“How did you go from dealing with ships to helping to colonize new lands for Bravia?”

“That’s not exactly a straightforward process and it wasn’t a quick one. In general, it is the Bravain tradition to make sure that people who serve in religious offices have some sort of real world experience to draw from. I spent my early childhood in Bravia and came from a family that wasn’t in the priesthood, so this was perhaps a bit easier for me than for others. Having experience working in the world allows one to relate to the concern of ordinary Bravians in a way that being in charge in a religious institution for one’s entire adult life doesn’t. I know that I was not meant to spend my entire life on ships, but some people do live their lives that way. Many people spend their lives in offices or on farms, or in the woods, and you have to be able to understand the concerns of such people. You have to know what it is like to earn one’s living by the sweat of one’s brow in a world full of brambles and thorns.”

“So, what happened to change your life from that of working in a ship?”

:”It happened as the ship I was on docked in Port Esperance, and I was told that I needed to meet at the office there. I thought I was in trouble at first, and when I came in, I saw that there were a few people there in the priestly robes, and my supervisor told me that the Faith was looking to bring me on as an assistant priest. I was, as one would figure, pretty happy to hear that was the case, and at that point I turned in my badge and was sent to a quick refresher course to get me up to speed on what would be required of me in my office.”

“As I assume, the faith in your country operates via protocol?”

“Yes, that’s absolutely right. We have a great deal of freedom to work within the structures and forms and liturgy of our religious practices but those forms give shape to our worship, exactly.”

“And what happened after your refresher course?”

“I received a little black book that had in it the sort of documentation I needed about how to serve as an assistant priest and I was then sent off to Porterville.”

“Porterville is just across the river, right?”

“That’s right, the city just across the river from here.”

“How was it like as an assistant priest?”

“I got along really well with the head priest there, who was in charge of the main congregation in Porterville, and I had the chance to do a lot of visits to get to know the people in the town and figure out what was going on.”

“So what is this area like?”

“Well, we’re Central Bravia, and the Central Bravians are in general a people who tends to have family farms as well as a lot of towns and small cities that are based on local trade and internal development. Porterville itself was founded by the Porter family who ran a large dairy operation before starting the town and had settled a large amount of land near the Eastern River. Originally, the town functioned as a sort of border town and the river itself was pretty fast at this point so not a lot of shipping went on.”

“Is that how a river town would get much of its income?”

“Absolutely. Porterville got a lot more of its income and importance as a land route than as a river port, which certainly did mean it was not as well off as many of the towns downstream where the Eastern River is slower and allows for transportation. On the plus side, though, some scouts were able to bridge the river with a rope bridge and then explore the area to the east of the river, where they found the whole land that makes up the Across-The-Eastern-River Province empty. This news was immediately conveyed to the people of Porterville, and others, and a larger bridge was built across the Eastern River that you came across to get here. New Porterville was built explicitly with the goal of being a staging point for the settlement of the rest of the province.”

“Are you guys disappointed that it didn’t become the capital?”

“Not at all. Bravian capitals are very specific places, and New Porterville was far too easily accessible to be a capital. But we did want to be able to help speed colonists into the province. I think we succeeded at that point.”

“I have a personal question to ask now.”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Are you married?”

“Yes, I am, as a matter of fact. Do you want to hear that story?”

“Yes, I have long been curious about marriage and courtship customs among your people.”

“Alright. I’ll call her in. Her side of the story is at least as interesting, and probably more so, than mine.” At that the priest called his wife into the room. When the priest’s wife came into the room, she was the sort of auburn-haired beauty that looks like and was the girl next door.

“What was your maiden name?”

“Porter,” she said with a slight smile.

“How did you two get together?”

“I think I noticed him before he noticed me. He came in as an assistant priest and started speaking on occasion and I could see that he was very intelligent. My father was on the congregation’s board and got to know a great deal about his life history and I thought it was pretty compelling. He was not only bright and intelligent but also a genuinely kind person who had come from an interesting background as a Free Port child outside the boundaries of the faith. The more I found out about him the more I found him to be really interesting.”

“I didn’t know any of this. I had to interact with her family because of the congregational board meetings where the priests and board members all would eat and talk together about congregational affairs, but while I found her attractive, I didn’t know anyone in the town and it is not always easy for a priest to engage in courtship as it can create a real problem within the congregation.”

