The Poppy War

by R. F. Kuang

  Rin expected that the nine stories of the pagoda would be proper floors connected by flights of stairs, but the interior was merely a winding staircase that led to the very top, an empty cylinder of air in the middle. A solitary beam of sunlight shone in from a square opening in the ceiling, illuminating dust motes floating through the air. A series of musty paintings had been hung on the sides of the staircase. They looked like they hadn’t been cleaned in decades.

  “This is where the statues to the Four Gods used to stand,” said Jiang, pointing up into the dark void.

  “Where are they now?”

  He shrugged. “The Red Emperor had most religious imagery stripped and looted when he took over Sinegard. Most of it’s been melted down into jewelry. But that doesn’t matter.” He beckoned for Rin to follow him up the staircase.

  He lectured as they climbed. “Martial arts came to the Empire by way of a warrior named Bodhidharma from the southeastern continent. When Bodhidharma found the Empire during his travels of the world, he journeyed to a monastery and demanded entry, but the head abbot refused him entrance. So Bodhidharma sat his ass in a nearby cave and faced the wall for nine years, listening to the ants scream.”

  “Listening to what?”

  “The ants scream, Runin. Keep up.”

  She muttered something unrepeatable. Jiang ignored her.

  “Legend has it that the intensity of his gaze bored a hole into the cave wall. The monks were either so moved by his religious commitment or so seriously impressed that anyone could be so obstinate that they finally let him into their temple.” Jiang paused in front of a painting depicting a dark-skinned warrior and a group of pale men in robes. “That’s Bodhidharma there in the center.”

  “That guy on the left has blood spurting out of a stump,” Rin observed.

  “Yeah. Legend also has it that one monk was so impressed with his commitment that he cut off his hand in sympathy.”

  Rin recalled the myth of Mai’rinnen Tearza committing suicide for the sake of Speer’s unification with the mainland. Martial arts history seemed to be riddled with people making pointless sacrifices.

  “Anyhow. The monks at the temple were interested in what Bodhidharma had to say, but because of their sedentary lives and poor diets, they were weak as shit. Scrawnier than you, even. Kept falling asleep during his lectures. Bodhidharma found this somewhat annoying, so he devised three sets of exercises to improve their health. Now, these monks were in constant physical danger from outlaws and robbers, but were also forbidden by their religious code to carry weapons, so they modified many of the exercises to form a system of weaponless self-defense.”

  Jiang stopped before another painting. It depicted a row of monks lined up on a wall, frozen in identical stances.

  Rin was amazed. “That’s—”

  “Seejin’s first form. Yeah.” Jiang nodded in approval. “Bodhidharma warned the monks that martial arts was about the refinement of the individual. Martial arts used well would produce a wise commander, a man who could see clearly through fog and understand the will of the gods. The martial arts in their conception were not meant solely as military tools.”

  Rin struggled to envision the techniques Jun had taught their class as purely health exercises. “But there had to be an evolution in the arts.”

  “Correct.” Jiang waited for her to ask the question he wanted to hear.

  She obliged. “When did the arts become adapted for mass military use?”

  Jiang bobbed his head, pleased. “Shortly before the days of the Red Emperor, the Empire was invaded by the horsemen from the Hinterlands to the north. The occupation force introduced a number of repressive measures to control the indigenous population, which included forbidding the Nikara to carry weapons.”

  Jiang stopped again before a painting depicting a horde of Hinterlander hunters riding upon massive steeds. Their faces were twisted into wild, barbaric scowls. They held bows that were longer than their torsos. At the bottom of the painting, Nikara monks were shown cowering in fear or strewn about in various states of dismemberment.

  “The temples that were once havens of nonviolence became instead a sanctuary for anti-Northerner rebels and a center for revolutionary planning and training. Soldiers and sympathizers would don monks’ robes and shave their heads, but train for war within the temple grounds. In sacred spaces like these, they plotted the overthrow of their oppressors.”

  “And health exercises would hardly have helped them,” Rin said. “The martial techniques had to be adapted.”

