No matter. Prepared or not, I had been given orders by a Voice, which bore a weight of compulsion second only to orders from the Emperor himself. I could only trust that Golden-Finch would explain when I answered his summons.
I dressed in my finest clothes and donned my scholar’s cap. My stomach churned all the while I walked across the garden. I felt wildly out of my depth and yet paralyzed by the impossibility of admitting as much--of telling Voice Golden-Finch, and by proxy the Emperor, that I was unfit for the task they had given me. An inner turmoil which so absorbed me that I nearly bowled over Oriole on the path.
“Alder!” he yelped, catching me by the arms and steadying me. There was a cloud over his expression that only deepened as he saw the nervousness in my eyes and the flop-sweat on my brow.
“Again, you get the thing I’ve always wanted,” he said. He all but shoved me away before continuing along the path, his posture written in jagged, furious lines.
“Oriole!” I caught up with him, matched his pace. “You heard, then. You must know I don’t want command. I never wanted it. If we could trade places--you off to war, and me staying here to study for the exams--you know I would in the space of a breath. You’re better suited to it. You’ve read all the romances, the tactics manuals, every treatise on every battle--”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, glaring down at the cobblestones. “I failed the examinations.”
“But you won’t this time,” I said. “The next examinations are a year away. In fact, it’s good that you won’t be going away to war. You’ll have a whole year to keep preparing. Keep your studies up, and you’ll--”
“I’m not you, Alder,” he said, and stopped, his breathing harsh, his hands balled tight, his sharp eyes full of anger. “And I'm sick of pretending that I could be, if I just tried hard enough.”
There were more words to be said. Anger to be vented at the ways the world had layered barricades between him and everything he wanted, everything he ought to have inherited. Yet words were never Oriole's gift.
Heart aching for him, I tried to bridge the gap.
“You don't have to be me, Oriole,” I said.
“Yes I do!” he snapped, harsh as he had been before our strange rivalry blossomed into friendship. “To be anything of value, I do. I have to be you, with your books and your ink and your quotations from the sages.”
As he spoke, I felt an echo of my own longing for a third path, carried since childhood. Was that feeling, too, something we could share? It was a risky arena for conversation, fraught with the treasonous aspects of my upbringing. Secrets I still held dear. Yet I could trust Oriole--if no one else--with such feelings, if not the reasons for them. And I found, to my surprise, that easing Oriole's burden would be worth the risk of exposing those parts of myself most hidden and dangerous.
“No, you don't,” I said. “You have a great deal to offer, even without an imperial commission. Your father imagines you as either a Hand of the Emperor, or a trifling merchant. Either a success in his eyes, or a total failure. But you could be something else, Oriole. Find a third way through the world. Your own way. Something you and your family can be proud of. It will take imagination, certainly, but together we can--”
“What do you mean together?” he said. “You speak as though you have ever had to find such a third way, but when has the path to success and prestige ever been anything but clear and sparkling for you, Alder? I don't think you intend to mock me, but this feels like a joke. Don't speak to me of it again.”
“There are things about me you don't know,” I snapped, my voice sharp. “Which of us has had an easier life, do you think? The one who studied twelve hours a day for ten years to earn a place in this palace, or the one who was born here?”
The muscles in his jaw pulsed, yet he swallowed his anger and left me standing on the path, feeling hollowed out. Though this strange assignment might yield an opportunity to win renown and advance toward my goal of a placement in the Academy, I found it nothing but a source of heartache for the wedge it had driven between Oriole and I.
Oriole was right. The odds that he would become Hand after having failed an examination were slight as a strand of silk. Passing would prove enough of a challenge--though one I believed he could surmount. Placing first was a near impossibility.
But not every officer in the imperial army was a Hand or a Voice of the Emperor. Generals were, but even battalion commanders might be ordinary men without sorcery. If he passed, and had distinguished himself in battle in his youth, Oriole could easily enter the military career he dreamed of. Not a third path, exactly, but a detour leading back to the path he longed for.
