Alya and Savi were both of the commonest strain, the northern. In illustrated versions – which seem, like the tale, to follow some older original – they are always represented as handsome examples, moderately tall and well-formed, with smooth, shapely faces – Alya’s with no beard or moustache – and neat, fairly narrow noses, a distinctly northern characteristic. They are often referred to as pale-skinned, despite their open-air upbringing. This probably meant a lighter, more golden shade of the slightly coppery colouring usual in the north. Most people both of the Citadel, the northern part of Volmur’s realm, and of the short-lived westward realms were of this same type, such as the old man at the ruined farm.
Many among them were noticeably paler, however, such as Asquan and the princess, whose skin colour was compared to fine parchment. Both appear to have had unusually lean, tall frames, with high cheekbones and relatively long noses. Asquan, surprisingly, is shown with curling hair; this was often aristocratic foppery, but it might have had another explanation, of which more below. Certainly their light skin seems to have been considered a mark of aristocracy, and perhaps also the inbreeding that goes with it. But it also seems to have belonged to a particular physical type, perhaps one that once lorded it over the rest, and spread its genes widely. Rysha, though from much humbler origins, was of similar appearance.
Vansha, interestingly, is always depicted as a mixture of these types, clean-cut like Alya, with darker copper skin and a much heavier build, but strikingly aristocratic height and features.
Further to the south of Volmur’s realm another strain became common, heavier of frame and with blunt, square features and much darker skin, from coppery red to very dark brown. They also often grew quite heavy beards, especially in middle age, and were considered to look particularly rustic. They were commonest in the extreme south; but like all the other strains they were to be found everywhere, and with them many minglings Lord Kalkan’s domain (his original title signified a feudal landowner of standing) was originally in the south-west, and most of his men, such as Darzhan, were of this type. He himself, though, seems to have been largely of the aristocratic type, though his hefty build and beard pointed to at least some local blood.
There was, however, another and more singular race, once found all over the country, but by this era much rarer. They were sturdy but usually short, their skin was also pale and their hair black; but it curled thickly, and they had heavier beards. Stranger still, though, they lacked the eyefold altogether, and their eyes are always depicted as unusually wide. Almost certainly it was from them that the aristocratic class inherited its tendency to curling hair, yet they had no special status, and their origins were obscure. It may well be that they represented an ancient northern people, perhaps kin to the largely dark-haired Svarhath who inhabited northern Kerys, who had lived in the lands now crushed beneath the advancing Ice. But they themselves also claimed descent from the ancient and honourable race of Duergar, long vanished from the westlands. Their sometimes gnarled and heavy features would support this, as would their taciturn cast of mind; but both could easily be true. Something of them may survive in the peoples of the north in more recent times, with whom they had things in common.
Inevitably their odd cast of face gave rise to some racial jibes – that they had bulging animal eyes and hair because their fathers had mated with buffalos, or their mothers with wild horses, or both with demons. They themselves turned this on its head by claiming descent from primal bears, which were their clan insignia and totem; and so it is still with the Ainu of recent times, whose ancestors stemmed from the same area, and who much resemble them.
Racial feeling rarely went beyond insults, however; for relatively primitive cultures the peoples of those lands had surprisingly little tradition of actual distrust. On the contrary, racial divergence was considered fairly normal, and they had little trouble accepting completely alien physical types. Louhi, for whatever reason, evidently modelled herself on the exceptionally pale-skinned Penruthya folk of Kerys and Kerbryhaine, and on the ash-blond colouring that was rare even among them. Perhaps she had some use for that appearance, or perhaps white simply came more naturally to her. Yet it is notable that she struck almost all those who saw her not as something pallid one might find under a stone, but as extraordinarily beautiful.
There may have been underlying reasons, of course, not least their own aristocracy’s characteristically pale skin. This has been common in many cultures, associated, understandably enough, with leisure, youth and cleanliness – historic China, for example, or Polynesia, where royal virgins were often kept out of the sun or otherwise bleached. European ‘blue blood’ ran in veins more clearly visible through the whitest skin. Louhi, therefore, may simply have looked supremely patrician.
