Frequently Asked Questions

Since there's been some discussion about exactly how Charisian warships might stack up against "real world" counterparts, here are some statistics to think about. All tonnages are "burden" not "displacement," and all are in long tons (despite the fact that long tons don't exist on Safehold; I'm using similar units so they can be properly compared to one another)

USN Ships:

USS Philadelphia: (1799): length 157'; beam 39'; 1,240 tons; gundeck 28 long 18-pounders; spar deck 16 32-pounder carronades; weight of broadside 508 pounds.

USS President (1799): length 175'; beam 43'8"; 1,576 tons; gundeck 30 long 24-pounders; spar deck 22 42-pounder carronades; 2 long 18-pounder chasers; weight of broadside 840 pounds.

USS Columbia (1813): length 175'; beam 44'6"; 1,511 tons; gundeck 30 long 32-pounders; spar deck 20 42-pounder carronades; 2 long 18 pounder chasers; weight of broadside 918 pounds.

USS Columbus (1816): length 193'3"; beam 52'; 2,480 tons; lower gundeck 30 long 32-pounders; upper gundeck 32 medium 32-pounders; spar deck 24 32-pounder carronades; broadside 1,376 pounds. (Notes: over-gunned for her displacement; despite her size she had no more than 5' or 6' freeboard between the waterline and the sills of her lower deck gun ports.)

USS Ohio (1817): length 197'2"; beam 53'10"; 2,725 tons; lower gundeck 30 long 32-pounders; upper gundeck 32 medium 32-pounders; spar deck 24 32-pounder carronades; broadside 1,376 pounds. (Notes: considered one of the finest two-decked ships-of-the-line ever built; carried her armament easily with almost twice Columbus' freeboard to her lower deck port sills.)

USS Pennsylvania (1822): length 210'; beam 56'9"; 3,105 tons; lower gundeck 30 long 42-pounders; middle gundeck 32 long 32-pounders; upper gundeck 32 long 32-pounders; spar deck 30 42-pounder carronades; weight of broadside 2,284 pounds.


Royal/Imperial Charisian Navy:

HMS Hurricane: length 108’; beam 35’; 750 tons; gundeck 14 35-pounder carronades; upper deck 14 35-pounder carronades; weight of broadside 490 pounds. (Notes: this is fairly typical of the Royal Charisian Navy's smaller converted merchant galleons. She does not have warship-grade scantlings or planking and carries only carronades to reduce weights, which limits the range at which she can engage. Even so, she has very limited freeboard.)

HMS Gale: length 115'; beam 35'; 840 tons; gundeck 18 35-pounders; upper deck 14 35-pounder carronades; 4 long 14-pounder chase guns; weight of broadside 588 pounds. (Notes: this is fairly typical of the Royal Charisian Navy's larger converted merchant galleons. She does not have warship-grade scantlings or planking, but her greater tonnage lets her carry long guns on the gundeck and gives her slightly better freeboard.)

HMS Dreadnought: length 154'; beam 42'6"; 1,200 tons; gundeck 30 long 30-pounders; spar deck 20 30-pounder carronades; 4 long 14-pounders; weight of broadside 828 pounds. (Notes: the first purpose-built war galleons of the Royal Charisian Navy. Approximately the same burden as Philadelphia but beamier to carry her heavier battery. Freeboard to lower port sills only about 10' — better than anyone else's, but still about 3'-4' short of what a proper blue-water frigate really needs. From this ship on, Charisian warships are as heavily built as — or more heavily built than — their USN counterparts.)

HMS Empress of Charis (original): length 168' 11"; beam 40'3"; 1,400 tons; gundeck 32 long 30-pounders; spar deck 30 30-pounder carronades; 4 long 14-pounders; weight of broadside 958 pounds. (Notes: if anyone is looking, in my original post about a matchup between this ship and Constitution, I think I forgot to divide by two when calculating Empress' weight of broadside. [G])

HMS Empress of Charis (final): length 168'11"; beam 40'3"; 1,400 tons; gundeck 30 long 30-pounders; spar deck 18 57-pounder carronades; 4 long 14-pounders; weight of broadside 991 pounds.

