Original fiction: Festivals
Dec. 21st, 2007 11:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseG. 2479 words. Following on from Inexplicable, Remembering, Reminiscence, Memory, Eternal, Cycles, Demonology, Argot, Analogy and Meanderings.
The seasons turn and sometimes nothing changes at all. Future plans are always the product of the past.
Thus for the coming end of Saturnalia and tomorrow's Solstice; Merry Winterish and fine mince pies to all. And maybe next time there’ll actually be a fully constructed site that I’ll post this to as well.
Festivals
Disclaimer: Original fiction.
++++++++++
I am inventing a new festival and I am going to call it Shoggothstophilies. And it will occur during the natural celebrations of Midwinter and involve mulled wine, toasted bread and many blankets. It will be a private festival held by my fireplace and covering the region between the chairs and as far as it takes to hold a poker with bread on the end, in the fire. So I announced loudly and unnecessarily to the electronic device that will relay my pronouncement to my second. Unnecessary, since he is liable to call on me anyway mostly likely accompanied by a round chunk of cooked ham. Ham keeps; it is for perusing, between other meats. I suppose I may go out and purchase something else or perhaps if I can find an old cudgel I might go kill myself a swan by the riverbanks. But it would be a perilous task if I did. They flock, those creatures and swarm and their beaks are like serrated knives. Which is why their meat has always been a delicacy. They could be farmed of course but where would be the carnivorous joy in that? If they are to be eaten, if they are to be allowed to grow into real meat for eating then they must be allowed to swarm and gather, death-dealing beaks and all.
It may be less about the meat than the manner of its subduing. There is no sport without the hunt. I hunted eels in spring, large ones that went well with sharp pickles and vinegary spices. And they keep in my larder for long enough for me to enjoy them without sharing. Tasted better than the ones I’ve purchased from the market too. Not that those are not caught, not from the stall where I eye their fish with suspicion, only that I was not the one to do the catching so some of the flavour was not really meant for me. That stall-keeper tried to sell me haddock once. It is a fish; I have been told. A fish. What use have I for fish? And I told him so. Eels are fish so I was told. But eels are not fish, not really; they are sea serpents and thus an equal foe. Haddock isn’t likely to challenge me. What will it do? Drown at me? But this vendor is at least somewhat human and has not the teeth to appreciate things that are unfishlike.
Humans like fish or so I have been told. I don’t have much use for them though I’ve eaten them for a time. When there are only rivers and streams and the venison is too swift there is little else to for it other than to go stumbling about into the water with a spear or better still, send someone else to do it. My second tried his hand at shooting fish with a bow and arrow once and came back with nothing but tiny minnows for his trouble. We put them into the stew boiling over the camp fire and considered the taste of fish in comparison to food that regularly wore antlers. The others were not so impressed and we spoke during the late watches of the amazing tenacity of human stomachs that they must be able to digest such poison. Humans, so my old teacher would say, will eat anything and more than that; they will come to like it. It is how they people the world, I suppose. Eating and settling where even the hardiest armies would prefer not to tread. They consume four basic food groups we are taught; wines, grains, fish and vegetation. You do not scorch the fields by a human settlement because they will simply eat the rest of the vegetation. If you block up their water supply they will collect what falls as rain, if you drive away their cattle they will make sustenance with their grain, if you poison their meat they will simply stop eating it. Tenacious creatures. What happens if you do all of that to them I asked once, in my youth and received the answer that they are human; even if you heap all the ills of the world upon their heads they will fight.
That is an old way of teaching now and yet perhaps the Empire suffers because we no longer teach as they did in my youth. Our soldiers are not taught to respect their foe quite so much as we were and often it is the case that they simply regard the enemy as an unnatural other. It does them no good. Just because something has no scales and no real teeth does not make it any less threatening. I could teach these youngsters a thing or two about wariness in battle. The humans we fought were no less vicious for their lacking. They fought as if their very souls depended upon it and in some of the far western cities even threw themselves down from the walls of their cities in a futile attempt to break our ranks. They were not an easy foe to combat. And those fools who talk of glorious conquest have no comprehension of true tenacity. We stand upon the might of our Empire; we conquered not out of sport but out of necessity. We did not march on their cities for the sake of marching but because these human nations would send their armies against our walls. I did what needed to be done and at that time there was no other to do it. I am a general not a hero. And I am faster than those who attacked me which is why I am still a general even now and not instead a martyr.
