The Land:
In the years of the Long Winter the extent of the land of Brasayhal was very great, a vast continent that stretched at its widest some thousand leagues from ocean to ocean across the northern world, and from the margins of the Ice to the all but impassable southern deserts some six or seven hundred leagues. Within this expanse were many realms, and those of the men the least. The events of the Book of the Sword here recounted took place wholly along its western seaboard, in the relatively narrow strip of country—some hundred and thirty leagues at its widest— between Meneth Scahas, the Shield-Range, and the sea. This was then the furthest-flung settlement of the peoples of Kerys, and the newest, being little over one thousand years old. A natural division to this western strip was the delta of a once great river, now fenland so flat that the sea's influence was felt many leagues inland; while outflowing streams remained fresh, stagnant or pooled water soon became brackish, turning the area into a vast salt-marsh. To the south of it stretched out country that was for the most part open and low-lying, much of it fertile grassland with only one main hilly region along the coast, and few large areas of woodland save around the foothills of the Shield-Range. Warm and well-watered, it was ideal land for both grain and livestock, and in the drier, hotter country further south grew many kinds of fruit in profusion. The sea was fished little, and served chiefly for travel. With this the first settlers, as described by Kermorvan in Chapter 5, were well content, since it made possible the city-centered culture they had known in the east; the lands north of the marshes seemed too wild to suit them. These were not only colder but higher and more hilly, sloping up more steeply to join the mountains, and broke up with thick woodland disturbingly like Tapiau'la-an-Aithen, the Great Forest of evil memory; save in the valleys, the soil was much poorer than in the Southlands. Much of the tree and plant life was different, seeming smaller and less rich, and there were many more wild and ferocious animals. For the time being, therefore, it was left little settled and explored, save by solitaries and outlaws. But when the later refugees were hounded from the south, they found the Northlands more to their taste, the people being chiefly of a northern strain in their homeland and less fond of large cities. The weather, though cooler, was milder and moister in summer, and if the grainland was less, there were rich hill pastures for livestock and as much game as their hunters could wish. Also the seas were as rich or richer than in the south, and small fishing communities sprang up along the coast. Less fruit was grown, save in the southernmost valleys around Thuneborg, but gradual clearing of the forests provided valuable wood and more farming land, without ever becoming widespread enough to disrupt the natural balance. In general the northern settlers, both the first-comers and the later brown-skinned peoples from across the Ice, adapted to the land rather than mastered it, as in the south. Their population remained therefore smaller and more scattered, and the country between their towns and villages much wilder, even along the High roads.
In both north and south, settlement was at its thinnest in the country directly against the mountain slopes, though this was once good land enough and well wooded. In the south the first settlers had disputed this land with the duer-gar, often bloodily, and driven them out. But few who won it prospered, and many a townlet sank into gradual depopulation and decay. In the north there was less dispute, for the settlers were not so hungry for land and the duergar now wary of confronting them, but the spreading influence of the Ice across the Nordenberg ranges had the same effect.
This, then, was the fashion of Brasayhal's western lands at this time. Of its other and yet greater lands more is told in later books. But vast as it was, a region as vast again lay on its northern boundary, and this was the realm of the Great Ice.
The Long Winter:
It may seem strange that the land of Brasayhal could remain so habitable and fertile, even in the north, so close to the margins of the Ice. The popular image of an Ice Age is of a period of eternal winter, a chill world blanketed in perpetual snow and ice, without sun or season. In fact, in the many times of glaciation that have oppressed the world, nothing like this has ever come about. Few living things could long survive such a terrible climate, however well adapted. At the height of such glaciations the world as a whole did indeed become colder, but only by a few degrees, on average over a period of time; even where the grip of the Ice was hardest the seasons would still come and go. We know also of the most recent Ice Ages that temperatures fell by very different degrees in different parts of the world. The consequences would therefore vary greatly, and the changes they wrought thus be subtler and more gradual.
One such would be a drop in sea level, laying bare much new land, since so much water was now frozen, and the consequent disruption of the cycle of water between air and river and ocean. This in turn would change the patterns of wind and clouds, and the cycles of rainfall that depend upon them. In many places this would cause or worsen droughts, so that hot but lush and well-watered lands might lose much of their water, but, being far from the ice, little of their heat. They would then become parched, and the deserts spread; this might explain why the equatorial lands of Brasayhal became uninhabitable, impassable deserts, with corresponding zones of calm at sea.
But, contrary to what one might expect, the changes wrought in northern lands could easily have been less severe. The lands immediately bordering the glaciers would soon be reduced to the frozen wastelands called tundra, as did indeed happen in the heartland beyond the Shield-Range. But even there this did not spread as far south of the Ice as the modern tundra, no more than one hundred and fifty leagues at its fullest extent. This was probably because the glaciers thrust forward beyond the colder northern latitudes into warmer, lower lands, where a stalemate developed between their chill and the original climate. Where there was a natural barrier such as the Nordenberg ranges to hold back the glaciers, their effect seems to have been even less drastic. The temperate Northlands suffered severer winters, but spring and summer, though shorter, still came in much of their former warmth. Also, it has been shown that a great mass of ice tends to deflect cyclonic storms southward. The weather may have become stormier, therefore, but rainfall increased, making the land richer for plant life. Certainly a kind of rainforest grew in the north at this time, like that in southern lands but made up of different, temperate vegetation. And it is known that some barren desert lands grew green and wooded.