HMS Royal Charis: length 174'; beam 40'; 1,520 tons; gundeck 30 long 30-pounders; spar deck 24 30-pounder carronades; 4 long 14-pounders; weight of broadside 834 pounds. (Notes: 30-pounder carronades later replaced by 20 57-pounder carronades, at which point weight of broadside became 1,048 pounds. She carried her guns higher than the original Empress, and showed 12' of freeboard to her port sills. This was the immediate follow-on class to Empress.)

HMS Sword of Charis: length 178'6"; beam 45'4"; 1,725 tons; gundeck 30 long 30-pounders; spar deck 20 57-pounders; 4 long 14-pounders; weight of broadside 1,048 pounds. (Notes: An improved Royal Charis. Her greater displacement gives her 14' of freeboard to her port sills.)

HMS Thunderer: length 194'6"; beam 52'3"; 2,500 tons; lower gundeck 30 long 30-pounders; upper gundeck 32 long 30-pounders; spar deck 24 57-pounder carronades; 2 long 57-pounders; weight of broadside 1,728. (Notes: This ship, which would have been the Imperial Charisian Navy's first true ship-of-the-line, was designed by Sir Dustyn Olyvyr before the Battle of the Gulf of Tarot, when no one was really thinking in terms of shell-firing guns or ironclads and the ICN hadn't captured so many prize ships from the Navy of God. The long 57-pounders are basically long 7.5" smoothbores on pivot mounts which allow them to fire in either broadside or directly ahead as chase guns.)

When comparing the tonnage costs of these ships' batteries, remember that: a USN 32-pounder weighs just over 6,000 pounds; a USN 24-pounder weighs 5,376 pounds; a Charisian 35-pounder weighs about 5,000 pounds; and a Charisian 30-pounder weighs about 4,800. This means, for example, that Empress of Charis' 30 long 30-pounders actually weigh 11% less than President's 30 long 24-pounders. Charisian "long" guns would have been considered "medium" guns by the USN, which gives them slightly shorter range than their USN counterparts might have had. On the other hand, they have more range than their Safeholdian counterparts.

And I'm not going to tell you about the ironclads which are going to be built instead of Thunderer.

I think I've just explained (at least I've tried to) why the waters concerned weren't considered "waters dominated by the ICN" at that time, and I also don't recall ever having said that no one ever considered stealing "some of the tithe passing by in 800 years." Even leaving aside the religious convictions to which Friar Bob quite rightly alluded, no nation (and no sane individual — even a Safeholdian athiest [although that’s a concept — pre-jihad, at least — to boggle my mind!] who imagined for one instant that he might be identifiable, for that matter) would ever even have considered it because of the penalties which would have attached and the fact that the Church and every other secular nation on the face of the planet would have come after them, of course, but I never said that no one at all considered pilfering from the tithe. In fact, one of the problems Duchairn has to address in MT&T is how to deal with putting an end to the margin of graft and corruption — embezzlement, if you will — which the Church had previously been willing to put up with in certain places. And I'm quite sure that more than one desperate individual, over the course of Safeholdian history, was willing to hit a Church tithe gatherer over the head to relieve him of the tithe . . . which is why tithe gatherers are normally accompanied by armed guards. And also one reason the tithe is not normally sent any farther by sea than it has to be.

Even without the threat of piracy or thieves, there's always the possibility of shipwreck, after all, and a "ship" that sinks in a canal is much more readily salvaged than one that sinks in a couple of thousand of feet of seawater. Hence, again, the reference to the fact that sending the shipment from Khairman Keep to Silk Town represented an unusual change which the loss of Archangel Chihiro and Blessed Warrior brought to a screeching stop.