“Yeah, so my father saw that I was interested and must have brought it up to him, and after that the two of us began to spend a lot of time talking, enjoying the company of the other people involved at the board meetings and dinners, and I got the chance to show him around the town and see the River Walk and other things like that. This was before we found out that the area on the other side of the river was open. When we did find out that there was going to be a new settlement, things became more urgent. My father wasn’t from the main branch of the Porters–there were others more important here, and so it was decided that he would be the patron of the new town, and that my (now) husband would be the priest, and so before we left we had a wedding and our honeymoon was helping to plat out the new town where we now are.”

“I’m not sure if platting a town sounds romantic.”

“There is little more romantic to a Bravian than seeing empty land become property that can be owned and settled and turned into something productive,” the priest laughed.

“I agree,” the priest’s wife said with a smile. “I don’t think I grew up with the expectation of being a priest’s wife, but I have enjoyed the service and I can’t deny that the social opportunities involved have also been very appealing as well.”

“Is there a sort of alliance between the priests and the people who organize and run settlements?”

“That’s a good way to put it,” the priest said. “It’s not too surprising that in a small town where the priest and the big landowners are the most important people and both of them focused on leadership through service that their families would get thrown together often generation after generation. There is a long genealogical tradition of the kingly lines and high priestly lines repeatedly marrying among each other and the same thing has also long between true among the aristocracy and the lower ranks of the priesthood as well.”

“The way you describe courtship is like hanging out, for the most part.”

“I think that’s really a big part of it. We don’t engage in intimacy before marriage here, so that drastically affects what one can do around each other. Indeed, even to be alone together before at least engagement if not marriage is viewed as a serious problem. You have to get to know people in the context of other people. You see how they treat others, how they deal with the public world, and also how they spend their time in both professional and social occasions.”

“Is the way that a priest engages in courtship different from the way that other people do?”

“I think that priests and royals both have the most restrictions when it comes to their courtship. Bravia has very strict laws against power rape so it is an extremely complicated process for someone who has institutional power to seek romantic relationships because in general, it may be argued that their power is shaping the relationship. There are always good reasons why powerful people tend to marry other powerful people, but there are even more in Bravia, since only people from powerful backgrounds are safe for people with power to involve themselves with. When you consider the roles that family plays in people connecting together, since it is well understood that people do not marry people but rather families, I would say that in general Bravian people tend to marry from among those they engage with in matters of faith and business. The goal is not so much to protect one’s property through endogamy, as is the case in some cultures, but rather to cement alliances within one’s larger social group, and this tends to mean that people marry broadly among their peers. Someone from a farming family might not marry another farmer, but rather someone from a logistics background who is involved in helping bring those farm goods to market. A fisherman might marry someone from the area of the marina where the boats dock. A lumberjack is likely to marry someone from the local town or camp where that lumberjack works.”

“Do you agree with this?”

“Yes, my husband is right, even if he’s not from the exact ranks of the provincial aristocracy like I am. Bravians have only a few solid means of building cohesion within society, as trust is a valuable and rare commodity, so we tend to see family businesses on a vertical level and marriage alliances horizontally to bring people in related trades together and thus able to keep business harmonious. People have this romantic ideal of people from wildly different backgrounds falling in love and breaking conventions, but more often ties form as a result of longstanding connections between people that include friendship, common business interests, and personal friendship and respect as well as attraction. Certainly all of those elements were the case in building up our marriage, and that is the general rule that we find all around us in Bravia.”

“I would have thought that it would be more complicated than that.”

“There’s no need for things to be more complicated than they need to be. I am sure that similar arrangements are the case for your own people.”

“You’d be right about that. I think that people are generally educated by their families as to which sort of people are suitable and that most people at least tend to learn those lessons well.”

“It’s much the same for us. No one arranges marriages here in a formal sense, but the circumstances are arranged so that suitable people are able to work things out in a controlled and safe environment where everyone is looking out for the interests of everyone else. My own boss as head priest and certainly others in the religious hierarchy were making sure that Miss Porter–as she was then–was suitable for me and I am sure that her family was doing the same.”

“Oh, believe me, they were,” she said with a laugh.

I must say that while I didn’t know these people well, I was very amused by their rapport and their honesty with each other. It was refreshing to see that the plainspoken nature of Bravian relations that I had seen on a diplomatic level were also true, in a humane and kind way, on the personal level as well. At this point, though, there was something else that I really needed to know.