All in all, it seems that the glaciers had not then so much overrun warmer zones, as squeezed them closer together and heightened their extremes, reducing the distance between the coldest and hottest zones. One could travel from ice-bound lands through cool temperate forests to warm grainlands and subtropical orchards in a much shorter time.
But that is not to minimize the menace of the Ice. The balance of the world is delicate, and needs no immense fall in its mean temperature to wreak havoc on all living things. Such may have been the first intention of the Ice. But there was a worse one, for ice breeds ice, in many ways. A great mass of it must increase the world's whiteness, mirroring back much of the heat of the sun and gradually cooling the air around and ahead of it. If that air becomes too cold, as in the depths of a hard winter, it allows the glaciers to spread further, and chills the icecaps of mountains in their path till they too grow and become glaciers, as Ansker accurately describes; he may have seen it happen, over a succession of winters. Those glaciers would in turn link up with the greater Ice, to reflect more heat and repeat the cycle further ahead, an exponential process with only one logical end. In that process there must be a single, crucial point at which it becomes self-sustaining, where so much heat is being reflected that even high summer in either hemisphere cannot raise the temperature of the world enough to drive back the Ice, and it begins to spread without seasonal check. No improvement in the climate would then be possible, and in a very short time an imprisoning shell of ice would close from both poles to the equator, and the popular picture of an Ice Age come fatally and permanently true.
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That crucial point, obviously, has not so far been passed. But in these years of the Winter Chronicles, all unknown to Elof, it was drawing very near.
The Peoples:
The People of the Southlands
The first men who came to the Southlands were rovers from the eastern colonies, many of them landless and outlaws. It was they who first clashed with the duergar of the region, who had formerly roamed at will in that rich country without any thought of claiming it for themselves. But the newcomers were bold and ruthless men, who had survived the many perils of the Forest, and were little disposed to favor any save themselves. A few small settlements were founded, but were destroyed in a generation or less, by either the duergar or internal strife. A few survivors only straggled back eastward, but with tales of the fine land that awaited proper settlement.
Understandably, however, none were too eager to risk such a venture until the Ice began to menace the eastern colonies, and the climate grew colder. The majority of the colonists were descended from the southern race of Kerys, the Penruthya (Arauthar in the northern tongue), and kept their forefathers' preference for a warmer clime, which suited the farming they knew best. A desire grew among them to risk the journey southwestward, but this their kings resisted; they knew that only a strong realm could hope to withstand to the Ice. Nevertheless dissension grew, swelled perhaps by secret votaries of the Ice, as its sinister glitter drew ever nearer the horizon. Conspiracies were formed, to plan flight—or escape, as they called it—and all through one late summer and autumn whole communities left their land and straggled off by one route or other westward. The then king, Keryn IV, might have prevented it with his soldiers, who remained largely loyal, but he was unwilling to start strife that could only aid the Ice.
The fate of such ignorant and ill-planned expeditions in the perilous heartland of Brasayhal can be imagined. Little more than one-third of those who set out won through to the coast. But these were principally the best organized and led, and their settlement this time was well chosen and established, a natural harbor among rich and varied country. This they called Bryhaine, the Land of Freedom, its heart their walled city. But they cast aside all the tra-ditions of Kerys, for the men of wealth and power who had led the expeditions rejected any kind of kingship and established themselves as a governing body, the Syndi-cacy, membership of which was governed by contributions to the public coffers. The Syndicacy then went further, and made Kerbryhaine a purely Penruthya settlement, where their tongue alone could be spoken. However, they did not otherwise persecute those of northern stock who had come with them. Such was the founding of Bryhaine, and from the very beginning it prospered.
