Changing Planes

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 re-carved 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 fathergod called Af. The highly formal rituals of the Affa religion were held in temples and led by priests. The Astasa religion was nontheistic 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, arid 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 arid 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, underpressure 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 nation-state. 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 simultaneously 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.

Since the beginning of time things had gone along in this fashion, with raids once or twice a year, both sides celebrating victory. Word of a raid was usually leaked well in advance, and the raiding party sang war songs very loudly as they came; so the battles were fought on the battlefields, the villages were unharmed, and the villagers had only to mourn their fallen heroes and declare their undying hatred of the vile Hoa, or the vile Farim. It was all satisfactory, until the Black Dog appeared.

The Farim got word that Hoa was sending out a large war party. All the Farim warriors stripped naked, seized their swords, lances, and shields, and singing war songs loudly, rushed down the forest trail to the battlefield known as By Bird Creek. There they met the men of the Hoa just running into the clearing, naked, armed with lance, sword, and shield, singing war songs loudly.

But in front of the Hoa came a strange thing: a huge black dog. Its back was as high as a man’s waist, and its head was massive. It ran in leaps and bounds, its eyes gleamed red, foam slathered from its gaping, long-toothed jaws, and it growled hideously. It attacked the war chief of the Farim, jumping straight at his chest. It knocked him down, and even as he tried vainly to stab it with his sword, the dog tore open his throat. This utterly unexpected, untraditional, horrible event bewildered and terrified the Farim, paralysed them. Their war song died away. They barely resisted the assault of the Hoa. Four more Farim men and boys were killed—one of them by the Black Dog—before they fled in panic, scattering through the forest, not stopping to pick up their dead. Such a thing had never happened before. The old men of the Farim therefore had to discuss the matter very deeply before they ordered a retaliatory raid.

Since raids were always victorious, usually months went by, sometimes even a year, before another battle was needed to keep the young men in heroic fettle; but this was different. The Farim had been defeated. Their warriors had had to creep back to the battleground at night, in fear and trembling, to pick up their dead; and they found the bodies defiled by the dog—one man’s ear had been chewed off, and the war chief’s left arm had been eaten, its bones lying about, tooth-marked.

The need of the warriors of the Farim to win a victory was urgent. For three days and nights the old men sang war songs. Then the young men stripped, took up their swords, lances, shields, and ran, grim-faced and singing loudly, down the forest path towards the village of the Hoa.

But even before they got to the first battlefield on that path, bounding towards them on the narrow trail under the trees came the terrible Black Dog. Following it came the warriors of the Hoa, singing loudly.

The warriors of the Farim turned around and ran away without fighting, scattering through the forest.

One by one they straggled into their village, late in the evening. The women did not greet them but set out food for them silently. Their children turned away from them and hid from them in the huts. The old men also stayed in the huts, crying. The warriors lay down, each alone on his sleeping mat, and they too cried.

The women talked in the starlight by the drying racks. “We will all be made slaves,” they said. “Slaves of the vile Hoa. Our children will be slaves.”

No raid, however, came from the Hoa, the next day, or the next. The waiting was very difficult. Old men and young men talked together. They decided that they must raid the Hoa and kill the Black Dog even if they died in the attempt.

They sang the war songs all night long. In the morning, very grim-faced and not singing, they set out, all the warriors of Farim, on the straightest trail to Hoa. They did not run. They walked, steadily.

They looked and looked ahead, down the trail, for the Black Dog to appear, with its red eyes and slathering jaws and gleaming teeth. In dread they looked for it.

And it appeared. But it was not leaping and bounding at them, snarling and growling. It ran out from the trees into the path and stopped a moment looking back at them, silent, with what seemed a grin on its terrible mouth. Then it set off trotting ahead of them.

“It is running from us,” cried Ahu. “It is leading us,” said Yu, the war chief. “Leading us to death,” said young Gim. “To victory!” Yu cried, and began to run, holding his spear aloft.

They were at the Hoa village before the Hoa men realised it was a raid and ran out to meet them, clothed, unready, unarmed. The Black Dog leapt at the first Hoa man, knocked him onto his back, and began tearing at his face and throat. Children and women of the village screamed, some ran away, some seized sticks and tried to attack the attackers, all was confusion, but all of them fled when the Black Dog left his victim and charged at the villagers. The warriors of the Farim followed the Black Dog into the village. There they killed several men and seized two women all in a moment. Then Yu shouted, “Victory!” and all his warriors shouted, “Victory!” and they turned and set off back to Farim, carrying their captives, but not their dead, for they had not lost a man.

