The Crow

by Alison Croggon

  Comprehensive written records in the Suderain and Amdridh seem to have been kept from around A2200, when the Library of Turbansk – along with the Library of Thorold, one of the oldest in Edil-Amarandh – was founded by Bards anxious to keep the Knowing alive after the destruction of Afinil. The Library of Car Amdridh was founded around a century later, while those of the other southern Schools seem to date from after the Restoration. Unfortunately, very few of the southern records have survived; the Annaren Scrolls are generally agreed to have been the contents of the great library of Norloch which, although it held copies of what the Bards considered the most significant documents from all the Bardic Libraries, by no means reproduced the contents of all of them.

  The Southern Monarchies

  Both the Suderain and Amdridh were ruled by monarchs, respectively the Ernani of Turbansk and the Po of Car Amdridh.4 The non-Bardic rulers in the other cities of the kingdoms were consuls, answerable to the Ernani or the Po. After the foundation of the School of Turbansk, the dual system of government that held sway through most of Edil­Amarandh meant that the monarchs were equal in authority and power to the First Bards of Turbansk and Car Amdridh. Before the collapse of the Annaren monarchy in the Long Wars, and the subse­quent conflation of the triple scepter of the Annaren Kingship into the role of the First Bard of Norloch, this situation made the First Bard of Turbansk the most politically powerful Bard in Edil-Amarandh.

  The inheritance of the monarchies of Turbansk and Amdridh was in general determined by primogeniture, regardless of the sex of the oldest child. There were, however, exceptions; succession was ulti­mately determined by the reigning monarch, and in rare cases he or she bestowed the crown elsewhere among his or her children or, in the event that the monarch was childless, to another branch of the ruling family. Given this, and given also that neither the Ernani nor the Po married but instead chose a consort (sometimes, as in the case of Har­Ytan, a succession of consorts), it is perhaps surprising that there are no records of wars of succession like those that destroyed the Annaren monarchy. Perhaps the authority of the rulers was such that any deci­sion of succession was considered unarguable; or perhaps the wealth of the Suderain and Amdridh, together with the strict application of the social rules of the Balance, gave the kingdom a stability the north­ern monarchy lacked. Certainly, many extant records claim as a matter of pride that even in times of famine and hardship – at the height of the struggle with the Nameless One during the Great Silence, for example – starvation and privation among the common people of the Suderain was almost unknown.5 There is only one account of civil unrest against the monarchy: after Aleksil the Tyrant forcibly imposed crippling taxes to fund his luxurious court, he was overthrown in a bloodless coup in A1333 by a popular uprising that was, intriguingly, supported by the Bards of Turbansk. This underlines how crucial the support of the Bard Schools was to the maintenance of political power in Edil-Amarandh.

  The Bards of the Suderain

  Unlike Afinil, the Bard Schools of the Suderain were never destroyed in the millennium-long Great Silence after the conquest by the Nameless One. This meant that traditions of the Light in the Suderain had continued unbroken for some thousands of years, and that in the south the Reformation under Maninae had minimal impact – unlike in Annar, where the Paur Libridha (Maninae N23) was the most influential and authoritative text on the constitution of the Schools. The Paur Libridha was in many ways a reforming text, written out of an urgency to ensure that the Light was never threatened again as it had been dur­ing the Great Silence and, as Alannah Casagrande points out, some of its innovations – for one, the explicit outlawing of dialogue with Elementals – were never quite accepted in Schools in the Seven Kingdoms. In Thorold, for instance, where the people believed that they owed their defeat of the Nameless One's forces to the mountain Elidhu Lamedon, this proscription was quietly ignored.6 The Suderain also continued to use the Afinil year count, rather then the Norloch count instituted by Maninae, but for clarity I will use the Annaren con­vention here.

