Since one of the primary concerns of an aristocratic class is the protection of bloodlines, and since Murgos live in what is quite literally a sea of slaves, Murgo society rigidly enforces separation between slave and master. Murgo women in particular are totally isolated from any possible contact with non-Angaraks, and this obsession with racial purity has quite literally imprisoned them within the confines of special ‘women’s quarters’ which lie at the center of every Murgo house. Any Murgo woman even suspected of ‘consorting’ with a non-Murgo is immediately put to death. Moreover, any Murgo male, regardless of rank, who is caught in delicate circumstances with a foreign woman suffers the same fate. These laws, since they have existed since the end of the second millennium, have guaranteed a remarkably pure strain. The Murgo of today is probably the only uncontaminated Angarak on the face of the globe. In time this obsessive concern with racial purity became viewed by Murgos as a quasi-religious obligation, and no attempt was ever made in the western hemisphere to convert non-Angaraks as became the practice in Mallorea.
It was perhaps the Disciple Ctuchik who was ultimately responsible for giving an elemental class prejudice the force of religious sanction. Ctuchik, mindful of the deterioration of Church authority in Mallorea as a result of the growing secularization and cosmopolitanism of Mallorean society, issued his pronouncements on the subject from his theological capital at Rak Cthol in the wasteland of Murgos. He reasoned (probably correctly) that a society faced with both a legal and religious obligation to avoid contact with foreigners would not encounter those new ideas which so seriously undermine the power of the Church. There is, moreover, some evidence which suggests that Ctuchik’s decrees were in some measure dictated by the increasing friction between him and his two fellow Disciples, the newly converted Zedar, and Urvon. Urvon in particular had embraced the idea of converting non-Angaraks with great enthusiasm, reasoning that this could only increase the authority of the Church. Zedar, of course, was an enigma, and was soundly detested by Ctuchik and Urvon both. It was to counter Urvon, however, that Ctuchik strove to maintain Murgo purity. It is entirely possible that Ctuchik reasoned that following Torak’s ultimate victory, the maimed God would welcome the delivery of an absolutely pure Angarak strain to function as the ultimate overlords of a captive world.
Whatever may have been Ctuchik’s ultimate motivation, Murgos and western Grolims vigorously contend that Mallorean cosmopolitanism is a form of heresy, and they customarily refer to Malloreans as ‘mongrels’. It is this attitude, more than anything else, which has led to the ages-old hatred existing between Murgo and Mallorean.
Following the upheaval which accompanied the destruction of Cthol Mishrak, Torak himself became almost totally inaccessible to his people, concentrating instead upon various schemes to disrupt the growing power of the kingdoms of the West. The God’s absence gave the military time to fully exploit its now virtual total control of Mallorea and the subject kingdoms. One of the oddities of this period was the lack of a supreme commander at Mal Zeth. Although powerful men had dominated the high command from time to time, the authority of the military was normally dispersed among the senior generals, and this condition prevailed until very nearly the end of the fourth millennium. Now that their authority in ancient Mallorea, Karanda and Dalasia was firmly established, the High Command once again turned its attention to the problem of the Melcene Empire.
As trade between the Melcenes and the Angaraks increased, so did Angarak knowledge about their eastern neighbors. The Melcenes had originally inhabited the islands off the east coast of the Mallorean Continent, and had, until the catastrophe caused by the separation of the two continents, been quite content to ignore their mainland cousins. The vast tidal waves (estimated to have been a hundred feet high) which swept across the oceans of the world during the readjustment of the two great land-masses, however, swallowed up more than half of their islands, leaving the survivors huddled fearfully together in the uplands. Their capital at Melcene itself had been a city in the mountains where affairs of state could be managed without the debilitating effects of the climate in the tropical lowlands. Following the catastrophe itself, however, Melcene was a shattered city, destroyed by earthquake and lying no more than a league from the new coast. After an intense period of rebuilding, it became abundantly clear that their tremendously shrunken homeland would no longer support a burgeoning population. With typical Melcene thoroughness, they attacked the problem from every possible angle. One thing was absolutely certain; they had to have more land. The Melcene mind is a peculiarly compartmentalized one, their answer to any problem is to immediately form a committee. The ‘newlands’ committee which was drawn up to present possible solutions to the Emperor arrived at its final proposal only after considering every possible alternative. They concluded that, since they could not make new land, they would be forced to either buy or take lands from someone else. Since southeastern Mallorea lay closest at hand and was populated by people of their own race, it was to that region that the Melcenes turned their attention. There were five rather primitive kingdoms in southeastern and east central Mallorea occupied by peoples of the same racial stock as the Melcenes themselves; Gandahar, Darshiva, Peldane, Cellanta, and Rengel. These kingdoms were overrun one by one by the Melcenes and were absorbed into their growing empire.
