Interlude 2: Julia of Aeduia

Even though we surrendered unconditionally on Aeduisia, that bloodthirsty bastard Caedmyr One Ear still wanted to kill us all. His soldiers wanted us dead too. They said we were tricking them, exploiting loopholes in their laws. They said we were not Aeduiana but uncircumcised savages undeserving of mercy. Said our surrender was insincere. They kept chanting, "Slay the savages!"

It took the intervention of a visiting priestess to stop them. Mikhlin Julia told them they couldn't execute us on the sacred day. She threatened to curse them all and saved us all as a result. Julia of Aeduia, Julia of the gray eyes, may Hchambas bless you and yours.

Despite our pardons, Rhexian mercy is a strange notion. 150,000 of us were left. In a country of countless thousands, we were the only survivors, starved but alive. Three out of every four men I had known were no more.

We thought we would go back to our homes and rebuild our lives but we had interfered with an extermination, a sin the Rhexians couldn't excuse. They couldn't kill us but they could still wipe us off the face of the earth some other way. And so they did.

First, they circumcised us. Every man fifteen and older got his foreskin snipped off. Malnourished and weakened as we were, what took Rhexian boys a week or two to recover from took us over a month. I was afraid my manhood would fall off. One of my friends lost his but the rest of us eventually healed.

Then the soldiers loaded us onto ships and scattered us. First, we sailed up and down the sea, then up rivers. They dropped off tiny groups of us into small towns and villages far from the sea and even farther from each other.

Only children under 15 remained with their parents. The rest of us were settled as far away from our friends and family as possible. We disappeared into the innumerable millions of residents of the A Hundred Realms like a block of salt in a lake. Swallowed and dissolved, never to coalesce again.

Just to make sure we wouldn't even dream of trying, King Daegan issued the Edict of Ten. If more than ten Kurkmen gather in one place, the eleventh man is put to death. Caedmyr One-Ear may have spared our lives, but he killed our gods, killed our kings, killed our culture.

My children will never learn to speak Kurkan. I could lose my tongue if I talk in the tongue of my fathers. I could lose my head for worshiping my gods. I could be stoned just for writing this book.

When Rhexians ride into neighboring kingdoms to kill, plunder and pillage, enslave and colonize, they call it conquering, and they call it glorious. Yet when we Kurkmen conquer coastal villages and unwalled towns by the Sechia Sea, they call it robbery and murder, the vilest of sins. Why? What makes Rhexians conquerors and us robbers?

- This first-hand account of The Scattering Of The Khwefians was sourced from The Extermination Of My Nation.