Finally, I don't know that I ever suggested (a) that piracy was "apparently endemic" to Safehold or (b) that "only the top and bottom of Safehold's society show[ed] any signs of corruption in those ~800 years." Certainly piracy was a problem prior to the jihad, but does the fact that piracy is rife in the waters off Somalia mean that piracy is "endemic" to 21st-century Earth? In certain areas, piracy was a known and even severe problem; in other areas, it was an occasional problem; in still others, maritime traffic was considered secure prior to the current unpleasantness. And I'm not sure what you mean about only the top and bottom of Safeholdian society showing any signs of corruption. Exactly what signs of corruption are they supposed to be showing in those theoretically "middle portions" of society? I think it's been pretty evident throughout the course of the books that there are criminal elements at just about every level of Safeholdian society, just as there are here on Earth, but you'll have to give me a little more guidance as to exactly what sort of "corruption" in what portion of society seems to be missing before I can address the point. You really need to stop assuming that just because I haven’t made some specific aspect of an entire literary world critical to the storytelling that that aspect doesn’t exist. If you really need me to show you a mid-level bank clerk skimming the accounts going past him, or a dishonest store clerk deliberately making the wrong change, or a plumber committing adultery to make it clear that there is routine, run of the mill corruption and human weakness at all levels of society, the story is really going to bog down, you know.

I have to write the stories the way I feel they should be written, however, and Merlin's high tech goodies are not going to turn into god weapons or panaceas in the course of the books for a whole bunch of reasons. Some I have already spelled out in terms of moral consequences to his actions. Some I have spelled out in terms of the damage they would do if they became known to the other side. Some have to do with the problems of charges of devil-worship and demon familiars which he has been at such pains to avoid. Some have to do with his refusal to replace one forcibly imposed set of technology guidelines and religous proscriptions and diktats with what amounts to another. Some have to do with story telling constraints. Some have to do with things you may not have yet thought about, but which I have . . . like how the Inqusition under Clyntahn is going to react to any town or settlement anywhere near to an "inexplicable" act of non-divine sabotage. (You do realize how likely he would be to start assigning "collective responsibility" and punishing the local inhabitants who were obviously assisting the saboteurs . . . whoever they were, don't you?) Some have to do with Merlin's own moral qualms and ethics. Some have to do with . . . .

I'll stop there. I hope this is enough of an explanation. I hope the readers will trust me with the books and with the characters, and that the characters' actions (and attitudes) will be consistent with who they are and what they've been shown to be. In the end, however, the stories will be written the way I think they need to be written. No doubt some readers will be upset and will voice their unhappiness with characters' actions (or inactions) as vociferously as thousands of Monday morning quarterbacks have second-guessed real lilfe military and political decision makers for as long as I can remember. If that happens, it will probably indicate that I got it right.

I'll leave you with one last thought. I could have had Nimue trot out her recon skimmer three days after she woke up in the cave, nuke Zion and all the major sources of the Church's military capabilities, then appear as "the Archangel Nimue," decree that the Church had fallen into corruption (as it had) and that she had been sent by God with the new dispensation, completing the teaching which had been interrupted by Shan-wei's "rebellion" when those claiming to be Langhorne's true followers had actually perverted the historical record of what had happened. In fact, Shan-wei was the first victim of the rebellion against Langhorne, to whom she was loyal to the moment of Armageddon Reef's destruction, and the true trator was Chihiro, who proceded to pervert and twist everything Langhorne had intended as his full teaching. That triumph of the Dark in the War of the Fallen established a thousand years of darkness on Safehold, making the Church's corruption inevitable, but the time has come to right the wrong which was done so many centuries ago and return humankind to the paths of righteousness, including the responsible use of technology which Shan-wei, as Langhorne's true, loyal lieutenant had been entrusted to reveal and teach before Chihiro the Foul's sinful, ambitious betrayal and revolt.

Now, obviously, I would have had to deal with the bombardment platform, but I can think of a couple of ways to do that right off the top of my head (one of which may yet be used), or I could simply never have inserted it into the mix in the first place. And what I've sketched out above is only one possible iteration of the many, many, many ways I could have allowed use of advanced technology to solve Nimue/Merlin's problems.

