Page 77 of Into the West

“Ah, all right. So you mean, staying mindful of the signs that things are going badly, then taking care of them compassionately, IS like prayers on a national scale?”

“Those flavors of magic are pure in a way no other tones or flavors match. It’s a quirk of the universe—like what water can do.”

Kordas had to admit, Silvermoon lost him completely sometimes. It was as if Silvermoon had begun talking about the intricacies of making hawk-equipment, a subject Kordas knew nothing about. So he listened and watched how Silvermoon acted as well as what he said, and inferred an ‘equivalent’ meaning, based upon what of Silvermoon’s emotions he understood. It made him perceive conversation as a flow, which in itself was an expression of broader meaning. That’s why I like Silvermoon so much, so quickly. The man absolutely wants to engage, and once you’ve matched velocity with him, the conversation takes on artistry and rhythm. This was communication of complex, important ideas in ways that would never be guessed at in the Empire. It’s both sophisticated and personal. I can’t get enough of this. I know Silvermoon is probably dumbing it down for me, but it’s like the conversation itself is encouraging creativity and expression in how I respond.

“I approve of water—simply amazing stuff. What can’t it do?”

Oh, that blew it for the sophisticated conversation, Kordas. He’ll be so impressed by that big insight from your deepest soul. He caught himself nodding too much. He completely thinks I’m a dolt now. Save this, change the subject, now now now. “And then you use it?” Tactical failure.

“Well, something would be worked out then, of course, and incentives would be involved. Power is as appealing to the benevolent heart as it is to the villain. Placing that power with those most experienced in its uses simply makes sense. More of the work done in fewer years is appealing to us.”

Steady this crash. Call back.

“And you were telling me about the loving care of freedoms? Curated?”

“Yes. Curated, because one wants to present the very best, significant, and understandable examples, in ways that give them meaning in context as well as now. We have a ceremonial tradition, born with the Tayledras ourselves, of expressing our feelings about important things as messages for our descendants. It gives us the longest of views, the arc of our history in our ancestors’ own words, since our inception as a people. As years passed, our ways of recording information got better, leading to images lifelike in their appearance, synchronized to a copy of the sounds and voices depicted. It was as if we could talk to them, and a resurgence of interest in our origins made us more aware of who we were as a people. We leave messages for our descendants a few times a year now. I like to think I’ll be heard by Tayledras for whom the work is done, someday in the far future.” Silvermoon poured himself another cup of wine, and added some to Kordas’s own. “This talk with you will feature well in my next message.”

Kordas blushed.

“I will tell you of a warlord. No records exist of anything that he loved or cared about, except acquisition of power, from his apprenticeship on. He was brilliant, and he was, we suspect, incapable in the blood of being compassionate. He became a ‘Kiyamvir,’ the symbolic embodiment of a nation, and what you might call an ‘Emperor of many tribes,’ before he even lay with his slaves. He became known as Ma’ar. Just the single name. Ma’ar ruled by division, over scores of city-states, in a constant state of conflict with each other for reasons that changed with the breeze. His cunning, coupled with his indifference to others’ suffering, led him to become a conqueror by disruption as much as by arms. Within ten years, he had three dozen city-states loyal to him, with more absorbed every year.

“Ma’ar had a particular method that always worked. In each tribe he wanted, his agents would find a minority—around ten percent of a population. That ten percent would be relentlessly portrayed by Ma’ar’s agents as horrors, perversions, or outright enemies, until the remaining ninety percent felt like they were facing implacable, relentless foes out to ‘get them.’ In truth, the persecuted were never more than one finger of both hands, else they could have been effective at fighting back.

“When Ma’ar got the people of a tribe riled up enough, they would ‘cleanse’ their population of that ten percent—which by then the citizens and slaves alike thought of as an overwhelmingly powerful, evil, hateful, and unknowable force. That made the persecutors feel as if they’d struck a great blow, even though their beatdown was at nine-to-one odds, and few of them had done anything at all but passively agree. They felt like glorious, rebellious heroes of their people, taking down a vast network of evil that outnumbered them. Now that Ma’ar had made the population easier to direct, congratulating their obedience and bravery, Ma’ar would recruit, and place provocateurs in the next targeted city-states. They’d pick another enemy—almost always at nine to one—and repeat it, until every small group that might have opposed them was systematically ‘cleansed’ from what was now a large, united civilization. Doubters within that civilization had seen from the inside what happened to dissenters. Nine to one. A certain size of mob will always win, and that is hard for idealists or artists to comprehend. Ma’ar thrived by it.

“They regressed, that civilization. They lost momentum, joy, and the openness that causes a people to feel the discovery of new things as a pleasure, not an unwelcome incursion. Even their food became homogeneous.

“The survivors of Ma’ar’s purges fled, driven south mainly, and in defiance, they made beauty even from their persecution. Songs of salvation and hope, stories of love overpowering mobs. With their creations, they could confront despair by weaponizing sophistication and hope. You see, the people most likely to fight a tyrant are those who give a people their vibrancy. The ones who escaped had their revenge by bringing their emotional artistry with them, and they created more every year.

“One of our proverbs is, ‘Do not interrupt an enemy while they’re destroying themselves.’

“The refugees gathered around an inherently kind soul, an Archmage called Urtho. Urtho didn’t want to lead anyone but his hundreds of apprentices. He simply wanted to be a creator of wonderful things, but he answered their pleas and brought the strategies of a genius to oppose Ma’ar’s cunning. ‘Let there be love’ was the simplest summation of Urtho’s philosophy. That simple. That magnificent. Under him, they innovated. Ma’ar’s side just poorly copied, and fanatically pushed their violence.

