Part 15, Chapter 5: A Patchwork Fiction
April 17th, 86 AG
Through the woodlands the army rolled, a river on the move more than a discernible body of men, an exodus that was less a leaving and far more an arriving. I rode along in the main body of soldiers, hooves drumming on the pavingstones in a monotonous tattoo filling my ears alongside the familiar sounds of wagon wheels clacking from bump to bump and a thousand boots slapping on the cool granite of the hours after dawn. Where we were, exactly, was not something I concerned myself with- by rights I normally wouldn't be here. A fact that the Governor-General of this region, Xavier Hersan, was well aware of. His impassive blonde-mustachioed face rode at my right hand, very similar to where he sat when both of us made our home at the Rose Council.
But this was an important spring. Doubly important because of what the spring had portended in the lands under his control.
Brittany was rising. Or, more accurately, several tribes that lived in Brittany, this wedge of France that had been carved out by the Breton lord who had shown foresight in joining with the Imperium, were rising. The signs had been seen all winter, a steady trickle of reports coming in; assessors ambushed or driven from villages by force, patrols forced to defend themselves against brigands, missives from spies and Eyes within the population reporting dissent that was frothing towards rebellion. There was only so much you could do to head off such social forces, once a region had entered a sufficient state of foment.
Arans. Gusivals. Ilidani. They were not names I was familiar with, not except for from the reports I had read with increasing concern in the heart of the White Palace, but they meant far more to the scattered farmers and herders of this region than me in distant Mara. Once they had been free tribes, kindreds ruled by chiefs of their own bloodlines and lineages, powers in their own right. Then the Brightlord, Robert Dawn, had begun his conquest of the region; he had ruled as any feudal king, seizing control through force of arms, ingenious in exploiting the changing tides of progress that rippled out from the boundaries of the Imperium for the advantage of his own people. They had fallen, these former tribes, forced to pay homage to the Bretons underneath Robert, fighting in his armies, accepting Imperial rule- but always the knowledge that the choice of joining was not their own had festered.
An infected wound left to rot corrupted the whole limb. Thus it was now, a half-generation hence, that the septic cancer had borne its sickly fruit. Where a thousand other tribes had freely accepted the sovereignty of the Great Anchor, binding their lives and customs to our own, it was different for those who were never given a choice. Now demagogues harangued the population, calling them to arms, to win back their freedom from the oppressor that had been set over them.
I glanced sideways to where Lord-Commander Flavian of the 4th rode his roan stallion, his eyes nearly glazed over as he digested another sheaf of reports from horseback. It was an axiom that Imperial society was built on, so fragile, so dangerous if the axiom was disrupted. This polity I had forged, this patchwork quilt of ten thousand ethnic identities and languages and kindreds, was balanced upon once simple statement: being a man was more important than being anything else. From Rome, to the Baltic Sea, to Mara, to the shores of the Adriatic, even to the wash of the Nile, that was the assumption under which the commerce and lives and ambitions of those folk who called themselves Imperial citizens operated. The gift of enlightenment that I, the Hegemon, had brought to them, was for all men- not just for the Marans, or just for those people who lived within the sight of the Erzgebirge, or just for those people who embraced the truth of the Almighty. Manusabi, Aegyptian, Breton, Italian, Salic, Anatolian; they were equal before Our Father, and thus equal sharers in the prosperity and opportunity that stood attendant in the hand of the Imperium.
Was it a fiction? Perhaps. But it was a fiction I had carefully cultivated, not just out of need, but out of belief. A fiction that I had told myself to avoid journeying to the dark places of my mind until it rang true in my heart. A man's allegiance was always divided, and that was the insidious poison that ate away at the roots of civilization. A brother chose a sister over a cousin, a tribal his kinsman over one not of his lineage, a citizen another citizen over a foreigner. It was the poison I had sought to purge so desperately from the hearts of those who had followed me decades and generations ago; the men we fought, the tribes who joined with us, were not the other. They were flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood, men merely deluded in their resistance to the truth that I had been given by Our Father. The light of reason, the truth of progress, the words of salvation. Long-lost brothers could be welcomed to the family, not established in their own category, and this was the reason why so many men and women had found in the Imperium the home they had not looked for. To be alone in the wild world, a member of a dwindling tribe surrounded by foes, was different entirely to the status of one who lived within the Imperium of Man- not an Imperium of one Man, but an Imperium for all Men.
A pleasant fiction, the societal glue that held the bonds of civilization together. And then the others had come along, with their strange ideas. The Scythians, serving God in a different way. The Norscans, following another king. The men of Fenis, even, clinging to their own superstitions and ideas. Those interlopers, those Deceivers, had been a dire threat to the new order that was rising under my careful cultivation. Men had asked questions, seen ideas that were not mind and weighed them to see if they were equal. I had had to act quickly to maintain the comforting belief that then permeated the Imperium, and had now come unto Gospel Truth for those who still lived within her borders; men might think differently, and do differently. But if they thought and did differently, they were wrong. Not the type of wrong of philosophers in debate, but the type of wrong of a man who slays another over a petty grievance. Disunity was a wicked seed that only those deceived embraced.
And here lay the heart of why the rebellions in Brittany were such a grave occurrence. By rising against the local garrisons and commanders, the Arans and the other tribes rejected that view of the world. They loudly declared not only that they were in the right, not deceived but free, and that men should take their own destiny into their hands, independent of the Imperium. It was one thing for men and women who did not know better to reject the light of civilization; they could were deluded, obviously, or so set in their habits as to not be able to shake free of their ignorance. It was another thing altogether for those who knew that light to cast it aside and say that instead they embraced the darkness.
In that embrace they called into question doubt in the minds of all who heard of their actions. And doubt was a disease.
A disease that this host and others now marched to eradicate. It would be bloody, most likely, a paroxysm of violence purging the vestiges of a man's mistakes from the body of the patient that I worked to treat. In some places in my heart I resented the actions of the Brightlord Dawn as much as I had previously lauded them. He had done well in joining his people to the cause of right upon this world, certainly. But the problems he would have inherited down the line, the suppression of an unintegrated populace, had now become our problems. Problems that would have to be solved in blood, and fire, and the scattering of families across the face of the earth.
Wrapped up in my melancholy thoughts I rode onward, noting only in passing thin columns of smoke rising in the distance. It was not far now before the Great Company would start coming across lands in open revolt, and the faces of the soldiers were grim, like my own.
