The Tree of Iron – from Glimpses of Unfamiliar Klial by Irrinzil the Xethan[1]
[1] Irrinzil The Xethan spent the last decades of his storied life in the City of Wei in the Kannylte of Windheart. It was there that I became his pupil & his editor & scribe. I have him to thank for much but his experience as an outsider in the Empire provides, I think, the most useful context for any future readers who must live outside the civilization that the Kannyltines created.
In The city you call Great Klial there only two, maybe three kinds of people. I could not understand it at all when first I arrived. In the further cities like Awese or even Athet there are so many, so many kinds of people. You cast your glance here, there, wherever you look, a different kind. Klial is different though. It is different in so many ways, every way. That is why I made my journey, to Klial and to here, to the whole Empire –So I could see myself how it is different and also why it is. Great Klial it is the biggest city of all, vast a metropolis. Certainly much larger than any other city anywhere, more people are in Klial city than in all of the Xeth Atheth country. I could go on and speak upon this fact for hours, but to the people that make their home there? It is of no importance. Not one says a word of how great or how many stones make the roads, how tall the statues. No, they are oblivious to those facts and think nothing of the status. They think the city is a country itself that is unrelated to the Empire that is named for it. They say of their own neighborhoods that they are their own Kyu, their own Kannylte even. Great Klialis speak of the city as Klial. They dismiss the Empire as everything outside – all of the lands over which the city rules and which call themselves Klial, people of the city do not consider. This, the great klialis call the Empire and they speak of it as a distant place. So I asked them, when I met anyone, is this Klial or is this other place Klial, to see if they could truly understand. Every one, they all understand the Empire of Klial, but think it removed from their own neighborhoods and life. They say the palisade hills of Whitesail are as distant as the nighted woods of Raindrinker. They conceive these far places as being as far away as the territory just outside the city which supply the metropolis with food and stone and everything. So in this respect the people of Great Klial are all of alike because they think of themselves as living outside of the Empire and so they are the only ones who do. But there is a reason for this homogeneity. The people of the city, all of the people, are born there. In other cities I have seen the people, the populace, is drawn from outside and it must be always so because disease and death are everywhere in cities, cities of any size, except, not in Great Klial. In Great Klial, where the streets are smooth and always clean and where every tenth person carries a branch, like a tree branch but made of iron. I thought this branch is why there is no filth upon the road, no dying people in the streets or dead animals. In every other city this is the way it is. In Klial, no. But in no other city do you see people with these branches. Tree branches but made from Iron. I thought, you know I am not smart, it is why I am curious, is this branch how they make this place the way that it is? I could not understand so I began to ask people what the branch means. Many would not speak to me, You see yourself my speech is poor, my Kliali is poor, and I look like a foreigner, dress in my people’s costume, then I did always. I was dismayed that no one would talk to me. I thought I am shamed. That the great kliali do not want me and I was foolish to come there at all. Because the similarity of all the people, that is what caused me to think they might have contempt for outsiders. I was hopeless then, I was forlorn but then I was approached by one of the men with the branches and he carried it in his hand which was unusual because all the time I would meet people carrying them in their belt, not like weapons but as decoration. This man approached and held his iron stick at me so I thought he meant to do harm to me, but then he saluted me! He salutes in the Kliali fashion and made a very fine bow and this was the first time anyone had given me this courtesy. I had seen it all around on the streets and so I thought, this is ordinary but I wanted it for myself, to feel this regard that the Great Klialis give each other. At their best these bows are artistic expressions like dance, beautiful. Draymund Raspe Alley was expert in that art, beautiful practitioner of the Kliali bow. He bowed with so much elegance that immediately I was relieved because remember he came to me with his stick, I thought he would rob me! But he only came to meet me. “I am Draymund Raspe Alley Goldendream, please accept my welcome to the City dear fellow.” He spoke to me immediately in Xeth the sea language, I had not heard in so long, I thought I had attained paradise, so much grace for just me, after I was at the depth of sorrows. He spoke the Xeth so well I was alarmed by its quality, no accent at all. I have not lost my accent in all these years, people still make jokes of it, but he had never been outside of the city and no accent. “I am the attaché of the embassy of the Xeth Atheth and I am grateful for the opportunity to make your acquaintance.”
Very quickly I confessed to Draymund that I was only a visitor and a storyteller, an artist, a performer. He did not dismiss me as some had elsewhere in the Empire but understood immediately what importance the storyteller carries for the Xeth-Atheth. “It was wise of others to have sent me to seek you out then. I will inform you of whatever I can.” He was very gentle. The way he spoke, or looked at me or led me through the city. His whole manner, gentle. He was an old man bald and very thin, so normally he could not intimidate anyone anyway. But he startled me because his eyes were big and friendly and he was so dignified. I could not reproach him even in a dream and if I did I would wake up instantly and be angry at myself. I explained to Draymund Rasp Alley Goldendream why I had come and my question about the iron sticks and complained that no one would speak to me and I spoke also of my experience of all the people of the city being so alike. I must have raved to him, it must have seemed completely foolish the way I carried on but I was excited because for once someone would answer me. Instead of being angry or disgusted which would be fair, a mad foreign man yells his discontent, no one enjoys this, but Draymund Raspe Alley Goldendream, my antics amused him and he graciously offered me an explanation.
