The Marpesian Connection

[Thaumantica]

Ballpark of the Windhaven Highlanders,
Gunnland

Accompanied by his wife Ellen and three children Karl IV, Helen, and Gunther, the controversial “Dictator” of Engellachia stepped out on to the baseball field of the Windhaven Highlanders. And while he walked out with a baseball made in Gunnland, the Eisgartman handed it off to Prince Dalmar to throw the first pitch, clapping along with those in the crowd who joined in his genuine astonishment at the Azraqi’s accurate and fiery fastball.

He and his wife then guided their children back off the field to find stairs up to a VIP box they could watch the game from in the intimate company of Prince Dalmar and wife Mary, several Gunnishmen and women, and to no surprise of his own Sheryl-Lynn Rydell who first turned ghost white when green eyes met Eisgart blue. “Thank you so much for hosting me this afternoon, a true honor indeed!”

Sheryl-Lynn was turning red now, “You have no -“ she began, but Karl’s children were running around her with wooden swords to the chagrin of their mother, who reached out to spank the youngest through his little brand new tartan kilt. “Frau Rydell is pregnant, Gunther, be careful!”

Little Gunther dropped his wooden claymore and pointed at her belly with wide eyes - “Papa, is there a Catholic growing inside her?”

Ellen Heydendahl slapped his hand down and pulled him aside by the ear, scolding him in German under her breath harshly. “First I offered my thanks, and now I must offer my apologies. I hope my children will grow to be as culturally enriched as all of you here - especially as enriched as you, Sherry!” Karl said with a smile and split second wink to the pregnant woman.

The guise of this meeting was idle appreciation of the leisurely game of baseball, and as the Eisgarten Icefox took the field Karl offered a light clap on level with the small group of fans present in Windhaven. Heydendahl asked his hosts questions about the home team, the Highlanders, and offered a basic knowledge of the Icefox and their lack of success since moving from Bearskull Junction to Eisgarten in 2005. He merely wanted to begin the afternoon by sharing some enjoyment of the game, and show his hosts that he was not the lunatic dictator some tabloids tried to portray.

@Gunnland ; @Azraq

 

[Gunnland]

Highlanders Stadium

The old ballpark lies between Wash and High, and therefore almost on the banks of the Wash, not far east of Alexander Square and the center of the city. But baseball parks are like priests offering the holy sacrifice of the Mass: they stand ad orientem. So there is no view of the city from the park. Looking out at a game, one only sees the Black Keep, where the Council of the North meets each day, poking up above the left field bleachers. Out center field, one looks up the mighty river flowing into the bucolic college town through its outlying forest-parks.

Though the crowd would usually be raucous in anticipation to play an interleague game with a TL team, especially one as consistently over-hyped as the Eisgarten Eisfüchse, they fell silent when Prince Dalmar took the mound, accepted the ball from a man wearing trousers in the summer heat, and threw an absolute heater to Gary Saint behind the plate. If six of the 57,000 people in attendance clapped reluctantly, it only accentuated the deafening silence in the stadium. Dalmar smiled, took off his navy cap with the interlocked 'WH' logo, and waved to a crowd that stood open-mouthed in stunned silence, unsure of whether to cheer or heckle the great black prince who had just the day before technically become the ranking member of the Gunnish nobility, second only to the queen herself.

Mary embraced him when Dalmar returned to the skybox. The prince had hoped for more cheers, it was true, but the MacLeods knew it would take the Gunnish people some getting used to. They had spaced out a number of public appearances over the next months to win the people over to the Azraqi Gunnophile, and display the odd and incongruous set of talents -- like clocking 80 on the gun in this children's game -- that Gunnishmen consider the pastimes proper to civilized men. The Advocate had been forced to run pictures of Dalmar fly-fishing in a MacLeod yellow-and-black tartan trilby; it was the only photograph the family licensed.

The invitation to join Heydendahls had come as a bit of a surprise, to none more than Sheryl-Lynn of course, and the countess had immediately insisted that the Engellachian leader throw the first pitch, only to be relieved by his refusal and the compromise that he walk the ball out to Dalmar.