But those days are gone now. We are not in the business of warring unless it is economically and over grain prices. I tried to follow the movement of our financial exchanges once or twice but each time I came away with the impression that the electronic boards were speaking an entirely different language or announcing transportation times. The overhead monorails in the new cities have that sort of thing and those yell the news of train arrivals at you too. I hear that the engineers take pride in such achievements. Such hubris really. If I want to travel from one city to the next I will ride given the chance or even walk but am more likely to be bundled into some automotive machine by my second and even then the yelling that this or other landmark has passed by is unlikely to turn my head. This is the square were the Praefectus praetorio was chosen? Really, fascinating, I was there. But let me explain that, for there is no real human equivalent term so I use those gleaned from my books.
We are, have always been in certain ways an administrative state. Call it a nation if you like, it makes little difference in our case. There is of course some time between our learning to stand up on our hind legs and our building walls where we were not so organised but it is a barely charted region filled with scholars crowding round diggings in the mud. Legend gives us the name of a ruler who united the peoples under his standard, it gives us the name of a queen who first engineered city walls, the name of the first of the priesthood granted illumination by the gods, it even gives us the names of the first circle of ten who learned the manner in which to conduct business with the planes beyond. But it does not give us substantiated detail. The records that we do have only date back so far and are mundane, meticulous things detailing the storage of grain and the building of walls. No ruler chose to document history till the third of the great queens who even then filled her records with mythology and curious legend. At least we do know that she valued the angle of the stars and practiced geometry and mathematics to a highly accurate degree. Her son though was the better merchant and used his sire’s formulae to calculate exactly how much grain might fit into the emergency storehouses under the old city. And if you believe old maxims it is always a man’s lot to find practical application for a woman’s love of numbers anyway. Strangely enough the same proverbs give the appliance of financial systems to be a man’s work because he can only understand application rather than the raw beauty of mathematical patterns for their own sake. I don’t see too much difference between building walls and pouring over ledgers but then that would be why I am a soldier and not an architect or a clerk.
I do not believe in these divisions of male and female labour anyway. I have always divided people into soldiery and civilian, though I’ve heard it said at the occasional dull conference that of course there are many men engaged in military pursuits because it allows us to come close to the beauty of mathematical application while not nearly close enough. But logistics is not mathematics and I have never marvelled at a catapult quite like an engineer might have done. Such things are a means to an end, not an end in of themselves. But then that sort of viewpoint is a male prerogative apparently so perhaps I do stereotype myself. Or perhaps not, for my lady loved calculus almost as much as she loved human-made gowns. Is that a stereotype anyway? What does calculus do after all, apart from steal letters out of language and change their meaning? Perhaps, when he arrives I will ask my second. It is the sort of debate he might find engaging. But then women have always loved him anyway. My second; the scholar.
I laugh to think of it but he was always so charming to women and it seemed to draw them closer to the extent where I believed that my abrasive nature might be rebuff enough. I was soon debased of that notion but it is an odd contrast nonetheless. I do not class the females I served alongside as women in a separate category; they are soldiers and appreciated candour in conversation just like the rest of my troops. And that is where the distinction rests. Even the regular engineers attached to various battalions were not given to idle chitchat over numbers and I fancy that our chief engineer would look particularly strange in a gown or anything else that wasn’t official Senatus robes. She is part of some aqueduct commission these days or so I’ve heard and spends her time now beating the foolishness out of novices with her words. I remember a time when she would have threatened to beat them with actual planks. At least she never threatened me with such, though once when I asked her to explain the mechanical system behind a retracting bridge scaffold she did look at me as if I’d grown three extra eyes. Not that such things are a soldier’s business to know; our business is more to the tune of leaping and striking and occasionally riding around under the baking sun.
