Young men, those who were not drafted for the corvée, sometimes escaped into the mountains to become bandits, and there they would be hunted down by the Imperial army like rats by exterminators.
The caravan rolled on, past the dead bodies, past the empty fields, past the desolation of abandoned huts, toward the port of Canfin and thence, the splendor of Immaculate Pan, the Imperial capital.
The caravan passed through the square in the center of a small town. A half-naked old man stumbled about, shouting at the carriages and pedestrians.
“Mount Rapa can be heard to rumble deep within for the first time in fifty years, and the Rufizo Falls have dried up. The black sands of Lutho Beach have turned red with blood. The gods are displeased with the House of Xana!”
“Is what he says true?” Krima asked. He scratched his bald head. “I had not heard of these strange signs.”
“Who knows? Maybe the gods really are angry. Or maybe he’s just mad with hunger,” Shigin said.
The soldiers riding with the caravan pretended not to have heard the old man.
They had also come from peasant families, and they all knew people like that back in their home villages in Rui and Dasu. Emperor Mapidéré had left many widows and orphans across Dara, and even the home islands of Xana were not spared. Sometimes, the anger built up so much that people had to scream out their treasonous thoughts just to keep on breathing. Maybe not all of them were really crazy, but it was best for everyone involved to pretend that they were.
The Imperial Treasury may have paid their salaries, but that didn’t mean that the soldiers forgot who they were.
The rain continued relentlessly for the fourth day. Krima and Shigin stared out the window of the inn and then put their faces in their hands in despair.
They were in Napi, still about fifty miles from the port of Canfin, but the roads were too muddy for the carriages. And even if they somehow made it to the coast, no ship would agree to set sail in this weather.
Yesterday was the last day when they still realistically had a chance of making it to the mouth of the Liru River and sailing up to Pan before the deadline. Each minute that passed meant a worse fate awaited them and their families. Whether the Imperial judges interpreted the laws in accordance with the letter or the spirit didn’t matter — in neither was there mercy.
“It’s useless,” Krima said. “Even if we get to Pan, we’ll end up as cripples or worse.”
Shigin nodded. “Let’s pool our money and at least get a good meal for today.”
Krima and Shigin obtained permission from their guards to leave the inn to go to the market.
“There are so few fish in the ocean this year,” the fishmonger told them. “Maybe even the fish are afraid of the tax collectors.”
“Or maybe they are just scared of the hungry mouths of all the starving men in Dara.”
But they paid the obscenely high price for the fish and then paid more for some wine. They used up all their money. Dead men had no use for copper coins.
“Come, come”—they gestured to the other men back at the inn—“even sad men, even men who are about to lose their ears and eyes, have to eat, and eat well!”
The men nodded. This was true wisdom. As corvée laborers, life was simply one whipping after another, and you could only be scared for so long before you decided that filling your belly was more important than anything else.
“Who among you is a good cook?” Krima asked. He held up a large fish by the mouth: silver-scaled, rainbow-finned, as long as his arm. The men felt their mouths water. They hadn’t eaten fresh fish in so long.
“We are.”
The speakers were a pair of brothers, Dafiro and Ratho Miro, sixteen and fourteen, barely more than boys really. Pan kept on lowering the age when men would be available for the corvée.
“Your mother taught you how to cook?”
“Nah,” said Ratho, the younger brother. “After Pa died in the Grand Tunnels, she spent a lot of time sleeping and drinking—” But his older brother shushed him.
“We’re good cooks,” said Dafiro, staring at every man around him and his brother in turn, daring anyone to make fun of what his brother had just said. “And we won’t steal any of the fish for ourselves.”
The men avoided his eyes. They had known too many families like the Miros. They were good cooks because they had to cook for themselves as children or starve.
“Thank you,” Krima said. “I’m sure you’ll do a great job. Be careful when you clean the fish. The fishmonger said that the gallbladder in this kind lies shallow.”
The others remained at the bar of the inn and drank. They hoped to drink until they forgot what was going to happen to them when they did finally get to Pan.
“Captain Krima! Captain Shigin! You’ve got to come and see this!” the Miro boys shouted from the kitchen.
The men got up on their unsteady feet and stumbled for the kitchen. Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin lingered behind for a moment and gave each other meaningful looks.
“This is it,” said Shigin.
“No way out now,” agreed Krima. And the two followed the rest of the men into the kitchen.
Ratho explained that he had sliced the fish’s belly open to clean it, and what did he find in the fish’s belly? A silk scroll filled with zyndari letters.
Huno Krima Will Be King.
The laborers stared at one another, their eyes and mouths wide open.
The people of Dara had always believed in prophesies and divination.
The world was a book in which the gods wrote, much as the scribes did with their brush and ink, wax and knife. The gods shaped the features of the earth and the seas much as the knife carved wax into logograms that could be touched and felt. Men and women were the zyndari letters and punctuation marks of this grand epic that the gods composed on the fly, changing their fickle minds from one moment to the next.
When the gods decreed that only Rui would possess the gas that made airships float, it meant that they wished to elevate Xana above all the other Tiro states and bring about the Unification. When Emperor Mapidéré had a dream of soaring above the Islands of Dara on the back of a Mingén falcon, that meant that the gods wished to glorify him above all men. It was useless for the Six States to resist the might of Xana, because the gods had already decided how the story would go. Just as wax clumps that refused to be shaped properly would be scraped away by the writer, to be replaced by new, pliant wax, so would men who resisted the fates be swept away, to be replaced by those sensitive to the shifts of fortune.
What did it mean that the typhoons were sweeping the coasts of the Islands more than ever before? What did it mean that strange clouds and strange lights were seen all over Dara? What did it mean that the giant crubens were sighted surfacing and breaching all over the western seas but not around Rui? What was the message brought by the famines and plagues?
Above all, what did the scroll in the belly of the fish tell the men who gawked at it, as Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin held it up to the light?
“We are dead men,” Huno Krima said. “And so are our families. We’ve run out of time.”
The men, packed into the kitchen, held their breaths and strained to hear. Krima wasn’t speaking loudly, and the fire in the hearth cast flickering shadows across their faces.