The Wall of Storms, page 60
An astonished Krita finally understood how utterly foolish he had been.
The former Lords of Dara were packed into underground cellars while Pékyu Tenryo gathered his warriors to announce his plans.
“This is a gift from the All-Father, brothers and sisters,” declared Tenryo. “It is the best gift from Him since the time He created the lands of Ukyu and Gondé, since He placed us and the Agon in this world to test our faith.
“Our land is beautiful—who can deny the thrill of watching a sunset from the back of a soaring garinafin?—but it is also harsh and difficult. All of you have known grandmothers and grandfathers choosing to stay behind to die in times of drought so that the tribe could move on without being burdened with their needs. All of you have known mothers forced to decide which child to feed when there is not enough for all and she must maintain her strength for the migration. All of you have seen fathers beat their chests in despair when a pack of horrid wolves, a plague, or even a flash flood wipes out the family’s herd, their livelihood. The scrubland is unforgiving, and we live ever at the mercy of forces beyond our ken or control.
“And the wars. Who can forget the wars? The wars between the Agon and the Lyucu are still fresh in our memories, but long before our peoples had coalesced into nations, the tribes have fought each other, as did families. I doubt there has been a single day in the history of this land when it was completely at peace. How many men and women have lost their lives in the struggle for survival? It was either kill or be killed because this land, though vast, can provide but for so few.
“It was not always so. Late at night, next to the fire pits and after everyone has had their fill of kyoffir, the elders tell stories of our past. We know from these old tales, the waystones of our spirit, that long ago our ancestors lived in a land that was lush and green, a paradise. There, the rivers flowed with honey and milk, and the bushes were heavy with soft, juicy berries, not the hard nuts that break teeth. In that land, the cattle calved each spring without fail, and there were no wolves to steal from us. Our ancestors dined on plenty and every parent could have as many children as they wished, not having to worry about how many they could keep alive. War was unknown because there was enough for everyone, from the oldest grandmother who had lost all her teeth, to the mewling babe yet to chew her first piece of fatty marrow.
“Our ancestors then angered the All-Father somehow. The stories of the different tribes do not agree on this. Some say that it was because they stole the special kyoffir that the All-Father kept for his immortal children, the purified spirits who dwell in the mountains and clouds and whom we worship. Some say that it was because they had become slothful and arrogant due to their life of leisure and ease, and they disobeyed the All-Father’s command to keep the celestial herd well-watered and fed. Some say that it was because they had forgotten the virtues instilled in them by the All-Father and fell to greed and internecine strife.
“Whatever the reason, the All-Father cast us out of paradise and placed us here so that our lives may be hard and our faith sharpened by suffering.
“But now we have learned something new and momentous. The All-Father has prepared another land for us, a new paradise called Dara. Have you heard the stories the savages of Dara tell? Over there, the rivers overflow with delicious wine—kyoffir made from fruit!—and fat fish practically leap out of the water onto your plates. The fields are so green and lush that they could feed all of us and our cattle and garinafins even if we were as numerous as the stars in the sky! Families there may have a dozen children, a dozen! And the old die peacefully in sleep while the young honor their memories by multiplying and being fruitful. Luxury greets you everywhere you look: shiny metal poking out of the ground; great, sky-clawing trees arrayed in dense forests; sparkling jewels dangling from every ear and neck like ripe berries.
“That is the land that we should live in.
“ ‘But Pékyu Tenryo,’ I hear some of you say. ‘That land is already inhabited.’
“That’s right. But look at what manner of inhabitants they are: arrogant, soft, lazy, devoid of virtue. They arrived at our shores as terrified refugees who had almost run out of food and water. We took them in as honored guests, shared our food and kyoffir with them, offered them all they needed.