“I shall take you to the Tree of Iron and describe as we walk what it is that has confounded you dear guest. First the provincial isolation of the capitol. You must understand that travel of any sort is uncommon in the Empire, people are bound to the land in which they are born. Many hundreds of people are born in the city every week and so it grows. But as with any of the dominions of the Kannyltine the capitol is a place to which people are bound. The great number of people within the city begs a question to the Kannyltine’s benevolent wisdom and that is dear guest; what to do with all of us. The Kannyltine being wise and benevolent above all has devised a network of bureaucracies that have allowed the Empire to flourish beyond any measure. To grow and to people these bureaucracies he has the people of the City. From a young age we are all educated, far more than our provincial counterparts. Every one of us born in the city is taught to read and to write. This rigorous education is another aspect of what you regard as homogeneity. From the City’s academies two out of every dozen people is brought into the Imperial Bureaucracy while the others take on a different role within the city. Many carry out the commerce that feeds us. Many engage in a trade or a craft. We Great Klialis are linked to our academies in the same way that our more provincial citizens are linked to their place of birth, hence I carry the name of the school which trained me – Raspe Alley.” So I asked him if the Iron Stick is a badge of his school. Or his job or something else.
“Just so dear guest, though I daresay it is more than you suspect. Here, is the Tree of Iron.” I had been curious to see a tree made of iron but I was confounded instead to find an enormous building. In Great Klial all of the buildings are enormous and clad in polished stone and all of them have imposing brass fixtures and doors. “You see,” he pointed to a place on the building facade, but I could not understand why. He must have remembered that few of my people can read and so he announced it for me. “The Tree of Iron. This is the headquarters of my bureaucracy. Come in dear guest.”
Within that building it was very strange. I have seen some of the libraries and storehouses of the Kannyltine elsewhere in the city. These are all of a kind. There is a grand entry, there are curving stairs and there are wonderful carpets with long halls lined with wood and glass doors. The Tree of Iron is altogether different, it is like none of these, like nothing I have seen before. A wonder but it is commonplace to them there, they do not think of it. In the center of a big room is a solarium, an inner garden and the only thing growing there is an enormous tree. There are still the door lined hallways but they radiate from the tree, and that tree, it is not very tall as you might suppose the biggest tree of all to be. Its highest branch is only twice, three times as high as my reach. Not very tall as a tree. But it is so wide though. Like many trees all grown together and fused over time, or, maybe a unique kind of tree alone in the world. Draymund did not know the kind of tree or if it ever bore seeds and only called it the Tree of Iron, :the dear old Tree of Iron,” he said. It is not made of Iron, no matter what you heard, it is a soft wood. The trunk of the tree grows outward in billows and curves like a curtain, pleated, like a robe. To follow it around the length of the trunk you must be carried away into mazes, convolutions within convolutions. “The width of the tree is said to be the width of the city itself though I believe that saying was coined long ago when the city was less geographically large. The tree is quite substantial as you have seen plainly, but consider that it has many hundreds of branches.” He pointed them out to me and I considered them as he said. “Each of the branches has a twin, an iron branch that is carried by a member of the bureaucracy. Here is mine.” There was a branch, which grew from out of a thicket of branches which may have matched his at one time. “Dear guest you see I have carried mine a long time, this was only a fresh shoot when I joined the bureaucracy. As the tree adds branches so the Empire adds people and so there is a greater need of capable civil servants our system is timed to perfection, tuned like no other clock.” He mentioned a clock, that was an interesting convention there in Great Klial too, only in the city, or perhaps maybe in Wei do they use clocks, for only in such places does time have the particular meaning that needs a clock. “See the bit of wire?” He pointed out to me a thing that I had noticed already I was about to ask him but he anticipated my question. This is the way with Draymond Raspe Alley Goldendream, always. He points me to a copper filament of wire, very fine, that was tied around the branch. The branch, though, had grown over the copper twine, engulfed it. Similar filaments hung more loose on their branches since they were still narrow. The filament was attached on the other end to a little tag, a piece of gold. “Go on, you may touch it dear guest” Still so gracious, always he encouraged me to take the gold tag in my hand but I hesitated, it was so much to see all at once, a great building a strange tree, a kindly stranger, a lot of things happening all at once. So, he took it in his hand before I could. “It says that I am here, in the City and that I am attaché to the Embassy of Xeth Atheth. The embassy has its own hierarchical conventions, but all of our names may be found here on the Tree of Iron. Many more of the names are of people that have been cast to the further corners of the Empire and serve their functions in the provinces, none of us serves anonymously and the boughs of the tree are cast like a blanket over the Empire’s people.”
I had so many questions but the first one I asked was because of Draymund Raspe Alley, so old, I wondered, “What happens when someone passes on?” I wondered what would happen to the little golden medal. I do not think that he thought I was being morbid, I think he thought I was being greedy, he knew outside Klial how foreigners think of gold.
“The golden tag is sent to the Kannyltine and the branch is re-purposed.” Draymund Raspe Alley Goldendream summoned over a younger person, another bureaucrat, he asked her to show her iron branch to me. This branch had several names carved on it, all in different styles, but each name was scratched so that the name could probably still be read, I assume. I cannot read even now, I am too much a donkey to try it. But I can see the way letters are made, how they are different from time to time or with different hands. Someone who could read, would see a name, a fresh name for a new person that was marked a the end. Draymund says to this young woman “Thank you dear colleague, Sindra Raspe Alley Goldendream.” I ask if they know each other, with the same name and they do not. No one in the world is like they are in Great Klial.