Portraits of Four Weddings.
Posted: 29 Aug 2017 18:47
Since it was called to my attention that I haven't actually shown anyone anything (or, lets be honest, created much of anything) about my main conworld in many, many years... I thought I'd remedy that.
But how? My setting is old and established enough to be huge, in terms of what I know the outline of, but neglected enough to be small and thin in terms of what I can actually talk about at length with any fixity.
So I had the idea of framing some semi-random content around four vignettes - more "excuses for infodumping" than real stories, I'm afraid, but perhaps they'll give some idea of the character of the places. Why four? One for each of the main 'POV', 'advanced' cultures that are most established (and most important, at least on this continent). And I decided to go with the theme of weddings: they're important, they're almost universal, and they display all sorts of cultural elements.
So.
Do, of course, feel free to ask questions, make comments, etc.
We'll start with a wedding in the city of Handor. Don't worry, this will probably be the longest by far of the four vignettes.
------------------
Handor
It is snowing on the city of Handor – but only lightly, as an afterthought. The snow on the ground and on the steep-angled shingled roofs is for the most part the debris of the last big blizzard, a week ago. Handor is a long way from the sea, so it’s spared the worst of the winter storms – the wooden walkways hammered into the sides of the houses are in most places only three or four feet high.
Most of the city is low – one or two storeys and a sizeable loft – and the city sprawls irregularly from the hills to the lake (a lake the size of a small sea), its mass pocketed with little pasturelands, old common areas nobody has the right to build on. Many houses have small, high windows poking out from the shingles, and the richer one have little cupolas above – quiet, empty rooms for private contemplation, as the Handorians are great believers in the necessity of alone time. Above the houses spike dozens of little towers – clock towers, bell towers. Civilisation is where you can always tell the time. A few other buildings poke above the skyline too, many decorated with their own miniature spires and stone pylons. One of the largest buildings is the Parliament; the others, more important, are the salons. Largest of all is the Grand Concordat Salon – but we are a couple of streets away from there, in a more (externally) modest, quieter building. This is the Salon of the Lady of the Seven Birds, and its walls drip with silks and cloth-of-gold. Tonight the whole of the salon is occupied by the wedding reception of Sakotl Rivanait sul-Carasatloc and Sakanga Täimant Rhapsutit ta-Arausoc.
The wedding itself was a simple affair: the happy couple and their respective fathers signed the appropriate forms at a local hall of records, suitably notarised by a local bureaucrat, himself appropriately delegated with the authority of the relevent princes. Then Sakotl went and got her tattoo.
It should be explained that the people of Handor are not one people – not in a sense, at least. They are representatives of perhas a hundred tribes, spread over an area the size of western Europe, each with its own ruling Prince and Council of Elders. Citizens of each tribe wear its symbol as a tattoo, and for most, in the countryside, that is that; in the cities, however, and above all here in the capital, inter-tribal marriages are common, and so the wives often need to be appropriately re-tattood with their new allegiances. In this case, Sakotl is from the Carasatloc, a sept of the local (and dominant) Scandoc – indeed, as her name suggests, she’s a carl of the Carasatloc, minor gentry. This doesn’t help her much – the Carasatloc territory is small, and her connections to its royal family are centuries past. If she were from a truly dignified family, she wouldn’t be in the city, she’d be at the court of the Prince (Princes shun the big cities with their smells and their trade guilds, and prefer their own country palaces, around which have grown sizeable towns – including, of course, their own salons, since even a Prince is not so gauche or shameless as to invite guests into his own home). If she were rich, she wouldn’t be marrying beneath her. Täimant is from the trade class, scion of a family who own, in theory, a string of flour mills, and he is paying a substantial bride price to Sakotl’s father, Rivan. At least, his own father, Rhapsut, is. Their family isn’t local – the Arausoc are from hundreds of miles away, deep in the Repalan Zone of Control. But Rivan saw where the money was, and where the wars weren’t, and took his family to the capital.
After the wedding comes the reception, and that’s why we’re here in the salon, surrounded by bright fabrics, sweet smells, fine marquetry... and beautiful women. Travellers from beyond the West are often a little baffled by salon culture: the Westerners, they say, celebrate all their occasions, no matter how solemn or private, with a trip to the local brothel. This is, to be fair, completely accurate, but also somewhat misleading. The salon girls are, it’s true, prostitutes – and perhaps later, when the bridge and groom have left, the richer guests (and they’ll have to be rich, in this salon) will discretely step into a side-chamber with one (or more) of the girls of their choice. But that’s not why they’re here now. That won’t happen until after most of the female guests have made their excuses and left. For now, the salon is less a brothel and more a restaurant or hotel. The wedding guests lounge about the main hall, enjoying fineries they would never see at home, eating the finest cuisine in the city (the staple crop in the west is a sort of mild, floury onion, so experiencing more exciting food is a priority for everybody), as the salon girls play lyres, sing, juggle, tumble... and converse. Later will come the highlight of the evening: the Lady herself will deliver one of her famous discourses comparing economic theory with the latest experiments on the sequestration of airs. Nobody, of course, is particularly interested in either chemistry or economics – not, at least, at the level of nations, the level that concerns the Lady – but it is very fashionable to give the impression of being so.
