by David Weber
“I’m sorry I missed it,” she said, and meant it. She’d initially taken her third doctorate in anthropology because it was a traditional complement to sociology and political science. But she’d quickly found that one developed a richer and fuller appreciation for the politics of a culture if one looked at its underlying premises, which was what anthropology was all about.
“I don’t understand all the fuss.” Roger pulled his hair up off his neck. “I can’t believe they treat all visitors like this.”
“Oh, I’m sure they don’t,” O’Casey said as her mind gradually cleared of fog. “You do understand the meaning of all this ritual, don’t you?”
“I suppose I don’t,” Roger said. “I don’t really understand most rituals, even the ones on Earth.”
O’Casey decided that it would be more discreet to avoid agreeing overenthusiastically with him, and took another sip of her warming water while she considered how best to respond.
“Well,” she said after a moment, “this was a sort of cross between a wedding and a funeral.”
“Huh?” Roger sounded surprised.
“Did Cord maybe take something off or put it on? Or maybe give something to someone?”
“Yeah,” Roger said. “They gave him a different cape to replace the one he was carrying. And he gave a spear and a staff to one of the other Mardukans.”
“I talked a little to Cord on the way down from the plateau,” Eleanora said. “This asi thing is a form of slavery or bondage—you realized that?”
“Today I did,” Roger said angrily. “That’s crazy! The Empire doesn’t permit slavery or bondage of any form!”
“But this isn’t an imperial world,” she pointed out. “We’ve barely planted the flag, much less started on socialization. On the other hand, I think you misunderstand the situation. First of all, let’s take a look at the definition of slavery.”
She considered how to go about explaining slavery, marriage, and the similarities between them that had existed for thousands of Earth’s years to a man of the thirty-fourth century.
“For most of history—” she began, and saw him glaze over immediately. Roger was always interested in the battles, but get onto the societal structures and faction struggles, and he completely lost interest.
“Listen to me, Roger,” she said, meeting his eye. “You just married Cord.”
“What?”
“That got your attention, didn’t it?” she asked with a laugh. “But you did. And you also took him as your slave. For most of history, the rituals of marriage and slavery were practically identical. In this case, you performed an action that required that you ‘marry’ the person whom you’d saved.”
“Oh, joy,” Roger said.
“And you are now required to ‘keep’ that person, for the rest of his life and into the afterlife, most likely.”
“Another mouth to feed,” Roger joked.
“This is serious, Roger,” his chief of staff admonished, but she couldn’t help smiling. “By the same token, Cord must obey your wishes religiously. And to his family, it’s as if he’s dead. Which is probably the origin of the big festivities at weddings, by the way. In most primitive cultures, there are practically no rituals involved in marriage bindings, but elaborate rituals for funerals. There’s a strong theory that the wedding rituals eventually evolve out of the funeral rites because the bride and groom are leaving their families . . . just as would have been the case if they’d died.
“Now, I used the term ‘marriage’ because I knew it would get your attention,” she admitted. “But I could have said ‘permanently binding oath of fealty,’ ‘slavery,’ or ‘indenture.’ The rites and customs for all of them were practically identical in most early human societies, and we’ve found parallels for that in almost all of the primitive nonhuman societies we’ve studied. But any way you look at it, it’s a very important sacrament for the Mardukans, and I’m really sorry I missed it,” she concluded.
“Well, the dance of the forest animals was apparently the climax,” Roger told her. He picked up one of the blackened bits of meat and popped it into his mouth, following it up with one for the tame lizard. Her explanation made quite a few little bits which had been confusing him fall into place. He would worry about the ones that hadn’t at another time.
“But I’m glad you woke up,” he went on. “If you hadn’t, I would have had to send someone for you. Cord has just broached an interesting subject.”
“Oh?” She picked a leftover bit of fruit off a plate . . . and set it back down hastily when she saw that several of the “seeds” were moving.
“Yes. It seems that his tribe is in need of some advice.”
The hut was hot, dark, and close.
The party had gradually broken up, and as people left the square, the front covers of the huts had come down. They were, indeed, designed to be pegged down, and the Mardukans had also laced up the sides. Most of the Marines were packed into the huts, while a few were in tents, but at least the entire company was under cover, and most of its members were asleep.
But in Delkra’s hut, the futures of both the company and Cord’s tribe were under discussion as Cord explained why the interruption of his vision quest and his departure with Roger constituted such a bitter blow.
“In the days of my father’s father’s father, traders came up the Greater River to the joining of Our River and the Greater River. Traders had long come upriver, but this group made peace with my father’s father’s father and took up residence on a hill at the joining. We brought the skins of the grack and the atul-grack, the juice of theyaden cuol and the meat of the flin. In my father’s day, I was sent to Far Voitan to study the ways of the sword and the spear.
“The traders brought with them new weapons, better metals. Cloths, grains, and wine. The tribe flourished with the wealth that was brought in.
