The boy emperor’s tiny figure seemed almost swallowed up by the giant throne he sat in. He didn’t understand what sort of joke the regent was playing. He had always had trouble following his old teacher’s erudite, complicated lessons, and the boy did not feel close to the man, certain that his teacher found him lacking as a student. Crupo was also such a strange man — the regent had come to him in the middle of the night to explain that he would now be emperor, but then the regent had given him almost nothing to do, telling him to just enjoy himself and play games with Pira and be entertained by an endless stream of dancing troupes, acrobats, animal trainers, and magicians. The emperor tried to convince himself that he liked the regent, but in truth, he was more than a bit intimidated by him.
“I don’t understand,” Emperor Erishi said. “I don’t see a horse. I see a deer.”
Crupo bowed deeply again. “Sire, you are mistaken, but that is to be expected, since you are young and still have much to learn. Perhaps the other ministers and generals here can help enlighten you.”
Crupo looked slowly around the room, and his right hand stroked the stag’s back lightly. His gaze was cold and severe. No one dared to meet it.
“Tell me, my lords, do you see what I see? Is this a fine horse or a deer?”
Those who were more clever and sensitive to the winds of change caught on.
“An admirable horse, Regent.”
“A very fine horse.”
“I see a beautiful horse.”
“Rénga, you must listen to the wise regent. That is a horse.”
“Anyone who says that is a deer must face my sword!”
But some ministers, and especially the generals, shook their heads in disbelief. “This is shameful,” said General Thumi Yuma, who had been in the Xana army for more than fifty years, serving even under Emperor Mapidéré’s father and grandfather. “That is a deer. Crupo, you may be powerful, but you cannot make men believe or say what is not true.”
“What is truth?” the regent said, enunciating his words carefully. “What happened in the Grand Tunnels? What happened on the Island of Écofi? These things must be written down in the history books, and someone has to decide what should be written.”
Emboldened by General Yuma, more ministers stepped forward and declared that the regent had brought a deer to the Grand Audience Hall. But the pro-horse party refused to back down, and the two sides got into a shouting match. Crupo smiled and stroked his chin thoughtfully. Emperor Erishi looked from one side to the other and laughed. He thought it was yet another of Crupo’s strange jokes.
As the months went by, fewer and fewer of those who stood up against Crupo on that day remained. Many were discovered to be coconspirators of the disgraced Prince Pulo, and from prison they wrote — after some convincing — tearful confessions of their crimes against the throne. They and their families were executed. That was the law of Xana: Treason was a taint in the blood, and five generations would pay for the crime of one.
Even General Yuma turned out to be one of the ringleaders in the failed plot — indeed, there was evidence that he had also tried to conspire with the emperor’s other surviving brothers. Those other princes all swallowed poison just as the emperor’s palace guards were about to seize them.
Unlike the other conspirators, though, Yuma refused to confess even after being shown incontrovertible proof of his guilt. The emperor was utterly devastated by the news of this betrayal.
“If he would just confess,” the emperor said, “I would spare him, considering his service to Xana!”
“Alas,” the regent said, “we tried to help him regain his conscience through the judicious application of physical pain, which cleanses the soul. But he is very stubborn.”
“How can anyone be trusted if even the great Yuma thought to rebel?”
The regent bowed and said nothing.
The next time the regent brought his horse to the Grand Audience Hall, everyone agreed that it was a very fine horse indeed.
The young Emperor Erishi was at a loss. “I still see antlers,” he muttered to himself. “How can that be a horse?”
“Don’t worry about it, Rénga,” Pira whispered next to his ear. “You still have much to learn.”
CHAPTER SIX. CORVÉE
KIESA: THE EIGHTH MONTH IN THE THIRD YEAR OF THE REIGN OF RIGHTEOUS FORCE.
Because Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin were the tallest among the group of men sent from the village of Kiesa to fulfill the yearly quota of corvée laborers, they were made cocaptains. Krima was thin and bald as a polished river stone. Shigin had hair the color of straw, inherited from his Rima-born mother, broad shoulders, and a thick neck that reminded one of a reliable water buffalo. Both had the bronzed skin of Cocru peasants who labored long hours in the fields.
The corvée chief explained to the two their duties: “You have ten days to get the corvée team from here to the site of the Mausoleum of Emperor Mapidéré—may he rest his soul. The regent and the emperor are quite annoyed that progress has been so slow on the eternal house for the emperor’s father.
“If you are late by one day, you will each lose one ear. If you are late by two days, you will each lose an eye. If you are late three days, you will each die. But if you are late by more than that, your wives and mothers will be sold to the brothels and your fathers and children will be condemned to conscripted hard labor forever.”
Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin shivered. They looked up at the sky and prayed that the weather would remain calm as they led the corvée crew and began their journey west to the port city of Canfin, where they would get on a boat to carry them north along the coast and then up the Liru River to the site of the Mausoleum near Pan. A storm would mean delays.
The corvée laborers, thirty in number, piled into three horse-drawn carriages at dawn. The doors were then locked to take away the temptation for desertion. Two Imperial soldiers would ride with the caravan as escorts until they arrived at the next town, where the local garrison would take over and provide two more guards to the next stop.
The men looked outside the windows as the caravan made its way along the road to the west.
Though it was late summer, when the crops should be ripening, the fields were not golden with grain and few could be seen working. Typhoons this year had been worse than anyone remembered for years, and the crops in many fields had been ruined, rotting in the rain and mud. Women whose husbands and sons were away toiling for the emperor’s grand visions struggled to manage the fields by themselves. What crops did survive had been claimed by the Imperial tax collectors. Though hungry men and women petitioned for reprieve, the answer from Pan was always a firm no.
Instead, the corvée quotas and taxes had been increased. The new Emperor Erishi had halted work on the Grand Tunnels, but he wanted to build a new palace of his own, and he expanded the design of the Mausoleum time after time to prove his filial piety.
The men stared blankly as they passed the corpses of starved men and women abandoned along the side of the road: skeletal thin, rotting, stripped of all their possessions, even the rags that constituted their clothes. There was famine in many of the villages, but the garrison commanders refused to open up the Imperial granaries, reserved for use by the army. Everything that could be eaten had already been eaten: some resorted to eating boiled bark and digging for grubs from the ground. Women, children, and old men tried to walk to where there was still rumored to be food, but sometimes they collapsed by the side of the road, their bodies without the strength to take another step, and their empty, lifeless eyes stared into an equally empty sky. Once in a while, a baby, still alive next to its dead mother, mewled with its last ounce of strength.