Peacemaker

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 a

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 begi

She repeated her argument that several areas of the aishidi’tat remained a problem, since they had been stop-gap arrangements following the War of the Landing; and she also proposed tough new negotiations with Mospheira about the protection of the environment.

The legislature balked . . . on all points. Regional interests did not want pieces of the post-War treaty reopened, for fear of having their pieces of it reopened. The Marid certainly did not want her solution to the west coast problems, and nobody but Dur cared about smoke that was mostly landing on the Gan peoples, since they had never signed on to the aishidi’tat.