Displaced by these immigrants, the aboriginal inhabitants of Obtry, the Tyob, retreated to the mountains, where they lived as poor herdsfolk. The Tyob kept to their old primitive ways and language and were not allowed to vote.
The Sosa and the Astasa each brought a religion to the plains of Obtry. The Sosa prostrated themselves in worship of a fathergod called Af. The highly formal rituals of the Affa religion were held in temples and led by priests. The Astasa religion was nontheistic and unprofessional, involving trances, whirling dances, visions, and small fetishes.
When they first came to Obtry the Astasa were fierce warriors, driving the Tyob up into the mountains and taking the best farmlands from the Sosa settlers; but there was plenty of good land, and the two invading peoples gradually settled down side by side. Cities were built along the rivers, some of them populated by Sosa, some by Astasa. The Sosa and Astasa traded, arid their trade increased. Sosa traders soon began to live in enclaves or ghettos in Astasa cities, and Astasa traders began to live in enclaves or ghettos in Sosa cities.
For over nine hundred years there was no central government over the region. It was a congeries of city-states and farm territories, which competed in trade with one another and from time to time quarreled or battled over land or belief, but generally maintained a watchful, thriving peace.
The Astasa opinion of the Sosa was that they were slow, dense, deceitful, and indefatigable. The Sosa opinion of the Astasa was that they were quick, clever, candid, and unpredictable.
The Sosa learned how to play the wild, whining, yearning music of the Astasa. The Astasa learned contour plowing and crop rotation from the Sosa. They seldom, however, learned each other’s language—only enough to trade and bargain with, some insults, and some words of love.
Sons of the Sosa arid daughters of the Astasa fell madly in love and ran off together, breaking their mothers’ hearts. Astasa boys eloped with Sosa girls, the curses of their families filling the skies and darkening the streets behind them. These fugitives went to other cities, where they lived in Affastasa enclaves and Sosasta or Astasosa ghettos, and brought up their children to prostrate themselves to Af, or to whirl in the fetish dance. The Affastasa did both, on different holy days. The Sosasta performed whirling dances to a wild whining music before the altar of Af, and the Astasosa prostrated themselves to little fetishes.
The Sosa, the unadulterated Sosa who worshiped Af in the ancestral fashion and who mostly lived on farms not in the cities, were instructed by their priests that their God wished them to bear sons in His honor; so they had large families. Many priests had four or five wives and twenty or thirty children. Devout Sosa women prayed to Father Af for a twelfth, a fifteenth baby. In contrast, an Astasa woman bore a child only when she had been told, in trance, by her own body fetish, that it was a good time to conceive; and so she seldom had more than two or three children. Thus the Sosa came to outnumber the Astasa.
About five hundred years ago, the unorganised cities, towns, and farming communities of Obtry, underpressure from the aggressive Vens to the north and under the influence of the Ydaspian Enlightenment emanating from the Mahigul Empire in the east, drew together and formed first an alliance, then a nation-state. Nations were in fashion at the time. The Nation of Obtry was established as a democracy, with a president, a cabinet, and a parliament elected by universal adult suffrage. The parliament proportionately represented the regions (rural and urban) and the ethnoreligious populations (Sosa, Astasa, Affastasa, Sosasta, and Astasosa).
The fourth President of Obtry was a Sosa named Diud, elected by a fairly large majority.
Although his campaign had become increasingly outspoken against “godless” and “foreign” elements of Obtrian society, many Astasa voted for him. They wanted a strong leader, they said. They wanted a man who would stand up against the Vens and restore law and order to the cities, which were suffering from overpopulation and uncontrolled mercantilism.
Within half a year Diud, having put personal favorites in the key positions in the cabinet and parliament and consolidated his control of the armed forces, began his campaign in earnest. He instituted a universal census which required all citizens to state their religious allegiance (Sosa, Sosasta, Astasosa, or Heathen) and their bloodline (Sosa or non-Sosa).
Diud then moved the Civic Guard of Dobaba, a predominately Sosa city in an almost purely Sosa agricultural area, to the city of Asu, a major river port, where the population had lived peacefully in Sosa, Astasa, Sosasta, and Astasosa neighborhoods for centuries. There the guards began to force all Astasa, or Heathen non-Sosa, newly reidentified as godless persons, to leave their homes, taking with them only what they could seize in the terror of sudden displacement.
The godless persons were shipped by train to the northwestern border. There they were held in various fenced camps or pens for weeks or months, before being taken to the Venian border. They were dumped from trucks or train cars and ordered to cross the border. At their backs were soldiers with guns. They obeyed. But there were also soldiers facing them: Ven border guards. The first time this happened, the Ven soldiers, thinking they were facing an Obtrian invasion, shot hundreds of people before they realised that most of the invaders were children or babies or old or pregnant, that none of them were armed, that all of them were cowering, crawling, trying to run away, crying for mercy. Some of the Ven soldiers continued shooting anyway, on the principle that Obtrians were the enemy.
President Diud continued his campaign of rounding up all the godless persons, city by city. Most were taken to remote regions and kept herded in fenced areas called instructional centers, where they were supposed to be instructed in the worship of Af. Little shelter and less food was provided in the instructional centers. Most of the inmates died within a year. Many Astasa fled before the roundups, heading for the border and risking the random mercy of the Vens. By the end of his first term of office, President Diud had cleansed his nation of half a million Astasa.
He ran for reelection on the strength of his record. No Astasa candidate dared run. Diud was narrowly defeated by the new favorite of the rural, religious Sosa voters, Riusuk. Riusuk’s campaign slogan was “Obtry for God,” and his particular target was the Sosasta communities in the southern cities and towns, whose dancing worship his followers held to be particularly evil and sacrilegious.
A good many soldiers in the southern province, however, were Sosasta, and in Riusuk’s first year of office they mutinied. They were joined by guerrilla and partisan Astasa groups hiding out in the forests and inner cities. Unrest and violence spread and factions multiplied. President Riusuk was kidnapped from his lakeside summer house. After a week his mutilated body was found beside a highway. Astasa fetishes had been stuffed into his mouth, ears, and nostrils.
During the turmoil that ensued, an Astasosa general, Hodus, naming himself acting president, took control of a large splinter group of the army and instituted a Final Cleansing of Godless Atheist Heathens, the term which now defined Astasa, Sosasta, and Affastasa. His soldiers killed anybody who was or was thought to be or was said to be non-Sosa, shooting them wherever they were found and leaving the bodies to rot.
Affastasa from the northwestern province took arms under an able leader, Shamato, who had been a schoolteacher; her partisans, fiercely loyal, held four northern cities and the mountain regions against Hodus’s forces for seven years. Shamato was killed on a raid into Astasosa territory.
Hodus closed the universities as soon as he took power. He installed Affan priests as teachers in the schools, but later in the civil war all schools shut down, as they were favorite targets for sharpshooters and bombers. There were no safe trade routes, the borders were closed, commerce ceased, famine followed, and epidemics followed famine. Sosa and non-Sosa continued killing one another.