Children of the Dragon

by Frank Robinson

  Pasny was a sharecropper on the great estate of Kalanhi, which stretched from Anayatnas halfway to Zidneppa, the proud domain of Jhay Parmar Harkout. For an Urhemmedhin tenant farmer, Pasny was well off, working almost a double-sized plot, and a very fertile one at that. With good crops even in the hard past year, Pasny had been able to put some money aside. They lived simply, but not in poverty.

  The farmer treated Maiya not as a servant, but almost as though she were his daughter. He was an indulgent master who sometimes, after trips into town, would bring her hair ribbons or other little presents. Nevertheless, Maiya held Gadour at arm’s-length. She never answered his questions about her past, never told him who she really was or how she had become pregnant.

  Several months after her arrival at the farm, Maiya gave birth. Gadour had brought in a midwife from Anayatnas to assure a safe delivery—a wild extrava- gance, especially since the child was not his own.

  “It’s a boy,” he told her enthusiastically when she awoke. “What are you going to name him?”

  Maiya thought for a moment. “Jehan,” she said.

  Pasny nodded approvingly. “Jehan; that’s a fine name. It means man. I’m sure your little one will grow to be quite a man one day.”

  The farmer clucked the infant under the chin. “He ought to have a proper family name, though.”

  “He has a family name,” Maiya murmured.

  “Oh, well, he could have your name, Draviyana, that’s true. But he should have a father’s name. Let his name be Jehan Pasny.”

  Maiya did not want to marry Gadour Pasny, but had no strong feelings against it. He was a decent enough man, who had been good to her. If it made him happy, and preserved her place on his farm, Maiya was willing to marry him. She could not face being cast out into poverty.

  She gave her husband two more children, both of them daughters; she insisted upon naming them Jenefa and Tsevni. The entire brood was thus expanded to six, and became a wearying occupation. Filled with children, cooking, washing, and working in the fields, years passed.

  Maiya settled stolidly into this life, harder than she’d have wished but pacific in its drab security. Conditions throughout the province continued to be poor, but Pasny’s rich earth still yielded good crops, and the growing family was well fed. There was-no reason to think she would not end her days here, an old matriarch with grandchildren, Mother Maiya Draviyana Pasny.

  And yet, there was a shallowness about her role here that told Maiya this was nothing but an interlude. Everything—the farm, her husband, even her daughters—smacked of unreality. This was not really her life. Only Jehan, her firstborn, was real to her, a concrete enclave of Maiya’s true realm. In her son, she saw the dungeon, her father, and the nightmare of her life that could never really be escaped.

  Secretly she would call the boy not Jehan Pasny, but Jehan Henghmani. Her husband was never told who the father was, although Maiya herself never doubted who it was.

  Sometimes Gadour Pasny would be chilled to see her staring, with half-crazed eyes, at nothing. Often at night she would writhe convulsively, choked by vivid and terrible dreams. Pasny was terrified to watch her, but he never guessed that her torment was no dreamworld at all.

  Gossip drifted from the town of Anayatnas: A man had been seen at Sratamzar, calling himself Brashir Atokhad. It was said that he was a monstrous giant, that he really was Jehan Henghmani, risen from the dead. Many people scoffed, but Maiya listened carefully to the gossip.

  And then, more: Up in the hills, hidden in the forests, a bandit army was coalescing, harking back to the days when the notorious Man Eater rode roughshod over the province. The new brigand leader was in fact spoken of as Jehan himself, with awe and skepticism in equal portions. And so potent was the mystique of the Jehan Henghmani legend that despite skepticism, the outlaws of Taroloweh were flocking to this new Jehan.

  Maiya contrived frequent errands to take her into Anayatnas, so that she could ferret out the latest rumors. Of course, it wasn’t really the old Jehan resurrected, the people said; and even had Maiya wished to seek him out, she would not have known where to look. So she held her tongue and waited. -

  At last, one day, it was her husband who brought the electrifying news.

