by R. F. Kuang
She took a shuddering breath. “I—I can’t. Fight it.”
“Ah, Runin. You don’t understand. You’re my soldier now. You follow orders. I tell you to jump, you ask how high.”
“But I can’t,” she repeated, frustrated.
Vaisra lifted his left hand, briefly examined his knuckles, and then slammed the back of his hand across her face.
She stumbled backward, more from the shock than the force. Her face registered no pain, only an intense sting, like she’d walked straight into a bolt of lightning. She touched a finger to her lip. It came away bloody.
“You hit me,” she said, dazed.
He grasped her chin tightly in his fingers and forced her to look up at him. She was too stunned to feel any rage. She wasn’t angry, she was only afraid. No one dared to touch her like this. No one had for a long time.
No one since Altan.
“I’ve broken in Speerlies before.” Vaisra traced a thumb across her cheek. “You’re not the first. Sallow skin. Sunken eyes. You’re smoking your life away. Anyone could smell it on you. Do you know why the Speerlies died young? It wasn’t their penchant for constant warfare, and it wasn’t their god. They were smoking themselves to death. Right now I wouldn’t give you six months.”
He dug his nails into her skin so hard that she gasped. “That ends now. You’re cut off. You can smoke yourself to death after you’ve done what I need you for. But only after.”
Rin stared at him in shock. The pain was starting to seep in, first a little sting and then a great throbbing bruise across her entire face. A sob rose up in her throat. “But it hurts so much . . .”
“Oh, Runin. Poor little Runin.” He smoothed her hair out of her eyes and leaned in close. “Fuck your pain. What you’re dealing with is nothing that a little discipline can’t solve. You’re capable of blocking out the Phoenix. Your mind can build up its own defenses, and you just haven’t done it because you’re using the opium as a safe way out.”
“Because I need—”
“You need discipline.” Vaisra forced her head up farther. “You must concentrate. Fortify your mind. I know you hear the screaming. Learn to live with it. Altan did.”
Rin could taste blood staining her teeth when she spoke. “I’m not Altan.”
“Then learn to be,” he said.
So Rin suffered alone in her quarters, with the door bolted shut, guarded from the outside by three soldiers, at her own request.
She couldn’t bear lying on her bed. The sheets scratched at her skin and exacerbated the terrible prickling that had spread across her body. She wound up curled on the floor with her head between her knees, rocking back and forth, biting her knuckles to keep from screaming. Her whole body cramped and shivered, racked with wave after wave of what felt like someone stamping slowly on each of her internal organs.
The ship’s physician had refused to give her any sedatives on the grounds that she would just trade her opium addiction for a milder substance, so she had nothing to silence her mind, nothing to quell the visions that flashed through her eyes every time she closed them, a combination of the Phoenix’s never-ending visual tour of horrors and her own opioid-driven hallucinations.
And, of course, Altan. Her visions always came back to Altan. Sometimes he was burning on the pier; sometimes he was strapped to an operating table, groaning in pain, and sometimes he wasn’t injured at all, but those visions hurt the most, because then he would be talking to her—
Her cheek still burned from the force of Vaisra’s blow, but in her visions it was Altan who struck her, smiling cruelly as she stared stupidly up at him.
“You hit me,” she said.
“I had to,” he answered. “Someone had to. You deserved it.”
Did she deserve it? She didn’t know. The only version of the truth that mattered was Altan’s, and in her visions, Altan thought she deserved to die.
“You’re a failure,” he said.
“You can’t come close to what I did,” he said.
“It should have been you,” he said.
And under everything, the unspoken command: Avenge me, avenge me, avenge me . . .
Sometimes, fleetingly, the visions became a terribly twisted fantasy where Altan was not hurting her. A version where he loved her instead, and his strikes were caresses. But they were fundamentally irreconcilable because Altan’s nature was the same as the fire that had devoured him: if he didn’t burn everyone around him, then he wasn’t himself.
Sleep came finally through sheer exhaustion, but then only in short, fitful bursts; every time she nodded off she awoke screaming, and it was only by biting her knuckles and pressing herself into the corner that she could remain quiet throughout the night.
“Fuck you, Vaisra,” she whispered. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
But she couldn’t hate Vaisra, not really. It may have just been the sheer exhaustion; she was so racked with fear, grief, and rage that it was a trial to feel anything more. But she knew she needed this. She’d known for months she was killing herself and that she didn’t have the self-control to stop, that the only person who might have stopped her was dead.
She needed someone who was capable of controlling her like no one since Altan could. She hated to admit it, but she knew that in Vaisra she might have found a savior.
Daytime was worse. Sunlight was a constant hammer on Rin’s skull. But if she stayed cooped up in her quarters any longer, she would lose her mind, so Nezha accompanied her outside, keeping a tight grip on her arm while they walked along the top deck.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
It was a stupid question, asked more to break the silence than anything, because it should have been obvious how she was doing: she hadn’t slept, she was trembling uncontrollably from both exhaustion and withdrawal, and eventually, she hoped, she would reach the point where she simply fell unconscious.
“Talk to me,” she said.
“About what?”
