“What will we eat?” asked one of the village elders.
“You are skilled at digging food out of dirt,” said Pékyu Tenryo. “So dig harder.”
“You’re sentencing us to death then,” said the elder. “There’s no time for planting another crop before the winter.”
“In that case, I see plenty of pigs with two legs walking around,” said Pékyu Tenryo. “I think they make excellent food. You could learn to diversify your diet.”
The villagers, once they understood what the pékyu had in mind, howled with rage and despair and rushed at the guards who had come to seize the granaries. But a few more swipes of the flaming breath of the garinafins soon quelled the nascent rebellion. The villagers stood by and watched mutely as the granaries were emptied and the garinafins and long-haired cattle feasted upon the food that was meant to supply the villages over the winter.
The invasion schedule would be kept. The Lyucu would not back down from a promise made.
But then, something odd happened. The long-haired cattle fell upon the ground, groaning and foaming at the mouth, their legs twitching wildly. Many of the garinafins fell down as well, and their excrement was a thick slush and smelled foul.
“How have they been poisoned?” demanded the pékyu. Since no deci-chief would admit to the plot, the pékyu forced them to eat the grain that had been fed to the garinafins. But nothing happened to them.
“I’ve heard that to get the juiciest beef, you need to feed the cattle grains,” said Théra.
The other ranch hands on her grandmother’s estate had accepted the new girl as one of them, and they shared bitter chicory root brew around the fire as Théra sought to understand more about their business.
“That is true. Grain-fed cattle fatten faster.”
“Why aren’t we feeding our cattle grains then?” asked Théra.
“Lady Lu is a shrewd businesswoman,” said one of the ranch hands, an old man everyone respectfully called Old Maza. “Grass-fed cattle has a different taste. When everyone feeds their cattle grain, the unique taste of her cattle commands a better price.”
“Oh.” Théra nodded. She wasn’t surprised that her grandmother liked to do things differently—after all, her mother’s stubbornness had to come from somewhere. “Sometimes I see the cattle looking at the granary hungrily. Is it a big deal to feed them some grain once in a while, especially on rainy days? Surely grains taste much better than hay.”
The ranch hands laughed uproariously, leaving Théra confused as to the source of their mirth. Eventually, Old Maza managed to hold back his laughter and tried to explain. “Girl, a cow’s stomach is a delicate thing. Do you know why they chew cud?”
Théra shook her head.
“It’s because grass is tough to digest. The cow has to let that sit in her stomach and ferment a bit, and then regurgitate and chew it some more. The inside of a cow’s stomach is a complicated world, and even ranchers who have been doing this for generations can’t explain how everything works. We do know that if you want to feed a cow grains, you’ve got to start to do it when they’re young. If you wait till their stomachs have grown used to grass and then switch to grain all of a sudden, the cattle will get sick and can even die.”
Théra nodded, thinking about the distant invaders from the north. They didn’t tend the fields and had no knowledge of grains. To them, surely the grains seemed like just another kind of vegetation, and if grass weren’t available, wouldn’t they turn to grains meant for people as a substitute?
Pékyu Tenryo ordered work gangs composed of the peasantry of Rui and Dasu into the mountains to cut down any vegetation that had survived the locust swarm due to their elevation. Given this tougher food that more resembled their natural diet, some of the garinafins who hadn’t eaten too many grains recovered relatively quickly. However, it would take longer for the others. Pékyu Tenryo gathered the sick garinafins into one place so that they could be tended to and guarded from further sabotage by the villagers.
“Should we postpone the invasion until they recover?” asked Tanvanaki.
“No,” said Pékyu Tenryo. “Our warriors already think the crafty barbarians of Dara have succeeded in their plot. The longer we delay, the lower our morale.”
“It seems risky to attack without our full strength,” said Tanvanaki.
“Considering the empress has no air force to speak of, we have more than enough healthy garinafins to attack the Big Island on schedule and overcome whatever resistance she can muster. And we can always send the rest later as reinforcements when they recover.”
“Thank Péa-Kiji then that the thanes had the presence of mind to seal the underground cellars where the younglings are kept when the locusts struck, and we still have control over the garinafins.”
Emperor Ragin paced in his prison cell.
The announcement of Pékyu Tenryo’s invasion plan had jolted him, though not shocked him. He realized that he had been hoping for a miracle, even though he had not admitted it to himself.
He had been fighting for decades for an ideal, an ideal of a Dara that was more just, more fair to the common people, that balanced conflicting interests and allowed more men and women of talent to succeed. But in the end, what had he accomplished? More blood was being spilled, more people were dying because he had not planned for everything, had not foreseen everything that could go wrong.
Timu’s betrayal had shocked him, but he could not fully blame the child for his error. How could Timu understand the full extent to which he was being taken advantage of by the Lyucu? Stuffed full of bookish ideals and rebellious anger, the young prince believed in a vision where justice could be achieved by sleeping with the enemy, where the wolf would lie down with the lamb.
He should have been more of a father to the child, but it was too late now.
He could imagine the confusion on the Big Island, now that Timu had become the puppet emperor of the pékyu—all those unsatisfied with the existing distribution of power in Dara would seize upon the occasion as an opportunity for rearrangement, for shuffling the deck to gain a better hand. He did not envy the difficult task Jia faced.
As long as he was alive, they could use his “abdication” as a way to legitimate Timu’s claim. Yet if he died now, in obscurity, the Lyucu would be able to continue to lie, with his ghost as a rallying flag. He had to try to give Jia and the others a chance.
The pékyu was a calculating man, Kuni knew, not too different from himself. He tried to imagine himself in the pékyu’s place. What would I do?
Timu is too valuable a prop to be risked, yet the fleet also needs another high-profile hostage for some battlefield theater.
He recalled a talk he had had with Jia over the dangers of battlefield injuries and what could be done to save the wounded. He closed his eyes. It was time to put that knowledge into use.
He looked and found a rusty nail in one of the window frames. He took off his left shoe and sock, and scraped the skin against the rusty nail until he had made a deep gash. He grimaced against the pain and replaced the sock and shoe.
Now he had to wait, and hope that he would be given a chance.
Twenty garinafins were deemed healthy enough to go to war. Pékyu Tenryo packed them onto eight city-ships along with three thousand Lyucu warriors. The rest would stay behind to guard Rui and Dasu with the help of surrendered Dara soldiers. Timu, or “Emperor Thaké,” was nominally left in charge, but everyone, perhaps even Timu himself, understood that he was a mere figurehead.