Canto 1

The Awakening
Of the Empire of the Sun
From Ancient Slumber


The Empirium of the Origin of the Sun was
a jewel set in the Western margins of the limitless ocean,
polished to a perfect lustre by centuries of dignified ceremony.

Collectively we remember the haven our ancestors had created,
where men and women realised a sketching of eternity,
its fragile shape floating, an iridescent silken kite,
above the mire of birth and death, pumping heart and gasping breath.
The commander of soldiers kept the brute world secure enough
to leave the Emperor’s serenity undisturbed.

Is it really true that we have mined these sublime images of our past
From the deep shafts of memory, or do we find such luscious garments
for our yearning as could never have been woven from the strands of time?

All that we can know for certain is the day when the fearsome fleet of Black Ships
appeared at anchor in our tranquil bay, We learned how they had sailed across that limitless ocean, unruffled and determined as the gods themselves. Now their thunder spewing engines were ranged against our helpless City.

The barbarians declared their hand. They promulgated the statutes of their greed. There would be no murder, no one would be harmed as long as we agreed to accept peace as a gift from them, a token of their superiority.

Then the menacing Black Ships would weigh anchor. Our obedience
would ensure against their murderous return. In this new atmosphere
of menace and hostility, we could salvage the scraps of our serenity.
With them we could bandage our bruised and battered pride.



Canto 2

Deep Serenity
Disturbed, The Past Disrupted,
Sleeping Dragons Wake.

The Black Ships finally sailed, leaving too many painful memories behind them.
Powerful citizens were quick to blame the Commander of Soldiers.
How, they asked, had he allowed the Emperor’s honour to be so fatally compromised? They blamed him even while they knew that he was helpless.
It would have made no difference how many of the Imperial Guard were slaughtered, the Barbarians would still have triumphed.
His most ardent and devoted subjects proclaimed
that they would take upon themselves the Emperor’s shame, that they
would live for nothing but the removal of the Barbarian’s stain.

The old Emperor was forced into granting the Barbarians all of their demands. The great officials had dipped their brushes in the shameful ink
and signed away their centuries of ancient culture.
Still they could live as ceremonially as they chose, and wrap the Emperor close round in worship. Yet they
could not oppose the Barbarians, who had now become the patrons of the
Emperor’s divinity.

All men know that Shame is the bitter ghost of beaten Pride, so it was only Shame who could preside at the Imperial Court. His presence haunted the
Imperial family. The Heir Apparent murmured bitterly in the echoing corridors.
At Audiences he maintained a magnificent silence.
The boy, who had been nurtured in the ancient spirit
of obedience, was deeply distressed when he realised that he viewed
his elderly father contemptuously. His revered father could no longer embody
the spirit of their ancient race. The boy could see that his father had sunk
into the fallible state of brute mankind.

He was an actor now, in borrowed finery. But if the Emperor could be no more than a humble player, what could his son ever hope to be?

He must create the Imperial Theatre anew. If the Barbarians had Black Ships, he must build black ships too. He must have power enough to imagine and direct a modern play. The Imperial Pageant must be adapted to these harsher days.



Canto 3

The Emperor Died.  
Now The Young Emperor’s Pride
Could Blossom Freely.

I wish no impiety when I say that we of the Bardic clan can only praise
Heaven for the old Emperor’s release. More than a decade had passed since
the Barbarian’s ships had first sailed into our peaceful bay. Their traders
remained, arrogant and grasping. Even while the surfaces of our people’s lives mirrored the new order placidly, in the depths below those tranquil appearances the heady wine of change was already fermenting. The saying is true, spoken by
       an ancient sage, the roots of the future run deep.

Through long and uneventful centuries we had become a people living
In fear that any alteration would destroy our perfected social order.
The new Emperor had been a boy when the Black Ships first appeared.
He reflected on the shock he felt so keenly, his understanding outstripped his years. He could see that as the decades trickled away, the Empire by degrees had lost its capability to overawe its foes.  So deeply did we desire to be
The People of Tranquillity, we lost sight of the seething forces of history, and
The turmoil they created, as fierce and unpredictable as the passions of the
restless seas.

Our youthful Emperor in waiting became an apprentice He laboured to comprehend the engines that drive the currents of change. Apprentice and Master too, for there was no vision that might guide him. With a wisdom that even exceeded his industry, he consulted the works of ancient scholars,
He sunk his own deep shafts into the deeply buried seams of our history.
In councils with practical men he evolved his plans. He came to honour his father’s weakness, and to recognise that he alone had been chosen to breathe new life in to the suffocating rituals of the Court, and to devise stratagems
for the restoration of Imperial Pride.

