 |
| Pharomenes, a Muvian Captain. |
According to the diplomats and travellers of the Atlanteans, no culture offers as much threat to the rest of the world as the Justified Children of Mu, the Fourth People.
Some four thousand years ago, a group of Atlanteans settling in the Northern half of Lemuria gained independence from the Atlantean Empire, peacably (according to the Atlantean history, which admits no military loss). Finally making accomodation with the Lemurians after centuries, the new people forged a confederacy of free cities and nation states in the land they now call Mu.
To Atlantean eyes, their customs are strange and savage. Their citizen classes live in vast collectives, organised on military lines. Commerce is alien to them. All things to them are in common, even their children, removed from their mothers at birth and brought up to recognise the greater people as their only parent. Their relationships, too: the Muvians know no jealousy, make no ties stronger than their esprit de corps. Muvians have no concern for heredity.
The Atlanteans think them a brutal people. The Muvians allow women to fight alongside their men in their armies in mixed barracks, they say. Muvian captains kill warriors who retreat, then and there, on the field, they say. The kings of Mu who fail in peace or war face summary annihilation before the vimana-rays of their own councils.
They have no slaves, either. Every Muvian is free, and every foreigner who enters a Muvian border becomes free by default.
All of these things are true, and cheerfully admitted. We are a hard people, say the Children of Mu, in a dying land, and we must fight, and we must make sacrifices.
Human sacrifice, too? The Atlanteans thinks so, accuse the Muvians of worship of elemental beings using rites even the Black Atlanteans would pall at. In fact, every Muvian city outlaws the elemental cult, on pain of the death of the perpetrator's entire barracks.
But laws define what has been done. While the penalties for the bloody cultists grow ever more extreme, more are executed for the rites daily. Many among the Children of Mu quietly begin to wonder if the kings of Mu-Foneca, Mu-Guatama and Mu-Pan have the power to prevent their own Black Sun rising over their kingdoms.
