The redwoods extended some way south, but Ker Bryhaine’s main woodlands were almost entirely deciduous, with a wealth of species, save for the swampy delta lands along the southern coast, where exotic varieties flourished such as magnolia, gums, cypress, fiddlewood and even mangroves. Many trees were cultivated, often on huge plantations, including species of nuts, and some kinds of citrus (called lemons and oranges in the text), possibly introduced from further south, as were tomatoes, or from Kerys.
Only in one small area did the giant redwoods linger. This was Aithennec, the Great Forest’s lesser arm, which extended through the lower passes of the Meneth Scahas and out along a deep river vale like shadowy fingers into the coastlands. At its margins and along its streams lower riverine species flourished; but behind them the various northerly species which dominated the heart of the continent reigned supreme, barring the southern sun with their own cool shadows. At this time Aithennec’s extent was least and its power weakest; for Ker Bryhaine in its youth felt confident enough to challenge the Forest Lord. Every few years a force of brave men went out to cut back the lesser trees around the river, and even fell the tall evergreens beyond. They had to work swiftly, and always in groups, for those who strayed might easily vanish.
Sometimes their corpses would be found among the branches of a fallen giant; or worse, they would reappear days later, witless and hunted. Despite this, the Forest was gradually beaten back into the vale, making passage possible by the inland road; and by day, as long as the trees were not disturbed, a bold man might venture beneath them. Nonetheless, to risk lying in wait there, Merthian’s men must have been desperate indeed.
In later years the watch waned, and the Forest slowly returned, with the fear of Tapiau. The inland road fell from use and was overwhelmed, by Elof’s day forgotten. It may be the clime also favoured Aithennec’s trees; for the magnolias and mangroves had greatly dwindled, and the citruses were much rarer, suggesting a land growing steadily but consistently colder. Even so far from its bounds, the inexorable breath of the Ice was being felt.
The Saltmarshes
Like most people, the smiths seem to have drawn little distinction between the kinds of plant that carpeted this bleak, depressing and perilous region, calling them reed and rush interchangeably. Towards the seaward side these would mostly have been grasses, probably of the Puccinellia and Spartina species, and the vicious black rushes (Juncus gerardii and roemerianus), that still torment walkers in such habitats today. Only occasional clumps of plants such as sea lavender and sea pinks on firmer ground would have broken the monotony. Further inland, however, where the channels were less tidal and the flow fresh, true reeds, Phragmites australis, took over, with transitionals such as marsh elder and Salicornia species on drier ground. The fallen tree trunks that scattered the inland regions may well have been large cedars.
The animal life of the Marshlands, under the malign influences that reigned there, was deeply distorted. Only smaller wetland species such as fish and amphibians remained unaffected. Birds, free to fly in and out, were also safe; but it is noticeable that they flocked only in the upper reaches. The main Marshes were dominated by less normal forms.
The glimpse of the dragon corresponds closely to those of Elof’s day, unnatural creatures which could hardly be called animals at all, so evident and malign was their intelligence. The reaction of the corsairs suggests that this one, though, had established predictable hunting patterns and times. Experience of drastic genetic modifications suggests that they tend to revert to their natural forms, and perhaps this was happening here. Other forms encountered, such as the monster with its ‘family’, suggest some terrible human origin, beside which the giant snake seems almost natural by comparison. The shed skin leaves little doubt that it was a snake, and not some other serpentine form, such as a ‘legless lizard’ or eel (which can wriggle easily enough across damp land). It may not have been as big as the trackway suggests, broadened possibly by the body flattening under its own weight. Anaconda-like species approaching this size have been reported from South America, but never conclusively; the best documented, filmed from a helicopter, appears to rise and snap in much the manner described.
OF THE BEGINNINGS OF BOTH
LANDS, THEIR SETTLEMENT &
GROWTH
While the lands themselves were much as Elof knew them, their populations were often very different; towns waxed that would later fade and dwindle while others were barely founded, country was cleared that would later return to the Wild, forests grew where fields would come, and the High Roads and Causeway were not yet built. The lands were yet young, and with the growing pains of youth.
