The Wall of Storms, page 75
As long as he was alive, they could use his “abdication” as a way to legitimate Timu’s claim. Yet if he died now, in obscurity, the Lyucu would be able to continue to lie, with his ghost as a rallying flag. He had to try to give Jia and the others a chance.
The pékyu was a calculating man, Kuni knew, not too different from himself. He tried to imagine himself in the pékyu’s place. What would I do?
Timu is too valuable a prop to be risked, yet the fleet also needs another high-profile hostage for some battlefield theater.
He recalled a talk he had had with Jia over the dangers of battlefield injuries and what could be done to save the wounded. He closed his eyes. It was time to put that knowledge into use.
He looked and found a rusty nail in one of the window frames. He took off his left shoe and sock, and scraped the skin against the rusty nail until he had made a deep gash. He grimaced against the pain and replaced the sock and shoe.
Now he had to wait, and hope that he would be given a chance.
Twenty garinafins were deemed healthy enough to go to war. Pékyu Tenryo packed them onto eight city-ships along with three thousand Lyucu warriors. The rest would stay behind to guard Rui and Dasu with the help of surrendered Dara soldiers. Timu, or “Emperor Thaké,” was nominally left in charge, but everyone, perhaps even Timu himself, understood that he was a mere figurehead.
A few of the airships captured from Emperor Ragin would accompany the fleet to act as scouts against surprise attacks by mechanical crubens while the rest would be left behind to defend Rui and Dasu.
On the morning of the day specified in the ultimatum, the fleet of city-ships and smaller escort vessels left Kriphi and sailed for the Big Island. The elders of Rui and Dasu recalled the launches of similar invasion fleets from the Xana home islands decades ago as Emperor Mapidéré and then Emperor Ragin had sailed this same course to the Throne of Dara. Pékyu Tenryo and Emperor Thaké would follow the success of their illustrious predecessors.
The invasion of the Big Island had begun.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
DREAM OF THE DANDELION
ZATHIN GULF: THE TENTH MONTH IN THE TWELFTH YEAR OF THE REIGN OF FOUR PLACID SEAS.
The few airships that accompanied the Lyucu fleet sailed ahead and to the side of the ships, and lookouts intently gazed at the surface below, trying to spot the approach of any mechanical crubens. The fleet took a course that avoided the known underwater volcanoes, but Pékyu Tenryo wasn’t going to take any chances.
As further insurance against a sneak attack, the flagship of the pékyu, Pride of Ukyu, displayed a bright red banner charged with the figure of a leaping blue cruben. This was the Imperial standard, and Pékyu Tenryo wanted to make sure that any Dara ship that dared to attack knew that they endangered the Emperor of Dara.
Empress Jia ordered Prince Phyro to stay in Pan with Consort Risana over his strenuous objections.
“I should be at the front, fighting!”
“You’re your father’s only heir after Timu’s error. Your safety is paramount because you must preserve the Imperial line, and, should the marshal and I fail, become the hope of an occupied Dara.”
“And avenge you.”
“No! Never let your love for your family become a hindrance to your duty to the well-being of the people. Vengeance should never be your goal, only freedom.”
She turned to Consort Risana and Prime Minister Cogo Yelu. “If . . . the gods decide that I should not return, the House of Dandelion is in your hands.”
Risana and Cogo both bowed.
“I am your loyal servant.”
“Be well, Big Sister.”
Near Ginpen, on the shore of the Zathin Gulf, Empress Jia had constructed an observation platform. This was a dais about two hundred feet on each side and about a hundred feet tall. Jia sat on top in a throne carved with leaping dyrans. Around her, the top of the dais was piled with firewood soaked in oil.
Should their stand here today fail, she intended to immolate herself in a final gesture of defiance.
Jia turned to Gin Mazoti, who stood at her side. “How do you like your new sword, Marshal?”
With some effort, Gin unsheathed Na-aroénna, the Doubt-Ender, and held it aloft with both hands. “Still getting used to it.”
“As your soldiers are still getting used to our new weapons?”