Would have been a damned boring book, too, and the entire war would have been over in about 12 minutes, with no moral growth or exploration of any of the characters. Ho-hum.

If you want that story, you'll have to go find it somewhere else, though, because I have no intention whatever of writing it.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "disbelief problems" in this instance. They may, however, result from misunderstanding the purposes of the original Langhorne and then trying to project him back onto the Federation as a whole.

The Federation knew exactly what first brought them to the Gbaba's attention: interstellar expansion into an area the Gbaba had already swept of competing sentient (or, at least, advanced) lifeforms. They had no way of knowing whether it was because they'd blundered across some stealth sensor system that had been left behind to report to the Gbaba, or because the Gbaba ran patrols through the area on some sort of regular schedule, or whatever, but first contact with the Gbaba followed decades of survey ships turning up evidence of destroyed alien civilizations. Until the Gbaba actually attacked, there was disagreement over how and why those civilizations had been destroyed, but after the Gbaba attacked, the debate was generally considered to have been settled. So while they might not have known exactly what level of technology triggered Gbaba interest in the other civilizations which were destroyed, they had pretty conclusive evidence that it was their own expanding high-tech presence in interstellar space which had brought them to the Gbaba's attention.

The original purpose of Operation Ark was not for the human race to permanently dig a hole, climb into it, and then fill it in behind them. The original ban on high technology — including interstellar travel — was intended to last only long enough to evade any Gbaba scouts deliberately searching for possible human "hidden colonies." The intention at that point was to not radiate telltale signals which might attract a scout to Safehold's star system in the first place and to maintain that "you can't see me" anonymity long enough for the search for them to have died down. At that point, humanity, knowing about the Gbaba's existence would begin reestablishing technology as carefully as possible and use the tech base which had been brought with them in knowledge form (which is precisely what Shan-wei and the others in the Alexandria Enclave wanted to maintain) as a starting point for a civilization which had almost been able to defeat the Gbaba as it stood to advance to one readily capable of dealing with the threat when it was encountered a second time.

Clearly, the ultimate intent was for the human race to return (eventually) to interstellar space loaded for bear and deal with the Gbaba once and for all because the Gbaba had left humanity no option through their own previous actions. That is clearly how Pei Shan-wei and Commodore Pei understood their mission orders, and it was the fear that someone like Langhorne would attempt to . . . modify those orders which led to the plans which placed Nimue Alban's PICA in a cave on Safehold a thousand years later.

Langhorne's solution to the problem, however, was to dig a hole and pull it in after him. He'd basically decided that the best way to deal with the Gbaba was to hide from them permanently, and his technique for doing that was to forbid the re-creation of a tech base which could ever permit humanity to expand beyond a single planet or draw the Gbaba's attention a second time. In other words, the Proscriptions — unlike the original plan to "go dark" until after the Gbaba scouts were done looking for fugitives — are intended as a permanent solution to the "Gbaba problem." As a consequence, they aren't so much concerned with preventing telltale electromagnetic or neutrino signatures per se as they are with killing the fundamental building blocks that might ever permit those signatures to be radiated in the first place. This doesn't indicate any ignorance on the part of the Terran Federation as to how/why the Gbaba initially discovered humanity's existence; it indicates an intention to prevent humanity from running into the Gbaba again anywhere, under any circumstances.