  “Maiya, I’ve heard the most remarkable thing! This new Jehan Henghmani’s finally struck, and in a big way! He’s taken Zidneppa, taken it—killed the Mayor and wiped out the Tnemghadi garrison! Only the priests got away. Those accursed jackals wormed their way out through an underground tunnel! How do you like that?”

  “And what do they say about Jehan?”

  “Oh, he’s a pretty grim customer, an ugly giant like the old Jehan. But this one’s even worse, they say. He’s a regular monster with his face all chopped up. You wouldn’t want to cross paths with him, Maiya, eh?”

  Gadour Pasny’s wife stared back at him, stared right through him.

  “What’s the matter, Maiya, have I frightened you?”

  “No,” she said. “You haven’t frightened me.” Her voice was cold and distant, as were her eyes. She took off her apron, and then separated her son, Jehan, from the other children playing in a corner of the room.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just for a little walk,” said Maiya, taking her son by the hand. “I’ll be back soon.”

  Gadour Pasny never saw them again.

  She had left for good, left her husband and even her own two daughters. They were part of the unreality that was now over. Maiya left everything behind her, except for the young Jehan.

  Her new life, her real life, was her father. She lived with him in the Zidneppa temple, and stayed perpetually close by him. Daughter, maidservant, valet—so completely did she devote herself to him. She cooked his meals, washed his clothes and mended them, prepared his bed. No chore was beneath her. She was a slave, a worshipper, a penitent.

  The other axis about which she orbited was the boy. Jehandai, little Jehan, she insisted, was not her father’s grandson. The boy, she swore, could only have been sired by his namesake. She was convinced that her father would come to rule an empire, and his son, her son, would be the heir. Maiya, through her flesh, would rule.

  Jehan loved playing with the little boy, making him funny hats out of parchment sheets, bouncing him on his knee. “My little grandson, Jehandai,” he would say fondly.

  “No. He is your son,” Maiya always answered. She pressed this claim persistently, and with equal persistence Jehan refused to entertain it.

  “How can you deny your son his rightful place?” she would argue.

  “And you would brand him illegitimate, or even worse, conceived in incest. It is unspeakable, better wiped from memory than harped upon. Take care, Maiya, that people don’t hear you talk this way.”

  “But it is the truth. You deny the truth.”

  “Whose truth?”

  “There can be only one truth!”

  “For a man who rules,” said Jehan quietly, “there can be many truths. I have learned this much already in my brief career. The truth is merely what the ruler deems true.”

  “Or what is manifest,” argued Maiya doggedly. “Not even an emperor can turn black to white!”

  “Manifest truth? What is manifest is only that Jehandai is the son of my daughter. Nothing else.”

  “O, Paban, have you no place in your heart for your son?” she wailed, the last word tom out of her.

  Jehan shook his head wearily. Ever since Maiya’s arrival at Zidneppa, she had been possessed of this dual obsession: her father and her son. She seemed to glory in the idea that her child was the product of carnal relations with her father! Jehan Henghmani didn’t understand.

  Maiya closed her eyes and submitted to a kiss of affection. They would cease arguing, for the time being. It made no difference, Jehan had no male descendants but Jehandai. The little boy, whether son or grandson, w
as equally the heir.

  Maiya composed herself and vouchsafed a smile, for the time being.

  11

  AND STILL JEHAN Henghmani paced and fretted, waiting for Jhay Parmar Harkout to deliver the agreed-upon sum.

  To stop the baron’s stalling, Jehan put a sharp deadline on his demand. He gave Harkout just four more days to pay the bribe. Unless Harkout complied, the Zidneppa grain and rice bins would be promptly opened. But this was not a threat for whose execution Jehan had any zest. What he wanted was the money.

  Meanwhile, inevitably, rumors spread of his bargain with the Lord of Kalanhi. And the people merely shrugged in resignation. In eight hundred years, nothing had changed. Jehan seemed to behave just like the Tnemghadi, keeping the food-stores locked up to enrich himself while the people starved. Why expect otherwise? It was a fact of life that the interests of the rich must conjoin with the interests of those holding power.

