The Hand of the Sun King

by J. T. Greathouse

  Young as I was, I did not understand why my uncle and grandmother were hunted, nor why my mother allowed my grandmother to live with us and yet refused to help her brother. I only knew that when my father returned and heard from his steward of all that had transpired in his absence, his voice had echoed through the estate with threats to throw my grandmother out of the house.

  “She is growing old,” my mother pleaded, while I hid in the corner of the room, fighting tears, knowing they would only stoke my father’s anger. “It is my duty to care for her. She is no threat to anyone. They hunt her for crimes committed long ago.”

  He had relented, with a promise that if soldiers ever searched his house again my grandmother would find the well of his mercy dry. In the four years since, they never had, and in fact it seemed at times that my father had forgotten that a fugitive lived beneath his roof--or, at least, pretended to have forgotten.

  Grandmother was quiet for a moment, studying the names of her son and daughter, before she rolled up the scroll of wooden slats and said, “There is one more thing to be done.”

  She floated the blood-stained rice paper on the surface of the alcohol, then lit it with a taper from the flames in the altar and waited for the ashes to settle in the bottom of the bowl. Grandmother drank deeply of the mixture--blood and ash and spirits--then offered it to me. After I drank she led me in the prayer-chant of naming. The words were meaningless to me, spoken in her language, which I had not yet begun to learn.

  It did not occur to me that our feeble names, carved in wood and sealed in blood, would one day ring out in the vast, columned halls of the Empire.

  Chapter Two

  An Education

  Over the next four years my grandmother taught me the culture of her people--our people, now, for I had been fire-named. She taught me Nayeni, the language native to our country, and bade me always speak it when we were alone. Under cover of darkness we practiced the Iron Dance, wielding dowels in place of swords. She taught me to name the stars and to read the trickle of water through the forest after rain. By night I reveled in her secret teachings. In contrast, my ongoing Sienese education was a laborious slog.

  Koro Ha, my tutor, hailed from Toa Alon, a distant and destitute province of the Empire’s southern edge. My father, impressed by Koro Ha’s high ranking and his letters of recommendation, had brought him to our estate to prepare me for the imperial examinations, which would be held in Nayen for the first time in my seventeenth year. A task he had taken to with relish and efficiency.

  After two years of his instruction I could read the ten-thousand Sienese logograms and write half of them from memory. After three I could recite the aphorisms of the sage Traveler-on-the-Narrow-Way when prompted only by page and line. After four I had written commentaries on the classics of poetry--and then rewritten them dozens of times until they met Koro Ha’s strict standard.

  “He is a studious child,” Koro Ha told my father when I was twelve years old. “Though often sleepy.”

  We had gathered in a pavilion overlooking the modest gardens of our estate. My father was home for a brief stay between mercantile adventures and had taken the opportunity to check my progress. Koro Ha and my father sat at a low table. I knelt nearby. My knees hurt, but I could not complain in front of my father. I craved his approval, for if I did well in his eyes he would be kind to me and have fewer harsh words for my mother during his brief stay in our house.

  Father stroked the wispy braids of his beard and studied me. I resisted the urge to glance to Koro Ha for reassurance. The smell of tobacco from my father’s pipe mingled with the delicate scent of chrysanthemum tea. Koro Ha filled my father’s cup, and then his own from the earthenware teapot, then set the pot aside for a servant to refill with steaming water. A third cup rested empty on the tray.

  “What are the three pillars of society?” father said.

  “The relations of father to son, husband to wife, and elder brother to younger brother,” I said. It was a foundational aphorism, the beginning of any examination.

  “What is the Emperor to his people?”

  “The Emperor is father to all.”

  “If the people starve, what is the Emperor’s duty?”

  “To feed them.”

  “If the Emperor is threatened, what is the duty of the people?”

  “To defend him.”

  “If the people are endangered, what is the duty of the Emperor?”

  “To protect them.”

  “If the people endanger themselves, what is the duty of the Emperor?”

  “To show them the right path.”