The deliberate imposition of Roman numerals in place of Arabic numerals, as a means to prevent the development of advanced mathematics, is one example of how that was supposed to work. The structure of a cosmology in which as many natural laws as possible are explained as divine dispensations rather than simply ignored is another. The Holy Writ not only describes the "miraculous dispensation" of gravity as a means to provide a constant "down" anywhere on the surface of a spherical planet, but also describes celestial phenomena in a way which accounts for Copernican observations within a basically Ptolemaic context, once again by describing what might be seen by the unaided human eye or through a telescope (and remember they have telescopes) in terms of "and this, too, is the mighty work of the Archangels' hands." In other words, the Writ sets forth internally consistent, comprehensive descriptions of observable phenomena in terms of divine dispensation in a way intended to prevent questions from arising in the first place. If we ever get to it (that is, if it ever becomes significant to the storyline), you will discover that most things which could be observed through magnifying glasses or simple microscopes — that is, microscopes which can be constructed without advanced technology — are also described in the Writ and explained in those same consistent cosmological terms. The entire objective was to create a situation in which the conflict between science and religion never arises because anything that the tools of a low-tech civilization can produce have already been satisfactorily explained/described by religion. There's no need to find a solution to the problem of new discoveries, because everyone already "knows" why things work the way they do. The Achilles heel of the Writ lies in the fact that the Writ doesn't specifically forbid efforts to expand upon the descriptions/answers already provided. There is a reason that it doesn't (which I may or may not go into at some point in the books; it was a judgment call on the part of the Writ's authors on the question of how specifically they wanted to try to nail things down at the risk of inadvertently contradicting themselves internally at some point), but that remains to be seen. It is, however, one of the reasons the Royal College in Tellesberg never quite crossed the line into anathematized knowledge before the Group of Four's attack on Charis. They weren't positing new, heretical knowledge; they were simply collecting, collating, and systematizing observations of how the permitted "knowledge" worked and attempting to derive still deeper insight into the "divine laws" established by the Archangels obedient to God's will.

On the basis of the Proscriptions, Merlin and the inner circle can actually form some pretty fair conclusions about what won't set off the Rakurai; the problem is that they can't be positive what will (beyond one point, discussed below). Essentially, the Proscriptions are very simple: instead of defining what technology is, they are intended — by defining what is permissible — to create conditions under which the evolution of an advanced tech base is not possible. In essence, the Proscriptions list the three elements of "Langhorne's Trinity" of acceptable power sources: wind, water, and muscle. Paityr Wylsynn explained in the last book how, working within those limitations, he can approve steam power. In his attestation, he simply points out that the generation of steam has always been allowed (see his reference to pressure cookers) and that all a steam engine really is is a wind-powered device. The steam simply represents wind generated where it's needed, just as Howsmyn's hydro-accumulators were simply a way to generate/provide waterpower where it was required.

The problem comes with an effort to step beyond steam into electricity, which is not part of Langhorne's Trinity. Moreover, the Writ makes it very clear that one of Shan-wei's worst offenses against God was to lay impious hands on Holy Langhorne's divine Rakurai. The deluded mortals who followed her during Shan-wei's War and The War of the Fallen were anathematized in part for their acceptance of her blasphemous desecration of the Rakurai, which is specifically set forever beyond human touch. From that, Merlin and the inner circle can be pretty clear in their own minds that a generating plant is going to catch a kinetic bombardment is anything is. Indeed, they have inferred (correctly) that the connection between the Rakurai and damnation was made so explicit to be sure that electricity stayed "off the table" once some Safeholdian Benjamin Franklin demonstrated that it and the Rakurai were the same thing.

One thing that needs to be borne in mind is that at this point that the readers of this forum know far more about what went on during Shan-wei's War and The War of the Fallen than Merlin or the inner circle know. Until the Key of Schueler came on the scene, they couldn't know what was under the Temple. In fact, even now they don't "know" a thing about what's under there; they can only surmise. By the same token, at this point they have no way of knowing exactly what the kinetic platform was put up there to do or what might trigger it.

Because of the rigor with which the Rakurai is forbidden to humans or to anyone except Langhorne Himself (remember, he's not "dead;" he's simply no longer "of this world," which means that the Writ specifically provides for his ongoing supervision of and influence in the world), Merlin is confident that building a generating station would be A Bad Idea. He was careful to set up his steam power experiment in a place where no one would be injured if things went badly and were (almost to support) there would be no human witnesses to a "Rakurai strike" if the kinetic bombardment platform disapproved of steam power. By the same token, he's not particularly concerned about the platform having been set up to essentially nuke Safehold back into the Key age, either, however. He strongly suspects (again, correctly) that if a electrical generating plant, for example, were to be struck by the Rakurai, it would not set off a general bombardment of Safehold. That, in fact, the people behind the Proscriptions would want witnesses to "Langhorne's divine wrath" to survive and spread the word of what had happened.