Ker Bryhaine
The first founders of the Southlands drew boundaries to encompass all the land they thought fit for themselves and their descendants: for they meant to found a mighty realm to equal Morvan, whence they had fled, or even Kerys, lost beyond the eastern Seas.
For the most part these first-comers were men of the race stemming from southern Kerys, the Penruthya. They dwelt in Morvan’s warm southern provinces, last to suffer as the Ice laid siege to it, yet first to drift away. Passing through the perils of the Forest Realms in ever increasing numbers, and at last in one mass flight, they found a land far more like that of their forefathers, and better suited to their traditional farming of fruits and roots and vines, corn and fattened beasts. There they built their greatest cities and their widest estates, of which Anlaithann was once one, though like many it dwindled through family division and the slow encroachment of the burning Wastes.
So, by the time the latecomers from Morvan reached the coast, those who endured until its fall was certain, or even until its last terrible hours, they found the land of Ker Bryhaine well established, ruled by a new order, and scarcely welcoming. These latecomers were mainly of the north Kerys stock, the Svarhath, which had helped them endure the chilling of Morvan for longer. Some with sothran blood and kin were accepted by the Penruthya, among them the surviving children of the royal line. These were allotted lands and fair treatment, but denied their kingship; for the kings, who insisted on defending Morvan, had fallen from favour, and power on the coasts had been vested in a self-appointed Syndicacy of lords and leading citizens.
Most of the latecomers, though, were treated like beggars, sheltered and fed, but grudgingly. And they were forbidden to settle land of their own – not only in the well-settled south, but even the still empty regions south of the Debatable Lands, around Ker an Aruel. These the sothran lords claimed for their children to come; but shame, as well as selfishness, lay behind their treatment of the latecomers, more steadfast than they and a living reproach.
This could not be borne. Men began to fight and die; but throughout the better part of an ordinary lifetime the leader of the latecomers, Lord Vayde the Great, already old, threw his terrible energies into finding his people a home. Forcing a shaky truce on the sothrans, he launched ambitious projects to explore the little-known areas beyond the Marshes, which the sothrans scorned. He built or began a great chain of castles and waypoints, picking out paths through the Marshes and clearing great tracts of marginal woodland and scrub. He found the North a land nowhere near as desolate as the sothrans had assumed – its clime well suited, in fact, for the newcomers. He was too late to prevent the outbreak of civil war, and in it he perished at the last; but in aiding his people’s great exodus northward.
So the two lands were born, in strife and hatred; and in their way they both prospered. The sothrans grew rich, or rather their lords did; and their power increased, until they held the hand of life and death above a population poor and ignorant, in thrall to the land and their masters, save in the cities where the merchant and craftsmen classes flourished. The lords were not evil, or especially oppressive; but the natural run of such a society, without the restraining influence of the kings, was towards vassalage and serfdom. By Kunrad’s time the process was well advanced.
Nordeney
This the Northerners
had seen, and hated. They might have accepted a monarchy; but most of the Kermorvannen chose their surer life in the South to an uncertain future in the North, and those who did not, felt unfit to take the sceptre. So the Northerners, without Vayde to unite them, formed independent settlements. One or two cities arose around Vayde’s castles, but more towns were founded by a few families at most, a good distance from neighbours and sternly independent of them. They also prospered and grew, but never wholly as Vayde had intended. The land in itself was poorer, but they used it well, and more systematically than in the South, in chains of family farms rather than great estates. The men who worked it always had some stake in it, labouring for their gain and their families, and not a remote lord. Arts of cool-weather farming, brought from Kerys and developed in the decline of Morvan, brought them richer harvests, though with harder labour. Trade and craft, a lesser occupation in the South, came to dominate the North, through the mechanism of the Guilds. And, to ease the lives of all, there were the incomparable benefits of smithcraft. That strange art had grown up in Kerys and Morvan, among the Svarhath most of all. In Nordeney, though, it attained its peak of achievement, and what had been a select and secretive study became of benefit to all.
