Rakushun was not nervous the day of the test. He was prepared. He knew every law, every philosopher, every writing character, every legend, the name of all the emperors and important officials for nearly two thousand years of the Kingdom of Kei's existence. He knew all the dates and battles and things that went into the history of Kei and its neighbors. He also knew a great deal about En, Hou, and the Tentei of Mount Hyo, thanks to his unusual connections.
He could ride a mount passably, thanks to the practice he'd had traveling between kingdoms over the years. He had forced himself to do it in his human form after one of his professors commented that mastery in one form did not excuse deficiency in the other – that since he was gifted with both forms, he should learn to apply both properly.
He briefly held the name seal she had given him in his hands for good luck, then fed the messenger bird they shared a piece of silver. The enchanted mechanical bird nibbled on the precious metal, then obediently listened to his voice.
"Dearest Yoko… I am off to take the government exam now. Wish me luck, although luck is not a factor in this exam. If I pass, I will do my best to serve you." He did not know what he would do if he failed. Try again next year?
"But do not worry about me too much. Thanks to you, and every one that has helped me over these last six years, I am as prepared for this this exam as I can be. Whether I pass or not, I will do my best and give it my all. Be well, Yoko."
He sent the bird on its way. It flew off toward the palace in the heavens, where Yoko and the court she'd never asked for waited.
The government exams were held at the university. They were free of charge to the public, and while any university students could opt to sit the exams early, most of them disabused themselves of that idea in their first year in school. The exams were not to be taken lightly.
The test itself was comprised of three parts. A multiple choice section took up four hours on the first day, followed by afternoon physical testing.
The second day was a long composition, which was followed by an oral examination and a defense of the compositions chosen to be most worthy after they had been read by the proctors.
Any one of the three areas could disqualify a candidate. There were forty candidates for only ten slots for the final oral exam.
Rakushun felt good about his multiple choice section. There were a few that he had had to think about, as the questions were deliberately worded to be tricky. But there were none that he had been completely lost on. He had been the first person to turn in his completed test; two people who had not graduated with him from the university had earlier turned in half-finished tests and left, dejected.
For the physical trials, he had managed to not fall off his horse and to hit quite close to the target with his arrow while mounted, although it was not quite a bull's eye. It was still a remarkable improvement over where he had started from before, tripping over his own two feet and tangling the arrow in his bow. And it was enough for a pass, which was all he needed.
Many others did not make it to the end of the second day.
Immortality was a strong lure. It was designed to attract the best and brightest into government service. But it was not a gift bestowed freely. Yoko had been given it unexpectedly, but her strong heart and will showed how much she deserved it. Rakushun had never thought about it for himself until he had met Yoko. Every day he aged, while she would remain a perfect sixteen years old until the day she died – which could be hundreds of years from now.
However, gaining immortality for himself was not his motivation for taking the exam. Nor was being with Yoko forever, although that had weighed heavily in his mind for some time. No. He was a true scholar, and he loved learning for the sake of learning. He loved testing as the challenge to himself for what he had learned. And he knew that he was good at both learning and testing.
The written exam was given as the same topic to everyone, in a sealed envelope, to be taken home and completed and turned in by sunset. Unlike the multiple choice section, they could use any citations and research they needed to support their argument. The proctors would then pull an all-nighter and narrow the compositions down to the ten best, who would spend the third day defending the composition in public. If they defended successfully, they would be assigned to the ministry for a trial period. However, if they failed the oral defense, that position would go unfilled.
"How did you do?" his elder classmate said as they shuffled off toward their dorms. Once the exam was over, pass or fail, they would have to leave the university grounds. Those who passed would be able to move to the palace. Those who failed… had to find someplace else.
Of the forty initial examinees, thirty were left to collect envelopes with topics. Eight more had failed their multiple choice or physical exams in addition to the two who had left the day before.
"I think I did well," Rakushun said, his whiskers twitching. He had changed back to a rat as soon as he had the opportunity. Holding his human form for so long during the physical exam had stressed him, and he wanted to ensure that he was at his best for the next day.
"Same here," the older man said, and patted him on the back. Rakushun had expressed in no uncertain terms that head pats were an intimate gesture reserved for a select few people, and most of his class mates respected his person. "There were a few that tripped me up, but obviously we got the majority of them right. I think I'll be fine tomorrow. Want to go grab some lunch before we begin?"
"I think that's an excellent idea," Rakushun agreed, and his stomach rumbled in agreement as well. "But we had better be fast."
The essay could be on any topic. They only had a few hours to compose and return their essays.
