Free The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) by S. M. Stirling Page B

thought. Then:
He bought us a generation when common folk could reap what they sowed with no one to put them in fear. He and Mother built the Kingdom on strong foundations.
That
is his victory, and nothing can take it away so long as we keep faith with him. To every generation their own task.
    But the sheer fact that she had something important to do, something that required her full concentration, kept the misery at bay. Her father had been fond of the saying that work was the best cure for sorrow, and it was true. The three leaders across the table looked at each other. Pure envy seemed to be involved in the subtle play of feeling on their faces.
    “The
jinnikukaburi
leaders are like that,” Egawa said. “Their ruling dynasty, and some of the lesser ones.”
    “Jinnikukaburi?”
Órlaith asked.
    That wasn’t an ordinary Nihongo word; it was a compound that meant roughly
human flesh cockroach
or perhaps
cockroach in human flesh
and to her it . . . tasted . . . as if it were a new coinage. There was a freight of loathing and unacknowledged fear to it.
    “What we call the
bakachon
these days,” Egawa went on. “Cannibal bastards.”
    One of Órlaith’s brows went up.
Baka
was the word for fool or imbecile.
Chon
translated in her mind as
Korean
and at the same time as something like—
    Her consciousness stumbled, as the new language tried to flow into concepts not present in her mind, superimposing on what she’d grown up speaking in a way strange to her. Terms she knew only vaguely floated by at the back of whatever part of her paid attention to the way the Sword amplified her knowledge of words:
dink
and
gook
among them, with
Canuk
a more familiar but very distant and qualified third.
    Here in Montival people insulted each other all the time over thingslike religion, tribe or clan, old feuds, occupation, social class and neighborhood, and they did it in ways ranging from rough half-friendly teasing to an active will to harm. But not in quite
that
way.
    Finally she got a sense that the closest rough equivalent in her native dialect of English would be something like
Korean
crossed with the content of the phrase
stinking retarded monkey
; the whole process took less than a second, though it seemed longer.
    Right, “Chon” is
not
a compliment. I don’t think they love each other, so.
    Reiko made a slight sound, the equivalent of an English-speaker’s
tsk-tsk
, and touched her folded fan to the man’s wrist for an instant.
    “That is not quite fair, General Egawa,” she said gently.
    To Órlaith: “We are not sure of the details, but from prisoners we know that there was a terrible war in Korea, not long after the Change. The enemy believe that the man who was their ruler then, who had escaped Pyongyang and hidden with his closest followers in a mountain fortress, received a divine revelation that enabled him to reunite Korea . . . what was left of Korea. He emerged when the chaos had destroyed all that went before and imposed his rule, claiming that the spirits had made him a
kangshinmu
, seer and sorcerer and priest, and that those who pledged allegiance to him alone were pure, and were entitled to make cattle of all others. Those who resisted were . . . disposed of, though it took years of fighting. We only really became aware of this afterwards, from interrogating prisoners we took when their raids began, and so we know only the story as the victors told it.”
    “Ah. That would be where the
human flesh
and
cannibal bastards
comes in?” Órlaith said with distaste.
    We were lucky here. I’ve heard oldsters laugh when we say that, but it’s true nonetheless. Luck is always something you say when thinking of someone with less of it, or more.
    “Yes. So they survived the terrible times, until there were crops again. That is why there are so many of them, for the stronger ate the weaker. That happened in many places, but not so . . . so organized, so disciplined, so deliberate. We Nihonjin