Steel and Fire

Everyone in the city of Monya knew to avoid the deep waters. Man was borne of the earth; that was his place - just as the ocean was the place of deadly waves, vicious beasts, and all manner of men too crude to live in organized society. For all of Pokomo's life, he'd avoided the bay, knowing the threat of the Glossian Corsairs lay waiting, never far enough from the shores. This was the balance of life, the unspoken agreement between the noble, gentle people of the land and the merciless vagabonds of wave-and-wind. The Monyasi tended to their forests along the delta of the benevolent river, and lived peacefully in their homes and gardens, always keeping an eye to the eastern waters, guarding but never crossing that invisible threshold, the Glossians doing much the same. Pokomo had heard tales of merchants who traveled too deep, who sailed off never to return, in the name of turning a profit. To him, those merchants were fools: why venture into dangerous waters when Earth herself already provided everything one might need? His family had lived off of the land for generations, curating and maintaining the forests as a farmer sees to his fields, taking only what was necessary yet always giving back even more. Many here still believed in the old gods, but even to them the divinity of the trees was supreme: the most important and abundant of all Earth's gifts, always to be cherished and protected. Pokomo was proud of his people and the empire he lived in, whose divine tenets forbade it from harming the Earth: they were her stewards, and she in turn was their greatest ally.   When a legion of imperial soldiers carrying hatchets arrived in Monya, Pokomo was concerned.   They came one hundred at once, their legate a burly, stone-voiced man from the capital, so slow and precise in his movements and speech that he himself seemed like a towering oak, too stubborn to bow before any gale of wind that might come. The Monyasi were bound by imperial decree to house the legate and his men, who announced their intent to build a naval base not far south of Monya, in a new port-of-call which they would use to protect their coasts and fend off the Glossians, ridding the area of piracy and setting it up as a hub for overseas trade. The plan was bold and, to Pokomo, unnecessarily cruel. His people had lived harmoniously for centuries by keeping to themselves, respecting the territorial bounds of the Corsairs and keeping to the lands, just as the Glossians held dominion of the baywaters, taming the wild currents others dared not ride. Yet he was not one to stand up to the decrees of a legate, although it pained him. When the soldiers began their chopping, he was silent.   They began with the development of a road leading out from the southern gate, which was not a stone-bricked gate as one might expect from a city of that size, but a dense, brambled arch of branches and vines shaped together by coiled metal like a bonsai tree, woven neatly into a grand, living entrance demarcating the city from the wilder lands around. From above, it would have been hard to tell the difference between the city and her surroundings, but as the roadway was cleared outwards in a near-straight line, the border between civilization and wilderness grew startlingly visible: trees felled one after the other, the architects of their demise taking the most efficient route to their destination; a scar upon the land reaching ever farther, dissecting it like a slain beast. All the while, the legate and his men were fed and quartered by the people of Monya; filling the inns yet paying no recompense for the inconveniences inflicted on the innkeepers; eating their food: nuts and berries foraged from the very trees they slew, game hunted from the very ecosystem they wrecked, the destruction spreading each day more and more like a plague. Pokomo was not the only one among his peers who was hurt by this, yet none had been courageous (or foolish) enough to speak out against it. When the road was finished, more than 50 kilometers long, the legionnaires set about clearing the land for their encampment. They razed the galleried trees of the delta's many tributaries, the ancient cherries and maples who had lived through so much more than any of the men themselves, who had grown taller than any of their own kin, and therefore had the most lumber to offer the greedy thieves-of-the-land. The months went on in this fashion until the lands of Pokomo's delta were no longer recognizable, tarnished by a power-hungry man sitting in a castle hundreds of kilometers away. They went on until the people of Monya had naught more to offer, until their stores were empty, their orchards desolate, the woodlands robbed of all they once had to give. Man had taken more than was necessary, and his project was nearly complete.   