That first wave became the Maka caste. They were mostly landless workers whose only value was the strength of their backs and arms, kept ignorant and unlettered because they were more tractable that way and thus more valuable-until the floodtime when there was no more room for them and they were stripped of value and discarded. They are still ignorant and unlettered. The powerful may change their faces, but never their natures.
Fifty years passed. A second wave went north. These became the Tanak caste. Farmers and fishermen, miners and smiths. Skilled laborers. Like the Maka they were men who worked more with their hands than their minds; they could read and write and cipher but had little interest in book learning beyond that bare minimum. They lost their value like the Maka had, but reclaimed it in the North as slaves. The Pliciks had learned not to waste good sturdy workstock.
There were two other waves before the southland was finally abandoned to heat and flood-which happened several centuries after the change began. The third wave were the merchants, the Tawa caste, they were not made slaves, they negotiated their way in. In the fourth wave were the priests, officers, administrators, landowners, the rich and influential, the Kisar; they bought their way in.
This is how our world wags, Shadow. No slaves now, but Kisar sits on Tawa, Tawa on Tanak and Tanak on Maka, with Pliciks atop them all.
With one exception, the Islanders. The exiles created exiles of their own, banishing folk to island chains off the coasts, the remnants from the parts of the northlands that got drowned. The Islanders do not permit castes and they take in fugitives from the Pliciks and the Priests, rebels, the disappointed, the disaffected, whoever wants to come. Naturally they don't do this out of altruism, they are not saints or holymen, they do it out of a profound hatred. for the mainlanders and for profit's sake. They tolerate no one who cannot earn his way either with a skill or as a weapon against the Pliciks and the Priests. I would not say it to them because they could not hear or understand it, but in their way they are nearly as rigid and oppressive as the Pliciks and the caste system.
Don't worry, Shadow, there isn't much more, I am winding my way to the explaining of the Pakoseo Year. Rigidity has its strengths and its breaking points. Near the end of the first millennium after the Flood, a Prophet arose among the people. He called himself Oplanikamon, God's singer, and he cried out against the evils he saw around him. It was a time of famine and terrible storms and great corruption among the Pliciks and the Priests. He sang his visions so powerfully that those who heard him saw them also. Nataminaho, Opalekis-Mimo and Nikamo-Oskinin stood behind him and guarded him and set their seal on him. The people saw Visions and believed him. He sang of returning to the holy time, the first-flight time, returning to the beginning and recreating virtue. With the Three striding before him, he led the first Pakoseo to the landing place, walking across the land, going from nation to nation and gathering in the people, taking them with him to the place where the ships came down. They tended the place and made it beautiful; they sang and saw visions and went home again, and-who knows why-life was better for a while.-No more slaves, for one thing.
I'm skipping over a lot, all you need is the outline and the understanding that what happened was wholly beyond the control of either the Priests or the Pliciks. They took bitter bloody measures to stop it and they could not. The Question and the Secret Police in each of the five nations tried to stop the Pakoseo and they could not. People left their villages, their farms, their businesses, their jobs; they traveled in a great river across the land. They were shot, axed, hung, imprisoned, beaten, tortured. They suffered hunger, thirst, exhaustion. Thousands died, but more thousands, came and finally there were not enough soldiers or prisons to hold them. The Prophet walked with the Three through the five nations and brought the people to the landing place and no one could stop him.
Five nations. Wapaskwen, where you are now; we here have control, of the landing site, the Mistiko Otcha Cicip. There are also Kwamitaskwen in, the central plains, Kwamaskwen, north plains, Swamiskwen, south plains, south coast and Nakiskwen on the west coast. Except for small differences in dialect, they are much the same. The Nistams loathe each other, they're bitter rivals, but they stand together against internal and external threats. It's why the Islanders never try invading the Main. It's also why rebellions have never succeeded before now.
Let's see. What else is there?
The Pakoseo Year happens when it happens.
The Priests and the Pliciks always try to suppress it. They never succeed.
Then they try running in front of the swell and turning it to their advantage. That generally does work. Eventually. It happens in times of anger and suffering.
Three years ago there was a plague in Aina'iril and a dozen other cities. Outbreaks in all five Nations at approximately the same time. And in all five Nations, the Pliciks and their sycophants ran for the country and left the city to the dying. Which spread rage and despair among the people who couldn't get out and among the factory workers and farmers when the Priests and Pliciks brought the plague with them. Thousands died before the sickness went away as mysteriously as it came.
The signs and portents arrive with the rising rage of the people.
Prophets appear and call for atonement, poets sing subversive rhymes.
Students rebel and children go wild, destroying and killing.
People dream of the Three. Some see Them walking.
The whisper starts: Pakoseo Pakoseo Pakoseo.
Last Harvest Festival the Gospah Ayawit proclaimed the Pakoseo Year. He didn't want to, but he had no choice.
It's been three generations since the last, but our souls remember and when the time comes we know it and we walk.
The insect horde grew quieter as the night got darker and older, they weren't flying about so much; instead, they crawled into every crevice and ran on any bit of exposed skin. Out in the murk around the islet there were coughing grunts, howls, peeping cries, hoots, splashes, and other less identifiable noises. Shadith sipped at the broth from Asteplikota's pot and frowned at Rohant's back.
The Dyslaeror was standing at the edge of the islet, sniffing and hawking to clear his head and staring down the stream where Kikun had gone-not that he could see anything except the occasional glimmer of moonlight reflecting off the leaden, viscid water. He felt her watching him, coughed, spat into the water, and came back to the fire. "He's probably in the belly of some crawler." He shook his head vigorously to drive off the crawling biters. "Dio! Asteplikota! There any kind of bugoff in your gear?"
Asteplikota looked up, startled out of the unhappy memories his minilecture had provoked. "What?"
"Never mind, we couldn't be that lucky." He dug out another blanket, scrubbed it over his face and arms, snapped it through the air to shake off smashed and clinging bugs, pulled it around his shoudlers as he dropped to the ground. "Shadow, that Talent of yours, how far can you stretch it?"
"You're that worried about him?"
"He should have been back an hour ago. All he meant to do was ditch the boat soon's he found a good spot, sink hole or something like it."
"Maybe he got lost, you can't see-much of the sky and one muddy tree looks a lot like another muddy tree even in the daylight"