Rhuvish Rising

~Hans-Christoph Neuert


The central provinces are more industrial; along the Sundkau and Dunnor rivers one sees factories and mills billowing smoke from their chimneys. As the Sundkau passes out of Kärnten Province, the river runs through the city of Alzenstadt, a settlement mixed between modernist monoliths and classical-styled government palaces. Scaffolding can be seen on many parts of the capital; the city is scarcely thirty years old and it bears wounds from the several Rhuvish wars. The Sunkau flows hither to the province that bears its name, then twists along to Bürheim. In Bürheim Province, the river opens up into the Südsee, the South Rhuvan Sea, at Göthafen, where the Kannexans invaded the then-communist republic years ago.

East of the Dunnor River are the breadbasket provinces of the small reich. Fields and fields of crops crisscrossed by rivers and highways and interspersed by forests stand here, providing a living for the people. Until recently the whole east of the country, Kärnten, Jamttal, the Leussens, and Belsfruch lay under Argent occupation.

The western provinces of Bürheim, Haagen, and Istrien are rocky and subsist on agriculture. Simple rural folk lived scattered across villages in this mountainous regions, where churches the tallest man-made structures around and everyone fears God and attends Mass on Sundays. Here, the Rhuvish people asserted their independence against Syrixia and Nebula time after time, under the leadership of a Heidi Rhein. But to those still living after the damnation of the Nazo War and under the foreign occupation, those times are long gone.

During the Floresque convention on post-Nazo Rhuvanland:

It was said, the Kannexans had come in like a storm -- German speakers, after all, had invented the Blitzkrieg tactics that every military of the last century revered. The military of the Empire of Kannex, loyal to God and Kaiser, struck Nazo Rhuvanland from the skies and rolled their metallic steeds onward, conquering the Rhuvish forces That sounded well on paper and the media of Kannex, all the great newspapers and networks based in metropoles like Manhatt and Weiterburg, showered praise on the daring conduct of the Kannexan officers and troops. In truth, Rhuvish morale had dwindled since their Führer Ulrich's death late in the war, and resistance had all but collapsed. What the Argents, Latins, Esplandians, and Kannexans all found upon entering Rhuvish territory was a bankrupt country that had spent most of its money on an army and armories that had now disappeared.

Civil and military authority was tied so much to the Nazo Party that, with the breakdown of the Party came a breakdown of control across the country. The Kannexans acted quickly to fill the void in their occupation zone by reappointing Nazo mayors and magistrates to their posts. Many of them, at any rate, had not been hardcore believers and were not known to have participated in any war crimes.

The Kannexan Army completed the occupation of the Dunnor river valley within a week. Thousands of Kannexan soldiers from the good ol' Reich arrived on trucks, with rifles slung on their shoulders and Kevlar helmets covering their shaved heads. They were hardened men with muscle-thick arms and baggy eyes. A few looked angry, a few looked scared, but many wore smiles and catcalled the local Rhuvish women with their peculiar Kannexan accents. With them came chaplains, mainly Lutherans and Catholics but also several Calvinists. Their first action was to reopen the town church, or rebuild it if it had been destroyed.

Kannexan commanders weren't just being good Christians. Just about every Rhuvish villager attended Mass weekly even if they didn't believe a word of the Bible. The tradition was strong in Rhuvanland. The local church made a good spot to set up soup kitchens and town halls.


Admiral Jang intended that the first vestiges of sovereignty be reestablished. "What is sovereignty?" he mused one day aboard his flagship, the Hyperion. His baby-faced, blond-haired adjutant Julian opened his mouth as to speak, but decided not to interrupt. His commander's train of thought was surely more important than his comments.

"Sovereignty is the power to assert one's laws. To hold together and maintain a state. The imperium, as the Latins say." Julian nodded thoughtfully. Jang continued, sipping whiskey as if it were like coffee. "Without sovereignty, men will become wild beasts, ripping each other apart. Such is the nature of man. Man needs a ruler to awe him, to subdue his fears and his natural desire to conquer." He glanced, eyes twinkling, at his adjutant. "Do you know who wrote that? I'll give you a hint. It's not Nietzsche."

"Yes, Herr Admiral. Hobbes, sir?"

"Yes. We need a police force."


