These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: begin, seed, spawn.
Oon-Above grew from a single family lost in the drifts meeting a single family stuck in a hollow. It filled the hollow and tunneled into the drifts and found them pleasing, if chilly. A safe place, and less cold once you wrapped yourself in the furs of a lemmer. Food and comfort both, down under the midnight that lasted months.
A clan dared venture beyond the forest for want of room and roots, and found that the oldstone, though so much heavier than wood, was ready to carve and twice as strong. If you heated it just so, if you hummed to it just right, it would do as you said and make homes that no fire could consume or storm thunder down. That was the root of Tnekt.
Guna was already ages-old when it was settled, but it had only poked itself above the surface some forty years before the canoes came. Then came more canoes, and more, and more, for the fishing was so very good. There were too many canoes and not enough Guna, and then someone asked what if they encouraged the growth of the atoll through fishmeal, and cleaning, and regular blood. And then came Great Guna.
These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: grow, thrive, sprawl.
Oon-Above filled quickly, oh too quickly. The crystalline snow-domes arched higher above the many hollows and the tunnels were bored deeper into the drifts for more space, more room, but still there was not enough. They flowed through the ice like water through cracks, and at last they came to a crack and chiselled it through to see a strange horizon that was green and blue, not white. They had found the edge of the glacier, and underneath them lay all the taiga in the world.
Tnekt did not grow. Tnekt chiselled away. Dispassionately, carefully, endlessly. Giant ridges and blocks are shaped hollowed and stamped. Walls are made from buttresses. Lamps from lumps. The average size of a dwelling in Tnekt is over fifty feet at the shoulder, and it holds hundreds. The inhabitants struggle to reach their own steps, like children wearing their parent’s clothes. But it is sturdy and invincible to assault and every day there is less oldstone and more Tnekt.
Great Guna grew and grew and grew without limit, feeding off the sea and its heady intellect both. Coral-shaping and coral-breeding were the greatest of professions, artistry and craftsmanship swirled together like the rainbow colours of its output. Some shone softly for light; some grew into natural fishtraps, some even floated, and then Great Guna grew rootless islands and sent vast expeditions into the world, to chart and to explore and to recruit. Join us, they said as they sailed. Join us, and make land from nothing. This is our word. This is Great Guna.
These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: crush, mangle, mutilate.
There were people down there beneath Oon-Above in the taiga in the trees, soft strange people who had never known the low creak and groan of living encased in ice that could crush continents. They did not know of the tunnels and had never seen hollows, not until they were brought back packed in slush and too cold to feebly resist. There they were warmed and put to work digging deeper, ever deeper, to grow, to expand, to render the hollows grander, the tunnels broader; to tend the lemmers and slaughter their flesh; to shine the ice-mirrors until they gleamed and spat fire from the sky. They hated and were despised and this was good and proper as Onn-Above took their timber and their bodies and their metals and crushed their land flat one league at a time.
Tnekt grew restless. There were wars to be fought, and feuds had grown dull; there were riches to be coveted, and their own had become everyday. Beyond their borders lay new foods, new goods, new trinkets. So they clothed their warriors in oldstone hauberks and gave them flaked spears and set them loose to demand tribute and teach construction and burn villages and sow crops. And in Tnekt’s name, they accomplished much of this.
Great Guna encompassed three separate island chains by the time of the breeding of towermaker coral. Less than a decade following that, it held eleven; seven in shackles. A war-island would sail into a bay. Join us, they said. Join us, and make land from nothing. And if they were received impolitely, or perhaps not eagerly enough, or maybe refused, they would flood the bay with towermaker spawn. Without the hour it would be a clot, within the day spires fit for ballista would raise. A bay into a beachhead, a village into an abbatoir, an island for Great Guna, which grew greater still. The corals still needed blood.
These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: bloat, fester, rot.
The lenses kept Oon-Above safe. Who could threaten them from below, with the ability to reflect light until it steamed flesh and fired wood? They took what they wished and burned what displeased them and crushed the rest as the glacier moved under their feet. And as time went on, they took more and more. The hollows and chambers of Oon-Above grew clotted with loot and plunder; the gentry competed and boasted and outdid one another. This one had more slaves. This one had more gold. This one had grander chambers. The chambers in particular were easy to rectify; have your slaves carve more, have your gold commission more. Oon-Above was already a warren, but year by year it was nearly coming to resemble a collection of soap bubbles.