  My father nodded, then filled my teacup. I sipped and met his approving gaze.

  “He knows the principles well,” my father said.

  “If I may, Master Wen,” said Koro Ha, bowing slightly. He turned toward me and adopted the aloof attitude of a Sienese tutor towards his student, a reflection of the foundational elder brother to younger brother relationship.

  “Continuing from your father’s query, let me pose a dilemma,” he said. “What is the relationship of the Emperor to his ministers?”

  “The Emperor must command his ministers as a husband, and his ministers must advise the Emperor as wives,” I said.

  “When a minister is concerned with the Emperor’s conduct, what is his duty?”

  “As a wife may gently reproach her husband and propose a new course, in this way a minister may advise the Emperor.”

  “What if the Emperor rejects that advice?”

  “A minister must submit to the will of the Emperor.”

  “But what if the Emperor is wrong?”

  A lump filled my throat. I stared at Koro Ha, forgetting for a moment the rules of propriety. We had skirted around such questions in our lessons. Koro Ha had presented me with thought experiments wherein I assumed the role of a wife married to a drunken fool, or a younger brother bound in loyalty to a tyrannical elder sibling, or a minister given some odious task by the Emperor. These thought-experiments were the most fascinating of Koro Ha’s lessons, but I did not think my father would approve of them.

  “Wen Alder?” Koro Ha prompted. “If you require a concrete example, let us say that the Emperor has levied too harsh a tax against one of his provinces. What if he has failed in his duty as father to his people in that province, and they starve because of it? What if, when informed of this error, the Emperor refuses to lighten the tax? What then should the minister do?”

  His question sent a jolt of surprise through me. Koro Ha, worldly man that he was, certainly knew of the hunger and poverty that gripped the north of Nayen, where my uncle's rebellion still fought, and to which my grandmother often alluded in her rants against the Empire. Had he noticed some sign of my nocturnal lessons? Bags under my eyes and bruises on my arms? A glimpse of my grandmother and I slipping from the garden by moonlight? Some subversive undercurrent in my thinking, detected in the nuances of my essays and our conversations?

  “The right and wrong of the Emperor’s actions are known only to the eternal divines,” I said, meeting his eye. “Only they, in their fatherly relationship to the Emperor, have the right to rebuke him. It would not be the role of the minister to do so, as it is not the role of a wife to rebel against her husband.”

  Koro Ha lifted his chin and gave me a satisfied smile. He turned to my father and resumed his subordinate role. “The boy’s understanding is immaculate for his age.”

  “Yes,” my father said. He patted the chair to his right. I sat and sipped tea with them, all the while struggling not to glare at Koro Ha. My father asked questions about other things; my mother, my reading in the classics and history, which Koro Ha said I had a mind for. In this way he fulfilled his duty to monitor and lead our household, despite his long and frequent absences.

  He had shown me a wealth of fondness, when I was younger. I had hazy, early-childhood memories, half-formed and almost mythical, of afternoons beneath the warmth of the summer sun when I rode on his shoulders throu
gh the garden of our estate. Memories of his whiskers tickling my cheek while he dandled me on his knee and told silly stories full of nonsense rhymes. But as his businesses had expanded those memories grew further apart, and with Koro Ha’s arrival my father’s affection had become a thing to be earned.

  When we had finished the pot of tea he dismissed us. Koro Ha and I bowed and backed out of his study. On the garden path, out of my father’s sight, I fixed Koro Ha with a chilling stare.

  “Oh, do not sulk, Wen Alder,” he said. “Your father was pleased with your answer, was he not?”

  “I don’t think he was pleased with your question,” I said. “I certainly wasn’t.”

  “Is it the role of the student to be displeased with his teacher?”

  “What if I had said the minister should rebel against the emperor? Do you think you would still have a place here?”

  “I would, most likely,” he said. “I came very highly recommended. If you had answered poorly, your father would have been displeased, and I would have seen to it that you did not answer poorly again.”

