Woeful Tales from Mahigul
When I’m in Mahigul, a peaceful place nowadays though it has a bloody history, I spend most of my time at the Imperial Library. Many would consider this a dull thing to do when on another plane, or indeed anywhere; but I, like Borges, think of heaven as something very like a library.
Most of the Library of Mahigul is outdoors. The archives, bookstacks, electronic storage units, and computers for the legemats are all housed underground in vaults where temperature and humidity can be controlled, but above this vast complex rise airy arcades forming walks and shelters around many plots and squares and parklands—the Reading Gardens of the Library. Some are paved courtyards, orderly and secluded, like a cloister. Others are broad parks with dells and little hills, groves of trees, open lawns, and grassy glades sheltered by hedges of flowering shrubs. All are very quiet. They’re never crowded; one can talk with a friend, or have a group discussion; there’s usually a poet shouting away somewhere on the grounds, but there’s perfect solitude for those who want it. The courtyards and patios always have a fountain, sometimes a silent, welling pool, sometimes a series of bowls, the water cascading from basin to basin. Through the larger parks wind the many branches of a clear stream, with little falls here and there. You always hear the sound of water. Unobtrusive, comfortable seats are provided, light chairs that can be moved, some of them legless, just a frame with a canvas seat and back, so you can sit right on the short green turf but have your back supported while you read; and there are chairs and tables and chaise longues in the shade of the trees and under the arcades. All these seats are provided with outlets into which you can connect your legemat.
The climate of Mahigul is lovely, dry, and hot all summer and fall. In spring, during the mild, steady rains, big awnings are stretched from one library arcade to the next, so that you can still sit outdoors, hearing the soft drumming on the canvas overhead, looking up from your reading to see the trees and the pale sky beyond the awning. Or you can settle down under the stone arches that surround a quiet, grey courtyard and see rain patter in the lily-dotted central pool. In winter it’s often foggy, not a cold fog but a mist through which and in which the sunlight is always warmly palpable, like the color in a milk opal. The fog softens the sloping lawns and the high, dark trees, bringing them close, into a quiet, mysterious intimacy.
So when I’m in Mahigul I go there, and greet the patient, knowledgeable librarians, and browse around in the findery until I find an interesting bit of fiction or history. History, usually, because the history of Mahigul outdoes the fiction of many other places. It is a sad and violent history, but in so sweet and lenient a place as the Reading Gardens it seems both possible and wise to open one’s heart to folly, pain, and sorrow. These are a few of the stories I’ve read sitting in the mild autumn sunlight on the grassy edge of a stream, or in the deep shade of a silent, secret little patio on a hot summer afternoon, in the Library of Mahigul.
DAWODOW THE INNUMERABLE
When Dawodow, Fiftieth Emperor of the Fourth Dynasty of Mahigul, came to the throne, many statues of his grandfather Andow and his father Dowwode stood in the capital city and the lesser cities of the land. Dawodow ordered them all recarved into his own image, so that they all became portraits of him. He also had countless new likenesses of himself carved. Thousands of workmen were employed at immense stoneyards and workshops making idealised portrait figures of the Emperor Dawodow. What with the old statues with new faces and the new statues, there were so many that there weren’t pedestals and plinths enough to set them on or niches enough to set them in, so they were placed on sidewalks, at street crossings, on the steps of temples and public buildings, and in squares and plazas. As the Emperor kept paying the sculptors to carve the statues and the stoneyards kept turning them out, soon there were too many to place singly; groups and crowds of Dawodows now stood motionless among the people going about their business in every town and city of the kingdom. Even small villages had ten or a dozen Dawodows, standing in the high street or the side lanes, among the pigs and chickens.