“But since that time, the town has grown greater and greater, and the tribe has become weaker and weaker. During my father’s time, we were at our greatest. We were more numerous and more fierce than the Dutak to the north or the Arnat to the south. But as the city has grown, its people have taken more and more of our hunting lands. Starvation has loomed more than once, and our reserves are always scanty.”
The shaman paused and looked around, as if trying to avoid an awkward truth.
“My brother has been overgenerous in this celebration. The barleyrice is purchased from the city, Q’Nkok, at great price. And the other foods. . . . There will be hungry mothers in weeks to come.
“The problem is the city. It has extended its fields too far, yet that’s hardly the worst of it. Their woodcutters are not to go beyond a certain stream, and even in that stretch where they are permitted, they are only to take certain trees. That is the treaty. For that, we are to be given certain goods—iron spears and knives, cooking pots, cloth. Yet these goods have become of worse and worse quality, while the woodcutters drive deeper and deeper into the forest. They do not restrict themselves to the proper trees, and their intrusion drives out the game or kills what remains.”
He looked around again and clapped his hands.
“If we kill the woodcutters, even if they are beyond the line, it breaks the treaty. The Houses of Q’Nkok will gather their forces and attack.” He ducked his head in shame. “And we will lose. Our warriors are able, but we would have to defend the town, and we would lose.
“But if we attack Q’Nkok, without warning, we can take it by surprise as the Kranolta took Far Voitan.” He looked around the humans, and Roger was forced to recognize that a fierce look was nearly universal. “Then we feed on their hoarded grains, kill the men, enslave the women, and take the goods that are rightfully ours.”
“There is, however, a problem with this,” Delkra said, and leaned forward as he took over the thread. “We will lose many warriors even if the attack is successful, and then Dutak and Arnat will fall upon us like flin on a dead flar beast. We didn’t know which way to go, so Cord went on a spirit
quest in search of a vision of guidance. If he’d seen peace in the future, it would have been peace. If he’d seen war, it would have been war.”
“What if he hadn’t come back?” Pahner asked. “He nearly didn’t.”
“War,” Delkra replied simply. “I’m in favor of it anyway. Without Cord to hold me back, we would have attacked last year. And, in all honesty, probably have been eaten by Dutak and Arnat.”
“Make peace with Dutak and Arnat,” Roger said, “and attack in concert.”
He felt O’Casey’s elbow connect with his ribs and realized what he’d just said. He supposed that advising the local barbarians to cooperate with one another in the destruction of this Q’Nkok would hardly advance the cause of civilization, and he remembered what his chief of staff had said about barbarism and infant mortality rates. On the other hand, these“barbarians” were his friends, and he didn’t particularly care for either of the possible outcomes Cord had described.
He started to glower at her, then stopped and looked down at his hands, instead. His history teachers—including Eleanora, when she’d been his tutor—had harped incessantly and unpleasantly on a ruler’s responsibility to weigh the possible impact of his decisions with exquisite care. He’d never cared for their apparent assumption that he wouldn’t have weighed such matters carefully without their pointed prodding. But now he suddenly realized just how easy it was for purely personal considerations to shape a decision without the decider’s even realizing it had happened.
He drew a deep breath, decided to keep his mouth shut, and went back to scratching his pet dog-lizard. He’d seen larger specimens around the camp, and if this one grew as large as some of the larger ones, it was going to be interesting. The biggest had been the size of a big German Shepherd, and the species seemed to fulfill the role of dogs in the camp.
Delkra, unaware of the prince’s thoughts, clapped his hands in resigned negation.
“The chiefs of both tribes are crafty. They have seen us weaken. They feel that if they just let us wither a bit more, they can take our lands and squabble over the leftovers.”
“So how can we help?” Captain Pahner asked. From his tone, Roger decided, it was pretty obvious that he knew at least one way they could help . . . and just as obvious that he was unwilling to do so.
“We don’t know,” Cord admitted. “But it’s obvious from your tools and abilities that you have great knowledge. It was our hope that if we described our quandary to you you might see some solution which has eluded us.”
Pahner and Roger turned as one to look at Eleanora.
“Oh great,” she said. “Now you want my help.”
She thought about what the two Mardukans said. And about city-state politics. And about Machiavelli.
“You have two apparently separate problems,” she said after a moment. “One on the receiving side, and one on the giving side. They might be connected, but that’s an assumption at this point.”
She spoke slowly, almost distantly, as her mind ranged back and forth over the Mardukans’ description of events, and she scratched the back of her neck while she thought.
“Have you been actively offered offense in your dealings with the rulers of the city-state?”
“No,” Cord answered definitively. “I have been to Q’Nkok twice recently to discuss the problems with the quality of the tribute and the unlawful intrusions of the woodcutters. The King has been very gracious on both occasions. The common people of the city don’t like us, nor we them, but the King has been very friendly.”
“Is wood-cutting a monopoly?” Eleanora asked. “Does one house cut all the wood? And what are these houses? How many are there, and how are they organized?”
