Post by Seek on Jun 19, 2016 1:51:16 GMT 10
Title: Takht Ya Takhta
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1325 words
Summary (and any Warnings): Zhu Wen, the Prince of Xuling, and the future emperor of Yanjing, plots to kill his way to the throne.
Notes: Please let me know if this doesn't quite fit ICW--I am a little concerned about it! It may also be a bit AU-ish. But we don't quite know that much about Yanjingyi politics so I took the fact it was based on China as reason to permit myself to be inventive.
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Zhu Wen, the Prince of Xuling, sipped wine from his cup and studied his counterpart across the low table. The paper lantern dangling from a wooden stand, laced with gold leaf and cunningly wrought to resemble a yawning tiger, cast a steady light on the two men at the table in the study.
You took risks, sometimes, Zhu Wen thought. He let none of those thoughts show on his features as his companion murmured praise of the calligraphed scrolls hanging on the walls, of the window artfully left open to display the view of the courtyard, with the solitary plum tree beneath the moonlight. You gained nothing by sitting down, by waiting. Oh, the world could surprise you sometimes. It could draw you into its private study, make you carefully-worded offers beneath the light of a single lantern.
Could ask you to do the unthinkable, could offer you splendid promises—and dark, fine wine—in a pale-glazed cup.
But dreamers didn’t change the world. Those who dared did, or found themselves yanked out before jeering crowds in a cangue to face the headsman. Or worse still: they were strangled in their sleep (the most merciful death, it was said), or poisoned—sometimes at lavish banquets. Our history is full of these, mused Zhu Wen, still handling his cup of dark wine. It was a night for such thoughts. All learned men knew that the history of Yanjing was written in intrigue and war and slaughter. All learned men knew that you had to kill to occupy the Dragon Throne, especially if you were the fourth son of the Emperor Honglei and very much out of imperial favour. It was not unknown for emperors to kill their siblings, removing potential sources of dissent. Men had killed for the Dragon Throne, though it was not popular to speak of this, or to imply that the throne had come in less-than-divine ways to an emperor.
There was a saying, in the province of Cenlik, sometimes called Shenli in the more civilised tongue of tiyon. They were sons of the steppes, in Cenlik—only a few generations removed from the tribes who had settled in many of the bordering kingdoms—and it showed in their language: a brutish, barbaric tongue that had none of the pleasantries that scholars and civilised men knew of. Takht ya takhta, they said in Cenlik. Throne or coffin, literally translated. It had a brutal simplicity to it, Zhu Wen thought: it cut through all the extraneous gilt and grasped the core of things in a sharp fist. You won, when you played for a throne. Or you died on the headsman’s block, or in your sleep, or by poisoned wine in a pale-glazed cup. The world was not kind to ambitious, powerful princes who wanted thrones.
“We have a lot in common, you and I,” murmured Zhu Wen, because the world, by that same measure, is not any more kind to ambitious, brilliant young generals.
There was the next, obligatory step of the dance, of course. General Hengkai bowed his head and muttered how honoured he was that the Prince of Xuling had noticed him (a truth), that he could not see how someone like him could be so similar to the Prince (a lie; etiquette demanded modesty) and so on.
You played by the rules, but you had to know when to break them, and Zhu Wen had watched Hengkai for some time. It wasn’t, after all, unknown for members of the imperial clan to grace some rising star—say, for instance, a young general beginning to gain a reputation for brilliance and daring—with their patronage. Who held allegiances at the imperial court held power. Zhu Wen knew this; he studied power with the same rapt attention he offered the complex patterns of history, of a game of qi. You knew a lot about a man by how he played, Zhu Wen had decided, and Hengkai’s games were by no means orthodox but he won. It was astounding.
To the others, Hengkai was a maverick: a brash young man who needed to better heed the wisdom of his elders—the more experienced generals who had decided how war was to be made. You could not attack an enemy as soon as you forded a river after marching an army for two hundred li. It was unthinkable: men needed rest, and there was a way things were done.
Hengkai hadn’t cared. Zhu Wen liked that in a man: the ability to instinctively grasp when rules stifled and to cut through them in an instant of utter disregard for generations of tradition.
He plied the general with more wine, ignoring the man’s protests. An honour, that. Wine poured by an imperial prince in the finest of celadon ware. He was a strategist himself: had led men into battle. You had to, as a Yanjingyi prince. The Emperor expected as much of his sons, and Zhu Wen would account himself skilled at the arts of war. But he was not Hengkai. He knew that as well. His own men were not enough, not to take the palace by force; he needed Hengkai, and the Eastern Guard he commanded.
There was the way things were done, of course. He’d quelled the rebellions in Anyang and fortified Lindong against the constant incursions of neighbouring kingdoms. He’d even reinforced the border guards during the ongoing skirmishes with the Namornese across the Sea of Grass. But still, he had been passed over: the crown prince was a boy barely a year past his naming day. “It defies tradition,” he’d heard the advisors say, cautiously, prostrating themselves before the emperor. “Either name the oldest or the brightest of your sons,” they remonstrated, the closest they’d come to reproach.
But the emperor’s decision stood and he would not be talked out of it. All because he’d cut down one scholar in the marketplace—a greatly respected man who’d spoken against recent imperial aggression, thought Zhu Wen, frustrated. The scholars were a dangerous group: they had to be handled with caution. You gave them too much freedom to voice themselves and the next thing you knew, you had an open wound bleeding dissent into the empire. It was one thing to speak of things an empire should and should not do; it was another thing to rule. History cared nothing for talk of what was right and what was traditional: you adapted or you died. Politics and governance—it was a game played with swords and the lives of men and if you didn’t have some of that steel in you, you were best taken off the board.
The scholar had criticised Yanjing’s seizure of Szeyang; as far as Zhu Wen saw, Szeyang was critical. They’d held it, a long time ago, when Yanjing was glorious and strong, and then lost it again in the fractured decades that followed the Blue Turban Rebellion in the reign of the Five Regents. It secured the empire’s northen border, and was a strong staging point for future expansion. Those things mattered, if Yanjing was to rise. If Yanjing was to once more become the dominant power in the region, and perhaps in the entire world. It had slumbered, for far too long, beneath his uncle and then his father.
Zhu Wen smiled and sipped his own wine. He could wait, of course: for his father to weaken, for Jia Jui to come through with her own promise. For the advisors disillusioned with their new crown prince to see that the Prince of Xuling was by far a better candidate for the throne. Emperors had abdicated before, after all. Sometimes, they’d even been forced to abdicate. What mattered now was getting Hengkai on his side, before the fighting began.
Weishu, he decided, abruptly. Set the cup down on the table. It was a good name, a strong name for a future Yanjingyi emperor.
He liked it.