Gin nodded. “Their courage is admirable. But untested weapons can’t be trusted.”
“I will stay here and pray for your success. Do you have any doubt?”
“I always have doubt,” said Gin. “And courage, as the Hegemon proved, is not all.”
“That’s an improvement from before, then,” said Jia. “You once told me you had no doubt that we had to yield.”
Gin grinned at this. “May this sword live up to its name.”
“What happened to that confident general who once told my husband that she could conquer Rui with only a thousand men?”
The marshal smiled wistfully. “Experience humbles.”
Jia nodded and looked solemnly at her. “I love my husband with all my heart. I know he would be willing to die for Dara, and the same is true of my son. Do you understand?”
“In the case of Prince Timu,” said Gin, “I’m not sure you’re right.”
Jia looked away. “Sometimes the weak need help to be strong, to do what they should do.”
Gin felt a chill down her spine.
“I love my son,” the empress continued. “But evil must be confronted.”
The marshal gazed at the empress and, after a while, nodded.
As the Lyucu fleet approached the shore of the Big Island, Pékyu Tenryo was growing more confident by the moment.
He was going to land his army at Ginpen, sweep over land like a bolt of lightning on the backs of the garinafins, and bring Pan to her knees in a single, swift strike. Without any kind of effective airpower, the walled cities of Dara could not withstand the might of the garinafins. After all, could the marshal plant her flamethrowers everywhere?
Gazing out over the last mile or so of water that divided his fleet from land, Pékyu Tenryo let out a held breath. No Dara navy sailed from the port of Ginpen to meet his fleet; no army of Dara was lined up onshore to meet his invasion force; and there were no signs of the fabled giant war machines that Ginpen had once been famous for, like the Curved Mirrors that could set ships aflame from a distance. Likely the barbarians of Dara realized that such outdated defenses could not survive a garinafin assault.
The walls of Ginpen were bereft of defenders, and lookouts on the airships reported that the city was surprisingly quiet, with all the civilians apparently huddled in their homes. All signs pointed to the conclusion that Empress Jia’s court had completely given up, and the dream of a new Lyucu homeland was at hand. Cudyu would eventually dispatch another fleet and bring more of the Lyucu to come and live in this paradise. Tenryo envisioned the Lyucu warriors living like kings, each supported by a docile herd of Dara farmers.
“I pity you, old man,” said Tenryo to the supine figure of Kuni Garu. “It must be hard to see your victories come to naught, to see your accomplishments swept away by the vicissitudes of fate and the inconstancy of the gods.”
Kuni remained oblivious in his slumber, turning and muttering inaudibly.
“What’s that?” asked Tanvanaki, standing next to the pékyu. The other Lyucu warriors standing on deck began to point and whisper as well.
Pékyu Tenryo followed where his daughter was pointing, and at first, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at: Mounds covered by bushes and beach grass seemed to be expanding, growing, rising, as though some large animals were wriggling underneath, seeking to emerge from their burrows.
“Prepare the garinafin riders,” ordered the pékyu. Perhaps these farmers of Dara had not yet been completely subdued. Even a cornered rabbit would dare to kick and bite at wolves, and he wasn’t going to let victory be snatched from his jaws by overconfidence.
Soldiers dressed in the finest armor of Dara surged onto the beach from hidden caves; ships carrying the bravest sailors of Dara rowed out of the port of Ginpen.
The ballooning mounds erupted, and with a sharp intake of breath, Pékyu Tenryo saw an impossible sight: six brand-new Imperial airships, larger than any they had ever seen, rising into the air.
Where did they get the lift gas?
Once Atharo Ye and Princess Théra discovered that the garinafins were powered by the same lift gas as the gas from manure fermentation used in the marshal’s flamethrowers, Zomi Kidosu came up with a bold plan for creating new airships in secret.
The fermentation gas wasn’t as light as the lift gas from Lake Dako on Mount Kiji, which necessitated design changes. The ships had to be made bigger to achieve the same lift capacities, and the materials used had to be lighter and the crew reduced. In underground caverns and basement workshops, the dedicated warriors and builders of Marshal Mazoti’s volunteer corps toiled to bend and shape bamboo into hoops, struts, and girders, and to sew gasbags from varnished silk.
