The Dragon Republic

by R. F. Kuang

  “What happens if they cross?” Rin asked.

  “Nothing too terrible. Guards toss them back to the other side. It happened more often at the beginning, but a few beatings taught everyone their lesson.”

  They walked a few more paces. A horrible stench hit Rin’s nose—the smell of too many unwashed bodies packed together for far too long. “How long have they been there?”

  “At least a month,” Baji said. “I’m told they started flooding in as soon as we moved on Rat Province, but it only got worse once we came back.”

  Rin could not believe that anyone had been living in these camps for that long. She saw clouds of flies everywhere she looked. The buzzing was unbearable.

  “They’re still trickling in,” Ramsa said. “They come in waves, usually at night. They keep trying to sneak past the borders.”

  “And they’re all from Hare and Rat Provinces?” she asked.

  “What are you talking about? These are southern refugees.”

  She blinked at him. “I thought the Militia hadn’t moved south.”

  Ramsa exchanged a glance with Baji. “They’re not fleeing the Militia. They’re fleeing the Federation.”

  “What?”

  Baji scratched the back of his head. “Well, yes. It’s not like the Mugenese soldiers all just laid down their weapons.”

  “I know, but I thought . . .” Rin trailed off. She felt dizzy. She’d known Federation troops remained on the mainland, but she’d thought they were contained to isolated units. Rogue soldiers, scattered squadrons. Roving mercenaries, forming predatory coalitions with provincial cities if they were large enough, but not enough to displace the entire south.

  “How many are there?” she asked.

  “Enough,” Baji said. “Enough that they constitute an entirely separate army. They’re fighting for the Militia, Rin. We don’t know how; we don’t know what deal she brokered with them. But soon enough we’ll be fighting a war on two fronts, not one.”

  “Which regions?” she demanded.

  “They’re everywhere.” Ramsa listed the provinces off on his fingers. “Monkey. Snake. Rooster.”

  Rin flinched. Rooster?

  “Are you all right?” Ramsa asked.

  But she was already running.

  She knew immediately these were her people. She knew them by their tawny skin that was almost as dark as hers. She knew them by the way they talked—the soft country drawl that made her feel nostalgic and uncomfortable at the same time.

  That was the tongue she had grown up speaking—the flat, rustic dialect that she couldn’t speak without cringing now, because she’d spent years at school beating it out of herself.

  She hadn’t heard anyone speak the Rooster dialect in so long.

  She thought, stupidly, that they might recognize her. But the Rooster refugees shrank away when they saw her. Their faces grew closed and sullen when she met their eyes. They crawled back into their tents if she approached.

  It took her a moment to realize that they weren’t afraid of her, they were afraid of her uniform.

  They were afraid of Republican soldiers.

  “You.” Rin pointed to a woman about her height. “Do you have a spare set of clothes?”

  The woman blinked at her, uncomprehending.

  Rin tried again, slipping clumsily into her old dialect like it was an ill-fitting pair of shoes. “Do you have another, uh, shirt? Pants?”

  The woman gave a terrified nod.

  “Give them to me.”

  The woman crawled into her tent. She reappeared with a bundle of clothing—a faded blouse that might have once been dyed with a poppy flower pattern, and wide slacks with deep pockets.

  Rin felt a sharp pang in her chest as she held the blouse out in front of her. She hadn’t seen clothes like this in a long time. They were made for fieldworkers. Even the poor of Sinegard would have laughed at them.

  Stripping off her Republican uniform worked. The Roosters stopped avoiding her when they saw her. Instead, she became effectively invisible as she navigated through the sea of tightly packed bodies. She shouted to get attention as she moved down the rows of tents.

  “Tutor Feyrik! I’m looking for a Tutor Feyrik! Has anyone seen him?”

  Responses came in reluctant whispers and indifferent mutters. No. No. Leave us alone. No. These refugees were so used to hearing desperate cries for lost ones that they’d closed their ears to them. Someone knew a Tutor Fu, but he wasn’t from Tikany. Someone else knew a Feyrik, but he was a cobbler, not a teacher. Rin found it pointless trying to describe him; there were hundreds of men who could have fit his description—with every row she passed she saw old men with gray beards who turned out not to be Tutor Feyrik after all.

