Chapter 17 #4
“You lot stay here,” she warned the women. “If any of you move, I will kill this child.”
The women nodded silently, tears streaking their powdered faces.
Rin backed out of the chamber and returned to the center of the main hall.
“Tsung Ho!” she shouted. “Where are you?”
Silence.
The baby quivered in her arms. His cries had diminished to distressed whimpers. Rin briefly considered pinching his arms to make him scream.
There was no need. The sight of her bloody trident was enough. He caught one glimpse of it, opened his mouth, and shrieked.
Rin shouted over the baby, “Tsung Ho! I’ll murder your son if you don’t come out.”
She heard him approaching long before he attacked.
Too slow. Too fucking slow. She spun around, dodged his blade, and slammed the butt of her trident into his stomach.
He doubled over. She caught his blade inside the trident’s prongs and twisted it out of his hand.
He dropped to all fours, scrambling for his weapon.
She kicked it out of the way and jammed the hilt of her trident into the back of his head. He dropped to the floor.
“You traitor.” She aimed a savage strike at his kneecaps. He howled in pain. She hit them again. Then again.
The baby wailed louder. She walked to a corner, placed him delicately on the floor, then resumed her assault on his father. The Ram Warlord’s kneecaps were visibly broken. She moved on to his ribs.
“Please, mercy, please . . .” He curled into a pathetic bundle, arms wrapped over his head.
“When did you let the Mugenese into your gates?” she asked. “Before they burned Golyn Niis, or after?”
“We didn’t have a choice,” he whispered. He made a high keening noise as he drew his shattered knees to his chest. “They were lined up at our gates, we didn’t have any options—”
“You could have fought.”
“We would have died,” he gasped.
“Then you should have died.”
Rin slammed her trident butt against his head. He fell silent.
The baby continued to scream.
Jinzha was so pleased by their victory that he temporarily relaxed the army prohibition on alcohol. Jugs of fine sorghum wine, all plundered from the Ram Warlord’s mansion, were passed through the ranks. The soldiers camped out on the beach that night in an unusually good mood.
Jinzha and his council met by the shore to decide what to do with their prisoners.
In addition to the captured Federation soldiers there were also the men of the Eighth Division—a larger Militia force than any conquered town they had dealt with so far.
They were too big of a threat to let loose.
Short of a mass execution, their options were to take an unwieldy number of prisoners—far too many to feed—or to let them go.
“Execute them,” Rin said immediately.
“More than a thousand men?” Jinzha shook his head. “We’re not monsters.”
“But they deserve it,” she said. “The Mugenese, at least. You know if the tables were turned, if the Federation had taken our men prisoners, they’d be dead already.”
She was so sure that it was a moot debate. But nobody nodded in agreement. She glanced around the circle, confused. Was the conclusion not clear? Why did they all look so uncomfortable?
“They’d be good at the wheels,” Admiral Molkoi said. “It’d give our men a break.”
“You’re joking,” Rin said. “You’d have to feed them, for starters—”
“So we’ll give them a subsistence diet,” said Molkoi.
“Our troops need that food!”
“Our troops have survived on less,” Molkoi said. “And it is best they don’t get used to the excess.”
Rin gawked at him. “You’ll put our troops on stricter rations so men who have committed treason can live?”
He shrugged. “They’re Nikara men. We won’t execute our own kind.”
“They stopped being Nikara the moment they let the Federation stroll into their homes,” she snapped. “They should be rounded up. And beheaded.”
None of the others would meet her eye.
“Nezha?” she asked.
He wouldn’t look at her. All he did was shake his head.
She flushed with anger. “These soldiers were collaborating with the Federation. Feeding them. Housing them. That’s treason. That should be punishable by death. Forget the soldiers—you should have the whole city punished!”
“Perhaps under Daji’s reign,” said Jinzha. “Not under the Republic. We can’t garner a reputation for brutality—”
“Because they helped them!” She was shouting now, and they were all staring at her, but she didn’t care. “The Federation! You don’t know what they did—just because you spent the war hiding in Arlong, you didn’t see what—”
Jinzha turned to Nezha. “Brother, put a muzzle on your Speerly, or—”
“I am not a dog!” Rin shrieked.
Sheer rage took over. She launched herself at Jinzha—and didn’t manage two steps before Admiral Molkoi tackled her to the ground so hard that for a moment the night stars blinked out of the sky, and it was all she could do to simply breathe.
“That’s enough,” Nezha said quietly. “She’s calmed down. Let her go.”
The pressure on her chest disappeared. Rin curled into a ball, choking miserably.