Every Rhuvish man between the ages of 13 to 65 owned a gun.

This fact was not by custom, as it is in certain countries. The Rhuvishmen had no particular fondness for the right to bear arms. It was not a right; it was simply a fact. Since the Syrixian Empire tried to annex Syrixia, many a foreign soldier had found his mortality on Rhuvish soil. Since the civil war broke out, whole villages had taken lessons in aiming and shooting. And since the collapse of the Nazos, the armories across Rhuvanland had been thoroughly ransacked.

By whom? All the Rhuvish soldiers had ripped off their uniforms now and burned their Nazo member cards. This served the Kannexans well. The Kannexans didn't ask and the Rhuvish didn't tell. Officially, the Kannexans did not want former Nazos joining their new locally-staffed police forces and town militias, but it was hard to turn down military-age men who brought their own rifles to training and already spoke good Standard German. The Rhuvish militiamen fell into step with a natural grace, led by dog-faced Kannexan sergeants.

Klein-Zion was the name for a small town kilometers outside of Blatzwend, in Kärnten Province. Formerly the village functioned as a factory for automobiles, but in the past few years had been converted into manufacturing big guns. Since the destruction of Rhuvanland as a sovereign entity, there had been no demand for either cars nor heavy weaponry.

A strange man sat on the steps of the town church every day. He was ninety years of age and nearly blind. Whenever he opened his eyes one could see the white cataracts of his pupils shine like full moons. The wrinkled veteran trudged around with a cane and spoke now and then to anybody he would listen, and there were many who would. He had a large following, though he was not particularly charismatic. He was not an Ulrich and when he spoke, his listeners had to strain their necks to hear his rustic German. But the young men of the village held him in awe and gaped as they watched him take his seat in front of the church every noon. Longevity had become a virtue in war-torn Rhuvanland. That a man could be so close to death and yet still walk amazed them. Off-duty Kannexan privates, too, would stop by and listen to the old man.

"Today our country is destroyed. Look around you. Our flag lies in the dust, our leaders in Alzenstadt have fled. Villages are destroyed and the people suffer. We have been torn up by the ferocious lions of the barbarians..." He casted his colorless gaze across the crowd, as if noticing the Kannexans in the back with their rifles and battle fatigues. "The sword of the infidel is at our neck. Oh Mother Rhuvanland! How have you fallen! Your proud flags and towers fallen, your brave sons martyred.

"By God, it is only deserving. We brought these calamities upon ourselves. With blind devotion to false prophets and unbound lusts, we sinned against His name time and time again. Like lemmings throwing themselves off a cliff, we charged into what we called 'modernity' and 'progress'. We threw the love of the Lord out of our hearts, shut our eyes and ears to his desires. Now here we have our punishment. A Rhuvanland ripped into shreds! Oh you National Sonacists, lovers of progress, is this what you dreamt of?

"Not a single day goes by without my old heart aching for what was. We forgot -- we all forgot -- the old ways. Men forgot to be men and women forgot to be women. Confusion reigned and in the great Babylon cities we indulged in our lusts and ate beyond our fill and raped this earth and we cried out to the Heavens and dared to demand more. Surely we have now been humbled! How great is God! We have committed many crimes against His name and yet he loves us in his aching heart despite the whore-wife that we are.

"Repent, youth of Rhuvanland. Discard the sins of your parents. Better die a martyr and a clean soul than to live in sin. It is not too late. Find it within yourselves, Christian sons of Rhuvanland, that crusader spirit. Wage war against all that is sinful and drive the heathen from your hearts. Only then can we seek forgiveness, only then can we be free."

"Penner!" swore Viktor, one of the Kannexan enlisted. The word corresponded approximately to "fucker." Viktor kicked the leg of the bunk bed, inadvertently cracking it, and swore again at nothing in particular. The Kannexan troop had heard the news. "What are the lame fucks at the Aussenministerium doing? How could they give up Rhuvanland like that?"

The others were sitting or standing. They stared at their boots and the floor, despondent. The question was on everyone's mind. What had they been fighting for? All the Kannexan dead died for the Empire's security. They had won the war, but now they had lost the fight. A bad regime was to be replaced with a terrible one. This could not be anything but a slap in the face of the Reich.