Thus the Northlands grew; and soon its population was swelled by the arrival from over sea of another folk, also fleeing the Ice and their persecuting kin. Some of these had been in the land when Vayde arrived, fishermen and sealers merely beaching for the season in what they thought of as perilous wasteland. When, however, they saw what wonders he and those who came after him worked, and how the land was changing, they brought word to their families across the ocean, and many returned with them to stay. They were a plainer folk, still living as tribe and clan, with less craft and skill, and only the simplest farming; but they were hardy and strong, good seamen and woodsmen and tireless labourers. To the pale-skinned kind of Kerys they looked somewhat strange, having skin the hue of fired copper and eyes curiously lidded, heavy of body and face; but mindful of their own late troubles, the Northerners gave them unstinting welcome, and at times helped them rout the cruel kin who harried them, the tribes later to be known as the Akia’wahsa, or Ekwesh. Their first great coming was in the time of Kunrad’s grandfather, and by his day the races were already mingling; until in Elof’s time a pale face was rare in the north. The sothrans made that one more ground for derision.
It was almost inevitable that the two lands should come into conflict; and less than twenty years after the exodus, it began. Most sothrans were content to be rid of their inconvenient kin, even a little ashamed. There were lords who had suffered in the strife, however, or feared the growth of a rival state, or were simply consumed by hatred. They were hard to restrain, for even the poorest lords maintained a personal guard, and one of only middling fortune could command some two to three hundred troops. These determined lords pieced together an expeditionary force, and sent it under noble commanders northward by sea. This force made the mistake of attacking Vayde’s fortress of Tensborg. The resulting battle left the North in possession of such ships as they could salvage, and the commanders, dearly ransomed to their friends. Too dearly, for the humiliation roused the South, and a legitimate force was sent, this time by land, around the end of the Marshes. This allowed the North ample warning, and they were met, not with pitched battle, but with skirmishes, harrying, lightning assaults by night; and, most lethally, a combination of scorched-earth tactics and the cutting of their supply lines. Plagued by disease from the Marshes and famine from the North, wandering aimlessly in unfamiliar country, the army mutinied and retreated in disorder before it had reached the first Northern towns. The next year a larger force beat back similar tactics to reach and burn Dunmarhas; but a confederacy of the Northern towns descended on them as they triumphed, and drove their rearguard back into the Marshes, where it was decimated. Similar incursions over the next thirty years met with more success, often beating back Northern armies and burning a few small towns, but never achieving anything significant; and this story became the story of conflict between the two lands. Numerically the Syndicacy’s forces could have crushed the North, but the cost would have been too great. The North was not strong enough to touch the South, except with swift freebooting raids by land or sea. These were returned, and became common enough to sustain bodies of corsairs who claimed a nominal allegiance, or none at all. Gradually conflict subsided; but bitter memories lingered on both sides of the Marshes.
Nonetheless, after a century of squabbling and brief inconclusive flares of war, the lands drew nearer a mutual tolerance; but still not to Vayde’s plan. Much he had hoped for was neglected. His chain of defences was never completed, and most fortresses never built. Thus it was at Asenby, where the King’s sister Ase the Deep-Minded settled with the remnant of her household, and where Elof was one day to awaken. After her death it dwindled to a parochial townlet behind a wooden palisade. Had it indeed become the stronghold Vayde planned, its subsequent history, and that of the whole Long Winter, might have been very different. In beginning the Great Causeway, however. Kunrad was destined to fulfil a crucial part of Vayde’s strategy; but in drawing the two lands closer he achieved still more.
Kunrad’s Rule
Most important of all, perhaps, was his effect on sothran society; for in his wide domains, both by intent and by his own Northern attitudes, he sharply reversed the trend towards serfdom. Often he did this by harking back to ancient laws and customs which had never been repealed. The rights of the peasants had been increasingly eroded; so he encouraged his people to form communities (such as Alais describes) which could still be granted charters of right. Peasants had become increasingly bound to the land, so they were often sold with it, like chattels; some even sought this, because it meant they could not be expelled from the land, either. He contrived to loosen those bonds, and those that held a man to the occupation of his fathers, so that men of ability could seek their own livelihoods in skills and crafts and trades, which he encouraged. Those who wished to remain with the land he gave rights in it, and the incentive to work for themselves.
