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to Murgo well-being diminished to a trickle. The starving Murgos
responded with a series of punitive expeditions into Mishrak ac
Thull until a stern command from Torak (issued by Ctuchik) halted
that practice. The situation of the Murgos was rapidly growing
desperate. It was at this point that they first encountered the oily
Nyissan slave-traders. Nyissans had long conducted slave-raids into
the southern reaches of the continent, which was inhabited by a
simple, quite docile race of people apparently somewhat distantly
related to the Dalasians of southwest Mallorea. The first purchase of
a slave by a Murgo aristocrat forever established the pattern of
Murgo society. The information gleaned from the Nyissans made
them aware of the lands and peoples lying to the south and they
immediately began their conquest of that region as part of their
search for an uninterrupted food supply.
Once the Murgos passed the desolate wastes of Coska, they found
themselves in a fertile land of lakes, rivers and forests. They also
found a ready supply of slaves. The native populations, viewed by
the Murgos as little more than animals, were brutally rounded UP
and herded into huge encampments from which they were parceled
out to work the farmlands in the emerging Murgo military districts.
In typical Murgo fashion, the regions in the south were organized
along military lines, and each district was administered by a general.
A peculiarity of the Murgos has long been a singular lack of any
sense of personal possession - particularly when dealing with land.
A Murgo simply cannot conceive of the notion of personally owning
land. The conquered territories of the south belonged, therefore, to
Murgodom in general. A Murgo's primary loyalty is to his
immediate superior, and he does not want to own land, since the
responsibility of ownership might divide that loyalty. Thus, Cthol Murgos
is divided into military districts administered by army corps.
Each corps (and ultimately the corps commander) has a specific
geographic region of responsibility. The land is further subdivided
into division areas, regimental areas, battalion areas and so on.
Individual Murgo soldiers act primarily as overseers and
slavedrivers. Murgo population centers thus more closely resemble
Military encampments than they do cities. Housing is assigned to
individual soldiers on the basis of rank. While such a society seems
bleak and repugnant to Westerners and Malloreans alike, one must
nonetheless admire the Murgo tenacity and sense of self-sacrifice
which makes it function.
Since one of the primary concerns of an aristocratic class is the
protection of bloodlines, and since Murgos live in what is quite
literally a sea of slaves, Murgo society rigidly enforces separation
between slave and master. Murgo women in particular are totally
isolated from any possible contact with non-Angaraks, and this
obsession with racial purity has quite literally imprisoned them
within the confines of special 'women's quarters' which lie at the
center of every Murgo house. Any Murgo woman even suspected of
'consorting' with a non-Murgo is immediately put to death..
Moreover, any Murgo male, regardless of rank, who is caught in
delicate circumstances with a foreign woman suffers the same fate.
These laws, since they have existed since the end of the second
millennium, have guaranteed a remarkably pure strain. The Murgo
of today is probably the only uncontaminated Angarak on the face
of the globe. In time this obsessive concern with racial purity
became viewed by Murgos as a quasi-religious obligation, and no