Tagra

« Tagra can be described as an oval excentrically inserted on the Pole, divided by glaciers into two halves that are referred to as Eastern and Western, and on such terms my description will be based. The Dragon's Jaw rises on the coast closer to the Pole, discharging its excess ice in the Sea of Storms; the Thunder Mountains rise on the other, discharging their own in the Throat. On both sides, icebergs people the waters surrounding Tagra. Between the two formations, there lie the frozen Polar Fields.

On the Sea of Storms blow towards lesser latitudes the freezing winds constantly exhaled from the peaks of the Dragon's Jaw; countless vessels lie dashed upon the basalt cliffs of its shores, to which clung the rocky nests of seabirds. Over this terrible sea there watches the western coast of the Kru'u Union, the most terrible of the nations of Tagra.

The Union extends more southward that any other kingdom, reclaiming even part of the Polar Fields. A pale tundra, marshy in the brief summer, fills most of this extension, succumbing to the forest only on the northern coast. It's a land of mines and steelworks ruled as a barrack by a council of Strategae. They have sworn enmity upon the rest of mankind, and appear to us in the form of border fortresses manned by grim-faced soldiers. Even the trees of the coast stand upright as soldiers, bare under the dark needle canopy. They call Krss their capital, all of granite and concrete, and remain active during the winter night seeking shelter in its network of underground galleries.

The northern coast of the Union faces, with black beaches of bituminous sand, the Sea of Whales, the richest of all caressing Tagra, and the main source of sustanance for the soldier-people with its cetaceans and giant kelp. It is studded with islets peopled by penguins, and by the hermit saints of the stern Kru'u religion.

Beyond the Union lie the sandy lands of the Tayaka, made so arid by the embrace of the Lightning Mountains, which stand between them and the ocean, blocking its winds. As there is no hope of agriculture, the Tayaka are mostly nomads. They live in caravans of hadrosaurs and other beasts, carrying with them tents of leather that they raise at the feet of the dunes when the western wind blows. They have the shortest face of all the 'ikra, and large eyes that they protect from the sand by wearing byssus veils. Tthey worship a shepherd-god whose will they read in the contour of clouds, in the ripples of water in the oasis, and in the cracks of dried clay. The southeastern plateaux host the only stantial tribes, which build monasteries and watermills on the red sandstone slopes. In a mud palace on these mountains gather yearly the matriarchs of all Tayaka tribes to treat among themselves or with foreign kingdoms.

Proceeding eastward one finds the thrice-centenarian Chaatai Republic, to which I'm honoured to belong. Rich in forests and farmed fields, its cities are connected by a most recent network of railroads; its many rivers, which mostly drain from the Thunder Mountains in the south, are regimented by bridges and dams. The different activities are managed by thirty commercial Guilds, whose Archonts sit in a single parliament. In the east, the Republic faces the Throat, a narrow wedge of sea that reaches the Thunder glaciers and completes the division of the two halves of Tagra. Here rises, like an artificial cliff, our capital Grikaa, the harbour of which has made us the greatest maritime power in history.

The Throat also divides us from the largest of the kingdoms of Tagra, hegemon of the Eastern half — the Takrakaya Empire, ancient as civilization itself, ruled for millennia by a single dynasty of Divine Empresses. The capital, Tsang-ha, counts more souls than whole nations, and the domes of its temples could contain villages. A capillary bureaucracy brings into every household the will of the Divine Empress — or, more likely, of her ministers. The Takrakaya are tall, with elongated faces and well distanced eyes. Their lands are rich, crossed by vast meandering rivers, adorned with marble outcrops. The pearl of the Empire is perhaps Lake Ngang, rich in mollusks and crustaceans, animated by reed boats and floating markets.

In the northeast, the land is more fragmented, and refractory to unification. However, the hundred states of the !Akau'a are mostly servants and vassals of Tsang-ha. Hills, lakes, waterfalls, and rainy forests that miraculously survive the trials of winter grace this green land, sadly bloodied by constant tribal warfare. Many sacrifice their prisoners to underground spirits or commit similar savageries, with great consternation of their civilized protectors. Some have instead accepted the worship of 'Au'a, and opened their ports to our merchant ships. The eastern tribes hunt whales and sea turtles beneath the cliffs of the Sea of Storms, the same that washes Kru'u.