The last warrior in line looked back down the trail. The Black Dog was following them. Its mouth dropped white saliva. At Farim they held a victory dance; but it was not a satisfactory victory dance. There were no dead warriors propped up, bloody sword in cold hand, to watch and approve the dancers. The two slaves they had taken sat with their heads bowed and their hands over their eyes, crying. Only the Black Dog watched them, sitting under the trees, grinning. All the little rat dogs of the village hid under the huts. “Soon we will raid Hoa again!” shouted young Gim. “We will follow the Spirit Dog to victory!”

“You will follow me,” said the war chief, Yu. “You will follow our advice,” said the oldest man, Imfa. The women kept the mead jars filled so the men could get drunk, but stayed away from the victory dance, as always. They met together and talked in the starlight by the drying racks.

When the men were all lying around drunk, the two Hoa women who had been captured tried to creep away in the darkness; but the Black Dog stood before them, baring its teeth and growling. They turned back, frightened.

Some of the village women came from the drying racks to meet them, and they began to talk together. The women of the Farim and the Hoa speak the women’s language, which is the same in both tribes, though the men’s language is not.

“Where did this kind of dog come from?” asked Imfa’s Wife.

“We do not know,” the older Hoa woman said. “When our men went out to raid, it appeared running before them, and attacked your warriors. And a second time it did that. So the old men in our village have been feeding it with venison and live coneys and rat dogs, calling it the Victory Spirit. Today it turned on us and gave your men the victory.”

“We too can feed the dog,” said Imfa’s Wife. And the women discussed this for a while.

Yu’s Aunt went back to the drying racks and took from them a whole shoulder of dried smoked venison. Imfa’s Wife smeared some paste on the meat. Then Yu’s Aunt carried it towards the Black Dog. “Here, doggy,” she said. She dropped it on the ground. The Black Dog came forward snarling, snatched the piece of meat, and began tearing at it.

“Good doggy,” said Yu’s Aunt.

Then all the women went to their huts. Yu’s Aunt took the captives into her hut and gave them sleeping mats and coverlets.

In the morning the warriors of Farim awoke with aching heads and bodies. They saw and heard the children of Farim, all in a group, chattering like little birds. What were they looking at?

The body of the Black Dog, stiff and stark, pierced through and through with a hundred fishing spears.

“The women have done this thing,” said the warriors.

“With poisoned meat and fishing spears,” said Yu’s Aunt.

“We did not advise you to do this thing,” said the old men.

“Nevertheless,” said Imfa’s Wife, “it is done.”

Ever thereafter the Farim raided the Hoa and the Hoa raided the Farim at reasonable intervals, and they fought to the death on the traditional and customary battlefields and came home victorious with their dead, who watched the warriors dance the victory dance, and were satisfied.

The War across the Alon

IN ANCIENT DAYS in Mahigul, two city-states, Meyun and Huy, were rivals in commerce and learning and the arts, and also quarreled continually over the border between their pasturelands.

The myth of the founding of Meyun went thus: the goddess Tarv, having spent a particularly pleasant night with a young mortal, a cowherd named Mey, gave him her blue starry mantle. She told him that when he spread it out, all the ground it covered would be the site of a great city, of which he would be lord. It seemed to Mey that his city would be rather a small one, maybe five feet long and three feet wide; but he picked a nice bit of his father’s pastureland and spread the goddess’s mantle on the grass. And behold, the mande spread and spread, and the more he unfolded it the more there was to unfold, until it covered all the hilly land between two streams, the little Unon and the larger Alon. Once he got the border marked, the starry mantle ascended to its owner. An enterprising cowherd, Mey got a city going and ruled it long and well; and after his death it went on thriving.

As for Huy, its myth was this: a maiden named Hu slept out in her father’s plow lands one warm summer night. The god Bult looked down, saw her, and more or less automatically ravished her. Hu was enraged. She did not accept his droit du seigneur. She announced she was going to go tell his wife. To placate her the god told her she would bear him a hundred sons, who would found a great city on the very spot where she had lost her virginity. On finding that she was more pregnant than seemed possible, Hu was angrier than ever and went straight to Bull’s wife, the goddess Tarv. Tarv could not undo what Bult had done, but she could alter things a bit. In due time Hu bore a hundred daughters. They became enterprising young women, who founded a city on their maternal grandfather’s farm and ruled it long and well; and after they died, it went on thriving.

Unfortunately, part of the western boundary line of Hu’s father’s farm ran in a curve that crossed the stream to which the eastern edge of Tarv’s starry cloak had reached.

After a generation of disputing about who owned this crescent of land, which at its widest reached about a half mile west of the stream, the descendants of Mey and Hu took their claims to their source, the goddess Tarv and her husband Bult. But the divine couple could not agree on a settlement, or indeed on anything else.

Bult backed the Huyans and would hear no arguments. He had told Hu her descendants would own the land and rule the city, and that was that, even if they had all turned out girls.