I turned back toward the audience hall, now with an agenda of my own.
* * *
The last time I had been in Voice Golden-Finch’s audience hall, it had been furnished and decorated for the banquet to celebrate successful examinees. Now, in place of long tables, chairs, and festive lanterns, the hall was a vast, open space furnished with oil lamps, bronze incense burners, and tall lacquered panels depicting scenes of filial piety from the Classic of Family Relations. There was a single, high-backed chair, where Voice Golden-Finch sat, dressed in black silks stitched with a repeating pattern of yellow feathers. A cap with the same decoration rested high on his head, leaving his brow uncovered along with the tetragram branded there in silver lines. Hand Usher stood at his right hand and inclined his head to greet me.
I knelt before Voice Golden-Finch and touched my forehead to the tiled floor.
“Rise, Hand Alder,” the Voice said. “And accept your orders.”
“I will, your eminence,” I said. “But before I do, in utmost humility I must ask why I have been chosen for this lofty role. I am as yet only proficient in two of the six sorceries. I have no experience leading men into battle, and my education in the arts of war has been cursory at best.”
“You have been given this task precisely so that you might amend those last two deficiencies,” Voice Golden-Finch said. “A Hand of the Emperor is many things, but he is first and foremost a weapon. Ordinarily, no Hand would be needed to punish banditry, but reports indicate that these self-professed rebels have witches with barbarous magic among them.”
Panic seized my throat. Barbarous witches, like my uncle and grandmother. If they led this rebellion, and were captured, my grandmother at least would recognize me. Would she reveal our family ties to the Empire to avenge my betrayal of all she had tried to teach me? If she did, I would find myself shackled and kneeling beside her on the executioner's field.
Of course, I could never let Hand Usher glean that I feared such a possibility. I swallowed my panic and focused on Golden-Finch's words.
“Hand Usher has volunteered his services,” the Voice went on. “And requested that you accompany him, both as his apprentice and his lieutenant.”
I looked up, expecting to see Hand Usher’s ghostly smile. Instead, he fixed me with a harsh, disappointed glare.
“I hope that your trepidation is genuine humility, and not cowardice,” Hand Usher said.
“I only recall the lesson of the pollical cat,” I said. “I accept that as a sorcerer I will have to fight, and that I will have to learn to command. I am not yet a commander, Hand Usher, yet you ask me to assume the role of one, when a man better suited to it might serve instead.”
“Oh?” Usher’s mouth twitched. “Who?”
“Master Oriole,” I said, and watched the ghostly smile bloom on Usher’s lips.
“Ha!” Voice Golden-Finch flicked out the ends of his sleeves. “The fool couldn’t even place in the examinations, yet you suggest he should be elevated above you, a Hand?”
“His passion is for the arts of war,” I said. “He has memorized every book of strategy and every tactical treatise. If I am suited to be a commander, he must be twice over.”
“My son’s fanciful obsessions are his weakness, Hand Alder,” Voice Golden-Finch said.
“Even if he is better suited in
some ways, you are a Hand, and he is not,” Hand Usher cut in. “You will command armies. Beginning with this one. And no one unmarked by the Emperor’s tetragram can ever hold station equal to or above you.”
“Then I would bring him as my advisor,” I said.
“An advisor?” Golden-Finch balked. “A scholarly role, for a boy who spent his youth shirking his studies?”
“Yes,” I said. “Or a tutor, if you prefer. He will teach me the arts of war as he taught me horsemanship.”
“This is absurd,” the Voice said. “Oriole will have a merchant fleet, and a steward to manage it for him. That is the only role suited to frivolous men with minds interested only in romantic heroism and vain amusement. He has tarnished our family enough without polluting your campaign with his useless advice--and likely leading men to their deaths in the process!”
“I think myself just as likely to lead men to their deaths,” I said. “If he fails in this, you will have lost little. If he succeeds, he will return in triumph. Give him this chance, your eminence, to polish away that stain on your family legacy.”