None of which makes anything of anything at the end of the day other than illustrating that such divisions are arbitrary. Male and female, soldier and civilian, human and Imperial citizen. And there’s the rub to borrow a phrase, because it is the final division between us and them that we seem to have founded our early society on. Which was well and good back in the day when such divisions were said to matter and the divide between us and them wasn’t a simple biological diversification. It was necessary then to use such a simple divide to characterise everything that we were and everything that they were not but now; in this modern age such divisions will only hinder if we insist that we must cling to them. The world is turning after all and the time for the Empire’s second golden age will come. First we were military victors, a position based on martial strength and technological endeavour; soon we will shed all pretence that we are not a glorious commercial hub.
We have the advantage of evolution at our backs perhaps. Not because we are not human but because we are ancient in our knowledge and have had much longer to get things done. The human nations are at a disadvantage still; we can cripple them through simple application of economics, our armies won’t even need to set foot out of their barracks. And for all this talk of how the Empire must eventually fail, we have already had our fallow season and no new power rose up to take our place. The next time the human nations might have such an advantage will be in many centuries to come when our space program finally comes to fruition. And what will they do then? When I finally lift my veto on this business of an orbital cannon. What will they do, under such a threat? They will do as the human nations have always done; they will thrive in adversity, growing up through the cracks like unstoppable weeds. They are resilient after all and the sooner our own people recognise the full extent of that the better. We are not tyrants; they are not slaves and for all the longevity of our people, theirs still thrive, short though their lifespans may be. Which gives me a new clause to add into the document I am preparing for the day that I do permit their nonsense space scheme. Co-operation. I will spell it out in bold and perhaps in the human language too to drive home my point. I am not talking of transitory and fabricated peace either, no, what I propose will be far more traditional in its means. We may eventually launch colonies towards the stars and when we do our fine armies will need human scouts and runners just as they did before.
Perhaps then we do not change at all, it is only that our expansion takes new forms.
Which is why I will celebrate my new festival of Shoggothstophilies. Because even if in increments; eventually, something must change. There must be growth out of stagnation, and life and hope must flourish evermore, in incremental measures and slices of toasted bread. That is the argument I will put to my second; that it is stagnation for us to go out and attend the usual festivals over again. Of course he will laugh but when we are done with the world beyond my door; we can celebrate Shoggothstophilies anyway. And I will wonder if I’m not so changeable after all.
++++++++++
Praefectus praetorio or praetorian prefect was, by the time of Lucius Septimius Severus, an administrative position involving legal decisions in both crown and civil cases.
The seasons turn and sometimes nothing changes at all. Future plans are always the product of the past.
Thus for the coming end of Saturnalia and tomorrow's Solstice; Merry Winterish and fine mince pies to all. And maybe next time there’ll actually be a fully constructed site that I’ll post this to as well.
Festivals
Disclaimer: Original fiction.
++++++++++
I am inventing a new festival and I am going to call it Shoggothstophilies. And it will occur during the natural celebrations of Midwinter and involve mulled wine, toasted bread and many blankets. It will be a private festival held by my fireplace and covering the region between the chairs and as far as it takes to hold a poker with bread on the end, in the fire. So I announced loudly and unnecessarily to the electronic device that will relay my pronouncement to my second. Unnecessary, since he is liable to call on me anyway mostly likely accompanied by a round chunk of cooked ham. Ham keeps; it is for perusing, between other meats. I suppose I may go out and purchase something else or perhaps if I can find an old cudgel I might go kill myself a swan by the riverbanks. But it would be a perilous task if I did. They flock, those creatures and swarm and their beaks are like serrated knives. Which is why their meat has always been a delicacy. They could be farmed of course but where would be the carnivorous joy in that? If they are to be eaten, if they are to be allowed to grow into real meat for eating then they must be allowed to swarm and gather, death-dealing beaks and all.
It may be less about the meat than the manner of its subduing. There is no sport without the hunt. I hunted eels in spring, large ones that went well with sharp pickles and vinegary spices. And they keep in my larder for long enough for me to enjoy them without sharing. Tasted better than the ones I’ve purchased from the market too. Not that those are not caught, not from the stall where I eye their fish with suspicion, only that I was not the one to do the catching so some of the flavour was not really meant for me. That stall-keeper tried to sell me haddock once. It is a fish; I have been told. A fish. What use have I for fish? And I told him so. Eels are fish so I was told. But eels are not fish, not really; they are sea serpents and thus an equal foe. Haddock isn’t likely to challenge me. What will it do? Drown at me? But this vendor is at least somewhat human and has not the teeth to appreciate things that are unfishlike.