A young soldier glanced around, uncertain. "I don't get it. What's so bad about this?"

"Use your head, dumbass! The Rhuvish were slaves of the Nazos. Now they're slaves of the Latins."

"Fuck if I care," piped up another, one of the older soldiers. He leaned back on the bed with his elbows. "We fought the war. We got rid of Ulrich. Now let them place whatever government they want in this shithole. I'd rather go home."

Viktor seemed ready to explode, so Walt stepped in. "It won't stop here. The Latin government won't work. Our Reich is gonna have to step in to clean up the mess a year or two from now, and guess who'll fight the war then? We will. We won in the battlefield, but if we had won at the negotiating table, we won't have to win in a few years from now too."

"The Latins know what they're doing. Let them play with the Rhuvish for a while. What the hell is our problem? If they fuck up, we can always drop in special forces or the KNA or whatever. Clean up the mess nicely, install some Reich-friendly strongman."

At least a few bunker-mates saw problems with that.

"They wouldn't let us." By 'they' everyone understood to be either Syrixia, or Imperium, or the DU.

"That wouldn't work. It's not working in Pelhafor."

"That'll just be another Ulrich!"

"Fuck if I care for this geopolitical bullshit. Why can't we go back to killing enemies of the Reich?"

"These are enemies of the Reich! The Latins! The DU! All of these fuckers want to control us. They don't trust us. They're afraid of us. Look at what they wanted to do to Syrixia. They will come after us next."

A big man in the middle stood up and slammed the table at the center of the room, a wooden piece of furniture lit up by a dim lamp and covered with, fittingly, a world map. "How about let's just kill all of them heathen fucks, huh? A few pieces of our finest atomics would do the trick."

The others laughed, bawling. "Ja ja, Chancellor Henneburg's hiring you as his next Foreign Minister soon!"

For each major Rhuvish city, at least one foreign soldier died every day. The soldiers had nowhere to hide; everybody knew where they could be found. Checkpoints around government buildings and police stations were major targets, but off-duty soldiers were not safe either. Soon, fewer foreign soldiers dared leave their security zone to visit the downtown bars and brothels. Soldiers staggering home from their drunk merrymaking were mowed down by rifles in passing vans. Their blood painted the sidewalks. Every week, the military police launch raids into the Rhuvish slums where no foreign soldier dared venture alone, dragging Rhuvish men from screaming women and confiscating hoards of rifles. Who was a criminal and who wasn't? Every time the armored cars made a stop in the residential quarters and screeched to a halt in front of the grimy apartment buildings, crowds of Rhuvish gathered to watch. Widows, old men, children, and others stood in silence. Their eyes threw accusations and curses even as they parted to let the MPs through.

The prisons grew full. Which were murdering soldiers in the streets and which were innocent? Every Rhuvishmen carried a gun now, whether in the cities or the countryside. The Nazo armories had been ransacked and crime was everywhere. Entire Nazo weapons depots had disappeared off the map and never accounted for -- their information had been burned when the Nazos surrendered. What information remained was overwhelming. Even if the occupation authority somehow managed to produce enough German speakers, the German "Amtsdeutsch" legalese remained elusive, now that the occupation authority had dismissed the Nazo functionaries of the previous regime. Kannexan experts and contractors needed to be flown in, but these were few in number and at any rate required bodyguards.

The occupation authority soon began rehiring low-level Nazo Party bureaucrats. A few returned from the countryside; others never left the city slums. Yet the bulk of the Nazo bureaucracy remained at large after they had been laid off, and the bulk of the Rhuvish security forces had mysteriously disappeared too. Despite these issues, security had to be provided for the installation of the new Principality regime. Rhuvish bureaucrats returning from the countryside now spoke of mass desperation among a starving population. A few men calling themselves Ulrich or Führer were running around with groups of well-armed young men, taking potshots at occupation troops and stirring up trouble.

"In the state of nature," the young, handsome man began, "when Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, man was free. In the natural state, without taxes or governments or kings or presidents, every man is free.

"But in this state of nature, there are the laws of God. God has told us: every man has the power to fight for his own life and the food on his plate. Every man is equal, no better and no worse than his peers. In nature, no man is king and no man is servant. And that is what God commanded. How is this so, you ask?"

