The Dragon Republic

by R. F. Kuang

  “I’ve always been amazed by snow.” Rin traced shapes into the porthole condensation as she stared out at the endless, hypnotizing flurry outside. “Every winter, it’s a surprise. I can never believe it’s real.”

  “They don’t have snow down south?” Kitay asked.

  “No. Tikany gets so dry that your lips bleed when you try to smile, but never cold enough for the snow to fall. Before I came north, I’d only heard about it in stories. I thought it was a beautiful idea. Little flecks of the cold.”

  “And how did you find the snow at Sinegard?”

  A howl of wind drowned out Rin’s response. She pulled down the porthole cover. “Fucking miserable.”

  The blizzard let up by the next morning. Outside, the forest had been transformed, like some giant had drenched the trees in white paint.

  Jinzha announced that the fleet would remain grounded for one more day to pass the New Year’s holiday. Everywhere else in the Empire, New Year’s would be a weeklong affair involving twelve-course banquets, firecrackers, and endless parades. On campaign, a single day would have to be enough.

  The troops disembarked to camp out in the winter landscape, glad for the chance to escape the close quarters of the cabins.

  “See if you can get that fire going,” Nezha told Kitay.

  The three of them sat huddled together on the riverbank, rubbing their hands together while Kitay fumbled with a piece of flint to start a fire.

  Somewhere Nezha had scrounged up a small packet of glutinous rice flour. He poured the flour out into a tin bowl, added some water from his canteen, and stirred it together with his fingers until it formed a small ball of dough.

  Rin prodded at the measly fire. It fizzled and sputtered; the next gust of wind put it out entirely. She groaned and reached for the flint. They wouldn’t have boiling water for at least half an hour. “You know, you could just take that to the kitchen and have them cook it.”

  “The kitchen isn’t supposed to know I have it,” said Nezha.

  “I see,” Kitay said. “The general is stealing rations.”

  “The general is rewarding his best soldiers with a New Year’s treat,” Nezha said.

  Kitay rubbed his hands up and down his arms. “Oh, so it’s nepotism.”

  “Shut up,” Nezha mumbled. He rubbed harder at the ball of dough, but it crumbled to bits in his fingers.

  “You haven’t added enough water.” Rin grabbed the bowl from him and kneaded the dough with one hand, adding droplets of water with the other until she had a wet, round ball the size of her fist.

  “I didn’t know you could cook,” Nezha said curiously.

  “I used to all the time. No one else was going to feed Kesegi.”

  “Kesegi?”

  “My little brother.” The memory of his face rose up in Rin’s mind. She forced it back down. She hadn’t seen him in four years. She didn’t know if he was still alive, and she didn’t want to wonder.

  “I didn’t know you had a little brother,” Nezha said.

  “Not a real brother. I was adopted.”

  No one asked her to elaborate, so she didn’t. She rolled the dough into a snakelike strip between both palms, then broke it up piece by piece into thumb-sized lumps.

  Nezha watched her hands with the wide-eyed fascination of a boy who’d clearly never been in the kitchen. “Those balls are smaller than the tangyuan I remember.”

  “That’s because we don’t have red bean paste or sesame to fill them with,” she said. “Any chance you scrounged up some sugar?”

  “You have to add sugar?” Nezha asked.

  Kitay laughed.

  “We’ll eat them bland, then,” she said. “It’ll taste better in little pieces. More to chew.”

  When the water finally came to a boil, Rin dropped the rice flour balls into the tin cauldron and stirred them with a stick, creating a clockwise current so that they wouldn’t stick to each other.

  “Did you know that cauldrons are a military invention?” Kitay asked. “One of the Red Emperor’s generals came up with the idea of tin cookware. Can you imagine? Before that, they were stuck trying to build fires large enough for giant bamboo steamers.”

  “A lot of innovations came from the military,” Nezha mused. “Messenger pigeons, for one. And there’s a good argument that most of the advances in blacksmithing and medicine were a product of the Era of Warring States.”