Täimant, Rivan, Rhapsut and the other men – at least, the more respectable men of the party – will not directly converse with the Lady, just as they are saying little to the salon girls now, beyond pleasantries, and snippets of half-remembered poetry they heard at another salon party. Largely the girls debate amongst themselves, mixing erudition with wit, with occasional questions from the wives and daughters of the gentlemen. The men, in theory, listen, and in practice watch. In a summer wedding they’d have more to look at, but this is Handor, and here even titillation has to take a back seat to thermal precautions, even in the warm salon chamber (heated miraculously through the walls and floor, with no smoke!), and the girls are fashionably but discreetly dressed. [A summer wedding would make much more sense – that’s why, since time immemorial, prestigious weddings take place in the winter. Any fool can lay on a feast at harvest time, but only great men would think to do so in the snows!]
The passivity of the male audience is no accident: Täimant isn’t a nobleman, or even a carl like his wife, but like most of the wealthy middle classes he apes their manners, and great men do not chatter. Great men do not debate, or ponder; they are not eager for profit, or anxious about loss. The great man, it is said (by a salon girl, originally) observes like the mountain, and acts like the avalanche. There are no gods in Handor – none that a man like Täimant would admit to believing in, at least – but there is always the earth, the great world spirit, that works its way with such immensity and timelessness that it is inscrutable to man. All people and all things are a part of the world spirit, and can do nothing but act as it decrees that they shall act: through the winds and the tides and the blood in their veins, it moves men as men move their fingers. Serenity, grace, and nobility, and hopefully material success, come from accepting, even embracing, man’s fundamental passivity – and the passivity of great men most of all, whose deeds, being of great import, are reserved and demanded with the greatest precision. The great man, therefore, acts not as himself but as the incarnation of the world, and he acts, not as his mind implores him, but as his nature moves him. The demands of the world gather within him as though his soul were a reservoir, until the dam breaks at the perfect moment and he acts, decisively, without conscious thought. That is why great men surround themselves with good conversation: it shapes their natures, so that at the critical time they will act appropriately. The same is true, of course, of women, but as the chief geopolitical function of women is to nurture a good spirit in their husbands and fathers and sons, it is necessary for them to take a more active role in the conversations.
As a result of all this, Rhapsut does not actually manage his flour mills – he did, when he was younger, but now that he’s achieved success he merely... reigns over them. Less fortunate men are concerned with the details, and he gestures – decisively, with economy – the general strategic direction in which the world spirit tells him that he ought to act. However, since he’s not actually a Prince, he’s invited several of his foremen to his son’s wedding – he needs to keep their affection and loyalty, and besides, other than his being more blessed by fate, they’re all basically equal, aren’t they? Weddings are a time for magnanimity, particularly, as at the Salon of the Lady of the Seven Birds, when it can be impressive magnanimity.
The one man who is listening intently to the conversation – at least whenever it turns to finance or to economics – is the one man everyone else is ignoring. He’s an older gentleman with a strangely long, grey beard, and on the richly padded seat to his left (nobody wanted to sit there) is his bizarre hat, a foot tall and in the shape of a tall square pyramid with several balconies from which knots of cloth dangle. Like his beard, and his odd robe, the hat marks him as Hasuar, the largest of the peripatetic tribes of the region (remnants of an old pastoralist invasion). The Hasuar, with their nomadic life and their fascinating religion of dreams, are regarded as exciting, romantic oddities by the native tribes – but oddities best observed from a polite distance. Beneath that distance lies another truth: this particular Hasuar, like many of his kind, doesn’t travel much these days. Like Rhapsut, he pays people to run his business for him. But where Rhapsut’s business is milling, the Hasuar’s business is business – an ostracised community of semi-migrant merchants distributed across the whole of Handoria (and some of the wider West) makes for a very profitable business network.
Something similar helps to explain the rich, though perversely masculine clothing of the woman on the Hasuar’s right: she’s an invert, a woman who has declared herself... well, not a man exactly, but a dominant spirit. Westerners believe that the world is divided into dominant (mostly male) people, and submissive (mostly female) people. This woman has declared herself one of the former, rather than the latter. This is not, in itself, particularly controversial – everybody knows that physical sex is of secondary importance to the character of the spirit – but it does come with a price. She will never have legitimate children – no man of her class could marry her without declaring himself a male invert, and while she could marry a woman, that would obviously make legitimate children impossible. Most families will try to keep their womenfolk at arms length from her – while she may make a fine and loving eligible husband for, say, a barren woman (not all inverts are interested in taking wives, but many are – if nothing else, a pretty wife is a good status symbol), mothers do not want their daughters being confused into following in her footsteps, nor trapped into a marriage without children. Men, meanwhile, will likewise avoid too close a contact, lest they be seen by others as her submissive invert toys. Even contacts with her own kind tend to be prickly – women willing to make such sacrifices tend to be strong-willed, to flaunt their dominance even more than men do, and to naturally fall into competition with one another. But there is also a certain camaraderie and alliance between them, and, like the Hasuar, female inverts are often wealthier than their class would otherwise suggest, as they often pursue status in the business realm, and without the responsibilities and distractions of a family. She sits next to the Hasuar because outsiders need to band together, and she listens to the salon girls because she might learn something to her advantage.
