Peacemaker

In fact atevi had long since been pushed past the limit, and when they met the managers and the large load of weapons, they had finally pushed back.

iii

<<Geigi>> Characteristically, we reacted to this threat in our clans, our guilds, and our associations. Offense to one of us triggered others, to the dismay of the humans.

Coastal associations responded. Then the aiji in Shejidan moved to assert control, and took over leadership in the War of the Landing: this absorbed the last western clans still holding apart from the aishidi’tat, and eventually brought the Marid in as well.

The aiji formed a strategy to contain the problem reasonably rapidly: to push the humans off the continent and onto Mospheira, where the greatest number of humans were already living. Mospheira was the home of the Edi and Gan peoples, who had first met the humans, and who were part of the bloodiest action, but they were not part of the aishidi’tat, and were not Ragi, nor of the same customs. They persisted in attacking the humans on their own, with disastrous results.

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 i

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.