“And for this hospitality, how have they repaid us? They acted as though they belonged to the race of immortal spirits, though they knew perfectly well that they were but ordinary mortals like you or me. They deliberately infected us with sicknesses previously unknown in this land . . . please forgive me for my tears, but who can forget the piteous cries of fathers holding their disease-stricken daughters or the howls of sons cradling the bodies of their illness-ravished mothers? Barbaric in their customs—consider how they degrade their women!—they dared to call us savages and insulted our women, many of them thanes and chiefs, as well as the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters of our men. They slaughtered our warriors with better weapons and think that makes them superior—but the measure of a warrior is in her spirit, not her tool.
“So we bided our time; we hid our strengths to lure them into revealing their weaknesses; we pretended to submit so that we could observe them up close and learn their secrets. What have we learned?
“They have no concept of honor and lie constantly to make themselves appear greater and more powerful. Effete and stupid, they understand only the language of violence—they thought they could intimidate us with their metal swords and vibrating bows, and yet when our garinafin riders appeared, all they could do was to cower in fear without even putting up a real fight. Though we followed the custom of the scrublands and opened our tents and hearts to strangers, sharing all that we possessed with them, they sought only to dominate and enslave us.
“No, the All-Father could not have meant for such a barbarous race to possess paradise. Rather, He sent these savages to us as a message, telling us that He has prepared a new home for us already filled with slaves.
“Do you not see how these indolent, arrogant men sound so similar to the fallen ancestors in our ancient tales? They have squandered their fortune, wallowing like greedy calves in muddy puddles, not knowing that winter is around the corner. We are the instruments of the All-Father, meant to cleanse that land of these ingrates. We are the punishment for their sins. We’re the divine scourge.
“Brothers and sisters, we have a mission. We shall conquer Dara and enslave these people until their spirits are purified of the diseases they call civilization, until we have redeemed paradise for the All-Father’s favorite children.”
And the scrublands were filled with the ululating war cries of a thousand warriors calling for blood, for cosmic justice and sacred war.
And so the Lords of Dara overnight became the captives of the Lyucu, and a nightmarish stage of existence began for them. The prisoners were forced to divulge every bit of information that could be useful to their new masters in planning their invasion of the Dara homeland.
Although the technologies brought by the city-ships were interesting, Pékyu Tenryo quickly decided that most of them were not practical for adoption by the Lyucu. Ukyu and Gondé were simply too different from the Islands of Dara, and it was no more sensible for the Lyucu to adopt the way of life of Dara than it would be for a desert cactus to be transplanted to the glaciers of the far north. The bronze and steel swords wielded by Krita and his officers were certainly stronger than bone axes and clubs, but Lyucu had no known source of iron or copper, and the supply brought by the city-ships would be quickly exhausted. Likewise, the scrublands lacked the wood to supply fletchers with arrow shafts, and stone arrowheads would be no better than slingshots.
Pékyu Tenryo did not think it wise to adopt a new mode of warfare that relied on weapons that the Lyucu could not replenish, and so he decided to focus on learning as much as he could about the fighting techniques of the Islands of Dara so that they could be countered.
An arena with walls made from garinafin bones was constructed—using the slave labor of the men of Dara, of course—and afterward Krita and his men were forced to spend their days inside the arena fighting against the warriors of Lyucu from sunup to sundown, so that Tenryo could study how the men of Dara waged war.
From Cocru sword dances to Faça infantry formations, the pékyu studied everything and carefully noted the weaknesses of each technique. Officers and soldiers were coerced to describe past battles in excruciating detail so that the general patterns of Dara military thinking could be discerned.
Krita eventually suffered a wound that became infected in one of these meaningless mock battles—an infection that the doctors who had come along on the expedition could not cure as they lacked the herbs native to Dara. As Krita lay in a feverish delirium before death, he could be heard to mutter words of love for Nolon and Kya, the Lyucu thanes who had beguiled him and then captured him, as well as prayers to the gods for Dara to take him to the land of immortals.