  Yet it was precisely because of this that Jehan alone understood how fundamentally the great barons were his enemies. No one realized better than Jehan that he was not a power holder at all. No matter that he strutted in Zidneppa, the Emperor at Ksiritsa was where the real power lay. The land barons—both Tnemghadi and Urhemmedhin—were still wedded to their alliance with the Emperor and his satraps and military muscle.

  Those barons would never reconcile themselves to a bandit in place of the Emperor. Only necessity had driven them to deal with Jehan now, and even so, they would expect him to abscond into the hills with their money, or else be crushed by the Imperium.

  Jehan could not make these barons his enemies, regardless of what he might do, simply because they were his enemies already. Since he could never win them over, it cost him nothing to betray them.

  So, when at last they met his deadline and paid the bribe—carts laden with gold, enough to feed and arm a great horde—Jehan Henghmani opened the granaries anyway, and sold every bit of grain and rice at the lowest price in history.

  He gave it away, free.

  Of course, once he had decided to double-cross the barons, he could have made even more money by selling the grain and rice for whatever it would bring. But while he did need money to equip an army, there was a prior need, and that was to raise an army.

  This he aimed to do through political appeal. He was not merely double-crossing the barons, he was doing it for the sole benefit of the peasantry, and he hoped this would attract them to his banner by the thousands. No longer would Jehan Henghmani be the bandit marauder who plundered villages. Henceforward he would be the white knight of populism, the tribune of the people, redeemer of the downtrodden.

  It was all carefully calculated. Even before they swooped down on Zidneppa, Jehan’s men had been instructed in detail, given an inkling of what he had in mind. Restraint now, they were told, would pay ample dividends later. There would be no looting at Zidneppa, there would be no burning, no rape. They were not in Zidneppa to abuse the inhabitants, but, quite the contrary, to curry their favor. Once the people had trembled at the mention of Jehan Henghmani’s name. Now they would cheer it. Once they had hated his ragtag army; now they would join it.

  Jehan’s men were a motley assortment of thieves, cutthroats, and outlaws, the poor, the wretched, and the depraved. But all of them were bound by the power of Jehan’s magnetism, and they obeyed him fully and without cavil. They not only behaved themselves in Zidneppa with complete decorum, but they actually became the city’s police force.

  They replaced the old constabulary, mostly Tnemghadi, which was disbanded. Like the Mayor and the garrison, the old police were unloved in Zidneppa. They had functioned to protect the property of the city’s Tnemghadi upper class. When ordinary citizens were victimized by crimes, the police typically did nothing. They were seen not as guardians of public order, but as one cog in the machinery of oppression.

  Nevertheless, the citizens at first viewed the replacements with alarm. Bad as the old police had been, would the new force, made up of outlaws, be any better? These people had been weaned on hair-raising tales of outlaw mayhem. But it did not take long for them to gain confidence in Jehan’s new police force.

  Its members might be thieves, but they did not steal. Indeed, in Zidneppa now, the apocryphal brotherhood among thieves did not obtain, at least not between Jehan’s thieves and the indigenous variety. The former proved to be the scourge of the latter, rooting them out and bringing them to justice. The new magistrate, the handsome Leopard Ubuvasakh, commenced holding court sessions in the main square, and the trials became an almost daily public spectacle. Almost no one was acquitted in that court. The mere fact that one of Jehan’s men had collared the miscreant was deemed sufficient evidence of guilt. And Ubuvasakh’s justice was as rigorous as it was certain. For thieves, the traditional penalty— severing a hand—was administered without mercy, and then the villains would be kicked out of town.

  Few tried to come back.

  An army of criminals had given Zidneppa to Jehan, but he knew that more could be gained from stamping out the criminal element than by absorbing it. So, just out of the dungeon, this chieftain of a cutthroat band became the most relentless persecutor of public enemies that Zidneppa ever saw.