At night the Emperor would often put on plain, dark clothing and leave the palace by a secret door. Officers of the palace guard followed him at a distance to protect him during these nocturnal excursions through his capital city (called, at that time, Dawodowa). They and other palace officials witnessed his behavior many times. The Emperor would go about in the streets and plazas of the capital, and stop at every image or group of images of himself. He would jeer softly at the statues, insulting them in a whisper, calling them coward, fool, cuckold, impotent, idiot. He would spit on a statue as he passed it. If he saw no one else in the plaza, he would stop and piss on the statue, or piss on earth to make mud and then, taking this mud in his hand, rub it on the face of the image of himself and over the inscription extolling the glories of his reign.
If a citizen reported next day that he had seen an image of the Emperor defiled in this way, the guards would arrest a countryman or a foreigner, anyone who came to hand—if nobody else was convenient, they arrested the citizen who had reported the crime—accuse him of sacrilege, and torture him until he died or confessed. If he confessed, the Emperor in his capacity as God’s Judge would condemn him to die in the next mass Execution of Justice. These executions took place every forty days. The Emperor, his priests, and his court watched them. Since the victims were strangled one by one by garotte, the ceremony often lasted several hours.
The Emperor Dawodow reigned for thirty-seven years. He was garotted in his privy by his great-nephew Danda.
During the civil wars that followed, most of the thousands of statues of Dawodow were destroyed. A group of them in front of the temple in a small city in the mountains stood for many centuries, worshiped by the local people as images of the Nine Blessed Guides to the Inworld. Constant rubbing of sweet oil on the images obliterated the faces entirely, reducing the heads to featureless lumps, but enough of the inscription remained that a scholar of the Seventh Dynasty could identify them as the last remnants of the Innumerable Dawodow.
THE CLEANSING OF OBTRY
Obtry is currently a remote western province of the Empire of Mahigul. It was absorbed when Emperor Tro II annexed the nation of Ven, which had previously annexed Obtry.
The Cleansing of Obtry began about five hundred years ago, when Obtry, a democracy, elected a president whose campaign promise was to drive the Astasa out of the country.
At that time, the rich plains of Obtry had been occupied for over a millennium by two peoples: the Sosa, who had come from the northwest, and the Astasa, who had come from the southwest. The Sosa arrived as refugees, driven from their homeland by invaders, at about the same time the seminomadic Astasa began to settle down in the grazing lands of Obtry.
Displaced by these immigrants, the aboriginal inhabitants of Obtry, the Tyob, retreated to the mountains, where they lived as poor herdsfolk. The Tyob kept to their old primitive ways and language and were not allowed to vote.
The Sosa and the Astasa each brought a religion to the plains of Obtry. The Sosa prostrated themselves in worship of a father-god called Af. The highly formal rituals of the Affa religion were held in temples and led by priests. The Astasa religion was non-theistic and unprofessional, involving trances, whirling dances, visions, and small fetishes.
When they first came to Obtry the Astasa were fierce warriors, driving the Tyob up into the mountains and taking the best farmlands from the Sosa settlers; but there was plenty of good land, and the two invading peoples gradually settled down side by side. Cities were built along the rivers, some of them populated by Sosa, some by Astasa. The Sosa and Astasa traded, and their trade increased. Sosa traders soon began to live in enclaves or ghettos in Astasa cities, and Astasa traders began to live in enclaves or ghettos in Sosa cities.
For over nine hundred years there was no central government over the region. It was a congeries of city-states and farm territories, which competed in trade with one another and from time to time
quarreled or battled over land or belief, but generally maintained a watchful, thriving peace.
The Astasa opinion of the Sosa was that they were slow, dense, deceitful, and indefatigable. The Sosa opinion of the Astasa was that they were quick, clever, candid, and unpredictable.
The Sosa learned how to play the wild, whining, yearning music of the Astasa. The Astasa learned contour plowing and crop rotation from the Sosa. They seldom, however, learned each other’s language—only enough to trade and bargain with, some insults, and some words of love.
