Ken Liu - The Grace of Kings

Over the next few days, Gin took him to observe some of the war exercises, and Luan was impressed. He had never seen training done this way in any of the armies of Dara.

He showed Gin some plans he had devised for constructing siege machinery with more portable components for ease of assembly and transportation; Gin immediately pointed out their flaws — Luan might be intelligent, but designing machines on paper was very different from making them real and useful in the field.

Luan looked dejected.

“Well,” Gin said gruffly. “The basic ideas are not bad. I can probably help you make them work.”

Then Cogo took Luan to see some of the more interesting inventions he had saved for Kuni to evaluate, and Luan grew excited also and discussed their virtues with Cogo.

Evenings, the three stayed up late conversing, drinking, and singing in the little house that passed for a palace in Daye. Their laughter and voices were harmonious, the sound of people who admired and respected one another as consummate craftsmen in their distinct realms. The torches cast their flickering shadows against the paper window of the little house, and it seemed sometimes as though they were three spirits, three dancing pillars that held up the roof of the palace.

“Lord Garu, in a thousand years, how do you think people will remember Emperor Mapidéré?”

Coming from someone else, it would have been an invitation to repeat the universal condemnation of a tyrant. But Luan Zya was not an ordinary man.

“I’ve changed my mind many times on this question,” Kuni admitted. “It’s easy to say that he was a tyrant who did nothing good. But it would also be untrue. I was a provincial boy, and yet I got to see some of the wonders of all the old Tiro states because of his forceful resettlement of people all across Dara.

“We talk often of the hundreds of thousands who died in Mapidéré’s wars, but we rarely speak of the many lives that might have been lost had he not stopped the incessant petty wars between the Tiro states. We talk often of the many who were forced to labor in his Mausoleum, but we rarely speak of the many who would have died from diseases or starvation without the reservoirs and roads he built. Only the gods know if the emphases and omissions in our histories will sway the opinions of men down the ages. A man’s legacy is a hard thing to foresee, especially when passions still run hot, and it is so much easier to speak ill than well.”

Luan nodded. They sat next to each other, and before them was a great bonfire on the beach of Daye and the endless darkness beyond of the open ocean. Above them the stars blinked in the pristine sky like the eyes of the gods.

“Things are rarely simple when it comes to judging a man who did much to change the world.” Luan took a long puff on his pipe, collecting his thoughts. “You’re right that the passage of years has a way of changing minds. When the first Ano settlers, refugees of the sunken Western Continent, arrived in Dara, all these islands were inhabited by natives like the people of Tan Adü. To the Adüans, our founding fathers were murderers and tyrants of no redeeming value. Yet today we walk on land they conquered and celebrate festivals that they brought with them. And few of us stop to reflect on the blood debt all of us owe.

“Emperor Mapidéré justified his wars by arguing that he would unify all the squabbling Tiro states under one throne and turn all swords into plowshares. Indeed, he even sought to confiscate all weapons after the Unification, melt them down, and construct from the metal eight statues of the gods to be placed at the center of Pan. That effort was abandoned in the end as too difficult, though many thought he merely wanted to remove the ability of the populace to resist the state with force.

“But the emperor’s words were not mere self-serving propaganda. Many scholars in Xana and the other Tiro states supported his vision of peace through unification and conquest. The bloody, endless wars between the Tiro states, spurred by the invention of ever more powerful weapons and larger armies, frightened many, and it was thought that a war to end all wars might be preferable to the interminable attrition due to a balance of powers.

“Had Mapidéré patiently spent more time on consolidating his rule, rather than pursuing the mirage of immortality; had he focused more effort on just administration and lasting institutions, rather than megalomaniacal engineering projects — it’s possible that the empire would have survived more than two generations. Had that been the case, in another hundred years, men who remember the old Tiro states would have all passed into death, and the new generations would have known nothing but a unified peace under Xana. Memories of the death and suffering caused by wars do not last beyond three generations, and people would remember Emperor Mapidéré fondly, as a visionary, a lawgiver who gave us peace.”

Kuni Garu threw more wood on the fire. “You are a heretic, Luan. Few dare to think such thoughts.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I’m mad. I spent my entire life seeking revenge against Mapidéré, trying to restore the independent Tiro states, to break apart what he fused together. But when the moment of victory finally arrived, I found myself mourning him because I had spent so much time studying him that I understood him better than his own ministers and children. I may have helped to bring about the fall of Xana, but Mapidéré, in some way, managed to bring about the fall of my convictions.

“After you came to Dasu, I went back to Haan to help King Cosugi to rebuild. I worked tirelessly to build up Haan’s strength, but everywhere I looked, there was only the rise of old conflicts and ancient enmity. When Emperor Mapidéré conquered Haan, he had deposed the old nobles and elites from power, and in their place he had put in a new elite of bureaucrats and merchants who prospered. When King Cosugi returned, he took the new elites out and moved the old elites in. Those who were politically astute profited, while others lost all they had. Yet, for most people — the fishermen, the peasants, the prostitutes and beggars and longshoremen — life did not change. They went on suffering as they had before: Officials remained corrupt, tax collectors stayed cruel, the corvée assignments were still onerous, and the threat of war ever present.

“I heard a children’s song in Haan:

When Haan falls, the people suffer.

When Haan rises, the people suffer.

When Haan is poor, the people are poor.

When Haan is rich, the people are poor.

When Haan is strong, the people die.

When Haan is weak, the people die.”

“Whatever the nobles and kings say they believe in, they always treat the people as mere stones on the cüpa board,” Kuni said.

There was no irony in his speech. In his heart, he still thought of himself as a commoner, a man who had nothing to his name and had to beg his friends for a place to sleep.

Luan looked directly at him, his eyes blazing in the reflected light of the bonfire. “King Cosugi did not see anything wrong with the new draft to raise an army to reconquer old Haan territories from North Géfica, the new corvée to rebuild the Palace of Ginpen, the new taxes to pay for a grand coronation.

“I went to the ruins of my ancestral estate and prayed to the soul of my departed father. Though I thought I had accomplished what I promised him on the day of his death, my heart was not at peace.

“As the moon rose, I saw the light illuminate an ancient quote from the Ano Classics, carved into one of the broken lintels: ‘All life is an experiment.’”