I dreamt I was a Chinese prince who was serving as an ambassador to the Japanese. China was in a stage of disunity at the time, and instead of representing an Emperor, I had been appointed by the consensus of a number of regional kings and warlords. The regional leaders would probably have been fighting amongst themselves for control of the country, except that the Japanese had invaded Manchuria the summer before, and all the leaders saw a common interest in fighting them off. The Japanese army had slaughtered all the Chinese armies who had tried to oppose the invasion, but after occupying coastal Manchuria and a bit further south, they halted their advance. Whomever was leading the Japanese was very clever. They had known that by pushing further inland, it would have become more and more difficult to supply and communicate with their armies. So they established a frontier and held the territory, without interfering with the rice planting the next spring (they needed the rice of the occupied territory to feed and pay their armies which were stationed there). Spring had turned to summer again, and their armies were getting ready for another march inland. What was left of the armies of the Chinese regions was poorly trained and unprepared.
I had been summoned to a Japanese fortress inside occupied Manchuria to hear the terms of the Japanese. If we gave a rice levy to them each year, they promised they wouldn't invade any more of our territory, and I was to bear news back of the size of the levy. My secret was that over the past year, I had been training a fairly decent sized force of soldiers in Southern China. I had planned to accept the levy in order to delay another fight on the Chinese mainland. While the Japanese were pacified by the promise of the levy, I would send these soldiers by boat to the southern Japanese mainland island, and in effect hold it for ransom. Though there was no hope I could hold the island for long, I thought it might buy time for us in China, as the large occupying armies in Manchuria would have to be recalled to Japan to fight there. The disorganisation this would cause the Japanese might give us more time to train a larger army to replace the losses from the year before.
I tried to keep these thoughts out of my head as I prepared to meet the Japanese envoy in the palace on the fortress grounds. Servants opened a door and the envoy entered the throne room. As I bowed and looked up at the envoy, I was shocked. I had heard that the Japanese imperial family considered themselves direct descendants of the Sun God, Ameratsu, but now I was convinced that this was actually true. The envoy was female, over two meters tall, and bone-slender with narrow shoulders. She wore a simple white silk gown with subtle characters printed across the silk in light grey. Her face was elongated and slender, with eyes that were too large but which still had the Asian shape, and she had perfectly smooth, porcelain white skin. But she seemed kind, not haughty, almost as if she was amused with the situation. As she turned and bent to sit in the throne before which I stood, I saw there was self-consciousness in her movements. She was so alien-looking that I couldn't judge her age by her appearance, but she moved like a very young woman. She was also, in a strange way, shockingly beautiful. I bowed deeply and tried to collect myself.
I greeted her with elaborate words which I forget now. With a self-conscious smile, she called for a plate to represent the size of the levy on the Chinese. Some kind of brightly shimmering green and gold dragonfly thing about a half a meter long buzzed into the room slowly, carrying a bowled golden plate on its back. I couldn't tell if the dragonfly was biological or mechanical. It looked a little of both. The dragonfly hovered before the Japanese envoy. She took the plate from its back, and dipped the plate into a large porcelain jar full of rice, which stood next to her throne. The amount of rice on the plate would be represent the size of the levy. I was dismayed because the size of the plate was bigger than I was expecting.
She drew it out of the jar heaped with rice. I saw the amount, stared at a map of Japan and China on the wall to the left of the throne room and calculated the output of the Chinese territories. She was asking for more than a third of the upcoming harvest! This was terrible. Even if my secret army was able to take part of Japan, if this was the amount of wealth they expected us to give them, then the best I'd be able to bargain would be to lower the levy, not eliminate it. Also, I knew that the troops I sent to Japan were doomed no matter what happened. Once the Japanese recovered from the shock of the counter invasion, there would be no way to keep them from overrunning my force eventually, so I couldn't count on them for the defence of China. The other option now was to not to pay the levy, and use my army to try to hold back the Japanese invasion which would surely result. But I knew that even my well-trained soldiers were no match for the samurai training and superior equipment of the Japanese. As I was trying to figure out what to do, the envoy walked to me and placed the plate of rice in my hands. By accepting the plate I was signifying that those whom I was representing accepted the levy. I looked down at the golden plate in my hands and could smell the rice. It was Japanese sweet rice, not Chinese glutinous rice. This rice was a delicacy in my lands.
I said, still a little overwhelmed, "Your eminence, this will be difficult."
Then Cecilie's alarm went off and I woke up. Errgh...
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