  Jiang nodded again. “Exactly. The arts then taught in the temple required the progressive mastery of hundreds of long, intricate forms. These could take decades to master. The leaders of the rebellion, thankfully, realized that this approach was unsuitable to the rapid development of a fighting force.”

  Jiang turned around to face her. They had reached the top of the pagoda. “And so modern martial arts were developed: a system based on human biomechanics rather than the movements of animals. The enormous variety of techniques, some of which were only marginally useful to a soldier, were distilled into an essential core of forms that could be taught to a soldier in five years rather than fifty. This is the basis of what you are taught at Sinegard. This is the common core that is taught to the Imperial Militia. This is what your classmates are learning.” He grinned. “I am showing you how to beat it.”

  Jiang was an effective if unconventional combat instructor. He made her hold her kicks up in the air for long minutes until her leg trembled. He made her duck as he hurled projectiles at her off the weapons rack. He made her do the same exercise blindfolded, and then admitted later that he just thought it would be funny.

  “You’re a real asshole,” she said. “You know that, right?”

  Once Jiang was pleased with her fundamentals, they began to spar. They sparred every day, for hours at a time. They sparred bare-fisted and with weapons; sometimes she was bare-fisted while he bore a weapon.

  “Your state of mind is just as important as the state of your body,” Jiang lectured. “In the confusion of a fight, your mind must be still and steady as a rock. You must be grounded in your center, able to see and control everything. Each of the five elements must be in balance. Too much fire, and you’ll lash out recklessly. Too much air and you’ll fight skittishly, always on the defensive. Too much earth, and—are you even listening?”

  She was not. It was hard to concentrate while Jiang jabbed an unguarded halberd at her, forcing her to dance around to avoid sudden impalement.

  By and large, Jiang’s metaphors meant little to her, but she learned quickly to avoid injury. And perhaps that was his point. She developed muscle memory. She learned that there were only so many permutations to the way a human body could move, only so many attack combinations that worked, that she could reasonably expect from her opponent. She learned to react automatically to these. She learned to predict Jiang’s moves seconds in advance, to read from the tilt of his torso and the flicker of his eyes what he was about to do next.

  He pushed her relentlessly. He fought the hardest when she was exhausted. When she fell, he attacked her as soon as she’d gotten back on her feet. She learned to stay constantly on guard, to react to the slightest movements in her peripheral vision.

  The day came when she angled her hip against his just so, forced his weight to the side and jammed all her force at an angle that hurled him over her right shoulder.

  Jiang skidded across the stone floor and bumped against the garden wall, which shook the shelves so that a potted cactus came perilously close to shattering on the ground.

  Jiang lay there for a moment, dazed. Then he looked up, met her eyes, and grinned.

  Rin’s last day with Sunzi was the hardest.

  Sunzi was no longer an adorable piglet but an absurdly fat monster that smelled heinously bad. It wasn’t remotely cute. Any affection Rin had felt for those trusting brown eyes was negated by the animal’s massive girth.

  Carrying S
unzi up the mountain was torture. Sunzi no longer fit in any sort of sling or basket. Rin had to drape it over her shoulders, grasping it by its two front legs.

  She could hardly move as fast as she had when Sunzi could still be cradled in her arms, but she had to, unless she wanted to go without breakfast—or worse, miss class. She rose earlier. She ran faster. She staggered up the mountain, gasping for air with every step. Sunzi lay against her back with its snout resting over one of her shoulders, basking in the morning sun while Rin’s muscles screamed with resentment. When she reached Sunzi’s drinking area, she let the pig drop to the ground and collapsed.

  “Drink, you glutton,” she grumbled as Sunzi frolicked in the stream. “I can’t wait until the day they carve you up and eat you.”

  On her way down the mountain, the sun began to beat down in earnest, eliciting rivulets of sweat all over Rin’s body despite the winter cold. She limped through the meatpacking district to the Widow Maung’s cottage and deposited Sunzi gracelessly on the floor.

