Ken Liu - The Grace of Kings

“To know the future is to have no choice,” Luan continued, “to be words fixed on a page by someone else. We can only do what we think is best, trusting that it will all somehow work out.”

“I know,” Kuni said. “The people think I see a clear path, but I’m stumbling in the dark too.”

“Maybe that’s what the gods are doing, as well.”

RIMA AND FAÇA: THE THIRD MONTH OF THE FIFTH YEAR OF THE PRINCIPATE.

As Cocru and Dasu were evenly matched along the Liru, Luan Zya and Gin Mazoti presented a plan to Kuni Garu to shift the strategic balance of power.

Up north, Faça and the reconstituted Rima — which everyone assumed was following Faça’s lead — had switched their allegiance between Dasu and Cocru several times and thus avoided being invaded by either. Most recently, they had both declared for Mata, given the lack of recent military success from Kuni.

They could become examples for the other states.

Taking only a small force of five thousand, Marshal Mazoti left Dimushi and marched to the coast of Zathin Gulf, close to Rima. There, she said good-bye to Luan Zya, who put on a disguise and, alone, piloted a small fishing skiff toward fog-shrouded Boama, capital of Faça.

Within the territories of old ring-wooded Rima, Mata Zyndu had created six new Tiro states. After a year of warfare, most of the new Tiro states were gone, and all the land was now consolidated under the control of Zato Ruthi, who had been one of King Jizu’s teachers when he first arrived at the palace in Na Thion. Later, he had immortalized Jizu’s sacrifice to save Na Thion from Namen’s army in a eulogy that every child in Rima could recite.

The rise of Zato Ruthi was the result of a series of accidents that was unlikely to ever repeat again. He was a scholar through and through, in the mold of someone who preferred neat books to anything in the messy real world.

As a child, rather than playing with friends, Zato memorized all the numbered sayings of the ancient Ano epigrammatist, Ra Oji. As a young man, rather than carousing with friends in bars, he stayed home and read all the commentaries on the ancient Ano moral philosopher Kon Fiji’s treatise on an ideal society. Disdaining the civil service examinations because they interfered with the pure contemplation of ideas, he refused to seek gainful employment but journeyed deep into Rima’s ancient woods to study in a tiny hut he constructed himself. By the time he was thirty, he was recognized as one of the greatest scholars of ancient philosophy in all of Dara, a rival of Tan Féuji and Lügo Crupo, though he had never studied in the famed academies of Haan.

Tanno Namen spared him when Na Thion fell, and he then traveled between the capitals of the new Tiro states, which Mata Zyndu had created in his beloved old Rima, teaching and lecturing.

As wars destroyed one Tiro state after another, the new conquerors always made a point to seek out Zato to get him to “bless” the new administration as being in harmony with Kon Fiji’s moral principles. On some level, Zato Ruthi surely understood that he was being used as a tool of propaganda, but he appreciated the attention that the powerful gave him, and he liked being treated as if his opinion mattered.

The last two Tiro states left in old Rima then went to war, as all along they knew they would. Neither could subdue the other, and as their armies clashed all over Rima, the people suffered.

Then King Shilué of Faça, as was his habit, decided to intervene again in the affairs in Rima and sent his troops to Na Thion to add to the chaos.

As the people of Na Thion suffered yet another military occupation, anger and despair filled the streets. One day, students of the Na Thion Academy took to the streets, demanding that Shilué go home with his foreign army, that the two kings of Rima stop the war, and that the people be left to live in peace.

Idle merchants, who had no business to conduct because of the war; idle farmers, who had no land to till because of the war; and idle workers, who had nothing to do because of the war, joined the students, and mobs of rioters filled the streets. The students led them to the Palace of Na Thion, where Shilué was negotiating with the ambassadors of the two kings of Rima.

The students carried Zato Ruthi on their shoulders, and they hailed him as their leader. “Teacher! Teacher! You’ve always wanted to build a state in the image of Kon Fiji’s ancient virtues. Now’s our chance!”

They chanted before the palace, and before he even understood what was happening, Zato Ruthi found himself standing on a makeshift stage in front of the palace, speaking to a crowd of thousands of angry men.

He rehearsed his old themes about the obligations of the ruler toward the ruled, about the importance of restraint and respect and justice and the right to eat, about the need for harmonious relations among all people in a state, and about the injustice of foreign military interference.

It was nothing new, and there was nothing special to the way he spoke, but the crowd roared and clapped, and he felt as though he was being lifted on their voices, on their strength of will. And his words became more fiery in response. He called for the people to tear the palace down, to usher in a more harmonious and just Rima.

Shilué and the ambassadors trembled in the palace, but Shilué shrewdly saw an opportunity. He pressed the two kings of Rima to not only agree to a cease-fire, but to abdicate their thrones and to support Zato Ruthi as the king of a unified new Rima.

“The people have spoken,” he said, “and they are not calling for either of your names.”

In reality, Shilué thought that Zato, being a mere scholar with no experience at administration, would be an easier puppet to control from Boama than either of the two kings, and he made it clear that Faça’s troops were ready to “support the people of Rima and their choice.”

Thus did Zato Ruthi become the King of Rima.

Marshal Mazoti called on King Zato to surrender three times. Each time her messengers were rebuffed but returned with earnest letters addressed to Mazoti from Zato:

It is known to every child of Dara that all Tiro states are equal, and none can claim lordship over another. King Kuni has breached this principle, which was set forth by the infallible Aruano and approved by the wise Kon Fiji. The hegemon will surely punish King Kuni for these violations of the moral principles governing relations among states.

Even worse, King Kuni has made a woman into a soldier and elevated her above men. This is at odds with the principles governing harmonious relations among the sexes that Kon Fiji so eloquently explained centuries ago. Rima hopes that King Kuni will soon recover from his errors and apologize for his mistakes. It is the only way for Dasu to be restored to honor.

Mazoti rolled her eyes. The words from Zato were as musty and stale as the old books that no one read. Coming from anyone else, the words would have been understood as sarcastic insults, but Mazoti knew that Zato was completely serious. He genuinely believed that there were “moral principles governing relations among states” and didn’t see them as the codification of the robber’s logic employed by strong states seeking to impose their will on weak ones.

As Mazoti’s troops wound their way through tree-canopied Rima, they encountered no resistance. The woodsmen and hunters were told that Kuni Garu’s soldiers would leave civilians alone unless they took up arms against them. They stood silently in front of their cottages or moved off the trails as Mazoti’s army marched south through the thick forest.