Nonetheless, this readiness to accept the unusual indicated a strikingly mature culture among the people of the western lands. Unfortunately, especially in Kerbryhaine, they themselves did not always find such ready acceptance.
The peoples of the coastlands
Tuma the Lynx, also called Tuma the Rider, is another hero who is often included in Alya’s band, although his own tale does not support this. It does, however, tell us a little of the coastal peoples from which he came. The most reliable version of the tale records the enormous length of his journey, and that he never once deviated from it. It is said to have taken him nine years, and that may be no epic exaggeration. He began it as one of fifty such envoys, travelled furthest and ended his journey last and alone, in great honour; and Alya and Savi, already in the east, are specifically mentioned as among those who welcomed him, and named a child for him, later to become a great chieftain himself. Tuma and his fellow messengers were sent out not by a single lord or country, but by a loosely federated state like Nordeney. The realms of the coast appear to have been small kingdoms, dispersed along the coastal lands, and their people, again, very much the same racial mix as in the heartlands – linked,’ despite the usual rivalries, by their common origins in some larger state, from which survived an unusual level of civilisation and culture, reflected in the courtly manners of the Princess Ulie.
Perhaps this gave them the vision to see what was happening throughout the land and that it would ultimately menace them; and that the time to act was while they still had prosperity and freedom. It may also have helped that the lands had established a joint council of chieftains, into which, in a time of frequent famine, were invited the merchants whose commerce linked the lands like veins, and later the Seers who could help guide their destiny, although there were always few of these. This council became increasingly powerful, till the rulers had perforce to rely on it and rule with its consent. As the threat of the Ice intensified, it coordinated resistance; and it was undoubtedly their support that made possible the great drive to build ships and escape.
The servants of the Ice
Only one people in all these lands could have been called a race apart, or at all exclusive; and that was by the will of their masters. These were the human warriors who served the Ice, the Aikiya’wahsa. That is the name they took to themselves, both in Brasayhal and the western lands, or as close as we can come to it. On both continents that name was contracted into various common forms, in everyday speech; for consistency’s sake the Brasayhal form Ekwesh has usually been used in these pages.
The tale tells us little new about them. They were of much the common kind, although often shorter and burlier of stature, save for their chieftains, and darker of skin; the commonest epithet given them means something close to ‘swarthy’, but with connotations of dirt and bestiality. Their nature is very much as described elsewhere: ruthless, vicious, dedicated by a savage discipline and a cult of atrocity to the service of their inhuman lords, despising all other races as subhuman, mere fodder for rapine, enslavement and ritual sacrifice.
What the tale does provide is a rare glimpse into their own communities, if that word can be used of the antheap settlements in the Ice. No doubt the squalor and savage
ry that ruled there was partly incidental, reflecting the Ice’s low expectations of humanity and living things in general. However, it may also have served as a recruiting test, from which thralls could escape by being sufficiently strong and ruthless. The town here closely resembles a more permanent and even less pleasant version of the Ekwesh shanty town Elof encountered at the Gate of Kerys some thirteen centuries later. It is remarkable how little appears to have changed, even to the dancing-ground for the shamans; but this Mouth, with its surrounding stones, was evidently some ancient shrine, perhaps even pre-dating the town or the glaciers themselves, some early and potent site of the distorted worship the Ice imposed on its thralls.
There is one major divergence with later accounts, however, and that is in the Ekwesh themselves. Those of later years, Elof’s day, or even of the Mastersmiths Gille and Olvar, are almost always described as tall and lean. Something appears to have changed them in the intervening years. The most likely explanation is a chilling one. We know that by Gille’s time, probably only a couple of centuries after these events, they had overrun almost all of the land. In doing so, they must have assimilated so many of its free – and taller – peoples, including no doubt those of Volaghkhan and the Citadel, that they drastically altered their own gene pool. It conjures up a grim picture; and it also provides another reason to set Alya and Savi at a considerably earlier date.
This tale also tells us something of the arcane arts they employed as readily as their enemies; but this is important enough to be dealt with of itself, below.
