Children of the Dragon

by Frank Robinson

  The marriage of Jehan Henghmani was not calculated to win the approval of his peasant followers. But in truth, the event created little stir; there were more important matters to concern Taroloweh.

  The most obvious was the province’s precarious situation. Never before had an Urhemmedhin revolt succeeded so fabulously, never had the Tnemghadi been driven out. But surely they would be back! That no further invasion had come so far seemed only to mean that the Tnemghadi were gearing toward a truly terrible attack. Jehan was shaping up his army too, but could he hold the northerners at bay indefinitely? Grave and widespread was the fear of invasion, and many believed that the Emperor would not be satisfied merely to regain Taroloweh. They believed the whole province would be punished as harshly as Zidneppa: destroyed, as a lesson to the entire southland.

  Meanwhile, by dint of prodigious exertions, Jehan and his regime were bringing under control the province’s internal convulsions. The enlarging army managed to impose a degree of order upon the countryside. Most towns saw restoration of some sort of rough provisional government, administered by Jehan’s army in concert with emerging peasant leaders. Likewise makeshift was the food rationing system promulgated to ward off starvation. The rationing was a colossal administrative quagmire, well beyond the ability of the fledgling regime to handle. It was widely undercut, abused, or ignored. But it did put food in the mouths of thousands who would otherwise have starved.

  Preoccupied as he was with Taroloweh’s problems, Jehan was thinking too beyond its borders. It was in the small hours of one dreary morning that Golana found him by himself, his huge pillar of a body hunched over a work-table. She entered soundlessly and stood in a corner, watching him.

  He had to bend deeply to study the details of an enormous map that was spread out upon the table, with its edges flopping over the sides. Golana recognized it as a map of the Empire of Bergharra, one of the most complete and accurate available. She herself had procured this map for Jehan. Now his eyes and hands were riveted to it, his fingers tracing thoughtful lines upon it.

  After some minutes, he sensed that he was not alone, and looked up. He smiled to see Golana, and she left her corner to join him behind the table.

  “Your finger is upon Ksiritsa,” she said.

  “Yes.” He jabbed at the oversized, decorated red blotch that marked the City of the Dragon, the capital of the Empire. “Ksiritsa. Ksiritsa.” He pronounced the name with an intense whisper of reverence.

  “I have never been to Ksiritsa,” Golana said.

  Jehan’s fist pounded down on the red blotch. “But you shall see it, Golana! I vow that you’ll see it. More than half a year now, we’ve been at Arbadakhar. We have things coming along nicely here; Taroloweh’s crisis is easing. Some of our men are growing restless here, others are growing complacent. Sarbat is weak; he hasn’t dared attack us since we took this city. Perhaps he thinks we mean only to hold Taroloweh. But he is wrong.”

  Jehan’s finger slashed a straight line across the map from Arbadakhar to the Dragon City. “The time is coming for us to go to Ksiritsa.”

  “No,” Golana said quietly.

  Jehan’s head jerked around. “What? I don’t understand. Maiya’s always ranting that you want to keep us at Arbadakhar. Don’t tell me she’s right?”

  “No, she is not right. My ambitions are no less than your own. But just look at what an attack upon Ksiritsa would involve: a northward march, through unfamiliar terrain, but worse than that, through the Tnemghadi provinces. You certainly won’t be cheered along the way there, unlike your march across Taroloweh. Indeed, you would have to fight your way every lim from here to Ksiritsa, with no sympathetic local peasants to replenish your forces. Your lines of supply would be stretched out impossibly. I doubt you could even feed your troops; the Tnemghadi will probably bum their crops along your path.

  “Then, if you do reach Ksiritsa: it’s an impregnable walled city. The army inside will be huge, and you’ll get no support from the civilian population. They’ll resist to the bitter end.

  “And finally, if you do take Ksiritsa, what have you accomplished? Sarbat would move his court to a new capital, he would retain the allegiance of the Tnemghadi people. You would have conquered a city—not an empire.”

  Jehan nodded at many of her points. “All you say is true, Golana. I never imagined it would be easy. It will take years.”

  “But it’s not the North you should attack at all. That’s what I’m getting at, Jehan. You want to conquer the Empire of Bergharra—but forget it. Do not be blinded by the brilliance of Ksiritsa. Turn your eyes away from it. Instead turn your eyes southward.