“Someone take her outside of camp,” Jinzha said. “Bind her, gag her, I don’t care. We’ll deal with this in the morning.”
“Yes, sir,” said Molkoi.
“She hasn’t eaten,” Nezha said.
“Then have someone bring her food or water if she asks,” Jinzha said. “Just get her out of my sight.”
Rin screamed.
No one could hear her—they’d banished her to a stretch of forest outside the camp perimeter—so she screamed louder, again and again, bashing her fists against a tree until blood ran down her knuckles while rage built up hotter and hotter in her chest. And for a moment she thought—hoped—that the crimson fury sparking in her vision might explode into flames, real flames, finally—
But nothing. No sparks lit her fingers; no divine laughter rippled through her thoughts.
She could feel the Seal at the back of her mind, a pulsing, sickly thing, blurring and softening her anger every time it reached a peak.
And that only doubled her rage, made her shriek louder in frustration, but it was a pointless tantrum because the fire remained out of her grasp; dancing, taunting her behind the barrier in her head.
Please, she thought. I need you, I need the fire, I need to burn . . .
The Phoenix remained silent.
She sank to her knees.
She could hear Altan laughing. That wasn’t the Seal, that was her own imagination, but she heard it as clearly as if he were standing right beside her.
“Look at you,” he said.
“Pathetic,” he said.
“It’s not coming back,” he said. “You’re lost, you’re done, you’re not a Speerly, you’re just a stupid little girl throwing a temper tantrum in the forest.”
Finally her voice and strength gave out and the anger ebbed pathetically, ineffectually, away. Then she was alone with the indifferent silence of the trees, with no company except for her own mind.
And Rin couldn’t stand that, so she decided to get as drunk as she possibly could.
She’d picked up a small jug of sorghum wine back at camp. She chugged it down in under a minute.
She wasn’t used to drinking. The masters at Sinegard had been strict—the smallest whiff of alcohol was grounds for expulsion.
She still preferred the sickly sweetness of opium smoke to the burn of sorghum wine, but she liked how it seared her delightfully from the inside.
It didn’t make the anger go away, but it reduced it to a dull throb, an aching pain rather than a sharp, fresh wound.
By the time Nezha came out for her she was utterly soused, and she wouldn’t have heard him approach if he hadn’t shouted for her every step he took.
“Rin? Are you there?”
She heard his voice around the other side of a tree. She blinked for a few seconds before she remembered how to push words out of her mouth. “Yes. Don’t come around.”
“What are you doing?”
He circled the tree. She hastily yanked her trousers back up with one hand. A dripping jug dangled from the other.
“Are you pissing in a jug?”
“I’m preparing a gift for your brother,” she said. “Think he’ll like it?”
“You can’t give the grand marshal of the Republican Army a jug of urine.”
“But it’s warm,” she mumbled. She shook it at him. Piss sloshed out the side.
Nezha hastily stepped away. “Please put that down.”
“You sure Jinzha doesn’t want it?”
“Rin.”
She sighed dramatically and complied.
He took her clean hand and led her to a patch of grass by the river, far away from the soiled jug. “You know you can’t lash out like that.”
She squared her shoulders. “And I have been appropriately disciplined.”
“It’s not about discipline. They’ll think you’re mad.”
“They already think I’m mad,” she retorted. “Savage, dumb little Speerly. Right? It’s in my nature.”
“That’s not what I . . . Come on, Rin.” Nezha shook his head. “Anyhow. I’ve, uh, got bad news.”
She yawned. “Did we lose the war? That was quick.”
“No. Jinzha’s demoted you.”
She blinked several times, uncomprehending. “What?”
“You’re unranked. You’re to serve as a foot soldier now. And you’re not in command of the Cike anymore.”
“So who is?”
“No one. There is no Cike. They’ve all been reassigned to other ships.”
He watched her carefully to gauge her reaction, but Rin just hiccupped.
“That’s all right. They hardly listened to me anyway.
” She derived a kind of bitter satisfaction from saying this out loud.
Her position as commander had always been a sham.
To be fair, the Cike did listen to her when she had a plan, but she usually didn’t.
Really, they’d effectively been running themselves.
“You know what your problem is?” Nezha asked. “You have no impulse control. Absolutely zero. None.”
“It’s terrible,” she agreed, and started to giggle. “Good thing I can’t call the fire, huh?”
He responded to that with such a long silence that eventually it began to embarrass her. She wished now that she hadn’t drunk so much. She couldn’t think properly through her helplessly muddled mind. She felt terribly foolish, crude, and ashamed.