There are other lands that do not belong to this ring of nations. The long and narrow islands called of the Raider Kingdoms extend northward from the hinge between the two halves of Tagra, dividing the Sea of Storms in the west from the Sea of Whales in the east. On the two largest, the stout and short one is called Gudju, and the tapered and curved one 'Ai!u'ai. These islands are partitioned among many eights of queens that derive their power from the command of armed fleets. Ships find shelter from the gales in the rocky bays. The land is bare, sharp, flayed by the waves; the breeding of penguins barely suffices to sustain its population, and must be supplied by raids. Recently a few queens have allowed merchants from the continent to gather guano from their valleys for the fields of Chaatai and Takrakaya.

There is a current surrounding all Tagra, flowing in eternal circle. There is no dry land on its path, and thus it proceeds undaunted, driven on by hurrican-like eternal winds. All the icebergs generated at the center of the world gather here, and march all around us in a formidable garrison. Water lashed by the winds erupts in brutal storms that swallow all ships, or send them to crash against cliff of stone or ice after having hopelessly lost their longitude. Even marine birds fear this belt of gales, which we know as the Wall of the Sea. Only whales cross it without fear, swimming far below those waves as hills of water, and thus sailors hail them as messengers between worlds.

The current is stronger near the northern half of 'Ai!u'ai, where the howling of the wind, the roaring of waves, the shrieking of the pelagorns, and the creaking of ice add into such a din that it is not surprising that the natives of that place believe that the souls of past multitudes gather in the sky and scream among the clouds. What lies beyond that horror of water, nobody can tell. The myths of the outer islands, strangely similar to the writings of our earliest philosophers, speak of a Warm Island lying beyond the Wall, where the sun shines throughout the winter, and plants grow in unimaginable profusion.

Tagra is a cold, harsh, dark, cruel land; a land of cliffs slimy with seafoam and guano, sharp rocks crusted with ice, bare trunks of contorted trees, bellowing waves and shrieking seabirds. It is also a land of peerless beauty; a land of cobalt lakes rimmed by snow, of marble mountains gleaming in the sun, of towering podocarps standing against spotless skies, of aurorae wavering in the winter night. Perhaps it is the cruelty of the environment that makes it beautiful, as the bite of water digs riverbeds and waterfalls, and the violence of subterranean transformations creates the veins of marble. Kru'u is the coldest and harshest of our kingdoms, and still it is the most rich in natural treasures. There, it is said, rises a pillar of ice created by the freezing of a waterfall that once tumbled down the Dragon's Jaw, and which moves to tears even their Strategae.

There is value and virtue in the talk of lands beyond the sea, all around the belly of the globe, or on the opposite pole where summer and winter exchange their place. I have indulged myself in such speculations, and still treasure the hope that something like the Warm Island can exist, can be accessed if we but find the courage and will to brave the Wall of the Sea. What glory, what joy to she whose feet are the first to touch shores never darkened by the winter night! But there is value and virtue in knowledge and acceptance of reality as well, and for the time being Tagra is the only land given to us. »

— Kukri Taika-Daagru

“… in any case, the possibility of advanced intelligence among mammals remains extremely speculative. Endothermy and brain cortex are in their favour, but their neurons are not dense enough if compared to ours. They would need an enormous head, and a proportionate blood supply. Which leads to their worst issue, viviparity. It should be obvious to anyone that egg-laying is a requisite for cerebral development; can you imagine the head of a sapient mammal passing through the mother’s birth canal? The problem is insurmountable.”

“Let us not overstate; harder problems have been solved by evolution. Clearly our sapient mammal ought to be a marsupial, which would complete its cerebral development in the mother’s pouch, relatively unconstrained as it sucks milk.”

“Call me a moralist, but the idea of a sapient being feeding on milk keeps repulsing me.”

“Our males regurgitate food in our children’s mouth; you think that so different?”

“You do not? Food is food, whether pre-digested or not. Milk is a bodily secretion – it’s like feeding on blood, on mucus, on semen. Mammals are born as parasites, and frankly I don’t believe they are worthy of upper faculties.”

