The Poppy War

CHAPTER 3

Rin and Nezha were the last ones to the main hall—a converted temple on the third tier of the mountain. Though the hall was not particularly large, its spare, dim interior gave an illusion of great space, making those inside feel smaller than they were. Rin supposed this was the intended effect when one was in the presence of both gods and teachers.

The class of first-years, no more than fifty in total, sat kneeling in rows of ten. They twisted their hands in their laps, blinking and looking around in silent anxiety. The apprentices sat in rows around them, chatting casually with one another. Their laughter sounded louder than normal, as if they were trying to make the first-years feel uncomfortable on purpose.

Moments after Rin sat down, the front doors swung open and a tiny woman, shorter even than the smallest first-year, strode into the hall. She walked with a soldier’s gait—perfectly erect, precise, and controlled.

Five men and one woman, all wearing dark brown robes, followed her inside. They formed a row behind her at the front of the room and stood with hands folded into their sleeves. The apprentices fell silent and rose to their feet, hands clasped behind them and heads tilted forward in a slight bow. Rin and the other first-years took their cue and hastily scrambled to their feet.

The woman gazed out at them for a moment, then gestured for them to sit.

“Welcome to Sinegard. I am Jima Lain. I am grand master of this school, commander of the Sinegardian Reserve Forces, and former commander of the Nikara Imperial Militia.” Jima’s voice cut through the room like a blade, precise and chilly.

Jima indicated the six people arrayed behind her. “These are the masters of Sinegard. They will be your instructors during your first year, and will ultimately decide whether to take you on as their apprentices following your end-of-year Trials.”

The masters were a solemn crowd, each more imposing than the last. None of them smiled. Each wore a belt of a different color—red, blue, purple, green, and orange.

Except one. The man to Jima’s left wore no belt at all. His robe, too, was different—no embroidery at the edges, no insignia of the Red Emperor stitched over his right breast. He was dressed as if he’d forgotten orientation was happening and had thrown on a formless brown cloak at the last minute.

This master’s hair was the pure white of Tutor Feyrik’s beard, but he was nowhere near as old. His face was curiously unlined but not youthful; it was impossible to tell his age. As Jima spoke, he dug his little finger around in his ear canal, and then brought his finger up to his eyes to examine the discharge.

He glanced up suddenly, caught Rin staring at him, and smirked.

She hastily looked away.

“You all are here because you achieved the highest Keju scores in the country,” said Jima, spreading her hands magnanimously. “You have beaten thousands of other pupils for the honor of studying here. Congratulations.”

The first-years cast awkward glances at one another, uncertain of whether they should be applauding themselves. A few tentative claps sounded across the room.

Jima smirked. “Next year a fifth of you will be gone.”

The silence then was acute.

“Sinegard does not have the time nor resources to train every child who dreams of glory in the military. Even illiterate farmers can become soldiers. But we do not train soldiers here. We train generals. We train the people who hold the future of the Empire in their hands. So, should I decide you are no longer worth our time, you will be asked to leave.

“You’ll notice that you were not given a choice of a field of study. We do not believe this choice should be left in the hands of the students. After your first year, you will be evaluated for proficiency in each of the subject tracks we teach here: Combat, Strategy, History, Weaponry, Linguistics, and Medicine.”

“And Lore,” interrupted the white-haired master.

Jima’s left eye twitched. “And Lore. If, in your end-of-year Trials, you are found worthy of one track of study, you will be approved to continue at Sinegard. You will then attain the rank of apprentice.”

Jima gestured to the older students surrounding them. Rin saw now that the apprentices’ armbands matched the masters’ belts in color.

“If no master sees fit to take you on as an apprentice, you will be asked to leave the Academy. The first-year retention rate is usually eighty percent. Look around you. This means that this time next year, two people in your row will be gone.”

Rin glanced around her, fighting a rising swell of panic. She had thought testing into Sinegard was a guarantee of a home for at least the next five years, if not a stable career afterward.

She hadn’t realized she might be sent home in months.

“We cull out of necessity, not cruelty. Our task is to train only the elite—the best of the best. We don’t have time to waste on dilettantes. Take a good look at your classmates. They will become your closest friends, but also your greatest rivals. You are competing against each other to remain at this academy. We believe it is through that competition that those with talent will make themselves known. And those without will be sent home. If you deserve it, you will be present next year as an apprentice. If you aren’t … well then, you should never have been sent here in the first place.” Jima seemed to look directly at Rin.