[There are also, of course, invert men. Indeed, among the salon girls here there is a token boy or two. There’s nothing wrong in the male guests ogling them – but only the most self-confident or powerful would be seen taking one of them aside. When a man is alone with an invert in intimate circumstances, how can his peers know for certain who is penetrating whom? It’s not unknown for invert males to conceal themselves, and to induce normal males, or invert males, to play submissive in public for them, but to take charge in private. (Dominance is a complex philosophical concept in theory; in practice, it largely equates to sexual penetration). There is of course nothing shameful in a man being an invert – the only shame is in hiding it. But for some reason many invert males seem not to wish to embrace their ‘natural’ position as dutiful wives and (more often) mistresses and prostitutes, leading to disgraceful deceptions.]
Both the outsiders are here as representatives of the real rulers of the country’s economy – the syndicates. Over the last century, the merchants of the major Western cities, particularly Handor, have banded together into alliances, syndicates, to better finance promising ventures, through a range of increasingly sophisticated contractual vehicles, many of them first devised in salons like these (actual merchants are too busy buying and selling to devote much thought to financial theory and legal novelties – the most exclusive salon girls, on the other hand, have most of the day to themselves, and extensive libraries, and are important advisors to the merchant class both in particulars (the Lady is available for consultations for a reasonable fee) and in matters of general theory). Anybody can be part of the syndicates – Rhapsut and Rivan both hold some joint venture stock themselves – and most members are simply ordinary people, but outsider groups like the Hasuar and the inverts, and foreigners, and indeed salon girls (who have operated as effectively joint stock companies for centuries) do hold a disproportionate power in that sphere. In a sense, given Rhapsut’s extensive debts, it’s these people who really own “his” flour mills, and that’s why he’s invited a bunch of them to his son’s wedding, including two people he wouldn’t otherwise talk to socially. Of course, in another sense the syndicate class really own very little at all – while a few great traders have risen to astonishing wealth, the overwhelming part of the money in the bourse is really property of the Princes. Handorian syndicates may underwrite ventures across the continent, and, indirectly, in the far-off Rhovarian colonies, but wellspring of that capital is the vast tracts of farmland and forest ruled by the Princes. Handoria is a vast and underpopulated country, and even its greatest cities are small – mere towns, in the eyes of travellers from beyond the West, of only tens of thousands – and the economy remains largely agricultural. There is no private ownership of land in the West – all land belongs to the tribe, and the tribe belongs to the Prince.
The Prince, of course, has his duties, and so does everybody else. They’re all the same duties, in a way. There is only one law in the West: the Eightfold Law of the Monument of the Elder Way. People may not read the Monument these days – few people can read at all, particularly among the upper classes (that’s what scribes and salon girls are for), but the Law is recognised almost everywhere as fundamental. The Law is simply a description of an individuals’ duties: to one’s children and dependents, to one’s parents and ancestors, to one’s village, to one’s tribe, to one’s authorities, to one’s kin, to one’s patrons, and to one’s own word (in the form of binding contracts). There are no other laws – the task of the tribal elders, and the national parliament, is to judge how those eight obligations weigh in each individual case. Marriage is an important and solemn act precisely because it changes obligations: Täimant is now obliged to protect Sakotl, while Sakotl is obliged to obey Täimant, her authority. Yet Sakotl is still obliged to honour Rivan, her father, and the will of her ancestors that acts (if Rivan is acting properly) through Rivan, and she is obliged to protect her children, including those not yet born. Rivan meanwhile is obliged now to work for the advantage of both Täimant and Rhapsut, and Rhapsut for Rivan, as marriage has made them kin, and Täimant must respect Rivan as a patron, and both must respect the terms of the bride price contract. Sakotl, however, no longer has to submit to her old tribe, and hence the dictates of her old Prince, though Rivan still does; instead, she must now submit to her new tribe, the Arausoc . This last is unlikely to be a major issue for her, given that the Arausoc lands and prince are hundreds of miles away, but there are theoretical consequences: if she were charged with a major violation of the law, it would be the Arausoc authorities who would judge her (or, at least, would be able to chose to do so; due to her class as a carl, she could probably insist upon it). It is a complicated system of competing obligations that leads to many prosecutions, and immense difficulties in time of war; it’s also a part of why groups like the Hasuar and the inverts, who in different ways stand apart from some of these obligations, are able to be so succesful.
