by Paul Krueger
And Tala.
As fine a figure as he cut in military dress, she took to it in a way that made him feel like he was playing dress-up. He saw a new rank insignia adorning her jade uniform, and felt a swelling of pride, despite the fact that she wore what had so recently been the uniform of the enemy. Whatever promotion she’d received—lieutenant, if his memory of Sanbuna designations served—had been richly earned for everything she’d done.
Now it was up to him to show his own gratitude.
“Hello,” he said. “And thank you for coming. I apologize for the short notice, but I felt it to be of vital importance that I address you all at the outset of my reign. In these fraught times, I feel the need to set the tone properly. And there are even more important matters to discuss than those of state.”
He remembered what his elocution tutors had taught him growing up. He was careful to fully enunciate his words, and to take his time. He kept his breathing slow and steady, so that his tone would betray neither nerves nor haste. In this regard, the throne room helped him; it had been specifically designed so that any who stood where he did could be clearly heard even in its farthest corners.
“The Sages wished for me to meet you in the traditional regalia of the Steel Lord: The Mountain Crown. The twenty sokutai of the prefectures. The flawless mirror of Steel Lord Sanjuro. But I told them the only treasure I intended to display tonight was the ever-keen blade of Setsuko, the first Steel Lord.”
He held the weapon aloft, still in its sheath. It was surprisingly plain: a black wooden sheath capped with gold, and a simple hilt of unwrapped steel with a gold pommel. It was so unassuming, one would never have imagined it was the single most important sword in all of Tomoda, if not the world.
But then, Jimuro reminded himself, it had been forged humbly to begin with. It had been the hand of Steel Lord Setsuko that had made it remarkable.
So, too, he prayed, would his own hand make it worth something.
It took him a moment to remember what came next in the remarks he’d prepared. He hoped his pause would be interpreted as regal gravitas, rather than uncertainty. But at last, he continued, “I’ve already had a great many of my subjects weigh in on how best to use this blade. Some wish for me to brandish it in defiance. Some want me to keep it tucked away in the depths of our archive. And still others,” he added, thinking of Kosuke, “wish for me to turn its edge on you—either right now, or after I’ve taken the time to hone it to its finest.”
“Spare us your posturing, boy,” came a grating voice that spoke in Shang. Of course, it was the Crane Emperor himself. Why couldn’t it have been a lower courtier, whom Jimuro wouldn’t have thought twice about rebuking?
He glanced for a moment at General Erega, but hopefully tore himself away before she noticed. This was his throne room, he reminded himself. It would be up to him to set the tone. His mother wasn’t there to save him, and neither was Erega nor the lieutenant by her side, whose gaze Jimuro had been studiously avoiding since he began speaking.
“We are in my house, in my country, Most August Personage of the Crane,” Jimuro answered in his best Shang. He was certain the delegates were judging his accent, but it was the prerogative of kings to not care. “I will tolerate interruptions as well as I will tolerate the way you blithely refer to me as ‘boy.’ And,” he added, switching back to Tomodanese, “it is a great sign of disrespect to your fellow delegates to refuse to speak our agreed-upon common language as you have. I’m certain the Most August Personage of the Crane will understand.”
Stunned silence greeted him, and he derived a delirious sort of satisfaction in it. He saw Xiulan immediately look stricken, while Lee couldn’t stop herself from grinning. Devarajah had tactfully hidden her mouth behind the folds of her dress, though the faint crinkles in the corner of her eyes betrayed the presence of her own smile. Erega kept her expression diplomatically impassive, but Jimuro knew her and her moods well enough to know what it looked like when she was impressed with someone.
He forced his eyes to slip over Tala. He couldn’t look at her, not yet.
At long last, the Crane Emperor grunted and nodded. Jimuro supposed it was the closest he’d get to an apology from the old goat, and opted to continue. He had a lot to get through.
“For those of you who don’t speak Shang,” he continued, “the Most August Personage of the Crane just accused me of empty posturing. But with this sword, I intend to make a very real gesture.”