“Lastly, I will give a warning. I do not tolerate drugs on this campus. If you have even so much as a whiff of opium on you, if you are caught within ten paces of an illegal substance, you will be dragged out of the Academy and thrown into the Baghra prison.”

Jima fixed them with a last, stern look and then dismissed them with a wave of her hand. “Good luck.”

Raban, the apprentice who had broken up Rin and Nezha’s fight, led them out of the main hall to the dormitories on the lowest tier.

“You’re first-years, so you’ll have sweeping duties starting next week,” Raban said, walking backward to address them. He had a kind and soothing voice, the sort of tone Rin had heard village physicians adopt before amputating limbs. “First bell rings at sunrise; classes begin half an hour after that. Be in the mess hall before then or you miss breakfast.”

The boys were housed in the largest building on campus, a three-story structure that looked like it had been built long after the Academy grounds were seized from the monks. The women’s quarters were tiny in contrast, a spare one-story building that used to be a single meditation room.

Rin expected the dorm to be uncomfortably cramped, but only two other bunks showed signs of habitation.

“Three girls in one year is actually a record high,” Raban said before he left them to settle in. “The masters were shocked.”

Alone in the dorm, the three girls warily sized one another up.

“I’m Niang,” offered the girl to Rin’s left. She had a round, friendly face, and she spoke with a lilting accent that belied her northern heritage, though it was nowhere as indecipherable as the Sinegardian dialect. “I’m from the Hare Province.”

“Pleased,” the other girl drawled. She was inspecting her bedsheets. She rubbed the thin off-white material between her fingers, made a disgusted face, and then let the fabric drop. “Venka,” she said begrudgingly. “Dragon Province, but I grew up in the capital.”

Venka was an archetypical Sinegardian beauty; she was pretty in a pale way, and slim as a willow branch. Rin felt coarse and unsophisticated standing next to her.

She realized both were watching her expectantly.

“Runin,” she said. “Rin for short.”

“Runin.” Venka mangled the name with her Sinegardian accent, rolled the syllables through her mouth like some bad-tasting morsel. “What kind of name is that?”

“It’s southern,” Rin said. “I’m from Rooster Province.”

“That’s why your skin’s so dark,” Venka said, lip curling. “Brown as cow manure.”

Rin’s nostrils flared. “I went out in the sun once. You should try it sometime.”

Just as Tutor Feyrik had warned, classes escalated quickly. Martial arts training commenced in the second-tier courtyard immediately after sunrise the next day.

“What’s this?” Master Jun, the red-belted Combat instructor, regarded their huddled class with a disgusted expression. “Line up. I want straight rows. Stop clumping together like frightened hens.”

Jun possessed a pair of fantastically thick black eyebrows that almost met in the middle of his forehead. They rested on his swarthy face like a thundercloud over a permanent scowl.

“Backs straight.” Jun’s voice matched his face: gruff and unforgiving. “Eyes forward. Arms behind your backs.”

Rin strained to mirror the stances of her classmates in front of her. Her left thigh prickled, but she didn’t dare scratch it. Too late, she realized she had to pee.

Jun paced to the front of the courtyard, satisfied that they were standing as uncomfortably as possible. He stopped in front of Nezha. “What happened to your face?”

Nezha had developed a truly spectacular bruise over his left eye, a bright splotch of violet on his otherwise flawless mien.

“Got in a fight,” Nezha mumbled.

“When?”

“Last night.”

“You’re lucky,” Jun said. “If it had been any later, I would have expelled you.”

He raised his voice to address the class. “The first and most important rule of my class is this: do not fight irresponsibly. The techniques you are learning are lethal in application. If improperly performed, they will cause serious injury to yourself or your training partner. If you fight irresponsibly, I will suspend you from my class and lobby to have you expelled from Sinegard. Am I understood?”

“Yes, sir,” they answered.

Nezha twisted his head over his shoulder and shot Rin a look of pure venom. She pretended not to see.

“Who’s had martial arts training before?” Jun asked. “Show of hands.”

Nearly the entire class raised their arms. Rin glanced around the courtyard, feeling a swell of panic. Had so many of them trained before the Academy? Where had they trained? How far ahead of her were they? What if she couldn’t keep up?

Jun pointed to Venka. “How many years?”

“Twelve,” said Venka. “I trained in the Gentle Fist style.”

Rin’s eyes widened. That meant Venka had been training almost since she could walk.

Jun pointed to a wooden dummy. “Backward crescent kick. Take the head off.”