  The southern Schools were therefore run on southern lines, which sometimes led to conflicts between the northern and southern Bards. The most striking cultural difference between Annar and the Suderain was the persistence in the south of forms of worship of the Light (although Bards were seldom strongly associated with this) and, some­times, of what appear to be Elemental figures. This is to say that a tradition of organized religion existed in the south that was completely unheard of in Annar, and was inflected subtly through Bardic culture. It is no accident that the mysticism of the Way of the Heart originated in Turbansk.7

  Another key – and perhaps, given the above, paradoxical – dif­ference was in the considerable sophistication of what we would think of as scientific and mathematical discourses in the Schools of the south. Of course, given the constant communication between Bard Schools, the discoveries and theories of the southern Bards became influential in the north, but many documents attest to the fact that any Bard interested in these areas of the Knowing would travel south to study.

  Jerr-Niken and Turbansk, in particular, were considered leading centers of theoretical exploration in mathematics and science, and we know that the Suderain Bards had a sure theoretical grasp of many sur­prisingly modern concepts. Although often practiced for its own sake, as part of the play of thought that was understood between Bards to be an expression of the Light, recent evidence also compellingly suggests that this knowledge was often applied practically: in medical tech­niques, for example, that show that the Bards had an accurate understanding of bacterial and viral infections, or in the field of astron­omy. The science of optics was highly developed in Jerr-Niken and Turbansk, and researchers have unearthed star maps of considerable complexity, rivaling those of the astronomers of the Maya. It also appears that the southern Bards had developed a workable theory of evolution, and we know Malikil of Jerr-Niken theorized genetic inheritance in N755,8 recording her meticulous observations of breed­ing and cross-pollinating ikil plants. Discoveries such as these allowed Intathen of Gent to theorize an evolutionary model of competing pop­ulations of species, using the game of Gis, a complex board game using counters, which was very popular among Annaren Bards.9 Some schol­ars argue that the prevalence of the spiral or double helix in the artwork and even the architecture of the south (the floor plan of the Ernan of Turbansk, the great palace of the Ernani, was, for example, famously based on a two-dimensional representation of a double helix) suggests that the southern Bards were aware of the existence of DNA.

  Many of the most interesting recent discoveries have been in the area of mathematics. The Suderain worship of Light led to intense Bardic studies of its properties, which in turn resulted in an early dis­covery of refraction. As early as A2500, Mulgar of Jerr-Niken described Snell's Law (that when light bends as it passes from one medium to another, the angles are related trigonometrically – the sine of the angle of incidence equals the sine of the angle of refraction). This meant that trigonometry and spherical geometry became a focus of mathematical thinking early on and led, among other things, to the precocious dis­covery two centuries later of Fourier Analysis by the mathematical genius Abin-Kan of Jerr-Niken. Abin-Kan's discovery, which he called Edhi-Delar (in the Speech, "light building") meant that Bards could represent any arbitrary shape in terms of an aggregation of simpler sinusoidal waves. Abin-Kan also, almost simultaneously, discovered that light is a wave, by means of a device very like Young's slit apparatus (a glass slide blacked by soot, with two lines scraped very close to each other). Together, these two discoveries permitted later Bardic thinkers to sketch out what appears to be a full mathematical basis for quantum mechanics, despite the fact that they had not made the physical hypotheses.

  Their number theory had intriguing parallels with that of the Greeks, leading some to speculate that Turbanskian mathematics may have survived into the classical Greek era. Like the Pythagoreans, Turbanskian Bards linked numbers with harmony: one was the pri�
�mordial unity from which all else is created, two was the symbol for the female, three for the male, and four symbolized harmony (because two is even, so four – two times two – is "evenly even"). Four also symbolized the four elements out of which everything in the universe was made (earth, air, fire, and water). The Suderain Bards, after Lilora of Turbansk (N230), also theorized prime numbers, and held the prime factor theorem – that every whole number can be expressed as a unique product of prime factors – in great reverence. Lilora's proof of this tenet used a nonlinear logic that has parallels with that of Brouwer and the intuitionists, in which any mathematical object is considered to be a product of a construction of a mind and that, therefore, the exis­tence of an object is equivalent to the possibility of its construction.10