“If you believe so. Myself, I see no reason an omnivorous marsupial, perhaps tree-dwelling, could not evolve organs of manipulation and an advanced brain. Tagra’s mutable environment would give it the necessary incentives. A prehensile-tailed tree-dweller could start using its forelimbs to handle objects, adopting a bipedal gait.”

“But having left the trees, it would have to walk on two legs, with its spine up straight, as a penguin’s, lest it falls forward. It’s not just very unseemly, it’s also extremely unstable.”

“Once the tail has lost its prehensile function, it could increase its size and balance the head’s weight, giving the marsupial a stance similar to ours. It would retain the furry coat, analogous to our plumage - there’s no reason to shed it, even in climates warmer than ours. The general result would be something much like an ‘ikra, although molded from different material.”

“Ah, such an image! Describe, describe us this thinking mammal of yours!”

“Well… our foremost sense is sight, as typical of the feathered beings of land and air. Not so among mammals – probably this being wouldn’t even see colours, fundamentally nocturnal creature that it is. It would find its way mostly with hearing and scent. I would expect a large wet nose proportioned to its brain, to sample the air with the precision worthy of a superior mind. We know that mammals can discriminate more scents than we can hues. Communication… the vocal apparatus of mammals is a poor thing, it allows little more than screeches and bellows. Many communicate with their bodily stance, or contracting their facial muscles, which are well developed in furred beasts, and might even supplement the function of hands in holding tools. Lips, perhaps, nimbler than beaks…”

“What a sight would they be, the cities of the featherless biped. People croaking and howling, jumping on the spot, baring their teeth and squinting their eyes. Grunting noses, lips smacking and spraying spit. But if their eyesight is as poor as you say, perhaps they would rather trust olfaction in this field as well, and communicate by rubbing on each other their nether glands, as astrapotheria do. And to do so they would need to be always sticking to each other.”

“I don’t think that would disturb them. Mammals appreciate physical contact; the smallest species are always curled in their burrows. The greater risk of disease might be a price worth paying. They would have no concept of a respectful distance and, who can say, maybe they would not envy it to us.”

“A use for burrows is dubious, for a species that fears no predators. It’s well known that the metabolic activity of mammals is generally inferior to that of feathered species. The hypothetical creature would inhabit only a warmer and moister world, dominated by flower plants. They would leave the trees to live in a garden of giant flowers…”

“Might be, might be. But I think they would conserve an instinctual love of enclosed spaces, moreso as they would spend their earliest infancy in the maternal pouch.”

“Enclosed spaces that would soon be satured with the stench of their secretions. Is this a fancy of yours, that you wish to impose on us?”

“And still you confuse your aesthetic pleasures with iron laws of nature, even in a world of conjecture. I wager, for you even the caravans of Yakak'ratu would be unsufferably alien. This being has sprouted from another branch altogether of the delta of life. What is pleasurable to us would probably be disgusting to it, and viceversa; but if the selfsame happiness is achieved by different means, what makes a form of it inferior to another? Tagra, even our noble city of Grikaa, is hardly perfection embodied. I have counted more than enough beggars and cutthroats leaving my house this morning. Who can say whether the thinking mammal, in her garden-world, isn’t happier than we?”

« Many are the riches of the desert spreading between the Lightning and Thunder Mountains, most of them imaginary, some real; all the more precious is the knowledge of the paths and oases that allow the caravans to go from a coast to another of the ocean of dust, and yet more their control. Through the Yqsal Gate, that sun-burnt gullet of rock, pass all the commmerces between the Kru'u Union and the two other main powers of the world. In that passage where it is still impossible to maintain a paved road or a railroad, as there is no solid ground on which to lay them down, each grain of iron or coal, each palm of rope or leather, each digit of naphtha or liquor must pass on the back of caravans, and pay a tribute to the guardians of the Gate.

Armies from all directions have pushed throughout the centuries into the heart of the burning land of the Kullaran, and while some of them returned thence, none did so as conqueror. Each army had come gleaming with bronze and steel, marching under standards and oriflammes, with their good retinue of wagons and iguanodonts. Each has saluted with trepidation the sight of the towers rising where soil and rock give way to sand.