Take the head off? Rin looked doubtfully at the dummy. Its head and torso had been carved from the same piece of wood. The head hadn’t been screwed on; it was solidly connected to the torso.

Venka, however, seemed entirely unperturbed. She positioned her feet, squinted at the dummy, and then whipped her back leg around in a twist that brought her foot high up over her head. Her heel cut through the air in a lovely, precise arc.

Her foot connected with the dummy’s head and lobbed it off, sent it flying clean across the courtyard. The head clattered against the corner wall and rolled to one side.

Rin’s jaw fell open.

Jun nodded curtly in approval and dismissed Venka. She returned to her place in the ranks, looking pleased.

“How did she do that?” Jun asked.

Magic, Rin thought.

Jun stopped in front of Niang. “You. You look bewildered. How do you think she did that?”

Niang blinked nervously. “Ki?”

“What is ki?”

Niang blushed. “Um. Inner energy. Spiritual energy?”

“Spiritual energy,” Master Jun repeated. He snorted. “Village nonsense. Those who elevate ki to the level of mystery or the supernatural do a great disservice to martial arts. Ki is nothing but plain energy. The same energy that flows through your lungs and blood vessels. The same energy that moves rivers downstream and causes the wind to blow.”

He pointed up to the bell tower on the fifth tier. “Two servicemen installed a newly smelted bell last year. Alone, they never would have lifted the bell all that distance. But with cleverly placed ropes, two men of average build managed to lift something many times their weight.

“The principle works in reverse for martial arts. You have a limited quantity of energy in your body. No amount of training will allow you to accomplish superhuman feats. But given the right discipline, knowing where to strike and when …” Jun slammed his fist out at the dummy’s torso. It splintered, forming a perfect radius of cracks around his hand.

He pulled his arm away. The dummy torso shattered into pieces that clattered to the ground. “You can do what average humans think impossible. Martial arts is about action and reaction. Angles and trigonometry. The right amount of force applied at the proper vector. Your muscles contract and exert force, and that force is dispelled through to the target. If you build muscle mass, you can exert greater force. If you practice good technique, your force disperses with greater concentration and higher effectiveness. Martial arts is no more complicated than pure physics. If that confuses you, then simply take the advice of the grand masters. Don’t ask questions. Just obey.”

History was a lesson in humility. Stooped, balding Master Yim began expounding on Nikan’s military embarrassments before they had even finished filing into the classroom.

“In the last century, the Empire has fought five wars,” Yim said. “And we’ve lost every single one of them. This is why we call this past century the Age of Humiliation.”

“Upbeat,” muttered a wiry-haired kid in the front.

If Yim heard him, he didn’t acknowledge it. He pointed to a large parchment map of the eastern hemisphere. “This country used to span half the continent under the Red Emperor. The Old Nikara Empire was the birthplace of modern civilization. The center of the world. All inventions originated from Old Nikan; among them the lodestone, the parchment press, and the blast furnace. Nikara delegates brought culture and methods of good governance to the islands of Mugen in the east and to Speer in the south.

“But empires fall. The old empire fell victim to its own splendor. Flush with victories of expansion in the north, the Warlords began fighting among themselves. The Red Emperor’s death set off a series of succession battles with no clear resolution. And so Nikan split into the Twelve Provinces, each headed by one Warlord. For most of recent history, the Warlords have been preoccupied with fighting each other. Until—”

“The Poppy Wars,” said the wiry-haired kid.

“Yes. The Poppy Wars.” Yim pointed to a country on Nikan’s border, a tiny island shaped like a longbow. “Without warning, Nikan’s little brother to the east, its old tributary nation, turned its dagger on the very country that had given it civilization. The rest you know, surely.”

Niang raised her hand. “Why did relations sour between Nikan and Mugen? The Federation was a peaceful tributary in the days of the Red Emperor. What happened? What did they want from us?”

“Relations were never peaceful,” Yim corrected. “And are not to this day. Mugen has always wanted more, even when it was a tributary. The Federation is an ambitious, rapidly growing country with a bulging population on a tiny island. Imagine you’re a highly militaristic country with more people than your land can sustain, and nowhere to expand. Imagine that your rulers have propagated an ideology that they are gods, and that you have a divine right to extend your empire across the eastern hemisphere. Suddenly the sprawling landmass right across the Nariin Sea looks like a prime target, doesn’t it?”

He turned back to the map. “The First Poppy War was a disaster. The fractured Empire could never stand up against well-trained Federation troops, who had been drilling for decades for this enterprise. So here’s a puzzle for you. How did we win the Second Poppy War?”

