the Agon Great Tent, and Tenryo walked down the row, smashing their skulls one after another. This was the most humiliating and disgraceful way to die, as the men and women could not resist, and blood spilled and soaked into the grass under the bright rays of the sun, the Eye of Cudyufin, ensuring that their souls would be forever marked with the brand of shame.
The Agon chieftains and their families were given to the Lyucu nobles as slaves, and the Agon common herders were forced to leave their home territories and move to the least desirable pastures close to the mountains in the east, the deserts in the south, or the ice fields in the north.
But the name of Tenryo was celebrated among the Lyucu. He was the greatest hero of them all, having delivered them vengeance against the hated Agon. And he had brought them a life of relative peace and prosperity.
He had understood the will of the gods better than any shaman.
“That was when we arrived,” said Oga.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
THE DREAM OF THE CITY-SHIPS
UKYU AND GONDÉ, THE LAND OF THE LYUCU AND AGON: TWENTY-ONE YEARS BEFORE LUAN’S ARRIVAL IN UKYU AND GONDÉ.
News of the sighting of the strange fleet off the coast caused much consternation among Tenryo’s thanes.
“Their ships are thousands of times bigger and more powerful than the small coracles we can construct,” said one of the advisers. “These strangers pose a danger. We should attack them as soon as they land.” She stood up and ululated, emphasizing her point by raising her war club in the air.
Many of the other nobles voiced their agreement with this opinion as they stood up and banged their war clubs against the bone poles that held up the tent.
But Tenryo ordered the assembled thanes to sit back down. “It is precisely because they may be powerful that we must not act rashly. We shall be as wily as the horrid wolves who blend into the thornbushes before a hunt.”
He ordered the garinafins moved miles away from the anticipated landing site of the strange fleet of giant ships. He made it clear that the strangers must never see any of the flying beasts until he directed otherwise.
Then he gave the strangest order of them all: Those with tents constructed from new material should disassemble them and send the hides and poles away. The only dwellings left near the landing site should appear as decrepit and worn down as possible.
The thanes were confused by these commands but did not question them. They were used to obeying the pékyu.
Led by the pékyu himself, the Lyucu welcomed the people from across the sea as honored guests. Long strips of cattle hide were laid out on the beach, and trenchers of meat and cheese and berries and nuts were brought out, along with gourds and skull-cups filled with fragrant kyoffir. The Lyucu stood well back from the surf, giving the visitors plenty of space to land.
The massive mountain-ships dropped anchor some distance away in shallow water and let down small pinnaces that carried visitors onto the beach. Pékyu Tenryo and his thanes gawped at these exotic new people: Look at how dark some of them are! Have they been sunburnt until their skin refused to heal? And why are so many of them so fat? Do they not work or fight? And look at the shapes of their eyes and noses and foreheads—who knew people could look like that?!
The visitors pulled their leaf-shaped pinnaces onto the sand and huddled around them tensely. They drew odd-looking weapons and examined the Lyucu, their postures full of fear and suspicion.
Pékyu Tenryo noted with interest how their long daggers—almost as long as war clubs—glinted and dazzled in the sun as though they were made from the reflective surfaces of placid lakes; he observed how some of them carried crescent-shaped clubs with a single string that resembled the curved lyres used by singing bards—though he suspected these were also weapons, perhaps used in conjunction with the bundles of sharp-tipped sticks they carried on their backs; he paid attention to the fact that everyone who was on the beach appeared to be a man—where were the women?—and how luxurious the objects owned by these new people were: Everything seemed to be made from the shiny, waterlike material; some kind of fabric that resembled mist or cloud made substantial; or wood.
So much wood! Pékyu Tenryo could not recall ever seeing so much wood in his entire life as existed in a single mountain-ship. Tall trees did not grow in large numbers on the scrublands; the Lyucu used the short, gnarled branches of wind-bowed bushes as firewood, and the occasional copses of real trees found next to waterholes were reserved for making luxury goods like carved cradleboards, ceremonial bowls, and statues of the gods. One had to journey many days to the east, to the foothills of the massive mountain ranges, to see a real forest. To use wood in such quantity and with such carelessness confirmed the strangers to be incredibly powerful.
He held up his hands to indicate that they were free of weapons, and led the thanes of Lyucu in a slow procession toward the people from across the sea.
After their yearlong voyage, the men of Dara who stumbled ashore were half-starved and grateful for solid land.
But they couldn’t relax yet; this land wasn’t uninhabited.
Warily, Admiral Krita and his advisers inspected the approaching natives. Their clothes, made of animal skin and woven grass, appeared dirty and crude; the weapons they left behind in a pile, made of bone and stone, looked primitive; their women were dressed just like their men and looked almost as ugly; the dwellings above the beach looked small and unimpressive; there didn’t appear to be fields of cultivation or any signs of industry around the area.
And the postures of the natives, led by their empty-handed chief, appeared submissive and humble. Krita could also see a feast laid out on the beach, filled with food that made his mouth water.
Whoever these people were, they didn’t appear to be immortals.
Krita relaxed, and told his men to stand down and put away their weapons.
The men of Dara might have thought of themselves as refugees desperately in need of baths and food that wasn’t rotten or stale, but the delicious feast prepared by the Lyucu and the ingratiating manner of their hosts made them feel like kings, or perhaps even semi-immortals. To be sure, the fermented milk drink called kyoffir made them want to throw up, but no one was expecting everything to be perfect.
“This is a gentle and harmless people,” declared Admiral Krita. And he let it be known to all his followers—just under ten thousand men and women who had survived the arduous journey—that they were free to relax and enjoy the feast.
“Dara! Dara!” they shouted while pointing at themselves. The natives seemed dim-witted, given their incomprehensible jabber, and they hoped that shouting would help.
“Savages,” said Admiral Krita. He sighed, sorry that he had not found the land of the immortals after all. Mapidéré’s expedition would just have to make the best of a bad situation.
The rest of the expedition—craftsmen, servants, maids, families of the captains and officers—came onshore as well since the coast was declared safe.
The honored guests of Dara were given everything they asked for: food, fresh water, daily entertainment, even native servants and guides for Admiral Krita and his staff. All conversation had to be conducted by miming and gestures and exaggerated expressions, but that was sufficient for the men of Dara to make their desires known.
To be sure, whenever the guests wanted to explore the surrounding countryside, the Lyucu hosts smiled with confusion at their requests and instead offered more food and that strong fermented milk drink, which the guests did not really enjoy as it upset their stomachs. But considering how primitive these people were, the men of Dara weren’t all that keen on seeing more tents full of half-dressed savages or more stinking herds of long-haired cattle.
It was clear that these barbarians didn’t know anything about immortals. The expedition members, surrounded daily by admiring glances and expressions of amazement, began to feel as if they were the lords of all creation.
They became ever more arrogant toward their hosts, demanding more food, service, and the company of women—whether willing or not. When a few of Krita’s men acted out their base instincts on some of the native women—Mapidéré’s expedition was mostly staffed by men—the insulted women, one of whom was a Lyucu chieftain, reacted with anger and brought their friends and followers to demand justice with clubs and axes drawn.
Krita decided that a show of force was necessary, and, instead of retreating to the city-ships with the offending members of the expedition, he ordered the marines to stand their ground and do whatever was necessary to defend the Dara camp.
The result was a one-sided slaughter. The Lyucu had never fought against metal weapons or bows and arrows, and seventeen Lyucu warriors lay dead at the end of the skirmish while only one of Krita’s men was injured. Still, Krita was keenly aware of how vastly outnumbered his side was, and he ordered everyone to retreat onto the city-ships and prepare to set sail if the situation deteriorated further.
