Children of the Dragon

by Frank Robinson

The kegs were stationed all along the rim. When that was finished, the lids were prised off, and the soldiers dipped big iron ladles into the kegs. Then the soldiers began ladling the liquid from the kegs clumsily out over the crowd of people in the ravine, spraying them with it.

  The people could not understand this. One woman put her finger to a big droplet of the stuff that had fallen on her forehead, and she put the finger to her nose to sniff it.

  Her face turned white.

  “Naphtha!”

  The terrible truth hissed through the ravine, as the soldiers worked to ladle it out quickly, two men at each keg, dipping and flinging, sloshing down the people with the naphtha.

  A few tried to scramble up out of the ravine, a hopeless try for escape, but the soldiers merely kicked them back. A few were slashed with swords, killed and thrown back. But most of the people made no attempt to get out. They sat in the dirt, keening with fright and terror. Pale and trembling, they covered their faces with their hands and wailed. Some affected dignity: Mothers embraced their children trying to comfort them; husbands comforted their wives; daughters comforted their aged mothers, stroking their white hair.

  And a few people screamed out loud, screaming curses at the Urhemmedhins or at their own ghastly fate.

  It did not take long for the entire shipment of naphtha to be dispersed. The people were drenched with it, many of them with their clothes plastered wet against their bodies, and the floor of the ravine was a big muddy puddle. Many of the people were vomiting from the noxious naphtha odor, and from their own shock.

  The kegs were up-ended to spill out the last drops, and then the soldiers brought forward firebrands of dried grass sheaves and lit them. At a signal from Gaffar Mussopo, all of the brands were tossed simultaneously into the ravine.

  Instantly the crowd was overswept with flame. So quick was the flash of the fire that the soldiers leaped back to avoid being singed.

  The screams of agony were an ear-splitting crescendo.

  A few, on fire, tried to struggle up out of the oven; flaming like torches, their flesh crackling, they shrieked and tried to clamber out of the ravine. But the soldiers shoved them back.

  With the dirt baked hard by the heat, the ravine became a crucible in which the people of Rayibab were destroyed.

  Within minutes, there were no more trying to escape. There were no more screams to be heard, only the sizzling, roaring of the fire.

  While it burned, Gaffar Mussopo gathered his soldiers and moved on.

  5

  ELEVEN NINETY-TWO WAS a bad year in southern Bergharra.

  Its food-producing regions had never fully recovered from the drought of 1176. Even in ordinary times, famine cannot be turned to bounty overnight, and hardship persists for years before the country swings back. But these were times fraught with unrest and upheaval. The system that was first unbalanced by the drought of 1176 was never given a decent chance to right itself.

  The Land Decree of Ksavra, promulgated in 1181, was Jehan Henghmani’s nostrum to deal with the South’s recurring agricultural woes. Had it been implemented in fruitful times, the land reform might well have been successful. But the attempt to radically alter the whole tenure system during a time of want could only exacerbate the problems already present.

  Even where they do succeed, land redistributions always involve an initial period of impaired productivity, a natural consequence when the land is being fought over. Farms cannot be tilled, sown, tended, irrigated, and reaped through a season when they are being trodden by conflicting claimants. Not only were the peasants struggling against the barons, but once the barons were dislodged the struggle became even more disruptive, with the tenants fighting among themselves for the biggest, choicest plots. Indeed, these newly landed peasants often tried to make themselves petty landlords in their own right, and the process had to be started all over again.

  The complications were many. Under the old sharecropper system, the landlords had often provided the farm implements, draft animals, and seeds. Exit the landlords and these vital resources became unavailable. Few tenants could afford them, and moreover, much was destroyed in the upset. It was hard to protect goods like that. The countryside was swamped with roving bands of the dispossessed. Robbing what they could, trampling fields, ruining half-grown crops, these gypsy bands created havoc.

