The Poppy War. R.F. Kuang

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СКАЧАТЬ she was fueled by praise from her masters. Praise meant that she had finally, finally received validation that she was not nothing. She could be brilliant, could be worth someone’s attention. She adored praise—craved it, needed it, and realized she found relief only when she finally had it.

      She realized, too, that she felt about praise the way that addicts felt about opium. Each time she received a fresh infusion of flattery, she could think only about how to get more of it. Achievement was a high. Failure was worse than withdrawal. Good test scores brought only momentary relief and temporary pride—she basked in her grace period of several hours before she began to panic about her next test.

      She craved praise so deeply that she felt it in her bones. And just like an addict, she did whatever she could to get it.

      In the following weeks, Rin clawed her way up from the bottom of the ranks to become one of the top students in each class. She competed regularly with Nezha and Venka for the highest marks in nearly every subject. In Linguistics, she was second now only to Kitay.

      She particularly enjoyed Strategy.

      Gray-whiskered Master Irjah was the first teacher she’d ever had who didn’t rely principally on rote memorization as a learning method. He made the students solve logical syllogisms. He made them define concepts they had taken for granted, concepts like advantage and victory and war. He forced them to be precise and accurate in their answers. He rejected responses that were phrased vaguely or could have multiple interpretations. He stretched their minds, shattered their preconceptions of logic, and then pieced them back together.

      He gave praise only sparingly, but when he did, he made sure that everyone in the class heard. Rin craved his approval more than anything.

      Now that they had finished analyzing Sunzi’s Principles of War, Irjah spent the second half of class lobbing hypothetical military situations at them, challenging them to think their way out of various quagmires. Sometimes these simulations involved only questions of logistics (“Calculate how much time and how many supplies you need to move a force of this size across this strait”). Other times he drew up maps for them, indicating with symbols how many troops they had to work with, and forced them to come up with a battle plan.

      “You are stuck behind this river,” said Irjah. “Your troops stand in a prime position for a ranged assault, but your main column has run out of arrows. What do you do?”

      Most of their class suggested raids on the enemy’s weapons carriages. Venka wanted to abandon the ranged idea entirely and pursue a direct frontal assault. Nezha suggested they commission the nearby farmers to mass-produce arrows in one night.

      “Gather scarecrows from the nearby farmers,” said Kitay.

      Nezha snorted. “What?”

      “Let him talk,” said Irjah.

      “Dress them in spare uniforms, stick them in a boat, and send them downriver,” Kitay continued, ignoring him. “This area is a mountainous region notorious for heavy precipitation. We can assume it has rained recently, so there should be fog. That makes it difficult for the enemy forces to see the river clearly. Their archers will mistake the scarecrows for soldiers, and shoot until they resemble pincushions. We will then send our men downstream and have them collect the arrows. We use our enemy’s arrows to kill our enemies.”

      Kitay won that one.

      Another day Irjah presented them with a map of the Wudang mountain region marked with two red crosses to indicate two Federation battalions surrounding the Nikara army from both ends of the valley.

      “You’re trapped in this valley. The villagers have mostly evacuated, but the Federation general holds a school full of children hostage. He says he will set the children free if your battalion surrenders. You have no guarantee he will honor the terms. How do you respond?”

      They stared at the map for many minutes. Their troops had no advantage, no easy way out.

      Even Kitay was puzzled. “Try an assault on the left flank?” he suggested. “Evacuate the children while they’re preoccupied with a small guerrilla force?”

      “They’re on higher ground,” said Irjah. “They’ll shoot you down before you get the chance to draw your weapons.”

      “Light the valley on fire,” Venka tried. “Distract them with the smoke?”

      “Good way to burn yourselves to death.” Irjah snorted. “Remember, you do not have the high ground.”

      Rin raised her hand. “Cut around the second army and get onto the dam. Break the dam. Flood the valley. Let everyone inside drown.”

      Her classmates turned to stare at her in horror.

      “Leave the children,” she added. “There’s no way to save them.”

      Nezha laughed out loud. “We’re trying to win this simulation, idiot.”

      Irjah motioned for Nezha to be silent. “Runin. Please elaborate.”

      “It’s not a victory either way,” said Rin. “But if the costs are so high, I would throw all my tiles in. This way they die, and we lose half our troops but no more. Sunzi writes that no battle takes place in isolation. This is just one small move in the grand scheme of the war. The numbers you’ve given us indicate that these Federation battalions are massive. I’m guessing they constitute a large percentage of the entire Federation army. So if we give up some of our own troops, we lessen their advantage in all subsequent battles.”

      “You’d rather kill your own people than let the opponent’s army walk away?” Irjah asked.

      “Killing isn’t the same as letting die,” Rin objected.

      “They’re casualties nonetheless.”

      Rin shook her head. “You don’t let an enemy walk away if they’ll certainly be a threat to you later. You get rid of them. If they’re that far inland, they know the lay of almost the entire country. They have a geographical advantage. This is our one chance to take out the enemy’s greatest fighting force.”

      “Sunzi said to always give the enemy a way out,” Irjah said.

      Rin privately thought that this was one of Sunzi’s stupider principles, but hastily pulled together a counterargument. “But Sunzi didn’t mean to let them take that way out. The enemy just has to think the situation is less dire than it is, so they don’t grow desperate and do stupid and mutually destructive things.” Rin pondered for a moment. “I suppose they could try to swim.”

      “She’s talking about decimating entire villages!” Venka protested. “You can’t just break a dam like that. Dams take years to rebuild. The entire river delta will flood, not just that valley. You’re talking about famine. Dysentery. You’ll mess with the agriculture of the entire region, create a whole host of problems that mean decades of suffering down the line—”

      “Problems that can be solved,” Rin maintained stubbornly. “What was your solution, to let the Federation walk free into the heartland? Fat lot of good the agricultural regions will do you when your whole country’s been occupied. You would offer up the whole country to them on a platter.”

      “Enough, enough.” Irjah slammed the table to silence them. “Nobody СКАЧАТЬ