Part 2

The Essay on Brinala, by Lady A.

The Archipelago

Brinala is an archipelago in a remote region of the South Sea, situated to the East of New Zealand, from which it is many days of sea travel away, but which is nonetheless its closest neighbor. The archipelago consists of dozens of larger and a great number of smaller islands, all of which are inhabited, unless they are so tiny as to be only rocks barely protruding from the surface of the sea.

The climate is subtropical and mild, with regular and sufficient rains, and long periods of undisturbed blue skies and calm sea in between them. Due to a meteorological peculiarity for which I have no explanation, the sun, without giving any less light or heat, seems to be milder than would be expected at this latitude — it does not dry the soil, does not parch the leaves of plants, and even I, with my pale northern complexion, never suffered from sunburn, no matter how many hours I spent outdoors, not always clothed in ways that would be considered decent by my British compatriots.

The islands offer perfect conditions for human habitation, especially since their inhabitants have learned to avoid the most dangerous single pitfall of confined and initially favorable environments, which can reduce them to places of misery, desaster and decline, namely, overpopulation. The soil is fertile, vegetation is lush and plentiful, the sea abounds with fish and all kinds of seafood, and even the rocks provide nourishment as they are home to large colonies of seabirds, who are easily caught and whose eggs can be collected. Among the fauna of the islands there are no poisonous snakes, and no large carnivores — the largest land animals are pigs and goats, which are kept for food in some parts of the archipelago, but about that later.

Traffic with the outer world barely exists, and is mostly confined to ships being blown off course and meeting their end on one of the archipelago's many reefs — the ensuing fate of their passengers and crew depending on the exact location of their shipwreck, but about that, too, later.

The Population

All inhabitants of Brinala, the Brinali, are of the same ethnicity. They largely conform to our idea of exotic beauty — olive-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed, sensuous, athletic and lithe. The centuries of occasional shipwrecks have left their traces, though: some of the Brinali have lighter skin, lighter eyes and lighter hair — I've even seen a few redheads! — while there are also some whose skins are of a much darker brown, or even black. The Brinali, while generally putting high value on human beauty, pay no more attention to different colors of skin than we do to different colors of hair, the only distinction important to them to establish affiliation to a certain group being the place of birth.

Not only are the Brinali of the same ethnicity, they also speak the same language, with minor local variations between the major islands. Nonetheless, they are divided into two distinct and strictly separated cultures — for lack of better names, I call them by their most characteristic features: the Cannibal and the Slave culture, or, the Cannibals and the Slavelanders (though, strictly speaking, also those who serve as food in the one case, and those who serve as slaves in the other, are part of their respective cultures, if at the bottom of their social orders).

The Cannibals are divided into tribes, the Slavelanders into queendoms (Brinali rulers with few exceptions being female), with both of these divisions corresponding to the major islands, so that both cultures consist of what might be called island-states. The smaller islands are usually affiliated with one of the larger ones, sometimes retaining various degrees of independence, with affiliations often changing through politics, economics, personal relationships, or, most frequently, local wars. Within each culture, traffic between these tribes/islands/states is frequent, and their members often intermarry.

While each of the two cultures looks down upon the other, and while quite frequently there are skirmishes, raids and armed conflicts between them (as there are between tribes or island-states of the same cultures), all in all they get along with each other remarkably well. Cannibal and Slavelander islands are spread all over the archipelago, without major conflicts about territory — wars over small islands are usually fought within the same culture. The general contempt that each culture feels for the other does not keep them from trading, whether in minerals, manufactured goods or humans, nor from mating, though close personal contacts or even romantic relationships between members of the different cultures are extremely rare, and usually do not end well, at least not for one of the pair.

The Cannibals are what we would call "savages" — they build their habitations from wood, bamboo and palm leaves, practice no agriculture, know no organized division of labor, and, one could say, mostly spend their lives feasting, fishing and making war. They do not know sexual morals in our sense, but walk naked all day and have sex whenever, and with whom ever, they desire. Their dealing with foreigners, whether from within or from without the archipelago, is usually straightforward: they eat them. They also eat the captives they make in raids or wars, and they eat members of their so-called "protected tribes": populations of small islands, who live on what vegetation and sea provide, and whom one particular Cannibal tribe "protects" from raids by other tribes. The price that the "protected" pay is that their own "protectors" can use them for food, according to arrangements which they call treaties.

Apart from humans, Cannibals despise the meat of creatures that walk on land, deeming them unclean — they only eat what they call the pure creatures of the sea and of the air (humans, walking upright with their heads far above the ground, and with a smooth skin that can easily be cleaned with water, seem to qualify as pure enough). And one more thing deserves to be mentioned: their human victims always die in pain, after severe torture — the Cannibals maintain that this not only increases their appetite, but also improves the flavor and tenderness of the meat, and, most of all, pleases the Goddess. The Goddess, by the way, as the highest or only deity, is worshiped by both cultures, but this is not the place to go into the details of the Brinali religion.

Different from the Cannibals, the Slavelanders are what we call "civilized" — they have towns, their houses are built from stone and are comfortably furnished, their main roads are paved, they use money, they have writing (though, like most primal civilizations, they use it for administration and business purposes, not for writing literature), and they are clothed, at least in public, often in elaborate garments made of precious fabrics, even though their clothes do not necessarily cover the parts of their bodies that we would consider to be the ones most deserving of coverage. Their sexual morals, I regret to say, are hardly better than those of their savage Cannibal kin.