Elder Race(20)
“It’s not magic,” he insisted, against all reason. “I am just made this way. I am just of a people who understand how the world works.”
“Nyrgoth Elder,” Esha said slowly. “Is that not what magic is? Every wise man, every scholar I have met who pretended to the title of magician, that was their study. They sought to learn how the world worked, so that they could control and master it. That is magic.”
“No!” he insisted. “A spade is not magic, just because it turns the earth better than your fingers! Iron is not magic, just because it needs a smith’s skill to forge. It is just knowledge.” Abruptly he was pressing his hands to his face. “No, no, I’ve already . . . I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t have interfered. It was different with Ulmoth. This isn’t any of my business. I’m . . . doing it wrong.”
“Nyrgoth Elder, great sorcerer, please,” Lyn said hurriedly. “In the name of your vow to Astresse Once Regent, you are needed here. That is your duty.”
“My duty is to let you all die,” he told her, not even harshly but with a terrible misery, the sadness of hundreds of years. “I should just walk away and let this happen, and record the story of it for those to come, as though there is anyone who will ever come. I should not be here. I am not a part of your stories.”
“But Ulmoth–”
“Ulmoth was different,” he told her, but then: “Ulmoth wasn’t different, though. I told myself it was my business, that he was interrupting the natural way of things here, because he had raised the ancient workers to cause trouble. But your whole world is built on the backs of those workers. How was what he did any more or less natural than your people running about with swords and kingdoms? The whole point of us coming here was a lie. There is no natural state. You’re a colony.” He was sunk in a different despair now, that same beast that he had fought in the forest, the one within him.
Lyn exchanged a look with Esha. “I don’t understand you,” she said softly, and then, “Nyr,” because when he was weak and unhappy that seemed an easier thing to say.
“I’m going to tell you, then.” He looked up and the smile he gave her was horrible, fragile. “Sit and listen, children, for I will tell you the true story of your people and your world, and break every law of my people. I don’t care anymore. Just listen.”
Nyr and Lynesse
About fifteen hundred years ago your ancestors came to this planet from another, a place called Earth. They came in a spaceship and the journey lasted many generations. On that ship they slept and woke, had children, died, until the last generation was trained by the ship in how to start the colonisation process. They were part of a wave of colonisation from Earth, the great dream of expanding into the universe.
Nearly four hundred Storm-seasons past, the ancients brought men into this world from the otherworld, ferrying them upon a boat through the seas of night in a voyage so long that those who left one shore were dust and their children’s children had to be taught how to farm and hunt and govern by the ship’s figurehead, which spoke with many voices and told them of a hundred ships and a hundred shores. In this way they became the living dream of the ancients.
They landed and set about adapting this planet for their purposes. It was already similar to the planet they had left, and there was a functioning ecosystem here, things like plants and animals, though without the hard dividing lines that they had known on Earth. The engineers of those people changed themselves and their environment, melding Earth and native stock to insert themselves into the planetary ecosystem, so that what you have now, your crops, your beasts, some are natives and some are tweaked Earth creatures and others are hybrids of the two, so that there is precious little left that resembles the original alien ecosystem.
When their ship beached they came ashore to a land that did not know them, but they were the ancients and with their magic they set about teaching the beasts and plants their place, naming them and giving them their roles. Those beasts and plants that would serve, they rewarded and made strong and fruitful; those that would not they drove to the far places. They invoked their ancient compacts with the royalty of the beasts they had preserved from the otherworld and married them to the princes of the beasts of the land the ship had found, and in presiding over such unions brought harmony to the world and made it a place fit to be ruled by men.
All of this was done in the understanding that the vastly expensive endeavour of interstellar colonisation would be self-sustaining and go on forever, as people so often think that the structures and systems they build will go on forever. But there was economic collapse back home, caused in no small part by the vast resource-sink of the colonising initiative, and the colonies were mostly still at a state where they had been expecting further shipments of people and technology in order to maintain their standards of living. However, being colonists, they adapted to what they had. They did their best to set up stable living systems that would ensure food and health for their descendants, and probably they watched the skies and hoped that Earth would come through for them. And, as the generations came and went, they forgot their science piece by piece, and could not mend what broke down. Their ancestors had done well in giving them life on an alien world, but they forgot that was what they lived on, and where they had come from, and just concentrated on surviving and prospering without the tools they no longer had, and the knowledge that was no longer of any use.