Now they all gathered with this mysterious man, really, his whole charming and unthreatening little family. Karl Heydendahl was a reasonable man: this was proven by the fact that he realized the Icefoxes were better since Bruce Harper left to sign with the Malamutes.

William thought Sherry would be proud and delighted at the presence of her countryman, but noticed his fiancée seemed nonplussed. His mind began to wander, as one's does at a baseball game, and he reflected that she seldom spoke of Vesper, or her family. Now that he thought about it, he had learned much more about Wilbur and Aleister Rydell from a book that the enquêteur* had given him, Everything That Rises? Failures of Cultural Convergence in the Engellosphere, 1900-1920, than from Sherry herself.

A sharp crack of the bat and the "Icefoxes" were up 2-0 already in the bottom of the first,* and Will leaned over to tell Karl Heydendahl this was a relief, because of course the MacLeods were fans of the Highlanders' division rival (alas, woeful) Arundel Far Northerners. Dalmar had his PR duties, but William winked at the Engellachian leader and slid on a red ballcap emblazoned with a cursive E.

He waited for the opportunity to recommend the Stolmand book, and thought of a way to say 'we are not so different, and once upon a time we were about to realize that,' without sounding like a quisling. For Will expected the eyes and ears of the 15AR and the Foreign Office were on him as he spoke.

 

[Thaumantica]

“While some of is it is quite dry,” Karl shrugged before lighting a pipe by match, a Port Stanley blend anyone in Gunnland might buy in a whim at the corner store, but for Eisgartmen these imports from beyond the Tavastian Sea or Westernesse Continent were scarce or downright impossible to attain after a century of trade war between Thaumanticans and the Continentals. “I could forward you a copy of the collected war diaries of Wilbur and Aleister. Wilbur’s globe trotting odyssey for the Sylvanian & West Engell War of Independence, and Aleister’s esoteric insights from within Engellkind’s Civil War.”

“Those ought to remain sealed in the archives, Heydendahl!” Sherry challenged with a grimace. “Oh well yes, the diaries do expose Wilbur as the most inventive tax cheat of all time, and Aleister as a blood sacrificing spiritualist!”

“I’ve read Stolmand,” Sherry replied, hoping to move past those damned scrolls - “the kernel he found is what I would wager Herr Heydendahl is here to discover: the Marpesian Spirit. I have fallen in love with a Gunnishman and this enchanting land . . And found here something transcendent in its Christian faith.”

To Sheryl-Lynn’s surprise Karl was nodding along, and not seeking some snarky response that a Vesplander would. Instead he confessed his fascination: “There was a majesty to our progenitors, the Proto-Marpesians, and perhaps I am predictably materialist but I seek the relics and records of our shared origin stories.”

Heydendahl drew then let out a puff of the pipe tobacco and crossed his arms together, bouncing to one side from his daughter Helen jumping into his lap, “Where’s Bruce Harper, papa, I love him!” Helen demanded as she peeked over the ledge down at the baseball diamond.

“He is a mercenary like your Papa,” Sherry told the girl, “He’ll play for whoever pays and wins.”

Karl raised his eyebrows but did not object. He descended from the Freikorps Grenadiers, mercenaries going back for centuries and through him now the future beyond little Eisgarten. “I am not a Catholic or a Freemason, I am neither Ostmarkian nor Engellexian” Karl lamented with his two other children taking up the wings, “I am a Father, and leader of a clan - so yes William, we are not so different, and I wish for us to re-discover our similarities rather than fight our differences.”

 

[Gunnland]

"It's too bad those Prometheist thugs did for Ulrike Freudenberger," Will was saying. "She always used to say that Gunnishmen lacked all interest in knowing where Gunni and Rurik and the Sword-From-Across-the-Water came from. We snatch them as our own, that's why they call us 'Marpesians.'" When you spent eight years at the Marian you began to assume the wide educated world had read the Pelasgian myths of Μαρπησία in the original.

