Past of the Mountain Country

A new day. After breakfast, Xilutaiya and Taliel made their way to Wenni's home. Little Landi was in the living room at the moment, playing while hugging a very large ball of yarn. "There you are." Wenni came out of the kitchen, carrying a plate of freshly baked cookies, and handed it to the two of them. "Have some." Then she picked Landi up and carried him back to his room to play by himself, and began the first formal lesson for the two of them. "First, I need to get a sense of Miss Tiya's grasp of letters." She set a very thick book on the table. "This is The Rings of the Fir: Past of the Mountain Country, a graduation gift from Scholar Haide. The author is Akanashi, a famous Scholar of three hundred years ago. It tells the early history of the Raygas Principality—how the Knight King Leijiade Buweili conquered the mountains, framed a code of laws, and pacified the tribes of the ranges until they swore fealty." "Now Miss Tiya may try reading aloud the chapter on page two hundred thirty-five, 'The Battle of Snowfall Mountain.'" "All right." Xilutaiya accepted the thick book with evident interest. She quickly turned to the given page and worked through the text. She recognized most of the words; a few phrases were somewhat obscure—likely vocabulary the body's original owner had never learned. Then she began to recite: The snow fell for five days and four nights. Its weight snapped the branches of the pines, and we had to dismount and trudge through the piled snow; all that met the eye was a boundless waste of white... Xide, the 'Wind' hunter traveling with me, told me that the wind still carried a breath of 'Sleeping Winter' that had not dispersed—that this great snow might have been made by human hands. It gave rise to worry in me. Malange and Pulisi said they would think of some way to help me deal with the blizzard, but I thought to myself: what could these scholars of Candle Fortress possibly do? They were only fit for sorting the knowledge of books and copying down the traces on ancient relics. The one thing about them that could be called pleasing, perhaps, was that they were all decent at mathematics and skilled at building stone-throwing siege engines—and that solved many problems for me. ... For two months we never found the enemy's main force, wandering the mountains to no purpose. Many men froze to death in the cold nights. Today Knight Huolin reported to me yet again that thirteen soldiers had failed to wake last night. I think we must be lost. ... Facing Knight Ruide's corpse, fury filled my body and made me long to burn and burst like the Blazing Sun. A pity I am not the 'Blazing Sun'—I could only drive my sword into the rock and soil beneath my feet. There could be no more waiting; things could not go on like this. I had Scholar Malange leave my tent for a time, then walked toward the birdcage draped in black cloth. A strange bird stood within, and it would carry my resolve... ... The Black-crested Magpie cried out; the four-hundred-and-thirty-second ring of the ruddy fir scarred over. Beneath the black pines of Snowfall Mountain I put Kechale to death. He fell bearing a curse, and the heavy sword in my hand was nicked all over. However it came about, we had won. We defeated the last and mightiest of the mountain tribes and beheaded its chieftain, and the Snow Mountain Hags who had aided Kechale were nailed to wooden stakes and bled dry. From twenty-one years ago, when I led my family's retainers south and settled in a little town on the shore of Ear Lake, through the road of pioneering, alliance, and conquest to the sweeping away of the last obstacle, this long journey has at last come to its end. It is time to go back. My family still waits for me, and so do those warriors. We shall raise a city where these ranges meet, make our covenant with the foundation stone, and found our nation. May it stand evergreen as the fir; may our knights' armor hold strong forever, and their long swords stay forever keen. When she finished reciting the rather lyrical close of the verse, Xilutaiya set the book down. Wenni clapped her hands softly in approval. "Not only is the pronunciation exceptionally standard—Miss Tiya's voice is lovely too, full of rhythm. It draws one right in." "If the perfect score is ten, I would give Miss Tiya a nine point six." "Eh? That's still not full marks?" Taliel didn't understand. "Mm. Miss Tiya probably wasn't born in the Raygas Principality. There were some words and local sayings unique to this region that she didn't know, and she skipped a few of them, so points had to come off," Wenni explained. "Oh, I see." "But it's reassuring that Miss Tiya read even the book's uncommon, obscure words correctly. You should know that the Scholar Akanashi who wrote it had a habit of showing off his literary skill—he liked to pick out rare words to display his erudition and taste." As she spoke, Wenni shook her head slightly, as if she had suffered plenty while studying this book in her own student days. "So there's no need to keep assessing Miss Tiya's command of letters. Next, arithmetic." She produced a sheet of paper covered in all manner of arithmetic problems and handed it to Xilutaiya. Before taking it, the girl felt a flicker of nerves—after all, since graduating from university she had forgotten nearly all the mathematics she had ever learned, especially advanced math, calculus, and the like. But the moment she made out the problems on the sheet, she relaxed at once. Weren't these just elementary-school problems, with at most a little junior high mixed in? She wrote the answers almost without thinking; the whole sheet took her less than a minute. Wenni had been about to use the time to quiz Taliel while Xilutaiya worked on the problems, but before she could so much as turn around, the girl had already handed in her answers, and she had to look over Xilutaiya's answer sheet first. "Everything correct." Her voice carried a hint of hesitation, a touch of disbelief. By then Taliel had leaned in too; one look at the numbers and problems covering the sheet made her head swim, and she turned her face away. "Now we needn't worry about Miss Tiya's foundations." Relieved, Wenni asked the girl to wait a little while she took Taliel's measure. In this interval, Xilutaiya went on leafing through The Rings of the Fir: Past of the Mountain Country with great interest. The book was written three hundred years ago by Scholar Akanashi. It quotes portions of the autobiography of 'Knight King' Leijiade Buweili, along with the records of scholars who marched with the army in the early years and accounts left by local figures, verifying and piecing them together into a long epic that tells of the founding of the Raygas Principality. Leijiade Buweili was born in the Gulunga Mountains at the heart of the continent, the second son of a minor local noble. Though the family title could never be his, he was wonderfully gifted from childhood, and at twenty-four he became a knight of the third-order 'Castle' attribute. Afterward he gathered companions and retainers of like mind, came south to a lake amid the mountains, and from that starting point slowly pushed back the borders of the wilds, until at fifty-six he had swept away every obstacle and founded the Raygas Principality. The knights and companions who had campaigned south and north with him became the first nobles of the new nation. The founding of the Raygas Principality was no smooth road. It took 'Knight King' Leijiade twenty-one years to conquer the mountains, and after the kingdom stood, nearly another twenty before the state was basically settled. The problems of public order, the economy, and construction that arose along the way left the Knight King at his wits' end more than once. Fortunately, the 'Candle Fortress School' that backed him sent scholars to this harsh and bitter mountain country for decades on end, to serve the local nobles as aides, advisors, and tutors—educating bit by bit, passing on skills, raising castles and tall towers—until at last the nation was truly made secure. Scholar Akanashi, too, must have come out of the 'Candle Fortress School,' Xilutaiya thought as she read to the end, guessing at the author's stance and origins. Though the earlier chapters had complained and joked at the School's expense, the praise that followed made those little flaws read like a deliberate move of criticizing first so as to praise later. There was perhaps some partiality in it—but without the records of those 'Candle Fortress School' scholars, later generations would have had no road at all into the past. On the whole, Xilutaiya came away with a rather good impression of the 'Candle Fortress School': they had genuinely widened the boundaries of civilization and bettered the living conditions of the local people.