irresponsible Shabble, now a priest, accepting the priestly duty of marriage counselling, and thus engaged in dialoguing the intimacies of the sexual conduct of a beglamoured but embattled young couple.
History, as one of the wise has had occasion to remark, is very largely a record of war, rape, murder, slaughter, torture, treason, revolution and riot; for which the historian is often blamed, as if history would cease to be enacted were all its chroniclers to be slaughtered (a remedy which has actually been essayed on at least three separate occasions, and which has proved to be singularly ineffective as a remedy for the woes of humanity). It is one of the frustrations of the chronologer’s task that most readers of annals such as these (these readers being few to start with, for history has never had popular appeal) are drawn to such pages by a positive lust for bloodshed; and, lacking any desire to join the ranks of the illuminati, have scant appetite for the scholarly conclusions which cast light on the Causes and the Processes of such disasters.
Scholarly conclusions now follow.
So:
Fly! Away! Let youth depart and race by a flicker of pages to the start of the next chapter, there to be gratified (perhaps) by tsunami, blasphemy or blatant copulation (or, then again, perhaps not).
And now, secure in the company of hoar age and toothless wisdom alone, let us proceed to show why Pelagius Zozimus was not constitutionally equipped to understand the temperament of the mob; and why, too, the political achievements of wizards and wonderworkers alike fall short of their potential.
As poets in committed combination are rare, so too are wizards; and for similar reasons. Any one great poet would remain great — as would any one great wizard — were all his fellows to disappear from the world in a great disaster. Hence most poets (and a great many wizards) secretly yearn for such a catastrophe. Much would be lost, but personal power would be enhanced by the lack of competition.
Compare this to the state of a soldier, be he of any rank from common muck-slugger to lordly general.
What is he on his own?
Nothing.
Can he rape, rob and pillage on his own?
Not effectively, for any washerwoman with a pitchfork in her hands can put him to flight.
Can he storm towns, sack castles, beseige cities, dare his desires across the seas or fortify his possession of ill-gotten treasures on his own?
The answer:
No.
Whereas wizard and poet alike can in solitude and with the self alone conspire to create instruments of temporal power (and in isolation consummate such conspiracy), no such ability is granted unto the ordinary run of mortals; wherefrom it follows that ordinary mortals must like the ants unite for cohesive action in the face of their individual impotence.
Ants engrossed in the multitude of their fellows partake of a power which would be alien to their existence were they to live alone; and so it is with most humans. As the antheap to the ant, so stands the State to the common citizen; and so like an ant the citizen submits to the oppressions of laborious routine, of claustrophobic discipline, and of war.
‘Discipline is good,’ says your average citizen; meaning, in truth, ‘I love power, and cannot find it on my own, for on my own I am as nothing.’
‘The gods are great,’ he says; meaning, ‘the gods reward my worship by allotting to me the worship of my wife, a worship made a very law of piety.’
‘If you would have peace then prepare for war,’ he says; meaning, ‘the militarization of the state in peace as well as war is the best enforcement of that hierarchy of discipline which rewards obedience with power.’
All this is true; yet unacknowledged. For it is a characteristic of humankind that the most bitter realities of their lives — the inevitability of death and the fatuosity of the periodic slaughters which so accelerate that death — are rarely conceded except by a small fraction of aberrant intellects most likely persecuted for such acknowledgement.
Thus, as ants in their mindless millions go to war, so go men; and, while philosophers of biology declare the intellect of the average human to be greater than the corresponding resource of the ant, the differences in the ultimate outcome of their behaviour are so slight as to be unobservable.
Such subordinations are alien to the intellects of wizard and poet alike; for, being possessed of powers won in solitary endeavour outside the antheap, they are disinclined to submit to those oppressions which the common citizen clamours to embrace.
It follows from above that the most unkempt band of syphilitic bandits is apt to display more political cohesion than the inhabitants of a salon of imperial poets; and the most murderous brood of pirates, though its members be universally refugees from the law of ordered States, enforces among its own number a discipline of war which wizards of Argan’s Confederation could only look upon in outright envy; and warriors, who in their leisure time display a gross indiscipline of drink and lust, conform upon the battlefield in perfect regulation.
In summary:
As it is with the warrior, so it is with your common citizen. Unlike wizard or poet, your common citizen holds no power in his own right, and can win power only by joining an antheap of oppressions. He joins the State because the State is in many ways a conspiracy to give him power. Power over property; power over slaves; power over the women in his life; power over children and his economic inferiors.
Thus so many applaud the State when the State is savage, and wrathful, and cruel; and thus a leader who kills, maims, tortures, imprisons and oppresses is often widely applauded as long as he is adroitly selective in his choice of victims. The poverty and suffering of the weak delight the strong, for thus they see their own power enhanced.
He crushed: he was a great leader.
He killed: he was a great leader.
He destroyed: he was a great leader.
He oppressed: he was a great leader.
He warred: he was a great leader.
Great, yes, and very holy.
It happens that from time to time a ruler of a different sort arises.
Justina was such a ruler.
The Empress Justina believed no self-justifying rhetoric of power, least of all that rhetoric which claims the might of the State to be a good in its own right. Instead, she perceived the State through the eyes of common sense. She saw that humans living as thickly upon the ground as they do within the confines of Injiltaprajura must combine to manage the supply of their water and the disposal of their sewage; that a regulated coinage and a disciplined merchantry can enhance the collective prosperity; that the collective State can extend to the aged and the indigent great mercies of charity which would be beyond the patience or the means of the individual; and that a just system of law supplies the aggrieved with an orderly remedy of wrongs so great that they would otherwise threaten the common peace.
The Empress Justina was good; and merciful; and wise; and therefore out of favour with most of her citizens. For an imperial disinclination to make the State an instrument of selective oppression thwarts the desires of those many citizens who wish to be lords of wrath in their own households and the neighbourhood streets.
Why then had she remained in power for so long?
On Untunchilamon, the Family Thrug came to power at the beginning of Talonsklavara. Lonstantine Thrug seized his opportunity and overthrew Wazir Sin in a move which owed everything to bloody ferocity and political opportunism; and such were the initial uncertainties of civil war that none wished to be the first to oppose him. For any wazir of Untunchilamon must necessarily support one side or another in Talonsklavara or else incur the wrath of both — and who could say which side would triumph?
When Lonstantine was incarcerated in the Dromdanjerie as a consequence of his mounting insanity, his daughter Justina inherited his throne and the very uncertainties which supported it. Later, when the victory of Aldarch Three became a probability, her position weakened, to the point where Aquitaine Varazchavardan had dared to coup against her.
Thereafter she had stayed alive (and in power) by bluff, luck, the loyalty of friends, and her own audacious skills at political manoeuvring.
