Peacemaker (37 page)

The aiji offered the tribal peoples refuge from the fighting, in two small areas of the west coast where they could pursue their traditional ways and their livelihood of fishing. Without attacks coming at them on the island, humans found it a place of safe retreat, and centered their non-combatants there—which left only the most aggressive humans on the continent, exactly the situation the aiji wanted. The humans on the mainland could now be attacked and maneuvered into small pockets that could be cut off.

The War of the Landing ended with the humans on the mainland cut off from supplies, with no way back to the space station, and with no prospect of rescue from the island, or even of retreat to it, since the forces from the Marid held the strait. The aiji in Shejidan offered these groups a choice: extermination, or a way out. Humans might have ownership of the large and rich island of Mospheira, the conditions being first, total disarmament—the weapons they had were to be taken out to sea and sunk.

Secondly, and this was why the aiji was so generous: surrender of the technology. In return for an untroubled sanctuary, the humans were to send a paidhi to Shejidan to live, to translate, and to supervise the gradual turnover of all their technology to the aishidi'tat—namely to the aiji . . . and they were not to build or use any technology that was not approved by the paidhi.

The desperate humans had a very limited understanding of what a paidhi was. They understood that he was to mediate, translate, and that he would be their official in the aiji's court, so they picked the most fluent Ragi speaker they had, hoping to stall off any demand for their weapons technology.

That was very well, the aiji said to them, through the paidhi they sent. There would surely be areas of agreement, and very useful things would serve.

That
any
knowledge could be turned to other purposes, and that atevi scientists were already finding out the secrets of foreign machines they had captured, was something the aiji failed to mention.

That there was still a starship the humans hoped would someday return was a matter humans had failed to mention, on their side.

But that agreement brought sufficient peace: this was the Treaty of the Landing, on which all our dealings with humans have been based. The Foreign Star, empty, continued to orbit the world.

Humans, vastly outnumbered, set about transforming Mospheira to suit themselves.

The aiji in Shejidan argued convincingly that the association atevi had formed to defend themselves should not be dissolved, since who knew if there were more humans to arrive from the heavens?

The allied association of the Marid had joined the aishidi'tat at the last moment, and would not accept the guilds: it maintained its own. Likewise the East was not yet part of the aishidi'tat in any permanent way.

But in the same way atevi had built the railroads, they had found pragmatic ways to work together—and the number-counters found fortunate numbers in the suggestions of an extension of the association—so it was felicitous that the Western Association, which was no longer just western, should stay together to respond quickly to any further difficulty from the humans on Mospheira.

The lords of the outlying clans and the regions, the aiji said, all should sit equally in the legislature in Shejidan, and they should all have a say in the laws of the aishidi'tat, the same as those born to the cental region.

The aiji further divided the entire continent into defensive districts, and these became provinces, with their own lords, also seated in the legislature. This added a few extra votes to critical regional associations, to balance the dominance of Shejidan: this pleased the lords.

The aiji then went to the guilds with another proposal: that, as they had all worked across regional lines during the War, they should continue after the war, adding a special privilege and formal principle. The guilds of the expanded aishidi'tat should have no respect for clan origin in candidacy for membership or in assignment: in fact, the guilds of
every
sort, like the Assassins, like Transport, should become their own authority, assigning members to posts only based on qualification, officially now without regard to kinship, regional association, or clan. This placed all power over membership into the hands of the guild masters.

The heads of the various guilds, interested in maintaining the power they held under war conditions, saw nothing but advantage in the aiji's proposal. The idea was less popular with some of the regional associations, who still held apart from the guild system—but in the main, it became the rule, not by statue, but by internal guild rules, and there was nothing the regional associations
or
the newly created provinces
or
the clan lords could do about that—if they wanted guild services.

The Assassins' Guild, in private conference and at the aiji's request, agreed to one additional rule, that no one of their guild could seek or hold a political office or a lordship. They received a concession in exchange: that, as they were barred from politics, they would have certain statutory immunities from political pressure. Their records could not be summoned by any lord, their members would testify only before their own guild council, and the disappearance or death of any member of that guild, granted the unusual nature of their work and the extreme discipline imposed on the membership, could only be investigated by that guild and dealt with by that guild, by its own rules.

There were other, more detailed, provisions in that Assassins' Guild charter, and there were peculiar ones, too, in the regulation of other guilds, and also in privileges granted the residents of Shejidan, to have their own officials, independent of any clan.

It was a tremendous amount of power the aiji let flow out of his hands.

But it also meant the aiji in Shejidan gained the support of the city and all the guilds, and now outvoted any several regional lords.

And from that time, the Assassins, freed of political pressure, became not only the law enforcement of the aishidi'tat, but the check and balance on every legal system, the unassailable integrity at the heart of any aiji's rule.

The new principle of guild recruitment across clan and regional lines had an unintended consequence. It brought ideas into contact with other ideas, and fostered a flowering of arts and skills, invention and innovation—a cross-pollination that within a few years ended one major cause of wars. Even the domestic staffs that served a clan lord might be from different clans, different regions, and different philosophies, all working together.

It was, in that sense, an idyllic era of growth, discovery, and change—with occasional breaches and dissonances, true—but the clan feuds grew fewer, and more often bloodless, to the wonder of those who thought in the old ways, and distrusted the new.

There were two exceptions.

There had once been a great power in the southern ocean, which had conquered and colonized the Marid before the Great Wave had destroyed all the seaboard cities on the Southern Island. The Marid, of a culture separate from the north, had been reaching for the west coast before the petal sails had begun to fall . . . and while it had cooperated with the aishidi'tat during the War of the Landing and remained officially a member after the Treaty was signed, it refused to allow what it called the Shejidani guilds to make any assignments in the Marid—and it did not have all the guilds. It maintained its own recruitment and training centers for the Assassins, the Treasurers, the Merchants, the Artisans, the Kabiuteri, and the Builders, as well as some unique to their region. The five clans of the Marid united only infrequently, maintained their seats in the legislature of the aishidi'tat, and their disputes frequently resorted to warfare among themselves.

