Samarskand and the Ancient World

Singhapura makes no sense without Samarskand, Your Grace, so we have to go back a long way. I warn you now that the ancient world will leave you with more questions than answers.

On the question of origins: the traditions disagree, and they do it with great variety and enthusiasm. Some hold that the world hatched from a cosmic egg. Others that a divine cow, afflicted with some celestial disorder of the stomach, heaved out the sun, the moon, the stars, the land, the oceans, the animals, and presumably other cows as well, which raises questions about the recursive possibilities inherent to cows. There is a tradition involving a one-eyed giant who lacked the depth perception to navigate a cosmic staircase, and from whose shattered bones and teeth we are mostly descended, though there are numerous competing theories about the pelvis. There is a drunken goddess of pottery who produced too many prototypes.

The modern position is that nobody knows. Your Grace need not resolve this question, and would be ill-advised to try; the factions that have staked their authority on their favourite answer barely tolerate each other as it is, and I doubt they would welcome Daub’s opinion on divine cows. The Haugris Church calls such questions obstruments - tools, thoughts, or tasks that actively subtract value from a situation.

Of the Yakshas and the Naagas

The stories agree on a time before the age of human kingdoms, when the world was ordered by the Yakshas and the Naagas. To the Yakshas were given the high places - the mountains, the tops of great forests, the skies. To the Naagas were given the rivers, the lakes and seas, the jungles, the deep places of the world. This is the subject of much of the Samarskand Commentaries.

We must think of Yakshas and Naagas as persons, though not necessarily in human form. Consider, as my old professor was fond of saying, a god of a small river. What shape would it want to take? What would it want?

Indeed, these beings may still exist. In the modern day, there is a category of daemon known as the Yaksha, able to leave their domain and traverse our world at will. There is the NAAGA division of the daemon realm, whose job is punishing the most egregious violations of magical principles.

It is said Yakshas were ruled, in that time, by Raavan.

Of Raavan and the Origins of Magic

The official account is preserved in both the Samarskand Commentaries and The Assembly of Gold and Saffron. It holds that Raavan was a Yaksha philosopher-king of immense power, ten-headed, capable of splitting reality itself and summoning the fire of the sun onto his enemies. The Naagas are said to have been his equals in power if not in ambition. Some sources hold that they maintained the balance of the world, sharing wisdom and withdrawing it as they deemed necessary.

Then there were the beasts, from which we are descended - it is said that Raavan took two monkeys and made of them men and women, and sent them forth to multiply and civilize the world. Upon his death, he gave to the world his essence - the Will of Raavan - and thus humans gained some small measure of his power as a reward.

One may debate whether civilization was an improvement. After all, the monkey pays no taxes and answers to no law. Nevertheless.

The Book of Lost Kingdoms puts forth a different origin: it states plainly that Raavan was not a yaksha but a human being, the first and greatest of magicians, part god and part man. To temper his arrogance, certain gods created Umesh, a wild man who became Raavan’s beloved companion. Together they slew the Yakshas, banished the Naagas, founded cities, and defied the gods, whereupon the gods, having arranged the situation to their satisfaction, killed Umesh.

Broken by grief and terrified of his own mortality, Raavan traveled to the ends of the earth in search of eternal life. He failed to find it, but in the searching, he systematized the study of magic, which he passed in its entirety to his citizens before his death.

The Reflections of the Moon in Still Water claims that from Raavan’s bones came the dragons and from his tears we rose, though it is widely agreed that the writer was far too fond of analogy.

My own view is that both accounts have some truth in them, but the Raavan of the Lost Kingdoms seems to me more plausible than Raavan as a daemon king. The underlying observation - that Raavan’s death distributed magic - is the same in all three texts, so I shall take that as my starting point and try a more modern reading. Perhaps some great magician died; perhaps that magic uplifted what already existed: from the apes and the monkeys rose the humans; from the lizards rose the dragons; the beasts of the wild grew stronger and wiser, or were turned into exceptional curries.