The young, goateed man lit his cigarette with a lighter. He was a strange figure. He was lean, wearing the glasses of an intellectual, but he had an AK-47 slung over his shoulder and mossy green army fatigues. He looked like a college student who had been conscripted for a third-world military. His amber-hued eyes shone with fervor and his slick black hair glimmered in the light of the electric lamp.

The young man waved his cigarette to emphasize the point. "Think: God made everyone only so tall, only so clever, only so strong. Even the smallest man can kill the biggest man here, through wit or by ganging up with his comrades. If God wanted kings and queens and servants, he would have set them apart from other men. Kings would be like godzillas -- towering over commoners, and far wiser, and far more intelligent. God would have placed them down and told his children, these are your kings and your emperors.

"But that's not the case. I can take a knife and cut into the heart of any king or emperor in the world. If I stab the old Caesar, blood will come out -- like the rest of us, like you and me. He'll be a dead man before long -- like anybody if I strike him down. God has made us equals.

"Now, let's return to our scenario: in the natural state, without kings or governments, each man is equal, and each man has a right to himself and what he owns. For how can you live, even with your head attached to your body, if you don't have food in your stomach, you don't have a fork and a spoon in your hands, you don't have land to grow and nourish yourself? God gave us the Earth for us to guard and enjoy and use. Through our use, the Earth becomes ours -- through our labor.

"So as a free man in nature, you'd have the right to beat the crap out of anybody who tries to rob you. After all, what's so different between theft and murder? If I steal your food, your nourishment from your hands and your mouth, am I not harming you? By God, you have the power to punish those who try to harm you. You are the judge and executioner of all crimes against you.

"So, man is free, that's good, isn't it? Everybody loves to be free. No taxes, no kings. Why would anybody leave the state of nature?

"Well, suppose you can fight off the first guy who tries to take your shit. But what about the second guy? Or a third guy? Or maybe a bunch of thieves will try to mug you together. How are you going to stand your ground, man? You have no safety. Your justice extends only to the length of your sword.

"But suppose you and a bunch of your friends come together. You and your buddies form a team, a community. Every man agrees to give up a little bit of his freedom to the cause, to come together for the sake of security. Now, nobody is messing with you. Your lives are safe. Your property is safe. You and your friends all agree that each month, one of you will be the boss, and the next month, another will be the boss, and so on.

"The important thing is that everybody agrees. Everybody agrees to form not only a government, but a republic. This is the only lawful form of government -- and so, what's the point of this? To protect our God-given rights; to our lives, freedom, and property.

"So why in the good Lord's name would you surrender your freedom to a man who calls himself king? The very definition of a monarch is a man who has the power of life and death and property over you. If you are aiming to protect yourself, to protect your property, you should not willingly give your freedom to a man who has every power to kill you, to take your daughters, to take your property. That is antithetical to what God intends.

"The false idea that the Lord has commanded these kings and emperors to arise is ridiculous. Fools often compare the king to the father of the state. They say, well, the king is like the patriarch of the family, he has rule over his sons. Let me tell you -- does the father have the power of life and death over the child? No. Does the father own the child like it's his piece of property, for him to use however he likes? No. And -- I'll be damned -- show me one man, just one man, who calls himself a father, who has created his children all by himself. After all, are we not from our fathers and mothers? So why would the father hold sole power over his child? We are all God's creations.

"And keep in mind why children are placed under their parents. It is because children don't have capacity for reason. They can't think like adults, my friends. The parents clothe their children under their protection, under their education, to teach them God and goodness and their rights. But this is temporary -- for as soon as the child is old enough, as soon as he develops his reason and becomes an adult, he is no longer under the rule of the parents.

"So why in God's name are we still talking about this? Political power is not parental power. It's apples to oranges. Political power is the power that comes from our agreement, our agreement to live together as a community and a republic. And again, our friends from overseas, the infidels and the heretics, will ask about monarchy -- monarchy, monarchy! Aren't monarchies lawful? Aren't monarchies also justified by God?