Marriage also makes Sakotl a lawful authority for Täimant’s peons – though her submissive female nature inevitably means she shouldn’t want to boss them around too much, lest people start thinking she was an invert, which could potentially humiliate her husband. Peonage is an institution peculiar to the West – effectively a form of inheritable indenture. Unlike true slaves, peons are bound only for a fixed term of years, generally in payment of a debt or punishment for a crime (though the creditor/victim may sell the peonage to a third party). In this case – as is commonly the case in the city – these peons have sold themselves into indenture for a future payment, effectively funding their move from the countryside to the capital and their establishment in some trade. Several have been invited to the wedding feast – they may be servants today, but they will become potentially profitable associates in a few years.
Täimant is a popular man in his ward, and down the street, in the Grand Concordat, employees, well-wishers, and the less prestigious class of neighbour are celebrating their own, less elaborate and more raucous wedding feast, paid for by the proud fathers of the couple. Later in the evening, the solemnities will spill out into the streets – where they will be watched with a wary eye. The city watch, employed by the city corporation (a front for the various guilds and syndicates) will try to prevent any major disruptions of the peace (swords are forbidden on pain of death, but knives, staves, whips, and fists and feet, are all frequently employed to lawless ends), but there are greater dangers here than mere violence. In Handor, congregations of inebriated men sooner or later turn to one thing: politics. And politics is dangerous. Handor is a capital city, but it has not ruled its own country for a hundred years, not since the abolition of the monarchy and the imposition of the Concordat (the Grand Concordat Salon used to be the Grand Royal). The Concordat carved up Handoria into five parts, each governed, for its own protection, by a different, victorious, foreign power. The nation that has twice ruled the continent has now been subjugated by its former subjects. Handor sits in the Capital Zone, a sort of neutral area governed by the three largest occupying powers in concert: the Repalans from the north, the semi-barbarian Varags from the east, and the League of Iron (itself a fractious confederation) from the south. A surfeit of rulers makes for a dearth of authority: impasse between the three ‘Ambassadors’ has left the local authorities the de facto rulers – within the Capital Zone, the Parliament is rarely challenged, though in the wider country its authority is largely symbolic only.
Rebellion is in the air. At the Salon of the Lady of the Seven Birds, the salon girls wink at it, and the wedding guests delicately gauge their laughter – they know the girls will report anyone who seems too enthusiastic (you don’t operate an establishment like this by inviting raids), but they also know their comrades will shun anyone who seems to lack patriotism. At the Grand Concordat, the mood is more subdued – they don’t have to worry about the girls there, because half the guests loitering in the immense arcades are spies. Perhaps later in the evening there will be a dramatic performance: salons double as theatres, and theatre doubles as sedition, with coded satire (and bawdy humour) the most popular genre. It’s best not to laugh too loudly, though, when you don’t know who’s watching. The occupying powers can’t imprison or torture everybody they suspect – because that’s everybody – but nobody wants to move their name too far up the list next time the authorities are looking for scapegoats. Not that rebellion is an immediate threat. The great uprising has been imminent for a century now, and the few attempts have been quickly quashed. The only rebels most people see are petty bandits – they claim to be royalists so as to gain the favour of the peasantry, and the occupying forces agree with the name, in order to associate rebellion with crime. It’s not even clear what the rebellion would be in favour of – the King in the mountains? The King beyond the sea? Who needs a king when there’s a Parliament? And who should be in Parliament? No, the real threat the powers fear is each other. There have been three major wars in the last century, and the great river that snakes down from Handor to the sea doubles as the front line in a permanent cold war between Repala and the League. Rebels are a source of worry not per se, but as potential fifth columnists in the coming war. There is always a coming war – which may be why men like Rhapsut are so willing to spend their money on lavish wedding entertainments. Eat, drink, and be merry...
When Täimant and Sakotl arrive at their new home (Rhapsut is wealthy enough to buy a very narrow house for his son immediately, though many newlyweds have to live with the groom’s father for a few years), they find an arrangement of idols and offerings left by well-wishers, lightly dusted in snow. Täimant may not believe in gods, but many of the common people do – house gods, tribal gods, personal gods, immigrant gods, and thousand and one different gods, and other gods without names – and Täimant brings the offerings inside respectfully. Gods, after all, are only the unsophisticated man’s way of understanding the world spirit, and disrespect to one is disrespect to the other. Besides, everybody prays from time to time.
Soon, Sakanga Täimant and Sakotl repair upstairs to their conubial bedchamber, which doubles as a wood-panelled sitting room – their bed, like all Handorian beds, is hidden in one wall, behind a sliding panel, on a base on warm bricks. This is another privilege of wealth: being alone in their own house, they have their bed to themselves. Until now, each has been used to sleeping in their parents’ bed – Handorian ‘beds’ are really miniature, padded rooms in their own right, capable of sleeping at least half a dozen comfortably. Nobody in this city sneaks out of bed without their parents knowing, because the adults sleep by the entrance. Other newlyweds must, as it were, seize their moments in the daylight, when the bed is otherwise unoccupied. This couple have the bed to themselves all night. They undress, enter, and slide the panel shut behind them. At which point, out of respect for their sense of decorum, we shall leave them.