Voice Golden-Finch glared at me where I lay, still prostrate on the tile floor. I had not only questioned his wisdom in giving me command, I had suggested that I understood his son better than he did, a direct subversion of his fatherly authority.
“Are all Nayeni so brazen?” Golden-Finch said at last. “First, with your ambidextrous stunt on the day you became Hand. Now, with this.” He shifted his gaze to Hand Usher. “Well? Will you have my fool of a son along for this little war?”
“It is a Hand’s prerogative to choose his own staff,” Hand Usher said, and shrugged. “If Alder believes that Oriole will be of use, then we will take him with us.”
I touched my forehead to the floor once more. “Thank you,” I said with genuine, deep-felt gratitude. “I am sure he will be an asset.”
“Yes, well, let’s get on with it,” Golden-Finch said. “And stand up, Hand. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
While Voice Golden-Finch went on laying out the parameters of our campaign, my mind kept drifting to the future, to Oriole’s excitement and gratitude when I told him that he would, after all, have his chance at glory, while I would have him to guide me through the uncertainties of my first command, with the fresh wound in our friendship mended.
* * *
We set out from Eastern Fortress with a company of three thousand Sienese soldiers. Our men--many of whom were veterans of similar campaigns to quash small uprisings--seemed to think that we would be back to the estate by the start of typhoon season in late summer, when walls of wind and water dashed themselves against the northern and western shores of the island. We were only facing bandits, after all.
Oriole spoke of the campaign with excitement. Finally, he would see battle firsthand. He would be like the heroes of the mythic romances he loved so much, who fought in the Emperor’s first wars of conquest to unite the kingdoms of Sien a thousand years ago. Clever Su White-Knife, who tricked the king of Twin Mountain into surrendering to a force of three hundred men. Or Mighty Lin Twelve-Ox, who led from the front lines and fought with a spear as broad as a cypress tree.
“I can’t understand why you’re so disinterested in the romances, Alder,” he said. We were riding at the head of our column through the flatlands just north of Eastern Fortress. He had caught my eyes glazing over while he launched into the tale of Ren Kingfisher, who could read terrain and weather like logograms. “I’ve had my head buried in the literary classics for the last two years, and they’re dry as old bones. Out here, in the fresh air, I feel like a hero of old.”
“Alder’s mind latches on to his two great fascinations in life--his career, and magic,” Hand Usher said, from his place just ahead of us. “The canon of sorcery would not be created until after those first conquests, when the Empire turned its eye on the Girzan steppe. If any of your heroes had sorcery, Alder might find reason to pay attention.”
“I’m more than a bundle of ambitions,” I said, annoyed by Usher’s ribbing. “The mythic romances are exciting and inspiring, but in that I did not grow up reading them I’ll never be as attached to them as you are.”
“What stories did you grow up with, then?” Oriole said.
The stories my grandmother had told me in the Temple of the Flame bubbled up from a neglected corner of my mind. Brittle Owl, and Tawny Dog, and Iron Claw, each with exploits of their own to rival the heroes of the Empire’s founding. I was a Sienese Hand, but the myths of my childhood were Nayeni. I felt the urge to share them with Oriole, as he shared the stories that had formed him. To reveal a facet of myself I had long kept hidden--from Koro Ha, from my own father, and now from everyone in my life, lest I be accused of sympathy for the rebellion, a crime tantamount to treason. Instead, I swallowed those stories. I hoped to someday trust Oriole well enough to share them, and with them at least a shadow of the truth of my bifurcated childhood, but I would never trust Hand Usher.
“The classics,” I said at last, with a bitter taste in my mouth. “I told you, my childhood left little time for anything but study.”
* * *
As we ventured into the Nayeni highlands, our expedition fell prey to that most nefarious enemy of all armies--logistics.
