R.F. Kuang - The Dragon Republic

A pair of arms grasped her around the waist. She kicked and flailed, but they only tightened as they dragged her back down. She twisted her neck around.

“Suni?”

He walked backward from the prow, carrying her by the waist like a little child.

“Let go,” she panted. “Let me go !”

He put her down. She tried to break away but he grabbed her wrists, twisted her arms behind her back, and forced her down into a sitting position.

“Breathe,” he ordered. “Just breathe.”

She obeyed. The pain didn’t subside. The screaming didn’t quiet. She began to shake, but Suni didn’t let go of her arms. “If you just keep breathing, I’ll tell you a story.”

“I don’t want to hear a fucking story,” she said, gasping.

“Don’t want. Don’t think . Just breathe.” Suni’s voice was quiet, soothing. “Have you heard the story of the Monkey King and the moon?”

“No,” she whimpered.

“Then listen carefully.” He relaxed his grip ever so slightly, just enough that her arms stopped hurting. “Once upon a time, the Monkey King caught his first glimpse of the Moon Goddess.”

Rin shut her eyes and tried to focus on Suni’s voice. She’d never heard Suni talk this much. He was always so quiet, drawn into himself, as if he were unused to being in full occupation of his own mind that he wanted to relish the experience as much as possible. She’d forgotten how gentle he could sound.

He continued. “The Moon Goddess had just ascended to the heavens, and she was still drifting so close to Earth that you could see her face on the surface. She was such a lovely thing.”

Some old memory stirred in the back of her mind. She did know this story after all. They told it to children in Rooster Province during the Lunar Festival, every autumn when children ate moon cakes and solved riddles written on rice paper and floated lanterns in the sky.

“Then he fell in love,” she whispered.

“That’s right. The Monkey King was struck with the most terrible passion. He had to possess her, he thought, or he might die. So he sent his best soldiers to retrieve her from the ocean. But they failed, for the moon lived not in the ocean but in the sky, and they drowned.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Why did they drown? Why did the moon kill them? Because they weren’t climbing to the sky to find her, they were diving into the water toward her reflection. But it was a fucking illusion they were grasping, not the real thing.” Suni’s voice hardened. It didn’t rise above a whisper, but he might as well have been shouting. “You spend your whole life chasing after some illusion you think is real, only to realize you’re a damned fool, and that if you reach any further, you’ll drown.”

He let go of her arms.

Rin turned around to face him. “Suni …”

“Altan liked that story,” he said. “I first heard it from him. He told it whenever he needed to calm me down. Said it would help if I thought of the Monkey King as just another person, someone gullible and foolish, and not a god.”

“The Monkey King is a dick,” she said.

“And the Moon Goddess is a bitch,” he said. “She sat there in the sky and watched the monkeys drowning over her. What does that say about her?”

That made her laugh. For a moment they both looked up at the moon. It was half-full, hiding behind a wispy dark cloud. Rin could imagine she was a woman, coy and devious, waiting to entice foolish men to their deaths.

She placed her hand over Suni’s. His hand was massive, rougher than wood bark, mottled with calluses. Her mind spun with a thousand unanswered questions.

Who made you like this?

And, more importantly, Do you regret it?

“You don’t have to suffer alone, you know.” Suni gave her one of his rare, slow smiles. “You’re not the only one.”

She would have smiled back, but then a wave of sickness hit her gut and she jerked her head down. Vomit splattered the deck.

Suni rubbed circles on her back while she spat blood-speckled phlegm on the planks. When she was done, he smoothed her vomit-covered hair out of her eyes as she sucked in air in great, racking sobs.

“You’re so strong,” he said. “Whatever you’re seeing, whatever you’re feeling, it’s not as strong as you are.”

But she didn’t want to be strong. Because if she were strong then she would be sober, and if she were sober she would have to consider the consequences of her actions. Then she’d have to look into the chasm. Then the Federation of Mugen would stop being an amorphous blur, and her victims would stop being meaningless numbers. Then she would recognize one death, what it meant, and then another, and then another and another and—

And if she wanted to recognize it, then she would have to be something, feel something other than anger, but she was afraid that if she stopped being angry then she might shatter.

She started to cry.

Suni smoothed the hair back from her forehead. “Just breathe,” he murmured. “Breathe for me. Can you do that? Breathe five times.”

One. Two. Three.

He continued to rub her back. “You just have to make it through the next five seconds. Then the next five. Then on and on.”

Four. Five.

And then another five. And those five, oddly enough, were just the littlest bit more bearable than the last.

“There you go,” Suni said after maybe a dozen counts to five. His voice was so low it was hardly a whisper. “There, look, you’ve done it.”

She breathed, and counted, and wondered how Suni knew exactly what to say.

She wondered if he had done this before with Altan.

“She’ll be all right,” Suni said.

Rin looked up to see who he was talking to, and saw Vaisra standing in the shadows.

It couldn’t have taken him long to respond to the soldiers’ calls. Had he been there the entire time, watching without speaking?

“I heard you came out to get some air,” he said.

She wiped vomit off her cheek with the back of her hand. Vaisra’s gaze flickered to her stained clothing and back to her face. She couldn’t read his expression.

“I’ll be okay,” she whispered.

“Will you?”

“I’ll take care of her,” Suni said.

A brief pause. Vaisra gave Suni a curt nod.

After another moment Suni helped her up and walked her back to her cabin. He kept one arm around her shoulders, warm, solid, comforting. The ship rocked against a particularly violent wave, and she staggered into his side.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry,” Suni said. “And don’t worry. I’ve got you.”

Five days later the Seagrim sailed over a submerged town. At first when Rin saw the tops of buildings emerging from the river she thought they were driftwood, or rocks. Then they got close enough that she could see the curving roofs of drowned pagodas, thatched houses lying under the surface. An entire village peeked up at her through river silt.

Then she saw the bodies—half-eaten, bloated and discolored, all with empty sockets because the glutinous eyes had already been nibbled away. They blocked up the river, decomposing at such a rate that the crew had to sweep away the maggots that threatened to climb on board.

Sailors lined up at the prow to shift bodies aside with long poles to make way for the ship. The corpses started piling up on the river’s sides. Every few hours sailors had to climb down and drag them into a pile before the Seagrim could move—a duty the crew drew lots for with dread.

“What happened here?” Rin asked. “Did the Murui run its banks?”

“No. Dam breach.” Nezha looked pale with fury. “Daji had the dam destroyed to flood the Murui river valley.”