  “This is what I’ve been mulling over for months. I saw it, in rough outlines, before you even came to Arbadakhar. Jehan, you do not know your proper destiny, you do not know who you are. But I have always known.”

  Jehan smiled seriously. “All right, Golana. I will listen. Tell me who I am.”

  Golana breathed deeply and settled herself before speaking. When she began, she spoke with quiet firmness, and with a fluidness that almost suggested a carefully prepared speech.

  “You started at Zidneppa as the champion of the downtrodden. That was a fine thing, perhaps a noble thing. You cleaned up the town, threw out the Tnemghadi, gave away food. You even proclaimed the land free.

  “And, oh, how they flocked to your banner! For years this province was strangled by intractable famine, the people run off their land and starving by the thousands. You promised land and bread and they flocked to you. And, for a while at least, you actually fulfilled your promise.

  “But now there is no more free food, and the land you’ve given them is proving to be a dubious gift. Is it bountiful in their hands? Can they get the seeds and tools and gaars they need? Will they fight over the land, neighbor against neighbor and brother against brother? And will the people wandering the roads prey upon the ones who have the land? But you know well enough what’s happening out there. I don’t have to tell you the ugly details.

  “Perhaps we could overcome all that if we got help from other provinces. But the Tnemghadi have cut us off. They aim to starve Taroloweh.

  “In short, what you are doing for the peasants, however noble, will soon stand revealed as a cruel illusion. They’ll find out they’re no better off under your regime than with the Tnemghadi—indeed, probably worse off. And the consequences of this should be obvious.

  “But there is a solution.

  “No matter how hungry they are, it may yet be possible for you to hold the loyalty of the Urhemmedhin peasantry. Yea, even to strengthen that loyalty. But your movement must undergo a drastic transformation.

  “Heretofore, you have focused the people’s attention on their empty bellies by harping on the promise of land and bread. Now, instead, you must divert them away from that hunger.

  “The Urhemmedhin people are starving, but food is not their only hunger. They have another hunger too, a more nagging hunger, a craving even more universal than that for food. Even those with food in their bellies possess this supervening hunger.

  “It is the hunger for freedom: yarushkadharra.

  “Freedom is what they hunger for, after eight centuries of slavery—freedom! They don’t want their noses pressed to the mud. They hate being spat upon, made slaves, considered subhuman. They want freedom, and the dignity that goes with freedom: yarushkadharra.

  “That, Jehan Henghmani, is what you must offer your people. Nothing more and nothing less.

  “That is why you must not go north to Ksiritsa. Instead, your destiny lies south. It is Naddeghomra, the city of King Urhem himself. We will go south, to Naddeghomra.” Now it was Golana’s finger that jabbed exuberantly at the map.

  “To Naddeghomra. King Urhem will be the guiding saint, and his creed will be our beacon light. Do you know the power of it, Jehan? For eight long centuries, that creed has been suppressed, the book forb
idden. And yet, it survived. The southern people have not forgotten the creed of Urhem. It is the veneration of love and human dignity, it is the foundation of freedom, it is more powerful by far than mere bread and land. With the creed of Urhem, you will rally his people to your cause, and with the might of that belief you will mobilize great armies.

  “So that is where your destiny lies: south, to Naddeghomra. And when you get there, it will be reborn. Naddeghomra will be the capital of a new nation, one that never existed before except in the hearts of its people.

  “We will call it Prasid Urhemma, the Nation of Urhem.

  “Urhemma, Jehan, Prasid Urhemma. The free Nation of Urhem. That is the dream for which the people will march.”

  Golana stopped to catch her breath. Her voice was carried musically aloft, her eyes were shining. “So now, my dear Jehan, do you know what you are?”

  He looked at her, deep into her eyes, with transcendent gravity. “Yes,” he whispered, “I do know what I am.”

  10

  ON THE SIXTH day of Dorotht in the year 1182, the criers and trumpeters fanned out through Arbadakhar, summoning the people one and all to the temple. And the people dropped what they were doing, to obey the summons, for it was an exciting one.