  I crossed my arms and let myself fall behind him. He folded his hands within the sleeves of his robe. Summer sunlight filtered through ginseng leaves to dapple the path with shadow. Birds chirruped in the trees. The stream that ran through our garden bubbled. The slap of a carp leaping for a water-walker struck a percussive note.

  “Were you trying to embarrass me?” I said.

  Koro Ha shook his head. “You will be asked similar questions all your life, Wen Alder, no matter how many times you prove yourself. Questions that test not only your learning, but your loyalty. You will have the right education and the right name, and these things will help, but you have the wrong skin, the wrong hair, the wrong maternal line. I mean to help you to succeed despite these impediments. Sometimes, the cost of success will be humiliation, or a betrayal of your own heart. Your father understands this--”

  I stormed past him, found my room, and locked myself inside for the rest of the afternoon. Grandmother had taught me to be proud of all the things Koro Ha presented as obstacles and flaws. More, I was certain that beneath them all I would find the secrets of magic, which ran in both my father and my mother’s line. It was my inheritance. The tool I would use to secure my place of prominence and restore the prestige of my family. And beyond that, I remembered the stunning, thunder-clap comprehension of the pattern of the world I had felt when my grandmother snapped her fingers and conjured flame. I still yearned for that feeling four years later, like a beggar yearns to fill his aching belly, haunted always by the memory of his last meal.

  * * *

  That night, grandmother summoned me with a rhythmic tap at my window. I rose and dressed in trousers and a shirt of home-spun cotton--simple clothes that let in the cool summer breeze. I crept through the hallways and met her in the garden. We returned, as we always did, to the Temple of the Flame.

  That night we continued with the tales of Nayen’s first heroes, who ruled their petty kingdoms before the time of the Sun Kings. She traced the runes and had me read along. Tales of Brittle Owl, who could not hunt or fight, but who tricked a dragon into sharing the secret of written language. Of Tawny Dog, who befriended a fox demon and learned to veer into the shape of a beast. Of Iron Claw, who met the wolf gods in his dreams and, with their guidance, forged the disparate cities of Nayen into a kingdom that spanned the breadth of our island.

  Compared to Koro Ha’s lessons, my grandmother’s were captivating. Sienese literature, in my experience, was thick with moralism and analogy. Nayeni tales were full of adventure, passion, and--most importantly--magic. One could often derive the ending of a Sienese narrative from a proper understanding of propriety and doctrine. The stories my grandmother told were suspenseful, twisting and turning in unexpected ways, full of grit and vigor. Yet they nonetheless felt hollow. A waste of time that only whetted my appetite for magic.

  When the tale of Iron Claw was done, grandmother stowed the books in their chest beside the altar and led me in practicing the Iron Dance. We still used dowels instead of blunted iron. An accidental bruise to the face or the hand could be explained more easily than a broken arm. The air thrummed with the clash and crack of our blows. I was becoming a young man, full of the energy and wildness of youth, and I reveled in the physical release, letting my mind focus only on the next sweep of her weapon while my arms and legs responded as though on their own.

  We came away drenched in sweat. I nursed my usual smattering of bruises. My grandmother nursed one of her own where I had clipped her elbow. She told me to sit on the edge of the altar and passed me a gourd of water.

  “You are getting better,” she said.

  I grinned and puffed out my chest--open pride was another thing constrained by the structures of Sienese propriety.

  “Someday soon I’ll be better than you.”

  “Oh really?” she said.

  “Really!” I wiped my mouth and handed the gourd back to her. The web of pale scars across her hand stood out in the nighttime dark. “Then you’ll have to teach me magic, whether you want to or not.”

  I expected a chiding rebuke. Almost every night I begged her to teach me the most secret of her arts, pointing to some minor accomplishment as proof that I had earned the right. Always she rebuffed me. That night, she sipped from the gourd and studied me, as though taking my request seriously for the first time.

  “You are not ready to learn,” she said and set the gourd between us. Then, just as I was settling into familiar disappointment, she stood. “But perhaps you are ready to witness.”

