The port of Ganx Gemen had one of the finest harbors east of Ceric. For a hundred miles upstream and downstream the River Orlilannen flowed fat and slow through a great green floodplain, to its east, in the hazy distance the dry hills jutting up, in the west, an open horizon, the sky reaching down to the far-off treetops of some windbreak or fruit orchard. It was a deep harbor, deep enough for some ocean ships had there been any, deep enough certainly for any river barge bound north for Poyn or Tuvel, or south for the Soydoi chieftaincies. No harbor south of Little Poyn and Tazraj had more traffic, and on any given day thirty barges might call at its twenty long docks, unloading rice and fruit and honey, opium and lumber and cottong and much more for use in the city, loading hammers and fine swords and glasswares and cloth in return, or simply buying supplies and continuing north or south. Along the port's embankments towered stately date palms. Looming over the harbor was the soul of the city, the black ziggurat or step pyramid, one hundred feet high and two hundred wide at the base, with a column of black smoke rising up into the sky, straight up when there was no wind, which was often, Ganx Gemen being an uncommonly windless place. The city's largest houses were crowded around the port, wooden structures which, like the civilization of Varannon, looked more precarious than they were, always two stories high, because it was a conceit of the Varannian race in the riverine port cities and the floodplain, known as "low Varannon," only to live on the second story (when they could afford it), as a physical symbol of their position as a caste above the people they ruled, and these two were painted black, after the custom of the hills-- "high Varannon"-- where black was first the color of the pigment-paste with which Varannian herdsman protected their huts against weather, then later became the symbol of the Varannian people.
Andrei of Ganx Gemen, tall and strong and proud and young, being only in his thirty-fifth year, held the office which Poynese called in their language 'king,' though the Varannian name farh, a corruption of "phaoroh" as the word was used by the decadent empire of Soyada centuries before, had a rather different meaning than what the Poynese meant by a king. A farh, or a Varannian king, was first priest as well as warlord and governor within his domain. As governor he enjoyed the power of life and death over every one of his subjects, a claim no Poynese king would ever have made. As first priest, by contrast, he was considered almost 'first among equals,' with the right and duty to preside over many important ceremonies in the sacred ziggurat, an important privilege, but with little power to coerce or punish his fellow priests. For all its mystique, its command of the skyline of the city, its power to captivate the eye (there was no district in the flat city from which the towering ziggurat was not visible) instill awe and fear, the ziggurats, of which there were nine, one for each Varannian 'king', four in the riverine ports of low Varannon and five in hilltop cities of high Varannon, were not the holiest places according to the beliefs of the Varannian priestly caste. There were caves and cloisters, some of them secret to certain special orders, which were regarded as holier. It was not easy for the Varannian kings, habituated to absolute command, to deal with these priests, who owed obedience to nothing but their law, their reverences, their caste, and their sacred skepticism, who came and went at will among all the Varannian kingdoms, who spoke their minds, rehearsing their austere propositions. But the kings tolerated the priests because they knew they had a double use. First, to unite the realm of Varannon, which constitutionally was a loose confederacy, and the pride and ambition of whose kings would often have sparked civil war but for the strong vows taken on their accessions, taken in the sanctity of the ziggurats, that Varannian not wage war with Varannian in the lands of the nine kings. (Sometimes, though rarely, Varannian kings had allied with opposite sides in foreign wars and fought one another on foreign battlefields without breaking their vows.) Second, because awe of the priests and ziggurats held in check the helots or low-caste peoples of the riverine ports and the floodplain.
The creed of the the Varannian priestly caste began very simply. A stone that we cannot lift is greater, they said, than a stone which a man can carry. A river which we cannot swim across is greater than one whose far bank can be reached without a boat. Likewise, those truths which we cannot know are greater than those which we can know. They cultivated in themselves an awe of the Unknowable, they dedicated the ziggurats to it, and burned the flesh of beats and sometimes of men on altars in sacrifices to it. Black, the color that symbolized the Varannian race, was understood also as the symbol of Unknowing, for in the darkness nothing is knowable. In their discourses the priests delighted in mocking men who thought they possessed knowledge, in setting paradoxes and logical traps. Such nihilistic pedantries were too much for the low castes to understand, and they held to old mythologies, and told fantastic and lurid tales about hundreds of rival deities, deities from many traditions which all mingled into one managerie of debased divinity and theologized magic, in which, however, they perhaps only half believed. But of the sacred skepticism of the black priests and the promiscuous paganism of the lower castes there occurred a strange symbiosis, for every pagan sect thought that when the black priests worshiped the "Unknowable," they were really worshiping the gods favored by their own sect, and therefore the state was in harmony with the gods even if their neighbors were not. It helped that the black priests enjoyed a legal monopoly of literacy in each of the kingdoms.