  Even before the free grain distribution, this clean-up won the townspeople to his support. Many of them, in fact, including citizens of substance, volunteered to join his new constabulary. One of these was a stocky, pugnacious fish dealer named Revi Ontondra, who had often loudly protested about the derelictions of the Tnemghadi police. Ontondra’s outspokenness had caused him to be regarded as a troublemaker, and the response of the old police to his criticism was to harass him. He was even once jailed on a trumped-up charge, but so great was the public outcry that the Mayor was compelled to set him free. Revi Ontondra welcomed the change brought by Jehan, and was quick to lend a hand, becoming in fact an officer in the new police force. This fish dealer played a major role in molding Jehan’s force into a citizen militia.

  Most of those prosecuted by the new regime at Zidneppa were petty thieves, hoodlums, and gangsters, but they were not the only ones. Jehan knew, just as did the commonfolk, who the real victimizers were. The minor criminals were a public nuisance, but the major force keeping the people in poverty was the systematic exploitation practiced upon them by a handful of commercial princelings.

  Nemir Alatassi Qapuriah was a very wealthy man who operated several lucrative businesses. Most of his fortune was made as a wholesale purveyor of foodstuffs. He lived in a large mansion near the edge of town, attended by many servants. This Qapuriah had been considerably irritated by Jehan Henghmani’s seizure of Zidneppa, and by the murder of his friends, the Mayor and General Nem. Closeted in his big house, the rich man waited for the storm to pass, waited for Jehan Henghmani and his bandits to head back into the hills.

  The brutal executions had been shocking to Qapuriah; the great grain holiday was an even bigger shock. Although Qapuriah could understand a bandit who would butcher an old official, he could not make head nor tail of a bandit who gave away valuable produce for free. The rich man became increasingly apprehensive.

  Two days after the grain holiday, there was a knock on the door of his big house. A servant opened it; standing outside was Jephos Kirdahi with a squad of rough-looking men. Despite his intimidating appearance, Kirdahi was scrupulously polite in inquiring if the master was at home.

  With equal politeness, the servant explained that Qapuriah was not to be disturbed.

  Shoving the servant aside, Kirdahi and his men invaded the house. The other servants, and the Qapuriah family, were aghast, and cowered in corners while the intruders combed through the mansion. It did not take them long to find Nemir Qapuriah, relaxing in his study.

  “You are under arrest,” said Kirdahi bluntly.

  “Pah!” said the rich man dressed in fine robes, and he glowered haughtily at Kirdahi. “Where is your warrant? For what offense do yo
u purport to make this arrest? By what law? What is your authority?”

  Kirdahi was unperturbed by Qapuriah’s spouting. “These armed men are my authority,” he said.

  “So might makes right, is that it?” Qapuriah was more indignant than afraid. “Well, let me tell you, this is completely improper, it’s an outrage. You can’t break into homes like this and seize people. What law have I violated, I ask you again?”

  “You will find out at your trial.”

  “Oh, so I am to have a mock trial, eh? But don’t tell me the charges, that would not suit you. I am to be given a trial, but no opportunity to defend myself.”

  “There will be no need for you to mount a defense,” said Kirdahi, “since the outcome of the trial has already been decided.”

  “Your candor is remarkable,” Qapuriah said wrily.

  But this was as much of a discussion as Kirdahi would countenance. He ordered his men to seize the merchant by the arms.

  “Get your hands off me, you swine. I’ll not be dragged like a carcass.”

  “Save your breath, old fellow. You can’t tell us what to do.”

  The men took Qapuriah by the arms. He did not squirm or resist, but held his arms stiffly in the air, as though he were leading his captors, rather than the other way around. They hustled him through the house, before the horrified eyes of his family and servants, and out the front door. Down through the City of Zidneppa they took him on foot. People stopped in astonishment to see so eminent a personage being shoved through the streets. Many dropped what they were doing and followed, to see what would unfold.

  At the central square, the court had already been set up. The commencement of the trial awaited only the defendant’s arrival. A crowd had gathered thickly around, and now it swelled even further with those who had followed Qapuriah through the streets. Word had spread quickly of this event, and it seemed as though the entire city was turning out to witness it.