So the Federation was never in much doubt as to what drew it to the Gbaba's attention; the Proscriptions are intended less to prevent "betraying spoors" which will attract the Gbaba to Safehold than with ensuring that no technology capable of taking humans beyond Safehold ever emerges; and Merlin and the inner circle, by a careful reading of the Writ and the Proscriptions can definitely rule out at least some technologies as virtually certain to activate the "Rakurai" (assuming, of course, that anything will do so).

I think you and I have a difference of opinion about what constitutes moral/acceptable behavior in this instance. Nor is that the only reason why nuking Zion is not an option for Merlin. Taking the many reasons for that in no particular order:

Merlin feels personally responsible for the deaths which have already occurred. He is, however, among other things, a product of a Terran Federation Navy which was sworn to the preservation of human life in a war it knew it was losing — a conflict which could have only one outcome. Nimue spent her entire life in that environment, with that overriding imperative. When Merlin says that Nimue was sworn to protect human life, he is telling nothing but the truth, and the number of people he's already personally killed in relatively small groups already weighs heavily enough upon him. By the same token, he knows — when he's willing to look at it logically and listen to the testimony of the native Safeholdians on "his" side — that the war which is currently ongoing between the Church leadership and those who believe in freedom of conscience (or at least adherence to the spirit of the Writ as they understand it) was inevitable. In point of fact, aside from the delay he caused an Archbishop Erayk's pastoral visit (which, arguably, delayed him long enough for the ground fire in Charis to get beyond the point where he could have hoped to re-exert any sort of control), Merlin had very little to do with Clyntahn's decision to launch the attack on Charis. Arabic numerals? That (along with the abacus) was really the only major innovation to have come out of Charis — and reached the Group of Four's attention — which was Merlin's handiwork. Clyntahn had been planning his "final solution" to the Charisian problem for quite some time; he scarcely needed anything Merlin might have done as an excuse.

Despite that, Merlin does feel responsible, even though Cayleb, Sharleyan, Maikel, Nahrmahn (when alive), and many others have told him that it would have happened anyway and that his "guilt" consists primarily of giving Charis an opportunity to survive, thereby lengthening the war and extending the massacre to somewhere else instead of basically allowing Clyntahn to simply depopulate Charis and be done with it . . . until the next secular realm pissed him off.

At the same time, as other readers have pointed out, his primary mission is not the survival of Charis or even of his friends and loved ones. His primary mission is to make sure that the Church is permanently and totally discredited as a "thought control" mechanism, that the orbital bombardment platform doesn't blast Safehold back into the equivalent of the dark ages, and that humanity is ready the next time it runs into the Gbaba. From that perspective, and speaking totally cold-bloodedly, the more thoroughly the Group of Four discredits itself with the human race — the more and greater the excesses and atrocities Clyntahn is allowed to perpetuate without being stopped by the rest of the Church hierarchy — the more the Church's legitimacy is undermined and, eventually, destroyed. I'm not saying that Merlin is deliberately attempting to provoke additional atrocities, because he isn't — his mind doesn't work that way — but he is aware of that side of the equation . . . and so are Cayleb and Maikel Staynair, quite possibly to an even greater extent than Merlin is. Moreover, Merlin most definitely is aware that he has to get the innovation/invention genie as thoroughly as possible out of the bottle before the Church is defeated. Nimue was a sufficiently astute student of history, and has had long enough to think about this, to realize that even when the Church is defeated militarily, it is extraordinarily unlikely that the Reformists and the Church of Charis are going to succeed in destroying the existing Church (unless, of course, it has succeeded in wreaking sufficient havoc and atrocities to generate the sort of universal revulsion Nazism and Hitler’s "Final Solution" generated after World War II and we have the equivalent of the Nuremberg trials and denazification on a planetary scale). The Church of God Awaiting is almost certainly going to survive the current jihad, one way or the other, and that means that the habit of thinking outside the Writ's limitations and the Proscriptions of Jwo-jeng has to become so widespread, so pervasive, that even a Church which has a successful Counter Reformation won't be able to fence it around with new restrictions and turn it back off at the tap. From that perspective — again, speaking cold bloodedly — he doesn't want to end the jihad tomorrow. Please note that that doesn't mean he'll deliberately delay a Charisian victory or sabotage Siddarmarkian armies in the field, because he won't; he'll fight like hell for Charisian victory. But it is a fundamental, underlying strand of his strategy and his mission.

