Artwork by kime_bot
Height is power. In our own species you can see it everywhere. Castles sit on hills, and armies have always fought over high ground. We call a king 'your highness' and the rich the 'upper classes' while we submit by bowing down or bending the knee. Superior is Latin for higher. Towers and spires are what cities, castles and churches build when they want to signal their importance. Taller people earn more, and get promoted more often.
Horses are another good example. A rider sits maybe a metre above a man on foot, and still cavalry was devastatingly effective through their height and increased speed and mobility. In many languages the word for horseman (chevalier, caballero, Ritter, cavalier) became a word that signalled status.
Now imagine how this plays out when a species can actually fly. The metre turns into a few hundred. And imagine them learning how to fly as early as we learn how to walk. That innate bit is important. A ground dweller that learns to fly later in life has spent its formative years seeing the world from the ground up. Those who learn to fly young see the world entirely differently. The ground is what they pass over. It is the hard bottom of their movement range. Yes, a lot of their food is found down there, but so is most of the danger.
So the first question is, would these creatures see height the way we do? The obvious answer is yes, of course they would. But maybe that's too quick. Maybe we see height as power precisely because it's hard for us to get up there, and a species that doesn't have to struggle for it might not see it the same way.
Is Height Dominance?
Let's explore the evidence in our own world.
Birds seem to love to sit on high and look at things. If there is a tower or a high roof there's almost inevitably a bird sitting up there. And that's while getting up there ain't free. Obviously it's easier for birds, but they still have to push themselves up there. That takes calories. And for birds, calories are a lot harder to come by than they are for us. And yet they still do it. So to their minds, the benefits must outweigh the costs.
A study of pigeons and cormorants found that the dominant birds claimed the higher perches and then returned to them evening after evening. From up there they're safer from attack, they can see further, and they can swoop down on the lower ranks, which lets them stay on top. It might also play a role that they get pooped on less.
It certainly would if I were sitting in a tree.
Now, birds don't fight a lot of wars. But an intelligent species that wants to dominate and can work together would, and in a battle height is tremendously valuable.
We already mentioned the horse. Flight is that effect squared. A flyer has the whole third dimension to move in, and a dive gives it more speed than any horse at full gallop. Heck, some birds outpace most sports cars.
Pilots in the First World War figured this out quickly. The higher side could decide whether there would be a fight at all. If they did commit, they came in from a dive, with all the speed that gave them. And if they managed to come out of the sun, they had surprise on their side as well.
So, would they care less about height than we do? If anything, more. We created an entire vocabulary around height based on the saddle, the tower and differences in individual height. For flyers, every encounter and contest will feature height. Whoever is above decides if they will act while the one below can only react. A ruler who lived below their subjects wouldn't be a ruler for long. And just like us, those with power would strive to build upwards to show it.
Prestige and Architecture
When the only way to reach the higher floors was to climb stairs, the rich tended to live one or two floors up. Servants, meanwhile, lived on the higher floors and worked in the basement. You can still see this in the English manor houses and shows like Downton Abbey. That's not to say the rich didn't build upward. They just didn't want to exhaust themselves climbing up there.
Once elevators became a thing, this quickly changed. Towers rose up. Penthouses became status symbols. The interesting thing is, the towers went up far higher than you'd expect for purely economic reasons. There's only so long people are willing to stand around in small metal boxes. Also, each additional metre a tower rises costs significantly more than the last one. And yet the towers kept climbing.
For example, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai stands at more than 800 metres, with the top 250 a spire which is not in use. In the industry this unused height is known as 'vanity height'.
Our flyers wouldn't have our elevator problem. They could also do without a lot of other pesky infrastructure like roads, bridges, stairs, hallways, toilets. As carrying things by air is expensive, they'd probably still want a few roads or canals to move bulk goods. But those wouldn't need to run through the whole city. All a house needs is somewhere to land and perhaps some plumbing as carrying water upward by hand would be a laborious process.
All this means they could put far more energy into building upward. And their towers would be simpler than ours. No stairs, no lifts, no hallways, so the whole lower part can be solid rock or timber. Ospreys already build like this. They nest on high, open spots and add to the nest every season. Some nests are three or four metres deep and have been occupied for seventy years.
This is not to suggest that our flyers would find this easy. Lifting things is hard for flyers. But high costs have benefits for those who can pay them. It turns the act into an honest signal. 'Look at me and how high I can build. I must be really rich and powerful to be able to afford this.'
Besides, it's not like they have much of a choice. Being lower than their rivals isn't just embarrassing and a loss of status. It's dangerous and stressful. You constantly have to make sure they aren't about to swoop down on you and any shadow you see could be your last. In old Hawaii when a commoner threw a shadow onto a chief this was considered highly offensive and could result in death. A flying culture might treat shadows similarly with throwing shade being seen as an insult or even a challenge. So when they build, you build. The desire to build higher would turn into a wings race between the powerful of such a culture.