  She pushed down a swell of despair. It had been stupid to hope in the first place. She’d known she’d never see him again; she’d resigned herself to that fact long ago.

  But she couldn’t help it. She still had to try.

  She tried broadening her search. “Is anyone here from Tikany?”

  Blank looks. She moved faster and faster through the camp, breaking into a run. “Tikany? Please? Anyone?”

  Then at last she heard one voice through the crowd—one that was laced not with casual indifference but with sheer disbelief.

  “Rin?”

  She stumbled to a halt. When she turned around she saw a spindly boy, no more than fourteen, with a mop of brown hair and large, downward-sloping eyes. He stood with a sodden shirt dangling from one hand and a bandage clutched in the other.

  “Kesegi?”

  He nodded wordlessly.

  Then she was sixteen years old again herself, crying as she held him, rocking him so hard they almost fell to the dirt. He hugged her back, wrapping his long and scrawny limbs all the way around her like he used to.

  When had he gotten so tall? Rin marveled at the change. Once, he’d barely come up to her waist. Now he was taller than she by about an inch. But the rest of him was far too skinny, close to starved; he looked like he’d been stretched more than he had grown.

  “Where are the others?” she asked.

  “Mother’s here with me. Father’s dead.”

  “The Federation . . . ?”

  “No. It was the opium in the end.” He gave a false laugh. “Funny, really. He heard they were coming, and he ate an entire pan of nuggets. Mother found him just as we were packing up to leave. He’d been dead for hours.” He gave her an awkward smile. A smile. He’d lost his father, and he was trying to make her feel better about it. “We just thought he was sleeping.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice came out flat. She couldn’t help it. Her relationship with Uncle Fang had been one between master and servant, and she couldn’t conjure up anything that remotely resembled grief.

  “Tutor Feyrik?” she asked.

  Kesegi shook his head. “I don’t know. I saw him in the crowd when we left, I think, but I haven’t seen him since.”

  His voice cracked when he spoke. She realized that he was trying to imitate a deeper voice than he possessed. He stood up overly straight, too, to appear taller than he was. He was trying to pass himself off as an adult.

  “So you’ve come back.”

  Rin’s blood froze. She’d been walking blindly without a destination, assuming Kesegi had been doing the same, but of course they’d been walking back to his tent.

  Kesegi stopped. “Mother. Look who I found.”

  Auntie Fang gave Rin a thin smile. “Well, look at that. It’s the war hero. You’ve grown.”

  Rin wouldn’t have recognized her if Kesegi hadn’t introduced her. Auntie Fang looked twenty years older, with the complexion of a wrinkled walnut. She had always been so red-faced, perpetually furious, burdened with a foster child she didn’t want and a husband addicted to opium. She used to terrify Rin. But now she seemed shriveled dry, as if the fight had been drained from her completely.

  “Come to gloat?” Auntie Fang asked. “Go on, look. There’s not
much to see.”

  “Gloat?” Rin repeated, baffled. “No, I . . .”

  “Then what is it?” Auntie Fang asked. “Well, don’t just stand there.”

  How was it that even now Auntie Fang could still make her feel so stupid and worthless? Under her withering glare Rin felt like a little girl again, hiding in the shed to avoid a beating.

  “I didn’t know you were here,” she managed. “I just—I wanted to see if—”

  “If we were still alive?” Auntie Fang put bony hands on narrow hips. “Well, here we are. No thanks to you soldiers—no, you were too busy drowning up north. It’s Vaisra’s fault we’re here at all.”

  “Watch your tone,” Rin snapped.

  It shocked her when Auntie Fang cringed backward like she was expecting to be hit.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that.” Auntie Fang adopted a wheedling, wide-eyed expression that looked grotesque on her leathery face. “The hunger’s just getting to me. Can’t you get us some food, Rin? You’re a soldier, I bet they’ve even made you a commander, you’re so important, surely you could call in some favors.”