Leaving all of that aside, however, there is the question of his personal morality, how it plays into that oath Nimue swore (and his own feelings of guilt over the fact that, despite all it can do, the TFN was unable to fulfill that oath), and exactly where direct (as opposed to indirect) responsibility for the atrocities actually lies.

Merlin is not prepared, is not willing, is morally unalterably opposed, to murdering a couple of million people who would never have any opportunity of defending themselves simply because they have been controlled by a monstrous lie and exploited by a corrupt institution headed by four greedy men, one of whom is a certifiable megalomaniac. He simply won't do it. He can't do it, and he is not prepared to salve his conscience with the argument of "expediency" or that "the ends justify the means." It would be a monstrous act, and while he might be willing to accept the blood guilt for it even if it condemns the soul he firmly believes in to hell if he felt it was the only solution to the problem of the Church of God Awaiting and the bombardment platform, that doesn't change the fact that he would regard it as utterly morally reprehensible and a sin against God Himself. In fact, Merlin would argue that if he does indeed still have a soul at this point, and he carried out such an act, he would deserve to spend the rest of eternity in hell. Nimue's oath to the Terran Federation Navy, her sense of having failed in that obligation, Merlin's conviction that it is his duty to protect rather than to destroy — all of those things factor into the psychology of his decision, but only to reinforce the fundamental bedrock of his conviction that it would be an act of evil and that if he could convince himself otherwise there would be no difference between him and Zhaspahr Clyntahn aside from their objectives.

It can be argued — indeed, I have seen it argued in posts on this site — that by not wiping out a couple of million innocent human beings in an eye blink, he is actually facilitating the evils which are being done. That it is somehow his fault that Zhaspahr Clyntahn and the Inquisition are able to commit the atrocities they are committing because he has the power to stop them and he refuses to use it. I'm sorry, but this is the same sort of logic — in reverse — which makes a terrorist's victims responsible for what happens to them. Merlin believes in freedom of will. So does the Church of Charis and the Reformists in general. So, in many ways, does the Church of God Awaiting, which is one reason for the Punishment of Schueler — men have the freedom to choose to do evil, which means that some of them inevitably will, and when they do, it is Mother Church's responsibility to deal with that evil. Merlin is not responsible for what others choose to do, any more than the Western Allies were "responsible" for Hitler’s and Himmler’s decision to implement a full bore extermination policy towards the Jews when they began to realize they were likely to lose (or at least not win) the war.

One of the striking aspects, for me, of the debate over moral responsibility and choices in warfare comes out of World War II and is too often lost in the shadows of the Holocaust. Who actually bears the moral responsibility for the millions of dead civilians killed in places like Hamburg, Dresden, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima? Was it the Germans, who first began the practice of bombing civilian centers of population from the air and therefore, in a sense, reaped what they had sowed? Was it the Japanese, who after all were responsible for the Rape of Nanking, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Batan Death March, and whose distortion of the code of bushido led to the horrendous casualties suffered by both sides in places like Tarawa and Okinawa and to the introduction of kamikaze attacks which convinced the US that an actual invasion would have resulted in over a million military totality's alone? Or was it the political and military leaders who dispatched the bombers that actually killed the civilians in question? Can men like Winston Churchill, Frankloin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, “Bomber” Harris, Carl Spaatz, and Curtis LeMay be let off the hook because the other side "made them do it," or should they be held accountable for their own actions and decisions? In many cases, there most definitely were other choices, other options, and people at the time who pointed those options out. Those other options were ignored, however, and surely that means that the military and political leaders who chose to ignore them must bear responsibility for that decision, if no other.