"Let me ask you -- if you place a knife at my throat and tell me I should give you my freedom, my property, and my life, is that lawful? So why is it lawful that the kings and emperors should put their knives to the throats of millions and tell them to surrender to them, as if they were idols of pagan gods! Rob a few and you are crucified as a thief, rob a million and they crown you king! These rights -- God has given them to me. No mortal man can take them from me without my consent. And no mortal man, no devil-king or kaiser, can take them away from you.

"By God, in Lord Jesus's name, may He grant us the strength to fight for what is naturally ours. May we appeal to heaven and repent our ignorant, sinful ways. May we strike down our enemies, so that their cities burn and their women wail in lament. May we see justice. Amen."

The first major attacks came a week after the Kannexans began to withdraw.

Election season was coming up in Kannex. Twelve years had passed under Chancellor Jörg Henneburg and the Democrats. The twelve years under Henneburg had been very eventful -- the Great War with Nebula had ended and the children that had grown up during the last major nuclear scare were now adults. There was a sense of malaise in the air. The whole Reich ached and bellowed like an old man beyond his prime.

Henneburg needed the troops back. The public now took a dim view of the invasion in the first place. Henneburg had jumped on the chance to reestablish Kannexan influence in fellow German-speaking Rhuvanland, but the Ignatius Plan -- with its authors primarily speaking Latin rather than German -- did not seem to promise that. The war did not make for good advertising. At any rate, Henneburg needed the family reunions -- the military men returning to joyous families, hugging their sons and daughters and kissing their wives -- on TV, to bolster his image before the grand election. Twelve years of Democratic policies and the next four years were at stake.

The Kannexan withdrawal left the guns and the execution of laws in the hands of young Rhuvish men. There were many groups of men with guns. The Kannexans had tolerated them, or even supported them, depending on how much danger they posed to them. Not many of them held Nazo sympathies or even cared about politics; the majority were simply farmers protecting their land against bandits. But several of them held different ideas on what Rhuvanland should be. A few militias based themselves around mostly-harmless preachers screaming about this or that apocalypse and offering a vague conception of a wrathful war-god Jehova, while others were just poor Rhuvish teenagers who screwed around with rifles and listened to DMX and Kannexan drug rap.

The Principality who comes to existence on the force of arms and fortune of others cannot survive for long if it does not extend its roots deep into the ground, wrote the famous Machiavel many centuries again. A prince can never make himself secure against a hostile people. The prince Varus Albinus knew this -- he had studied the classics, a must for the education of young Latinate noblemen, but he hadn't studied the difference between Catholics and Protestants and he still confused his grammatical cases. He had the habit of addressing himself as "Prinz" when the proper title was "Fürst." But every evening, after all the official reports had been related to him in his tongue, he would take up reading his textbook on elementary German.

Varus sat with a rigid pose in his chair, watching the sun set in the west from his Alzenstadt office. He had a perfect view of the city, which had been half-destroyed in the war. People milled about like ants on a picnic blanket, moving along the wide avenues between white-marble and steel government palaces to residential neighborhoods with narrower streets and packed shops. He couldn't tell whether they were Rhuvish or Latinate; from this distance they looked the same. Occasionally he spotted lines of men marching, patrols consisting of occupation troops. They had begun recruitment of local men earlier in the month and now the Alzenstadt police force boasted a decent amount of German speakers.

"We shouldn't have dismissed all the Nazos," he murmured to no one in particular. "Should've kept some of them... then kill them off. Slowly." For political reasons, the Nazo bureaucracy of Rhuvanland had been virtually disbanded and had to be rebuilt from bottom-up. The foreign powers in the Floresque Convention would not allow -- could not have allowed -- those same men who signed so many innocents off to die to remain employed.

Varus was a peach-faced man with brown hair and a hard, stoic countenance. To the Rhuvish he was no more than another foreigner who had decided to butt into Rhuvish affairs. In the streets of Alzenstadt, the Rhuvish had begun throwing around the word "Ungläubiger," 'infidel.' It was merely descriptive at first, but now one always spat it with contempt. They were foreigners, unbelievers who believed in false gods and spoke an alien, ugly tongue.

At first there were protests. Rhuvishmen marched crying out for bread and freedom. As the demonstrations grew larger and the waves of people began carrying sticks and other things, Varus sent troops to suppress them. Of course they didn't want to inflame the situation. The troops watched in formation, shielding the government district.

TBC