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As the day wore on, we became less concerned about bizarre and unexpected attacks that might occur, and more involved in the sparkling conversation which swirled around Tzika without significant pause. A stop for lunch interrupted our discussion of the foolish fripperies of the wealthy or noble. The conversation had moved beyond amused commentary on specifics. The morning had heard vivid descriptions from Astrea of the contracts nobility made with the vampires and those who chose to be snacked upon by vampires. The show we had seen in the Divarae had been a public, poorly staged enactment of a genre favored by low-minded members of the rich and powerful.
My patrons had never engaged in anything of the sort. After inquiring after the names of my patrons, Astrea regaled the party with an incident that had occurred before my foster father was hired by my patrons. My patrons had entertained a judge and her spouse who were vegetarians. While my patrons had thoughtfully provided a feast of vegetables, they had not studied the form of vegetarianism practiced by their guests, who avoided animal products in all forms. They refused to sit on the leather seats of the dining chairs. They declined to use the bone-inlaid tableware. They inquired after the preparation of the vegetable dishes, and declined anything prepared in butter, sauced with cream or eggs, topped with cheese, whether melted or grated, and even declined a dessert dyed with a red coloring extracted from beetles. Several dishes had to be prepared a second time, to ensure the guests had anything to eat at all. By the end of the evening, harried, my patrons had hustled the entertainment out to perform before the guests who were then consuming after-dinner drinks. They did not tell their guests what to expect, and when the performers began feeding on each other, the judge's spouse sat stunned for a moment, before vomiting as a physical expression of his disgust at the performance. The judge, a more forthright, physical person, had physically separated the performers, and harangued them at length at the sanitary risks associated with consuming animal products, in particular blood, and how humans were some of the least safe of animals to consume. Worse, she continued, the blood was in no way cooked, or heated. She conceded that those being fed upon were healthy, and certainly the blood was fresh, but she objected to the lack of cleansing of the skin around the area to be bitten, and counseled that an animal which appeared healthy might yet harbor contagious diseases too dire to contemplate, and blood was one of the most sure means of transmitting those diseases.
Finished with them, she had rounded on my patrons, and described in detail how she would never have close dealings with people who couldn't satisfy simple dietary constraints when warned ahead of time, much less people who condoned such unsanitary practices as what she had been compelled to watch. She remonstrated with them for having not warned them, so her more sensitive husband could at least have shielded his eyes, left the room, or perhaps not eaten so as not to have anything to throw up when subjected to such a distressing spectacle.
With that, they departed. The vampires, Astrea said, were struck by what the judge had to say, and after that incident had refused to have dealings with my patrons. They had also instituted a series of rules intended to reduce the rate of infection of vampires who hired out for this kind of entertainment. Those who were to be fed upon were chosen by vampires, or, at least, they had the right to refuse any particular choice. They were required to be clean, and the area to be bitten was cleaned with strong spirits before biting. A vampire did not bite more than one person in a session, without cleaning his or her mouth and teeth thoroughly, to avoid transferring disease from one to the next, a protection which helped ensure a continuous stream of non-vampire participants in the entertainment. The result of all the reform had probably caused that particular form of entertainment to last longer than it otherwise might, and therefore to cause the incident with my patrons to be remembered far longer than it otherwise might.
With lunch, we turned from discussions of sordid enactments for the wealthy, to whether the wealthy actually were. Everyone had stories of merchants who had become impoverished through loss of a cargo or ship or caravan. More interesting were the tales of merchants who had engaged in a too-profitable business, resulting in their own downfall. As we proceeded south along the path after lunch, Jack told us the following tale.
A certain merchant from a town far north of Laurel had become wealthy trading a large number of commodities. She had begun with textiles and furs, both whole and finished goods. Over a decade, she had handled food briefly, and then gems, spices and other high value, light weight items. She had dominated that trade for a large region, and in order to grow her business still further, had branched out into high value, high weight items, notably, gold and silver ore and bullion. After a few years of erratic, but increasingly profitable business in this area, she had contracted with a major prince in the area to make the coinage for his realm. Initially, she had suffered the usual litany of problems: the amount she was allowed to make was small, her risk great, and her customer not at all used to making agreements, or abiding by them. Nevertheless, she had, as at everything else, found profit, until the prince had decided to declare war on a neighboring region. That area, a loose affiliation of cities to the east, had no standing army, no nobles, and was run by citizens who met minimum financial stature requirement, represented through a committee. The prince expected to win the war handily, and to tax the territory he gained at an exorbitant rate to support additional wars against more powerful regions further east.