The dominating force in the Melcene Empire was the bureaucracy. Unlike other governments of the time, which frequently operated on royal whim or upon the accumulation of personal power, the Melcene government was rigidly departmentalized. While there are obvious drawbacks to a bureaucratic form of government, such an approach to administration provides the advantages of continuity and of a clear-eyed pragmatism which is more concerned with finding the most practical way to getting a job done than with the whim, prejudice and egocentricity which so frequently mars more personal forms of government. The Melcene Bureaucracy in particular was practical almost to a fault. The concept of an ‘aristocracy of talent’ dominated Melcene thinking, and if one bureau chose to ignore a talented individual—of whatever background—another was almost certain to snap him up.
Thus it was that the various departments of the Melcene government rushed into the newly-conquered mainland provinces to winnow through the population in search of genius. The ‘conquered’ people of Gandahar, Darshiva, Peldane, Cellanta and Rengel were thus absorbed directly into the mainstream of the life of the Empire. Always pragmatic,
the Melcenes left the royal houses of the five mainland provinces in place, preferring to operate through established lines of authority rather than to set up new ones, and, although the title ‘king’ suffered reduction to the title ‘prince’, it was widely considered more prestigious to be a ‘prince of the Empire’ than a ‘king’ of some minor east-coast kingdom. Thus, the six principalities of the Melcene Empire flourished in a kind of brotherhood based on hard-headed practicality. The possession of talent in Melcena is a universal passport, and is considered more valuable than wealth or power.
For the next 1800 years the Melcene Empire prospered, far removed from the theological and political squabbles of the western part of the continent. Melcene culture was secular, civilized and highly educated. Slavery was unknown, and trade with the Angaraks and their subject peoples in Karanda and Dalasia was extremely profitable. The old Imperial capital at Melcene became a major center of learning. Unfortunately, some of the thrust of Melcene scholarship turned toward the arcane. Their practice of Magic (the summoning of evil spirits) went far beyond the primitive mumbojumbo of the Morindim or the Karandese and began to delve into darker and more serious areas. They made considerable progress in witchcraft and necromancy. Their major area of concentration, however, lay in the field of alchemy. It is surprising to note that some Melcene alchemists were actually successful in converting base metals into gold—although the effort and expenditure involved made the process monumentally unprofitable. It was, however, a Melcene alchemist, Senji the Clubfooted, who inadvertently stumbled over the s
ecret of the Will and the Word during one of his experiments. Senji, a 15th century practitioner at the University in the Imperial city was notorious for his ineptitude. To be quite frank about it, Senji’s experiments more often turned gold into lead than the reverse. In a fit of colossal frustration at the failure of his most recent experiment, Senji inadvertently converted a half-ton of brass plumbing into solid gold. An immediate debate arose among the Bureau of Currency, the Bureau of Mines, the Department of Sanitation, the faculty of the College of Alchemy and the faculty of the College of Comparative Theology about which organization should have control of Senji’s discovery. After about three hundred years of argumentation, it suddenly occurred to the disputants that Senji was not merely talented, but also appeared to be immortal. In the name of scientific experimentation, the varying Bureaus, Departments and faculties agreed that an effort should be made to have him assassinated.
