The Grace of Kings (26 page)

Or—and Luan had to stop in the middle of the road because he was thinking so hard—perhaps the answer was hidden within a mathematical puzzle. While it was easy to calculate the area of the petals that made up the flower of the butter-and-eggs, it was not at all clear how to determine the exact area of an umbel of Queen Naca's Lace. From a common center, the stalks branched and subbranched, like blood vessels dividing into capillaries, until they terminated in tiny white florets that were barely visible. Luan could already see that calculating the area of such a thing, made up more of holes and edges than solid presence, would be like computing the circum­ference of a snowflake. It required a new kind of mathematics, one that could account for the infinitesimal and fractal.

So was that a hint from the gods that the road to Haan's resurrection would be long and winding, requiring hard work to discover new paths that could surmount difficult odds?

For all his skill in divination, all that Luan could determine was that the gods refused to speak clearly, leaving the outcome in doubt.

Unable to find out how to proceed from the gods, Luan focused on matters in this world. His knowledge of mathematics was not limited to the realm of divination alone. He understood how to calculate force and resistance, tension and torque, how to combine levers and gears and inclined planes into intricate machines. Could such a machine, an engine, allow a lone assassin to succeed where the armies of the Six States had failed?

Alone, secreted in dark basements or abandoned storehouses, he plotted and replotted schemes for the death of Emperor Mapidéré. He carefully made contact with old Haan nobles, now scattered around the Islands, and tested their loyalty to the new regime. When he found a sympathetic soul, he demanded their help: money, letters of introduction, a place to let him build his secret workshop.

He settled on a daring plan. The Xana Conquest was largely symbolized by the great oar-propelled airships powered by the lift gas from Mount Kiji. So, in a gesture of poetic justice, he would bring death to Emperor Mapidéré from the air. Inspired by the great albatrosses and cliff-dwelling eagles found along Haan's bleak coastline, who stayed aloft for hours without flapping their wings, he designed a stringless battle kite that would take a rider and a few bombs aloft. He experimented with larger and larger prototypes in test flights in remote, uninhabited valleys and passes in the Wisoti Mountains along the border of old Cocro and Gan, out of sight of the emperor's spies.

Several times, after his prototypes had crashed and left him at the bottom of some valley, days from the nearest village or town, disoriented and nearly dead, bones broken and blood oozing from a dozen wounds, he wondered whether he was mad. He watched the stars spin slowly overhead, listened to wolves howl in the distance, and thought about the brevity of life compared to the eternal indifference of the natural world.

Could it be, he thought, that the gods always spoke so ambivalently and were so hard to understand because they experienced space and time at a different scale than mere mortals? For Rapa, rivers of ice that moved inches a year flowed as fast as torrential floods, and for Kana, lava thawed and froze as regularly as mountain streams. Lutho, the old turtle, had lived for a million millennia and would continue to live for millions more, and all the generations of men in the history of Dara would be gone in a few blinks of his leathery, salty-teared eyes.

The gods did not care who was sitting on the throne in Ginpen, he thought. The gods did not care who died and who lived. The gods did not have a stake in the affairs of men. It was foolish to think that one could divine their will. It was foolish to think that his vendetta against Emperor Mapidéré meant anything to them other than a balm for his aching, raging heart.

And then he blinked and realized that he was back in the world of men again, the world dominated by Xana, the world where so many were content to live with tyranny, the world where his promises were still unfulfilled.

He had a job to do. He bandaged his legs and closed his eyes to lie wearily until he could limp his way out of the valley, until he could fix the errors in his calculations and try again.

The attempt on the emperor's life from the Er-Mé Mountains, on the road north of Zudi, was the culmination of years of work.

The Porin Plains, basking in the steady sun, generated the rising air currents that could keep the stringless kite aloft.

He strapped himself in, checked everything one last time, and then launched himself over the Imperial Procession, a slow-flowing river of barbaric splendor in the flat expanse below.

And yet he had failed. His aim had been true, but the emperor's Captain of the Imperial Guards had been brave and quick-thinking, and he would never have such a chance again. He was now a wanted man, and throughout the empire they hunted for him, the man who came closer than anyone to assassinating Emperor Mapidéré.

Was it the will of the gods that had saved the emperor? Was it Kiji who had bested Lutho and thus preserved Xana? It was impossible to know what the gods wanted.

There was nowhere safe in the empire for him. All his old friends and the Haan nobles who had once helped him would not hesitate to turn him in now that sheltering him meant death for five genera­tions.

He could think of only one place to go: Tan Adü, the remote southern island where the savage natives kept the Islanders away. Poised between a known terror and an unknown one, he chose to wager his life. After all, Lutho was also the god of gamblers.