"Those ninth-century marauders set sail from somewhere far north and far west of here, anyway. Up here they put Wulfstan and the Ealdangells in their place, just as Charlemagne put Widukind and the Lexens in theirs. But most of the Marpesians kept going south, because almost all of them like Rygard prefered dealing with or ruling over the Tiburianized Franks. The old books call this the Regnum Marpesiae up here, but really most of them left Gunni behind to dicker with the Rheni tribes and Lexen towns. Now everywhere from Rurikgrad to Chagny is called "Marpesia," but they spent less than two hundred years passing through, before they began the great conquests of the Thaumantic domain."

Will realized he had been talking for too long about things everyone knew, and he chuckled at himself. "In Gunnland history goes backwards. The great Marpesian attitude, urthr, wyrd, or resoluteness in the face of one's fate, that only shows up with Gunni in 800. But it doesn't stop us from applying it to Caractacus when he told the Tiburian emperor Claudius to shove it... 750 years earlier!"

Sheryl-Lynn had no doubt already invited him to see the Stone Chair in St. Tears, the landing site of Gunni near his shining home city of Ayr, where the crude Thingstead met in a crude ampitheater sprayed by the cold sea. But the talisman was just a black rock on a cliff jutting into the Straits of Mar. Will thought better of inviting the Engellachian dictator to go see the singularly unimpressive ninth-century site. Surely it only raised the minds of Gunnishmen to high thoughts.

"I should introduce you to Maria Plutarska-Huyldrich, who has taken over Ulrike's classes at the Marian. She probably knows the archaeological sites in Scania where you could tour proto-Marpesian sites. I guess when the Engells reached your country it was almost like coming full circle to where the Marpesians began."

 

[Gunnland]

While Will was up in the loge prattling about poorly remembered pre-Marpesian Gunnish heroes like Caractacus... ironically these were better-remembered in Lower Marpesia where there was more Marpesian blood, so thoroughly had Gunni's clan system fused the Celtic Rheni and Germanic Lexens into Marpesian identity... there was a political scandal of some note in the third-baseline seats behind the away team dugout. At its center was the last man Molly MacLeod would want to see, her ex-husband.

There was a rumor, and anyone who knew anything knew it was just a rumor, that the once-powerful and increasingly isolated anti-imperial politician Jim Blackthorn, whose hard-partying ways had taken a toll on Gunnish diplomacy and his mortal coil alike, had said, "I would rather live in the East Engell Republic than a Holy Tiburian Empire." But the phrase had become notorious, not least because radical liberals like Skylaw, Hanson, and Stolmand kept reporting the rumor as true on theliberal.gn; Arundel's free speech zone let one say these things in Ayr, and here they could express their own opinion while attributing it to the old conservative battleaxe they hated.

Anyway, you can imagine Jim's dismay when he came to the ballpark to forget about politics for an afternoon, the great black majesty that had cuckolded him took the mound and delivered a searing fastball to Gary Saint. The videoboard even briefly showed Blackthorn's ashen face, the very image of awkwardness in the silent stadium. At first Blackthorn wanted to leave, even resign his thingmanship, even leave politics forever and take his surgical practice somewhere else.

But instead Jim did what he usually did in trying times -- he had a drink. Not a Becker's Pilsner or an Elben's Best Lager either, the usual ballpark beers of a Gunnish summer. He had an EPA, the beer that had become an overnight sensation at the famous Ølrepubliken bar in Gothenhagen, in a conspicuously labeled Engellkin Pale Ale glass. And he had enough so that he did not refuse when his buddy Jude MacReddin pulled a red Eisfüchse cap with its cursive 'E' logo, Jim did not refuse out of decency, but just said "Fookin' nashgabs," and watched the team from Eisgarten pull out a surprise 5-3 victory.

 

[Thaumantica]

The eldest Heydendahl boy, Karl IV, tried to follow along with William’s historical information but found himself drifting back to the excitement of the game as he attempted to keep an accurate record of events on a scorekeeper card.

“Can you check my card, Majesty Mary?” the eight-year-old asked hopefully, having no grasp on the roles of nobility beyond what schooling of Eisgart children briefly covered on the tyranny of Burgundian and Ostmsrkian monarchy.

“Perhaps you’ve gathered from Sheryl-Lynn’s darling personality,” the adult Karl spoke, though quietly and privately to William (aware their intelligence tails would be listening closely now), “that Engellachians speak plainly to both our benefit and demise.”