The Kullaran sentinels, accustomed to tell the glimmer of oases apart from mirages, to recognize the meanest trace of moisture in a field of stone, see the armies at the horizon from their watchposts at the summit of the sandstone pillars. They call each other, they warn each other; leather drums and terracotta flutes sound their signals among the dunes, and within hours the whole nation of the desert has received the message. Feasts are interrupted, quarrels are forgotten; all water is drunk, and all food is swallowed, in a moment, without speaking.

The tents, paper-light constructions of woven feathers and hollow bones, which contain no furniture but only bags and carpets, are dismantled in an eyeblink and loaded onto the back of people and beasts. The families depart into different directions, throw onto their backs sand-colored coats; a camp of a thousand souls dissolves like brine in the sunlight. The explorers of the various tribes run on the dunes, spying every movement of the invaders, whistling to each other messages that codify their discoveries in the pattern of notes, or their own lineage; tribes bloodied by generation-long wars forget their hostility.

The stone piles marking the safe paths are moved or buried; the road to the oases is barred or strewn with poisonous herbs, the secret storehouses of water and food emptied and scattered; the torches that ought to light water dwells in the night shine at the center of salt pans. No single Kullaran, even if captured and delivered to the tormentor, could reveal the location of more than a minimal fraction of the desert's resources.

The dispersed Kullaran do not fight, except to prevent the return of enemy explorers; the desert fights for them. The sun slowly consumes the invaders, burdened by useless and increasingly suffocating armor; the spiders and scorpions of the sand emerge in the night to disturb their sleep; the columns of soldiers, blinded by duststorms, separate and lose their way among the dunes that change their shape every day.

Sometimes they attempt to goad the invisible enemies into battle. If they meet by chance a group of Kullaran that has taken the wrong path, they abandon themselves to massacre, to avenge their own consumption, to quench their thirst with blood, but it's worth nothing.

The flower of empires is powerless, like a dagger sinking its blade into water. The heroines of a hundred battles die one by one without having taken up their sword. Prayers are vain: desiccated tongues cannot articulate them, and the burning wind scatters them. Warriors throw away their shields and unlatch their armors, hoping to march lighter, disrobe themselves and tear off the denser feathers from their necks, and perhaps a few of them survive to the end of the journey. No general, not even the Kru'u strategae educated to cruelty since their hatching, is as empty of mercy as the desert.

A few armies reach the opposite end of the desert, decimated, crestfallen, having gained nothing, and often having lost everything. Generals return home in disgrace, if they return at all, with flesh wrapped more tightly around their bones. These are the fortunate ones. I've seen several times, with Shalasha, a great mound of mummified bodies, with their skin white and featherless, their heads contracted backward, briefly uncovered by a gust of wind. I must believe that the sand of Kulla-Tag is nothing but the remains of a million armies ground into dust by sun and wind.

The bodies have no longer arms or insignia; the Kullaran take their toll from all who trample their lands. In the camps I saw fathers give crop milk to their children in Chaatai helmets, produced, I believe, during the Second Kingdom, but polished clean as if they had just left the forge; I saw infirm old men walk leaning on rifle barrels as canes; steaming blood roasts served in shields of Kru'u making, and iguanodonts with broken hooves wrapped in the imperial standards of Takrakaya.

Then the flutes and the drums sound victory, first softly, undistinguishable from the hissing wind, then loudly. The Kullaran meet each other again, they divide and unite according to their tribes, bring the provisions back to the storehouses, the torches and stone piles back to their place. They collect the abandoned weapons, and feast on the scavenger birds attracted by the hecatomb. They drink and they laugh, the lords of the sands, from whom not a single feather was taken. The invasion has only made them richer; more trophies to flaunt in the tents of the matriarchs, more fables on the wonders of Kulla-Tag, one more call for the next empress, who will have already forgotten the lessons of her predecessors.

Once in a while a kingdom falls, or an empire contracts in the spasms of a rebellion; but the Kullaran, untouchable, keep living as they did at the dawn of our species, and so they will even when the iron and the coal will no longer pass through the Yqsal Gate; and so they will, following on the ground the invisible paths that the Aurora mirrors in the sky, until the last breath will have left Tagra, and this world will disappear entirely beneath ice. »

– Kukri Taika-Daagru, travel records