Mata did not have much time for play, and so he made no meaningful friendships. He treasured the privilege of noble and ancient learning, won with so much hard work by his uncle. But Mata had little use for poetry. Instead, he loved books of history and military strategy. Through them, he learned about the golden past that was no more and came to realize that Xana’s sins were not limited to what had happened to his family. “Mapidéré’s conquest had degraded the very foundations of the world,” as Phin told him time and again.
The origin of the old Tiro system was lost in the mists of time. Legend had it that the Islands of Dara were settled long ago by a people who called themselves the Ano, refugees of a sunken continent far over the seas to the west. Once they had defeated the barbarians who were the original inhabitants of the Islands, some of whom intermarried and became Ano, they promptly fell to fighting among themselves. Their descendants, over many generations and many wars, separated into various states.
Some scholars claimed the great ancient Ano lawgiver Aruano created the Tiro system in response to the chaotic wars among the states. The Classical Ano word tiro literally meant “fellow,” and the most important principle of the system was that each Tiro state was an equal of every other Tiro state; no state had any authority over another. Only when one state committed a sin that offended the gods could the other states band together against it, and the leader of such a temporary alliance was given the title princeps, first tiro among equals.
The Seven States had coexisted for more than a thousand years, and but for that tyrant from Xana they would have existed for a thousand more. The kings of the Tiro states were the ultimate secular authorities, the anchors from which seven parallel Great Chains of Being dangled. They enfeoffed lands to the nobles, who each kept the peace in his domain and administered it like a miniature Tiro state. Each peasant paid his taxes and labor to a lord, and each lord to his lord, and so on up the chain.
The wisdom of the Tiro system was evident in the way it reflected the natural world. In the ancient forests of Dara, each great tree, like a Tiro state, stood independent of the others. No tree held sway over another. Yet each tree was made up of branches, and each branch of leaves, just as each king drew his strength from his nobles, and each noble from his peasantry. It was the same with the separate Islands of Dara, each composed of islets and lagoons, of bays and coves. The pattern of independent realms, each composed from miniature copies, could be found in coral reefs, in schools of fish, in drifting forests of kelp, in mineral crystals, and in the anatomy of animals.
It was the underlying order of the universe, a grid — like the warp and weft of the rough cloth woven by Cocru craftsmen — formed by horizontal lines of mutual respect among equals and vertical lines of downward obligation and upward fealty in which everyone knew his place.
Emperor Mapidéré had eliminated all that, swept it away like the armies of the Six States, like fallen leaves in autumn. A few of the old nobles who surrendered early got to keep their empty titles and sometimes even their castles and money, but that was all. Their lands were no longer theirs because all land now belonged to the Xana Empire, to the emperor himself. Instead of each lord giving the law in his domain, there now was but one law that governed all the Islands.
Instead of the scholars of each Tiro state writing with their own sets of logograms and arranging the zyndari letters in their own fashion, bound up with local tradition and history, everyone now had to write in the manner of Xana. Instead of each Tiro state determining its own system of weights and measures, its own way of judging and seeing the world, everyone now had to make their roads as wide as the distance between the wheels of a cart from the Immaculate City, their boxes as big as could be packed tightly into a boat from the port of Kriphi, the former Xana capital.
All sources of loyalty, of local attachment, were replaced with allegiance to the emperor. In place of the parallel chains of devotion forged by nobles, the emperor had put in a pyramid of petty bureaucrats — commoners who could barely write any logograms beyond those in their own names and who had to spell everything out in zyndari letters. Instead of ruling with the best, the emperor had chosen to elevate the craven, greedy, foolish, and low.
In this new world, the old orderly way of life was lost. No one knew his place. Commoners were living in castles while nobles huddled in drafty huts. Emperor Mapidéré’s sins were against nature, against the hidden pattern of the universe itself.
As the Procession disappeared into the distance, the crowd gradually dispersed. Now they had to return to the struggle of daily life: fields to harvest, sheep to tend, and fish to haul.
But Mata and Phin lingered.
“They cheer for a man who murdered their fathers and grandfathers,” Phin said quietly. Then he spat.
Mata looked around at the departing men and women. They were like the sand and mud stirred up by the ocean. If you scooped up a cup of seawater, it would be full of swirling chaos that obscured the light.
But if you waited patiently, eventually the common dross and dregs would settle to the bottom, where they belonged, and the clear water would allow the light through, the noble and the pure.
Mata Zyndu believed it was his destiny to restore clarity and order, as surely as the weight of history pulled everything down to its rightful place.
THE PROPHECY OF THE FISH
CHAPTER THREE. KUNI GARU
SEVEN YEARS LATER.
ZUDI: THE FIFTH MONTH IN THE TWENTY-FIRST YEAR OF THE REIGN OF ONE BRIGHT HEAVEN.
In Zudi, many stories were told about Kuni Garu.
The young man was the son of simple farmers who had big hopes for their children to move up in the world, hopes that Kuni somehow dashed again and again.
Oh, as a boy, Kuni had shown hints of brilliance — he could read and write three hundred logograms before he had turned five. Kuni’s mother, Naré, thanked Kana and Rapa every day and couldn’t stop telling all her friends how brilliant her little boy was. Thinking that the child had a future as a lettered man who could bring honor to the family, Kuni’s father, Féso, sent him at great expense to study at the private academy of Tumo Loing, a local scholar of great renown, who had served the King of Cocru as Minister of Grains before the Unification.
But Garu and his friend Rin Coda preferred to skip school whenever they could and go fishing. When he was caught, Kuni would apologize eloquently and profusely, convincing Master Loing that he was truly contrite and had learned his lesson. But soon he would be back to devising pranks with Rin and talking back at his teacher, questioning his explanations of the classics and pointing out errors in his reasoning until Loing finally ran out of patience and expelled him — and poor Rin Coda, too, for always following Kuni’s lead.
That was just fine with Kuni. He was a good drinker, talker, and brawler, and soon became close to all sorts of disreputable characters in Zudi: thieves, gangsters, tax collectors, Xana soldiers from the garrison, girls from the indigo houses, wealthy young men who had nothing better to do than stand around all day on street corners looking for trouble — as long as you breathed, had money to buy him a drink, and enjoyed dirty jokes and gossip, Kuni Garu was your friend.
The Garu family tried to steer the young man into gainful employment. Kado, Kuni’s elder brother, demonstrated an early instinct for business and became a local merchant of women’s dresses. He hired Kuni as a clerk. But Kuni professed a disdain for bowing to customers and laughing at their stupid jokes, and finally, after Kuni tried to implement a harebrained scheme of hiring girls from the indigo houses as “models” for dresses, Kado had no choice but to fire him.