How can we, whose lives have all been lived in his shadow, praise
so a great a mind and brave a soul sufficiently?
I will tell how rapidly he acted, when the gods decreed his apprenticeship complete. The cloak of mourning allowed him to speak an elegy for his departed father. His mourning words bit deep into the authority of the Commander of Soldiers. The new Emperor asked why the Commander had not died of shame when the moment to protect the Empire came, and found him impotent. He had allowed the Emperor to be exposed to Barbarian domination. To save his wealth, his influence, his place He gave himself to the conquerors, becoming no more
than a tool in their rapacious hands.

After that the Emperor solemnly stripped the Commander of his office, and banished him to a pacific island refuge set in the mountainous seas.
The Emperor then appointed his loyal and practical men to the running
of the Empire’s ministries. The Title of Commander of Soldiers was no more. The Army’s generals, the Navy’s captains swore their oaths with trembling voices before the Emperor’s throne. Part of his long study had been to understand all
of the Barbarian nations. He learned of their many inventions, their mighty
technologies. He decreed that the brightest of the nation’s youth would study overseas. Within a scaffold borrowed from the modern world, the Emperor
determined to rebuild antiquity.




Canto 4

Prosperous Nation,
The Most Powerful Army
That Wealth Can Supply

Twenty-six years had gone by. By now the Emperor’s government
had built a nation adapted to the Barbarian’s ways. In every village and city the people could see how order and discipline could generate prosperity,
and then protect it. In every hamlet every young man was required to be a soldier or sailor. Every man spent four years of his life in the military,
and seven more as a reservist. So the Army’s needs shaped and structured Imperial society. And these former soldiers brought with them their habits of obedience and pride when they returned to their industrious civilian lives.

Nobody now could wish to remember how the Commander of Soldiers, in an act of contemptible treachery, had tried to cling to his ancient powers. How from his exile, he marshalled troops to destroy the new Imperial order. The memory of those events has been by now erased. From his defeat followed the Commander’s disgrace, and from his disgrace his death in a squalid skirmish,
surrounded by the few loyal supporters who still remained faithful to his tarnished
name.

But could all of these achievements be preserved? The Barbarians were flattered by the Emperor’s desire to learn all about their industry and power.  In the Emperor’s ambitions and plans, they saw opportunities to make great increases in their own wealth and power. So the Barbarian states vied with each other to supply the warships, uniforms, the guns. They competed fiercely to teach the Emperor’s soldiery the arts of warfare, navigation and command.

As yet the Empire was still confined to its homeland chain of islands,
at the edge of the measureless ocean. To the East there lay the shores
of a mighty continent, where the crumbling empire that was ancient when the world was young, still dreamed in its timeless slumber of those distant eons when
its Emperor could truly say that he was Emperor of Heaven.

“There is no Empire until the Empire grows.” Such was the Emperor’s decree.
“Beyond these island shores that rotting hulk still contains sufficient might
“to threaten us.” his generals declared, “From their nearest province they could “threaten our well being, mount a blockade or launch an invasion. That finger
“of land might as well be a dagger pointed menacingly at our heart.”

So in the Councils of State the Emperors advisers were agreed. They would force their enemy to concede this suddenly disputed territory. In the world
Barbarians it would be understood that the Empire of the Sun had grown
beyond its previous weakness. Its power, once demonstrated, could no
longer be ignored.


Canto 5

The Empire Invaded
The Distant Mainland. Many
Died. Families Mourned.

Some said that the Emperor composed delicately elegiac verses while
the Empire’s war machine destroyed the army and the navy of their foes.
He declared his court in mourning when his invading force embarked on
this first gamble of conquest. His commanders promised victory, without
concealing from him the likely price in death and mutilation.

Before the embarkation he reviewed the departing regiments. Before him he saw
the ranks of young and dedicated men, ranged like automata, soon to be lacerated and gored, to hack their way to epic victories. Their uniforms were colourful and bold, each regiment or corps with emblazoned banners to proclaim
their determination and their savagery in the Empire’s cause.

Before the armies sailed the court indulged in celebration. The Emperor declared
it his noble duty to ensure that all those warriors who were fated never to return should have tasted the fruits of victory. To his closest confidants he spoke of the
horror of reviewing regiments of ghosts.

As he had foreseen, the path to victory proved short but bloody. The issue was decisively settled at sea. His modernised navy easily out-gunned its enemy.
Drowned sailors reached the coasts too late to be anything but fodder for the carrion hoards of hungry seabirds. The Emperor was reconciled to his destiny.
He was the ruler who had guided the Empire to the path of greatness.
The ruler the Barbarians must learn to fear.