  Dén Haven and the Rise of the Nameless One

  The Nameless One, known most often in the Suderain by his usename Sharma, was the king of Den Raven before he became one of the most adept mages in Edil-Amarandh. When he studied with the Bards of the Light in the Dhyllic city of Afinil, it was said his innate powers rivaled even those of Nelsor, the legendary Bard who invented the first Bardic writing and who is also credited with creating the Treesong runes. The story of Sharma's journey to Afinil in A1567 is well known; what is more puzzling is why he traveled hundreds of leagues north, rather than to Turbansk, where it might be surmised that he would find such knowledge as he desired closer to home. The answer seems to lie in a mysterious animus against the Bards of the south; the Bard Nindar remarked on Sharma's commonly expressed contempt for the Bards of Turbansk, "It was said that his face would darken at any praise of a Turbanskian Bard, and but for courtesy, he would spit," he wrote. "Some said they had never seen such bitterness in another human being, without seeming reason or foundation; and if anyone asked him the reasons wherefore his black feelings, he would look so threateningly that no more questioning was ventured."11

  Nindar also records Sharma's fascination with the Elidhu who vis­ited Afinil, most notably the Winterking Arkan, later known throughout Annar as the Ice Witch and reviled by the Bards for his alliance with Sharma. While Nindar appears to believe that Sharma's primary interest was in the Elemental Wars, it seems likely that he was more interested in the Elidhu's possession of endless life. In the Naraudh Lar-Chane it is strongly suggested that it was at this time that Nelsor, who may have been Arkan's lover, captured the power of the Elidhu Treesong in the Treesong Runes, inscribing them on a Dhyllic lyre and a tuning fork (in connection with this event, it is worth remembering that one of the magical qualities of Dhyllic lyres was that they never needed to be tuned). We can conjecture that Sharma, sus­pecting that the secret of the Elementals' eternal life was held in the power of the runes, stole the tuning fork from Nelsor and immediately left Afinil for Den Raven. His abrupt disappearance certainly caused speculation in Afinil, enough for it to be recalled later, when the extent of his ambition became evident. However, as the existence of the Treesong Runes was a secret known to very few Bards, perhaps only to Nelsor and Sharma, it was not until much later, when Maerad was called to fulfill her quest for the Treesong, that Sharma's theft became clear. Given that Sharma did not steal the whole Song, it seems fair to speculate – with many Bards who wrote later about these events – that his knowledge of the Runes was dishonestly gained. "There were many who distrusted Sharma, even before he cast aside his Name and revealed his dark design," wrote Callachan of Gent."12 It was said that he would spy on his own shadow, and that his right hand would cheat his left."

  How Sharma used the Treesong Runes to make the Spell of Binding that ensured his deathlessness is unknown; but many Bards speculated that the lack of half the runes meant that the spell was only partially successful. Although the spell gave Sharma eternal life, it was eternal life in torment; it seemed that the magery he exerted in the Spell of Binding was too powerful for his human body to sustain. Certainly, the few extant descriptions of the Nameless One all mention his physical anguish, and it was often claimed that his form was unimaginably monstrous.

  After his return to Den Raven, nothing more was heard from Sharma in Annar or the Suderain for another three centuries. It was during this time that he began the transformation of Den Raven into the vast prison camp and armory that it became in Maerad's day, and set up strategic alliances with powerful Elidhu, including Arkan in Zmarkan and Karak in Indurain (perhaps the same Elemental known later as the Landrost, although this is by no means certain). In A1810 he began his campaign to defeat the Bards of Annar with an invasion of South Annar, and in A2041, after many grievous wars, succeeded in his aim of conquering Annar and completely destroying the civilization of the Dhyllin.