He took a step down toward the floor. “I appear before you today in military dress because for a century and a half, this is the Tomoda you’ve known. When we beached our ships on your shores, when we pulled your ore from the earth, when we filled those holes with the bodies of your dead…this is the Tomoda that did that to you.”
He took another step down. His mouth felt dry, but he could hardly stop for a glass of water now. “My ancestors had their reasons for colonizing your homes. But I am not my ancestors, and in this moment I tell you those reasons were wrong. For me, the future is a clear and open road, and I have the freedom to take it along any path I so choose. I choose to travel a path previous Steel Lords have not.”
A third step. Only two more remained. “Yet, I dress this way to say I won’t forget what my ancestors did to you. What I have been complicit in doing to you,” he added, with a quick glance toward Lee. “If my people run from the horror of what we’ve done, in time we would forget. And if we forget, we might one day do it again. Your peoples do not have the luxury of forgetting how you’ve suffered. And so I intend to deny my people that same luxury.”
A fourth step. His voice took on a more rehearsed cadence as he said, “In the old days of Tomoda, a warrior who had disgraced themselves would offer up their life to their lord.”
A ripple of alarm passed through the Sages and the Kobaruto alike. Jimuro supposed that made sense enough; after all, it wasn’t as if he’d cleared this with any of them. The delegates, on the other hand, were still too confused to understand what he was doing. But soon enough, they would.
“The disgraced warrior would kneel, and then impale themselves upon their own sword and hold it there. A sideways slash would cause them to bleed out quickly, but they were not allowed to grant themselves the release of an easy death. They were to kneel before their lord in excruciating pain, waiting for their lord to decide that they had suffered commensurately to their crime so that they could be relieved with a beheading.”
The fifth step. The final step. “According to legends, a great warrior named Mitsuha once disgraced her liege lord by bedding his husband. Incensed, the lord demanded her life for the crime. So she knelt at his feet, impaled herself upon her sword, and waited for her lord to end her suffering. Except he didn’t. So bent on vengeance was this lord that he intended to wait until Mitsuha clung to life by a single thread, so that she could suffer as much as possible before he granted her mercy.
“For three days, Mitsuha knelt, transfixed upon her own blade, demanding neither food nor water. She spoke no words, not even to demand the mercy she was due. Each day, the lord would wait at her side, saying nothing himself, and each night he would leave, so that she could continue to suffer while he slept. But on the third day, her strength finally failed her and she died while the lord ate his breakfast.”
The legend of Mitsuha was one of the most famous in Tomodanese folklore, so there were many different versions Jimuro had heard over the years. Some said that when she died, her lord choked on a mouthful of rice himself, so that their two spirits intersected in the afterlife. Some said that the lord’s husband came in the night and granted Mitsuha the release his cruel spouse wouldn’t. Still others said that the spirits themselves took pity on her and, to punish the lord for his vanity, gave her the strength to kneel there for fifty years, so that the lord died before she did.
But the version he’d just told had been his mother’s favorite, and she
’d insisted it was the true version of the story.
“We’ve forgotten the lord’s name and remembered Mitsuha’s because the lord was a fool,” Jimuro said simply. “Mitsuha was the greatest warrior of her age. He was lucky to have her in his service, but he forced her to use her sword to enact vengeance when he could have used its might to make himself Steel Lord, if he wanted. Nonetheless, that’s the choice I offer you now.”
He took his step onto the floor. This was the most important one, symbolically speaking. Royal protocol dictated that the Steel Lord should always be the highest in his own throne room. For those who understood that about his culture, they would understand the significance of the gesture he’d just made. Certainly, he saw Xiulan’s eye light up in surprise.
“You all have ample reason to make me plunge this sword into my guts, then walk away without ever finishing the matter. I don’t deny that. But even with the sins that hang over Tomoda’s past…and present,” he added, with a lingering look around the throne room, “I’m here to argue that Tomoda offers more to the world alive than dead, or as some shriveled-up vassal state.