Sons of the Sosa and daughters of the Astasa fell madly in love and ran off together, breaking their mothers’ hearts. Astasa boys eloped with Sosa girls, the curses of their families filling the skies and darkening the streets behind them. These fugitives went to other cities, where they lived in Affastasa enclaves and Sosasta or Astasosa ghettos, and brought up their children to prostrate themselves to Af, or to whirl in the fetish dance. The Affastasa did both, on different holy days. The Sosasta performed whirling dances to a wild whining music before the altar of Af, and the Astasosa prostrated themselves to little fetishes.
The Sosa, the unadulterated Sosa who worshiped Af in the ancestral fashion and who mostly lived on farms not in the cities, were instructed by their priests that their God wished them to bear sons in His honor; so they had large families. Many priests had four or five wives and twenty or thirty children. Devout Sosa women prayed to Father Af for a twelfth, a fifteenth baby. In contrast, an Astasa woman bore a child only when she had been told, in trance, by her own body fetish, that it was a good time to conceive; and so she seldom had more than two or three children. Thus the Sosa came to outnumber the Astasa.
About five hundred years ago, the unorganised cities, towns, and farming communities of Obtry, under pressure from the aggressive Vens to the north and under the influence of the Ydaspian Enlightenment emanating from the Mahigul Empire in the east, drew together and formed first an alliance, then a nationstate. Nations were in fashion at the time. The Nation of Obtry was established as a democracy, with a president, a cabinet, and a parliament elected by universal adult suffrage. The parliament proportionately represented the regions (rural and urban) and the ethnoreligious populations (Sosa, Astasa, Affastasa, Sosasta, and Astasosa).
The fourth President of Obtry was a Sosa named Diud, elected by a fairly large majority.
Although his campaign had become increasingly outspoken against “godless” and “foreign” elements of Obtrian society, many Astasa voted for him. They wanted a strong leader, they said. They wanted a man who would stand up against the Vens and restore law and order to the cities, which were suffering from overpopulation and uncontrolled mercantilism.
Within half a year Diud, having put personal favorites in the key positions in the cabinet and parliament and consolidated his control of the armed forces, began his campaign in earnest. He instituted a universal census which required all citizens to state their religious allegiance (Sosa, Sosasta, Astasosa, or Heathen) and their bloodline (Sosa or non-Sosa).
Diud then moved the Civic Guard of Dobaba, a predominately Sosa city in an almost purely Sosa agricultural area, to the city of Asu, a major river port, where the population had lived peacefully in Sosa, Astasa, Sosasta, and Astasosa neighborhoods for centuries. There the guards began to force all Astasa, or Heathen non-Sosa, newly reidentified as godless persons, to leave their homes, taking with them only what they could seize in the terror of sudden displacement.
The godless persons were shipped by train to the northwestern border. There they were held in various fenced camps or pens for weeks or months, before being taken to the Venian border. They were dumped from trucks or train cars and ordered to cross the border. At their backs were soldiers with guns. They obeyed. But there were also soldiers facing them: Ven border guards. The first time this happened, the Ven soldiers, thinking they were facing an Obtrian invasion, shot hundreds of people before they realised that most of the invaders were children or babies or old or pregnant, that none of them were armed, that all of them were cowering, crawling, trying to run away, crying for mercy. Some of the Ven soldiers continued shooting anyway, on the principle that Obtrians were the enemy.
President Diud continued his campaign of rounding up all the godless persons, city by city. Most were taken to remote regions and kept herded in fenced areas called instructional centers, where they were supposed to be instructed in the worship of Af. Little shelter and less food was provided in the instructional centers. Most of the inmates died within a year. Many Astasa fled before the roundups, heading for the border and risking the random mercy of the Vens. By the end of his first term of office, President Diud had cleansed his nation of half a million Astasa.
He ran for reelection on the strength of his record. No Astasa candidate dared run. Diud was narrowly defeated by the new favorite of the rural, religious Sosa voters, Riusuk. Riusuk’s campaign slogan was “Obtry for God,” and his particular target was the Sosasta communities in the southern cities and towns, whose dancing worship his followers held to be particularly evil and sacrilegious.