But the low Varannian kings did not rely only on the priests to maintain their rule. They had several other methods. It was understood, albeit vaguely, that in the event of a low-caste revolution in one or more of the low Varannian kingdoms, the high Varannian kings would join the battle on the side of their low Varannian fellows. The hosts of high Varannon had never been seen by the low Varannian helots but twice, when revolutions had erupted in Deneth Doun and Atremar Jah, riverine kingdoms north and south of Ganx Gemen, and been crushed by the united forces of the nine kings with great slaughter. The priestly monopoly on literacy served the kings' interests, too, as it weakened their subjects. The kings encouraged opium addiction among the people, too, while forbidding it strictly to their Varannian subjects, to keep them strong. It was also for better control of their subjects that the riverine kings had long divided the people into castes by profession, ordering each man to follow the profession of his father and regulating marriage laws so that caste loyalties formed and the kings could use the divisions to keep their subjects in line.
The Varannians were a formidable people in trade and war alike. They had fought all their neighors, as every new generation of kings had to fight to prove their mettle and earn reputations for valor. Their wars tended to be short and dramatic, not especially bloody, and inconclusive. They were remembered differently by each side, but the Varannian kings claimed victory even if no territory or other advantage were gained, and their subjects usually believed them. In Andrei of Ganx Gemen's day the great cause had been the defense of Poyn against Tuvel. He had ridden northward with the great Varannian host, which had never before been seen so far from the dry hills and the fat, slow banks of the lower Orlilannen. He had come back changed. He dismissed his concubines. The languid evenings of music and wine and sensuality which he had enjoyed almost every night for years now contradicted a new idea of industry and energy which he had conceived. This languor seemed to pervade the city: the languid flow of the river, the languid rise of the smoke from the ziggurat, the languid incantations, the languid marketplaces, the languid efforts of caste laborers who had no love of their work. He began to think of great reforms, new laws; he though of letting a man choose his own profession as in high Varannon or Poyn; he wanted to build new buildings. Despite his absolute power he found himself frustrated by a passive opposition that he did not understand. Ganx Gemen was stuck in the old ways like a wagon in the mud. Andrei became more pragmatic then, but his determination remained, and his subjects said of him, with respect, that he had become "northern." However, he knew, too, that he was forgetting the lessons he had learned in Poyn, that they were slipping away from him, and he was somehow helpless in the face of this sleep and forgetting. In Poyn, he had seen counselors who did not flatter but told the truth, who argued and disagreed, and who sometimes, too, praised the wisdom of the king's ideas, and when they did so could be trusted, because they would not say so if they did not believe it. In Poyn, he had seen judges who thought not of what interests were being served but of what was right. In Poyn, he saw soldiers who fought not like politicians thinking of their own glory and ambition, but plunged into the fray gloriously indifferent to death in disinterested service to something greater. He saw, above all, knights: men who loved valor and adventure, men who possessed not the stiff pride of the Varannians, but something similar yet utterly different, honor, thanks to which they could joke and laugh and be merry even as they were about to die. He had never seen such things before, or even imagined them, but when he saw them they were like waking from a dream: he saw that it ought to be so, and that the corrupt judges and flattering counselors of Ganx Gemen were false copies of things of which he had now seen true examples, and he recognized them as worthless. But the memories of Poyn faded so quickly.
He did not know it, but the reason they faded is that he succumbed to arrogance amidst the eulogies to Varannon's glorious victory. In Varannon, even stalemates were hailed as great victories; now the Varannian host's participation as the second-greatest ally of Poyn was told as if Varannon had put the Tuvelain legions to flight single-handedly, magnanimously saving the hopelessly beaten Poynese and restoring their all-but-lost kingdom to Medvelil. Let it be said that Medvelil, who thought honor and glory a cheap way to pay for Varannian allies, had done much to encourage the belief in Varannon that Poyn's cause depended utterly on their support. As Andrei grew daily more contemptuous of Poyn's military prowess and more vainglorious of Varannon's and especially his own, his admiration of Poyn changed. There were merits in the manner of administration in Poyn; they were worthy of selective emulation; but Varannon's military superiority bore witness to the value of its customs, too. And Andrei, his pride restored, took new concubines and spent his evenings again in a languor of wine and music and women's arms.
Still, there were changes, and one of these is that he ceased to tolerate pirates on the Orlilannen. For decades pirates had sailed up the Orlilannen, preying on the villages and towns of the west bank of the river, which were not part of Varannon and were often ill-governed and chaotic, as well as on villages on Varannon's side of the river, but careful to avoid plundering the black houses of the Varannian ruling caste. Seeing little glory in fighting pirates, and some profit in buying their stolen goods, and caring little for the lives and property of their low-caste subjects, the kings had largely ignored them. But now this policy seemed to Andrei craven and cowardly. And so when a pirate ship appeared in the Orlilannen, pillaging the villages on the east bank, Andrei ordered warships to pursue it. To his frustration, after a fierce battle, it escaped, but he took seven prisoners. Six he ordered hanged. The seventh he spared for the moment, for he had recognized him.
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Posted by: Mac Vincent | June 05, 2011 at 10:43 PM