With trembling hands, Rakushun went to his dorm and opened the envelope.
"Her Magnificence the Empress Sekishi is a taika, a citizen of our Kingdom of Kei who had once been lost Over There, then returned to us by the Mandate of Heaven and our Lord Keiki's benevolence. So too are the rulers of our sister kingdom En, Enki and the Emperor of En Shoryu, and the lost and found kirin of the Kingdom of Tai, Taiki. Trace the influence and significance of other taika and their influence in our world."
Rakushun stared at the paper, astonished.
He could not believe his luck. Taisikin had once called him the kingdom's only expert on taika. It was true that the subject fascinated him, not just because of Yoko, but because the taika and kaikyaku were considered outsiders, much like the hanjou were. He had pored over all the most famous once in history, not just in Kei and En, but all over the Twelve Kingdoms.
They could not have picked a better subject for him if they had tried.
Could Yoko have…?
No, she did not interfere at the lower levels of the kingdom, preferring to let her ministers maintain autonomy. She did have a habit of visiting in plainclothes to see how she was treated, something she had called the "secret shopper technique of quality improvement." Any minister or lower government official who was caught violating the spirit or the letter of the law was demoted or appropriately punished. Her technique was unorthodox, but considering she'd personally stopped a civil war using it, the Tentei seemed to approve.
He leaned forward on his desk, his claws curling under his chin as he stared at the paper. Well. He certainly knew the topic inside and out. It would all boil down to composing a tight, cohesive narrative.
He picked up his quill pen, took a deep breath, and began to write.
A mere four hours later he was done.
The composition was almost seven pages of tiny script characters in length, speaking of the five most influential taika of the Kingdom of Kei over the last two thousand years. One of the earliest Keikis has been a taika. The other four had been a general, a Buddhist priest, an immortal government official who had ruled over his province of the kingdom for several centuries before committing suicide, and then of course Yoko herself. Each one had had a noticeable impact on the kingdom. Yoko, they had been pleased to learn, was raised as a Buddhist and she strongly supported it because it is a religion of peace.
(Rakushun himself was fairly irreligious – certainly he had seen gods and mystical beings with his own two eyes by now, but the fuzzy present existed on a different plane to him than the written past. Until he had met Yoko and thus Keiki, he'd considered the goings about of gods and kirin to be things that did not involve him, and thus were not important.)
Shortly after he finished his essay, Rakushun returned to the exam building and turned it in to a pretty young bureaucrat, who herself had passed the exam early enough in her life to lock in her beauty before it faded. She could be a hundred years old or more, but there was a quality to her smile that indicated to Rakushun she was still relatively young after all.
"If your composition is selected as one of the finalists, you will be listed on a sheet at this door tomorrow. Your assigned number is five."
She handed him a scrap of cloth with the Arabic numeral five on it. Rakushun smiled. The Arabic numerals had been introduced to Kei by the minor government official; it was that outstanding introduction to math and science that had earned him his contract of immortality. That was a section in his essay, and it was clearly something that they had been looking for. And if someone had failed to include it in their essay, they would doubtless automatically fail.
Rakushun nodded to the woman and padded away, back toward his dorm, feeling fairly confident in himself for once. But he would check and double check his reference sources tonight, to be prepared in case he was called to defend tomorrow.
The ten numbers listed on the board were 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 23, 24, 25, and 29. Rakushun's whiskers twitched as his fertile mind detected the pattern in the first six numbers. Coincident, surely. Yoko was a master of the Arabic numerals; she could do things with the numbers that had astonished the mathematics tutor who had briefly been assigned to her during the first year of her reign. After a few lessons, the man had thrown his hands up and concluded she should be tutoring him, not the other way around, and her tutors had switched her to history and calligraphy full time instead.
Yoko would have been able to tell him the name of the pattern he had seen.
"Congrats," his friend whispered. He was number two.
"Congratulations to you as well. And good luck on your defense."
The selected candidates were called out one by one. Three was another older classmate; they both emerged looking happy and relieved. They had passed.
But at his turn, the pretty young bureaucrat had come out and asked him if he minded waiting until the end. Rakushun was so started that he began to chew on his lip. Was there something wrong with his essay?
He watched, one by one, as the remaining test takers went in. Number eight came out crying.
"I failed my composition," he said quietly to Rakushun, who was standing off to one side. "They said mastery of the characters was incomplete, and that my fact finding had been thin." He took a deep, ragged breath. "They gave me one more chance with the defense, but I choked."
Rakushun clucked and patted the younger man sympathetically. The defense was critical – even if your essay contained mistakes, you could rectify them with clear answers.