To reduce weight, the shipwrights reduced the number of internal supports for the bamboo frame, leaving as much space for the gasbags as possible. Some of the bamboo hoops and struts were reinforced with steel as the combination of materials provided more strength than either alone.
To make the most of the weaker lift gas, Atharo Ye designed the airships to have a flattened profile so that they resembled two saucers stacked face-to-face, or the body of a manta ray, rather than the traditional egg-shaped oblong. Although the new hull design was bulkier and less maneuverable, it also generated lift with forward motion, which helped the airships to stay aloft. As rowers sitting at the rim of the flattened hull wielded their massive feathered oars, the semirigid airships pulsated forward like jellyfish swimming through an empyrean sea.
The new Imperial ships were thus structurally weaker than their predecessors and could not weather the unpredictable conditions of long cruises as well; the marshal compensated by disguising the airships under a light covering of sand on the beach, as close to the scene of combat as possible.
The gondolas of the new airships were also shaped oddly. Instead of the sleek, sailing-ship-like profiles of the past, the new gondolas were oval in shape and far bigger, taking up almost a quarter of the bottom surface of the billowing hull and embedding a sizable portion inside the hull as well. Weight reduction was achieved by constructing most of the gondola, except the structural elements, with wicker. The crews had to be as light as possible, too, which meant once again that they were almost all women, mainly veterans of Dara’s old air force and women’s auxiliaries.
But as the gondolas were so light in comparison to the rest of the hull, the flight characteristics of the airships were somewhat unstable. To compensate for this, each of the airships was also equipped with a heavy ballast ball just aft of the gondolas, a large ceramic sphere suspended below the hull like a gigantic, dangling dewdrop hanging from the belly of a grasshopper.
The design seemed strangely inefficient to the shipbuilders—many of them former engineers who had retired to the Big Island to enjoy their golden years after a lifetime of service at Mount Kiji Air Base—but they reasoned that this was perhaps the best Atharo Ye could do given the constrained time frame for modifying the traditional airship design to work with a new lift gas.
The greatest weakness of the fermentation-gas-powered airships, of course, was the flammability of their lift gas. If any of the gasbags sprang a leak, even a spark would cause the entire ship to turn into a fiery bubble. There was not much the marshal could do to reduce the risk, however, as any additional armor for the ship would have increased its weight beyond the power of the weak lift gas. She had to rely on the fortunate happenstance that the Lyucu had not adopted the use of archers, especially not with fire arrows.
For the same reason, the marshal had to eschew equipping the airships with flamethrowers; instead, Mazoti would have to rely on other surprises.
Her back ached from long days spent silk-spinning,
Hands rough from nights spent boiling and reeling.
She returned from Pan with a tearstained face.
“Oh, Mama, what made your heart so heavy?”
Pick the cocoons, soak, boil, stir, reel.
Spin the wheel, sister, spin that wheel!
“My child, I saw many jade-tempered lords
And honey-voiced ladies dressed in fine silk.
How many know that they are wearing shrouds?
Or that silk makers only have hempen shawls?
Pick the cocoons, soak, boil, stir, reel.
Spin the wheel, sister, spin that wheel!
Though the song that the crew of the marshal’s flagship, Silkmotic Arrow, chanted in unison began in the efforts of silk makers to relieve the tedium of long days in the workshops, the wheels the women now spun in the airship generated not threads or yarn, but power, power that would be stored until it was needed.
Hinged doors at the front of the gondolas dropped open as the airships readied themselves in battle configuration.
Oddly, the six airships were not all flying at the same height. Rather, four of the airships—Spirit of Kiji, Heart of Tututika, Resolve of Fithowéo, and Vigor of the Twins, all commanded by trusted captains from the old all-women Dasu air force under Gin Mazoti—hovered in the same plane to form a diamond parallel to the ground. Silkmotic Arrow flew above the diamond while Moji’s Vengeance, commanded by Zomi Kidosu, flew below it.