The prince, however, miscalculated. The cities raised an army, poorly trained, but motivated. They had created weapons, poorly at first, but better and faster over time. They held their own at the beginning, with the assistance of some mercenaries, including Jack, Leroy and Astrea, who supplied tactical advice on the campaign of battle, and on the manufacture of weapons and supplies for their fighters. The prince, finding himself hard-pressed to maintain his early gains, had also hired mercenaries. Running low on funds, he had raised taxes, and begun confiscating stores of precious metals, gems and other items which could be used to pay the mercenaries. The merchant would have been subject to that confiscation, only she took a look around and decided that her side had neither honor nor probability of success on their side, and took her goods to the east and offered her services there.
The merchants were happy to have her, but by that time, the war dominated the local economy so thoroughly, she could find no way to make money, and she was subject to the same taxation as natives of her new home, and watched her money bleed away in the course of the war. She was eventually forced to return to her earlier trade in textiles and food, items needed desperately regardless of the war, and slowly began to rebuild. She couldn't collect on debts owed her by the prince of her previous homeland, as he had bankrupted himself as a personal and then run the country out of money as well. When the extent of his failure was rumored, some of the laborers in the area around his castle had surrounded it, demanding punishment for the man who had sent their children off to die, and impoverished them all. By this time, the frontier had been pushed well within the borders of the princes land, and the coalition of cities would shortly include all the towns and villages of the prince's land as well. The prince had attempted to escape via a concealed passage, but someone detected him, possibly with the assistance of a trusted aide inside, and the laborers had killed him. His body was never buried; rumor held his body had been scattered on fields around the castle.
When Jack, Leroy and Astrea had met the merchant, in the course of assisting in the war which had precipitated her move, the merchant had been extremely bitter about the idle rich, particularly the powerful, idle, rich. She'd told them a number of stories, the details of which had mercilessly left them with time, of those who inherited many lands and the income from those lands, then borrowed against the value of that land and the income many times over from various sources. She said in the usual case, under that prince who later lost his realm through bad judgment, the squabble ended in court where the crown took the land and income, and those who were owed were fined.
Alvin, still in human form, did not stutter at all as he related the slow birth of Kathmandu Consolidated. It was a story, he said, that all children raised in the valley were required to learn.
The valley had initially been more like an island than part of a land mass, populated primarily by birds, plants and the occasional small animal that had survived being flown over the mountains or crossed a pass in the height of summer. The mountains had not yet been colonized by dwarves or any of the other races who sometimes chose to live underground. The story did not say why, but I conjecture that the enlightened attitudes prevailing in the regions controlled by the Divarae permitted those races to live where they liked, rather than where they could.
A number of dragons had been discussing, so the story went, over the millennia, the problem of child care. Dragons were an advanced race, and a long-lived one, and, as was typical of such races, the young took longer to mature, and were more helpless in their youth. Child care could really dampen the adulthood of dragons, and more and more dragons were choosing to have fewer young as a result, and waiting longer. The net effect was a decrease in the size of the dragon population. At first, this was desirable, but as more populous races learned they could take on an individual dragon without fear of immediate reprisal, the urgency of the child care problem forced the dragons to search for a solution that in a matter of decades or at most centuries, rather than further millennia. The survival of the race was at stake.
All attending the conference agreed that all dragons able to reproduce should do so, as soon as possible and as often as possible. How to ensure the care and feeding of the resulting young to adulthood was the meat of the problem, chewed over by the conferrers at great length. Initial solutions, proposed by those too old, or through injury, unable, to reproduce required the parents to raise the young and not doing anything else until the young were able to fend for themselves. A few skirmishes resulted, and a few of the old and reproductively disadvantaged were killed by way of example, and debate moved on to other solutions. The next idea required all dragons to participate in child care, a popular proposal in the face of the examples mentioned above. The need for a facility for child-rearing was identified. A place accessible to dragons, but not to others, and difficult for young dragons to escape were the major criteria. Kathmandu valley was selected, with an intention to expand to distant islands when the valley proved too small.
Kathmandu valley was slowly populated with adult dragons in shifts, and over time, with infant, toddler, young and adolescent dragons. Many dragons, parents of current charges or not, evaded their shifts for decades at a time. Those who continued to serve, while resentful, had neither the time nor the energy to wage war against the others, and instead chose a wilier solution: they would find others to do the work, and levy a tax against dragons who avoided service. The tax would be collected directly from their hordes, unprotected during their extended absence.
Dragons scoured the Divarae for suitable child minders, and found many. The initial groups were flown in, and constructed housing for those who would come later. As flights to transport workers and their goods became more and more of a burden on the dragons, a council was again called, this time consisting of all those now in Kathmandu, dragon or otherwise. Because of the participation of many of the short-lived races, this council was completed in a matter of days: a system of tunnels would be constructed in and around Kathmandu valley, furnished with a suitable system of defense, to be determined by a smaller committee, and with provisions for travelers, to be managed by another smaller committee, paid for by an additional levy against dragons who avoided service. The matter of construction was not addressed, but rather deferred to the dragons.