A well-known defenestrator was retained to throw the irascible old alchemist from a high window in one of the towers of the University. The experiment had a three-fold purpose. What the various Departments wished to find out was: (a) If Senji was in fact unkillable, (b) what means he would take to save his life while plummeting toward the pavement, and (c) if it might be possible to discover the secret of flight by giving him no other alternative. What they actually found out was that it is extremely dangerous to threaten the life of a sorcerer—even one as inept as Senji. The defenestrator found himself translocated to a position some fifteen hundred meters above the harbor, five miles distant. At one instant he had been wrestling Senji toward the window; at the next, he found himself standing on insubstantial air high above a fishing fleet. His demise occasioned no particular sorrow—except among the fishermen, whose nets were badly damaged by his rapid descent. In an outburst of righteous indignation, Senji then proceeded to chastise the Department heads who had consorted to do violence to his person. It was finally only a personal appeal from the Emperor himself that persuaded the old man to desist from some fairly exotic punishments. (Senji’s penchant for the scatological had led him rather naturally into interfering with normal excretory functions as a means of chastisement.) Following the epidemic of mass constipation, the Departments were more than happy to allow Senji to go his own way unmolested.
On his own, Senji established a private academy and advertised for students. While his pupils never became sorcerers of the magnitude of Belgarath, Polgara, Ctuchik or Zedar, they were able to perform some rudimentary applications of the Will and the Word which immediately elevated them far above the magicians and witches practicing their art forms within the confines of the University.
It was during this period of peace and tranquillity that the first encounter with the Angaraks took place. Although they were victorious in that first meeting, the pragmatic Melcenes realized that eventually the Angaraks could overwhelm them by sheer weight of numbers.
During the period when the Angaraks turned their attention to the establishment of the Dalasian protectorates and Torak’s full concentration was upon the emerging Angarak kingdoms on the western continent, there was peace between the Angaraks and the Melcenes. It was a tentative peace— a very wary one—but it was peace nonetheless. The trade contacts between the two nations gave them a somewhat better understanding of each other, though the sophisticated Melcenes were amused by the preoccupation with religion which marked even the most worldly Angarak. Periodically over the next eighteen hundred years, relations between the two countries deteriorated into nasty little wars, seldom longer than a year or two in duration and from which both sides scrupulously avoided committing their full forces. Obviously neither side wished to risk an all-out confrontation.
In the hope of gaining more information about each other, the two nations ultimately established a time-honored practice. Children of various leaders were exchanged for certain periods of time. The sons of high-ranking bureaucrats in the city of Melcene were sent to Mal Zeth to live with the families of Angarak generals, and the sons of the generals were sent in turn to the Imperial capital to be raised there. The result of these exchanges was to produce a group of young men with a cosmopolitanism which in many was later to become the norm for the ruling class of the Mallorean Empire.75 It was one such exchange toward the end of the fourth millennium which ultimately resulted in the unification of the two peoples. At about the age of twelve, a youth named Kallath, the son of a high-ranking Angarak general, was sent to the city of Melcene to spend his formative years in the household of the Imperial Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Minister, because of his position, had frequent official and social contacts with the Imperial Family, and Kallath soon became a welcome guest at the Imperial palace. The Emperor Molvan was an elderly man with but one surviving child, a daughter named Danera, who, as luck would have it, was perhaps a year younger than Kallath. Matters between the two young people progressed in a not uncommon fashion until Kallath, at the age of eighteen, was recalled to Mal Zeth to begin his military career. Kallath, obviously a young man of genius, rose meteorically through the ranks, reaching the position of Governor General of the District of Rakuth. He was by then twenty-eight, becoming thereby the youngest man ever to be elevated to the General Staff. A year later Kallath journeyed to Melcene, where he and Danera were married.
Kallath, in the years that followed, divided his time between Melcene and Mal Zeth, carefully building a power-base in each capital, and when Emperor Molvan died in 3829, Kallath was ready. There had been, of course, others in line for the Imperial throne, but during the years immediately preceding the old Emperor’s death, most of these potential heirs had died—frequently under mysterious circumstances. It was, nonetheless, over the violent objections of many of the noble families of Melcena that Kallath was declared Emperor of Melcena in 3830. These objections however, were quieted with a certain brutal efficiency by Kallath’s cohorts.