The People of the Northlands
The race that came from the northern lands of Kerys called themselves Svarhath, but were named by sothrans Run-duathya. They looked much like their southern cousins, but ran rather to dark hair than to red, and to breadth rather than great height. By nature they were more taciturn and secretive, wise and deep-delving rather than merry and outgoing. They tended to mysticism and deep study, at their worst to fanaticism, treason and stratagem, but at their best to great loyalty, wisdom and strength of will. Thus it was that the majority of them held fast by their lord against the advancing Ice. But Keryn V could not or would not see that his realm was now too weak, and would not spare what resources remained to prepare any refuge. So when at last the Ice rolled over the east, most of those who were not slain fled westward in as poor a state, or worse, than the earlier fugitives. A few held fast, determined to defend the remaining smaller towns of their realm though king and city had fallen. By good fortune those who fled found a leader, though an unwilling one, in the great hero Vayde, who had lately won his way to them over the ocean from Kerys, one of the last to do so. He it was brought them across Brasayhal with small loss, and at last to Bryhaine. But there they found scant welcome, and as the years passed anger grew between the two peoples, swelling at last to terrible strife. Vayde, already old beyond the common years of men, engineered his people's escape northward across the Marshlands at the cost of many lives, including, it is said, his own. So the realm of Nordeney began in blood, and this, perhaps, was why it never became a truly sound country. Vayde, had he lived, might have united it, but without him men drifted apart, weary and distrustful, seeking only to Jive their own Jives m peace. Small towns sprang up everywhere, generally around the households of wealthy men and chieftains, but they were small and scattered. The realm might well have been too weak to hold together long, but some hundred and fifty years after the first settlements, a new people began to drift into the northern territories, a strong, sturdy folk with strange-set eyes, black hair and skin the color of dark leather. They came chiefly in boats, from crude skin craft to huge black-hulled galleys, sailing westward along the dangerous margins of the Ice in search of new lands to settle. For they too were refugees from the Ice, which was overrunning their west-era homeland, and from the growing power of a strange cruel nation which was profiting from the disorder. The northerners, remembering their own misfortunes, and with plenty of land to spare, made them welcome. They were well repaid, for the newcomers, a lively and industrious people, well used to living in cool lands not far from the Ice, swiftly learned the ways and the tongue of the people of Kerys and joined with them in increasing the worth and strength of the land, and the wealth of the townships. Some grew quite large, though never to a fraction the size and stature of Kerbryhaine. Without the newcomers Nordeney might not have survived. In time they so mingled with the first settlers that a pure white skin became a rarity (and sometimes ill thought of), especially in the most northerly lands.
It was mutual trade and the demands of trade that came to hold the Northland towns together, and the guild systems, inherited from the east, became of signal importance. Within a generation too, there was trade with Bry-haine, which, no longer threatened, may have felt some shame and remorse for its former harshness. As the years passed into centuries the two realms settled into mutual acceptance, though the bonds of friendship that had created the strength of Kerys were never renewed. Strong links were forged by the traveling traders, and these lasted for many hundreds of years. But otherwise the two realms lived lives apart, neither knowing nor caring much about the other save as it affected their trade. So it was that neither saw the slow decaying that settled on them both, which a union of their sundered strengths might have helped resist.
The Lawmakers and the Guilds
The guilds were almost the only authorities common to Northland and Southland, and even that link was tenuous. They had common roots in both realms, and before that in the Lost Lands of the east, but by Elof's time they had grown far apart, most notably in the influence they enjoyed.
Rule and order in the north were clearly left to each town to sort out for itself; in larger towns some kind of elected council usually directed day-to-day affairs, but in smaller towns it was commonest to find a more or less autocratic headman, either hereditary or chosen by a council of elders. Law was therefore a strictly local matter, but the rules and standards set by the guilds, which the townships had to enforce, provided an element of continuity; as these covered such matters as fair trading, quality, weights and measures, contract enforcement, employment and apprenticeship, they concerned almost every aspect of life, and were a strong stabilizing influence. The guilds therefore wielded great political power, becoming the nearest thing to a government in Nordeney; they encouraged the leaguing of towns for mutual defense and the protection of trade.
In the Southlands, by contrast, power lay squarely in the hands of the Syndicacy. In peacetime it was principally a law-making council, usually dominated by one or two powerful personalities who were the city Marshals, commanders of the Guard, an armed constabulary. In emergencies such as the Ekwesh invasion, however, the Guard became the nucleus of a citizen army, and the syndics became commanders under the guidance of the Marshals, directing the actual fighting if they were warriors, supervising watch
-keeping, firefighting and food rationing if they were not. Otherwise, individual syndics enjoyed prestige and influence, especially if they sat as magistrates in the city courts, but no personal power. Exceptions to this were the Marchwardens, syndics from the warrior class charged with defending the borders; in practice this usually meant suppressing bands of outlaws and corsairs, rather than actual war. As the Syndicacy grew complacent and corrupt, strong Marchwardens could often make themselves all-powerful within their domain.
In Bryhaine, therefore, the guilds were no more than trade and craft organizations, even their rules subject to ratification by the Syndicacy. Their political power was slight, save when members would band together to finance a representative for the Syndicacy. Kathel Kataihan was one such, for though his personal wealth was instrumental, he could not have managed all the high contributions on his own. Sometimes a powerful guild might put pressure on the Syndicacy; the Farmers' Guild had some prestige, for many landowning syndics were members, and the Mariners' Guild, directly descended from that of Kerys itself, jealously maintained the privilege of legislating sea traffic. But there was never any doubt where the ultimate authority lay.
Once only did the guilds of both lands work together, and that was in the early days when enmities had faded, both realms were wealthy and trade was expanding. Then they came together, with the guarded blessings of the Syndicacy and the larger northern towns, and built the great Causeway across the Marshlands, replacing the former crazy mix of half-flooded trails, short stretches of embanked wagon track and rickety bridges. They also began the extension of the High roads into Nordeney, but this was completed in later years by the north alone.
The Anvil of Ice Page 37