The women and other noncombatants—craftsmen and craftswomen, traders, navigators, sailors, cooks, maids, doctors—from Dara were not spared either. They were made to fill in details of Dara society that the Lyucu had not already learned: how roads were constructed; how villages were organized; how Imperial power was wielded by Mapidéré in Pan and how the ordinary people felt its effects. Tenryo understood that he would have to conquer a much larger population with a small force, and even with the advantage provided by the garinafin riders, controlling such a population required some understanding of the motivations and patterns of life, which had to be exploited to benefit an occupying force.
Oga presented a special case. At first, upon being informed that he was a fisherman, Tenryo decided that Oga’s knowledge was of limited use. Fishing was not an important source of food for most Lyucu, and the species of fish common in Dara were different from the common species near the coast of Ukyu and Gondé, with Dara fishing techniques often inapplicable. Oga was thus assigned the most menial tasks.
But Tenryo’s thanes then noticed that Oga was the center of attention for gatherings of captives. After a long day’s hard labor, he entertained them with lively tales and kept their spirits up. Some thanes became suspicious of Oga, fearing that he might become the leader of a secret revolt.
Tenryo decided that he would listen to Oga’s stories himself. For several nights in a row, disguised as a simple Lyucu slave overseer, he sat on the very edge of the crowd of captives from Dara gathered around the fire, listening to Oga’s performances.
Oga’s tales were not mere retellings of legends from Dara; instead, he spun embellished tales of their journey here to Ukyu and Gondé. Though he was unlettered, he had a natural storyteller’s gift for craft and invention. He spoke of the wonder of the Wall of Storms, of pods of whales and crubens at sea, of the immortals who lived amongst the spinning stars, of fantastical creatures and princes who inhabited new lands. He had even picked up bits of the Lyucu tongue and learned some of their stories, which he wove into fantastic tapestries of savage daring and dauntless cunning.
Tenryo was mesmerized. Oga was a man who had somehow managed to marry the sophistication of Dara’s storytellers with the raw materials gathered from a new land. He was telling Dara-style epics using the setting and values of the land of his captivity.
And so the great pékyu ordered Oga into his own service. “You will accompany me everywhere I go and see everything I see. Like your court historians who wrote down the deeds of the Lords of Dara, you will be my biographer, the architect of my living monument, a story to instruct a thousand ages.”
Of course, every captive from Dara was also used to teach the Lyucu their language. Pékyu Tenryo’s young children were brought up to speak it—it was essential to understand the thoughts of a foreign people if the Lyucu were to rule over them.
As the captives exhausted their store of useful information, pressure intensified. Torture became routine, and the daily drills in the arena became more relentless. Some of the captives died from disease or injuries, and others took their own lives. Even in death, however, their suffering did not end. Their children—whether born to marriages among the captives or from couplings between the Lyucu and their slaves—were enslaved in their place. The cursed blood of Dara doomed them to the same fate as their parents, though a few of the mixed-blood children were raised as full members of the Lyucu tribes if their mothers or fathers were powerful thanes.
Two years after landing, nine out of ten of the men and women who had arrived in Ukyu in the city-ships were dead.
The first light of dawn filtered through the bars at the top of the tunnel, dimly illuminating the inside of the dark cell.
“I cannot imagine how much you have suffered in the ensuing nineteen years,” said Luan Zya. Not a single thing Cudyu and Vadyu had told him was true. He hoped against hope that the old man’s survival meant that the Lyucu had abandoned their mad quest to sail across the ocean to wage war.
“Has it already been nineteen years?” muttered Oga Kidosu. “So many friends . . . maimed, beaten, then dead. So many times I’ve wanted to die, but I wanted to see home one last time. . . .”
To conquer Dara, first the Lyucu had to find a way back to it.
Pékyu Tenryo understood that the path Krita’s fleet had followed, which depended on the strong oceanic current, was a dead end. Even the city-ships could not do much against the powerful pull of the current, and sailing “upriver,” as it were, seemed an impossible dream. Tenryo thus dedicated himself to the task of figuring out a new way back to Dara.