Needless to say, the dragons balked at that. How, they asked, were they supposed to construct those tunnels? A delegation from the short-livers replied that the alternatives were to carve roads over the mountains, impassable much of the year, and which would render the valley vulnerable to encroaching outsiders the rest of the year, defeating the purpose of the valley. The dragons asked whether there might possibly be unexplored option, since the council had reached its conclusions in less than one week. To this, the humans replied that a research program to develop flight for non-dragons had been proposed, but scrapped as the secret could hardly be kept from others, once developed, and that would not only defeat the purpose of the valley, but constitute a dire threat to the existence of dragonkind. The dragons recoiled from this suggestion, and immediately addressed the question of tunnel construction instead.
The tale as told by Alvin did not include the details of the construction of the tunnels, but instead merely noted that a crash investigation into that part of dragon magic most closely related to digging spells used by short-livers turned up something useful, and it was applied in a comprehensive manner. That research still took many years, leaving the defense committee plenty of time to devise a system. The research of the committee took the form of messengers sent to track down documents and descriptions of dungeons and underground residences of all races imaginable. Dwarven kings were visited. The multiply-trapped access ways to great treasure were mapped in detail, in some cases, leaving the treasure in place, to the great confusion of later explorers. The burrows of gnomes were explored. The tunnels of the Drow saw more light than ever before or, likely, ever again. The tunnels around the hordes of dragons were laid out in detail. These were some of the most interesting, as they were typically the work of a number of unrelated adventurers in search of treasure -- or developing an access way to a continually growing pile of treasure which could be reliably stolen from as long as one didn't get too carried away. The tunnels to and from horrible prisons were found and perused. Entire armies silently infiltrating an enemy fortress were, more than once, startled and appalled to find industrious delegates of the defense committee taking notes by lamplight.
The results of all this research were disappointing. Most complicated defense systems undid themselves, or were vulnerable to direct attack. In the end, only intelligent, informed defenders could withstand the wide array of attackers, thieves and other mischief-makers that Kathmandu could expect as the traffic of short-livers in and out of the tunnel system inevitably caused rumor to flourish. Thus, the defense committee devoted themselves to finding a solitary race capable of focused attention over long periods of time, and lethal attack on short notice, very occasionally. This proved far more difficult, and as the dragon research neared an end, the committee became desperate, as the race of the defenders would drive the design of the concealed rooms they would occupy, and, for that matter, the nature of the defenses, as they would also be the likely resuppliers and re-armers of the defenses. As time grew short, the committee, about to resort to rotating shifts of pairs of any race they could hire, in hopes they could keep themselves entertained and out of trouble between attacks, and provide rest breaks for each other, several members of the committee who were conferring in the Divarae, were asked if they would receive visitors from a race virtually no one in the Divarae, one of the most cosmopolitan cities known, had ever heard of: the Moiridan. The committee agreed, and met with distant ancestors of Calliope, Rodesta and Kentee, among others.
The Moiridan were suffering from a unique reproductive problem of their own, and were searching for a solution. In the course of their research, they had stumbled across the efforts of those working for Kathmandu, and concluded that an opportunity for mutual benefit existed. The Moiridan did not become able to reproduce until they had spent a large number of years without seeing another of their race. It could be thought of as their racial mechanism for preventing overpopulation. Whatever benefit it might have served in the past, in the present, no one in the current generation was able to reproduce, and the race risked extinction if a solution could not be found. They understood that Kathmandu was looking for workers who would be isolated for years on end, but supplied with periodic entertainment in the form of attackers, and consistently supplied with the necessities of life. Stunned, the committee could only agree with this summation of their goals. The Moiridan requested this position, and asked what they could do to increase the likelihood of their being selected. The committee, which in retrospect might have asked for pay, instead established Kathmandu Consolidated as a joint enterprise with the Moiridan, contracting the services of the race in perpetuity, or until the enterprise was dissolved by mutual agreement of the parties, whichever came first.
This generosity was rewarded as the future existence of the race was ensured. The pressure off, the Moiridan might well have pulled out of the agreement, because living in caves was hardly their first choice, any more than it was mine. However, the profits they took from the enterprise ensured there were always a few willing to put in their years in the tunnels, to guarantee the ability to reproduce and the wherewithal to afford a mate and offspring. Over time, the enterprise extended to child care for other races, in addition to dragons, but therein lay another tale.
Night was falling as Alvin concluded. We had traveled through the late afternoon and into the evening without stopping to make camp. While I have presented the tales in a concise fashion, and one might conclude therefrom that we listened enthralled, without interruption, that was hardly the case. Interruptions and interlocutions, commentary and caustic remarks were more common than not, and occasionally, a shorter anecdote interrupted the main line of the story. I don't think I could have reproduced all that was said, as I was far too involved at the time with my own contributions, and so I have instead offered up the main body of discussion.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 1999.
Created: July 8, 2012 Updated: July 8, 2012