The first true settlers of the new city arrived not long after its defences were complete, and the soldiers at last moved on from Monya, into their new fort upon the sea, out from which the rest of the city would be built. The entire settlement had been planned out, every detail from the start, in the way that Man had always felt the need to control his environment, to bend it to his will for fear of the unknown, of losing his mighty grasp. Its walls, its streets and alleys, its canals, its markets and its inns, they had all been plotted out in perfectly efficient geometrical patterns, so unlike Earth herself, so mechanical, so unchanging. As the flood of migrants grew steadier, the city came to life (if you could call it that). Houses and shops rose from the ground, docks were built and paths of stone laid, temples of gods both old and new, some devoted to the very nurturing Earth on whose grave they stood. In two years there came two thousand, bringing with them all the trappings of modernity: fields and farms to feed them, trenches and towers to protect them, wells for their water and sewers for their shit. Man mutilated Earth with every system that he had contrived for his comforts; the forests thinned and Earth weakened, Earth who once would have nourished the settlers as guests in her home, if they had only the decency to ask.   But it was too late to ask. The people of Monya had now a neighbor, a city three times larger than their own with no history of its own, sprung into existence at the whims of an emperor who had not once come to see it. Its people were chiefly from the capital and other large cities, the few places in the world who could spare the population to found a place completely new, like a parasitic worm grown to its limit, splitting itself in two to leech doubly from its host. The new city they called Katsz-Nim, after the legate who founded it and now acted as its earl and protected it from the raiders at sea. The raiders, however, now anchored their ships much closer than they once had, threatened by the aggression brewing at their borders, curious for the first time about what treasures must lie beyond such defences. Many of Katsz-Nim's people were sailors and soldiers, brought there at first to keep it safe from the Glossians, now to launch their own assaults, to push them from the shores into the deep waters of the bay, to free up the coasts for trade.   One could not say for certain who had struck first, but ultimately it did not matter. The two sides were now at each other's throats, each day another skirmish, another ship sank, another life lost. The Glossians were fierce, adapted to the tides and currents, knowledgeable and coordinated in ways the imperials simply were not. But the empire was big. The man in the faraway castle cared less for the numbers lost at sea than for the numbers of coins in his treasury. As the fighting continued, the Glossians retreated slightly more each day, until eventually one would not have known for certain that the fighting was even still going, if not for the ships returning to port with sails painted black. Nevertheless, the threat had been taken so far from the empire's borders that the city was now declared open for trade, and a new flood of migrants began, this time of temporary visitors from distant lands, bringing with them the many wonderful things they themselves had raped from their own corner of the planet. They brought leather and cashmere, borrowed from the backs of tame beasts; they brought metals and jewels, siezed from the clutches of mountains and caves; they brought spices, which they had no doubt grown in neat little rows, in that all-controlling fashion that Man was so prone to. Many called the city a metropolis, praising the miracle of its being, that the evil mutineers had been beaten back to the point of irrelevance, that civilized society had prevailed amid the dark waters.   All the while, the city of Monya dwindled. Her people tended to their groves as they always had, shaping and nourishing the glades in the customary symbiosis of their culture. Trees were left to stand, rivers to meander, and birds to sing. Yet for all their efforts, they could not undo the damages. Some species had been so over-hunted during the construction of Katsz-Nim that they were no longer seen. Some groves had been stripped bare and burned as firebreaks. Her land was scarred and withered, in spite the blossomings of wealth in the garden of her neighbor. The Monyasi clung desperately to their ways, nursing her wounds wherever they could, yet there were some wounds that could never be healed, and as Earth's ability to provide waned, there began an exodus. Some left in search of new homes, new fertile beds to sow with their seeds of hope. Others, however, left to live in Katsz-Nim, to walk its cobbled paths and till its foul fields, complicit in the ongoing pillaging yet left with no other options. Pokomo did not resent them. He too had considered leaving. Every time he turned the idea over in his head, though, he could not bring himself to act upon it. Monya was his home, and just as she had cared for him in his times of illness, he would stay and care for her.