The Rivan Codex

by David Eddings

  The tiresome History of the Angarak Kingdoms was handed off to the scholars at the University of Melcene, who are just as stuffy and wrong-headed as their counterparts at the University of Tol Honeth. It worked for us in the Belgariad, so it was probably going to work just as well in the Malloreon, (If it ain’t busted; don’t fix it), and it worked again. Then we substituted The Mallorean Gospels for The Holy Books in the Belgariad Preliminaries. The intent was the same. Our overall thesis was that there are two worlds running side by side—the ordinary, mundane world, and the theological magic world. When they start to overlap, all hell breaks loose, and you’ve got story. You’re neck-deep in story. Did you want to summarize the twentieth century? Try that as a starting point.

  To get ‘story’, we were obliged to become Manichees, maintaining that good and evil are evenly matched. If God is all-powerful, why are we so worried about the Devil? When the medieval Church declared Manicheism to be a heresy, she squirmed a lot, but never did answer that specific question. I won’t either.

  We also added a note of Existentialism by forcing Cyradis, acting for all of mankind, to make the final choice between good and evil. It makes a good story, but it probably shouldn’t be accepted as the basis for a system of personal belief, since it might get you into a lot of trouble. If the Pope doesn’t get on your case, the Archbishop of Canterbury probably will.

  The Malloreon Preliminaries conclude with King Anheg’s personal diary, which sort of followed our outline for Book One of the Malloreon. It gives us a condensed chronology, and that’s always useful.

  As with the Preliminaries to the Belgariad, these Malloreon Prelims had quite a few dead-ends which we discarded during the actual writing. One of the dangers of epic fantasy lies in its proclivity to wander off into the bushes. We have what appears to be the gabbiest of all possible fiction forms, but it requires iron discipline. The writer absolutely must stick to the story-line and deviate only when an idea or character will improve the overall product. I can’t verify this, but I have heard that there was a medieval romance that was twenty-five thousand pages long!! That’s an entire library all by itself. I suspect that if you were to give a contemporary fantasist free rein, he might take a shot at that just to get his name in the Guinness Book of Records.

  All right, push bravely on. We’ll talk again later.

  IV

  PRELIMINARY STUDIES FOR THE MALLOREON

  A CURSORY HISTORY OF THE ANGARAK KINGDOMS

  Prepared by the History Department of the University of Melcene

  Tradition, though not always reliable, places the ancestral home of the Angaraks in the southern latitudes somewhere off the south coast of present-day Dalasia. In that prehistoric era, when Angarak and Alorn lived in peace, the favored races of mankind inhabited contiguous areas in a pleasant, fertile basin which was forever submerged by the cataclysmic event known as ‘The Cracking of the World’. It is not the purpose of this work to dwell upon the theological implications of that event, but rather to examine the course of the history of the Angaraks in the centuries which followed.

  The so-called ‘Cracking of the World’ appears in fact to have been a splitting of the crust of the primeval proto-continent, and its effects were immediately disastrous. The plasmic magma upon which the great land-mass floated immediately began to extrude itself into that vast split and to force the now-separated continental plates apart. When the waters of the southern ocean rushed into the resulting gap and inundated the rising magma, a continuous violent explosion ripped from one end of the vast fault to the other, forcing the plates even farther apart and setting off a tremendous, rolling earthquake which soon encompassed the entire globe.73 Entire mountain ranges quite literally crumbled into rubble, and colossal tidal waves raced across the oceans of the world, forever altering coastlines a half a planet away. The Sea of the East grew daily wider as the elemental violence at its floor rudely shouldered the two continental plates farther and farther apart. The explosive separation of the continents appears to have continued for decades until it gradually subsided and the two great landmasses stabilized in more or less their present location. The world which emerged from this catastrophe was almost totally unlike the world which had previously existed.