The Eastern Association, headed by Malguri from the time of the War of the Landing, was the second isolate entity, a vast territory walled off from the west by the continental divide, and by the storms of the Eastern Ocean. Its small clans and its three cultures had united with the West for the first time in the face of the threat from the heavens. But after the Treaty, as before, Easterners hunted, fished, and worked crafts, never having formed the guilds that were so important in the rest of the world.

They were, however, fierce fighters, and one guild had gotten a toehold in the East during the War of the Landing—the Assassins. They had organized their own training, their own guild hall, and ran their own operation in the East during the War. The Eastern Assassins' Guild affiliated itself with the Guild in Shejidan. It allowed certain of their members to be
assigned
by the Guild in Shejidan—but allowed no outsiders to come in. They were good, they were impeccably honest, they were in high demand because of their reputation, and recruitment was easy because of the general poverty of the East. But the East was otherwise separate from the guild system of the aishidi'tat . . . until Ilisidi, aiji in Malguri, was courted by the aiji in Shejidan.

Ilisidi-aiji brought a great deal to the marriage. She joined the vast territory of the East to the aishidi'tat. She had her own opinions, and voiced them, and being widowed, she continued to voice them in support of a list of causes including opposition to human presence, opposition to industrial encroachment, support for the environment, and concern for the unresolved west coast situation in the regions facing Mospheira. She maintained a considerable and independent bodyguard, larger than any other lord in the East or the west, and when widowed, she refused to give up her young son to the aiji's maternal grandfather.

She maintained control of the Bujavid, made herself aiji-regent, since she did not succeed in having the aishidi'tat accept her as aiji in fact—and she simultaneously refused to leave Shejidan—while she kept an iron control of Malguri. She continued well into her son's majority to have her own agenda, and her own very large bodyguard, which by now had extended her authority over the entire East, and which maintained her safety, even in annoying a number of the powers of the aishidi'tat in Shejidan.

Her son, Valasi, finally succeeded in establishing his own authority as aiji in Shejidan, with the help of the Taibeni clan of the Padi Valley, his grandmother's clan, and others of the north and mountain regions. He was twenty-seven by the time he made his bid for power, and Ilisidi conceded to him, finally, as he gained sufficient votes in the legislature.

Valasi made a contract marriage with a woman of the Taibeni, quickly produced an heir as insurance, and found it convenient to follow that contract marriage with several others, of whatever region he needed to draw more firmly into his hands. This bedroom diplomacy solved several petty wars.

He also gained several important technological advances through his partnership with Wilson-paidhi, including aviation and early television, and in all, had a strong grip on power, while he avoided having his eldest son in the hands of his various wives by putting young Tabini into Ilisidi's hands and urging the aiji-dowager to keep Tabini safe in her own estate at Malguri.

This kept his minor son and Ilisidi both separate from the center of politics. It kept the center of the aishidi'tat very happy, in the absence of their chief irritant, the aiji-dowager, but Valasi's concentration on trying to keep power out of Ilisidi's hands had left the west coast of the aishidi'tat embittered: they viewed Ilisidi as their ally, and her departure to Malguri as Valasi's definitive refusal to deal with their problems.

The west coast clans, notably the Maschi at Targai and Tirnamardi, had been forced to play a cautious kind of politics, balanced between the Edi tribal people, who supplemented their traditional fishing with piracy and wrecking, and the Marid clans, who saw the west coast as naturally theirs. Marid shipping was the principle target of the piracy. The Marid at times pursued their aims with contract marriages in the west, but all the same, given the resentments of the Edi people, unwilling settlers on that coast, and clan wars inside the Marid, all these moves came to was a generally unsettled condition on the west coast. The north coast fared somewhat better, in the happy relationship of the Gan tribal people with their nearest neighbors, also mariners, on the island of Dur—

But the adjacent Northern Association, while not in the same ferment as the south, and somewhat inland, had its own ambitions. The head of the Northern Association, within the aishidi'tat, was the lord of Ajuri clan . . . and he, pressed by a struggle inside his own clan, arranged the marriage of a young relative, Komaji, to an older lady of the ancient Atageini clan—the Atageini lord being one of the closest allies of the aiji-dowager, and at the moment engaged in politics with Valasi-aiji, in a dispute with their nearest neighbors, the Kadagidi.

It was a marriage of great potential value for Ajuri. It proved, however, unfortunate, in the death of the Atageini lady soon after the birth of a daughter, Damiri, under circumstances some called suspicious. Lord Tatiseigi of the Atageini, in a heated confrontation with Komaji, handed over the baby to Komaji, thus breaking the association with Ajuri and terminating the Ajuri hope of having a relative in an influential position within the great Atageini house.

Valasi-aiji managed to patch the quarrel between the Atageini and the Kadagidi, and simultaneously prevented the Atageini lord from Filing Intent on Komaji. He also kept the southwest coast out of the hands of the Marid, and had got control of the aishidi'tat back into western hands and out of the hands of the aiji-dowager.

Valasi was accounted a great aiji.

He died unexpectedly, however, with his heir still short of the twenty-three years of age required to be elected aiji.

The aiji-dowager returned to Shejidan with her grandson Tabini and applied to be elected aiji herself, citing the complex business of the aishidi'tat, particularly in view of increasing traffic with the Mospheirans, who were beginning to colonize neighboring Crescent Island, and who were developing industry without restraint—a matter which left the northwest coast of the continent on the receiving end of the smoke and the effluent.