Niohuru Tie laid back in his upholstered chair, hands restless on the armrests, and watched clouds of steam and smoke from the water pipes rising languidly up to the rafters, which were painted to resemble a star-filled night sky. All through the teahouse the other sons and daughters of the Great Houses jostled and laughed, trying to agree on what their next amusement might be.

A girl Tie had known since early childhood, youngest daughter of a cadet branch of Suwan Guwalgiya, was all for visiting one of the private dinner theaters south of Zhengyang Gate. “Come along, you lazy slugs,” she said, prodding the arm of the boy sitting next to Tie and glaring in his direction. “It will be fun.”

Tie knew what she really wanted. Her tastes were somewhat… exotic, and based on his long experience with her, Tie knew that as soon as they had shadowed the front door of some private theater, she would be agitating to go instead through Qianmen Gate, to the quarter of dancing and prostitution. “It’s only a little way further,” she would say, as she had countless times before. Tie wondered what her father would say, himself a court official of the first rank, second class, if he knew the use to which his young daughter put her daily allotment of silver taels.

“It won’t be fun,” said the boy sitting across from Tie, a son of the Hoifa clan who seemed to wear a perpetual pout of annoyance. “It will be boring. Let’s go racing instead, yes?” He looked to the others for support, eagerly.

If he was waiting for Tie to chime in, he’d be waiting a long time. They’d spent so many evenings racing three-wheeled speeders all over Northern Capital that Tie was sure he could navigate the route with his eyes closed. From the city’s center north to the Great Bell Temple, then west to the Fishing Terrace, then finally ending up at Sandy Mouth in the Outer City. The loser would stand the others to their next round at some tavern or teahouse, complaining all the while that they’d been cheated by some tactic employed by another, with the winner boasting of their driving prowess until everyone shouted them down. Then they’d be back to the same spot in which they found themselves now, bored and trying to work out what to do next. Sitting around, waiting for something exciting to happen.

“I know!” A daughter of the Magiya clan clapped her hands, excitedly. “Let’s go tip an elephant!”

The others groaned.

“Not that again,” said a Nara girl with a moue of distaste. “Last time we went over there I had the smell of dung in my nostrils for days.”

Tie couldn’t help but sneer, though the Nara failed to notice. He glanced around at the other girls, all of them wearing the high, rigid Manchurian hairstyles favored by the fashionable women of the city this season. He wondered if any of them knew that the lacquering agent which held their coiffures aloft was derived from dung collected from the elephant grounds inside the Xuanusu Gate.

“I’m with Hoifa,” another boy chimed in. “Let’s go racing.”

The Suwan Guwalgiya girl rolled her eyes. “Not that again…”

A serving girl went by with a plate of dumplings, and the boy sitting beside Tie, middle son of a Sumuru family, speared a couple of them on the end of a chopstick. Chomping one between his teeth, he extended the chopstick to Tie, offering him the other.

“Eighteen-hells!” Tie shouted, jumping up, sending his chair toppling backward. “Have none of you any shame?”

All of the others stopped talking at once, turning to look at him, blank-faced.

The Sumuru boy looked from Tie to the chopstick in his hands and back, confused. “But it was just a dumpling, Niohuru…”

“It’s not about the dumpling, idiot!” Tie snarled.

“Then what is it about, Niohuru?” Nara asked, her eyebrow arched.

“Have any of you looked around, lately?”

The others looked at him, confused.

Tie grit his teeth, and pointed a finger at a pair of old men seated at the far side of the teahouse, passing the nozzle of a water pipe back and forth. The exchange was made somewhat difficult due to the fact that one of the two was missing both hands, his arms instead ending in crude prosthetic claws, while the other was missing one leg beneath the knee. Both men had a haunted look, and had kept to themselves all evening.

“What about them?” the Hoifa boy asked. “They’re not bothering us.”

“But they should bother you,” Tie snapped. “The very fact of them should bother you!”

Tie knew he would be better off addressing a collection of statues, but he couldn’t help himself. For weeks the thought had been plaguing him, and he now simply had to give this thought voice.

“When we race through the city, or amble over to the theaters and taverns, do you happen to notice the countless veterans crowding the narrow streets? Or the poor legless wretches, blind or deaf or worse, busking for a few copper coins? Well, do you?!”

The others exchanged bewildered looks and shrugs. “Well, certainly,” a girl said, “but…”

She trailed off, as the rest of the sentence didn’t need uttering.

“But what is it to us?” Tie finished for her, mockingly.

The girl didn’t speak, but nodded.