  While outlawry was on the rise, the ranks of the honest farmers dwindled. Continual warfare, constant recruitments, and civil strife meant a steady attrition of able hands to work the land. Particularly acute too was the shortage of livestock. Few peasants had been able to afford to keep and feed their animals, and millions of these were slaughtered for food. During past famines, the landlords had always acted with an eye to the future in protecting livestock, but the starving peasants could think only of today’s hunger. They did not consider what animals they might need next year. As lean times continued, the goats and chickens, the gaars and oxen to pull the plows all became fewer and fewer.

  Perhaps the most pernicious effect of the turmoil was the haphazard, heedless cultivation of the land. Most of the southern soil had never been very rich. Only by judicious crop rotation and the development of sophisticated agricultural techniques had the barons been able to make this land profitable. But such niceties went by the boards now. Without the landlords insisting on crop rotation and instructing them on all details, the peasants gave these matters no thought. They were starving, and were desperate to grow as much as they could. The result, inevitably, was the ruination of the soil. Year after year, the harder the peasants beat their land to squeeze more crops out of it, the poorer did the soil become, and the smaller the crops.

  Not just the landlords, but all social and political stability was gone. The old Tnemghadi regime had relied heavily upon the barons as the bulwark of the order; the whole political infrastructure had rested upon them. Now their power had collapsed, but Jehan Henghmani’s presence could replace them only gradually. In the meantime there was a gaping power vacuum that was filled by an assortment of brigands, warlords, and adventurers. With small armed bands, opportunists of this stripe carved out little spheres of power, reigning by terrorism and extorting tribute from the peasants. These gangs left the populace completely impoverished, without the means to continue working their land.

  Jehan’s attempt to replace the Tnemghadi political structure—and the warlords—with locally elected councils was plagued by problems. The councils concentrated on administering the towns and cities, leaving the unruly peasant farmers largely to themselves. Attempts to tax the farmers or mandate crop rotation always met with violent resistance. Besides, the councils were elected by the peasants themselves, and responsible to them; hence taxation of the rich became the undeviating principle. But the rich were quickly taxed out of existence. Whence then would needed revenues be garnered? The councils naturally quailed from taxing their own constituency—and thus became bankrupt and impotent.

  It proved impossible to establish local councils that could stand against the armies of adventurers. While Jehan’s own armies had spread throughout Urhemma in the late 1180s setting up the councils, after them came the bandits and warlords, undoing the work.

  It was a ceaseless tug of war. For a number of years, the Urhemmedhin army did manage to keep the brigands under some degree of control, returning to town after town, ousting them again and again. This could be done as long as a large southern army was maintained. But once the Urhemmedhin military force became concentrated instead upon the North, the power vacuum in the South was larger than ever. One by one, the villages succumbed to more or less permanent warlord rule.

  The disease even afflicted the larger towns and cities now. Sometimes bloody battles would be fought between the citizen militia and the outlaw forces, but sooner or later, the attackers would prevail. One after another, the important cities fell: Ravdasbur, Jamarra, Hsokhso, Rabiznaz, Bebjella, Mughdad, Pamliyah.
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  It had all started with the drought of 1176. Since then, despite the elements’ benignity, a vicious cycle had set in, and each bad year made the next one more difficult from the outset. Each year brought smaller crops and more hunger. Plainly, it would only take one year of bad weather to produce an epic disaster.

  That cruel year came in 1192.

  In 1192, the skies were unstinting with broiling sunshine and were niggardly with rain. The gray soil was beaten by the sun, baked like clay in a kiln, scarred across with the cracks and fissures of dehydration. Clods of this soil were hard dry chunks that would crumble into powder.

  This was hardly soil at all. Seeds refused to germinate, and where shoots did dare poke through the crust, even the hardiest were quickly stamped down by the merciless sun.

  The people were seized by a starvation more brutal than any plague or any warlord. Even a warlord might relent, but not this famine. The suffering was titanic. Millions died. Few even hoped to survive—for surely this was Sexrexatra, returning at last to fulfill his vow, and to devour all his children.