By carefully examining the navigational logs of the city-ships and skilled application of torture to the Dara navigators—who had been spared so far for this purpose—Tenryo was able to obtain an approximate idea of the location of the Islands of Dara. Ever cautious, he decided to send out a small scouting expedition whose only goal was to confirm the location of the Islands.
Instead of using the captured city-ships, which he intended to use to transport his invasion force, Tenryo built a small exploratory fleet based on traditional Lyucu seafaring designs enhanced with the knowledge of Dara shipwrights.
Though the Lyucu and the Agon were both nomadic peoples living on the backs of garinafins across the scrubland, some tribes had settled along the coast and were skilled with navigating the sea in more advanced craft than the small coracles that Luan Zya had seen. Some of these craft were constructed out of multiple circular coracle hulls connected together with a bone-lattice frame, and garinafin hide, which was both waterproof and fire-resistant, was then stretched over it to form a platform. Animal bladders filled with air were then attached to the lattice to provide additional flotation. These keelless craft were very shallow-drafting by design, but they were surprisingly stable on the sea, though they did not have anywhere near the capacity of the city-ships and transporting any garinafins was out of the question.
A fleet of these Lyucu ships, augmented with a few Dara-style ships constructed by the Lyucu as learning projects while Admiral Krita was still alive, were dispatched and sailed due west to try to find the Islands of Dara. The Lyucu had never sailed that far into the ocean, believing that the ocean extended in that direction as a featureless, endless expanse. Most voyages by Lyucu ships in the past had been coastal, transporting goods for trade or warriors for raids. But now that they knew there was land beneath the horizon, the men and women aboard were eager and expectant.
Only one of the ships returned, more than a year later, with news that the path west was impassable. The fleet had managed to cross the ocean current in its slow-moving portion, just as recorded in Krita’s logs; it had then come into sight of the Wall of Storms, also reported by Krita.
The survivors spoke of a curtain made of cyclones that rose from the sea to the sky. For months, the ships sailed north and south in the hopes of locating an opening, but none could be found. Frustrated, the fleet commander ordered the ships to try to brave the cyclones head-on, but the storms were so furious that all the other Lyucu ships had perished, and this one barely escaped in time. Thereafter, one of the cyclones had left the wall and seemed to gain a will of its own as it pursued the surviving ship for days like a cat toying with a mouse. It was only by pure luck that the ship managed to escape and return to tell the tale.
The pékyu had to give up his dream, the terrified survivors explained, for paradise seemed to be guarded by furious demons of the sea and the air.
But Tenryo did not give up. He had the survivors executed for cowardice and disobedience—he had told them to find a passage to the Islands of Dara, not to come crawling back with excuses for why it couldn’t be done.
A second fleet was dispatched to complete the task that the first could not finish.
“Absolute obedience!” thundered Pékyu Tenryo. “Remember that.”
This fleet suffered a fate even worse than its predecessor, for not a single ship returned after a year. Some of Tenryo’s most trusted thanes grumbled that the pékyu’s uncompromising style of command probably taught the members of the second fleet that it was better to leave and find some uninhabited island to live out the rest of their days than to face certain death, either at the Wall of Storms or at the hands of the pékyu.
The pékyu had to accept that his plan to conquer Dara was but an unfulfillable dream and spoke no more of it.
The surviving captives were distributed to the tribes as ordinary slaves, and the Lyucu resumed their nomadic life across the scrubland, visions of paradise seemingly forgotten. The fleet of city-ships remained anchored next to the shore, guarded by a detachment of the Lyucu army along with about a dozen garinafins. From time to time, the Agon, who had been forced into parts of the scrubland with the harshest conditions, revolted, and Tenryo would lead expeditions to put down these rebellions. But for the most part, life seemed to return to its familiar rhythm for most of the people of the scrubland.
