Chapter 8: feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes (I have done what I could; let those who can do better)

Reading over the "notes" that the girl, Taiki and Risai had taken for him over the time that he'd been out of commission was rather like sticking a knife in his heart and twisting it around. Maybe his kingdom was technically stable, but it was certainly not prospering! There were two civil wars being waged further dividing an already splintered royal authority. First was the more obvious war between Taiki, Yuka and the unreplacable provincial governors of Ba, Bun, Jou, and Ie provinces.

:I don't know whether to admire her or be far more concerned that she and Taiki decided to take their struggles against them off the battlefield.:

On one hand he could see the sense in it. All three note-takers had made it clear that Yuka and Taiki worked together in tandem, and that the girl felt obliged to listen to the kirin's wishes. Taiki clearly wished that people would not be made to suffer from war. That wish would have necessitated an armistice.

:I do not know that I agree with their decision, however,: Gyousou thought as he looked at the population charts.

The north had been all but emptied of civilian life. He knew that that meant that many farms would have gone fallow, industries and resources would have been abandoned along with towns and trading posts needed to run them. He understood that this, too, would have been part of the economic stranglehold that the girl was slowly weaving around their necks, but it was going to have serious impacts on the future, especially in those places most affected by it. Risai had urged that they should assemble the army and simply go in and wipe out the opposition, this would have secured the kingdom under their rule. However, Taiki and Yuka had placed their priority on getting the situation with the youma rampaging around the countryside under control.

:While not technically the wrong decision,: Gyousou thought. :A quick, decisive victory against them would have been better, I think, than this protracted proxy-war.:

Added into the economic conflict was the fact that the ministries were divided. The efficient, decisive system of able and trustworthy ministers that Gyousou had so painstakingly put into place was gone.

:That hurts,: he thought with a wince.

He'd worked so hard at it too. His court and the six ministries under him had been like a well-oiled machine! But all things considered, having two "bad" ministries out of six, when one took into account that the ministries themselves had been inherited from a usurper, he supposed was not so bad.

:Especially when the pair nominally ruling the throne have no authority to appoint new ministers,: he reminded himself. Gyousou of course would have sacked the ministers of spring, summer and fall for their insubordination, as well as the choushi for failure to report misbehavior of his fellow officials, but if they had no choice but to work with what they had and make it do, he supposed some political struggle was inevitable.

Taiki's notes were incomplete or rather, they had clearly been written with every attempt made to spare his king's feelings and paint a series of events as "not so bad, really". The notes that Risai took were typically military, dry facts about tactics and troop movements and the augmentation of resources. They were useful but pertained only to her area of expertise.

The notes the girl left him however didn't spare him any of the gorey details. It even sort of felt like she was (justifiably) admonishing him for what she'd had to put up with. However, aside from her occasional irritated "why won't you wake the hell up, damn you!" she covered everything from the reasons she had used her plan to stabilize the economy as a way to manipulate the population away from the northern province's all as part of her slowly tightening noose around the throats of the lords and ministers she could not replace without royal authority, to the various personalities she faced both in the ministries and in the government officials she had been left with.

Gyousou was left with the impression of an incisive and cunning mind, but one with a slightly disturbing tendency toward isolation and a "her against the world" mentality. Risai had marked it up to a comment let slip by the regnant queen of Kei (who was reportedly an old friend and schoolmate of the girl) apparently she'd been bullied in the past. While it had surely toughened her skill at observation of interpersonal relationships and analysis of personalities, it had not made her inclined to open up to people it seemed.

:I'm inclined to agree with Risai's assessment of her,: Gyousou thought after a long moment to study the first book she'd left him. :She's not much on military tactics, but when it comes to handling politics and the economy, the girl is as powerful as a general in the field.:

There was no doubt that the Royal Consort pro-tem had a canny and cunning mind. What worried him about her was the way she seemed to see everyone else but Taiki as a potential enemy. It didn't seem very healthy.

:Then again, that's probably one reason why she's still alive.:

Risai had also detailed the attempts to get at the Taiho and the Royal Consort. Taiki was thankfully oblivious to many of them for either Risai had caught them in time or Yuka had worked with her to gloss them over so that the kirin didn't notice that an attempt had been made. What Yuka was apparently not aware of (for her chief of security hid it from her) was that there were three times as many attacks on the girl's life than were ever attempted on the Taiho. The reason why was stated simply.

