The Anvil of Ice
Page 39
Religion:
This is one of the hardest subjects to comment on, for although the peoples of Kerys were aware of forces at work in the world, feared some and respected others, they rarely turned to formal worship of either; when they did, it was usually to darker forces. These tendencies seem to have endured in their descendants.
By the time of the Chronicles, though, the settlers in the north were already losing their ancient knowledge of the powers, both favorable and hostile, and the will that lay behind them. That knowledge was absorbed into the animistic beliefs of the newcomers, more comprehensible to a simple peasant society, and relegated to folk legend. For example, the royal banner of the Lost Lands showed Raven flying across the sun, leading men to its light. But this eventually became transmuted to a tale of Raven stealing the sun for mankind, and so it has endured.
In the Southlands greater wisdom was preserved, but it had hardened—or fossilized—into patriotic and civic ritual. To a sophisticated Sothran such as Kermorvan an appearance of Raven would be like a statue stepping down off its pedestal, Athena appearing to Pericles.
Common to both countries, though, was a concept of afterlife they called the River. This they saw as a barrier to an afterworld beyond perception or return, except possibly by dark arts. That image may in part derive from the dark regions of tundra and taiga forest that always spread ahead of the Ice, lands crossed by a network of rivers icy with meltwater. For these were the realm and preserve of Taoune, and there the dead were ever to be found.
Ekwesh religion:
Though a full account of the Ekwesh society, and the strange forces at work within it, belongs in later volumes, some account of their religion should be given here; its blacker side was well known, but Kermorvan had evidently learned something more. In its original form it was the same simple animism as that of the other peoples of their land, but as the Ekwesh grew stronger their religion came to be dominated by the shamans who became powers in the clans second only to the chieftains; in some cases they wielded more real power. Their rites involved dancing to drums and ecstatic, visionary frenzies in which their pronouncements were regarded as oracular. At this stage they still retained some recognition and reverence of the powers, but a new element gradually began to intrude itself: the outright worship of the advancing Ice. This was organized as a kind of secret society or mystery religion among the upper echelons of the clans, to which only the elect and powerful were admitted, and it drastically changed the character of their society.
The cannibalism that made them so greatly loathed and dreaded was apparently an ancient custom, probably encouraged by the dwindling of food supplies as the Ice overran their lands. But originally it had been a funeral rite, intended to honor and perpetuate the dead by absorbing their wisdom and bravery. The new cult made it a rite of debasement and domination, battening on thralls. It fits the pattern of a society being systematically corrupted and turned against its neighbors. And, indeed, it appears that the Ice cult made deliberate use of even greater atrocities in its rituals to create a dark bond among its votaries and heighten their ruthlessness. Similar ideas have been attributed to recent cults, such as thuggee in India and the An-ioto and Mau Mau in Africa.
Smithcraft:
True smithcraft had a definite religious significance in the Northlands; smith's work was an act of secondary creation linking them to the shaping powers and their creator. Though by the time of the Chronicles it was somewhat taken for granted, it kept a great civic importance. The town smith was a privileged citizen, responsible more to his guild than the town authorities; he was usually the best-educated man in small villages, and through his journeyman's wanderings the most widely traveled. He would marry couples over his anvil, symbolically joining them as the rings he forged for them. Later he would name their children, and in the smaller towns might also give them an elementary education. Most smiths, though, remained little more than smiths, never achieving mastership. Those who did might simply be accomplished craftsmen, like Hjoran, but often they were already wealthy enough to rise above the day-to-day business of smiths, and devote themselves to civic affairs, fine art or even scholarship and natural philosophy; a few individuals, however, turned to personal ambition.
The people of Bryhaine regarded smithcraft as mere superstition, but nonetheless flocked to buy the work of northern smiths in preference to their own. Certainly it had a fixed base of ritual in the introduction of music, verse, pattern and shaping at various stages of the creative process; these were seen as expressing and harnessing the power or talent latent within the smith. Music or verse might come first. Music was generally held to be the more intense influence on the work, but for that reason the less finely controlled; the words gave direction to the intensity. The pattern caught and bound the influence thus expressed, and the completed shaping of the piece gave it the necessary identity.
In the duergar the power of true smithcraft seems to have been more evenly spread than in ordinary men, with fewer troughs and peaks among individuals. That, and the immense reserve of experience maintained in a long-lived and stable society, gave them an advantage. But a truly powerful human smith could often achieve much more, and create work of startling intensity, if only he had the skill.
True smithcraft did not automatically confer skill in working metal, but the greater the skill, the more it was intensified. And such skill there must certainly have been; in the years of the Chronicles, metalworking, especially among the duergar, reached heights that have barely been equaled. The making of Kermorvan's sword, as recounted in Chapter 7, is a fair summing-up of the process by which bulat steel was made, the secret of the ancient sword-smiths of Damascus; the oiled-silk patterns and the golden sheen were characteristic. That technique produced a carbon steel, combining elasticity with great strength, that even advanced industrial processes have not matched. The Damascus smiths did not understand how their process achieved this, and neither did modern researchers, until recently. Elof and his duergar master evidently understood it perfectly.
It is worth noting that metalworking long remained something of a separate and mysterious art, even in societies that had lost all memory of true smithcraft. Among the Touareg of North Africa, the smiths form a separate caste, in some ways inferior but respected in others; the curse of a smith is not taken lightly. And in our own society the village smith was a powerful figure in folklore, and especially folk medicine, a "kenning man" by virtue of his profession.
THE CHRONICLES
In Kerbryhaine the recording of history was something of a religious exercise, drawing moral guidance and lessons from the errors of the past, and it was probably some surviving aura of this that caused the Winter Chronicles to be preserved when so much else was lost, numinous things to be copied and recopied even when their meaning had entirely faded.
Although the date they were written cannot now be said for certain, there is no doubt that the world they record is not so very remote. In its vast age the world has endured many long winters, many ages when the polar ice has thrust its crushing fingers outward across warmer lands. But only in the four great glaciations of the most recent, or Quartenary, era can there have been men to record them. There are other indications which may narrow the field further. We have seen that the world of the Winter Chronicles bore a very great likeness to our own; its plants and animals, despite some slight inconsistencies and archaic forms, are recent enough to be recognizable in such of the same habitats as man has spared. Even more striking are the maps in some Chronicles; when we translate them from different mapping conventions and projection techniques, as has been done for the endpaper map, and allow for the greater width of coastal land exposed by the drop in sea level at this time, the resulting coastline is recognizably recent. All these strong similarities suggest the most recent of the four glaciations. Known as the Wurm or Wechsalian, and in America the Wisconsinian, this is generally agreed to have reached its height some eighteen thousand years ago. Its rise was slow, its dec
line remarkably rapid. And it is at the height of just such a major glaciation that the events of the Book of the Sword occurred.
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MICHAEL SCOTT ROHAN was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and graduated from Oxford with a master's degree in law and legal philosophy, and a great dislike of law. He is the author of several works of nonfiction; one science fiction novel, Run to the Stars; and numerous short stories.
THE ANVIL OF ICE begins Mr. Rohan's spectacular fantasy trilogy, The Winter of the World. (Watch for The Forge in the Forest, second volume in the trilogy, coming next year from Avon Books!) Mr. Rohan writes, "The story has a million roots but derives most from my love of mythology, archaeology and prehistory, and also classical music."
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Appendix
About the Author
Link
Appendix
MICHAEL SCOTT ROHAN