“Anything. Literally anything else.”
So he started telling her court stories in a low murmur that wouldn’t give her a headache; trivial tales of gossip about who was fucking this Warlord’s wife, who had really fathered that Warlord’s son.
Rin watched him while he spoke. If she focused on the most minute details of his face, it distracted her from the pain, just for a little bit. The way his left eye opened just slightly wider than his right now. The way his eyebrows arched. The way his scars curled over his right cheek to resemble a poppy flower.
He was so much taller than she was. She had to crane her head to look up at him. When had he gotten so tall? At Sinegard they had been about the same height, nearly the same build, until their second year, when he’d started bulking up at a ridiculous pace. But then, at Sinegard they had just been children, stupid, naive, playing at war games that they had never seriously believed would become their reality.
Rin turned her gaze to the river. The Seagrim had moved inland, was traveling upstream on the Murui now. It moved upriver at a snail’s pace as the men at the paddle boards wheeled furiously to push the ship through the sludgy mud.
She squinted at the banks. She wasn’t sure if she was just hallucinating, but the closer they got, the more clearly she could make out little shapes moving in the distance, like ants crawling up logs.
“Are those people?” she asked.
They were. She could see them clearly now—men and women stooped beneath the sacks they carried over their shoulders, young children staggering barefoot along the riverside, and little babies strapped in bamboo baskets to their parents’ backs.
“Where are they going?”
Nezha looked faintly surprised that she had even asked. “They’re refugees.”
“From where?”
“Everywhere. Golyn Niis wasn’t the only city the Federation sacked. They destroyed the whole countryside. The entire time we were holding that pointless siege at Khurdalain they were marching southward, setting villages ablaze after they’d ripped them apart f
or supplies.”
Rin was still hung up on the first thing he’d said. “So Golyn Niis wasn’t . . .”
“No. Not even close.”
She couldn’t even fathom the death count this implied. How many people had lived in Golyn Niis? She multiplied that by the provinces and came up with a number nearing a million.
And now, all across the country, the Nikara refugees were shuffling back to their homes. The tide of bodies that had flowed from the war-ravaged cities to the barren northwest had started to turn.
“‘You asked how large my sorrow is,’” Nezha recited. Rin recognized the line—it was from a poem she’d studied a lifetime ago, a lament by an Emperor whose last words became exam material for future generations. “‘And I answered, like a river in spring flowing east.’”
As they floated up the Murui, crowds of people lined the banks with their arms outstretched, screaming at the Seagrim.
“Please, just up to the edge of the province . . .”
“Take my girls, leave me but take the girls . . .”
“You have space! You have space, damn you . . .”
Nezha tugged gently at Rin’s wrist. “Let’s go belowdecks.”
She shook her head. She wanted to see.
“Why can’t someone send boats?” she asked. “Why can’t we bring them home?”
“They’re not going home, Rin. They’re running.”
Dread pooled in her stomach. “How many are still out there?”
“The Mugenese?” Nezha sighed. “They’re not a single army. They’re individual brigades. They’re cold, hungry, frustrated, and they have nowhere to go. They’re thieves and bandits now.”
“How many?” she repeated.
“Enough.”
She made a fist. “I thought I brought peace.”
“You brought victory,” he said. “This is what happens after. The Warlords can hardly keep control over their home provinces. Food shortages. Rampant crime—and it’s not just the Federation bandits. The Nikara are at each other’s throats. Scarcity will do that to you.”
“So of course you think it’s a good time to fight another war.”
“Another war is inevitable. But maybe we can prevent the next big one. The Republic will have growing pains. But if we can fix the foundation—if we can institute structures that make the next invasion less likely and keep future generations safe—then we’ll have succeeded.”
Foundation. Growing pains. Future generations. Such abstract concepts, she thought; concepts that wouldn’t compute for the average peasant. Who cared who sat on the throne at Sinegard when vast stretches of the Empire were underwater?
The children’s cries suddenly seemed unbearable.
“Couldn’t we give them something?” she asked. “Money? Don’t you have stacks of silver?”
“So they could spend it where?” Nezha asked. “You could give them more ingots than you could count, but they’ve got nowhere to buy goods. There’s no supply.”
“Food, then?”
“We tried doing that. They just tear each other to pieces trying to get at it. It’s not a pretty sight.”
She rested her chin on her elbows. Behind them the flock of humans receded; ignored, irrelevant, betrayed.
“You want to hear a joke?” Nezha asked.
She shrugged.
“A Hesperian missionary once said the state of the average Nikara peasant is that of a man standing in a pond with water coming up to his chin,” said Nezha. “The slightest ripple is enough to put him underwater.”
Staring out over the Murui, Rin didn’t find that the least bit funny.
That night she decided to drown herself.
It wasn’t a premeditated decision so much as it was an act of sheer desperation. The pain had gotten so bad that she banged on the door to her room, begging for help, and then when the guards opened it she ducked past their arms and ran up the stairs and out the hatch to the main deck.
Guards ran after her, shouting for reinforcements, but she doubled her pace, bare heels slamming against the wood. Splinters lanced little shreds of pain through her skin—but that was good pain because it distracted her from her screaming mind, if only for half a second.