  Affected most severely were the infants. Births were times of weeping, not of joy. It seemed perverse to bring babes into a world where they had no chance. So ill-fed were the mothers that there was rarely milk in their breasts to feed their infants.

  The children could not withstand the dual ravages of malnourishment and the diseases to which it made them vulnerable. For such weak children, any slight infection would be fatal. Those who did not perish of disease wasted away slowly. With not even water to bloat their bellies, grown children shriveled to baby weight, their muscles lost the power to move their sticklike limbs. Even if food came, they were too sick to take it.

  Adults too suffered the same slow death. Discolored bags of bones, they would crawl in hopeless search for food, until they could no longer move. Then they would remain lying in the open streets and roadways, unable to come out of the blistering sun, their mouths filled with their black, parched tongues. Blind from hunger and the sun, they would not fend off the scavengers who would feast on their few remaining shreds of flesh.

  At Ksiritsa, Jehan Henghmani sat upon the Tnemenghouri Throne.

  As though mirroring the travail of the lands he ruled, his health was suffering. The strains and exertions of the last sixteen years had taken a heavy toll. An ordinary man might not have survived them, but not even one of Jehan’s robust constitution could endure such a life without effect. Now he felt himself weakening and aging rapidly. The old aches from the dungeons assailed his body with unrelenting acuteness; he was beset too by powerful headaches, fever, dizzy spells, nausea. Some days he would have to struggle to pull himself up out of bed, and often his hands would tremble like leaves in a breeze. But through it all, he kept going, he refused to be mastered by the frailties of his body.

  He pushed himself like a master whips a slave. Ever more deeply he immersed himself in governmental business, spending endless hours conferring with his underlings, poring over documents, penning state papers. Little time was begrudged to sleep. Ignoring his abused body, he worked harder than ever before, since what afflicted him most now was not physical. More than ever, Jehan Henghmani was gnawed by apprehension and uncertainty.

  Every day the problems seemed to multiply. In the north, the Tnemghadi were stubbornly resisting his rule, and the Akfakh were pressing ever harder; but it was the South that made Jehan’s heart ache. The starvation was massive and he felt impotent to deal with it. He could not draw food out of the air. Moreover, the political structure which he had so lovingly nurtured was collapsing. Starvation made the people ever more vulnerable prey to bandits and warlords, and the map of Prasid Urhemma was becoming meaningless. The real map would have shown not one great country, but a thousand little fiefdoms. Bit by bit, Jehan felt his people slipping away from him.

  Even the City of Ganda Saingam fell, in 1192, to the warlord Nekatsim Nosnibor. This was a particularly bitter piece of news for Jehan to swallow, for Ganda Saingam’s council had survived through nine years, having been the model for the system he had tried to establish throughout the South. Well in memory too was the ecstatic welcome he’d received at Ganda Saingam.

  Dearly Jehan wished that he could mass an army and redeem this beloved city from the warlord Nosnibor. But it was out of the question: every Urhemmedhin soldier that could be put under arms was desperately needed in the North. By now, in fact, all but token forces had been withdrawn from the South.

  Jehan wept for Ganda Saingam, and he wept too for his child, the Assembly. The divisiveness that had marked its vote for war had only worsened. In the third Assembly wise old Taddhai was deposed as President, and the body’s deliberations degenerated into nothing but partisan bickering. The fourth Assembly had been ill attended and had adjourned itself after only two months.

  Once, all too briefly, the heart of the nation and the fount of all political authority, the Assembly’s work now seemed pointless. Its members had little will to go on making laws, and what laws they did make were simply ignored by the usurpers who ruled most of the country. Unwilling to see this once-bright hope become a travesty, Jehan issued a decree indefinitely postponing the fifth Assembly.

  There was nowhere he could turn for solace. Even within his own Court the disease of disintegration seemed rampant. Jehan was repelled by the decadence of his entourage. Coming into luxury after years in the wilderness, the Urhemmedhin leaders supped deeply. All around were fine foppish clothes, pretty giggling women, and feasts of rich delicacies.