All the time this would get more and more expensive until eventually the cost would outweigh the value, at least from a safety point of view. The question is, would they then stop?
Would we? Did medieval people ever stop building taller? Beauvais Cathedral had the tallest vault in Christendom at 48 metres, and part of it came down twelve years after it was finished. Three centuries later they put a 153-metre tower on top, only for it to also fall within half a decade.
In San Gimignano, in Italy, it ended differently. Rival families built 72 towers in two centuries, often at ruinous cost, until the council decreed 'this high and no higher.' Perhaps our flying species would need similar legislation. Otherwise gravity would have to be the law that brings the race to an end.
How They Might Dominate Others
One thing we haven't yet touched upon is how the flying species would end up becoming dominant. The truth is, it wouldn't be all that hard. Sure, they would probably struggle to hold land. From our own history we know that air forces aren't very good at this. But then, they wouldn't really need to.
All they need to do is make the land too expensive to use without their say-so. Pay tribute, or watch your harvest burn.
Imagine trying to fight flyers. They can drop things on you from high up, or swoop down and strike with a spear or their own talons. Both can be countered.
Dropping things isn't accurate. The higher you go the worse it gets. The stone falls for several seconds, the wind has a say, and the target isn't likely to stand still. Swooping down is deadly for the flyers because the defenders can group together and form a block of spears much like they do against cavalry.
The thing is, the ground-based defenders are always going to be slower than the flyers. To stop the flyers from swooping down they want to form a spear block. But this makes them an easy target for dropping things. Here armour won't help much. During the First World War they dropped steel darts from planes and these pierced helmets. So the only option is for the soldiers to split up again. But when they do that, the flyers start swooping back down. And so, the army ends up exhausting itself forming up and breaking apart.
Bows and ballistas would only help a little as it's not hard for flyers to figure out how high their arrows and bolts can fly and stay just above that. They could even pluck them out of the air and turn them into new projectiles to drop on the ground forces.
To make matters worse, intelligent flyers can drop a lot of nasty things. Oil and fire, hot water, acid, or perhaps a nest of red ants?
There are answers to this. You can build fortifications or vehicles that can take whatever is thrown at them, or make sure you're only out in the open when you can't be seen, at night or in fog. Going underground would work well.
The problem? Even if you build such fortifications or manage to move your army only under the cover of darkness, you'd still be vulnerable. Much like our First World War example, the flyers can decide when and where to fight.
And why fight an army when you can starve it instead?
A saying from warfare goes 'amateurs talk tactics. Professionals talk logistics.' Here again the flyers have a lot of advantages. They're faster, ignore the mud, don't need roads, can fly over obstacles like rivers and mountains, and know everything the enemy is doing.
So, the flyers would constantly harass your forces by dropping things, raiding your supply line, or attacking poorly defended groups like scouts. Imagine trying to move a force under those conditions. The flyers' one big drawback is how little they can carry. Even that isn't as bad as it sounds, since they can store things where non-flyers can't reach or see them, like cliffs and treetops.
Even if you say the flyers can only inflict minimal damage, they can do so constantly and with few opportunities for the ground-based army to strike back. And say you still push on. What do you attack? The flyers don't need to build their settlements anywhere you can reach on foot. Sooner or later most opponents would rather pay than fight on those terms.
The British did something similar in Iraq. In 1922 they put the RAF in charge of the country, because squadrons were cheaper and more manoeuvrable than garrisons. Their strategy? If a tribe did not pay tribute they would simply bomb them until they did. And it worked for ten years.
Perhaps the flyers would accept services as tribute so they can build their towers yet higher or more easily fight those who have not yet submitted.
Foundation of an Empire
And before you know it a peculiar empire has formed. It wouldn't work much like the Roman Empire with its roads and garrisons. Instead, it would function far more like the Golden Horde and their horse clans who held none of the land they taxed but instead specialised in collecting tribute and burning the towns of those who would not pay.
Rather than following rivers or coastlines, they might be more tempted to follow mountain ranges or the contours of difficult terrain so they can build unassailable cities. This would in turn affect the species around them who might want to move into open land where the flyers would struggle to carry off their loot and could not form strong points other species would struggle to attack. Those on the ground might also develop a hostile or fearful relationship with shadows.
The cities alone with their many tall towers reaching into the sky from high points would be quite a sight.
And no doubt I've missed numerous other ways that flyers would build their empire differently. If you can think of any, let me know. If you'd like to know more about how the Persistence incorporates flyers, an essay about how our flyers and their offspring have built cities is in the works! What species is that? Dragons.
