than a league from the new coast. After an intense period of
rebuilding, it became abundantly clear that their tremendously shrunken
homeland would no longer support a burgeoning population. With
typical Melcene thoroughness, they attacked the problem from
every possible angle. One thing was absolutely certain; they had to
have more land. The Melcene mind is a peculiarly
compartmentalized one, their answer to any problem is to immediately form a
committee. The ‘newlands’ conmmittee which was drawn up to
present possible solutions to the Emperor arrived at its final
proposal only after considering every possible alternative. They
concluded that, since they could not make new land, they would be
forced to either buy or take lands from someone else. Since
southeastern Mallorea lay closest at hand and was populated by people of
their own race, it was to that region that the Melcenes turned their
attention. There were five rather primitive kingdoms in
southeastern and east central Mallorea occupied by peoples of the same racial
stock as the Melcenes themselves; Candahar, Darshiva, Peldane,
Cellanta, and Rengel. These kingdoms were overrun one by one by
the Melcenes and were absorbed into their growing empire.
The dominating force in the Melcene Empire was the
bureaucracy. Unlike other governments of the time, which frequently
operated on royal whim or upon the accumulation of personal power,
the Melcene government was rigidly departmentalized. While there
are obvious drawbacks to a bureaucratic form of government, such
an approach to administration provides the advantages of
continuity and of a clear-eyed pragmatism which is more concerned with
finding the most practical way to getting a job done than with the
whim, prejudice and egocentricity which so frequently mars more
personal forms of government. The Melcene Bureaucracy in
particular was practical almost to a fault. The concept of an ‘aristocracy of
talent’ dominated Melcene thinking, and if one bureau chose to
ignore a talented individual – of whatever background – another
was almost certain to snap him up.
Thus it was that the various departments of the Melcene
government rushed into the newly-conquered mainland provinces to
winnow through the population in search of genius. The ‘conquered’
.people of Gandahar, Darshiva, Peldane, Cellanta and Rengel were
thus absorbed directly into the mainstream of the life of the Empire.
Always pragmatic, the Melcenes left the royal houses of the five
mainland provinces in place, preferring to operate through
established lines of authority rather than to set up new ones, and, although
the title ‘king’ suffered reduction to the title ‘prince’, it was widely
considered more prestigious to be a ‘prince of the Empire’ than a
“king’ of some minor east-coast kingdom. Thus, the six principalities
of the Melcene Empire flourished in a kind of brotherhood based on
hard-headed practicality. The possession of talent in Melcena is a
universal passport, and is considered more valuable than wealth or
power.
For the next 1800 years the Melcene Empire prospered, far
removed from the theological and political squabbles of the western
part of the continent. Melcene culture was secular, civilized and
highly educated. Slavery was unknown, and trade with the
Angaraks and their subject peoples in Karanda and Dalasia was
extremely profitable. The old Imperial capital at Melcene became a
major center of learning. Unfortunately, some of the thrust of
Melcene scholarship turned toward the arcane. Their practice of
Magic (the summoning of evil spirits) went far beyond the primitive
mumbo-jumbo of the Morindim or the Karandese and began to
delve into darker and more serious areas. They made considerable
progress in witchcraft and necromancy. Their major area of
concentration, however, lay in the field of alchemy. It is surprising to note
that some Melcene alchemists were actually successful in converting
base metals into gold – although the effort and expenditure involved
made the process monumentally unprofitable. It was, however, a
Melcene alchemist, Senji the Clubfooted, who inadvertently
stumbled over the secret of the Will and the Word during one of his
experiments. Senji, a 15th century practitioner at the University in
the Imperial city was notorious for his ineptitude. To be quite frank
about it, Senji’s experiments more often turned gold into lead than
the reverse. In a fit of colossal frustration at the failure of his most
recent experiment, Senji inadvertently converted’a half-ton of brass
plumbing into solid gold. An immediate debate arose among the
Bureau of Currency, the Bureau of Mines, the Department of
Sanitation, the faculty of the College of Alchemy and the faculty of
the College of Comparative Theology about which organization
should have control of Senji’s discovery. After about three hundred
years of argumentation, it suddenly occurred to the disputants that
Senji was not merely talented, but also appeared to be immortal. In
the name of scientific experimentation, the varying Bureaus,
Departments and faculties agreed that an effort should be made to
have him assassinated.