A boy named Han raised his hand. “The Trifecta?”

Muted snickers sounded around the classroom. The Trifecta—the Vipress, the Dragon Emperor, and the Gatekeeper—were three heroic soldiers who had unified the Empire against the Federation. They were real—the woman known as the Vipress still sat on the throne at Sinegard—but their legendary martial arts abilities were the subject of children’s tales. Rin had grown up hearing stories about how the Trifecta had single-handedly flattened entire Federation battalions, leveraging storms and floods with their supernatural powers. But even she thought it sounded ridiculous in a lecture about history.

“Don’t laugh. The Trifecta were important—without their political machinations, we might never have rallied the Twelve Provinces,” said Yim. “But that’s not the answer I’m looking for.”

Rin raised her hand. She had memorized this answer from Tutor Feyrik’s history primers. “We razed the heartland. Pursued a strategy of slash and burn. When the Federation army marched too far inland, their supply lines ran out and they couldn’t feed their armies.”

Yim acknowledged this answer with a shrug. “Good answer, but false. That’s just propaganda they put in the countryside textbooks. The slash-and-burn strategy hurt the rural countryside more than it hurt Mugen. Anyone else?”

It was the wiry-haired boy in the front who got it right. “We won because we lost Speer.”

Yim nodded. “Stand up. Explain.”

The boy shoved his hair back and stood. “We won the war because losing Speer made Hesperia intervene. And, uh, Hesperia’s naval abilities were vastly superior to Mugen’s. They won the war over the ocean theater, and Nikan got looped into the subsequent peace treaty. The victory wasn’t really ours at all.”

“Correct,” Yim said.

The boy sat, looking immensely relieved.

“Nikan did not win the Second Poppy War,” Yim reiterated. “The Federation is gone because we were so pathetic that the great naval powers to the west felt bad for us. We did such a terrible job defending our country that it took genocide for Hesperia to intervene. While Nikara forces were tied up on the northern front, a fleet of Federation ships razed the Dead Island overnight. Every man, woman, and child on Speer was butchered, and their bodies burned. An entire race, gone in a day.”

Their class was silent. They had grown up hearing stories about the destruction of Speer, a tiny island that punctuated the ocean between the Nariin Sea and Omonod Bay like a teardrop, lying just beside Snake Province. It had been the Empire’s only remaining tributary state, conquered and annexed at the height of the Red Emperor’s reign. It held a fraught place in Nikan’s history, a glaring example of the massive failure of the disunited army under the Warlords’ regime.

Rin had always wondered whether the loss of Speer was purely an accident. If any other province had been destroyed the way Speer had, the Nikara Empire wouldn’t have stopped with a peace treaty. They would have fought until the Federation of Mugen was in pieces.

But the Speerlies weren’t really Nikara at all. Tall and brown-skinned, they were an island people who had always been ethnically separate from the Nikara mainlanders. They spoke their own language, wrote in their own script, and practiced their own religion. They had joined the Imperial Militia only at the Red Emperor’s sword point.

This all pointed to strained relations between the Nikara and the Speerlies all the way up through the Second Poppy War. So, Rin thought, if any Nikara territory had to be sacrificed, Speer was the obvious choice.

“We have survived the last century through nothing more than sheer luck and the charity of the west,” said Yim. “But even with Hesperia’s help, Nikan only barely managed to drive out the Federation invaders. Under pressure from Hesperia, the Federation signed the Non-Aggression Pact at the end of the Second Poppy War, and Nikan has retained its independence since. The Federation has been relegated to trading outposts on the edge of the Horse Province, and for the past nearly two decades, they’ve more or less behaved.

“But the Mugenese grow restless, and Hesperia has never been good about keeping its promises. The heroes of the Trifecta have been reduced to one; the Emperor is dead, the Gatekeeper is lost, and only the Empress remains on the throne. Perhaps worse, we have no Speerly soldiers.” Yim paused. “Our best fighting force is gone. Nikan no longer possesses the assets that helped us survive the Second Poppy War. Hesperia cannot be relied upon to save us again. If the past centuries have taught us anything, it is that Nikan’s enemies never rest. But this time when they come, we intend to be ready.”

The noontime bell marked lunch.

Food was served from giant cauldrons lined up by the far wall—congee, fish stew, and loaves of rice flour buns—distributed by cooks who seemed wholly indifferent to their jobs.

The students were given portions just large enough to sate their growling stomachs, but not so much that they felt fully satisfied. Students who tried to pass through the line again were sent back to their tables empty-handed.