For one heartbeat she saw an image of him riding turret on a Second World War tank through the North African night with five Gurkhas hitching a ride behind him. Her soul was chilled.
She took this desert priest by the hand and led him through the Palace maze toward the aroma of Aesoe’s private dining quarters. Suesar and Aesoe followed to the feast which she knew had been kept waiting and warm past its time. She seated them and served Kaesim first in repayment for his service to her. Last she carved the tiny carcass and heaped their plates with meat and gravy. The foreign priests made some sign over their food and began to eat heartily while Kathein began her stories of war, emphasizing atrocity so that she might make these men so loathe the horror of it that they would reconsider the role of warrior clan.
She told of the total extermination of the Jews in Britain on orders of the Pope so that the British people never thereafter had a Jewish problem. She told of the massacre of the Persians at Thermopylae. She told of the mountain of skulls in India. She told the story of the Turks forever cursed with the blood of the Armenians. She told of the inefficiencies of Belsen and the efficiencies of Hiroshima. She told of the post First World War invasion of Poland by Russia, and the retaliatory invasion of Russia by Poland, and of the final solution to the Polish problem when the Russians, a generation later and allied with the Nazis, overran Poland and executed 15,000 members of the Polish military clan and buried them in a mass grave at Katyn.
She told of the great Amerikan Peace Movement whose theory of justice was that the brutal Amerikan Army should move out of Southeast Asia so that the Cambodians could fertilize their fields with the bodies of Cambodians so that the Vietnamese could prey on the corpse of a decimated nation so that the Chinese could punish the Vietnamese so that the Vietnamese could drown their own Chinese in the sea. She told of the sack of Rome.
The priests of Itraiel listened to her as one listens to an Ivieth chew the leg of a traveller with tales of distant places. They began to ask her questions about strategy, purpose, gain. She answered the difficult problems they posed as best she could. They tried to make sense of Hitler at Stalingrad and the perplexities so gripped them that, for a moment, they forgot their meat. They came to the tentative conclusion that the Riethe were not mad, just stupid.
“They understood weapons,” said Kaesim.
“But they did not understand strategy,” said Suesar.
Both began to question Kathein about weapons. She told them of axe and sword and crossbow and rifle and cannon and tank and fighter aircraft and helicopter gungods and long-range bombers and ICBMs and spy satellites.
Kaesim grinned through the fei flower scars upon his face. “Maybe God is a spy satellite for the Riethe.” He laughed. They all laughed the great laugh till tears came to their eyes, for that was too terrifying a joke to take seriously.
Kathein told of the weapons cycles that passed through Riethe history. First the bows and arrows and the staffs and slings made the individual supreme. Then the invention of the two-wheeled cart was taken over by nomads who lightened and perfected the design for rapid control of their herds. (Herds, Kathein explained, were small clans of people kept for their meat and hides and milk.) The chariot was pulled by a Horse.
“The Horse piece of chess?”
“The Horse is historical? Not mythical?”
“The Horse of The Forge of War,” explained Aesoe, “is a very large humanoid creature with a long face and four legs and no arms.”
The Itraiel priests grinned hugely and clinked shot glasses of whisky to this image of a four-footed Ivieth trying to pull a wagon.
“Horses were expensive and hard to train. Chariots were costly, so a select military clan grew up around them and swept down over Mesopotamia and India and as far east as China, killing all the priests who were not afraid of them.” She smiled at Aesoe.
“The confusion of weapon with strategy,“ commented Kaesim.
Kathein told of the next wave of weapons: long daggers of cheap iron, wielded like staffs, that made the individual soldier supreme again. An untrained man with an iron sword was a match for a highly trained and wealthy aristocrat in his chariot. So aristocracies died.
Then came the light Horse mounted by an archer. The foot soldier with iron sword and spear and shield was no longer effective. The only defense was an armored Horse and an armored rider who took years to train and the wealth of a village to support. Central governments collapsed. The man whose sword no longer defended his family lost power to the armored warrior of his village who became a hereditary priest.
But exploding powder of char and sulfur and nitrate was invented. A man with no training and a musket became the equal of the armored lord. The lords were swept away in revolutions that gave power to the common man.
Weapons grew more sophisticated. Machine rifles, aircraft, tanks, artillery, seagoing battlegods. Clans with industrial power learned to sweep away the riflemen. ICBMs that held ransom over cities were manned by an elite corps trained at great expense. The common man ceased to be a soldier. He refused to be drafted. Professional armies rose to power. Democracies crumbled. Socialist aristocracies took their place, exploiting the now impotent common man.
Then in the everlasting search for more sophisticated weapons the insect-sized machine-mind came as cheap iron had come at the end of the bronze age. With a basket of wheat any man could buy a demon missile that would fell a huge airplane or roast a tank or peel open an armored car. Industrial peoples could no longer control poor peoples. The new socialist aristocracies, no longer able to frighten the common man, withered away.
And the message was always the same. When the priest clans of Riethe dominated with their expensive weapons, their world was ruled by massacre, and when the underclans dominated with their cheap weapons, Riethe turned red with blood.
Kathein finished her analysis with an accusing glance at Aesoe as if to say: you would inflict that on us?
“The military lords of the Riethe would nourish us at our Dispersion Feast,” boasted Kaesim, unimpressed.
“The Riethe pose no absolute threat,” mused Suesar. “They have no sense of strategy. But we will need the weapons. Even a genius is flattened by the mindless boulder rolling down the mountain.”
She was furious at them for the casual way they had taken her stories. “You would want the responsibility of holding in your hands a machine that would make sunfire to devour a whole city?”
“We would welcome it.”
Aesoe called for entertainment. His Liethe women entered. Honey played her instrument while Cairnem and Sieen danced. The dark guests shouted their encouragement and pleasure, and clapped their hands for it was that type of fast light dance. Then the priests begged to demonstrate their own skill.
They stripped so that they were only wearing their brass belts and genital protectors. Cries erupted from their lips as they began to circle each other on the dance floor, hissing. Suesar snarled and attacked and through the magic of swiftness and leverage was thrown high where it appeared he would crash into the floor. But he pulled and twisted in midair and landed on his feet.
Of the three Liethe only the Queen of Life-before-Death stayed to watch the combat, rapt with fascination, wearing the persona of Cairnem.
The play of kembri wills continued, where a gesture might rescue one from a smashed skull, or an attack might seem to pass right through an opponent. They bowed to Aesoe’s foot stamping. Caimem grinned.
Before they had finished their bows, she was hissing a challenge. The priests turned in astonishment because she had used the kembri form of major insult. While they stared, she repeated her insult and stripped to her belt, a tiny belt with a wooden buckle that matched her tiny size. The priests burst out laughing.