The Meme Master Post

This is a sibling piece with N is for Nereid, O is for Octopi, and P is for Poinsettias.

One reason the Empire had become – and managed to stay – the Empire was because it understood the purpose of information. There were, on the official Empirical payroll, people whose job it was to travel to all corners of the Empire, however closed-off, however dangerous, and disseminate and gather information. It was their job to assure that the will of the Empire was the will of the whole Empire, and their job to assure that all the secrets of a great sprawling land were properly catalogued. These Informers moved in circuits around the Empire, so that they understood the whole land and so that they grew none too attached to one place.

Eliška Konvalinka’s circuit had brought her to the city Scheffenon for the first time; she had been down in the warmer south since her training period ended, as far from the far-northern Capital where she had been born as possible and still be in the Empire. Such was the tradition, but now her probationary period was also over and she was being cycled up to places more in suiting with her linguistic knowledge.

She met her contact in the Informers’ Embassy, a place which each city was required to maintain. This one was mosaiced in water patterns, and three fountains marked its streetwise corners: an octopus, a mermaid, and a shark.

Moya Ní Mháille was cycling out of Scheffenon and to someplace, as she put it, “less damp and less creepy.” The Informers were required to be aware of the places they were stationed, not to like them. She poured the tea, beginning a ritual that was older than the Empire.

“Scheffenon, jewel of the Northern Sea,
Noted for oddities one, two, and three,” she began, in a lilting sing-song. She would recite four couplets and sip her tea; Eliška would repeat back the four couplets and add a rhyming question. Every twelve couplets they would recite the whole thing together.

“Third the fountains, the water, it sings out with pain,
the binding renewed with each stormfall’s new rain…”

Moya had learned a shorter version of the poem from the person before her, who had passed on what she had learned from the Informer before her, and so on. Once a week, Eliška would repeat all the poems she had learned and embellished, cementing them into her memory and locking them into the walls of the embassy itself.

There were paper records, of course, books and books of them, in the Embassy, travelling with the Informers, copied into the Imperial vaults. But the poem lived on, and could neither be burned nor forged.

“The people of Scheffenon hold secrets close
But the answers are written on their walls & their shores.”

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The Meme Master Post

This is a sibling piece with N is for Nereid and O is for Octopi.

If Scheffenon, high on the Northern Sea, was the strange step-child of the nation, then Orschëst, down by the southern border, was its misbehaving youngest child. Scheffenon talked to strangers because they had money and trade goods. Orschëst talked to them because they were fun.

The woman of Orschëst were known across the world for being elegant. Fashions that would end up in Scheffenon in fifteen or fifty years began with a woman’s whim in Orschëst. And not just Scheffenon; Orschëst fashions traveled the known world.

If Orschëst women were fashion-setters, their young men were something else indeed. In that age when they were no longer children but had not yet learned the wisdom of adulthood, they preened and postured like peacocks. “The Orschëst Poinsettias.”

They competed: who could wear the brightest colors, the most colors at once. Whose boots could sport the most extreme cut, whose doublets could have the most buttons. They competed for their hair – wearing it longest, shorted, most braids or highest styling. There was not a young man in Orschëst who looked what the rest of the country would call normal, not from the time he was given his first belt-blade to the time he first convinced a woman to keep his calling card.

“It’s like they are continually drunk on the show,” more than one tourist from the midlands has been overheard saying. “Like they’re afraid what happens if, for one minute, they stop showing off.”

The more astute tourists have noticed, that while every city in the nation has their statues, Orschëst has only one. The Faceless Lady, as she is called by those who do not know her name – and nobody speaks her name aloud – stands in the center of Orschëst. And every young Orschëst Peacock in his feathers will stop by her statue, showing off his brilliant plumage. “Dancing for the Lady,” the tourists call it, and never wonder why the boys look so frightened when they dance.

In the same universe as Around Elephants and The Club, which is probably the same setting as Edora & Rodegard (here & here), and which now DEFINITELY needs a setting name…

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/927331.html. You can comment here or there.