But how? My setting is old and established enough to be huge, in terms of what I know the outline of, but neglected enough to be small and thin in terms of what I can actually talk about at length with any fixity.
So I had the idea of framing some semi-random content around four vignettes - more "excuses for infodumping" than real stories, I'm afraid, but perhaps they'll give some idea of the character of the places. Why four? One for each of the main 'POV', 'advanced' cultures that are most established (and most important, at least on this continent). And I decided to go with the theme of weddings: they're important, they're almost universal, and they display all sorts of cultural elements.
So.
Do, of course, feel free to ask questions, make comments, etc.
We'll start with a wedding in the city of Handor. Don't worry, this will probably be the longest by far of the four vignettes.
------------------
Handor
It is snowing on the city of Handor – but only lightly, as an afterthought. The snow on the ground and on the steep-angled shingled roofs is for the most part the debris of the last big blizzard, a week ago. Handor is a long way from the sea, so it’s spared the worst of the winter storms – the wooden walkways hammered into the sides of the houses are in most places only three or four feet high.
Most of the city is low – one or two storeys and a sizeable loft – and the city sprawls irregularly from the hills to the lake (a lake the size of a small sea), its mass pocketed with little pasturelands, old common areas nobody has the right to build on. Many houses have small, high windows poking out from the shingles, and the richer one have little cupolas above – quiet, empty rooms for private contemplation, as the Handorians are great believers in the necessity of alone time. Above the houses spike dozens of little towers – clock towers, bell towers. Civilisation is where you can always tell the time. A few other buildings poke above the skyline too, many decorated with their own miniature spires and stone pylons. One of the largest buildings is the Parliament; the others, more important, are the salons. Largest of all is the Grand Concordat Salon – but we are a couple of streets away from there, in a more (externally) modest, quieter building. This is the Salon of the Lady of the Seven Birds, and its walls drip with silks and cloth-of-gold. Tonight the whole of the salon is occupied by the wedding reception of Sakotl Rivanait sul-Carasatloc and Sakanga Täimant Rhapsutit ta-Arausoc.
The wedding itself was a simple affair: the happy couple and their respective fathers signed the appropriate forms at a local hall of records, suitably notarised by a local bureaucrat, himself appropriately delegated with the authority of the relevent princes. Then Sakotl went and got her tattoo.
It should be explained that the people of Handor are not one people – not in a sense, at least. They are representatives of perhas a hundred tribes, spread over an area the size of western Europe, each with its own ruling Prince and Council of Elders. Citizens of each tribe wear its symbol as a tattoo, and for most, in the countryside, that is that; in the cities, however, and above all here in the capital, inter-tribal marriages are common, and so the wives often need to be appropriately re-tattood with their new allegiances. In this case, Sakotl is from the Carasatloc, a sept of the local (and dominant) Scandoc – indeed, as her name suggests, she’s a carl of the Carasatloc, minor gentry. This doesn’t help her much – the Carasatloc territory is small, and her connections to its royal family are centuries past. If she were from a truly dignified family, she wouldn’t be in the city, she’d be at the court of the Prince (Princes shun the big cities with their smells and their trade guilds, and prefer their own country palaces, around which have grown sizeable towns – including, of course, their own salons, since even a Prince is not so gauche or shameless as to invite guests into his own home). If she were rich, she wouldn’t be marrying beneath her. Täimant is from the trade class, scion of a family who own, in theory, a string of flour mills, and he is paying a substantial bride price to Sakotl’s father, Rivan. At least, his own father, Rhapsut, is. Their family isn’t local – the Arausoc are from hundreds of miles away, deep in the Repalan Zone of Control. But Rivan saw where the money was, and where the wars weren’t, and took his family to the capital.
After the wedding comes the reception, and that’s why we’re here in the salon, surrounded by bright fabrics, sweet smells, fine marquetry... and beautiful women. Travellers from beyond the West are often a little baffled by salon culture: the Westerners, they say, celebrate all their occasions, no matter how solemn or private, with a trip to the local brothel. This is, to be fair, completely accurate, but also somewhat misleading. The salon girls are, it’s true, prostitutes – and perhaps later, when the bridge and groom have left, the richer guests (and they’ll have to be rich, in this salon) will discretely step into a side-chamber with one (or more) of the girls of their choice. But that’s not why they’re here now. That won’t happen until after most of the female guests have made their excuses and left. For now, the salon is less a brothel and more a restaurant or hotel. The wedding guests lounge about the main hall, enjoying fineries they would never see at home, eating the finest cuisine in the city (the staple crop in the west is a sort of mild, floury onion, so experiencing more exciting food is a priority for everybody), as the salon girls play lyres, sing, juggle, tumble... and converse. Later will come the highlight of the evening: the Lady herself will deliver one of her famous discourses comparing economic theory with the latest experiments on the sequestration of airs. Nobody, of course, is particularly interested in either chemistry or economics – not, at least, at the level of nations, the level that concerns the Lady – but it is very fashionable to give the impression of being so.