  These affectations Jehan might have tolerated had he not felt so keenly a basic dearth of competent and honest men. The regime was worse than merely decadent; everyone to whom the Emperor turned seemed unscrupulous and worthless, ridden with cupidity.

  One exception seemed to be the Treasury. The Minister, Revi Ontondra, was an old fish dealer who knew nothing of finance, and did not pretend to know anything. After Golana’s death, however, Jehan had recruited a crafty merchant named Chardar Kozhbob to serve as On- tondra’s deputy. In reality, of course, the affairs of the department were placed almost entirely in Kozhbob’s able hands.

  But then Jehan happened to notice that some of the shipments of silver coins from the mint had more of a greenish tinge than others. An assay revealed their fineness fell short of the prescribed level, and this was not happenstance. A discreet investigation proved that Kozhbob was responsible, embezzling the silver and replacing it with tin. It turned out to be only the crudest of several schemes by which he was milking the Treasury.

  Reluctantly, Jehan ordered Kozhbob put on trial and executed as a deterrent against further such misdeeds. Hapless Ontondra was sent away to fill the conveniently vacant governorship of Prewtna. But deprived of an adroit hand at the till, the Treasury Department floundered, and with it, the Empire’s finances. Meanwhile too, corruption went on unabated. The more Palace bureaus and officials Jehan investigated, the more thievery and graft he uncovered. It was a virulent cancer permeating his regime.

  One of the most troubled bureaus had long been that of Agriculture, having the impossible task of managing the land tenure tangle in both North and South, while the country was in the grip of its worst famine ever. This grave responsibility belonged to Hnayim Yahu, as it had for eight years now; and despite being an unlearned former thug, Yahu was bearing up well.

  Then, Jehan was made aware by informers of a massive scandal infecting the Agriculture Ministry. Instead of uniformly pushing forward the land redistribution, its officials were extracting systematic bribes from landlords in return for leaving them alone. Literally dozens of men were implicated, up to the highest level. This included the Minister, Hnayim Yahu.

  Jehan could not bring himself to act until the evidence had mounted so powerfully that Yahu could not be exonerated. Loath as he was to lose such a loyal old comrade, the Emperor finally called him in for a private audience, and showed him the affidavit
s detailing his corruption.

  Hnayim Yahu sat in a chair and silently examined the documents. He had never been very good at reading and writing. But slowly, his face turned red, and beads of sweat popped out on his forehead.

  “Well,” Jehan whispered, “what have you got to say?”

  “There is no point in denying anything.” Yahu’s voice was so choked as to be almost inaudible. “I guess it’s all over for me.”

  “Hnayim, I thought you were the most loyal of my friends. We have been together for a quarter of a century. How could you do this? How could you do this to me?”

  Yahu turned his beet-red face away, and begged Jehan to spare his life.

  But the Emperor said no.

  6

  ELEVEN NINETY-TWO WAS over, but the new year brought no joy, no deliverance.

  Jehan felt suffocated, sinking in quicksand. He too remembered the old Sexrexatra myth, and it did seem as though some cataclysmic force was at work to wreck everything. A glimmer of comfort might be taken from the Bergharran army’s tenacious defense against the Akfakh— but even here, the war’s cost was staggering, and the Bergharrans were being slowly ground down. The Akfakh shadowed Jehan like a huge boulder poised on a ledge, on the verge of crashing down on him.

  Conferences with his ministers were ever more frequent, and ever more depressing. Repeatedly he would broach dramatic proposals for dealing with the crisis.

  “Let us try to make peace,” Jehan might say. “At least let us open up negotiations with Znarf. We can offer him a few Tnemghadi provinces. What is that to us?”

  “No,” the answer always came, “we can’t give up a single inch of ground. The Tnemghadi lands are the only ones right now producing any food. And they’re part of Bergharra. It’s our sacred trust to defend it, to prevent those jackals from gaining a toehold.”

  And someone else might say: “Besides, Znarf won’t be appeased with a few meager provinces. That would only whet his appetite for more. We must be strong in resisting.”