  They were summoned to hear Jehan Henghmani. Never had he personally addressed Arbadakhar like this; it was obviously an occasion of great importance. No one knew what to expect, but they thronged the temple’s courtyard by the thousands. So great was the crush of people that many fainted and were injured. It was a struggle for the guards to keep order.

  At the appointed hour, Jehan Henghmani ascended to the temple’s highest balcony. Flanked by his five generals, he towered over the crowd. There was no preliminary, no introduction; Jehan commenced to speak, in brief sentences and in a booming voice.

  In broad outline he first recapitulated the history of the Urhemmedhin people. It began with their legendary spawning from the dragon Sexrexatra, together with their brethren, the Tnemghadi. Then Jehan traced through the rise and fall of King Urhem of Naddeghomra, to the conquest by Tnem Khatto Trevendhani and the ensuing centuries of subjugation. This reviled period he dwelt upon, telling his hearers how the Tnemghadi had taken the bread from their mouths, children from their mothers, and crushed their freedom underfoot.

  That had been a nightmare, Jehan declared, but now the long dark night was ending for the Urhemmedhin people, and the sun was coming up to shine in their sky. Already in Taroloweh, the long-awaited dawn had broken, and it would break too in every other southern province. Throughout the southern lands, Jehan Henghmani swore, the sun would shine.

  And beneath that sun there would arise a new nation:

  Prasid Urhemma, the free Nation of Urhem.

  It would be the greatest nation in the history of mankind. Prasid Urhemma would be founded on the credo of its namesake, that human life is sacred, and the highest triumph of human life is love. That would be the sun in whose warmth the new nation would bask and thrive.

  No longer would they grovel in the dirt before tyrants.

  No longer would they be herded into slavery.

  No longer would they worship secretly and fearfully.

  Freedom: this was the promised land into which Jehan Henghmani would lead his people. He would be their savior, the heir of King Urhem.

  Jehan Henghmani was, at last, the Ur-Rasvadhi, at last the true Ur-Rasvadhi.

  The forbidden book itself, strangely enough, was barren of any mention of the Ur-Rasvadhi. That was because its words had been set to paper only a century or two after the era of King Urhem. In those days the southern people had still been free; there was no need for any savior.

  Then down from the north came the Tnemghadi, and the shackles of slavery.

  Despite the conquerors’ awesome power, sporadic outbreaks of rebellion always plagued their occupation of the South. One of those uprisings took place at Hsokhso, Prewtna Province, in the year 396.

  Its instigator was a clandestine priest of Urhem, a mystical young firebrand who posed as a rickshawman and secretly recruited a cadre of Hsokhso peasants and tradesmen sympathetic to his cause. He was a wiryframed fanatic with burning eyes, who bound his followers to him with a beautiful and eloquent voice.

  His name was Nadghour Knidrach, but he called himself Urhemma Raspadari Yevadhi, which meant, roughly, Sainted Savior of Urhem. Somehow, the name became contracted to Ur-Rasvadhi.

  Knidrach was reputed to be indeed saintly in his personal life. He had no wife, did no wenching, drank no wine, and slept little. His hours not spent organizing and proselytizing in his rickshawman guise were devoted to private prayer and meditation. Frequent fasts made his body cadaverous. He claimed to be the reincarnation of King Urhem, and swore that by the power of his own wisdom, love, and piety, he would deliver his people from bondage.

  Finally, Knidrach dropped his disguise, and at his signal, his underground army rose up suddenly. Knidrach led them on a rampage through Hsokhso. Many Tnemghadi were killed, and the rest expelled. Briefly, Nadghour Knidrach reigned as the liberator of the city. But his asceticism was not a weapon that could daunt Tnemghadi horsemen. The army attacked and recaptured Hsokhso; Knidrach and a band of followers retreated into a mountain cave. For almost a month, they held out, but they had very little food. In the end, the soldiers overcame the hunger-weakened defenders. All except Knidrach were executed on the spot. The leader was instead taken to the catacombs of the Hsokhso temple, where he was tortured to make him renounce Urhem.

  No matter what agonies they inflicted upon him, Nadghour Knidrach refused to give them satisfaction. They cut off his hands and feet, broke his body on the rack, and flayed the skin from him. When he still would not utter the words they demanded, his tongue was burned away down to its root with hot irons. When the rebel was barely half alive and delirious with agony, they dragged him out to the public square of Hsokhso, where he was nailed to a post and burned to death.

