Marune: Alastor 933 by Jack Vance Read Free Book Online Page B

ceremonial function.
    “Now allow me to describe the act of eating. On those rare occasions when a Rhune is forced to dine in the company of others he ingests his food behind a napkin, or at the back of a device unique to Marune: a screen on a metal pedestal, placed before the diner’s face. At formal banquets no food is served - only wafts of varied and complicated odors, the selection and presentation being considered a creative skill.
    “The Rhunes lack humor. They are highly sensitive to insult; a Rhune will never submit to ridicule. Lifelong friends must reckon with each other’s sensibilities and then rely upon a complicated etiquette to lubricate social occasions. In short, it seems as if the Rhunes deny themselves all the usual human pleasures.
    What do they substitute?
    “In the first place, the Rhune is exquisitely sensitive to his landscapes of mountain, meadow, forest, and sky - all changing with the changing modes of day.
    He reckons his land by its aesthetic appeal; he will connive a lifetime to gain a few choice acres. He enjoys pomp, protocol, heraldic minutiae; his niceties and graces are judged as carefully as the figures of a ballet. He prides himself on his collection of sherliken scales; or the emeralds which he has mined, cut, and polished with his own hands; or his Arah magic wheels, imported from halfway across the Gaean Reach. He will perfect himself in special mathematics, or an ancient language, or the lore of fanfares, or all three, or three other abstrusities. His calligraphy and draftsmanship are taken for granted; his life work is his Book of Deeds, which he executes and illustrates and decorates with fervor and exactitude. A few of these books have reached the market; in the Reach they command enormous prices as curios.
    “The Rhune is not a likeable man. He is so sensitive as to be truculent; he is contemptuous of all other races than the Rhune. He is self-centered, arrogant, unsympathetic in his judgments.
    “Naturally I allude to the typical Rhune, from whom an individual may deviate, and everything I have said applies no less to the women as the men.
    “The Rhunes display correspondingly large virtues: dignity, courage, honor, intellects of incomprehensible complexity - though here again, individuals may differ from the norm.
    “Anyone who owns land considers himself an aristocrat, and the hierarchy descends from kaiark, through kang, eiodark, baronet, baron, knight, and squire.
    The Fwai-chi have retreated from the Realms, but still make their pilgrimages through the upper forests and along the high places. There is no interaction between the two races.
    “Needless to say, among a people so passionate, proud, and reckless, and so anxious to expand their land holdings, conflict is not unknown. The force of the Connatic’s Second Edict and, more effectively, an embargo upon energy weapons, has eliminated formal war. But raids and forays are common, and enmities last forever. The rules of warfare are based upon two principles. First, no man may attack a person of higher rank than himself; second, since blood violence is a mirk-deed, killing is achieved at a distance with blast-bolts; aristocrats however use swords and so demonstrate fortitude. Ordinary warriors will not look at a man in the face and kill him; such an act haunts a man forever - unless the act is done by mirk, when it becomes no more than a nightmare. But only if unplanned. Premeditated murder by mirk is vile murder.”
    Pardero said, “Now I know why my enemy sent me off to Bruse-Tansel instead of leaving me dead in a ditch.”
    “There is a second argument against murder: it cannot be concealed. The Fwai-chi detect crimes, and no one escapes; it is said that they can taste a dead man’s blood and cite all the circumstances of his death.”
     
    On this evening Pardero and Kolodin chose to spend the night in the tourist chambers on the lower decks of the tower. Kolodin made a videophone call and returned with a