Journeying the following year to Mal Zeth, Kallath brought the Imperial Melcene army with him as far as the border of Delchin, where they stood poised. At Mal Zeth, Kallath delivered his ultimatum to the General Staff. His forces at that time were comprised of the army of his own district, Rakuth, as well as those of the eastern principalities in Karanda, where the Angarak military governors had already sworn allegiances to him. These forces, coupled with the Melcene Army on the Delchin border, gave Kallath absolute military supremacy on the continent. His demand to the General Staff was simple: he was to be appointed Overgeneral-Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of Angarak. There were precedents, certainly. In the past, an occasional brilliant general had been appointed to that office, though it was far more common for the General Staff to rule jointly. Kallath’s demand, however, brought something new into the picture. His position as Emperor of Melcena was hereditary, and he insisted that the office of Commander-in-Chief of Angarak also be inheritable. Helplessly, faced with Kallath’s overpowering military forces, the Angarak generals acceded to his demands. Kallath stood supreme on the continent. He was Emperor of Melcena and Commander-in-Chief of Angarak.
The integration of Melcena and Angarak which was to form modern Mallorea was turbulent, but in the end it can be said that Melcene patience won out over Angarak brutality. Over the years it became increasingly evident that the Melcene bureaucracy was infinitely more efficient than Angarak military administration. The first moves by the bureaucracy had to do with such mundane matters as standards and currency. From there it was but a short step to establishment of a continental Bureau of Roads. Within a few hundred years, the bureaucracy had expanded until it ran virtually every aspect of the life of the continent. As always, the bureaucracy gathered up every talented man in every corner of Mallorea, regardless of his race, and it soon became not at all uncommon for administrative units to be comprised of Melcenes, Karands, Dalasians and Angaraks. By 4400 the ascendancy of the bureaucrats was complete. In the interim, the title ‘Commander-in-Chief-of-Angarak’ had begun to gradually fall into disuse, in some measure perhaps because the bureaucracy
customarily addressed all communications to ‘The Emperor’. Peculiarly, there appears not to have been a specific point at which ‘The Emperor of Melcene’ became the ‘Emperor of Mallorea’, and such usage was never formally approved until after the disastrous adventure in the west which culminated in the Battle of Vo Mimbre.
The conversion of the Melcenes to the worship of Torak was at best superficial. The sophisticated Melcenes pragmatically accepted the forms of Angarak worship out of a sense of political expediency, but the Grolims were unable to command the kind of abject submission to the Dragon God which had always characterized the Angarak.
In 4850, however, Torak himself suddenly emerged from his eons of seclusion. A vast shock ran through all of Mallorea as the living God of Angarak, his maimed face concealed behind the polished steel mask, appeared at the gates of Mal Zeth. The Emperor was disdainfully set aside and Torak once again assumed his full authority as ‘Kal’—King and God. Messengers were immediately sent to Cthol Murgos, Mishrak ac Thull and Gar og Nadrak, and a council of war was held at Mal Zeth in 4852. The Dalasians, the Karands and the Melcenes were stunned by the sudden appearance of a figure they had always thought was purely mythical, and their shock was compounded by the presence of Torak’s Disciples, Zedar, Ctuchik and Urvon. Torak was a God, and did not speak except to issue commands. Ctuchik, Zedar and Urvon, however, were men, and they questioned and probed and saw everything with a kind of cold disdain. They saw immediately what Torak himself was strangely incapable of seeing—that Mallorean society had become almost totally secular—and they took steps to rectify that situation. A sudden reign of terror descended upon Mallorea. The Grolims were quite suddenly everywhere, and secularism was, in their eyes, a form of heresy. The sacrifices, which had become virtually unknown, were renewed with fanatic enthusiasm, and soon not a village in all of Mallorea did not have its altar and its reeking bonfire. In one stroke the Disciples of Torak overturned eons of rule by the military and the bureaucracy and returned the absolute domination of the Grolims. When they had finished, there was not one facet of Mallorean life that did not bow abjectly to the will of Torak.
The Rivan Codex: Ancient Texts of THE BELGARIAD and THE MALLOREON (The Belgariad / The Malloreon) Page 30