Even accounting for the difficulty of moving three thousand men and all the sundry necessities of war, the journey from Eastern Fortress to Setting Sun Fortress--the largest city in northern Nayen, which would serve as the staging ground for our attack on the bandit force--should have taken three weeks. We had anticipated ruts and shattered cobbles, the scars of conquest borne by all the highways of Nayen. We found plenty of both, as well as mountain roads overgrown with ferns and brambles, or eroded by wind, rain, and decades of neglect. Splintered wheels and broken axels slowed our wagons, and a collapsing bridge killed a dozen men and injured a dozen more. A month and a half had passed before we arrived.
Our soldiers pitched camp outside the walls of Setting Sun Fortress, while Usher, Oriole, and I occupied the guest rooms of the city magistrate. After our first decent meal since leaving the governor’s estate, we reviewed the numerous and lengthy reports that the magistrate and his scouts had been keeping on the enemy.
“They march beneath the banner of Frothing Wolf,” Hand Usher said, with a note of surprise. “I’d have thought she’d be long dead by now.”
“Who is she?” I asked, feeling a breath of relief that these bandits were not led by my uncle, Harrow Fox. An end, at last, to the lingering worry that I might encounter him or my grandmother during this expedition.
“A witch,” Oriole said. He had set up the compact stones board he had brought along. I had beaten him at camp the night before, and he’d been itching for a rematch all day. “One of the leaders of the Nayeni who fought on, long after their kings and cities had surrendered.”
“This must be her last vainglorious attempt at rebellion before old age cripples her,” Usher said, setting that report aside and taking up the next. “Though it is not surprising she would meet with some success recruiting here. The fighting went on longest in the north, and many of these Nayeni never truly accepted imperial rule.”
We went on studying the reports. Most described raids on small villages in the foothills and valleys by bandits armed with plowshares beaten into spearpoints, woodsman’s axes, hunting bows, and other weapons improvised from farming tools. The reports grew monotonous, and Oriole and I made a game of them by placing stones on the board each time we finished with a document. While we did, Hand Usher unrolled a map of the surrounding area and began marking each raided village.
“What do you two make of this?” he said, studying the strange pattern of the bandits’ movements. Oriole and I looked up from our stones board--the game having reached a point of tension while Oriole played into a trap I had laid, distracting us from the reports we ought to have been reading. The pattern of raids seemed haphazard to me. The bandits would attack one village while ignoring its neighbors, before
moving on to sack an entire valley indiscriminately.
“Is there any difference between the villages?” I said. “Maybe they’re passing over targets that are impoverished. Why bother raiding someplace with nothing worth taking?”
Hand Usher stroked the wisps of his beard. “We could ask the magistrate for tax records, to confirm. But the wealthier villages would also be the best defended.”
“It isn’t that,” Oriole said. He leaned across the table, his eyes sharp and bright with realization. “In The Conquest of the Western Kingdoms, Lin Twelve-Ox stood before the gate of Clay-River Fortress and offered to move on, killing no one, destroying nothing, if only the people would swear fealty to the Emperor. The city chose to resist, so he killed every man, woman, child, and beast within, then burned the city to the ground and salted its fields. After that, all but the foolhardiest of the Western Kings surrendered at the sight of his banner.”
“You think Frothing Wolf is emulating an ancient Sienese hero?” Usher said.
“I doubt she’s ever heard of Lin Twelve-Ox,” Oriole said. “But just because a village has not been sacked does not mean she has neglected to capture it.”
“The magistrate’s scouts report that the headmen of those villages are loyal to the Empire,” I said.
Oriole shrugged, obviously relishing the fact that he had come to this strategic insight before either of the two Hands in his company. “They may well be. She may have struck a deal with the people directly, going around the headmen, extracting promises of support, or a promise to rise up when the time was right.”
“And, oh wise advisor, when do you think that will be?” Usher said and offered his ghostly smile--for the first time I had seen--to someone other than me.
The Hand of the Sun King Page 13