Humans like fish or so I have been told. I don’t have much use for them though I’ve eaten them for a time. When there are only rivers and streams and the venison is too swift there is little else to for it other than to go stumbling about into the water with a spear or better still, send someone else to do it. My second tried his hand at shooting fish with a bow and arrow once and came back with nothing but tiny minnows for his trouble. We put them into the stew boiling over the camp fire and considered the taste of fish in comparison to food that regularly wore antlers. The others were not so impressed and we spoke during the late watches of the amazing tenacity of human stomachs that they must be able to digest such poison. Humans, so my old teacher would say, will eat anything and more than that; they will come to like it. It is how they people the world, I suppose. Eating and settling where even the hardiest armies would prefer not to tread. They consume four basic food groups we are taught; wines, grains, fish and vegetation. You do not scorch the fields by a human settlement because they will simply eat the rest of the vegetation. If you block up their water supply they will collect what falls as rain, if you drive away their cattle they will make sustenance with their grain, if you poison their meat they will simply stop eating it. Tenacious creatures. What happens if you do all of that to them I asked once, in my youth and received the answer that they are human; even if you heap all the ills of the world upon their heads they will fight.
That is an old way of teaching now and yet perhaps the Empire suffers because we no longer teach as they did in my youth. Our soldiers are not taught to respect their foe quite so much as we were and often it is the case that they simply regard the enemy as an unnatural other. It does them no good. Just because something has no scales and no real teeth does not make it any less threatening. I could teach these youngsters a thing or two about wariness in battle. The humans we fought were no less vicious for their lacking. They fought as if their very souls depended upon it and in some of the far western cities even threw themselves down from the walls of their cities in a futile attempt to break our ranks. They were not an easy foe to combat. And those fools who talk of glorious conquest have no comprehension of true tenacity. We stand upon the might of our Empire; we conquered not out of sport but out of necessity. We did not march on their cities for the sake of marching but because these human nations would send their armies against our walls. I did what needed to be done and at that time there was no other to do it. I am a general not a hero. And I am faster than those who attacked me which is why I am still a general even now and not instead a martyr.
But those days are gone now. We are not in the business of warring unless it is economically and over grain prices. I tried to follow the movement of our financial exchanges once or twice but each time I came away with the impression that the electronic boards were speaking an entirely different language or announcing transportation times. The overhead monorails in the new cities have that sort of thing and those yell the news of train arrivals at you too. I hear that the engineers take pride in such achievements. Such hubris really. If I want to travel from one city to the next I will ride given the chance or even walk but am more likely to be bundled into some automotive machine by my second and even then the yelling that this or other landmark has passed by is unlikely to turn my head. This is the square were the Praefectus praetorio was chosen? Really, fascinating, I was there. But let me explain that, for there is no real human equivalent term so I use those gleaned from my books.
We are, have always been in certain ways an administrative state. Call it a nation if you like, it makes little difference in our case. There is of course some time between our learning to stand up on our hind legs and our building walls where we were not so organised but it is a barely charted region filled with scholars crowding round diggings in the mud. Legend gives us the name of a ruler who united the peoples under his standard, it gives us the name of a queen who first engineered city walls, the name of the first of the priesthood granted illumination by the gods, it even gives us the names of the first circle of ten who learned the manner in which to conduct business with the planes beyond. But it does not give us substantiated detail. The records that we do have only date back so far and are mundane, meticulous things detailing the storage of grain and the building of walls. No ruler chose to document history till the third of the great queens who even then filled her records with mythology and curious legend. At least we do know that she valued the angle of the stars and practiced geometry and mathematics to a highly accurate degree. Her son though was the better merchant and used his sire’s formulae to calculate exactly how much grain might fit into the emergency storehouses under the old city. And if you believe old maxims it is always a man’s lot to find practical application for a woman’s love of numbers anyway. Strangely enough the same proverbs give the appliance of financial systems to be a man’s work because he can only understand application rather than the raw beauty of mathematical patterns for their own sake. I don’t see too much difference between building walls and pouring over ledgers but then that would be why I am a soldier and not an architect or a clerk.