A good many soldiers in the southern province, however, were Sosasta, and in Riusuk’s first year of office they mutinied. They were joined by guerrilla and partisan Astasa groups hiding out in the forests and inner cities. Unrest and violence spread and factions multiplied. President Riusuk was kidnapped from his lakeside summer house. After a week his mutilated body was found beside a highway. Astasa fetishes had been stuffed into his mouth, ears, and nostrils.
During the turmoil that ensued, an Astasosa general, Hodus, naming himself acting president, took control of a large splinter group of the army and instituted a Final Cleansing of Godless Atheist Heathens, the term which now defined Astasa, Sosasta, and Affastasa. His soldiers killed anybody who was or was thought to be or was said to be non-Sosa, shooting them wherever they were found and leaving the bodies to rot.
Affastasa from the northwestern province took arms under an able leader, Shamato, who had been a schoolteacher; her partisans, fiercely loyal, held four northern cities and the mountain regions against Hodus’s forces for seven years. Shamato was killed on a raid into Astasosa territory.
Hodus closed the universities as soon as he took power. He installed Affan priests as teachers in the schools, but later in the civil war all schools shut down, as they were favorite targets for sharpshooters and bombers. There were no safe trade routes, the borders were closed, commerce ceased, famine followed, and epidemics followed famine. Sosa and non-Sosa continued killing one another.
The Vens invaded the northern province in the sixth year of the civil war. They met almost no resistance, as all able-bodied men and women were dead or fighting their neighbors. The Ven army swept through Obtry cleaning out pockets of resistance. The region was annexed to the Nation of Ven, and remained a tributary province for the next several centuries.
The Vens, contemptuous of all Obtrian religions, enforced public worship of their deity, the Great Mother of the Teats. The Sosa, Astasosa, and Sosasta learned to prostrate themselves before huge mammary effigies, and the few remaining Astasa and Affastasa learned to dance in a circle about small tit fetishes.
Only the Tyob, far up in the mountains, remained much as they had always been, poor herdsfolk, with no religion worth fighting over. The anonymous author of the great mystical poem The Ascent, a work which has made the province of Obtry famous on more than one plane, was a Tyob.
THE BLACK DOG
Two tribes of the great Yeye Forest were traditional enemies. As a boy of the Hoa or the Farim grew up, he could scarcely wait for the honor of being chosen to go on a raid—the seal and recognition of his manhood.
Most raids were met by an opposing war party from the other tribe, and the battles were fought on various traditional battlegrounds, clearings in the forested hills and river valleys where the Hoa and Farim lived. After hard fighting, when six or seven men had been wounded or killed, the war chiefs on both sides would si
multaneously declare a victory. The warriors of each tribe would run home, carrying their dead and wounded, to hold a victory dance. The dead warriors were propped up to watch the dance before they were buried.
Occasionally, by some mistake in communications, no war party came forth to meet the raiders, who were then obliged to run on into the enemy’s village and kill men and carry off women and children for slaves. This was unpleasant work and often resulted in the death of women, children, and old people of the village as well as the loss of many of the raiding party. It was considered much more satisfactory all around if the raidees knew that the raiders were coming, so that the fighting and killing could be done properly on a battlefield and did not get out of hand.
The Hoa and Farim had no domestic animals except small terrier-like dogs to keep the huts and granaries free of mice. Their weapons were short bronze swords and long wooden lances, and they carried hide shields. Like Odysseus, they used bow and arrow for sport and for hunting but not in battle. They planted grain and root vegetables in clearings, and moved the village to new planting grounds every five or six years. Women and girls did all the farming, gathering, food preparation, house moving, and other work, which was not called work but “what women do.” The women also did the fishing. Boys snared wood rats and coneys, men hunted the small roan deer of the forest, and old men decided when it was time to plant, when it was time to move the village, and when it was time to send a raid against the enemy.
So many young men were killed in raids that there were not many old men to argue about these matters, and if they did get into an argument about planting or moving, they could always agree to order another raid.
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