Tarv, who had some sense of fair play but did not feel any great warmth towards the swarming progeny of her husband’s hundred bastard daughters, said that she’d lent Mey her mantle before Bult raped Hu, so Mey had prior claim to die land, and that was that.

Bult consulted some of his granddaughters, who pointed out that that piece of land west of the river had been part of Hu’s father’s family farm for at least a century before Tarv lent her mantle to Mey. No doubt, said the granddaughters, the slight extension of the mantle onto Hu’s father’s land had been a mere oversight, which the City of Huy would be willing to overlook, provided the City of Meyun paid a small reparation of sixty bullocks and ten thubes of gold. One of the thubes of gold would be pounded into gold leaf to cover the altar of the Temple of Mighty Bult in the City of Huy. And that would be the end of it.

Tarv consulted no one. She said that when she said the city’s land would be all that her mantle covered, she meant exactly that, no more, no less. If the people of Meyun wanted to coat the altar of Starry Tarv in their city with gold leaf (which they had already done), that was fine, but it had no effect on her decision, which was based on unalterable fact and inspired by divine justice.

It was at this point that the two cities took up arms; and from this time on Bult and Tarv played no recorded role in events, however constantly and fervently invoked by their descendants and devotees in Meyun and Huy.

For the next couple of generations the dispute simmered, sometimes breaking out in armed forays from Huy across the stream to the land they claimed on its western bank. About a mile and a half of the length of the stream was in dispute. The Alуn was some thirty yards wide at its shallowest, narrower where it ran between banks five feet high. There were some good trout pools in the northern end of the disputed reach. The forays from Huy always met fierce resistance from Meyun. Whenever the Huyans succeeded in keeping the piece of land west of the Alуn, they put up a wall around it in a semicircle out from the stream and back. The men of Meyun would then gather their forces, lead a foray against the wall, drive the Huyans back across the Alуn, pull the Huyans’ wall down, and erect a wall running along the east side of the stream for a mile and a half.

But that was the part of the stream to which the Huyan herders were accustomed to drive their cattle to drink. They would immediately begin pulling down the Meyunian wall. Archers of Meyun shot at them, hitting sometimes a man, sometimes a cow. The rage of Huy boiled over, and another foray burst forth from the gates of the city and retook the land west of the Alуn. Peacemakers intervened. The Council of the Fathers of Meyun met in conclave, the Council of the Mothers of Huy met in conclave, they ordered the combatants to withdraw, sent messengers and diplomats back and forth across the Alуn, tried to reach a settlement, and failed. Or sometimes they succeeded, but then a cowherd of Huy would take his cattle across the stream into the rich pastures where since time immemorial they had grazed, and cowherds of Meyun would round up the trespassing herds and drive them to the walled paddocks of their city, and the cowherd of Huy would rush home vowing to bring down the wrath of Bult upon the thieves and get his cattle back. Or two fishermen fishing the quiet pools of the Alуn above the cattle crossing would quarrel over whose pools they were fishing, and stride back to their respective cities vowing to keep poachers out of their waters. And it would all start up again.

Not a great many were killed in these forays, but still they caused a fairly steady mortality among the young men of both cities. At last the Councilwomen of Huy decided that this running sore must be healed once for all, and without bloodshed. As so often, invention was the mother of discovery. Copper miners of Huy had recently developed a powerful explosive. The Councilwomen saw in it the means to end the war.

They ordered out a large workforce. Guarded by archers and spearmen, these Huyans, by furious digging and the planting of explosive charges in the ground, in the course of twenty-six hours changed the course of the Alon for the whole disputed mile and half. With their explosives they dammed the stream and dug a channel that led it to run in an arc along the border they claimed, west of its old course. This new course followed the line of ruins of the various walls they had built and Meyun had torn down.

They then sent messengers across the meadows to Meyun to announce, in polite and ceremonious terms, that peace between the cities was restored, since the boundary Meyun had always claimed—the east bank of the river Alon—was acceptable to Huy, so long as the cattle of Huy were allowed to drink at certain watering places on the eastern bank.

A good part of the Council of Meyun was willing to accept this solution. They admitted that the wily women of Huy were bilking them out of their property; but it was only a bit of pastureland not two miles long and less than a half mile wide; and their fishing rights to the pools of the Alon were no longer to be in question. They urged acceptance of the new course of the river. But sterner minds refused to yield to chicanery. The Lactor General made a speech in which he cried that every inch of that precious soil was drenched in the red blood of the sons of Mey and made sacred by the starry cloak of Tarv. That speech turned the vote.

Meyun had not yet invented very effective explosives, but it is easier to restore a stream to its natural course than to induce it to follow an artificial one. A wildly enthusiastic workforce of citizens, digging furiously, guarded by archers and spearmen, returned the Alуn to its bed in the course of a single night.

