Herald of Steel

The cultures of Bahu and Matrak were once similar, both following their pagan religions. But due to the decision of their individual ruling noble families, over time, they diverged so significantly that by now they were almost incompatible.

For instance, before the advent of the Ramuh faith, both regions followed a tradition of marriage that was very different from the strict husband and wife structure of now. This monogamous idea came mainly from the Ramuh faith.

But before, people usually just lived in large joint families, where the men and women would cohabitate under a single roof with no formal ceremony.

And in that house, everyone would be allowed to freely have relationships with each other.

So all the brothers had access to their, what we would call ‘sister in laws’. And vice versa, the women were able to approach any men as they wished.

Even inter generational relationships, such as young nieces and nephews with their aunts and uncles and fathers and uncles with their daughter in laws, although disliked, were quite common.

These immortal practices were their equivalent of our modern day extra marital affairs, inconvenient but nothing too shameful.

Even straight, blatant incest.. such as father with daughter and mothers with sons was not that big a deal, and some remote villages even had the tradition where a girl’s step into adulthood was celebrated by letting her first experience be with her father and a boy’s with his mother.

Many of these hidden villages even survived in Matrak to this day, practicing such acts in secret, away from the temple’s prying eyes, under the veneer of Ramuh faith.

Now, as the matter of how they dealt with the matter of pregnancies and births which such open, free sex naturally caused… well as if it was not weird before, this was where things started going really out of the boundaries of common sense.

At that time, the people of the two provinces did not even understand how pregnancy worked!

More specifically, they did not believe intercourse and that the sperm meeting the lady’s private parts was how babies were created,… even though they saw other animals reproduce in such a way, they still refused to learn.

Rather, they thought intercourse was simply a physical ritual and it was the natural spirits their pagan system believed in that bestowed a girl with this gift.

Hence as long the men and women did not do the act with the intention to reproduce, the spirits would not respond and thus there would be no problem. And vice versa, if the spirits wanted, they could make any girl pregnant regardless of her experience.

To support this hypothesis, they even had many folktales of virgin girls becoming miraculously pregnant. And parents would even offer prayers and rituals every year to save their daughters from such tribulation.

Of course, we can easily guess what truly happened in those incidents- some poor girl most likely did some secretive things with some boy behind her family’s back, ending up with an unwanted package in her belly.

Then unable to abort and afraid of being shamed by her family and the community, chose to attribute the birth to the unseen.

It was just unknown how everyone else in the land was that gullible to buy that. Or perhaps they were simply willfully ignorant.

But whichever the reason might be, such belief was once widespread among the people of Matrak and Bahu, and thus, the intimate act between men and women was simply seen as a pleasurable thing one did with one’s family for entertainment, one that even helped grow the familiar bonds tighter.

Anyone refusing to partake would be seen as cold and detached. Which would be a grave accusation in this time period when families were so important and one’s entire life revolved around them.

Everyone lived in the same village for not just years or decades, but generations.

As for the laws of inheritance when such a child was born… well there were two versions of rulings, one older, one relatively fresher.

In the first one, the child would belong to the man to whom the birthing mother belonged. Because even if the men did not have formal wives back then like they have now, they were still responsible for the women they introduced to the family- and were in charge of feeding and clothing them from his portion of the earnings.

In this ruling, even if the man was away from the home for years, such as off fighting a war or trading, and then he comes to find his woman has given birth to three, or four children… they would still be considered his even though biologically it was impossible.

The logic used to reach this answer was as mentioned earlier, the people believed it was the spirits who granted life. So the rationale was, while the man was away, his ‘woman’ pleaded for a child and was thus visited by a spirit.

As for the child looking nothing like the man, but more like his brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, uncles, or aunts… well this was not even a problem to begin with. They were all one big family, so what was the problem with the child looking like someone related to the man… this was only natural. It was simply said that that person’s spirit was in the child and it was hoped they would grow up to be just like them.

In this way, a man could be found in reality raising his nephew, niece, and even brother, if the one who made the woman conceive was his father. As for what you would call if it was the son who did it…well English does not have a word to describe that relation.

Now, this practice, as ‘full proof’ and ‘robust’ as it was, had several flaws- the biggest one being the difficulty of assigning a father to any child born from a mother who was not owned under a man.

For instance, a girl who had just become an adult and had yet to be chosen by another man to come and live with him, but in the meantime was taken by her brothers or uncles and thus became pregnant.

Who was going to take care of her and the child then?

Originally it was decided that it would be the father, as he was the guardian of children till they came of age.

At that time, it was not seen as a sin for such a young girl without a man to become pregnant, as it was well known by the people that spirits were also moody creatures.

So sometimes they responded without the girl even wanting to conceive. And vice versa, sometimes they did not respond even when pleading for decades.

At least, that was how the people justified unwanted pregnancies and infertility.

In this endeavor, they even came up with names and characteristics for such spirits- mischievous ones who liked to make innocent girls pregnant on a whim and revengeful poltergeists who killed babies in the womb, thus denying conception.

Then combining this, they of course added all kinds of prayers and rituals as well as one’s behaviour in life, believing it affected the activities of these unseen beings.

However, over time, this method began to get challenged.

Men began to prefer pure women, both out of simple cultural change, but also because of a ruling that made ‘inheriting’ a woman meant also inherent her children.

So when a man chose a woman, he would also have to take all her children from previous encounters.

This was a very difficult cost for young men to bear.

Not to mention the societal problems that came from having to raise another man’s child. Secret infanticides were rife in those times as jealous men strangled these defenseless children since they were considered an eye sore.

In addition, fathers also started to find it hard to care for their grandchildren along with the rest of the family.

For example- imagine a man has just two women under him, a very conservative estimate in reality. If they gave birth to two daughters and after some years both the girls conceive, suddenly he has two more mouths to feed.

Or if both his wives and unclaimed daughters become pregnant at the same time…then he would have four more mouths to feed. And if they became pregnant again next year….

Things would easily start to snowball from there.

Hence facing such pressure some of the families began to detach themselves based on generations… meaning no uncles living with nephews.

Grandfathers, fathers, and brothers, all lived separately and it was forbidden, or at least disliked, for men from one generation to fraternize with women belonging to the other generation.

And it was this family structure that existed to this day in many parts of Matrak.

Officially the men following this simply claimed to the temples and visiting priestes that they lived with their wives and children in large joint families, looking after the ancestral farms altogether.

But in secret, they refused to keep their hands from their sister in laws, they had no concept of this in the first place.

This incensed Bahu because the practice was outlawed and severely prosecuted in their territory but due to Matrak it could never be eliminated from the land.

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