Aki did not put up mourning tablets for her sons either. “I did not bury them with my hands,” she said, “and I certainly will not bury them in my heart.”
Sometimes, when Mimi woke up in the middle of the night, she saw her mother sitting on the floor next to the bed, her shoulders heaving, her face turned away. Mimi would put a hand out and touch her mother’s back. The two would stay connected like that in the silence, until Mimi fell asleep again.
Eventually the people left the magistrate’s courtyard and went back to their endless toil, which turned sweat into food and pain into drink. Private shrines to the dead and presumed dead were erected in their houses, but none made passionate speeches about the honor of Xana or spoke of vengeance against the Hegemon. The people were too numbed by sorrow to feel hatred—wars were personal to the great lords, but who could say for sure that the Hegemon bore more responsibility for these deaths than the marshal or Emperor Erishi?
While her brothers and father did not come home, a new king did arrive in Dasu.
King Kuni was a strange lord. He lowered the taxes, did not demand corvée service to build a new palace but paid the laborers to repair roads and bridges, and abolished the old, harsh laws of Xana that had meted out punishment for even sneezing too loudly. He let it be known that men and women of the other islands who had been displaced by the wars were free to come to his island, and he would even help them get settled with free seeds and tools. The elders and widows of Dasu rejoiced: The wars had drained the island of men, and husbands and fathers were in short supply. Though some women agreed to marry into existing households, especially if the families were wealthy, not all wanted such an arrangement.
It was also customary for women in love or in need of each other to be joined in Rapa marriages—the goddess was said to have once fallen in love with an ice maiden. As the folk opera troupes sang:
With the war, the number of Rapa marriages had grown so that women could support each other—it was easier to till the fields and to raise children together. Still, there were many women who preferred men and did not want to share, and strangers were indeed welcome.
Aki, who was asked but never agreed to bind herself in a Rapa marriage, paid no attention to any of the new men who came to settle in their village, though several seemed interested in her. She struggled to till their small plot of land with only Mimi’s help and supplemented their income by helping the fishing crews.
“My husband is away,” she said to anyone who asked. “He’ll be back soon. And my sons, too.”
“Do we have any talent?” Mimi asked her mother one day.
“Why are you asking that?”
Seven-year-old Mimi had returned home earlier to prepare dinner while her mother was finishing up in the field. She had to stand on a stool to reach the boiling pot on the stove—dangerous, but the children of the poor had to learn to do things earlier. A crier had come through the village bearing an announcement from the palace in Daye: King Kuni was looking for people with talent and was willing to reward them, no matter their present station in life.
Mimi repeated the message to her mother, word for word. It ended with this: An oyster clasped in the branches of the most exquisite head of coral is as likely to hold a pearl as one mired in mud.
She had always had an excellent memory: She could repeat stories from Aki after one telling, and she could perform entire folk operas in the long winters to entertain her mother.
“The magistrate’s son is said to be going to the palace in Daye to show the king his skill with the brush and writing knife,” said Mimi. “And the village schoolmaster is holding a contest for his students to select two who can recite the most Classical Ano poems to be presented to the king. I heard Uncle So on the other side of the village is going to show the king his new way of tying knots in fishing nets, and Auntie Tora is thinking she wants to present her collection of herbal remedies. Do we have any talent? Maybe we can also go to the king and live like the magistrate’s son.”
Aki looked at her daughter. She is an extraordinary child. What if the king took an interest in her?
Then she remembered what had happened to her husband. Men of talent should be honored to serve the emperor.
“Talent is like a pretty feather in the tail of a peacock, daughter. It brings joy to the powerful but only sorrow to the bird.”
Mimi pondered this. The veil over the world seemed to grow even thicker.
King Kuni rebelled against the Hegemon. Once again, the men (and women also, this time) of Dasu left the fields and fishing boats to die in distant lands. Aki wasn’t surprised. The dreams of the great lords of the world were built upon the blood and bones of the common people. The blossoming of the golden chrysanthemum required the fertilizer made from the ashes of the Hundred Flowers. That was an eternal truth.
Peace did not come again until Mimi had turned thirteen, when King Kuni became Emperor Ragin, initiating the Reign of Four Placid Seas.
One day, Mimi was in the markets at Daye. She was old enough for Aki to trust her to take care of selling the harvested grain and paying the landlord their rent all by herself. She was a better negotiator than Aki, in any event.
The sons and daughters of the wealthy rode through the streets on horseback, whips singing through the air, and Mimi and the other peasants dodged out of their way. Her hobbling gait and the heavy load of the grain sample bag meant that sometimes she was too slow, and several times the horses came close to trampling her. But Mimi only gritted her teeth and did not complain. Just as there were many ways of seeing, there were many ways of walking.
The scholars and bureaucrats of the emperor rode more sedately through the streets on comfortable carts pulled by teams of horses or men, and they kept their gazes averted from the dirty, numb, malnourished faces of the poor next to the sewer ditches hugging the road.
Mimi tamped down her anger. That was the way of the world, wasn’t it? Emperor Ragin was supposed to care about the lives of the common people, but there were gradations among the commoners as well. As far as she could tell, it was only the people who were already well off who sang the praises of the new reign.
It was as useless to think about how she and her mother could also lead a life of ease and luxury, to be dressed in silk instead of rough hemp, to eat soft white rice instead of sandy millet that scratched their teeth, as it was for a dandelion to think that it could be honored like the chrysanthemum.