13, 21, and 23 passed. 24 did not – she had forgotten a critical citation and been called out on it. Honesty was one of the most desired traits in a government official, and failure to credit others was a huge oversight. She would be allowed to try again next year, as would number eight.
After they'd all left – either to celebrate or drown their sorrows, they finally called him in.
"Master Rakushun?"
Miserable and nervous, all his confidence gone, Rakushun followed. He was especially unhappy about being in his human form. He was sure they could see how nervous he was.
Five older bureaucrats sat around one end of a long table. The other end had a single empty chair. The young girl motioned for him to sit there.
After a moment of quiet, one of the bleary eyed men spoke.
"Master Rakushun, we asked you to come in here last for a specific reason, but we must first verify your composition. Are you prepared to defend your work?"
Rakushun nodded.
"Then each of us will ask you a question about your writing. Answer the question to the best of your abilities."
The questions were difficult, but not unfair. One wanted to clarify a point about the Buddhist priest. Another one asked for further evidence of scientific improvements from the Arabic numerals. All of them asked about his character choices on a few words. Rakushun answered each question carefully, thinking about what he wanted to say for a few moments and then speaking in an unhurried tone.
"No more questions," the first name, obviously the head of the committee, finally said after everyone had fallen silent. "You have passed the exam. Congratulations."
Rakushun inhaled slowly.
The man continued. "The reason we called you in last is because, as we suspected from your score on the multiple choice exam, you are no ordinary scholar. You are the first to pass the exam with a perfect score in nearly two hundred years." He smiled kindly. "The first since myself, in fact."
Rakushun blinked. "Even the physical…?"
The head of the committee nodded. "Well, those are all pass/fail, so passing counts as a perfect. The multiple choice and composition, on the other hand, are much more difficult to pass and a single wrong answer or wrong character will mar the perfect score. You have done well, Master Rakushun."
All six heads bowed toward him in a sign of respect.
Rakushun felt a surge of elation like nothing he'd felt since he'd first fallen in love with Yoko.
"We have arranged for you to have an audience with the Empress herself tomorrow at 4PM sharp. Then we will assign you to your office in the government. I know that Her Majesty has said that a hanjou may appear before her in any form, but there are others still in the court who are more hidebound. So please appear as you are now, and please dress appropriately."
They all stood, and Rakushun did as well, giving them a stiff bow. He was still in shock, which was probably the only reason he wasn't grinning stupidly. As it was, the six scholars saw a serious young man with a serious expression on his face, and not much else since they were so exhausted. They were all going to go to sleep as soon as they could.
Rakushun was escorted out of the building, still floored. His father would have been so proud.
The first perfect score in two hundred years!
His mother, too, would be enormously proud, he realized. As he left the doorway, the young bureaucrat handed him a sheet of vellum. On it were his job instructions and some quick information.
He was now eligible for the contract of immortality (as he had known), and while his immediate family was not – he would require several promotions for that - they were allowed to join him on the palace grounds to live out the rest of their days in comfort.
The reality of that hit him – once he took the contract, he would not die. He could remain with Yoko forever….
Rakushun had already brought his mother from the deteriorating country of Kou to the newly reborn country of Kei. His mother had heckled him lightly about the fact that the current era had the same character as his name – he had not told her that was by design, because Yoko wanted this age to be an age of prosperity for him, and those like him.
He plodded along back to his dorm, slowly, as he continued reading. They would be allowed to move to the outermost ring of the palace grounds, to a small housing building they would share with three other newly appointed government workers. As he was promoted, he would be provided better housing options, but a two room apartment inside the palace walls was where he would start. Rakushun smiled to himself as he remembered Yoko complaining that she had thirty bedrooms for herself, and asking if some of those rooms could be used for refugees from Kou instead. Keiki had put his foot down.
Kou's latest kirin had yet to reach maturity; the egg had only hatched a few years ago, and she was still learning and growing on Mount Hyo. She was a lot bubblier than Kourin had been, or so Rakushun had heard from Enki, but also a lot more stubborn. That was probably for the best. Kourin had been painfully beautiful but weak willed; she had let her Emperor commit unspeakable atrocities without more than a token protest.
The situation in Kou had fallen so much that the newly formed UN Resource Group could not provide enough aid to everyone. Yoko and Keiki had opened the border shared with Kei to refugees, but Kei's own recovery was still fragile and their already strained resources could not handle much more.
Yoko's problems were now, in some small way, Rakushun's problems too. If he could ease her burden in any way at all, he would be content.