Täimant, Rivan, Rhapsut and the other men – at least, the more respectable men of the party – will not directly converse with the Lady, just as they are saying little to the salon girls now, beyond pleasantries, and snippets of half-remembered poetry they heard at another salon party. Largely the girls debate amongst themselves, mixing erudition with wit, with occasional questions from the wives and daughters of the gentlemen. The men, in theory, listen, and in practice watch. In a summer wedding they’d have more to look at, but this is Handor, and here even titillation has to take a back seat to thermal precautions, even in the warm salon chamber (heated miraculously through the walls and floor, with no smoke!), and the girls are fashionably but discreetly dressed. [A summer wedding would make much more sense – that’s why, since time immemorial, prestigious weddings take place in the winter. Any fool can lay on a feast at harvest time, but only great men would think to do so in the snows!]
The passivity of the male audience is no accident: Täimant isn’t a nobleman, or even a carl like his wife, but like most of the wealthy middle classes he apes their manners, and great men do not chatter. Great men do not debate, or ponder; they are not eager for profit, or anxious about loss. The great man, it is said (by a salon girl, originally) observes like the mountain, and acts like the avalanche. There are no gods in Handor – none that a man like Täimant would admit to believing in, at least – but there is always the earth, the great world spirit, that works its way with such immensity and timelessness that it is inscrutable to man. All people and all things are a part of the world spirit, and can do nothing but act as it decrees that they shall act: through the winds and the tides and the blood in their veins, it moves men as men move their fingers. Serenity, grace, and nobility, and hopefully material success, come from accepting, even embracing, man’s fundamental passivity – and the passivity of great men most of all, whose deeds, being of great import, are reserved and demanded with the greatest precision. The great man, therefore, acts not as himself but as the incarnation of the world, and he acts, not as his mind implores him, but as his nature moves him. The demands of the world gather within him as though his soul were a reservoir, until the dam breaks at the perfect moment and he acts, decisively, without conscious thought. That is why great men surround themselves with good conversation: it shapes their natures, so that at the critical time they will act appropriately. The same is true, of course, of women, but as the chief geopolitical function of women is to nurture a good spirit in their husbands and fathers and sons, it is necessary for them to take a more active role in the conversations.
As a result of all this, Rhapsut does not actually manage his flour mills – he did, when he was younger, but now that he’s achieved success he merely... reigns over them. Less fortunate men are concerned with the details, and he gestures – decisively, with economy – the general strategic direction in which the world spirit tells him that he ought to act. However, since he’s not actually a Prince, he’s invited several of his foremen to his son’s wedding – he needs to keep their affection and loyalty, and besides, other than his being more blessed by fate, they’re all basically equal, aren’t they? Weddings are a time for magnanimity, particularly, as at the Salon of the Lady of the Seven Birds, when it can be impressive magnanimity.
The one man who is listening intently to the conversation – at least whenever it turns to finance or to economics – is the one man everyone else is ignoring. He’s an older gentleman with a strangely long, grey beard, and on the richly padded seat to his left (nobody wanted to sit there) is his bizarre hat, a foot tall and in the shape of a tall square pyramid with several balconies from which knots of cloth dangle. Like his beard, and his odd robe, the hat marks him as Hasuar, the largest of the peripatetic tribes of the region (remnants of an old pastoralist invasion). The Hasuar, with their nomadic life and their fascinating religion of dreams, are regarded as exciting, romantic oddities by the native tribes – but oddities best observed from a polite distance. Beneath that distance lies another truth: this particular Hasuar, like many of his kind, doesn’t travel much these days. Like Rhapsut, he pays people to run his business for him. But where Rhapsut’s business is milling, the Hasuar’s business is business – an ostracised community of semi-migrant merchants distributed across the whole of Handoria (and some of the wider West) makes for a very profitable business network.
Something similar helps to explain the rich, though perversely masculine clothing of the woman on the Hasuar’s right: she’s an invert, a woman who has declared herself... well, not a man exactly, but a dominant spirit. Westerners believe that the world is divided into dominant (mostly male) people, and submissive (mostly female) people. This woman has declared herself one of the former, rather than the latter. This is not, in itself, particularly controversial – everybody knows that physical sex is of secondary importance to the character of the spirit – but it does come with a price. She will never have legitimate children – no man of her class could marry her without declaring himself a male invert, and while she could marry a woman, that would obviously make legitimate children impossible. Most families will try to keep their womenfolk at arms length from her – while she may make a fine and loving eligible husband for, say, a barren woman (not all inverts are interested in taking wives, but many are – if nothing else, a pretty wife is a good status symbol), mothers do not want their daughters being confused into following in her footsteps, nor trapped into a marriage without children. Men, meanwhile, will likewise avoid too close a contact, lest they be seen by others as her submissive invert toys. Even contacts with her own kind tend to be prickly – women willing to make such sacrifices tend to be strong-willed, to flaunt their dominance even more than men do, and to naturally fall into competition with one another. But there is also a certain camaraderie and alliance between them, and, like the Hasuar, female inverts are often wealthier than their class would otherwise suggest, as they often pursue status in the business realm, and without the responsibilities and distractions of a family. She sits next to the Hasuar because outsiders need to band together, and she listens to the salon girls because she might learn something to her advantage.