“I called you here so I could offer you three things,” Jimuro said. He swallowed. There wasn’t much more to his speech, but what was left would be the hardest to say. “The first is a warning: that there’s a greater threat in the world than Tomoda, and it will require our collective might to effectively deal with him.”
That certainly evoked some reactions. The Dahali delegates muttered among themselves, though Devarajah remained separate from them, her curious gaze fixed on him. The Crane Emperor puffed up like an angry bird. Of the three leaders present, only General Erega seemed to have even the faintest inkling of what he was talking about. But even her reaction was nothing compared with the grim expressions of knowing that flitted across Xiulan’s, Lee’s, and Tala’s faces.
“The next,” Jimuro pressed on, “is to offer up an apology. And it comes hand in hand with the third thing I offer you.”
And then he unsheathed the sword of Steel Lord Setsuko.
Even with the lights overhead taken into account, it was the most brilliant thing in the room, like a shaft of sunlight in his hand. Despite the centuries, careful pacting and maintenance had left the steel gleaming and flawless. There wasn’t so much as a notch on the blade’s edge. It was as if it had never bitten into flesh, had never split sinew, had never spilled blood.
He knelt, placed the sheath at his side, and held aloft the sword with both hands.
Xiulan’s mouth hung open. Lee glared at him in warning. Tala frowned, the way she always did, but he could see how her whole body tightened.
First Sage Shuichi and Captain Sakura rounded on him at the same moment. “Your Brilliance—!” they chorused.
“Mitsuha’s lord was a fool,” Jimuro repeated, ignoring them. “Mitsuha could never have bled enough to satisfy his thirst. To those of you who come here with vengeance in your heart: I submit to you, neither can Tomoda. You can strip us of our resources, feed my people to your shades, and plant your seeds in our land, but especially if you divide the spoils among the three of you, it will never feel like appropriate recompense for what you’ve lost.
“But if you accept my apology and give Tomoda a chance to earn your forgiveness, I pledge to use the might and resources of my country to rebuild yours. I will share the secrets of our engineering and industry, so you can use them as you see fit to help your people. All this and more, I promise in the pact that I would make with you.”
Once again, he elicited murmurs of surprise, but this time there were no strings attached to the satisfaction he found there. After all, he’d chosen the word pact very carefully.
At last, he brought himself to look at Tala directly again. He’d let his sight glide over her, but now he lingered and caught her eye. She was, as ever, the picture of soldierly discipline: stiff-backed and stiff-lipped. His most tireless servant, and the one he’d thrown away most carelessly.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Tomoda was selfish, and greedy, and shortsighted. No matter Tomoda’s intent, even one innocent person harmed in the pursuit of good intentions is enough to taint them. I wish there were a stronger word in any of our languages to communicate the depths of my regret, but I’ll spend the rest of my life using the one we have.”
He sensed the world’s eye on him again, but now he could shut it out. Now he had eyes only for Tala.
“I’m not about to disembowel myself,” he said, and saw the First Sage and Lee both breathe tiny sighs of relief. “But nonetheless, I leave the future of my people in your hands, delegates. The choice is yours to accept, or not, but I will live with the decision of the triumvirate all the same.”
A ringing silence fell over the chamber, one that felt even louder than his voice had just been. Though people looked at one another, none dared speak.
Until Bhavna Devarajah said, “Before Tomoda so foolishly violated Great Dahal’s borders, she was always a valuable trading partner. I know her funds are depleted, but she has both the location and the infrastructure to become an economic asset once more. The Merchants Council would be foolish to bypass such a lucrative opportunity…pending some negotiations and concessions.”
Jimuro had expected as much from Devarajah. Dahal’s priorities were reliably mercantile, and they had suffered by far the least of the three nations present.
