Empress of the Sun, Ch.6
6 Local Views
by Sally Oh
(copyright 2016, Patricia Ormsby)
“So what has ‘Er ‘Oly ‘Ighness the Pink Priestess Princess got to say to us plebes? Will she apologize, yeh think, for the intrusion?” Tom shook his mane. “They said it’d be ‘temprary’ but I doubt they meant it. That is a lot of work that went into those houses and their little tea gardens.”
“I think it was wishful thinking on their part, Tom. It’s not any fun losing your homeland to hostile invaders that say they mean to boil you alive. Have you tried talking to any of them?”
“Would they deign to talk to someone as lowly as myself?”
“Not if you don’t try, Tom. You’re not trying. If you hold out an olive branch, most people in distress will take it. They’re shy, Tom, so you may have to, like, shove it at them and keep insisting. That’s what they expect, because that’s how they relate to each other. They hesitate.” Henry took a thoughtful sip of his scotch. “You have to show them they are welcome. They’re not bad people. Even the piss-poor among them never steal.”
“'Xcept yer land.”
Henry frowned. “They bought their lands here. You can check out the deeds at the courthouse.”
The land on which the palace had been built was adjacent to the long-standing shrine famous now for the “waiting giant and dancing lawyer” from their coded messages. That shrine had been established more than a century previously and had preserved a large stretch of forest in good shape. Forested land adjacent to it had been purchased. The county would have been loath to part with such a large amount of public forest had it not been for the promise of effective preservation in its natural state with limited intrusions. (The technological help and a certain sum of precious metals being offered was certainly another factor, though.)
“It is all legally recognized,” continued Henry. “They played the system the way it stands.”
“They bribed people.”
“”They paid the asking price, which has always been quite a bit higher for ‘wayfarers,’ by the way.”
“Who are yeh accusin’?”
“Nobody, Tom! I don’t know who benefits from it, nor do I care to hazard a guess!”
“Well, to be sure, it was extortionist.”
“Of whom?” wondered Henry into his drink, more to himself than to his companion. He checked his pocket watch, which had stopped again.
“Oh, look!” said Tom, “There’s Josh! Cm’over and chat, guy!”
Josh swaggered over cheerfully. Henry hoped his other friend, lacking relatives in high places, would take a slightly more circumspect view of the Japanese.
As it happened, though, Josh was more preoccupied with the drought and the effects it was having on crops, meaning eventually, food. This topic did not lead directly to the Japanese. It did indirectly, but Josh was sensible enough not to bring it up, because, again, it was a sore point.
The Cascade Republic had gradually become a rice-growing region. Over the decades, the Japanese refugees had acquired their own lands, acre by acre, but not prime farmland, from which they were systematically excluded. Instead, they acquired forested mountainous land with rugged terrain. They cut the timber for their houses and created terraced paddies with elaborate gravity-fed irrigation systems, within which organic matter and minerals would precipitate, gradually enhancing the soil. They started out barely able to survive, planting small crops that could tolerate the acidic soil or creating small plots with rich soil by their houses, where they grew vegetables and tubers, but as time went on, they managed to create their own good farmland.
The drought had not affected them as much as other people. Springs still flowed, and they were accustomed to hand-carrying water to their vegetables day after day during dry spells. That simply had to become a larger scale effort this year. Lots of hard work.
Everybody had been happy to see these quiet, hard-working little people slowly get to their feet again in ways that did not compete directly with their own livelihoods. They were a source of inspiration, and often compared to “honeybees”-another insect analogy.
“Industrious little guys,” as Josh was apt to call them. Josh had picked up some of their carpentry techniques, and it had brought him a grudging degree of respect for them. The houses they built stayed up even in severe earthquakes and withstood the terrible winter gales each year. If you were very patient, you could apprentice yourself directly to one of them. There was a famous school with a master, the son of one of the Daiippa. He’d had a humble origin in Japan as a day laborer, but rose to prominence in Cascadia when the ancient but economically disfavored techniques he’d studied in his free time-one of the benefits of economic decline-suddenly became vital to survival.
One had to apprentice him- or herself for seven years to learn the trade, which was never explained, merely shown, and if you didn’t get it right, you just didn’t eat that day. Non-Japanese who had mastered the trade could found their own schools, which were more explanatory and less demanding. Those who had studied under them did not receive the coveted Japanese accreditation, but they helped propagate a lot of the methods.
The net result of this, however, was that again and again fate just seemed to favor the intruders. And here again, a major drought had come along, but yet again, the Japanese were doing okay. And then along came their queen…