Shuli Go Stories Vol. 7: Benefits of a Classical Education

Part 1

In the final decades of the Shan dynasty, the Shuli Go – magic-infused lawmen and women who had kept the peace for two thousand years – were disbanded as a caste. Trained to interpret the law and dispense justice, their education was broader and deeper than that received by most public servants in the Central Empire. After being pushed outside that same educated and elite set of institutions though, their former colleagues often excluded them from the discussions that helped form Imperial society.

20 Kao, 3272 CE – Between Wufei and Ming Kingdoms – Four years before Wamai

The fire was hypnotic, soothing. The air about it was still, the night dense, the darkness emulsifying external existence: the fire was all, a source of warmth and joy and safety. When the first human beings walked the lands that are now part of the Central Empire, they brought fire with them. The greatest tool, the grandest ambition, to bring light to darkness, and to burn enemies. What a triumph it would have been to create their own, to start a spark through ingenuity and dedication. To hold it at the end of a stick and feel that first great victory over the things that would do them harm: nature, beast, other humans. But also to feel fear of the thing that gave power: a tool and a danger wrapped together. Like every tool, if used the wrong way, if misunderstood. Every tool was a danger. Every weapon could be turned on its creator.

Zhao Lian stared at the fire and immersed herself in its hypnosis. Often on nights like this – pleasant, still, unthreatening – she would stare at the fire and let it collect her thoughts on the smoke and carry them to other places, other times. She thought of those first human beings often. The Shei believed they had first come to the Cradle of Civilization fifteen thousand years ago. The Tiendu Shu believed humans had grown out of this land itself, like all the other animals that lived and thrived there. Lian didn't care which, if either, of them were right. She knew things had beginnings, even if the beginnings repeated over and over again. Some human had built the first fire and felt great mastery over the scary, threatening world.

Lian's fire was small, fed with little more than some twigs in a dirt clearing, keeping the mosquitos and nightlife away; good enough for a short stop on her annual trip south. The remains of a large rodent – which Lian couldn't even identify as she'd caught it – recently roasted and consumed, sat in the middle of the blaze. It had been her only meal all day, and her stomach was a throbbing, unhappy voice in her belly. Her horse, which she considered herself lucky to have, was tied to a nearby tree, munching an overgrown bush, also still hungry, but looking more satisfied than Lian felt. The thin mare's eyes also took in some of the majesty of the fire, even as it continued eating and eating.

The cooling rains and breeze of spring had started to fade, but the night had not yet reached the humid sauna of the summer in the Cradle. She didn't like to wait this long to head back to her son Quan, but the pickings for work that winter had been slim, and she had so little money she'd been forced to go without food wherever she could. Hence the unidentified rodent. It was another few weeks ride to Zhosian and the good food she knew waited for her there. She could last until then.

So she stared at the fire and waited to start feeling sleepy. She fed the fire a few more sticks, looked at the licks and wisps of flame, and waited. Still her stomach protested, keeping her awake.

Then the other fires appeared behind her, lighting up the sky with a dull echo of their own licks and wisps, the horizon's purple becoming pink and yellow as the fires approached and grew brighter.

Lian's camp was a few hundred yards from the main road that ran along the Brilliant River. It was never a good idea to camp right beside the road: Lian was likely to be robbed – either by thieves or the patrolmen hired to guard against them – and had learned early on that a few hundred yards of darkness was all it took to keep most predators at bay. But the lights now turning the night sky into color were directly on the road. Lian got up and stalked back towards the road now, the new conglomeration of illumination opening the way for her to do so without the threat of a stubbed toe or trip on a root.