[There are also, of course, invert men. Indeed, among the salon girls here there is a token boy or two. There’s nothing wrong in the male guests ogling them – but only the most self-confident or powerful would be seen taking one of them aside. When a man is alone with an invert in intimate circumstances, how can his peers know for certain who is penetrating whom? It’s not unknown for invert males to conceal themselves, and to induce normal males, or invert males, to play submissive in public for them, but to take charge in private. (Dominance is a complex philosophical concept in theory; in practice, it largely equates to sexual penetration). There is of course nothing shameful in a man being an invert – the only shame is in hiding it. But for some reason many invert males seem not to wish to embrace their ‘natural’ position as dutiful wives and (more often) mistresses and prostitutes, leading to disgraceful deceptions.]
Both the outsiders are here as representatives of the real rulers of the country’s economy – the syndicates. Over the last century, the merchants of the major Western cities, particularly Handor, have banded together into alliances, syndicates, to better finance promising ventures, through a range of increasingly sophisticated contractual vehicles, many of them first devised in salons like these (actual merchants are too busy buying and selling to devote much thought to financial theory and legal novelties – the most exclusive salon girls, on the other hand, have most of the day to themselves, and extensive libraries, and are important advisors to the merchant class both in particulars (the Lady is available for consultations for a reasonable fee) and in matters of general theory). Anybody can be part of the syndicates – Rhapsut and Rivan both hold some joint venture stock themselves – and most members are simply ordinary people, but outsider groups like the Hasuar and the inverts, and foreigners, and indeed salon girls (who have operated as effectively joint stock companies for centuries) do hold a disproportionate power in that sphere. In a sense, given Rhapsut’s extensive debts, it’s these people who really own “his” flour mills, and that’s why he’s invited a bunch of them to his son’s wedding, including two people he wouldn’t otherwise talk to socially. Of course, in another sense the syndicate class really own very little at all – while a few great traders have risen to astonishing wealth, the overwhelming part of the money in the bourse is really property of the Princes. Handorian syndicates may underwrite ventures across the continent, and, indirectly, in the far-off Rhovarian colonies, but wellspring of that capital is the vast tracts of farmland and forest ruled by the Princes. Handoria is a vast and underpopulated country, and even its greatest cities are small – mere towns, in the eyes of travellers from beyond the West, of only tens of thousands – and the economy remains largely agricultural. There is no private ownership of land in the West – all land belongs to the tribe, and the tribe belongs to the Prince.
The Prince, of course, has his duties, and so does everybody else. They’re all the same duties, in a way. There is only one law in the West: the Eightfold Law of the Monument of the Elder Way. People may not read the Monument these days – few people can read at all, particularly among the upper classes (that’s what scribes and salon girls are for), but the Law is recognised almost everywhere as fundamental. The Law is simply a description of an individuals’ duties: to one’s children and dependents, to one’s parents and ancestors, to one’s village, to one’s tribe, to one’s authorities, to one’s kin, to one’s patrons, and to one’s own word (in the form of binding contracts). There are no other laws – the task of the tribal elders, and the national parliament, is to judge how those eight obligations weigh in each individual case. Marriage is an important and solemn act precisely because it changes obligations: Täimant is now obliged to protect Sakotl, while Sakotl is obliged to obey Täimant, her authority. Yet Sakotl is still obliged to honour Rivan, her father, and the will of her ancestors that acts (if Rivan is acting properly) through Rivan, and she is obliged to protect her children, including those not yet born. Rivan meanwhile is obliged now to work for the advantage of both Täimant and Rhapsut, and Rhapsut for Rivan, as marriage has made them kin, and Täimant must respect Rivan as a patron, and both must respect the terms of the bride price contract. Sakotl, however, no longer has to submit to her old tribe, and hence the dictates of her old Prince, though Rivan still does; instead, she must now submit to her new tribe, the Arausoc . This last is unlikely to be a major issue for her, given that the Arausoc lands and prince are hundreds of miles away, but there are theoretical consequences: if she were charged with a major violation of the law, it would be the Arausoc authorities who would judge her (or, at least, would be able to chose to do so; due to her class as a carl, she could probably insist upon it). It is a complicated system of competing obligations that leads to many prosecutions, and immense difficulties in time of war; it’s also a part of why groups like the Hasuar and the inverts, who in different ways stand apart from some of these obligations, are able to be so succesful.
