“We’ll see.” Easily, with a shrug. “Ask what you like.”
“I haven’t talked to the Brodaini that often,” she admitted. “For the most part they’ve been too busy to answer my questions. But I’ve been talking to the Classani, when I can.”
“It didn’t take you long to learn that the servants are always the best sources of information,” Campas grinned. “My congratulations.”
“Thank you.” A large, dull-colored bird came fluttering up from the underbrush almost under the feet of Fiona’s horse; it snorted and half-reared. Fiona brought it under control, soothed the horse by stroking its neck, and then looked up at Campas.
“After the Classani got over their surprise at having their opinion solicited at all,” she said, “they talked very freely. I’ve been trying to make sense out of what they told me. And of what the Brodaini have told me about themselves, and of what your own people have told me about them. So I thought I’d ask for you for the afternoon, to help me sort it all out.”
He looked at her with a wry smile. “I once started a history of the Brodaini,” he said. “The Brodaini were very much in fashion for a season or two, you see, about ten years ago. All the city fashion brats trying to dress simply, imitating their direct speech, striving to affect martial virtue. No doubt it amused the Brodaini to no end. But the fashion changed... and suddenly there was no audience for my history. I abandoned it, but whatever I learned is at your service, Ambassador.”
“Thank you, Campas.” The history was a surprise, a stroke of good luck. She rode on for a moment in silence, wondering how to begin. She’d had abstracts of the formal history the Brodaini taught their own children, of course: there was a lot of strange legend in it, gods and spirits wandering among the mortals and motivating their behavior, but there had also been large swatches of careful statistics — which lord brought how many men to which battle, that sort of thing — that seemed factual enough. There were also a great many madmen running through the histories, with nothing made of it: it was as if the Brodaini considered it a fairly usual thing to go mad, and never held it against the madman after he’d recovered his wits. It had all been difficult to untangle, particularly since the motivations of everyone in the histories had been so difficult to fathom. They went here, they did this: but why? Motivation and psychology were unknown to the Brodaini; they simply didn’t bother explaining behavior, aside from the appearance of an occasional god or demon whispering in a warrior’s ear. There was no distinction between fact, supposition, legend, and myth. The personalities had to be understood in the context of Brodaini culture, and it was a context Fiona found entirely opaque.
There were also enormous gaps. The Brodaini warriors held center stage; the Classani were occasionally given a footnote, if valiant enough; the other two classes were scarcely mentioned at all. It was not unusual, she supposed, for the ruling class to be blind to the thoughts and actions of their inferiors, but it was frustrating.
“The Brodaini,” Campas said, filling the silence, “came as conquerors. They were living in the mountains to the north of their land, in the deep valleys there... and their gods told them to go down and conquer the flatlands and the islands, which they did, though it took them sixty years. There were a lot of revolts, of course, and the Brodaini had to be wary; their gods told them how to order society for the betterment of all, and things settled down. But after the revolts had all been put down the gods started fighting among themselves, with their Brodaini adherents battling right along. There hasn’t been peace up there since.”
“Yes,” Fiona said. Barring the nonsense about the gods, it made sense. A poor people living on the fringes of the glaciers, looking down with envy on the more prosperous folk below. And then the climate changed, perhaps, forcing them south; or their numbers increased, demanding a migration in search of living space — and then a sixty-year war, won by the invaders thanks to the total militarization of their society and a certain technological superiority: their armored lancers, once they’d learned proper tactics, had run smash over their enemies’ infantry-based armies. The numbers of Brodaini had never been very large — less than one-tenth of the entire population of the area they controlled — and their survival depended on their constant military preparedness. The class barriers would have risen in an attempt to keep arms from the conquered; the danger of revolt would have demanded constant military readiness, and a firming of the military system. And after the situation had been stabilized the military caste would have needed a justification for their existence, so they began fighting one another.
Another society might have expanded outwards in search of conquest, but the Brodaini had been too inner-directed: a possible revolt of their subjects would never have been far from their minds, and they would not have dared to send a military force abroad lest their inferiors rise up while they were away. The result: a feuding upper caste obsessed with its own security and committed to maintaining a rigid class system that kept them safely on top. Anything alien, anything foreign that threatened to upset the system was an enemy: their ideal was stability, rather than evolution. Vail, in their own language, an ideal, eternal, unchanging harmony... .
“After that the chronicles are filled with wars to the point of tedium,” Campas said. “Also genealogies: those people were always allying by marriage, but the alliances didn’t always hold, so a lot of first cousins ended up giving each other the chop.”
“Do you think the women would have become militarized during the conquest?” Fiona asked. “To be able to hold down the peasants while the men were off at war cutting off new bits of territory?”
Campas frowned. “I don’t know. That possibility hadn’t occurred to me.” He gazed abstractedly northward, toward a great east-bending swoop of the river. “The idea seems reasonable,” he added. “I can think of any number of Brodaini heroines who were celebrated for conducting epic defenses of their homelands while their menfolk were off fighting somewhere else.”
“Do they reach as far back as the conquest?”
Campas knit his brows. “Let me think. There’s Amasta Toronu y’Tosta — the Tosta family epic is about her. There was a big defense of the home castle against an uprising; she won by spreading plague among the attackers. Later she went mad, poisoned her husband, and started a war that ended tragically. Committed suicide in the end; there’s a famous verse drama about that, all dramatic monologue, hell on the voice but a part to kill for.” He looked up. “But it was the siege that made her famous. And she’s from the time of the conquests. You may be right.”
He looked at her with open curiosity. “Do women fight on your world, Ambassador?”
Fiona glanced away. Why was she finding it so hard to lie to this man? The answer, in all its full implications, was such that he couldn’t possibly understand it in any case.
“Yes, we do,” she said. “I would be thankful if you kept this private.”
“Of course, Ambassador.”
“We’ve made our weapons very small,” Fiona said. “Physical strength isn’t required. Anyone can carry them.”
Now why had she said that? It would do nothing but raise further questions, questions that she would be bound not to answer. He couldn’t possibly understand the nature or evolution of energy weapons, nor was it proper that he should. Nor the nature of war on Igara, the carefully formal dance of death between the complex interwoven country families, the city block republics, the tenuous, infirm nations, theoretically controlling so much planet surface but with such little real power. War was real, but it was kept small; it was murderous, but in its way it was also very personal, almost intimate. And, when it happened, sudden and incredibly violent.