Of Maro, Telingo, and Suyng

Another tale I wrote years ago, oft reposted on my blog sites, of a land not far enough away...

Far away, beyond the Sea of Colours whose tides glow with rainbows from the glowing jewels of its deeps, past the Reef of Shooting Stars and its silver spoors that soar into the sky and burst with sparks of blue and violet lightning. East of the great Empire of Tessarna, where the dweomercraefters of the Chega-toleh guild make their crystalline dreamholders to snare fantasies great and small. Even beyond the Shattered Horizon where the Godstrife tore the world open to the Land of Dreams where words become real, lay the shimmering minarets of the city-states of Maro, Telingo, and Suyng.

Maro, with its minarets of platinum and sapphire and roads that floated above the tops of immense bambah trees that spread out their orange-leafed boughs over an acre of land, was the wealthiest of the three cities thanks to the Seven Lucky Animals. These magical beasts lived in the jade-walled Temple of Fortune where the priests of the gods of wealth and luck served sacrifices of incense, gold, and wine to the gods on altars of ivory and ebony inscribed all over with prayers inlaid with silver. All the people of Maro wore robes of gold cloth and smelled of precious spiced oils and walked on magical clouds of pink vapours that smelled of jasmine and orchids and myrrh. The priests of the gods of fortune walked the city streets passing out delicacies from around the world for people to dine upon. And merchants from Prangshuing and Tessarna and the kingdoms of the mermaids deep beneath the sea gave away many of their wares for free simply to be allowed to pray at the Temple of Fortune and make offerings to the Seven Lucky Animals. There was no hunger or poverty in Maro, and everyone there was blessed by the fortune of the Seven Lucky Animals.

Telingo, nestled in a tiny vale north of Maro, was a city of towers built upwards into the sky’s purple clouds by generations of blacksmiths stacking houses one atop another and scaling the distances between these towers with bridges of chains and arching balustrades of girders. Built downwards it is, too, for the deep mines beneath the city are filled with great houses cut out of the rock of tapped out veins of ore and lined with walls of steel. Telingo is the noisiest of cities, forever clinking and clanking, screeching and creaking. It is alive day and night with the sounds of hammers and lathes and forges and rattling carts rolling on metal rails as they carry ore to the smelters, rods and sheets of metal to the lathes, coal to the forges and men to the mines. Telingo is the smokiest of cities, too, and fearfully hot. The forges of the city fill the valley with heat and streams of black smoke; the breath of Telingo’s folk is choked and their lives shortened, but they love the ringing sound of metal more than the years they lose.

Suyng, the City of Bells, is home to a nation of musicians who sing instead of speaking and make all judgements based on musical ability. Town criers sing out the news in the streets, guilt and innocence in the courts is judged by a contest of voices, and the kings and lords of Suyng are chosen by audition. All dance to whither they go, never stooping to merely walk even across a room, while drumming, piping, or whistling as they go to set their rhythm. When two Suyngis, as they are wont to call themselves, meet or even pass in the street, they merge their songs to make a harmony, so the songs are constantly changing, a swirling sea of sound, as people move and work. Every task has a song that goes with it and every song has its dance to make every task a showy performance and every place is a stage where the Suyngis perform for each other and themselves. The whole city of Suyng hums with music and the sound of tapping feet and snapping fingers. Everything made in Suyng is tested for its musicality before being bought or sold, whether a chair or a door or a wagon or a spoon or a shirt or a carpet. Everything has its bells and whistles and drums, and everything is writ with notes and lyrics to be hummed or strummed on the lyre, and the song of a thing goes with the thing’s every use.

Now after many long centuries there was made king in Telingo a man who was not content with the ringing of hammers and the smell of smoke from the forge, and he lusted for the wealth of Maro. This king, Ingarimoro, traveled one day to Suyng in his royal palanquin of steel that was a smithy unto itself and spewed black smoke from its oven and so weighty as to need sixty men, blacksmiths and warriors all, to heft it up and carry it. And there he complained bitterly to the king of Suyng, Babaluango, about the unfairness of Maro having the Seven Lucky Animals while neither of them had even one such fabulous beast for their city. Babaluango concurred, singing a mournful lay about the unfairness of life. Enthused, Ingarimoro joined in with his hoarse voice, and soon the two had turned the tune about, making it into a song of revenge and bloodlust that the courtiers of Suyng joined with to make a dark choir bent on war. And so it was that Telingo and Suyng joined together to war on Maro, with weapons and armour and engines of war made in Telingo, and wardrums and pipes from Suyng. The soldiers of Telingo marched in a clockwork file like a deadly machine, arrayed in gleaming armour of steel with long spears and iron hammers. And the soldiers of Suyng chanted war anthems as they beat upon their shields and blasted on their horns and danced across the hills that lead to Maro.

