Martha Wells’ new Rising World series takes place in the aftermath of a shattered empire, at least, half the plot does. The other half takes place during the shattering. The series has all of the layered texture and finely-observed detail — the colors, the fabrics, the smells — we expect in Wells’ novels, so that much is a known and welcome quality. It also helps that the prose is quite graceful and pretty, with enough rough edges to give verisimilitude in what the hands of a lesser writer would be merely purple.
Last week I signaled that Wells’ main theme in the first two books of the Rising World, Witch King and Queen Demon, is anti-colonization, but that’s imprecise. It’s more about de-imperialization than anti-imperialism. It begins with the question: what would the world look like if there had never been an empire to preside over colonized lands?
Over the span of two novels, we see three phases of history in the lands that span from Nibet and Enalin to the Arik, the Arkai, Palm and Belith, and all the way to the Witchlands and the grasslands of the Saredi — the Rising World.
The first phase is pre-imperial, a world that is not Edenic but one in which the many cultures of these lands have largely worked out a kind of equilibrium and social parity. There’s some trade, a great many treaties that are mutually enforced, and in general, peace. Sufficiency. Order. Respect. It’s important that we see this, not only to understand Kai’s story, but to glimpse a world where there has never been an empire to dominate all the others.
That world is shattered when the Hierarchs come. Cities, entire peoples, entire cultures, are wiped out. In the aftermath of that initial genocide, Kai is chained in the Cageling Demon Court in the Hierarch’s Summer Halls, thoroughly defeated and half dead. And he would have stayed that way, had Bashasa not rescued him. Bashasa and the rest of the rebels would have died had Kai not first been rescued and then, of his own will, joined with them.
Despite fighting their way out of the Summer Halls and conquering Benais-arik, Bashasa’s fledgling army stands on quicksand, they all know that
There were Arike who even now wondered if the fight was worth it, who thought it might be true that the Hierarchs would spare the rest of the Arik city-states, as they had promised. If they only submitted enough, if they gave the Hierarchs what they wanted, if they let the Hierarchs take everything the land had and grind its people into dust. Kai had heard his cadre talk about it. None of them believed the Hierarchs intended any mercy, the cynical veterans of the Hostage Courts that they were. Arsha had said sarcastically, Of course, just because they massacred everyone in Sunai-arik and the Arkai and the Sana-sarcofa and the Witchlands and all the way up the coasts to the north and east and south and west, I’m sure they’ll let us live.
Queen Demon, p. 82
Between the people who think that appeasement will protect them, and the people who have been turned and become true believers of the Hierarch’s imperial program, rousing the country is the rebels’ difficult program. (Sound familiar?) Because some of the natives have become invested in the Hierarchs’ conquest. Some of the locals have been trained to betray their own people; they’ve come to believe that the Hierarchs are wiser and better — or simply that they’re too powerful to counter. (Again, sound familiar?)
As he got the windows uncovered, light and a fresh breeze flooded the room, illuminating the faded mural on the far wall. It had once shown the Hierarch bringing the gifts of civilization to the primitive north, which was a fairly standard subject for the places the Hierarchs had built for their servant-nobles to rule from.
p. 38
Just what might those gifts be? So far, we’ve seen a lot of death, a lot of wanton slaughter. Even so, the servant-nobles who serve as the empire’s lieutenants, the eyes and ears of the Hierarchs, enacting their policies across the lands, don’t see themselves as villains. (Once more, sound familiar?) Some of these people can’t be appealed to, and those hoping to partake of the “gifts of civilization” are among the most entrenched of imperial allies. Others have made alliances of convenience, giving in in the hopes they’ll be mostly left alone. It’s a vain hope, of course, but it’s hard to see a truth when your ease, your routine, your own neighborhood hasn’t been destroyed.
Tahren, who has left the Immortal Blessed’s alliance with the Hierarchs and betrayed her people to save her brother’s life and soul, tells Kai that nothing less than the threat to Dahin would have turned her:
“I’m not sure I would have forced myself to confront the hypocrisy of our way of life, otherwise.”
That was a more honest answer than Kai had counted on. “If it hadn’t hurt you personally.”
“Correct. Even if you have always known in your heart, that your way of thought, your . . . belief in your own superiority, has foundations of straw and not stone, it is still a shock to have it collapse so quickly.”
p. 203
There are people who don’t learn empathy until they themselves experience pain, threat, and loss. Even if they’re brilliant. Even if they’re an Immortal Marshall, a being of great power and wielder of deadly weapons. Even if they’re a snappy dresser with a high Twitter follow. Bashasa’s response to the converts is to welcome them into the coalition because, you know, much better late than never. We should all be so wise, so disciplined.
For the record, anyone who says that fantasy isn’t a mirror to reality and history, allow me to 1) direct you to the LeopardsAteMyFace subreddit now, 2) encourage you to look up treaties with Native American tribes online to see how well that worked out for the Native Americans, and 3) consider the tattered state of the American experiment.
Bashasa leads a fragile alliance held together more by shared hatred of the Hierarchs and the force of his personality than anything else. The shared hatred will only get the rebels so far. We can see in this warfare phase of the series that there are a good number of would-be successors to Bashasa, especially if he decides to step into the power vacuum that throwing off the Hierarchs will form.
As we know from the current plot (I’ve written very little about the current plot so far), the rebels will indeed throw off the Hierarchs, and Bashasa will be known in his lifetime as Bashasa the Great, but the extent of his authority has yet to be revealed. And the fragile experiment in dismantling the empire and returning governance to traumatized and shattered city-states and regions has not yet been revealed. What is true, however, is that even though entire cities lie abandoned like Orintukk in Witch King, a mere 60-70 years after the age of the Hierarchs and their continental genocide, life is slowly returning to the Arik:
From above, the old roads were still etched on the landscape. These had been the main routes before the Hierarchs, but they led to places that didn’t exist anymore. From the surface they were mostly buried under grass and dirt, only the occasional boundary stone visible.
The raft passed over a few tumbled ruins that had once been villages or large farmsteads, but the signs of life — long canal boats or flitting skiffs, ox-drawn wagons and striding wallwalkers — was a reminder of survival that Kai would never grow tired of watching.
Queen Demon, p. 27
To return to a world where there has never been an empire to dominate all the others — that was Bashasa’s impossible dream. In the aftermath of the war, the states and city-states form a coalition, but all of it now stands on a knife’s edge, and even without interference from Hierarchs who may or may not still nurse imperial designs, ruthless and ambitious Prince-Heirs would happily step up to dominate all the rest. The mold has been cast; it could be destroyed, but as along as the memory of the mold of empire remains, the temptation to rebuild it is depressingly enduring, in whichever world we’re talking about.
Next week I want to tie up loose ends, so far as we know them. We haven’t talked about the beautiful delicacy of Bashasa and Kai’s relationship, or the mourning that Kai hasn’t resolved and why Bashat and Ramad can so thoroughly hurt him. We haven’t discussed the ties and tensions in the family that knits a demon, a Witch, and two Blessed together, and we haven’t talked at all about where this is all going.
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