Marriage also makes Sakotl a lawful authority for Täimant’s peons – though her submissive female nature inevitably means she shouldn’t want to boss them around too much, lest people start thinking she was an invert, which could potentially humiliate her husband. Peonage is an institution peculiar to the West – effectively a form of inheritable indenture. Unlike true slaves, peons are bound only for a fixed term of years, generally in payment of a debt or punishment for a crime (though the creditor/victim may sell the peonage to a third party). In this case – as is commonly the case in the city – these peons have sold themselves into indenture for a future payment, effectively funding their move from the countryside to the capital and their establishment in some trade. Several have been invited to the wedding feast – they may be servants today, but they will become potentially profitable associates in a few years.
Täimant is a popular man in his ward, and down the street, in the Grand Concordat, employees, well-wishers, and the less prestigious class of neighbour are celebrating their own, less elaborate and more raucous wedding feast, paid for by the proud fathers of the couple. Later in the evening, the solemnities will spill out into the streets – where they will be watched with a wary eye. The city watch, employed by the city corporation (a front for the various guilds and syndicates) will try to prevent any major disruptions of the peace (swords are forbidden on pain of death, but knives, staves, whips, and fists and feet, are all frequently employed to lawless ends), but there are greater dangers here than mere violence. In Handor, congregations of inebriated men sooner or later turn to one thing: politics. And politics is dangerous. Handor is a capital city, but it has not ruled its own country for a hundred years, not since the abolition of the monarchy and the imposition of the Concordat (the Grand Concordat Salon used to be the Grand Royal). The Concordat carved up Handoria into five parts, each governed, for its own protection, by a different, victorious, foreign power. The nation that has twice ruled the continent has now been subjugated by its former subjects. Handor sits in the Capital Zone, a sort of neutral area governed by the three largest occupying powers in concert: the Repalans from the north, the semi-barbarian Varags from the east, and the League of Iron (itself a fractious confederation) from the south. A surfeit of rulers makes for a dearth of authority: impasse between the three ‘Ambassadors’ has left the local authorities the de facto rulers – within the Capital Zone, the Parliament is rarely challenged, though in the wider country its authority is largely symbolic only.
Rebellion is in the air. At the Salon of the Lady of the Seven Birds, the salon girls wink at it, and the wedding guests delicately gauge their laughter – they know the girls will report anyone who seems too enthusiastic (you don’t operate an establishment like this by inviting raids), but they also know their comrades will shun anyone who seems to lack patriotism. At the Grand Concordat, the mood is more subdued – they don’t have to worry about the girls there, because half the guests loitering in the immense arcades are spies. Perhaps later in the evening there will be a dramatic performance: salons double as theatres, and theatre doubles as sedition, with coded satire (and bawdy humour) the most popular genre. It’s best not to laugh too loudly, though, when you don’t know who’s watching. The occupying powers can’t imprison or torture everybody they suspect – because that’s everybody – but nobody wants to move their name too far up the list next time the authorities are looking for scapegoats. Not that rebellion is an immediate threat. The great uprising has been imminent for a century now, and the few attempts have been quickly quashed. The only rebels most people see are petty bandits – they claim to be royalists so as to gain the favour of the peasantry, and the occupying forces agree with the name, in order to associate rebellion with crime. It’s not even clear what the rebellion would be in favour of – the King in the mountains? The King beyond the sea? Who needs a king when there’s a Parliament? And who should be in Parliament? No, the real threat the powers fear is each other. There have been three major wars in the last century, and the great river that snakes down from Handor to the sea doubles as the front line in a permanent cold war between Repala and the League. Rebels are a source of worry not per se, but as potential fifth columnists in the coming war. There is always a coming war – which may be why men like Rhapsut are so willing to spend their money on lavish wedding entertainments. Eat, drink, and be merry...
When Täimant and Sakotl arrive at their new home (Rhapsut is wealthy enough to buy a very narrow house for his son immediately, though many newlyweds have to live with the groom’s father for a few years), they find an arrangement of idols and offerings left by well-wishers, lightly dusted in snow. Täimant may not believe in gods, but many of the common people do – house gods, tribal gods, personal gods, immigrant gods, and thousand and one different gods, and other gods without names – and Täimant brings the offerings inside respectfully. Gods, after all, are only the unsophisticated man’s way of understanding the world spirit, and disrespect to one is disrespect to the other. Besides, everybody prays from time to time.
Soon, Sakanga Täimant and Sakotl repair upstairs to their conubial bedchamber, which doubles as a wood-panelled sitting room – their bed, like all Handorian beds, is hidden in one wall, behind a sliding panel, on a base on warm bricks. This is another privilege of wealth: being alone in their own house, they have their bed to themselves. Until now, each has been used to sleeping in their parents’ bed – Handorian ‘beds’ are really miniature, padded rooms in their own right, capable of sleeping at least half a dozen comfortably. Nobody in this city sneaks out of bed without their parents knowing, because the adults sleep by the entrance. Other newlyweds must, as it were, seize their moments in the daylight, when the bed is otherwise unoccupied. This couple have the bed to themselves all night. They undress, enter, and slide the panel shut behind them. At which point, out of respect for their sense of decorum, we shall leave them.