  “That’s cute.” Rin peered into the cauldron. “Proves that war’s good for something, then.”

  “It’s a good theory,” Nezha insisted. “The country was in chaos during the Era of Warring States, sure. But look at what it brought us—Sunzi’s Principles of War; Mengzi’s theories on governance. Everything we know now about philosophy, about warfare and statecraft, was developed during that era.”

  “So what’s the tradeoff?” Rin asked. “Thousands of people have to die so that we can get better at killing each other in the future?”

  “You know that’s not my argument.”

  “It’s what it sounds like. It sounds like you’re saying that people have to die for progress.”

  “It’s not progress they’re dying for,” Nezha said. “Progress is the side effect. And military innovation doesn’t just mean we get better at killing each other, it means we get better equipped to kill whoever decides to invade us next.”

  “And who do you think is going to invade us next?” Rin asked. “The Hinterlanders?”

  “Don’t rule them out.”

  “They’d have to stop killing each other off, first.”

  The tribes of the northern Hinterlands had been at constant war since any of them could remember. In the days of the Red Emperor, the students of Sinegard had been trained primarily to fend off northern invaders. Now they were just an afterthought.

  “Better question,” Kitay said. “What do you think is the next great military innovation?”

  “Arquebuses,” Nezha said, at the same moment that Rin said, “Shamanic armies.”

  Both of them turned to stare at her.

  “Shamans over arquebuses?” Nezha asked.

  “Of course,” she said. The thought had just occurred to her, but the more she considered it, the more attractive it sounded. “Tarcquet’s weapon is just a glorified rocket. But imagine a whole army of people who could summon gods.”

  “That sounds like a disaster,” Nezha said.

  “Or an unstoppable military,” Rin said.

  “I feel like if that could be done, it would have been,” said Nezha. “But there’s no written history on shamanic warfare. The only shamans the Red Emperor employed were the Speerlies, and we know how that went.”

  “But the predynastic texts—”

  “—are irrelevant.” Nezha cut her off. “Fortification technology and bronze weapons didn’t become military standard until well into the Red Emperor’s rule, which is about the same time that shamans started disappearing from the record. We have no idea how shamans would change the nature of warfare, whether they could be worked into a military bureaucracy.”

  “The Cike’s done pretty well,” Rin challenged.

  “When there are fewer than ten of you, sure. Don’t you think hundreds of shamans would be a disaster?”

  “You should become one,” she said. “See what it’s like.”

  Nezha flinched. “You’re not serious.”

  “It’s not the worst idea. Any of us could teach you.”

  “I have never met a shaman in complete control of their own mind.” Nezha looked strangely bothered by her suggestion. “And I’m sorry, but knowing the Cike does not make me terribly optimistic.”

  Rin pulled the cauldron off of the fire. She knew she was supposed to let the tangyuan cool for a few minutes before serving, but she was too cold, and the vapors misting up from the surface were too enticing. They didn’t have bowls, so they wrapped the cauldron in leaves to keep their hands from burning and passed it around in a circle.

  “Happy New Year,” Kita
y said. “May the gods send you blessings and good fortune.”

  “Health, wealth, and happiness. May your enemies rot and surrender quickly before we have to kill more of them.” Rin stood up.

  “Where are you going?” Nezha asked.

  “Gotta go take a piss.”

  She wandered toward the woods, looking for a large enough tree to hide behind. By now she’d spent so much time with Kitay that she wouldn’t have minded squatting down right in front of him. But for some reason, she felt far less comfortable stripping in front of Nezha.

  Her ankle twisted beneath her. She spun around, failed to catch her balance, and fell flat on her rear. She spread her hands to catch her fall. Her fingers landed on something soft and rubbery. Confused, she glanced down and brushed the snow away from the surface.

  She saw a child’s face buried in snow.