  “They’re not feeding you?” Rin asked.

  Auntie Fang laughed. “Not unless you’re talking about the Lady of Arlong walking around handing out tiny bowls of rice to the skinniest children she can find while the blue-eyed devils follow her around to document how wonderful she is.”

  “We don’t get anything,” Kesegi said. “Not clothes, not blankets, not medicine. Most of us forage for our own food—we were eating fish for a while, but they’d all been poisoned with something, and we got sick. They didn’t warn us about that.”

  Rin found that impossible to believe. “They haven’t opened any kitchens for you?”

  “They have, but those kitchens feed perhaps a hundred mouths before they close.” Kesegi shrugged his bony shoulders. “Look around. Someone starves to death every day in this camp. Can’t you see?”

  “But I thought—surely, Vaisra would—”

  “Vaisra?” Auntie Fang snorted. “You’re on a first-name basis, are you?”

  “No—I mean, yes, but—”

  “Then you can talk to him!” Auntie Fang’s beady eyes glittered. “Tell him we’re starving. If he can’t feed all of us, just have them deliver food to me and Kesegi. We won’t tell anyone.”

  “But that’s not how it works,” Rin stammered. “I mean—I can’t just—”

  “Do it, you ungrateful cunt,” Auntie Fang snarled. “You owe us.”

  “I owe you?” Rin repeated in disbelief.

  “I took you into our home. I raised you for sixteen years.”

  “You would have sold me into marriage!”

  “And then you would have had a better life than any of us.” Auntie Fang pointed a skinny, accusing finger at Rin’s chest. “You would never have lacked for anything. All you had to do was spread your legs every once in a while, and you would have had anything you wanted to eat, anything you wanted to wear. But that wasn’t enough for you—you wanted to be special, to be important, to run off to Sinegard and join the Militia on its merry adventures.”

  “You think this war has been fun for me?” Rin shouted. “I watched my friends die! I almost died!”

  “We’ve all nearly died,” Auntie Fang scoffed. “Please. You’re not special.”

  “You can’t talk to me like that,” Rin said.

  “Oh, I know.” Auntie Fang swept into a low bow. “You’re so important. So respected. Do you want us to grovel at your feet, is that it? Heard your old bitch of an aunt was in the camps, so you couldn’t pass up the chance to rub it in her face?”

  “Mother, stop,” Kesegi said quietly.

  “That’s not why I came,” Rin said.

  Auntie Fang’s mouth twisted into a sneer. “Then why did you come?”

  Rin didn’t have an answer for her.

  She didn’t know what she’d expected to find. Not home, not belonging, not Tutor Feyrik—and not this.

  This was a mistake. She shouldn’t have come at all. She’d cut her ties to Tikany a long time ago. She should have kept it that way.

  She backed away quickly, shaking her head. “I’m sorry,” she tried to say, but the words stuck in her throat.

  She couldn’t look either of them in the eyes. She didn’t want to be here anymore, she didn’t want to feel like this anymore. She backed out onto the main path and broke into a quick walk. She wanted to run away, but couldn’t out of pride.

  “Rin!” Kesegi shouted. He dashed out after her. “Wait.”

  She halted in her tracks. Please say something to make me stay. Please.

  “Yes?”

  “If you can’t get us food, can you ask them for some blankets?” he asked. “Just one? It gets so cold at night.”

  She forced herself to smile. “Of course.”

  Over the next week a torrent of people poured into Arlong on foot, in rickety carts, or on rafts hastily constructed of anything that could float. The river became a slow-moving eddy of bodies packed against each other so tightly that the famous blue waters of the Dragon Province disappeared under the weight of human desperation.

  Republican soldiers checked the new arrivals for weapons and valuables before corralling them in neat lines to whichever quarters of the refugee district still had space.

  The refugees met with very little kindness. Republican soldiers, Dragons especially, were terribly condescending, shouting at the southerners when they couldn’t understand the rapid Arlong dialect.