Maro was a wealthy city, but had few soldiers, and the soldiers of Suyng and Telingo swept through the city of Maro and captured the jade-walled Temple of Fortune, and soon stole two of the Seven Lucky Animals. Now among the Seven Lucky Animals there was the Nightingale, the Tiger, the Ant, the Hare, the Cobra, the Horse, and the Elephant. The soldiers tried to seize them all, but the Tiger, the Cobra, and the Elephant were so ferocious they could not be taken, the Horse was so swift it could not be caught, and the Ant was so small that it could not be found in its hiding place. The soldiers of Suyng heard the Nightingale singing and found it in a tree with golden bark and fruit whose seeds were diamonds, and seized it quickly with a net of silk before it could fly away. The warriors of Telingo saw the Hare peeking out of its burrow and admired it greatly, for they too like to dig into the earth for its treasures. So they set in with their spears as shovels and spades and dug up the Hare’s burrow that was full of gems and gold that the Lucky Animal had searched through the earth for and caught him in a net of fine silver chains.

Maro’s king fumed and plotted revenge, but could do nothing, having too few soldiers to defeat both rival cities, and so the people of Maro made themselves content with five sevenths of their previous good fortune. Suyng prospered as never before building great concert halls and theatres and music schools and markets where the Suyngis could perform for money and barter songs for goods. Telingo lined its road with waving banners of silver mail and golden wire. Gilded its towers of iron so they shone in the sun at dawn, covered its bridges of chain and balustrades of steel with diamonds and rubies. Lined the rooms of its people with black silk pillows and cloth of gold tapestries, and summoned cool breezes to flood the city so that the smoke and heat of the forges was wafted away. And though King Ingarimoro was still jealous, Babaluango was content and the people of Telingo and Suyng were happier than they had ever been. So peace was made between the three cities, and after many years the war was all but forgotten, and the people of the three cities returned to their lives and little was all that different from the way things had been before the war.

Yet in Maro there was a minister of the king who fumed at having lost the war and blamed himself for the loss of the two Lucky Animals. So he hatched a scheme to steal them away from Telingo and Suyng and return them to the jade-walled Temple of Fortune in Maro. Streaking out of Maro and riding to the iron walls of Telingo, he snuck into Telingo with a squad of soldiers. While the soldiers began lighting fires and creating havoc in the night to distract the city’s guards, the minister stole stealthily into the Temple of the Forge where the Hare was being kept. Swiftly laying low the guards who had grown soft and complacent from years of peace with a silent bow and softly glowing arrows of eternal sleep, the minister entered the inner chamber of the temple and retrieved the Hare, breaking open its cage and putting it into a sack of velvet. Replacing the magical animal with a mundane rabbit of the same colour, the thieving minister skulked out of the temple and returned to his city with his prize.

In Telingo, the priests soon realized what had happened, and the king’s ministers were making plans to wage war against Maro once again, but King Ingarimoro strode around the city on his silk padded shoes of gilded steel and saw the smiling workers banging and drilling and hammering and digging and hauling, and saw too that the silks had turned black and sooty and torn from lack of care, and that the luxuries provided by the magical rabbit had been forgotten by his people as they joyfully toiled at their forges and mines and kilns. A cool breeze still wafted through the city, redolent of myrrh, and the smoke was still swept away and the city was more pleasant than before the war, despite the loss of the magical beast.

So King Ingarimoro returned to his palace of iron girders and sheets that now shone in the sun with gold and rang with ringing hammers and roared with the fires of a thousand forges, and sat on his vast throne of gilded anvils and silken pillows now covered in soot and listened to the wailing ministers and priests bent on war until he grew tired of them. He raised his callused hand and they all fell silent, “Our Luck has left us. But it was never ours. The people are still happy at their smithies, the sweet breezes still clean our air and cool our workshops, and the gold and diamonds and silk have been forgotten for the joys of iron and coal and fire. We need no Lucky Animals. Let us learn a lesson from our history…” An angry general leapt forward and growled, “What lesson can we learn from this outrage?!” But Ingarimoro just waved him away dismissively and proclaimed with a note of finality, “Hare today, gone to Maro”, then retired to his smithy.