  His—she thought it was a boy, though she couldn’t quite tell—eyes were wide open, large and blank, with long lashes fringed with snow, embedded in dark shadows on a thin, pale face.

  Rin rose unsteadily to her feet. She picked up a branch and brushed the rest of the snow off the child’s body. She uncovered another face. And then another.

  It finally sank in that this was not natural, that she ought to be afraid, and then she opened her mouth and screamed.

  Nezha ordered a squadron to walk through the surrounding square mile with torches held low to the ground until the ice and snow had melted enough that they could see what had happened.

  The snow peeled away to reveal an entire village of people, frozen perfectly where they lay. Most still had their eyes open. Rin saw no blood. The villagers didn’t appear to have died from anything except for the cold, and perhaps starvation. Everywhere she found evidence of fires, hastily constructed, long fizzled out.

  No one had given her a torch. She was still shaken from the experience, and every sudden movement made her jump, so it was best that she didn’t hold on to anything potentially dangerous. But she refused to go back to camp alone, either, so she stood by the edge of the forest, watching blankly as the soldiers brushed snow off yet another family of corpses. Their bodies were curled in a heap together, the mother’s and father’s bodies wrapped protectively around their two children.

  “Are you all right?” Nezha asked her. His hand wandered hesitantly toward her shoulder, as if he wasn’t sure whether to touch her or not.

  She brushed it away. “I’m fine. I’ve seen bodies before.”

  Yet she couldn’t take her eyes off of them. They looked like a set of dolls lying in the snow, perfectly fine except for the fact that they weren’t moving.

  Most of the adults still had large bundles fastened to their backs. Rin saw porcelain dishes, silk dresses, and kitchen utensils spilling out of those bags. The villagers seemed to have packed their entire homes up with them.

  “Where were they going?” she wondered.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Kitay said. “They were running.”

  “From what?”

  Kitay said it, because no one else seemed able to. “Us.”

  “But they didn’t have anything to fear.” Nezha looked deeply uncomfortable. “We would have treated them the way we’ve treated every other village. They would have gotten a vote.”

  “That’s not what their leaders would have told them,” said Kitay. “They would have imagined we were coming to kill them.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Nezha said.

  “Is it?” Kitay asked. “Imagine it. You hear the rebel army is coming. Your magistrates are your most reliable sources of information, and they tell you that the rebels will kill your men, rape your women, and enslave your children, because that’s what you’re always supposed to say about the enemy. You don’t know any better, so you pack up everything you can and flee.”

  Rin could imagine the rest. These villagers would have run from the Republic just as they had once run from the Federation. But winter had come earlier that year than they’d predicted, and they didn’t get to the lowland valleys in time. They couldn’t find anything to eat. At some point it was too much work to stay alive. So they decided with the rest of the families that this was as good a place as any to end it, and together they lay down and embraced each other, and perhaps it didn’t feel so terrible near the end.

  Perhaps it felt just like going to sleep.

  Through the entire campaign, she had never once paused to consider just how many people they had killed or displaced. The numbers added up so quickly. Several thousand from famine—maybe several hundred thousand—and then all the soldiers they’d cut down every time, multiplied across villages.

  They were fighting a very different war now, she realized. They were not the liberators but the aggressors. They were the ones to fear.

  “War’s different when you’re not struggling for survival.” Kitay must have been thinking the same thing she was. He stood still, hands clutching his torch, eyes fixed on the bodies at his feet. “Victories don’t feel the same.”

  “Do you think it’s worth it?” Rin asked him quietly so that Nezha couldn’t hear.

  “Frankly, I don’t care.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  He considered for a moment. “I’m glad that someone’s fighting Daji.”

  “But the stakes—”

  “I wouldn’t think too long about the stakes.” Kitay glanced at Nezha, who was still staring at the bodies, eyes wide and disturbed. “You won’t like the answers you come up with.”