  During this vast upheaval, the Angaraks retreated north-easterly before the steadily encroaching sea, and they ultimately sought the safety of the higher ground of the Dalasian Mountains in West Central Mallorea. Once the movement of the continental plates had subsided, however, the Angaraks found that the unstable weather generated by the newly-formed Sea of the East made the Dalasian Mountains too inhospitable a place for permanent residence, and they migrated north into the reaches of what is now called Ancient Mallorea.

  NOTE

  When speaking of this era, some confusion is possible. Modern Mallorea encompasses the entire continent, whereas Ancient Mallorea was limited to the northwestern segment of the land mass and was bordered on the south by Dalasia and on the east by Karanda. It is in part the purpose of this study to trace the expansion of the Angaraks which ultimately led to their domination of all of Mallorea.

  During the troubled times which accompanied the migration, the presence of Torak, Dragon God of Angarak, was scarcely felt. Although he had previously dominated every facet of Angarak life, the mutilation inflicted upon him by CTHRAG-YASKA (which men in the west call the Orb of Aldur) caused him such unbearable suffering that he was no longer able to function in his traditional capacity as ‘Kal’, King and God. The Grolim priesthood, demoralized by the sudden incapacity of Torak, was unable to fill the vacuum, and the leadership of Angarak fell by default into the hands of the military commanders. Thus it was that the emerging nation of the Angarak people was administered from the military head-quarters at Mal Zeth. By the time that the Grolims recovered, they discovered that the military had established de facto rule of all of Angarak. Shaking off their shock-induced paralysis, the Grolims set up an opposing center of power at Mal Yaska at the southern tip of the Karandese Mountains. Had matters remained so, inevitably there would have been a confrontation between the military and the priesthood, which in all probability would have destroyed Angarak in the convulsions of civil war.

  It was at this point, however, that Torak roused himself sufficiently to reassert his authority. During the period of his illness (perhaps a century or so) the military had become dominant in Angarak society, and much to the chagrin of the Grolim priesthood, the awakening God made no effort to reestablish their ascendancy. Instead of establishing himself at either Mal Zeth or at the ecclesiastical capital at Mal Yaska, however, Torak marched northwest to establish the holy city at Cthol Mishrak on the northern edge of the District of Camat. It should be pointed out here that the religious writings of the period do not reveal the entire story. The Book of Torak states that the Dragon God took his people to Cthol Mishrak and caused them to build the city following his maiming by Cthrag-Yaska. The scriptures blur over the hundred year interval during which the Angaraks spread out over the northwestern quadrant of Mallorea and implies that those who followed the maimed God comprised all of Angarak. Civil records of the period, however, reveal that scarcely more than a quarter of the Angarak people followed Torak to Cthol Mishrak. Pleading the necessity of administering and protecting the rest of the nation, the military remained in place at Mal Zeth; and similarly, the Grolim hierarchy, with the equally plausible excuse of the need for overseeing the spiritual requirements of a growing and widespread population, continued to occupy Mal Yaska, from which they jealously guarded church interests against military encroachment. Torak, almost totally absorbed in his effort to gain control of the Orb, seemed oblivious to the fact that the majority of the Angarak peoples were becoming secularized. Those who followed him to Cthol Mishrak were, by and large, the often hysterical fringe of religious fanatics which are to be found in any society. Since Torak’s attention was almost totally focused upon the Orb, the administration of day to day life in Cthol Mishrak fell to his three
Disciples, Ctuchik, Urvon and later, Zedar. This trio, with the zeal which usually marks the Disciple, rigidly maintained the older forms and customs, in effect petrifying the society of Cthol Mishrak in that somewhat pastoral form which had obtained in the Angarak culture prior to the migration to Mallorea. As a result, the rest of Angarak changed in response to external pressures and their new environment, while the society at Cthol Mishrak and environs remained static. It was precisely this divergence which ultimately led to the friction which divides Cthol Murgos and modern Mallorea.