“There are sixteen Great Houses,” Cord told her. “Plus the House of the King. There are also many smaller houses. The Great Houses sit on the Royal Council and . . . there are other rights attached to them. No single house has the right to cut wood, and the woodcutters who offend are not from a single house.”
“And the tribute? Is it supplied by the Houses or by the King?”
“It is supplied by the King through taxes on the Houses, Greater and Lesser. But it is usually conveyed by one of the Great Houses.”
“Expansion of the city-state is inevitable,” she said after a moment’s thought. “And as long as they need the wood as a resource, they’ll encroach farther and farther on your lands. Wars are usually about resources—about economics—at the base. But your concerns are certainly justified.
“I can’t know what’s going on from here. As I understand it, we’re traveling to this Q’Nkok next?” She made it a question and looked at Pahner, who gave a confirming nod and then looked at their hosts.
“I ask that you hold off on any attack until we visit the city,” the Marine said. “I ask for two reasons. One is that we need to trade for goods and animals to make our journey; Q’Nkok is the closest and most accessible source of what we need. The second is that we might be able to come up with a third option that would avoid the needless bloodshed of a war. Let us do a reconnaissance of the town, then we’ll send back word of what we find. As outsiders, we might be able to discern something that you can’t.”
Delkra and Cord looked at one another, and then the chief clapped his upper hands in agreement.
“Very well, we won’t rush to attack. When you go to the town, I will send some of my sons with you. They’ll aid you on the trip and act as messengers.” He paused, and looked around at the gathered humans, and his body language was sober. “I hope for all our sakes that you are able to find a third way. My brother is asi now, and dead to his family, but it would grieve him if his family were dead in truth.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The city-state was a larger version of the village of The People and was obviously expanding. The company had followed the river from Cord’s village downstream to its junction with a still larger river, and the city sat on a small ridge on the eastern side of the new one. The ridge was near the apex of the confluence of the two streams and more or less covered with structures. A wooden palisade surrounded the intersection, but the palisade was obviously a temporary expedience, and several sections of it had already been replaced with a high stone curtain wall. It was nearing evening as the travelers came to the cleared boundary of the city-state’s lands, and the sky over the town was gray with the smoke of the evening’s fires.
The jungle ended with knife-sharp abruptness at the border of the city-state’s territory. The stream that marked the boundary was the fourth one they’d crossed, but this crossing had significant differences from any of the earlier ones.
On the west side of the stream—the “civilized” side—there were large mounds every few hundred yards. They were surmounted by oddly constructed houses, and more mounds and houses were scattered throughout the valley of fields and orchards. The houses had no lower-floor doorways, and the upper floors extended out to overhang the walls of the lower sections, which were very stoutly constructed. For the life of him, Roger couldn’t figure out why they were designed that way, but from their placement, they were clearly intended to defend the fields.
Also scattered along the banks of the irrigation ditches and poor roads were very simple huts. Compared to them, the huts of Cord’s village were masterpieces. These were more stacks of barleyrice straw than true dwellings, and Roger was fairly sure they were temporary shelter for the peasants who worked the land. No doubt they were expected to wash away with the regular seasonal floods, for they could certainly be “rebuilt”—if that wasn’t too grand a term—easily enough.
The cultivation of barleyrice took up the majority of the several square kilometers of cleared land. Unlike Terran rice, it was dry farming, and Roger thought it might be a tradable grain in the Empire. It was as easy to prepare as rice but had more and better taste, and if it lacked some amino acids, so did rice. Combined with the proper terrestrial foods, it would provide a balanced diet.
It was clear that the s
ingle biggest difficulty in cultivating the grain around Q’Nkok wasn’t the jungle, but rains and floods. Most of the fields, especially in the lower areas near the river, were surrounded by dikes intended to keep water out, not in. Lifting pumps, like a sort of reverse waterwheel, were everywhere, pulling water out of depressions cut into the corners of the fields. Some were driven by peasants pushing circle wheels, but most were attached to crude windmills.
What was not evident were reasonably sized domestic animals. As they emerged from the jungle, they’d seen a line of what Cord identified as pack beasts entering the distant city, and Roger, along with several of the Marines, had used his helmet to zoom in on the large creatures. They’d been surprised, for the beasts were apparently identical to the flar beast which had threatened Cord. When Roger commented on it, Cord had responded with a grunting laugh and indicated that although the pack beasts, which he called flar-ta, might look the same as the creature he called flar-ke, which Roger had killed, there were huge differences between the two obviously related species.
The peasants who worked the grain were scattered throughout the area, weeding and planting. Some were done for the day and were drifting back to their dwellings, whether those were the temporary huts, the blockhouses near the jungle, or the distant town, when they spotted the travelers’ approach and slowed abruptly.
As the humans followed the twisting roads towards the town, the crowd of workers became thicker. Some who’d gone ahead turned and retraced their steps, and others looked up from the fields and began to flow towards the roadside. Pahner had started to get a feel for Mardukan body language, and he didn’t care for the hostile looks and gestures thrown their way. Nor did he like the occasional, half-understood insults . . . or the way one or two of them waved agricultural implements.