The railing of the prow came up to her chest. She gripped the edge and attempted to pull herself up, but her arms were weak—surprisingly weak, she didn’t remember getting that weak—and she sagged against the side. She tried again, hoisted herself far enough that her upper body draped over the edge. She hung there facedown for a moment, staring at the dark waves trailing alongside the Seagrim.
A pair of arms grasped her around the waist. She kicked and flailed, but they only tightened as they dragged her back down. She twisted her neck around.
“Suni?”
He walked backward from the prow, carrying her by the waist like a little child.
“Let go,” she panted. “Let me go!”
He put her down. She tried to break away but he grabbed her wrists, twisted her arms behind her back, and forced her down into a sitting position.
“Breathe,” he ordered. “Just breathe.”
She obeyed. The pain didn’t subside. The screaming didn’t quiet. She began to shake, but Suni didn’t let go of her arms. “If you just keep breathing, I’ll tell you a story.”
“I don’t want to hear a fucking story,” she said, gasping.
“Don’t want. Don’t think. Just breathe.” Suni’s voice was quiet, soothing. “Have you heard the story of the Monkey King and the moon?”
“No,” she whimpered.
“Then listen carefully.” He relaxed his grip ever so slightly, just enough that her arms stopped hurting. “Once upon a time, the Monkey King caught his first glimpse of the Moon Goddess.”
Rin shut her eyes and tried to focus on Suni’s voice. She’d never heard Suni talk this much. He was always so quiet, drawn into himself, as if he were unused to being in full occupation of his own mind that he wanted to relish the experience as much as possible. She’d forgotten how gentle he could sound.
He continued. “The Moon Goddess had just ascended to the heavens, and she was still drifting so close to Earth that you could see her face on the surface. She was such a lovely thing.”
Some old memory stirred in the back of her mind. She did know this story after all. They told it to children in Rooster Province during the Lunar Festival, every autumn when children ate moon cakes and solved riddles written on rice paper and floated lanterns in the sky.
“Then he fell in love,” she whispered.
“That’s right. The Monkey King was struck with the most terrible passion. He had to possess her, he thought, or he might die. So he sent his best soldiers to retrieve her from the ocean. But they failed, for the moon lived not in the ocean but in the sky, and they drowned.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Why did they drown? Why did the moon kill them? Because they weren’t climbing to the sky to find her, they were diving into the water toward her reflection. But it was a fucking illusion they were grasping, not the real thing.” Suni’s voice hardened. It didn’t rise above a whisper, but he might as well have been shouting. “You spend your whole life chasing after some illusion you think is real, only to realize you’re a damned fool, and that if you reach any further, you’ll drown.”
He let go of her arms.
Rin turned around to face him. “Suni . . .”
“Altan liked that story,” he said. “I first heard it from him. He told it whenever he needed to calm me down. Said it would help if I thought of the Monkey King as just another person, someone gullible and foolish, and not a god.”
“The Monkey King is a dick,” she said.
“And the Moon Goddess is a bitch,” he said. “She sat there in the sky and watched the monkeys drowning over her. What does that say about her?”
That made her laugh. For a moment they both looked up at the moon. It was half-full, hiding behind a wispy dark cloud. Rin could imagine she was a woman,
coy and devious, waiting to entice foolish men to their deaths.
She placed her hand over Suni’s. His hand was massive, rougher than wood bark, mottled with calluses. Her mind spun with a thousand unanswered questions.
Who made you like this?
And, more importantly, Do you regret it?
“You don’t have to suffer alone, you know.” Suni gave her one of his rare, slow smiles. “You’re not the only one.”
She would have smiled back, but then a wave of sickness hit her gut and she jerked her head down. Vomit splattered the deck.
Suni rubbed circles on her back while she spat blood-speckled phlegm on the planks. When she was done, he smoothed her vomit-covered hair out of her eyes as she sucked in air in great, racking sobs.
“You’re so strong,” he said. “Whatever you’re seeing, whatever you’re feeling, it’s not as strong as you are.”
But she didn’t want to be strong. Because if she were strong then she would be sober, and if she were sober she would have to consider the consequences of her actions. Then she’d have to look into the chasm. Then the Federation of Mugen would stop being an amorphous blur, and her victims would stop being meaningless numbers. Then she would recognize one death, what it meant, and then another, and then another and another and—
And if she wanted to recognize it, then she would have to be something, feel something other than anger, but she was afraid that if she stopped being angry then she might shatter.
She started to cry.
Suni smoothed the hair back from her forehead. “Just breathe,” he murmured. “Breathe for me. Can you do that? Breathe five times.”
One. Two. Three.
He continued to rub her back. “You just have to make it through the next five seconds. Then the next five. Then on and on.”
Four. Five.
And then another five. And those five, oddly enough, were just the littlest bit more bearable than the last.
“There you go,” Suni said after maybe a dozen counts to five. His voice was so low it was hardly a whisper. “There, look, you’ve done it.”
She breathed, and counted, and wondered how Suni knew exactly what to say.