  The Grolim hierarchy at Mal Yaska, chafing at what they felt was the usurpation of power by the military, began to take certain steps which once again brought Mallorea to the brink of civil war. While their campaign was scrupulously theological, it was nonetheless quite obviously directed at the military chain of command. The practice of human sacrifice had fallen into a certain disuse during the protracted illness of the Dragon God, but it was now reinstituted with unusual fervor. By carefully manipulating the drawing of lots which selected the sacrificial victims, the Grolims began to systematically exterminate the lower echelons of the officer corps.

  The situation soon grew intolerable to the military commanders at Mal Zeth, and they retaliated by leveling fraudulent criminal charges at every Grolim unlucky enough to fall into their hands. Despite the howls of protest from Mal Yaska, where the hierarchy strenuously maintained that the priesthood was exempt from civil prosecution, these ‘criminals’ were all summarily executed.

  Ultimately, word of this surreptitious war reached Torak, and the God of Angarak took immediate steps to halt the bloodshed. He summoned the Military High Command and the Grolim Hierarchy to Cthol Mishrak and delivered his commands to the warring factions in blistering terms. There were to be no further sacrifices of military officers and no further executions of Grolims. Exempting only the enclaves at Mal Yaska and Mal Zeth, all other towns and districts in ancient Mallorea were to be ruled jointly by the military and the priesthood, the military to be responsible for civil matters, and the priesthood for religious ones. He told them, moreover, that should there be any recurrence of their secret war, he would immediately order the abandonment of all of the rest of Mallorea and command all of Angarak to repair immediately to Cthol Mishrak and to live there under the direct supervision of his disciples.

  In retrospect, it is quite obvious that Torak had plans for the future which necessitated both a strong military and a powerful, well-organized Church. At that moment, however, it was only his threat and the cold-eyed stares of the dreaded disciples which whipped the military and the hierarchy into line. Shuddering at the prospect of living in the hideous basin which surrounded the City of Night under the domination of Torak’s Disciples, the military and the priesthood made peace with each other, and the matter ended with their return to their separate enclaves where they could exist in at least semi-autonomy beyond the range of Torak’s direct scrutiny.

  This enforced truce freed the commanders of the army to pursue other matters. It had become evident almost as soon as the Angarak migration had reached the continent that there were other inhabitants of Mallorea. The origins of these people are lost in the mists of pre-history, and scriptural references to them are notoriously inexact. The traditional view that the Gods each selected a people and that the unchosen— or Godless—people were then driven out must, in the light of more modern perceptions, be regarded with some scepticism. Whatever their origins, however, three separate and quite distinct races inhabited the Mallorean continent prior to the coming of the Angaraks; the Dalasians of the southwest, the Karands of the north, and the Melcenes in the east. Once Torak’s intervention had established some kind of internal stability in Mallorean society—about nine hundred years after the original Angarak migration—the military at Mal Zeth was forced to focus its attention upon Karanda.

  The Karandese were not a wholly unified people, but lived in a loose confederation of seven kingdoms stretching across the northern half of the continent from the Karandese Mountains to the sea lying beyond the mountains of Zamad.74 There is some evidence to suggest that the original home of the Karands lay around the shores of Lake Karand in modern Ganesia. Their expansion over the centuries was largely the result of population pressures and climatic conditions. There is abundant evidence that there had long been periodic glacial incursions reaching down onto the plains of north central Mallorea out of the frigid trough lying between the two ranges of mountains in the far north. Retreating before the encroaching ice, the Karands were pushed into Pallia and Delchin and ultimately into Rengel and what is now the District of Rakuth in eastern Mallorea proper. The last of these glacial ages occurred just prior to the catastrophic events which led to the formation of the Sea of the East. At that time the Barrens of Northern Mallorea were sheathed in ice to a depth of several hundred feet, and glaciers extended a hundred leagues or more south of the present shoreline of Lake Karand. The explosive appearance of the Sea of the East, however, brought an abrupt end to the grip of the glaciers. The flow of warm, moist air off the vast steam cloud which accompanied the volcanic formation of the sea poured up through the natural channel lying between the Dalasian and Karandese ranges and initiated a glacial melt of titanic proportions. The suddenly unlocked waters gouged out the huge valley of the Great River Magan, quite the longest and most majestic river in the world.