  Rin spent hours each day walking the docks with Venka. She was glad to have escaped processing duty, which involved standing guard over miserable lines while clerks marked the refugees’ arrivals and issued them temporary residence papers. That was probably more important than what she and Venka were doing, which was fishing out the refuse from the segments of the Murui near the refugee chokepoints, but Rin couldn’t bear to be around the large crowds of brown skin and accusing eyes.

  “We’re going to have to cut them off at some point,” Venka remarked as she lifted an empty jug from the water. “They can’t possibly all fit here.”

  “Only because the refugee district is tiny,” Rin said. “If they opened up the city barriers, or if they funneled them into the mountainside, there would be plenty of space.”

  “Plenty of space, maybe. But we haven’t got enough clothes, blankets, medicine, grain, or anything else.”

  “Up until now the southerners were producing the grain.” Rin felt obligated to point that out.

  “And now they’ve run from home, so no one is producing food,” Venka said. “Doesn’t really help us. Hey, what’s this?”

  She reached gingerly into the water and drew a barrel out onto the dock. She set it on the ground. Out tumbled what at first looked like a soggy bundle of clothing. “Gross.”

  “What is it?” Rin stepped closer to get a better look and immediately regretted it.

  “It’s dead, look.” Venka held the baby out to show Rin the infant’s sickly yellow skin, the bumpy evidence of relentless mosquito attacks, and the red rashes that covered half its body. Venka slapped its cheeks. No response. She held it over the river as if to throw it back in.

  The infant started to whimper.

  An ugly expression twisted across Venka’s face. She looked so suddenly, murderously hateful that Rin was sure she was about to hurl the infant headfirst into the harbor.

  “Give it to me,” Rin said quickly. She pulled the infant from Venka’s arms. A sour smell hit her nose. She gagged so hard she nearly dropped the infant, but got a grip on herself.

  The baby was swaddled in clothes large enough to fit an adult. That meant someone had loved it. They wouldn’t have parted with the clothes otherwise—it was now the dead of winter, and even in the warm south, the nights got cold enough that refugees traveling without shelter could easily freeze to death.

  Someone had wanted this baby to survive. Rin owed it a fighting chance.

  She strode hastily to
the end of the dock and handed the bundle off to the first soldier she saw. “Here.”

  The soldier stumbled under the sudden weight. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “I don’t know, just see to it that it’s cared for,” Rin said. “Take it to the infirmary, if they’ll let you.”

  The soldier gripped the infant tightly in his arms and set off at a run. Rin returned to the river and resumed dragging her spear halfheartedly through the water.

  She wanted very badly to smoke. She couldn’t get the taste of corpses out of her mouth.

  Venka broke the silence first. “What are you looking at me like that for?”

  She looked defensive. Furious. But that was Venka’s default reaction to everything; she’d rather die than admit vulnerability. Rin suspected Venka was thinking about the child that she’d lost, and she wasn’t sure what to say, only that she felt terribly sorry for her.

  “You knew it was alive,” Rin said finally.

  “Yes,” Venka snapped. “So what?”

  “And you were going to kill it.”

  Venka swallowed hard and jabbed her spear back into the water. “That thing doesn’t have a future. I was doing it a favor.”

  Wartime Arlong was an ugly thing. Despair settled over the capital like a shroud as the threat of armies closing in from both the north and the south grew closer every day.

  Food was strictly rationed, even for citizens of Dragon Province. Every man, woman, and child who wasn’t in the Republican Army was conscripted for labor. Most were sent to work in the forges or the shipyards. Even small children were put to task cutting linen strips for the infirmary.

  Sympathy was the greatest scarcity. The southern refugees, crammed behind their barrier, were uniformly despised by soldiers and civilians alike. Food and supplies were offered begrudgingly, if at all. Rin discovered that if soldiers weren’t positioned to guard the supply deliveries, they would never reach the camps.

  The refugees latched on to any potentially sympathetic advocates they could. Once word of Rin’s connection to the Fangs spread, she became an involuntarily appointed, unofficial champion of refugee interests in Arlong. Every time she was near the district she was accosted by refugees, all pleading for a thousand different things that she couldn’t obtain—more food, more medicine, more materials for cooking fires and tents.