If the others had failed to notice, Tie most definitely had not. Most were not as fortunate as the two veterans sitting across the teahouse, who obviously had returned home to families or fortunes enough to keep them clothed, housed, and fed. Those in the city streets were not so fortunate. Tie had seen them, the walking wounded of the Second Mexic War. The street performers beating Manchu eight-cornered drums and singing the victory songs of bygone heroes. The men and women on crutches and carts, begging for alms, rattling a coin or two in a clay bowl to attract attention. Or those who simply lounged in the public places, lacking the will and means to go anywhere or do anything else, simply sitting and waiting, but for what Tie didn’t know. For death to take them? For the war to finally end and their brothers-in-arms still on the red planet to be sent home? Or for those children of privilege who raced past them without a second glance to finally stop, and notice, and think?

There were few children more privileged than Niohuru Tie, and it shamed him that it had taken so long to realize what was wrong in his world.

“It is everything to us,” Tie said, his jaw set.

Sons of the Niohuru family had been ranking members of the imperial court since the days of Nurgaci, before the Manchu came down from the north to establish the Clear Dynasty. Daughters of the Niohuru had married into the imperial Aisin Gioro clan ever since, becoming the mothers of emperors and empresses, as well as occasionally empresses in their own right. But like many wealthy families with ties to the court, those rare nobles who inherited their titles and estates rather than earning them through examination and service, the Niohuru in recent generations had become too comfortable and complacent, resting on ties of blood, marriage, and money.

“We waste our lives in gentle pursuits,” Tie went on, “letting others suffer and die for our freedoms.” He nodded toward the two wounded veterans at the chamber’s far side, who as yet had taken no notice of their discussion.

Tie fancied that he was a man out of time, an atavistic throwback to his honored ancestor Niohuru Eidu, who served as councilor to the great Nurgaci, founder of the Manchu state and father of the Eight Banners. Niohuru Eidu had won glory and honor with the strength of his sword, the keenness of his wits, and the sureness of his seat on horseback, earning a hereditary title enjoyed by his descendants for generations. But those days were long gone, and now the sons of Niohuru, like the sons of the other noble Manchu and Han families, avoided military service if they could, and in those rare cases in which they could not avoid it altogether, used their families’ influence to secure positions in the rear echelon, far from the dangers of the front lines. “You may turn your nose up at ‘gentle pursuits,’ Niohuru,” the Hoifa boy said, with a sly grin, “but if you ask me they are the reason for living, not its waste.”

Tie shook his head, angrily. “We squander the legacy handed down to us by our honored forbears.”

The Suwan Guwalgiya girl turned her head away, holding her hand up in a gesture that communicated boredom and dismissal.

“Then what do you intend to do about it?” said Sumuru, munching contentedly on his second dumpling.

Tie drew himself up even straighter.

“I will serve my emperor,” he said proudly. “Tomorrow morning I’ll be enlisting in the Eight Banners.”

“You?” the Nara girl said, disbelievingly. “A bannerman?”

Tie held his chin up, refusing to be baited. “The name of Niohuru was once well-known in the Bordered Yellow Banner. It will be again.”

The others exchanged uneasy glances, not sure whether Tie was joking, or to laugh if he was.

“In a few months’ time,” he said, raising his voice, “I’ll be on the red planet Fire Star, helping to rout the Mexica, while you’ll all still be here trying to decide whether to go racing or get drunk.”

Tie strode away from the circle of chairs, heading toward the door.

“Farewell,” he called back over his shoulder. He couldn’t help but smile, seeing the confused looks on their faces. He had days of glory before him, while they had nothing at all.

On his way to the exit, still puffed up with pride, he passed the table where the pair of veterans sat smoking, and for the first time caught their eyes. He wasn’t sure if they had heard him, and he thought to say something comradely to them before he left. As he opened his mouth to speak, though, he noticed again the haunted look in their eyes. Close up, he saw now that they weren’t old men at all, but perhaps only a few years his senior. A few years older, and a lifetime more worn.

No words came. Finding nothing suitable at all in his mind to say, he turned and walked from the teahouse, out into the night, clinging to the strength of his convictions.

---

PREVIOUS CHAPTER: Hexagram 4
Juvenile Ignorance
Below Water Above Mountain
Below the Mountain emerges the Spring. In the same way, the noble man makes his actions resolute and nourishes his virtue.

NEXT CHAPTER: Hexagram 6
Contention
Below Water Above Heaven
Heaven and water operate in contrary ways. In the same way, the noble man in conduction business carefully plans how such things begin.

Return to Index.

Chapter 5 of Three Unbroken by Chris Roberson. Copyright © 2007 Monkeybrain, Inc. For more action from the Celestial Empire don't miss The Dragon's Nine Sons.

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