  Few documents exist to record the Great Silence, which lasted for more than a millennium, until Maninae cast Sharma out of Annar in A3234 and began the Restoration of the Light. Those few that do remain record an absolute militaristic tyranny, in which entire popula­tions were enslaved – the archetype, perhaps, of a totalitarian regime. The Light continued undefeated in the Seven Kingdoms, and even continued to flourish in the Suderain, but was nevertheless under con­stant attack from Sharma's powerful sorcerers, the corrupt Bards known as Hulls who had given up their Bardic Names for a shadow of Sharma's immortality. Unlike Sharma, Hulls could be killed, even if only by magery; but they did not die of normal physical wounds or disease or age. Most of the time they used glimmerspells to disguise their horrific appearance. Callachan of Gent describes them thus:

  The bodies of the Hulls do not remain youthful, but as the cen­turies pass, show the depredations of their extreme age: they appear as withered skeletons clothed with skin as dry and yellow as parchment, and their eyes burn with a red light in the hollow skulls of their faces. And with their comeliness, so any pleasure in living vanishes; and they are filled with a hatred for anything fair or good, or that flourisheth in its innocence and joy in the gentle meadows of the world, and all that they make in their cunning is designed to hurt or to do ill or to cause despair, even when it seemeth that to do so makes little sense. For there is a wantonness in how the Hull makes others suffer that is beyond most human cruelty, that taketh an active joy in the pain inflicted, even in its seeming indifference; and this evil joy and indifference together seemeth to me to be the very essence of the Dark.

  A Hull employs the Speech, as doth a Bard; but in its mouth the Speech hath not its true virtue, and it is a hurt to hear it twisted so that it signifies often the very reverse of what it should intend. Thus Bards call it the Black Speech, to differentiate its use from our own; for if the words are the same, the meanings and powers summoned by the Black Speech are as if torn from the grace of the Balance, and an injury to the fabric of magery. This is the Dark Art of Sorcery, which draweth from our powers, only in order to destroy them.13

  After the Restoration, it was widely believed that Sharma had fled Den Raven, taking refuge in the southern deserts. For some five hundred years Den Raven was free of Sharma's tyranny, although his shadow did not pass from the kingdom: there had been much hurt done to the land by his sorceries that even the Suderain Bards were unable to heal, and later it was discovered that some Hulls secretly remained, work­ing for the eventual return of their master. The isolated kingdom opened up relationships with its neighbors, instituted a system of par­liament, and founded several Bardic Schools. However, after millennia of absolute rule by Sharma these institutions and reforms were fragile, and the coup by the Hull Imank in N654 under the kingship of Ukbra led to the slaughter or banishment of all Den Raven Bards, the destruc­tion of the Schools, and the return to petty tyranny and isolation.

  By N750, under the apparent leadership of the Hull Imank, a pow­erful sorcerer in his own right and also Captain of the Black Army, Den Raven began to make aggressive forays against the eastern reaches of the Suderain. When the great School of Jerr-Niken was sacked and burned to the ground in N939, many in the Suderain began to fear that the Nameless One had indeed returned. In the face of widespread skepticism from An
nar, the Ernani Har-Ytan and First Bard of Turbansk, Juriken, began to prepare their defenses for the invasion that eventually occurred in N945.

  Unlike most of Annar and the Seven Kingdoms, where the influ­ence of Bards meant that social status was usually a fluid concept, Den Raven society was strictly hierarchical. At the apex, beneath the author­ity of Sharma himself, were the Hulls, but even within the Hulls there were strictly observed rankings. During the Great Silence, the Nameless One had instituted a system of Circles, each of different status. There were nine Circles of the Dark, ranging from the Sick (or Sickle) Moon – to which belonged all the most powerful Hulls, including Imank – to the Eyes – Hulls who were in charge of surveillance in Den Raven and were greatly feared (the Hull known as the Spider in Sjug'hakar Im was most probably an Eye) – to the Circle of Insects – the lowest rank, from which were drawn petty officials such as slave masters. Beneath the Hulls was an intricate caste system, kept in place by fear: the Hulls used their sorceries for both surveillance and punishment, and employed a wide system of spies. Any sign of rebellion among the populace was crushed with terrifying ruthlessness. The most powerful class beneath the Hulls were the Grins, fabled for their greed and cruelty, who ruled the small towns and often ran the huge farms and mines and armories. The Grins were invariably extremely wealthy. Below them were arti­sans, valued for their skills; these trades were usually hereditary and each had its own status. Below them, at the bottom of society, were the numerous slaves who were required to labor in the industries of Den Raven and to serve in its huge armies.14