A well-known defenestrator was retained to throw the irascible
old alchemist from a high.window in one of the towers of the
University. The experiment had a three-fold purpose. What the
various Departments wished to find out was: (a) If Senji was in fact
unkillable, (b) what means he would take to save his life while
plummeting toward the pavement, and (c) if it might be possible to
discover the secret of flight by giving him no other alternative. What
they actually found out was that it is extremely dangerous to threaten
the life of a sorcerer – even one as inept as Senji. The defenestrator
found himself translocated to a position some fifteen hundred meters
above the harbor, five miles distant. At one instant he had been
wrestling Senji toward the window; at the next, he found himself
standing on insubstantial air high above a fishing fleet. His demise
occasioned no particular sorrow – except among the fishermen,
whose nets were badly damaged by his rapid descent. In an outburst
of righteous indignation, Senji then proceeded to chastise the
was finally only a personal appeal from the Emperor himself that
persuaded the old man to desist from some fairly exotic punishments.
(Senji’s penchant for the scatological had led him rather
naturally into interfering with normal excretory functions as a means of
chastisement.) Following the epidemic of mass constipation, the
Departments were more than happy to allow Senji to go his own way
unmolested.
On his own, Senji established a private academy and advertised
for students. While his pupils never became sorcerers of the
magnitude of Belgarath, Polgara, Ctuchik or Zedar, they were able to
perform some rudimentary applications of the Will and the Word
which immediately elevated them far above the magicians and
witches practicing their art forms within the confines of the
University’
It was during this period of peace and tranquillity that the first
encounter with the Angaraks took place. Although they were
victorious in that first meeting, the pragmatic Melcenes realized that
eventually the Angaraks could overwhelm them by sheer weight of
numbers.
During the period when the Angaraks turned their attention to
the establishment of the Dalasian protectorates and Torak’s full
concentration was upon the emerging Angarak kingdoms on the
western continent, there was peace between the Angaraks and the
Melcenes. It was a tentative peace – a very wary one – but it was
peace nonetheless. The trade contacts between the two nations gave
them a somewhat better understanding of each other, though the
sophisticated Melcenes were amused by the preoccupation with
religion which marked even the most worldly Angarak. Periodically
over the next eighteen hundred years, relations between the two
countries deteriorated into nasty little wars, seldom longer than a
year or two in duration and from which both sides scrupulously
avoided committing their full forces. Obviously neither side wished
to risk an all-out confrontation.
In the hope of gaining more information about each other, the
two nations ultimately established a time-honored practice.
Children of various leaders were exchanged for certain periods of
time. The sons of high-ranking bureaucrats in the city of Melcene
were sent to Mal Zeth to live with the families of Angarak generals,
and the sons of the generals were sent in turn to the Imperial capital
to be raised there. The result of these exchanges was to produce a
group of young men with a cosmopolitanism which in many
was later to become the norm for the ruling class of the Mallorean
Empire.
* This was a common practice in antiquity. Attila the Hun, for example, spent several
Years of his childhood in the City of Rome. The idea was to civilize and Christianize him.
It didn’t work out that way, however.
It was one such exchange toward the end of the fourth
millennium which ultimately resulted in the unification of the two
peoples. At about the age of twelve, a youth named Kallath, the son
of a high-ranking Angarak general, was sent to the city of Melcene
to spend his formative years in the household of the Imperial
minister of Foreign Affairs. The Minister, because of his position,
]lad frequent official and social contacts with the Imperial Family,