Of Samarskand Itself

From this point we return to the Commentaries.

Humans progressed rapidly after Raavan’s death; fledgling city-states flourished, though I hasten to add that we would hardly recognize them as towns today. Something drove people to band together, most likely rampaging Yakshas with nobody left to keep them in line. The Mahason Chronicle tells the tale of the Yaksha Mahasona - the name translates broadly as mass grave - and his rise to power over the leaderless yakshas; it is presented as pure fantasy, but it fills the gaps so neatly that I have my doubts.

That is how Samarskand began. Other kingdoms - Kishar, Magan, Samis-A-laa - appear in references, but we know of them only because people in Samarskand wrote about them. Samarskand was founded with three relics of Raavan: a tooth, an eye, the index finger of the left hand. The Haugris Church claims those same relics as the Divine Corpus from which it draws authority; Raavan’s remains, it seems, keep very well. These relics are said to have given the early queens of Samarskand some portion of Raavan’s abilities, or at least magnified their existing power, such that they could seal away the Yakshas and Naagas and restore peace to the world.

Having saved everyone, Samarskand spread from a city-state into a proud kingdom extending the full length of the Diamond River. The Commentaries record many monuments and the willing surrender of many awed peoples, spreading south to north, east to west.

Two things Samarskand left behind are still with us, and they matter far more than its relics or monuments.

The first is the formalization of magic. Until Samarskand, magicians, as far as we can tell, were born with their power, and there were very few of them. It was the mages of Samarskand who attempted a formal description of possible magics: a thesaurus, first, of what could be done, and then a proper symbology in which the description itself became the magic it described. This is what the Taprobane System descends from; this is what allowed Samarskand to field extraordinary numbers of magicians and to imbue its armies and infrastructure with dread magics. Ancient Lusian generals wrote of fighting Samarskand as a folly comparable to fighting Raavan himself.

The second is law. Until Samarskand, most places functioned according to the will of whoever held power. There were kings and queens and princes and tyrants and councils, but it was Samarskand that sat down and wrote a code that would bind everyone from the highest to the lowest. That code is how Singhapura swallows its neighbours. It is also why an idle noble cannot simply help himself to Your Grace’s lands, and why we can trade across great distances and expect someone to put things right when they go wrong.

The Book of Lost Kingdoms is relevant here too. Raavan as human magician-king - who built a library, systematized knowledge, and spent his final years in the service of his people - looks very much like the father of both. He could not save his friend, so he saved everything he knew; he could not live forever, so he made certain his work would. Singhapura does not tell that story about itself. I think its schools and its courts would recognize it anyway.

The Samarskand system of writing remains in use for administration, poetry, and magic; the Samarskand system of laws, much revised and made complex over the years, governs all affairs the Empire touches; the Samarskand inheritance of Raavan’s power is formally accepted each time the Haugris Church bells toll for the Singha Adiraj. That is how Singhapura claims the right to rule, and it repeats the claim every time the bells ring.

Of Samarskand’s End

Samarskand did not last. It stood in the shadow of a mountain - Samar’s Kand, Samar’s Mountain - of which no trace remains today. Accounts from Lusia and Tangowan record a great flood that shattered the mountain, destroyed the city, and swept everything away, and with it the allied state of Taprobane. The mouth of the Diamond River is most likely the exact site; centuries of excavation have recovered what could only have been the ruins of that great empire.

The damage was so great that the rebuilding fell to Samarskand’s outer provinces, and that project drained them over generations until the world entered a dark age of infighting and petty warlords. The grass grew over their graves, as we say. Much of what survives can be found at the Taprobane Magisterium museum and the Hall of Ancient Arts.

Go and see it if Your Grace is ever in the city. Most of what the Empire is started there.

Folio XXV · Other Records of Note

Transcribed by Victor Konara