peasant; and the word ‘Nadrak’ meant tradesman. These, of course, were
the names Torak assigned the three tribes before he sent them into
the west. To insure their continuing enthusiasm for the tasks he had
set them, moreover, he dispatched the Disciple Ctuchik, along with
every third Grolim in all of Mallorea to accompany them on their
migration. The abrupt decimation of Grolim ranks profoundly
disrupted the power of the Church in ancient Mallorea and in the
subject kingdoms to the east and marked yet another step, toward
the secularization of Mallorean society.
The great trek across the land bridge to the western continent cost
the western tribes of Angarak nearly a million lives, and the lands
which awaited them were profoundly inhospitable. The Murgos (in
keeping with their position as the aristocracy) took the lead in the
march, and thus it is that their lands are most far removed from the
natural causeway formed by the land bridge. The Thulls, still
subservient to their former masters, followed closely behind. The
Nadraks, on the other hand, seemed quite content to remain as far
from Murgo domination as possible. It was, quite naturally, the
Nadraks who most quickly adjusted to the new conditions in which
they found themselves. A fundamentally middle-class society has
little need for serfs and even less for overlords. Thullish society
could function, albeit marginally. For the Murgos, however, the new
situation was very nearly a disaster. Since they were aristocrats (i.e.
the warrior class), their society was organized along military lines
with position stemming in large measure from military rank.
Moreover, their decisions were frequently based upon military
considerations. Thus, their first major stopping point in their
migration to the south was at Rak Goska. Rak Goska is admirably
situated from a military standpoint. As a location for a functioning
city, however, it is a catastrophe. The surrounding territory consists
of the bleak, unfarmable wastes of Murgos, and all food, therefore,
must be imported. To make matters even worse, Murgos make very
poor farmers. At first, the Thulls were more than willing to supply
the needs of their former masters, but as time and distance blurred
the former ties between the two nations, the Thullish contributions
to Murgo well-being diminished to a trickle. The starving Murgos
responded with a series of punitive expeditions into Mishrak ac
Thull until a stern command from Torak (issued by Ctuchik) halted
that practice. The situation of the Murgos was rapidly growing
desperate. It was at this point that they first encountered the oily
Nyissan slave-traders. Nyissans had long conducted slave-raids into
the southern reaches of the continent, which was inhabited by a
simple, quite docile race of people apparently somewhat distantly
related to the Dalasians of southwest Mallorea. The first purchase of
a slave by a Murgo aristocrat forever established the pattern of
Murgo society. The information gleaned from the Nyissans made
them aware of the lands and peoples lying to the south and they
immediately began their conquest of that region as part of their
search for an uninterrupted food supply.
Once the Murgos passed the desolate wastes of Coska, they found
themselves in a fertile land of lakes, rivers and forests. They also
found a ready supply of slaves. The native populations, viewed by
the Murgos as little more than animals, were brutally rounded UP
and herded into huge encampments from which they were parceled
out to work the farmlands in the emerging Murgo military districts.
In typical Murgo fashion, the regions in the south were organized
along military lines, and each district was administered by a general.
A peculiarity of the Murgos has long been a singular lack of any
sense of personal possession – particularly when dealing with land.
A Murgo simply cannot conceive of the notion of personally owning
land. The conquered territories of the south belonged, therefore, to
Murgodom in general. A Murgo’s primary loyalty is to his
immediate superior, and he does not want to own land, since the
responsibility of ownership might divide that loyalty. Thus, Cthol Murgos
is divided into military districts administered by army corps.
Each corps (and ultimately the corps commander) has a specific
geographic region of responsibility. The land is further subdivided
into division areas, regimental areas, battalion areas and so on.
Individual Murgo soldiers act primarily as overseers and
slavedrivers. Murgo population centers thus more closely resemble
Military encampments than they do cities. Housing is assigned to
individual soldiers on the basis of rank. While such a society seems
bleak and repugnant to Westerners and Malloreans alike, one must
nonetheless admire the Murgo tenacity and sense of self-sacrifice
which makes it function.