  That evening the snowstorms started up again and did not relent for another week. It confirmed what everyone had been afraid of. Winter had arrived early that year, and with a vengeance. Soon enough the tributaries would freeze and the Republican Fleet would be stuck in the north unless they turned back. Their options were dwindling.

  Rin paced the Kingfisher for days, growing more agitated with every passing minute. She needed to move, fight, attack. She didn’t like sitting still. Too easy to fall prey to her own thoughts. Too easy to see the faces in the snow.

  Once during a late-night stroll she stumbled across the leadership leaving Jinzha’s office. None of them looked happy. Jinzha stormed past her without saying a word; he might not have even noticed her. Nezha lingered behind with Kitay, who wore the peeved, tight-lipped expression that Rin had learned meant that he hadn’t gotten his way.

  “Don’t tell me,” Rin said. “We’re moving forward.”

  “We’re not just moving forward. He wants us to bypass Baraya entirely and take Boyang.” Kitay slammed a fist against the wall. “Boyang! Is he mad?”

  “Military outpost on the border of Rat Province and Tiger Province,” Nezha explained to Rin. “It’s not a terrible idea. The Militia used Boyang as a fortress during the first and second invasions. It’ll have built-in defenses, make it easier to last out the winter. We can break the siege at Baraya from there.”

  “But won’t someone already be there?” Rin asked. If the Militia was garrisoned anywhere, it had to be in Tiger or Rat Province. Any farther north and they’d be fighting in Sinegard for the heart of Imperial territory.

  “If someone’s already there, then we’ll fight them off,” said Nezha.

  “In icy waters?” Kitay challenged. “With a cold and miserable army? If we keep going north, we’re going to lose every advantage we’ve gained by coming so far.”

  “Or we could cement our victory,” Nezha argued. “If we win at Boyang, then we control the delta at the Elehemsa tributary, which means—”

  “Yes, yes, you cut around the coast to Tiger Province, you can send reinforcements to either through riverways,” Kitay said irritably. “Except you’re not going to win Boyang. The Imperial Fleet is almost certainly there, but for some reason Jinzha would prefer to pretend it doesn’t exist. I don’t know what’s wrong with your brother, but he’s getting reckless and he’s making decisions like a madman.”

  “My brother is not a madman.”

  “Oh, no, he might be the be
st wartime general I’ve ever seen. No one’s denying he’s done well so far. But he’s only good because he’s the first Nikara general who’s been trained to think from a naval perspective first. Once the rivers freeze, it’s going to turn into a ground war, and then he won’t have a clue what to do.”

  Nezha sighed. “Look, I understand your point. I’m just trying to see the best in our situation. If it were up to me I wouldn’t go to Boyang, either.”

  Kitay threw his hands up. “Well, then—”

  “This isn’t about strategy. It’s about pride. It’s about showing the Hesperians that we won’t back down from a challenge. And for Jinzha, it’s about proving himself to Father.”

  “These things always come back to your father,” Kitay muttered. “Both of you need help.”

  “So say that to Jinzha,” Rin said. “Tell him that he’s being stupid.”

  “There’s no possible version of that argument that goes well,” Nezha said. “Jinzha decides what he wants. You think I can contradict him and get away with it?”

  “Well, if you can’t,” Kitay said, “then we’re fucked.”

  An hour later the paddle wheels creaked into motion, carrying the Republican Fleet through a minor mountain range.

  “Look up.” Kitay nudged Rin’s arm. “Does that look normal to you?”

  At first it seemed to her like the sun was gradually coming up over the mountains, the lights were so bright. Then the glowing objects rose higher, and she saw that they were lanterns, lighting up the night sky one by one like a field of blooming flowers. Long ribbons dangled from the balloons, displaying a message easily read from the ground.

  Surrender means immunity.

  “Did they really think that would work?” Rin asked, amused. “That’s like screaming, ‘Go away, please.’”

  But Kitay wasn’t smiling. “I don’t think it’s about propaganda. We should turn back.”