There was no resistance, no bloodshed, for the Council of Huy, bent on peace, had forbidden their guards to attack the party from Meyun. Standing on the east bank of the Alon, having met no opposition, smelling victory in the air, the Lactor General cried, “Forward, men! Crush the conniving strumpets once and for all!” And with one cry, says the annalist, all the archers and spearmen of Meyun, followed by many of the citizens who had come to help move the river back to its bed, rushed across the half mile of meadow to the walls of Huy.

They broke into the city, but the city guards were ready for them, as were the citizens, who fought like tigers to defend their homes. When, after an hour’s bloody fighting, the Lactor General was slain—felled by a forty-pint butter churn shoved out a window onto his head by an enraged housewife—the forces of Meyun retreated in disorder back to the Alуn. They regrouped and defended the stream bravely until nightfall, when they were driven back across it and took refuge within their own city walls. The guards and citizens of Huy did not try to enter Meyun, but went back and planted explosives and dug all night to restore the Alуn to its new, west-curving course.

Given the highly infectious nature of technologies of destruction, it was inevitable that Meyun should discover how to make explosives as powerful as those of their rival. What was perhaps unusual was that neither city chose to use them as a weapon. As soon as Meyun had the explosives, their army, led by a man in the newly created rank of Sapper General, marched out and blew up the dam across the old bed of the Alуn. The river rushed into its former course, and the army marched back to Meyun.

Under their new Supreme Engineer, appointed by the disappointed and vindictive Councilwomen of Huy, the guards marched out and did some sophisticated dynamiting which, by blocking the old course and deepening the access to the new course of the river, led the Alуn to flow happily back into the latter.

Henceforth the territorialism of the two city-states was expressed almost entirely in explosions. Though many soldiers and citizens and a great many cows were killed, as technological improvements led to ever more powerful agents of destruction which could blow up ever larger quantities of earth, these charges were never planted as mines with the intention of killing. Their sole purpose was to fulfill the great aim of Meyun and Huy: to change the course of the river.

For nearly a hundred years the two city-states devoted the greatest part of their energies and resources to this purpose.

By the end of the century, the landscape of the region had been enormously and irrevocably altered. Once green meadows had sloped gently down to the willow-clad banks of the little Alуn with its clear trout pools, its rocky narrows, its muddy watering places and cattle crossings where cows stood dreaming udder-deep in the cool shallows. In place of this there was now a canyon, a vast chasm, half a mile across from lip to lip and nearly two thousand feet deep. Its overhanging walls were of raw earth and shattered rock. Nothing could grow on them; even when not destabilised by repeated explosions, they eroded in the winter rains, slipping down continually in rockfalls and landslides that blocked the course of the brown, silt-choked torrent at the bottom, forcing it to undercut the walls on the other side, causing more slides and erosion, which kept widening and lengthening the canyon.

Both the cities of Meyun and Huy now stood only a few hundred yards from the edge of a precipice. They hurled defiance at each other across the abyss which had eaten up their pastures, their fields, their cattle, and all their thubes of gold.

As the river and all the disputed land was now down at the bottom of this huge desolation of mud and rock, there was nothing to be gained by blowing it up again; but habit is powerful.

The war did not end until the dreadful night when in a sudden, monstrous moment, half the city of Meyun shivered, tilted, and slid bodily into the Grand Canyon of the Alуn.

The charges which destabilised the east wall of the canyon had been set, not by the Supreme Engineer of Huy, but by the Sapper General of Meyun. To the ravaged and terrified people of Meyun, the disaster was still not their fault, but Huy’s fault: it was because Huy existed that the Sapper General had set his misplaced charges. But many citizens of Huy came hurrying across the Alуn, crossing it miles to the north or south where the canyon was shallower, to help the survivors of the enormous mudslide which had swallowed half Meyun’s houses and inhabitants.

Their honest generosity was not without effect. A truce was declared. It held, and was made into a peace.

Since then the rivalry between Meyun and Huy has been intense but nonexplosive. Having no more cows or pastures, they live off tourists. Perched on the very brink of the West Rim of the Grand Canyon, what is left of Meyun has the advantage of a dramatic and picturesque site, which attracts thousands of visitors every year. But most of the visitors actually stay in Huy, where the food is better, and which is only a very short stroll from the East Rim with its marvelous views of the canyon and the half-buried ruins of Old Meyun.

Each city maintains on its respective side a winding path for tourists riding donkeys to descend among the crags and strange, towering mud formations of the canyon to the little River Alуn that flows, clear again, though cowless and troutless, in the depths. There the tourists have a picnic on the grassy banks. The guides from Huy tell their tourists the amusing legend of the Hundred Daughters of Bult, and the guides from Meyun tell their tourists the entertaining myth of the Starry Cloak of Tarv. Then they all ride their donkeys slowly back up to the light.