  The Karands themselves, as is so frequently the case with northern peoples, are a warlike race, and their frequent glacier-compelled migrations left them little time for the establishment of the cultural niceties which characterize the nations of more southerly latitudes. Indeed, it has been said with some accuracy that the Karands habitually hover just on the verge of howling barbarism. Karandese cities are crude by any standards, usually protected by rude log palisades, and the sight of hogs roaming at will through the muddy streets is all too common.

  By the beginning of the second millennium, incursions by roving bands of Karandese brigands had become a serious problem along Mallorea’s eastern frontier, and the Angarak army moved out of Mal Zeth to take up positions along the western fringes of the Karandese Kingdom of Pallia. In a quick punitive expedition, the city of Rakand in southwestern Pallia was sacked and burned and the inhabitants taken captive.

  It was at this point that one of the most monumental decisions in Angarak history was made. Even as the Grolims prepared for an orgy of human sacrifice, the military commanders paused to take stock of the situation. The Angarak military had no real desire to occupy Pallia. The difficulties of communication over long distances as well as the wide dispersal of their forces which such an occupation would have involved made the whole notion distinctly unattractive. From the point of view of the military it was far better to keep the Pallian Kingdom intact as a subject nation and to exact tribute than to physically occupy a depopulated territory. No one can be sure to whom the solution first occurred, but the military universally approved.

  The Grolims were naturally horrified when the suggestion was first presented to them, but the military was adamant. Ultimately, both sides agreed to place the matter in the hands of Torak himself and to be bound by his decision.

  The idea which was presented to the Dragon God was that the Pallian captives should be converted to the worship of Torak rather than being summarily butchered. Though the Grolims were smugly convinced that Torak’s devotion was centered upon the Angarak people, certain military commanders had a shrewder conception of the true nature of the Angarak God. Torak, they perceived, was fundamentally a greedy God. He hungered for adoration, and if the case of the Pallian captives—and ultimately of all of Karanda—were presented to him in the light of a manifold increase in the adoration which would be his if he agreed to conversion as opposed to extermination, he could not help but side with the position of the military. Their understanding proved to be correct, and once again the military won out over the shrill protests of the priesthood. It must be conceded, however, that Torak’s motives may have been
more complex. There can be no doubt that the Dragon God, even at that early date, was fully aware that ultimately there would be a confrontation with the West. The fact that he almost continually sided with the military in their disputes with the Grolims is mute evidence that the God of Angarak placed supreme importance upon the growing army. If the Karandese could be converted to the Worship of Torak, at one stroke he would nearly double the size of his army and his position in the coming conflict would be all the more secure.

  Thus it was that the Mallorean Grolims were given a new commandment. They were to strive above all else to convert the Godless Karandese to the worship of the God of Angarak. ‘I will have them all,’ Torak told his assembled priests. ‘Any man who liveth in all of boundless Mallorea shall bow down to me, and if any of ye shirk in this stern responsibility, ye shall feel my displeasure most keenly.’ And with that awe-some threat still ringing in their ears, the Grolims went forth to convert the heathen.

  The conquest of the seven kingdoms of Karanda absorbed the attention of both the military and the priesthood for several centuries. While the Angarak army, better equipped and better trained, could in all probability have accomplished a purely military victory in a few decades, the necessity of conversion slowed their march to the east to a virtual snail’s pace. The Grolims, moving always in advance of the army, preached at every cross-road and settlement, offering the Karands the care of a loving God if they would but submit. Karandese society, essentially unreligious, took some time to absorb this notion; but ultimately, swayed by Grolim persuasiveness and by the ever-present threat of the Angarak army poised just to the west, resistance crumbled.