“Papa says hockey is the best sport because it’s the one we can hit Suomenmaa and Sylvania around in without it being a war crime!” Little Gunther interrupted as if to prove his father’s point. Karl smiled uncomfortably but did not correct his son at all.

“For the purposes of business, I wish to introduce a cordial face from me to your country and alliance” the Thaumantic Dictator admitted, “When I leave you, such gracious and friendly hosts, I will send my children home to Eisgarten and proceed alone to Ouistreham to attempt to prevent my forces and those of our Thaumantic partners from creating new generation wars, and work to end this one as quickly as possible.”

Karl stood, and handed his sleeping daughter Helen off to his wife who also shooed the other children away in hushed 19th century German, nearly identical to their mercenary forefathers who took Rydell’s coin in Ostmark to fight in Sylvania. “But should I die there, and I very well may, I wish to ask you to allow my wife and children to flee Eisgarten to live near you Sheryl-Lynn?”

Sherry was shocked, ready to blurt out no right away, but just then she felt the child inside her kick and turn about. “I can’t speak for Gunnish immigration and customs, Herr Heydendahl, but some clans in this world are star-crossed I've come to believe . ." Sherry confessed, "in a hundred years your children and mine will still be arguing the details of our past!"

"I pray that there remains land to till, and oxygen to breathe in a hundred years -" Karl replied, not specifying to whom or what he prayed to for the sake of his company, "I myself have come to believe that there are individuals and entities who would poison our air and earth if only to prove their ideological point, and deny life to all those who disagree!". Again Karl did not specify as to who he meant, but one likely candidate were the Serazine, and a close second one could construe were the Cussians.

"Excuse me," Karl begged, "I would invite you to New Year's in Vesper later this year. Start hydrating and training your constitution now, oh - and Sherry should know, though maybe she doesn't, bring worn-in dancing shoes because you may not find a seat in the whole city after dark - it may even be one of their queer laws, but they dance, drink, and yes drug into the next day and evening."

"Engellachians on New Years'," Sherry said, bursting with a glowing grin, "I've timed this baby right I think, we can bring in the New Year with vodka . . salmon . . olivier salad . . oh my mouth is watering, I haven't had an Engellachian meat jello in years!"

"We have mutton and haggis jello, if you dare!" Karl joked. "When we, our foreign office I mean, went back to Ostmark I'm told they brought a can of sardines and a potato as their state gift . ." Karl sighed, rolling his eyes up to the sky, "Needless to say we have a lot of work to do in the diplomacy standards department!"

 

[Gunnland]

Not far from the Heydendahls’ box, the sports reporters instinctively gave the two men a wide berth. The enormous Padraig Buchanan Smith sent the hacks scurrying like he was going to pull their suspenders. Everyone knew the kingdom’s chief of police. What was he doing in the press box? At least Walter MacAllister Matthew was a journalist, or had been, though nobody dared to ask him for his credentials. The two men put on headphones and occasionally exchanged words in a low voice. Walter chain smoked Calidian black-market Zolotaya cigarettes and drank Becker’s. Padraig ordered a seltzer water that sat untouched, slowly bubbling less and less.

Of course, they were not listening to the game, but to the Heydendahls and MacLeods. Every time they mentioned the Stolmand book, Walter angrily crushed a cigarette in the ashtray.

“The book is a flamin’ pile of shite! And a hackjob on that dobber Will!”

“Maybe it’s twice the hackjob on the third Liberal triumvir, so...”​

“Doug MacLeish? Maybe. Maybe.”

But really they didn’t pay much mind to the Liberals. Neither man came from the coastal cities; both were patriots of the old school. Integrity. But on the back of both of their minds was their slipping hold on power, as a new clique of “Trousers,” consisting of more urbane international lawyers and professors, was now in control of imperialization.

“Gads this Heydendahl is beflumin’ ‘em, Trick.”

“Uh huh. Wonder who from 15AR is on this blether.”​

“Maclo?”

“Can you believe he didn’t go to Bill’s wedding.”​

“Ol’ Waldo can’t stand Coemgein.”

“Who can anymore?”​

Silence.

