Maybe I have just become sensitized to references to the wind by now. I look for deeper meanings. When Flandry arrives on Altai:
"The northern hemisphere was approaching winter. A wind streaking off the pole sheathed Flandry in chill, hooted around his ears, and snatched the beret from his head.
"He grabbed it back, swore, and confronted the portmaster with less dignity than he had planned." (II, p. 345)
This prefigures what will happen to Flandry on Altai. He will be threatened, will endure the planetary cold and will lose his dignity but, of course, will triumph. His recovery begins immediately. In the hybrid Altaian language, he says, as instructed:
"'Greeting...may peace dwell in your yurt. This person is named Dominic Flandry, and ranges Terra, the Empire.'" (ibid.)
Instruction would certainly be necessary for such a convoluted self-introduction. He conceals, or at least does not immediately declare, both his rank and his knighthood. Even approaching Altai, Flandry has witnessed modern but non-Terran military technology and knows that caution is essential. More than a wind waits to remove more than his beret.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I always find it amusing, reading that bit about Flandry being sheathed in chill by a frigid wind which "spitefully" snatched his beret just before he met the portmaster! It's the first of several times in "A Message in Secret" where we see Anderson having Flandry go thru Bertie Woosterish moments. Besides its serious aspects, "Message" is the most humorous of the Flandry stories.
Flandry's greeting to the portmaster might seem excessively formal and convoluted, but it was appropriate for its Russo/Mongol background and cultural setting. And that bit about "...ranges Terra, the Empire" has stuck with me for decades.
Ad astra! Sean
The language has apparently adapted to the nomadic lifestyle!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
As would be inevitable, given how nomadism was the dominant cultural form on Altai. Dominant because it worked on that planet. A point stressed by Oleg Khan himself.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
And Flandry was literally ranging Terra, the Empire. His journeys and missions took him to many worlds in and out of the Empire. The adventures we see in the stories covers only a small part of Flandry's long career.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that nomadism is a response to thinly spread resources.
It's not practical to sit in one place and have what you need come to you, so you have to go around consuming it on the spot, and you move frequently to avoid over-stressing the available yield in one spot.
This is a function of both environmental constraints (eg., aridity) and of technology, both physical and social.
Early-medieval kings and nobles moved around a lot because instead of having taxes or estate profits brought to them in one spot, they had to move around to consume them: yields were low, productivity was low, and transport was bad enough that it was more practical to move the consumers than the goods consumed.
This was the situation in, say, the Frankish kingdom in 750 AD. Very different from the same territory 600 years earlier, when the economy and transport were both much more advanced. So that it was possible simply to transfer money from various places to a central location -- in fact, in 150 AD in the Roman empire, you could do that by a letter of credit from a banker.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Thanks for this mini-essay. You brought together ideas and facts many might know only in a more "scattered" way. Yes, there were practical reasons why nomads were nomadic. And I think Anderson did a good job of making a high tech kind of nomadism plausible on Altai.
I did know of how peripatetic early Medieval kings and barons were, but your comments made clearer why that was necessary. I was reminded of how, in Anderson's THE LAST VIKING, he discussed how it was King Edward the Confessor's practice to make a circuit of the kingdom, moving from one royal manor to another for fairly short stays. He did so for the reasons you discussed.
It was probably politically useful as well--because King Edward would stay in closer touch with local leaders and what was going in different parts of England.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes, it was politically useful too -- the bureaucracy was too 'thin' to gather and collate the necessary information. Though that's -still- a problem.
Many Roman Emperors traveled a lot precisely to keep in touch with local opinion and local conditions -- Hadrian, for example, spent more time outside Rome than in it. Though that also had risks.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
One problem, these days, is my belief many heads of state now have to cope with too MUCH information.
Yes, I recall reading of how Hadrian visited every single province of the Roman Empire. And many later Emperors were nearly as peripatetic, esp. from a desire to be near militarily threatened frontiers.
Ad astra! Sean
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