He drifted onto the shores of Tan Adü in a raft, half-dead with thirst and hunger. As he crawled up the beach, out of the reach of the tides, he fell into a deep slumber. When he came to, he realized that he was enclosed in a circle made of pairs of feet. He looked up from the feet, up the legs, up the naked bodies, and stared into the eyes of the warriors of Tan Adü.

The Adüans were tall, lanky, and very muscular. They had brown skin like many men of Dara, but it was covered in intricate dark-blue tattoos. The ink patterns glowed with a rainbow sheen in the sunlight. Blond haired and blue eyed, they held spears whose tips seemed to Luan sharp as shark's teeth.

He fainted again.

The Adüans were rumored to be brutal cannibals who killed without mercy—this was the explanation for the failure of the various Tiro states, especially Amu and Cocru, to conquer Tan Adü over the years. The civilized people of Dara simply could not be as savage as the Adüans.

But they did not kill him and eat him, as Luan had feared. Instead, when he woke up, the Adüans were gone. They left him to fend for himself on the island, unmolested.

Luan built himself a hut on the beach, away from the Adüan village. He caught his own fish and cultivated his own taro patch. Nights, he sat in front of his hut and watched the flickering fires in the distant village, around which young men and women with lithe bodies and sweet voices sometimes danced and sang and at other times sat still to listen to old tales being told in new ways.

But he could not believe his good fortune. He was certain that he needed to prove that he was useful to the Adüans to justify their strange mercy. When he caught a particularly large fish or found a bush loaded with more juicy berries than he could eat, he would bring the excess to the village and leave an offering at the border.

Curious Adüan children began to visit his hut. At first, they acted as if they were approaching the lair of some dangerous animal, shrieking in laughter and running away if Luan showed signs that he had seen them. So he pretended to be oblivious until the children were so close that the pretense was no longer possible, at which point he would look up and smile at them, and a few of the boldest would smile back.

He found he was able to communicate with the children through a set of gestures and signs—it was impossible to feel self-conscious when faced with their open smiles and infectious laugh.

They made him understand that the villagers found him peculiar, with his habit of leaving them gifts.

He spread his hands open and put on an exaggerated look of confusion.

The children pulled at his clothes—now little more than rags—and made him come with them back to the village. There was a dance and a feast, and he was made to join in the eating and drinking as though he were already one of them.

In the morning, he moved into the village and built himself a new hut.

Only months later, after he had acquired some facility with their language, did he finally understand how strange his behavior had seemed.

“Why did you hold yourself apart,” Kyzen, the chief's son, asked, “as though you were a stranger?”

“Wasn't I?”

“The sea is vast and the islands few and small. Before the power of the sea, all of us are helpless and naked like newborns. Anyone who drifts onto shore becomes a brother.”

It was odd to hear such a note of compassion from a people reputed to be savage, but by then Luan Zya was finally ready to accept that he really knew nothing about the Adüans at all. So much received wisdom was not wisdom at all, just like so much of what men imagined as signs from the gods were only wishes in their heads. It was best to attend to the world of what
was
, rather than what he
had been told
.

The Adüans called him
Toru-noki
, which meant “long-legged crab.”

“Why did you name me that?” he finally asked.

“That's what we thought you looked like, when you crawled up from the sea.”

He laughed, and together they drank bowls full of strong, sweet arrack, fermented from coconuts and with a kick that made one see stars.

Luan Zya wanted to be happy living the rest of his life as an Adüan, never again having to concern himself with the mysterious signs of the gods or impossible promises he made as a boy.

He learned the secrets that the Adüans knew: to see the sun-­dappled ocean not as a featureless expanse, but as a living realm crisscrossed with currents as neatly laid out as roads; to comprehend as well as imitate the calls of colorful birds, clever monkeys, and fierce wolves; to make useful implements out of everything one laid eyes on.

In return, he showed his friends how to predict eclipses of the sun and the moon, how to track the passage of the seasons with precision, how to divine the weather and estimate the coming year's taro harvest.

But his nights began to be filled with dark dreams that left him drenched in sweat. Old memories surfaced and refused to sink. The sight of burning books and the voices of dying scholars seized his mind. His heart yearned for the task he thought he had left behind.

“The aspen wishes to stand still,” his friend Kyzen said as he saw the look in Luan Zya's eyes. “But the wind does not stop.”

“Brother,” Luan said, and then the two men stopped and drank arrack together, which was better than any sad speech.

And so, seven years after Luan Zya became
Toru-noki
, he said good-bye to his new people and left Tan Adü in a coconut raft headed for the Big Island.