  In the centuries that followed, the story reoccurred in many places; and while Nadghour Knidrach was forgotten, the name he had assumed—the Ur-Rasvadhi—became a talisman of hope for the Urhemmedhin people. This was the messiah for whose coming they prayed, the great holy man who would deliver them from bondage. Surely if enough holiness and purity could be concentrated in one man, they thought, his cause would be irresistible.

  In the eight centuries since Nadghour Knidrach, countless people had proclaimed themselves Ur-Rasvadhi. Some of them even attracted large followings. The word of the new savior would go out across the southern lands, and the Urhemmedhins would pray—would this one prove to be the real Ur-Rasvadhi? But always, the end was the same: the Tnemghadi were too powerful and entrenched. Or perhaps the would-be saviors were never saintly enough, and the true Ur-Rasvadhi was yet to come.

  Now the word was going out once more, this time from Arbadakhar: a new messiah has arisen. But this time it was different, very different.

  Jehan Henghmani was the antithesis of the classic Ur- Rasvadhi image. But Golana made the daring leap of insight and imagination, to seize upon the dream for a sainted holy man, and superimpose it upon a rough-hewn bandit warlord. It worked because Jehan possessed the one key thing that all the other claimants of the title Ur- Rasvadhi had lacked: the power to make it a reality. Jehan had already liberated one province, and that made him more the true messiah than any of his predecessors.

  Golana was the first to understand this; and now the Urhemmedhin people understood it, once Jehan had proclaimed it from the balcony of the Arbadakhar temple. The notion of this monstrous brigand as Ur-Rasvadhi was breathtaking and electrifying, and the people embraced it enthusiastically.

  Readily they cast aside the ancient vision of a savior so saintly that the Tnemghadi would melt away without his raising a finger. That had been a naive dream, born of despair. The Urhemmedhins had never imagined themselves capable of expelling the o
ppressors by force. But now they had a hero who could actually do that. No longer need they salve themselves with foolish dreams of bloodless triumph.

  And so throughout the southern lands the people rattled against their chains of slavery. And they raised their eyes to the heavens, and their voices in united prayer:

  Vahiy Jehan! Victory to Jehan!

  Vahiy Prasid Urhemma!

  Vahiy Yarushkadharra!

  After the Great Proclamation of the Sixth of Dorotht, Jehan’s first act was to vacate the Arbadakhar temple and move his headquarters to the less imposing Vraddagoon.

  Then, the temple—the finest marble edifice in the province—was once more consecrated as a house of worship. The golden idol of the Emperor had been removed, and in its place there would be a new statue, hewn of plain stone quarried from southern earth. It would be a statue of Urhem.

  Unlike the elaborately crowned Emperor, Urhem would be portrayed as a bare headed old man in coarse beggar garb. This was Urhem after he had abjured his throne and palace, in penance for his sin against the sanctity of life. Thus would the statue be more than a monument to Urhem; it would be a monument to all the lessons of his life and all he stood for.

  This would be the first temple, but Jehan promised many more. In all the lands he’d liberate, temples would be raised to Urhem.

  But no priests were consecrated to officiate. The reborn church of Urhem would be without hierarchy, without any formal structure. The temple itself would be maintained only by a corps of unobtrusive lay custodians, to keep it clean and open to anyone who cared to worship there. No offering was required. And although the shrine was dedicated to Urhem, the temple was open to all. The Tnemghadi era had seen enough suppression of free worship; there would be no more, no gods or creeds proscribed. Anyone might worship in this temple in any fashion he chose, so long as he did not disturb the others using it. So it would be in all of Jehan’s temples.

  On the day of its consecration, the first service in the new temple was conducted by the limping old priest who had performed the marriage of Golana and Jehan. They themselves headed the list of worshippers, bowing down before the still-unfinished statue of Urhem. Golana, who was responsible for all this, had the honor of placing the first votive offering upon the altar: many shokh baskets filled with plump fruits and vegetables. But the rich offering was neither consumed by the god nor appropriated by the priest. Instead, it was distributed among the hundreds of townsfolk who had gathered to observe the temple’s dedication.