Political alliance between the Empress and the King of Esfi

The Political alliance between the Empress and the King of Esfi transforms the Empress’s defense of her native country into a world-spanning order of conquest and tribute. She first offers assistance without demanding a bargain, then destroys the forces opposing the King and compels maritime and inland nations to submit. The alliance is presented as protection against unjust attack and as a route to peace, but its outcomes depend on naval destruction, the burning of towns, and the threat of further ruin.

Origins and Terms of the Alliance

The alliance takes shape after the Empress has crossed from the Blazing-World to her native country and helped defeat the fleets attacking it. The King of Esfi, ruler of several kingdoms, sends word that the surviving enemies still obstruct his dominions’ trade and traffic. The Empress answers with a decisive offer: she will burn or sink any ships that refuse to pay him tribute. Rather than treating her intervention as a limited act of defense, she makes the protection of the King’s commerce the basis for extending his sovereignty.

Before acting, she seeks to establish contact with the commanders of her native country. She sends a letter declaring her power and her purpose of assisting them against their enemies, and asks them to say when they want her help. Their council cannot promptly agree on a reply because its members hold conflicting opinions. The Empress, angered by the delay, considers returning to the Blazing-World without helping; the Duchess of Newcastle persuades her to be patient with the council’s slowness. This hesitation contrasts with the Empress’s own swift, centralized decisions once she turns military power toward the King’s cause.

When the Empress addresses her countrymen, she frames the alliance as loyalty to her place of birth. She reminds them that, although she is now an absolute princess and Empress of a whole world, she was once a subject of their kingdom. She says she has left the tranquility, riches, and pleasure of her new position to help them, asking in return only for grateful acknowledgment and recognition of her love and loyalty. Her appeal promises to make them the most powerful nation in their world, presenting intervention as both personal fidelity and national rescue.

Naval Victory and the Extension of Power

The Empress’s victory at sea makes her offer of assistance tangible. Fish-men carry the Fire-stones beneath or alongside enemy ships, uncover them, and wet them so that the ships catch fire; when the flames reach their gunpowder, the fleets explode. The enemy navies are destroyed in a short time. The King’s general reports the deliverance and conquest to his sovereign, while the Empress herself asks the King how she can further serve him. His answer—that hostile ships continue to hinder trade—opens the next stage of the alliance, in which military defense becomes enforcement of tribute.

The Empress demands tribute from neighboring maritime nations on the King’s behalf. When they refuse with scorn, she orders her Fish-men to destroy foreign ships trading at sea. The nations eventually ask to negotiate, but she offers no terms short of submission and payment; after a long negotiation, they yield. The King thereby becomes master of the seas and, in the Empress’s formulation, gains control over the world, since its nations cannot readily live without commerce by sea as well as by land.

That settlement proves unstable. The neighboring nations feel so constrained by tribute that they join forces again against the King. The Empress responds by destroying the remainder of their naval power, forcing them back into submission. Some nations, however, can manage without foreign maritime trade, while others conduct their commerce by land. Since these states remain outside the tribute system, the Empress threatens to burn their towns and cities unless they submit. The alliance’s reach thus expands beyond controlling the sea: it treats economic independence from sea trade not as an endpoint but as an obstacle to be overcome by force.

Fire-Stones and Universal Submission

To make the threat credible, the Empress orders Bird-men and Worm-men to attack the resistant nations’ settlements. She directs them to begin with smaller towns, preferring not to cause more destruction than she considers necessary, and warns the rulers that a limited loss may become total ruin if resistance continues. The Worm-men can travel beneath the earth, while the Bird-men approach by air. They plant Fire-stones under house foundations and on rooftops so that rain and moisture will ignite them. The Bird-men tell the inhabitants that the next rain will set their towns on fire; the people laugh at the apparent contradiction, since they expect water to extinguish flames.

When rain falls, the houses blaze, and the more water is poured over them, the more fiercely they burn. The spectacle frightens neighboring cities and kingdoms into granting the Empress’s demand and submitting to the King. One nation, receiving little rain, still rejects her power. The Empress learns that it is inundated annually by a tide lasting several weeks, and orders Fire-stones placed at the bases of the supports beneath its raised houses. When the tide arrives, the buildings catch fire; the water is turned to vapor, and the resulting destruction of houses and barrenness across the country force the holdout to submit as well. By these campaigns, the Empress saves her native country and makes it the absolute monarchy of the world, with the King of Esfi at its head.

Public Ceremony and the King’s New Status

The alliance is also staged as a public spectacle of authority. After the conquest, the princes of the various nations ask to see the Empress before she returns to the Blazing-World. She arranges for their ships to form a wide circle in the open sea, where her own fleet can close the ring. At night, Fire-stones make the sea and air appear aflame, frightening the assembled spectators; the Empress then extinguishes the lights and appears in garments of light. Bird-men carry her into the air, and Fish-men answer the Bird-men with a song that makes sea and sky seem to converse. Splendor and fear prepare the audience to hear her political declaration.

At daybreak, the Empress meets with the King of Esfi aboard his ship and assures him that her assistance will be available whenever he requires it. She then addresses the gathered princes, describing the King as unjustly attacked and his hereditary rights and prerogatives over the Narrow Seas as wrongfully challenged. She presents his absolute power as a reward from Heaven for those injuries and advises the rulers to pay him tribute so that they may live peacefully and happily. The language of just redress and heavenly favor turns the results of conquest into a claim of legitimate sovereignty; her warning that resistance will bring loss, not victory, makes clear the force behind that appeal.

After the address, the Empress’s fleet enters the circle without any visible aid from sails or tide. She boards her own ship, and the entire fleet sinks beneath the sea, leaving the princes amazed. It remains underwater until the return to the Blazing-World. The display gives the King’s new status an extraordinary public setting, while the fleet’s disappearance demonstrates that the military power securing his supremacy is not available for the other rulers to inspect or challenge.

Sovereignty, Peace, and Coercion

The alliance’s political logic echoes the Empress’s domestic preference for a single sovereign. In the Blazing-World, its statesmen defend monarchy by comparing a political body with one head to a natural body, and by arguing that one Emperor suits their belief in one God. They also explain that many laws breed divisions and factions that can lead to war. Yet when factional conflict later threatens the Empress’s own government, the Duchess of Newcastle advises restoring one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language, and dissolving the learned societies whose disputes disturb public order. Against that background, the campaign for the King of Esfi extends the ideal of unity outward: a single monarch is made master not merely of a kingdom, but of the whole world.

The story nevertheless distinguishes the promise of peace from the methods used to impose it. The Empress says she comes to protect her country rather than pursue her own interest, and her intervention does defeat invading forces. But once the King asks for help with trade, the campaign expands into forced payments, destruction of shipping, and the burning of settlements. The Empress’s preference for beginning with smaller towns limits damage only conditionally: continued refusal is met with a threat of total ruin. Peace follows, but it is a peace secured by overwhelming force and by eliminating the practical alternatives to submission.

The alliance also creates a revealing contrast with the Empress’s refusal to enrich her own family. On the voyage back, she explains to the Duchess that wealth can make people mad with the desire to destroy one another, and that covetousness grows rather than diminishes with riches. She has nonetheless used the threat to trade and the collection of tribute to strengthen the King’s rule across the world. Her concern about riches therefore does not prevent imperial extraction; instead, the narrative places her suspicion of private accumulation beside an expansive political order that redirects commerce and tribute to the sovereign. The alliance ends as both a bond of native loyalty and the instrument of a new imperial hierarchy.