“And in the end, it could stand no more. The mobs overwhelmed the refugees, and they fled again. Only this time, what was left of both their lands was two wide craters.” Silvermoon traced his fingers around a huge lake that Kordas now knew they called Lake Evendim on the map, and far south, a wider, shallower crater.

“The Mage Wars,” Kordas whispered.

“The Mage Wars, yes. The wound we’re healing,” Silvermoon answered. “And now you know why I warn you. You are refugees. A rock to the skull is not a sophisticated attack, but it does kill every time. Hate and fear are crude and cruel, and unenlightened, widely ignorant people are puppetted by appealing to their aching anxieties. It can come from within a people, too—and compared to armies, it’s even inexpensive. Rage, hate, and fear can smash through any defense made of rock and wood, and can cause a people to unknowingly give themselves freely to the very ones who have secretly terrorized them. The only times it fails in all of known history is when people have more understanding of each other than the hatemongers can defeat, and the education to recognize deceit. It can be stopped when it’s small, and it’s detected by listening closely to people’s problems. There are few things in life, Kordas, as deeply saddening as a lost possibility for something wondrous to have happened. In a few notorious examples, pre-Tantara, even when nations knew to watch for it in principle, sadly, the ones that fell were those who were too slow to act upon it.”

“And our new settlement is a haven for a new nation, and you see it as just as vulnerable.”

“Maybe more so, because your people’s loyalty is built around you. They’re no dedicated wildland explorers who would have come here anyway—they wouldn’t be here at all, ever, if it wasn’t for your leadership. They are here because they trust you. If you fail them, they’ll fail to become what you could make them. They would plummet in esteem from ‘chosen-by-a-visionary’ to ‘idiots-abandoned-in-the-woods.’ They would struggle, their numbers would drop, and if they survived that, little would be left among the survivors of the ideals you brought along.” He paused and shook his head. “I apologize for the blunt analysis, Kordas, but you all are what you are. A purely strategic, economic, and wisdom analysis has to be factual. And history shows that with every doubling of population comes a doubling of would-be Ma’ars.

“Don’t box them in by regulating freedom. Just make sure they know what truly counts, and help them have it. Ten people with good intentions and healthy minds can accomplish what ten thousand with torches cannot. You need to create standards of behavior and be certain they work in practice. Don’t be so sophisticated or detached a leader that you lose track of your people staying happy, because Ma’ar’s strategy I speak of always works. Don’t use behavioral laws as a means of diminishing your people, however odd they may seem. From oddity comes comparison, from comparison comes perspective, from perspective comes compassion, from compassion comes prosperity.” Silvermoon leaned in again to Kordas, to meet his eyes and make a direct, solid eye contact to deliver his vital ultimatum.

“I like you. I’ve seen deeper into your soul than you think, and so has the Star-Eyed, and so have others whose best futures depend upon what you do. I believe you can outmaneuver the dangers all tribes face, within and without, and you can make a lasting nation of quality. A year ago, we didn’t know you existed, and yet we Tayledras were here for a decade before, in the right place at the right time, to give you a place to begin. Only when your expedition Gated in did we realize it.” He gestured as if presenting the whole world as a prize in a tourney. “And we weren’t even shocked by it. Provident luck, amazing coincidences, unexpected solutions to thorny troubles, mistakes that secretly aren’t, and the discovery of or the placement of aid that might not matter for another fifty years. This is what life here is like. We know we are subject to the will of others, and we don’t do this work alone. Unseen powers connect everything. Accepting that as a reality may take you a while to embrace fully, but I know you already accept it as a concept.”

“Well, there’s no denying the unlikelihood of us being here, ‘us’ meaning the expedition’s flotilla and population. Yet here we are. One thing I am in awe of is the casual, almost indifferent way you Tayledras talk about and handle power that would incinerate us even in our best attempts.”

“Ah. That came up in our discussions about you all, you know. More than one of us wanted to make no contact with you at all, figuring that you would experiment with what was in this abandoned Vale and we’d come back and sweep up your ashes afterward.”

“Yes, pragmatic. You’re very relaxed with the concept of killing, if I may say so.”

“We kill a lot. Selectively ending lives is a part of the work, and once we get used to it enough, it’s always there in our minds as an option. With what we face, we have to be that way for our sanity. Being able to kill isn’t a fantasy for us, like it may be for some. We will kill, and we will be killed. It’s only the minority of us that die peacefully. But this—talks like this—this is what we crave.” Silvermoon paused, most likely going through memories of his own lethality. “A thing about people, Kordas, is that everyone loves to think of themselves as the hero of the story they’re in. We Tayledras, though, we live by it. We’re all raised to be heroes. Life is easy to come by—meat makes meat—so generating population is not an issue for us. We could triple our number easily enough. It’s the quality of that person that we care about, as a reality for the children that are already born. Fewer people consuming resources, highly educated, skilled in physical, mental, and emotional excellence, and the most fully themselves that they can be. The magical power, the spellwork, the Heartstones—we have them all, because we don’t permit poverty. There are never more of us than we can handily provide for. We like to be intellectual. Early education establishes the baseline for an entire society. Keep them smart, Kordas. Train everyone to read, cipher, and have general knowledge of worldly things, both adults and children.”

“I’ve been curious about that. Where are all the children, anyway?”

“I’ll tell you about ward-cities soon. This was productive, Kordas. Unless you’d like to do more than build treaties a while, we should get back to directing our charges. We must think improvements through well enough that they aren’t just built for now, they can be upgraded too. Plan for contingencies, with generations ahead in mind. A monarch’s sweetest crop is the quality of his people, so tend to it well. Don’t neglect the future, or it might just leave without you.