Tnekt glutted itself. Every year thousands went to the fields on its behalf and every day thousands moved cartloads on its behalf and every night it took itself to the table and satiated its stomach on their offerings. The stone was cold but the nights were warm, and warmer still if you were of the oldest of the oldstone, the families who traced their roots back to the dawn of Tnekt itself, when that ingenious clan had first began to heat it and tap it and hum at it just so, just so. HE was of grander lineage than SHE, but not as much as THEY, and so on and so on. Harmless arguments that turned deadly when it came to politics and it always does.
Great Guna wrapped half the world, albeit much of it quiet blue. They decided what was land and what was sea, and dominated wherever the two met. They took up the spear and the shield and the great ballista when this was questioned. Where the war-islands sailed they were obeyed, and they sailed everywhere, expanding as the years rolled on and each being caroused and welcomed and feasted when it returned home with an admiral bragging their conquests. All were glad to listen and toast. Except, perhaps, the other admirals.
These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: rupture, erupt, drain.
Oon-Above’s most sacred and respectable and beautiful of places was the Hearthollow, where the oldest and riches and most impressive of its gentry lived. And this was why when the slaves revolted, it was here that the fighting was fiercest, and this was why it was here that the lens-operators grew desperate enough to turn their glares on Oon-Above itself, and this was why it was here that the thin-sliced shelled of Oon-Above was first revealed to be, alas, only too thin. Entire hollows slid away, sheared side from side. The glacier groaned and bucked underfoot and slid and crumbled at its edges. Oon-Above burned as it froze, screamed and fell silent save pattering footsteps and muffled weeping.
The Tennekta died. This was not unusual. The Tennekta died young and childless. This was unusual. The Tennekta’s mother’s family was accused of treachery by her father’s family, and the Tennekta’s father’s family was accused likewise by the same. This was not unusual. The Tennekta’s families put each other’s crops to the flame after a hard, drought-ridden year. This was unusual. Six months later, half of Tnekt was starving and the other half was putting each other to the spear. This, by then, was usual.
In all of Great Guna’s grasp, none were greater than Admiral Deeg. Born on the eighteenth isle of the fifth chain of the ninth conquest, his ambition had risen him from slave’s-son to island-driver to Admiral to the heights of the fleet. He had brought thousands into the grasp on voyages of years, each time returning with a fresh crew of strangers to behold Great Guna itself for the first time. And although all toasted him in the streets, his fellows stared at his back and groused at its foreign shade and shape. It was not right, they said, for Great Guna to rely so upon a man who was not proper of it, raised right. And one day they all said so to each other, and they gave him a toast that night that was a good deal stronger than usual. So strong, in fact, that he smelled it as he raised the cup. That night, Deeg returned to his war-island. That night, Deeg sent word to his old lieutenants. That night, Great Guna itself saw towermaker coral fill its harbours.
These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: wither, unravel, crust.
Oon-Above was emptied, its people long-fled into the forests to hunt for roots and beg aid before its greatest accomplishment was done. After the long slow years of its dissolution and collapse, very little of the front third of the glacier remained, and it retreated in sulky silence, leaving broken trees and grooved ground and the odd lump of shiny metal that had once been an admirable statue in the halls of a respected family. Now gone.
The oldstone heated just right and hummed to just right came apart in just the right way, and soon enough just the wrong one. A building falls into a building falls into a building like dominoes made of oldstone and flesh and screams and the fields and the harbour are clotted with screaming refugees. What is left is gripped by war-lords, and soon after the strange great coral-island appeared on the horizon, its walls manned by keen-eyed and hungry-toothed warriors, they found themselves grasped low and made to bow in the ruins of their grandfathers. Now gone.
Great Guna’s grasp reached halfway around the world the night of Admiral Deeg’s escape from death. By the day he breathed his last, it no longer existed. The last of the war-islands had sunk each other ten years before; the secrets of the towermaker had been long lost, running into the saltwater with the blood of the coral-architects as Guna was laid low by ballista and torch and thunderous strife. As the fleets streamed home to devour one another their subjects rose up one by one to look above the horizon and find that where once land had been made from sea, only blue remained. Now gone.
And they thought about what they would build now.
These are the rules of civilization.
Much as they would pretend otherwise.