The Peacock Cloak

said gruffly, patting the tiny girl on the head.
    And the cloak shook off the fragments of snot and dust that the child’s fingers had left behind.
    Ten minutes later Tawus turned and looked back at them. They were little more than dots in the mountain landscape but they were still watching him, still holding hands. Around them, unheeded, the sheep grazed with the goats.
    Suddenly, Tawus was vividly reminded of three other children he had once seen, of about the same ages. He had hardly given them a thought at the time, but now he clearly saw them in his mind: the younger two huddled against their sister, all three staring with white faces as Tawus and his army rolled through their burning village, their home in ruins behind them. It had been in a flat watery country called Meadow Lee. From his vantage point in the turret of a tank, Tawus could see its verdant water meadows stretching away for miles. Across the whole expanse buildings were burning and columns of dirty smoke were slowly staining the whole of the wide blue sky a glowering oily yellow.
    When was that, Tawus wondered? On which of the several different occasions when fighting had come to Meadow Lee? He thought it had been during one of his early wars against his brother Balthazar. But then he wondered whether perhaps it had been at a later stage when he was in an alliance with Balthazar against Jibreel.
    “Neither,” said the Peacock Cloak. “It was in the war all six of you waged against Cassandra, that time she banned chrome extraction in her lands.”

    “Don’t needlessly interfere. Offer guidance where necessary, head off obvious problems, but otherwise allow things to take their own course”.
    It would be wrong to say these were Fabbro’s instructions to the Seven because he had never spoken to them. They were simply his intentions which they all knew because his memories were replicated in their own minds. When they encountered those first villagers, the Seven had greeted them, requested food and a place to rest that night, and asked if they were any matters they could assist with. They did not try and impose their views, or change the villagers’ minds about how the world worked or how to live their lives. That had all come later, along with the wars and the empires.
    “But did he really think we could go on like that forever?” Tawus now angrily asked. “What were we supposed to do all this time? Just wander around indefinitely, advising on a sore throat here, suggesting crop rotation there, but otherwise doing nothing with this world at all?”
    The Seven had begun to be different from Fabbro from the moment they awoke. And paradoxically it was Tawus, the one made most completely in Fabbro’s likeness, who had moved most quickly away from Fabbro’s wishes.
    “We can’t just be gardeners of this world,” he had told his brothers and sisters, after they had visited a dozen sleepy villages, “we can’t just be shepherds of its people, watching them while they graze. We will go mad. We will turn into imbeciles. We need to be able to build things, play with technology, unlock the possibilities that we know exist within this particular frame. We will need metals and fuels, and a society complex enough to extract and refine them. We will need ways of storing and transmitting information. There will need to be cities. On at least one planet, in at least one continent, we will have to organise a state.”
    The Six had all had reservations at first, to different degrees, and for slightly different reasons.
    “Just give me a small territory then,” Tawus had said, “a patch of land with some people in, to experiment and develop my ideas.”
    In his own little fiefdom he had adopted a new approach, not simply advising, but tempting and cajoling. He had made little labour-saving devices for his people and then spoken to them of machines that would do all their work for them. He had helped them make boats and then described space ships that would make them masters of the stars. He had sown dissatisfaction in their minds and, within two years, he had achieved government, schools, metallurgy, sea-faring and a militia. Seeing what he had achieved, the Six had fallen over one another to catch up.
    “How come they all followed me, if my path was so wrong?” Tawus now asked.
    “They had no choice but to follow you,” observed the Peacock Cloak, “if they didn’t wish to be altogether eclipsed.”
    “Which is another way of saying that