She had to practice whispering her words before she could voice them out loud. “So what’s happening now?”
“Same thing as usual. They’re gathering up the civilians. The men will cast their votes tonight.”
She sat up. “They should not get a vote.”
“They’re Nikara. All Nikara get the option to join the Republic.”
“They helped the Federation!”
“Because they didn’t have a choice,” Nezha said. “Think about it. Put yourself in their position. You really think you would have done any better?”
“Yes,” she snapped. “I did. I was in their position. I was in worse—they had me strapped down to a bed, they were torturing me and torturing Altan in front of me and I was terrified, I wanted to die—”
“They were scared, too,” he said softly.
“Then they should have fought back.”
“Maybe they didn’t have the choice. They weren’t trained soldiers. They weren’t shamans. How else were they going to survive?”
“It’s not enough just to survive,” she hissed. “You have to fight for something, you can’t just—just live your life like a fucking coward.”
“Some people are just cowards. Some people just aren’t that strong.”
“Then they shouldn’t have votes,” she snarled.
The more she thought about it, the more ludicrous Vaisra’s proposed democracy seemed.
How were the Nikara supposed to rule themselves?
They hadn’t run their own country since before the days of the Red Emperor, and even drunk, she could figure out why—the Nikara were simply far too stupid, too selfish, and too cowardly.
“Democracy’s not going to work. Look at them.” She was gesturing at trees, not people, but it hardly made a difference to her. “They’re cows. Fools. They’re voting for the Republic because they’re scared—I’m sure they’d vote just as quickly to join the Federation.”
“Don’t be unfair,” Nezha said. “They’re just people: they’ve never studied warcraft.”
“So then they shouldn’t rule!” she shouted. “They need someone to tell them what to do, what to think—”
“And who’s that going to be? Daji?”
“Not Daji. But someone educated. Someone who’s passed the Keju, who’s graduated from Sinegard. Someone who’s been in the military. Someone who knows the value of a human life.”
“You’re describing yourself,” said Nezha.
“I’m not saying it would be me,” Rin said. “I’m just saying it shouldn’t be the people. Vaisra shouldn’t let them elect anyone. He should just rule.”
Nezha tilted his head to the side. “You want my father to make himself Emperor?”
A wave of nausea rocked her stomach before she could respond.
There was no time to get up; she lurched forward onto her knees and heaved the contents of her stomach against the tree.
Her face was too close to the ground. A good deal of vomit splashed back onto her cheek.
She rubbed clumsily at it with her sleeve.
“You all right?” Nezha asked when she’d stopped dry-heaving.
“Yes.”
He rubbed his hand in circles on her back. “Good.”
She spat a gob of regurgitated wine onto the dirt. “Fuck off.”
Nezha lifted a clump of mud up from the riverbank. “Have you ever heard the story of how the goddess Nüwa created humanity?”
“No.”
“I’ll tell it to you.” Nezha molded the mud into a ball with his palms. “Once upon a time, after the birth of the world, Nüwa was lonely.”
“What about her husband, Fuxi?” Rin only knew the myths about Nüwa and Fuxi both.
“Absent spouse, I guess. Myth doesn’t mention him.”
“Of course.”
“Of course. Anyway, Nüwa gets lonely, decides to create some humans to populate the world to keep her company.” Nezha pressed his fingernails into the ball of mud. “The first few people she makes are incredibly detailed. Fine features, lovely clothes.”
Rin could see where this was going. “Those are the aristocrats.”
“Yes. The nobles, the emperors, the warriors, everyone who matters. Then she gets bored. It’s taking too long. So she takes a rope and starts flinging mud in all directions. Those become the hundred clans of Nikan.”
Rin swallowed. Her throat tasted like acid. “They don’t tell that story in the south.”
“And why do you think that is?” Nezha asked.
She turned that over in her mind for a moment. Then she laughed.
“My people are mud,” she said. “And you’re still going to let them run a country.”
“I don’t think they’re mud,” Nezha said. “I think they’re still unformed. Uneducated and uncultured. They don’t know better because they haven’t been given the chance. But the Republic will shape and refine them. Develop them into what they were meant to be.”
“That’s not how it works.” Rin took the clump of mud from Nezha’s hand. “They’re never going to become more than what they are. The north won’t let them.”
“That’s not true.”
“You think that. But I’ve seen how power works.” Rin crushed the clump in her fingers. “It’s not about who you are, it’s about how they see you. And once you’re mud in this country, you’re always mud.”