Such practices Kunrad wisely confined to his own domains, never offending his fellow lords by seeking to spread them, openly at least. Yet spread they did; for the whole land came to hear of them, and many of the wiser lords noted that by some mysterious alchemy the Marchwarden’s revenues were swelling, not shrinking, and he was growing unexpectedly richer. They too began to perceive that taxing a free man is kinder than stripping a slave, and incidentally more profitable; and when their own peasants began to murmur about such matters, they found their demands greeted with gracious acquiescence, often before they were actually made.
The gulf between lord and man remained wide. Kunrad was not so foolish as to think it could ever be otherwise; but his good sense turned a tide, and left a stronger, more united land that endured until Elof’s day and after, and the end of both realms.
THE DUERGAR
Of these uncanny folk and their history more is said elsewhere in the Chronicles. The glimpses of them here reflect how they were perceived and treated even in Elof’s day, as near animals. Duergar were in fact human enough to breed with men, though neither folk looked kindly upon the idea. The sinister aspect, barely capable of speech, they cultivated for their own protection, and so that knowledge should not be forced from them. For all their power and wisdom they feared men, for their sheer numbers and their rapacity. Kunrad had neither the chance nor the genius to draw as close to them as did Elof; but humanity and kindness alone led him to look beyond the mask, and he was rewarded for it. When he came into his Lord Wardenship, he sternly enforced Kermorvan’s promise, and persecution was stamped out for many years thereafter. Yet in all his years dwelling at Ker an Aruel, in the shadow of the mountains, he never again saw the Folk of the Hollow Hills; or at least, there is no account of it. But he did wander freely in the high passes, to the marvel of many; and whether he could have done so, without at least the goodwill of their guard
ians, is to be doubted.
OF ARTS AND WISDOM IN THE
NORTH
Smithcraft
To other accounts of this singular art Kunrad’s tale adds some informative sidelights. Next to legendary masters such as Elof Valantor, greatest master of all mastersmiths, and his strange precursor Lord Vayde, his achievements were modest; yet few if any ordinary masters could have achieved what he did in the dungeon, for example, with such scanty resources. In a sense they were incidental; it was the power inborn in him, and the singular concentration with which he was able to direct it. Yet without the shreds of material and the craftwork to focus this power it would have been useless; he could have stared at the bars till he perished, without effect. Such was smithcraft, a power that manifested itself solely through the mind of the talented smith and the metals and forces he worked.
As Kunrad claimed, that power could appear in either sex; but equally, as Alais divined, it was considered man’s work. Women smiths were uncommon but, in fairness to the Guilds, they were generally accepted, especially if they favoured finer work such as jewellery. Usually their worst problem was finding a master to let them serve their apprenticeship.
In the majority of smiths the craft flowed modestly. To most it gave only an ability to influence simple artefacts, enhancing their normal function – a deeper-striking hoe, a ploughshare which did not shatter in stony Northland soils. The charm against rust Kunrad used was only slightly more sophisticated. The text here is a highly simplified rendering of one quoted elsewhere in the Chronicles, as is the account of its action, couched in the terminology and philosophy of the craft. To later eyes this is about as intelligible as a discussion of electron shells might have been to mastersmiths; although there is evidence to suggest they might surprise us there also. It is certainly clear that such simple charms depended as much on physical and chemical action – and knowledge – as on more arcane craft. Some mildly and specifically corrosive substance was employed to bond with the iron’s oxidisation layer. That this might be an acid of phosphorus is a guess, but an informed one, for such acids are commonly used in ablative rust treatment. Such virtues as the smith added would only intensify its action – or, in Kunrad’s case, its absence.
The Castle of the Winds Page 47