Silk screens inside the gondolas hid most of the crews of the airships as well as the machinery they operated. Only about six women on each ship were visible from the open door at the front, holding longbows with nocked arrows.
The airships approached the Lyucu fleet as garinafins took off from the city-ships, rising to meet this unexpected challenge. Below them, Lyucu warriors scrambled around a golden canopy on the deck of the pékyu’s flagship, Pride of Ukyu.
“That canopy must be where the pékyu is seated,” said Marshal Mazoti. “Target it.” In truth, she doubted that the crafty Pékyu Tenryo would be so foolish as to make himself such an obvious target. But striking the golden canopy, whatever it was hiding, would certainly enhance the morale of the Dara forces.
Dafiro Miro, who was serving as the marshal’s executive officer, gave a series of quick orders to the rowers to maneuver Silkmotic Arrow slightly forward of the formation, and the archers at the front of the airship pointed the tips of their arrows at the distant golden canopy below.
The Lyucu warriors on the decks below jeered as they saw the few archers crouched at the opening at the front of the airship gondolas. Did the barbarians of Dara really think they would defeat the garinafins and city-ships with a few archers?
“Men of Dara,” the pékyu’s voice boomed from a bone trumpet installed at the top of the main mast. He was speaking from somewhere deep in the ship’s hold, safely hidden from the surface. “Stand down! This is the order of your old emperor!”
As a stunned Marshal Mazoti and the rest of her crew watched, the golden canopy was whipped away to reveal a bed on which lay Kuni Garu, the Emperor of Dara.
Kuni wasn’t moving.
Two of the Lyucu warriors stepped forward and lifted him from the bed, and he groaned as he twisted his face away from the light. The crews of the Imperial airships gasped.
Kuni had kept the injury in his toe hidden from the guards until it had become infected. By the time his rotting wound was finally discovered, the only option was an amputation of his gangrenous foot. But even after severing the limb, his condition did not seem to improve. The doctors the pékyu sent for declared Kuni to be on the verge of death.
Pékyu Tenryo had wanted to use Kuni as his secret weapon. He had suspected that Empress Jia might stage some last act of resistance, and he had planned to bring out his prized prisoner at the right moment as a way to grind down the morale of Dara’s defenders.
Given the condition of the crippled and dying Kuni, the pékyu thought it was no longer necessary to keep him in a bone cage; rather, he left him lying on a bed under a canopy watched over by a few guards.
Even held up, Kuni appeared to remain in a deep and feverish slumber; he didn’t react to the commotion around him.
Confused whispers passed through the crews of Silkmotic Arrow and the other airships. They were glad to see that their emperor was still alive, and most suspected that the pékyu was lying about the emperor’s abdication and his orders to stand down. Nonetheless, the archers lowered their weapons.
“Target the emperor,” Gin Mazoti said, her voice calm and steady.
Dafiro repeated her order and glanced at her. Though the marshal’s voice betrayed no emotion, he could only imagine the turmoil that raged in her heart. Kuni Garu was the man who had lifted her out of obscurity and made her into the greatest general of Dara, but he had also stood by as she was accused of treason and stripped of her title and dignity.
She had once been willing to die for him, and now she was forced to kill him to preserve the fruits of his revolution.
Mazoti took a deep breath. This was a sacrifice that she could not avoid. As long as Kuni remained alive, her forces would not be able to fight freely. There would always be doubt among the soldiers that they were thwarting the emperor’s will. Yet once she gave the order to kill Kuni, she would never be able to free herself from suspicion that she had, indeed, intended to betray him.
It was a price she had to pay to secure victory. To win, she had to give up her name and endure the judgment of history.
Mazoti steeled herself to give the order to fire.
Kuni looked around him, confused.
He was in Pan, the Harmonious City, standing in the middle of the broad expanse of Cruben Square in front of the palace. (How can I be standing, when I’ve lost my foot?) Normally the square was empty, save for children who flew kites in spring and summer and built ice statues in winter. Occasionally an Imperial airship landed in it, and nearby citizens would gather to watch.