The Crane Emperor spoke next. “Your theater does not impress me,” he said. “In your children’s children’s lifetimes, you will still owe Shang a debt for what you’ve taken. Abasing yourself does not earn you credit with me.”
For the first time, Jimuro’s temper truly rose in the back of his throat. What did the fool expect him to do, exactly? It wasn’t like he could just unravel the past centuries with a snap of his fingers. “Gestures are meaningless without follow-through, it’s true,” he said. He heard his mother’s voice in the back of his head, counseling restraint.
But he also heard Tala’s voice in his head, counseling an ass-kicking.
“For instance,” he continued in a theatrically mild tone, “a formal declaration of peace means nothing if the daughter of a head of state attempted to assassinate another head of state while he was traveling home, don’t you think? If such a sovereign conducted himself that way, don’t you think everyone would agree that his word was meaningless, and that he was perhaps unfit to sit his own throne?”
Lee let out a cackle that she hastily disguised as a cough.
Xiulan remained impassive, but Kou’s nose twitched excitedly.
The Crane Emperor glared at Jimuro with wide eyes. He looked like a lightbulb that had suddenly blown out. Clearly, he hadn’t expected his daughter’s subterfuge to be so widely known. But when he glanced around to Devarajah and Erega looking for support, he received stony glances in reply.
“Tonight is the gesture,” Jimuro said. “Everything from this point will be my follow-through, to lend it actual meaning. But for me to follow through, Most August Personage of the Crane, you need to accept the gesture.”
He couldn’t believe he was mouthing off to the Crane Emperor himself. He supposed his throne room was the one place in the world where he could do so safely, and even then he still couldn’t believe his own audacity. He was grateful a lifetime of Tomodanese upbringing had taught him how to keep a straight face. The last thing he needed was for everyone to see precisely how terrified he was.
At last, the Crane Emperor scowled and nodded. He couldn’t have given a less enthusiastic nod if it had been coaxed out of him at gunpoint, but it was a nod nonetheless, and it would have to do. And besides, Jimuro reminded himself, the Crane Emperor was an old man. As long as Tomoda could secure the backing of Xiulan and her siblings, then the old man wouldn’t matter all that much.
Last of all, General Erega grinned. “The Sanbuna Republic was forged out of its ten islands’ need to unite in
our fight for freedom,” she said. “So I think there’s plenty of virtue in what you say, Your Brilliance. Especially if there’s something else on the horizon…”
At last, Jimuro felt like he could get to his feet again. “I don’t know his name,” he said simply. “But what I can say is that he wears a purple coat, he can summon a seemingly limitless number of shades by himself…”
He noticed a ripple pass over the Shang and Sanbuna delegations as they caught his second use of the word shade.
“…and where he goes, death follows.”
“And he’s a threat to us, why?” said Devarajah.
“Because,” Jimuro said, then swallowed. “More than anything else in the world, he wants me dead.” By now, he knew that not to be true. But he’d deduced the only other common factor in their every encounter thus far.
“I wonder why that would be,” Devarajah said, smirking.
“I know it seems outlandish,” said Jimuro, “but I’m not the only one who’s seen him in action.”
“I can certify the veracity of his statements,” Xiulan called out.
“I’ve…heard of him,” General Erega said. “Do you really think he’s that severe of a threat?”
“In such a fraught political climate, I think the danger of any unbalancing factor is multiplied tenfold,” Jimuro said. “And even in peacetime, I’d still think of him as the most dangerous man alive. For better or for worse, I’m the fulcrum on which our future peace rests. Without me, there’s no sovereign Tomoda. And despite your warranted feelings on the subject, I’ll stress again: That’s nothing to hope for.”
“So what do you propose?” said Xiulan. Her father gave her a reproachful look, but she seemed to pay him no heed.
He nodded gratefully to her. “Given the gutted state of the former Tomodanese military, I will require the aid of your nations’ strongest warriors, so that we may bait him into the open to take him down. And to lead this special force, General Erega, I humbly request the services of my escort, Lieutenant Tala.”