  An excited flush bloomed in my chest and spread to the tips of my fingers and toes. I fought the urge to leap ahead of her as she led me out to the overgrown courtyard behind the Temple of the Flame. Ivy crawled over every surface and choked the fountain at the center of the yard, which had once fed a now-dry streambed. A lonely pavilion stood beside the fountain. Grandmother knelt in its shadow and bade me kneel across from her.

  The crescent moon was dim that night. My grandmother was only a vague silhouette beyond the dry streambed.

  “Watch closely, Foolish Cur,” she said. “I’ll not show you again until you are ready to learn for yourself. With a head as thick and wool-stuffed as yours, the gods alone can say when that will be.”

  A plan true to my name was forming in that thick, wool-stuffed head of mine. I remembered the rush of power I had felt when she kindled the hearth and named me. The burst of warmth through my body, the sharp reality of the world, the elation of freedom. Though she had hidden her hand from me then, and hid herself in shadow now, I thought that I could learn her magic by feel alone.

  The scent of burnt cinnamon filled the air. My senses sharpened, making every paving stone, every line in the grain of every piece of wood, and every snarl in the ivy seem infinite in its complexity and importance. I shut my eyes and focused on the oiled-iron feel of the sorcery she worked and the changes it carved into the fabric of the world.

  Power suffused her bones. It filled, bent, and changed her flesh. As the wake of her spell washed over me, my skin crawled and muscles clenched in rhythm with her transformation. When it ended I felt a sudden chill, like being doused in cold water, and heard the flutter of wings.

  I opened my eyes. An eagle-hawk perched on the rotted brackets of the lonely pavilion. I recognized my grandmother, for I could trace the continuity of her power, but an unknowing eye would have seen only the bird.

  I gazed up at her, awe filling me like an inheld breath. I half believed that she might be reading my mind or may have felt my touch as I traced the pattern of her magic, for I did not know the limits of her powers. She watched me silently, then dropped to the earth and vanished into shadow.

  The unfurling of her magic was faster and easier than veering had been. Things, after all, want to be what they are, and people want that most of all. The burning smell and unsettling gravity of power clung to her like tobacco smoke.

  “You’ve
seen enough for today, boy,” she said. “You’re a mean whelp to ask so much of an old woman. My knees hurt. Carry me back to the house.”

  * * *

  Some days later, in the pavilion by the pond where we so often engaged in our lessons, Koro Ha and I revisited the Classic of Upright Belief, the foundational text of Sienese religion. Unlike my grandmother’s stories, which shrouded their moralism in myth, Sien conveyed its spirituality as it conveyed all things--through aphorism and directive. The nearest thing to a god was the Emperor, whose name never changed, who built the Empire from the fractious Sienese kingdoms with the aid of the primordial divines. Before Sien, there was only chaos, from which civilization had to be forged by the sages, the first Voices of the Emperor.

  When I was very young, I reconciled these two mythologies--my grandmother’s and Sien’s--by conflating her wolf gods and the primordial divines. They had been the Emperor’s predecessors, only neglected because he had taken their place as a son must one day take the place of his father.

  As I grew older, I had come to understand more clearly that my grandmother’s religion was not an eccentricity, but a crime in the eyes of Sien. That her temple only survived because the Sienese had yet to find and destroy it. That her gods were not the divines who once aided the Emperor, but his enemies.

  Where you find folk belief, the sage Yu Carries-Fire wrote in the Classic of Upright Belief, know that it is crafted from naught but trembling awe of the celestial bodies, in ignorance of the forces of nature, and in terror of the beasts of the field. Subsume whatever can be salvaged into upright belief; eradicate whatever breeds deviance. In this way, the ignorant can be brought to knowledge, and the deviant into alignment with the will of the Emperor.

  I set the book down. A question percolated within me, desperate to be asked. But how would Koro Ha react? At twelve years old, I already thought myself clever, and sought a way to craft the question to hide the source of my curiosity.