Coemgein Gallagher, the censor, had resigned the priesthood when following the death of his patron Henry Cardinal Stewart, the doors of a church career were closed to him. He now worked for Mons Pietatis, the bank. Elwald Maclo appeared to have taken over 15AR after the death of Robert Gunn and Thomas MacIntyre, when the queen ordered its former spymaster, Fr. Gregorius Keiper, to remain in Port Stanley with her brother Joachas. Padraig had been in Port Stanley, actually in Loago, when Robert and Thomas had died while rescuing Sheryl-Lynn from Fante slavers. The enquêteur and Will MacLeod had become an odd pair of friends.

Even as they lost vigorous associates and the 15AR spy-ring, their allies had abandoned what was once called the "Smith-Gallagher circle" also. Jim Blackthorn had left the party over empire, and he was making a public show about it in the third base seats. The lairds and generals were lining up for imperial offices, and controlled access to Queen Julian, who had resigned herself to this new imperial reality. It would be a régime that a group of a half-dozen friends could no longer control. Better, perhaps, that Robert Gunn was dead.

Their friend Billy Bowerman was still Leader, though his election had happened by accident when the Integrity Party was trying to engineer new elections. But Mrs. Bowerman was practically a Trouser. Then they heard Karl Heydendahl’s invitation for the MacLeods to travel to Vesper for New Years’.

“So they’ll skip Hogmanay and go get blootered where the sun don’t shine.”

“He’s on a peace mission to Ouistreham?”​

“The problem with MacLeods is they don’t know whose side they’re on.”

“I think that’s why they get along with kind Uncle Karl.”​

“So did you ever find out if the wench is a spy of theirs?”

“Sherry? It’s the weirdest file in my desk, Walter.”​

 

[Azraq]

So this is what counts as sport this far North? Dalmar asked himself, a bemused arched brow creasing his otherwise impeccably smooth forehead, while his elongated fingers - crushed and stretched since birth - rapped the sides of his crystal whiskey tumbler.

Swirling the golden brown liquor in the vain hope the extra ice he'd furtively poured in would melt some more, he continued to watch as the white men in their patterned jersies smacked a small white ball with wooden sticks and ran around in circles in what was effectively a giant park, if small by Azraqi standards. It was at moments like this he wondered if Molly was really worth it all. The cold, the strange customs, the humiliation.

Trying not to choke and his sipped his drink - the peaty tones almost overwhelming - the emptiness of the applause after his 'fastball' filled his mind. In many ways it would have been better to have had no claps rather than just a handful, and the brief flicker of his wife's ex-husband on the giant screens overlooking the stadium underlined the brutal awkwardness of the entire event. But Dalmar had to smile and wave his stupid cap anyway, before walking off to the lofty heights of the 'sky box', where he was forced to mingle with the great and the good, including the odd Engellachian 'dictator' who had handed him the ball in the first place.

Watching the players below, Dalmar could somewhat sympathise with the distrust and judgement from the audience. After all, here he was, a foreigner in their land, judging one of their favourite pastimes. And there he stood, on the mound, not just a Nethian, but a Dawamalian prince, married to one of the most high profile noblewomen of Gunnland. These people had probably never even seen a black person in the flesh before. Dalmar, with his frequent trips to the luxury boutiques of Retalia and the five-star hotels of Kollam, was all too familiar with the whites - of a certain class and wealth. He could only imagine the reaction Molly would get in the slums of Haradhera and Jugol.

As the game continued, Dalmar's mind drifted and his ears wandered. Behind him, the weird Engallachian fellow, with his wife and brood, chatted history with the Gunnishmen. Dalmar smirked. History to these men seemed to start and end with Tibur. Yet hundreds, if not thousands, of years before Tibur even existed, Dawamalian sailors we're bringing spices, silk and other exotic goods across the Hamar and Implarian oceans. Further west, the Cyanopians - the civilisation that gave Azraq its name - were erecting grand obelisks and warring with the Pelasgians for control of the Wadjet Sea.

The roar of the crowds below returned Dalmar's attention to the game, but not fully. History still on the brain, he recalled the medieval Urodoah texts he had read describing the Crusaders. Short. Brutish. Flame-haired. How little they had changed...