"They want to get rid of the impediment to royal authority and autonomy in the form of the Consort. If they assassinate Taiho then a new one is born on a Riboku and they have to worry about a new dynasty coming in. They get rid of Yuka and they can make the Taiho into their puppet. As long as she remains strong against them, then they cannot rule as they wish and they have someone blocking them at every turn."

Gyousou turned back to assessing the sory state of his royal court. Out of his sankou, the three advisors which consisted of Taifu, Taishi and Taiho (which was a different rank, confusingly enough, than that saiho-Taiho, Taiki) there were none of them that had survived the purges that Asen had made on the upper ranks. In the interim while he'd been sleeping, Taiki took over the official duties of all three advisors and Yuka had more or less taken on the duties of the chousai in order to curb the excesses of the chousai that was officially appointed (still left over from the reign of the previous king, Kyou-ou). Apparently, since there was no king to settle a question once and for all, Yuka and Taiki had to work things out between them until they could come to a consensus that they could both agree on.

:That is another reason why so many of the situations that require swift decisive action are left to languish.:

However, not all of them stagnated in a mire of bureaucracy and indecisiveness. Between Yuka and Risai, they had created a small team of elite stealth fighters, ones they could deploy to gather information or make incisive covert strikes. Yuka didn't officially know about them and Risai didn't officially report about them, but in times when the northern shuukou were on the move the two women became awfully fond of taking tea and playing shoji in the garden (a cover for their true activities of circumventing the next movements by the Shuukou).

While an adept and cunning politician, Yuka relied entirely upon Risai's military advice and the poor general was near-exhausted from handling both the internal security of the palace, the guards stationed around the five provinces under Golden Rule to slay the youma and the covert intelligence gathering and tactical strikes on the rebellious shuukou of the north to deal with.

:Risai is doing the job of three generals all at once,: Gyousou thought with dismayed admiration.

He felt humbled by the way those still loyal to him (or to Taiki, in the case of the girl) had pulled together and pitched in to maintain damage control on a volatile situation.

Risai, it was reported to him by an amused member of his personal staff, spent the morning chasing Lady Yuka around the salle. Her reason was that Yuka should never have been injured by a lone assailant, so she must have been so preoccupied with her political maneuvering that she had neglected to keep honed sharp the skills that would keep her alive. Thus the general had ordered the royal consort stuffed into her "practice robes" (the older, cut up and worn garments they used to keep her in the habit of being able to move defensibly even when mummified in several layers of silk) and proceeded to run her through drills both armed and unarmed, then sparring matches, and finally escape scenarios.

Gyousou knew of this because Taiki fretted over it. In truth, the necessity of it bothered the king as well as his kirin. Taiki knew that his duty was to escape and stay alive. Gyousou, however, felt his pride was further cut by the fact that any of this was necessary at all. Not only was it bad enough that a girl would have to step into the place he should have been able to occupy in the first place (and hold it for longer than most actual anointed kings reigns lasted, despite near-impossible odds and monumental difficulties) it was made just that much worse that she should be attacked inside the royal palace, inside the imperial throne room, at a time when he was awake but not strong enough to protect anyone due to his recent illness. It really bothered him.

:It won't bother me for much longer,: he promised himself as he rose out of bed and managed to walk all the way to the other room without having to lean on anyone or anything to aid him in his weakness. He was regaining his strength. Soon he would be back up to fighting trim.

:And then...: he promised himself. :Those who have had their way for far too long will find themselves with greater problems to worry about than avoiding what few means the girl has found to control their excesses:

Yes, the revelation that he had a wife of necessity was, as the girl herself had put it, awkward. However that awkwardness on his part did not stem from the reasons she probably surmised. To Gyousou Saku, Tai's famous general and the whirlwind king, the awkwardness about the situation came from the very fact that it was necessary at all. That he had failed his kingdom so badly that some innocent schoolgirl and his own sweet kirin had been forced to step in and shore up such a situation was a mark of deep shame for him. He was not taking it well.

Taiki and Risai both had urged, however, that he study the situation a little bit more first before wading in and making changes. The reports only covered the high points after all, and it would be wiser to get a better sense of the terrain before he tried to march his troops over it, so to speak. Gyousou understood well the importance of reconnaissance, so he had agreed to their recommendation to attend the meeting of the shuukou that evening but remain hidden to watch the proceedings. he disliked that he was not quite up to strength yet and was forced by necessity to remain in recovery for a while yet. Even he knew that it would be still dangerous to attempt to control the willful shuukou if he wasn't at full strength.