Since one of the primary concerns of an aristocratic class is the
protection of bloodlines, and since Murgos live in what is quite
literally a sea of slaves, Murgo society rigidly enforces separation
between slave and master. Murgo women in particular are totally
isolated from any possible contact with non-Angaraks, and this
obsession with racial purity has quite literally imprisoned them
within the confines of special ‘women’s quarters’ which lie at the
center of every Murgo house. Any Murgo woman even suspected of
‘consorting’ with a non-Murgo is immediately put to death..
Moreover, any Murgo male, regardless of rank, who is caught in
delicate circumstances with a foreign woman suffers the same fate.
These laws, since they have existed since the end of the second
millennium, have guaranteed a remarkably pure strain. The Murgo
of today is probably the only uncontaminated Angarak on the face
of the globe. In time this obsessive concern with racial purity
became viewed by Murgos as a quasi-religious obligation, and no
attempt was ever made in the western hemisphere to convert
nonAngaraks as became the practice in Mallorea.
It was perhaps the Disciple Ctuchik who was ultimately
responsible for giving an elemental class prejudice the force of religious
sanction. Ctuchik, mindful of the deterioration of Church authority
in Mallorea as a result of the growing secularization and
cosmopolitanism of Mallorean society issued his pronouncements on the
subject from his theological capital at Rak Cthol in the wasteland of
Murgos. He reasoned (probably correctly) that a society faced with
both a legal and religious obligation to avoid contact with foreigners
would not encounter those new ideas which so seriously undermine
the power of the Church. There is, moreover, some evidence which
suggests that Ctuchik’s decrees were in some measure dictated
by the increasing friction between him and his two fellow Disciples,
the newly converted Zedar, and Urvon. Urvon in particular had
embraced the idea of converting non-Angaraks with great
enthusiasm, reasoning that this could only increase the authority of the
Church. Zedar, of course, was an enigma, and was soundly detested
by Ctuchik and Urvon both. It was to counter Urvon, however,
that Ctuchik strove to maintain Murgo purity. It is entirely possible
that Ctuchik reasoned that following Torak’s ultimate victory’ the
maimed God would welcome the delivery of an absolutely pure
Angarak strain to function as the ultimate overlords of a captive
world.
Whatever may have been Ctuchik’s ultimate motivation, Murgos
and western Grolims vigorously contend that Mallorean
cosmopolitanism is a form of heresy, and they customarily refer to Malloreans
as ‘mongrels’. It is this attitude, more than anything else, which has
led to the ages-old hatred existing between Murgo and Mallorean.
Following the upheaval which accompanied the destruction of
Cthol Mishrak, Torak himself became almost totally inaccessible to
his people, concentrating instead upon various schemes to disrupt
the growing power of the kingdoms of the West. The God’s absence
gave the military time to fully exploit its now virtual total control
of Mallorea and the subject kingdoms. One of the oddities of this
period was the lack of a supreme commander at Mal Zeth. Although
powerful men had dominated the high command from time to time,
the authority of the military was normally dispersed among the
senior generals, and this condition prevailed until very nearly the
end of the fourth millennium. Now that their authority in ancient
Mallorea, Karanda and Dalasia was firmly established, the High
Command once again turned its attention to the problem of the
Melcene Empire.
As trade between the Melcenes and the Angaraks increased,
so did Angarak knowledge about their eastern neighbors. The
Melcenes had originally inhabited the islands off the east coast of the
Mallorean Continent, and had, until the catastrophe caused by the
separation of the two continents, been quite content to ignore their
mainland cousins. The vast tidal waves (estimated to have been a
hundred feet high) which swept across the oceans of the world
during the readjustment of the two great land-masses, however,
swallowed up more than half of their islands, leaving the survivors
huddled fearfully together in the uplands. Their capital at Melcene
itself had been a city in the mountains where affairs of state could
be managed without the debilitating effects of the climate in the
tropical lowlands. Following the catastrophe itself, however, Melcene
was a shattered city’ destroyed by earthquake and lying no more