But who sings us these songs? Why, travelling bards who come out of the Forest, boasting that same red hair celebrated in every chorus. They leave greenwood families living not in indolent ease but in the straitened circumstances of any who must forage for food among root and bough. Minstrels carolling the romances of Viyenne or Lareal do not exalt a lost ideal but merely solicit coin to clothe their children and fill their bellies with bread. Their songs are not mystical history but idle entertainment, to distract their folk from their own cold and hungry existence. Look around your city and you will see plenty of copper-crowned heads. Over the generations, many a Forest man has forsaken the woods for the practical comforts of settled life and trade. The Forest Folk are not distant paragons of a nobler age; they are your tradesmen, your servants. We all share the same concerns for our children, our prosperity, and our posterity. Those so inclined worship the same gods. Why should we imagine it was not ever thus? One can tell a tree by its fruit, after all and the apple never falls far from the tree.
Consider the Mountain Men. Read the sagas copied in the libraries of Vanam and Inglis and you see a race remote and forbidding as the very peaks of Gidesta. Incomprehensible myths speak of men unyielding as stone, dangerous as dragons reputed to haunt their peaks. Scholars nod wisely of the cruel climate that makes such men so harsh. The miners and trappers among the hills and forests north of the Dalas would laugh at such wilful ignorance. Where have the towns of northern Ensaimm learned their noted skills in smelting and smithing if not from the countless sons of Mountain blood who have settled in softer climes and married there, quite content with their lot? There can be no such great differences between us if they do not divide those sharing the honesty of the marriage bed. Tales of ancient warfare among the snowbound crags may send a shiver of steel down the spine when told around a fireside but the truth is that the Mountain Men are as familiar and as slight a threat as the knife you use to cut your meat at table.
What though of the Plains People? That is the greatest mystery of all, or so it is whispered around the chimney corners. We see no trace of them, only gazing in awe at the earthen walls that ring their sacred places, at mighty barrows raised above their honoured dead. Gentlemen such as yourselves dig into these and wonder at copper pots and axes. Why were they buried? Did they truly believe such possessions could be carried aboard Poldrion’s ferry? Every discovery turns up more questions than pebbles. The earth-stained bones cannot speak so we invent answers for the silent skulls. Just as children make monsters out of fear and the shadows cast by candles, so we weave the darkness of ignorance into the myth of the Eldritch Kin, masters of a realm beyond the rainbow, rulers of the unchancy lands of water meadow and sea strand, the Plains People gone away into the twilight where we cannot follow.
Nothing could be further from the truth just as no race could be closer to us. The turfed forts of Dalasor may be remote and eerie but the prosaic ploughs of Caladhria and Ensaimin turn up copper rings and brooches with every spring sowing. We live among the ancient dwellings of the Plains People; we cannot see them only because our barns and houses, streets and shrines are raised upon their remnants. We cannot see descendants of this ancient race as we do of Forest and Mountain because those born of the Plains are our very selves. As we have lived for untold generations on these wide and fertile lands, so we have passed from primitive lives and beliefs to wed with the civilisation that the Tormalin Emperors brought from the east. As warp and weft in one cloth, so we wove together the superiority we enjoy today, as the growing child sets aside his toys and takes up the tools of manhood. The Mountain Men have followed our lead and in time the Forest Folk will turn from their amiable idleness and heed their lessons in turn.
Islands of the Elietimm,
5th of For-Summer
Be careful, there’s ice melt coming down there.” Shiv looked back over his shoulder. He was sitting in the prow of the wooden-framed, hide-covered boat we’d stolen. He shook seawater from his white, wrinkled hand. “Curse it, that’s cold!”
Behind me, Ryshad was steering, long tiller tucked under his arm, both hands gripping it firmly. He narrowed his eyes at the milky flow running across the dark grey beach to bleach the greenish water of the sound. “Put your backs into it.”
Sorgrad and ’Gren exchanged a mutinous look but both renewed their grip on their oars. I smiled encouragement at them and did my best to keep my feet out of the water puddled in the bottom of the boat. My back ached from sitting on the hard thwart and the non-stop wind was cutting through my jerkin. I shivered and began rubbing my arms to try and get a little warmer. “Sit still,” Sorgrad told me curtly.
“I’m freezing,” I retorted.
“There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. You’ll only get more chilled fidgeting,” he said sternly. “Who’s spent more time in the mountains, you or me?”
“Just make sure you keep your hands and feet moving,” Ryshad advised. “You don’t want frost nip in your fingers and toes.”
I could see Sorgrad scowling at that but it seemed he couldn’t deny that was fair advice, much as he might want to.
“You could always cursed well row,” ’Gren said as he pulled hard. “That would soon warm you up.” He certainly boasted a rosy glow.
“I don’t want to risk grounding,” said Shiv with some alarm.
“It’s all sandbanks round here,” scoffed ’Gren. “We’d be all right.” There were certainly none of the vicious skerries that had threatened us like vicious claws as we’d negotiated the uncomfortably exposed shore of Shernasekke.
“Let’s not take the risk,” suggested Ryshad.
Sorgrad said nothing, just shooting ’Gren a warning look.
“So you stay sitting like a noblewoman on a pleasure jaunt,” ’Gren grumbled. If he wasn’t having a good time, no one else was going to.
I refused to feel guilty for having neither the heft nor the weight to match anyone else’s stroke. I’d tried spelling both brothers and no one could dispute Ryshad’s decision that I stop, after we found ourselves veering so unexpectedly off course.
“Pull, now!” Ryshad leant all his weight into the tiller and the brothers bent over their oars, hauling them back with breath hissing through their teeth. From the concentration on Shiv’s face, he was doing his part with magic. All I could do was hold tight as the light boat bucked and swerved. Ashore, a surging stream laden with fine white sand cascaded down a mountainside thick with ash. It drew a stark line across a black sand bar, which itself cut abruptly across the paler grey of the beach where huge boulders, raw edges unweathered, lay scattered like a haphazard throw of knucklebones. Pale fingers reached through the dark waters towards us but everyone’s efforts took us safely past.
“ ’Sar would dearly love to see a fire mountain burning,” Shiv remarked, gazing at the mountain rising high above the shallow swell of the island we were passing. Yellow-tinted grey, the jagged peak had faint wisps of cloud clinging to the topmost pinnacles. No, not cloud but smoke or steam, ever renewed to defy the constant winds. I wondered if Misaen would heed a mongrel lass like me asking him politely to keep his fires banked until we’d quit this unnerving place.
“See, that’s all rock spewed up recently.” Shiv pointed to a formless mass of black stone sprawling across the beach and dusted with white. “It was so hot, it boiled a barrel full of salt out of the sea before it was quenched.” He smiled, intrigued at the notion.
I decided I preferred land that had the decency to stay as it had been made.