The world we have found

The world we have found

The world is wide and old. We have walked between thirty kingdoms in the course of these letters, and most days the world looks like any other place. The plough goes through the soil; the smith works the iron; the priest tells the harvest its blessings, by long habit and at the proper hour, and any priest who declines to swear that the blessings worked is shortly out of a living. The merchant counts his coin and pretends to virtue. Children come into the world and into the world’s quarrels with them. Old men die in their beds, when the gods are kind.

But the kingdoms also fight, and have always fought. Dynasties end without warning, by sword or by gout. Plague follows the trade-roads as surely as wagons do, and faster. A schism in one cathedral splits a city, and the city eats itself across a generation while neighbours write moralising letters and lend no soldiers. None of these troubles is divine, whatever the priests of all sides swear. One needs no god to explain a famine: only a bad king and a wet spring.

The ruins of older troubles are everywhere. Some are last century’s — a sacked fortress, a vineyard gone to brambles, a road that goes nowhere because the bridge fell in someone’s grandfather’s war. Some are far older. Their walls were laid by hands that did not work as our hands work; their glyphs are no longer read; their fitting-courses are unknown to any mason of any current kingdom. The world does not unmake what was done. Every century’s wreckage stays where it fell, awaiting the next century to walk past it without understanding.