  It rolled over, squealed loudly and ran in a circle, chasing its own tail.

  The Widow Maung came out to the front carrying a bucket of slops.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” Rin panted.

  The Widow Maung shook her head. “There won’t be a tomorrow. Not for this one, anyway.” She rubbed Sunzi’s snout. “This one’s going to the butcher tonight.”

  Rin blinked. “What? So soon?”

  “Sunzi’s already reached his peak weight.” The Widow Maung slapped Sunzi’s sides. “Look at that girth. None of my pigs have ever grown so heavy. Perhaps your crazy teacher was right about the mountain water. Maybe I should send all my pigs up there.”

  Rin rather hoped that she didn’t. Chest still heaving, she bowed low to the widow. “Thank you for letting me carry your pig.”

  The Widow Maung harrumphed. “Academy freaks,” she muttered under her breath, and began to lead Sunzi back to the sty. “Come on, you. Let’s get you ready for the butcher.”

  Oink? Sunzi looked imploringly at Rin.

  “Don’t look at me,” Rin said. “It’s the end of the road for you.”

  She couldn’t help but feel a stab of guilt; the longer she looked at Sunzi, the more she was reminded of its piglet form. She tore her eyes away from its dull, naive gaze and headed back up the mountain.

  “Already?” Jiang looked surprised when Rin reported Sunzi’s fate. He was sitting on the far wall of the garden, swinging his legs over the edge like an energetic child. “Ah, I had high hopes for that pig. But in the end, swine are swine. How do you feel?”

  “I’m devastated,” Rin said. “Sunzi and I were finally starting to understand each other.”

  “No, you sod. Your arms. Your core. Your legs. How do they feel?”

  She frowned and swung her arms about. “Sore?”

  Jiang jumped off the wall and walked toward her. “I’m going to hit you,” he announced.

  “Wait, what?”

  She dug her heels into the ground and only managed to get her elbows up right before he slammed a fist at her face.

  The force of his punch was enormous—harder than he’d ever hit her. She knew she should have deflected the blow at an angle, sent the ki dispersing into the air where it would dispel harmlessly. But she was too startled to do anything but block it head-on. She barely remembered to crouch so that the ki behind his punch channeled harmlessly through her body and into the ground.

  A crack like a thunderbolt echoed beneath her.

  Rin jumped back, stunned. The stone under her feet had splintered under the force of the dispelled energy. One long crack ran between her feet to the edge of the stone block.

  They both stared down at it. The crack continued to splinter the stone floor, crawling all the way to the far end of the garden, where it stopped at the base of the willow tree.

  Jiang threw his head back and laughed.

  It was a high, wild laugh. He laughed like his lungs were bellows. He laughed like he was nothing human. He spread his arms out and windmilled them in the air, and danced with giddy abandon.

  “You darling child,” he said, spinning toward her. “You brilliant child.”

  Rin’s face split into a grin.

  Fuck it, she thought, and leaped up to embrace him.

  He picked her up and swung her through the air, around and around among the kaleidoscopically colorful mushrooms.

  They sat together under the willow tree, staring serenely at the poppy plants. The wind was still today. Snow continued to fall lightly over the garden, but the first inklings of spring had arrived. The furious winter winds had gone to blow elsewhere; the air felt settled, for once. Peaceful.

  “No more training today,” Jiang said. “You rest. Sometimes you must loose the string to let the arrow fly.”

  Rin rolled her eyes.

  “You have to pledge Lore,” Jiang continued excitedly. “No one—no one, not even Altan, picked things up this fast.”

  Rin suddenly felt very awkward. How was she to tell him the only reason she wanted to learn combat was so she could get through the Trials and study with Irjah?

  Jiang hated lies. Rin decided she might as well be straightforward. “I’d been thinking about pledging Strategy,” she said hesitantly. “Irjah said he might bid for me.”