My point here is that Merlin is not responsible, whatever he may think, for a single atrocity the Church has committed. It is because Merlin is not a psychopath that he thinks he is responsible, but the truth of the matter is that the people ordering and carrying out the atrocities are responsible, and no one else. Would Merlin, therefore, be justified in personally killing a couple of million human beings to prevent what the Inquisition and the Church of God Awaiting under Zhaspahr Clyntahn's leadership is currently doing? Does he have the moral right to murder other innocent civilians in order to prevent someone else from killing innocent civilians?

Merlin doesn't believe he does, and the true difference between him and Zhaspahr Clyntahn isn't the fact that Clyntahn is a self-serving, megalomaniac, sabyrite who believes that as God's anointed champion he can do whatever he wants, but rather that Merlin will not use the argument that "the ends justify the means" to excuse himself for doing something he knows — knows, deep down at the core of what makes him who he is — is not simply wrong but an abomination in the eyes of God.

Having said all of the above, I should also point out that the numbers being thrown around at this point for the deaths and suffering being inflicted by Clyntahn and the Inquisition certainly aren't based on anything I've given you. Starvation, privation, atrocities — all of that is, indeed, happening on a vast scale, but 130,000,000? The combined population of Safehold is a whisker over 1,000,000,000, so this number is a full 13% of the total population of the planet! How are that many human beings supposed to be being killed, tortured, and starved simultaneously?

Remember that the western provinces of the Republic of Siddarmark were the most lightly populated ones, and that the entire population of the Republic amounts to only 129,000,000 and change. You can't seriously throw the entire population of Siddarmark into the scales for Merlin to balance against murdering the entire population of Zion any more than you could argue that the entire population of the Soviet Union in 1940 was directly and immediately threatened and subjected to atrocities by the German Army between 1941 and the Battle of Kursk in 1943. I admit that the numbers of Siddarmarkian's who have died, suffered, or been displaced — or who will have been by the time the invasion of Siddarmark is over — greatly outnumber the total population of Zion, but not by anywhere near the scale which is being suggested by using the number 130,000,000.

Even the Nazi extermination machine, with all the advantages of mid-twentieth century technology, was unable to get anywhere near that figure. Estimates for the total number killed in the Holocaust range from 10,000,000 to 26,000,000, and the death toll for the entire war ranges from a low of 40,000,000 to a high of around 78-80,000,000, or about 1.5-3% of the then-current world population. World War I killed between 15,000,000 and 65,000,000 (and the high end number includes the death toll of the Spanish influenza epidemic, not just the direct casualkties inflicted as a result of military operations) or roughly 1-4% of the current world population. To get to higher percentages of the world population than that, you have to go to wars like the Mongol invasions, or the domestic warfare of China prior to the 19th century, where I would submit that the very best records available are likely to be . . . unreliable, at best. Lord knows there's enough dispute today about numbers in current, ongoing humanitarian tragedies to make me dubious about records that are four and five hundred years old. My point, however, is that Zhaspahr Clyntahn isn't even in shouting range of that kind of number at this point, and all indications are that the curve of Charisian innovation is sufficient that the Church of God Awaiting isn't going to be able to inflict that kind of death toll before its armies are eventually crushed by the Empire of Charis. It's valid to point out that Merlin's "inaction" is leaving Clyntahn alive to add to his box score, but I think we ought to at least restrict ourselves to numbers that bear a passing resemblance to the numbers the Inquisition and the Church of God Awaiting and its forces have already or are actually in a position to inflict at this time.