I do not believe in these divisions of male and female labour anyway. I have always divided people into soldiery and civilian, though I’ve heard it said at the occasional dull conference that of course there are many men engaged in military pursuits because it allows us to come close to the beauty of mathematical application while not nearly close enough. But logistics is not mathematics and I have never marvelled at a catapult quite like an engineer might have done. Such things are a means to an end, not an end in of themselves. But then that sort of viewpoint is a male prerogative apparently so perhaps I do stereotype myself. Or perhaps not, for my lady loved calculus almost as much as she loved human-made gowns. Is that a stereotype anyway? What does calculus do after all, apart from steal letters out of language and change their meaning? Perhaps, when he arrives I will ask my second. It is the sort of debate he might find engaging. But then women have always loved him anyway. My second; the scholar.
I laugh to think of it but he was always so charming to women and it seemed to draw them closer to the extent where I believed that my abrasive nature might be rebuff enough. I was soon debased of that notion but it is an odd contrast nonetheless. I do not class the females I served alongside as women in a separate category; they are soldiers and appreciated candour in conversation just like the rest of my troops. And that is where the distinction rests. Even the regular engineers attached to various battalions were not given to idle chitchat over numbers and I fancy that our chief engineer would look particularly strange in a gown or anything else that wasn’t official Senatus robes. She is part of some aqueduct commission these days or so I’ve heard and spends her time now beating the foolishness out of novices with her words. I remember a time when she would have threatened to beat them with actual planks. At least she never threatened me with such, though once when I asked her to explain the mechanical system behind a retracting bridge scaffold she did look at me as if I’d grown three extra eyes. Not that such things are a soldier’s business to know; our business is more to the tune of leaping and striking and occasionally riding around under the baking sun.
None of which makes anything of anything at the end of the day other than illustrating that such divisions are arbitrary. Male and female, soldier and civilian, human and Imperial citizen. And there’s the rub to borrow a phrase, because it is the final division between us and them that we seem to have founded our early society on. Which was well and good back in the day when such divisions were said to matter and the divide between us and them wasn’t a simple biological diversification. It was necessary then to use such a simple divide to characterise everything that we were and everything that they were not but now; in this modern age such divisions will only hinder if we insist that we must cling to them. The world is turning after all and the time for the Empire’s second golden age will come. First we were military victors, a position based on martial strength and technological endeavour; soon we will shed all pretence that we are not a glorious commercial hub.
We have the advantage of evolution at our backs perhaps. Not because we are not human but because we are ancient in our knowledge and have had much longer to get things done. The human nations are at a disadvantage still; we can cripple them through simple application of economics, our armies won’t even need to set foot out of their barracks. And for all this talk of how the Empire must eventually fail, we have already had our fallow season and no new power rose up to take our place. The next time the human nations might have such an advantage will be in many centuries to come when our space program finally comes to fruition. And what will they do then? When I finally lift my veto on this business of an orbital cannon. What will they do, under such a threat? They will do as the human nations have always done; they will thrive in adversity, growing up through the cracks like unstoppable weeds. They are resilient after all and the sooner our own people recognise the full extent of that the better. We are not tyrants; they are not slaves and for all the longevity of our people, theirs still thrive, short though their lifespans may be. Which gives me a new clause to add into the document I am preparing for the day that I do permit their nonsense space scheme. Co-operation. I will spell it out in bold and perhaps in the human language too to drive home my point. I am not talking of transitory and fabricated peace either, no, what I propose will be far more traditional in its means. We may eventually launch colonies towards the stars and when we do our fine armies will need human scouts and runners just as they did before.
Perhaps then we do not change at all, it is only that our expansion takes new forms.
Which is why I will celebrate my new festival of Shoggothstophilies. Because even if in increments; eventually, something must change. There must be growth out of stagnation, and life and hope must flourish evermore, in incremental measures and slices of toasted bread. That is the argument I will put to my second; that it is stagnation for us to go out and attend the usual festivals over again. Of course he will laugh but when we are done with the world beyond my door; we can celebrate Shoggothstophilies anyway. And I will wonder if I’m not so changeable after all.
++++++++++
Praefectus praetorio or praetorian prefect was, by the time of Lucius Septimius Severus, an administrative position involving legal decisions in both crown and civil cases.