  He waved his hand. “Irjah can’t teach you anything you couldn’t learn by yourself. Strategy’s a limited subject. Spend enough time in the field with Sunzi’s Principles by your bed, and you’ll pick up everything you need to win a campaign.”

  “But . . .”

  “Who are the gods? Where do they reside? Why do they do what they do? These are the fundamental questions of Lore. I can teach you more than ki manipulation. I can show you the pathway to the gods. I can make you a shaman.”

  Gods and shamans? It was often difficult to tell when Jiang was joking and when he wasn’t, but he seemed genuinely convinced that he could talk to heavenly powers.

  She swallowed. “Sir . . .”

  “This is important,” Jiang insisted. “Please, Rin. This is a dying art. The Red Emperor almost succeeded in killing it. If you don’t learn it, if no one learns it, then it disappears for good.”

  The sudden desperation in his voice made her intensely uncomfortable.

  She twisted a blade of grass between her fingers. Certainly she was curious about Lore, but she knew better than to throw away four years of training under Irjah to chase a subject that the other masters had long ago lost faith in. She hadn’t come to Sinegard to pursue stories on a whim, especially stories that were disdained by everyone else in the capital.

  She was admittedly fascinated by myths and legends, and the way that Jiang made them sound almost real. But she was more interested in making it past the Trials. And an apprenticeship with Irjah opened doors at the Militia. It all but guaranteed an officer position and her choice of division. Irjah had contacts with each of the Twelve Warlords, and his protégées always found esteemed placements.

  She could lead troops of her own within a year of graduating. She could be a nationally renowned commander within five. She couldn’t throw that away on a mere fancy.

  “Sir, I just want to learn to be a good soldier,” she said.

  Jiang’s face fell.

  “You and the rest of this school,” he said.

  Chapter 7

  Jiang did not appear in the garden the next day, or the day after. Rin went to the garden faithfully in the hope that he would return, but she knew, deep down, that Jiang was done with teaching her.

  One week later she saw him in the mess hall. She abruptly put her bowl down and made a beeline toward him. She had no clue what she might say, but knew that she needed to at least talk to him. She would apologize, promise to study with him even if she became Irjah’s apprentice, or say something . . .

  Before she could corner him he upended his tray over a startled apprentice’s head and dashed out the kitchen door.

  “Great Tortoise,” said
Kitay. “What did you do to him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Jiang was unpredictable and fragile, like an easily startled wild animal, and she hadn’t realized how precious his attention was until she had scared him away.

  After that, he acted as if he didn’t even know her. She continued to see brief glimpses of him around campus, just as everyone did, but he refused to acknowledge her.

  She should have tried harder to patch things up with him. She should have actively sought him out and admitted her mistake, nebulous though it was.

  But she found it less and less of a priority as the term came to an end, and the competition between the first-years reached a frenzied peak.

  Throughout the year, the possibility of being culled from Sinegard had hung like a sword over their heads. Now that threat was imminent. In two weeks they would undergo the series of exams that constituted the Trials.

  Raban relayed the rules to them. The Trials would be administered and observed by the entire faculty. Depending on their performance, the masters would submit bids for apprenticeship. If a student received no bids, he or she would leave the Academy in disgrace.

  Enro exempted all students who were not intent on pledging Medicine from her exam, but the other subjects—Linguistics, History, Strategy, Combat, and Weaponry—were mandatory. There was, of course, no scheduled exam for Lore.

  “Irjah, Jima, Yim, and Sonnen give oral exams,” said Raban. “You’ll be questioned in front of a panel of the masters. They’ll take turns interrogating you, and if you mess up, that’s the end of your session for that subject. The more questions you answer, the more you get to prove how much you know. So study hard—and speak carefully.”

  Jun did not conduct an oral exam. The Combat exam consisted of the Tournament.

  This would take course over the two days of exams. The first-years would duel in the rings using the same rules that the apprentices used in their matches. They would compete in three preliminary rounds determined by random draws, and based on their win-loss ratios, eight would advance to elimination rounds. Those eight would be placed in a randomized bracket and fight one another until the final round.