Of their language
This is given in the singular, for a very good reason. Even the curly-haired easterners had one remarkable thing in common with all the rest – an error. They believed they spoke separate languages; but outsiders would have thought differently. Literally everyone across this vast continent could make shift to understand one another.
On the other hand, accents and pronunciations might differ greatly, to the point of appearing nearly incomprehensible. Many kinds of localised vocabulary were springing up, especially in towns. Isolated areas, like Alya’s father’s farm, or the Citadel, tended to preserve the older, higher style of speech; so that Alya and Vansha sounded not like the bumpkins they feared before Volmur, but surprisingly old-fashioned and lordly. Yet for every distinction or difference, it is clear that all these peoples were essentially speaking dialects of one great language.
This had not always been the case. It is still obvious that each racial group had many names closely associated with it, and that these originated in radically different languages and locations – those with the terminator transliterated here as -shan, for example, were largely southern, and those with -mur terminators northern. But by now, while a name or type of name might still be common in a particular locality, it would be found quite freely used in distant regions and wholly unrelated peoples. It might even lose its gender identity; as with Vansha and Rysha, the -sha terminator being originally male.
Nonetheless, however much its externals had altered, the heart of the language remained the same. Even the Ekwesh spoke a blunt and bastardised descendant of it, thickly accented and poorly pronounced, with a minimal vocabulary and limited capacity for complex expression, giving them a tendency to grunt and gesture that made them seem more barbaric and stupid than they actually were. This appeared to change little over a millennium and more, which demonstrates very clearly that it was imposed from above. When the Ekwesh, and their chieftains in particular, learned other languages they often spoke them perfectly well, though they despised any form of literature more complex than war-chants.
The forgotten legacy
Across such wide and fragmented lands, the combination of racial blending; a relatively high culture and moral sense, even in decayed circumstances; and a tenacious single language, can only point to one thing – the ancestral civilisation whose ruins and relics, neglected and incomprehensible, are strewn everywhere in the tale. Once it must have ruled all those lands, a realm at least as strong as Kerys or Morvan at their greatest; but long before their rise and fall, the glaciers ground over it also, and with even greater effect. Having crushed its physical presence into the face of the earth, the Ice now set out to destroy even its memory. As Oshur rightly says, the Ice even usurped its ancient name, and bestowed it contemptuously on the humans it enslaved and distorted into its own wolf-pack; so that when men came across it, in some old text or inscription, it awoke not nostalgia but curses, and led them to spurn their own inheritance. By the time of Alya and Savi, its characters could no longer be read, preserved, if at all, for the power still hidden in its inscriptions; and few if any remembered whence had come the strange stones in the wild, or the very words they spoke. That was the triumph of the Ice.
Of the races other than human
There were far fewer of these abroad than in the lands of Brasayhal across the ocean. The Duergar, as has been said, were long gone, and with them their craft and wisdom from civilisations more ancient still. It is suggested that some lurked still among the peaks of the eastern ice-sheet; but if so, as in northern Nordeney, they kept to themselves in the hollow hills, built strong defences and sought no allies.
And in a land that no longer had anything much in the way of forests, the lord Tapiau had little foothold, and with him his Children. Only in the coastal realms did he find any reverence; and even that was fading, as the great pines and redwoods were hewn down and sawn into ship’s planking. It is possible that some of the other creatures in the Nightingale’s wood were of his dominion; but of them only uncanny rumours are recorded.
What stranger creatures could still be met with were either the dark things spilled from the Ice, of which there were many; or others almost as alarming who found they could live well among the ambience of this embattled land. One such, evidently, was Nightingale; but there seem to have been many others, some far less human and aware.
He was an extraordinary creature, and there is no record in all the Chronicles of another remotely like him. His account of his origins is unusual in what it says about the attitude of the Powers to their bodies, reflected in Louhi’s problems with hers. It is more likely than otherwise that a lesser Power, shaping a casual semblance of a form he could not be bothered to understand, would create himself the ability to father a child without even realising it, or caring if he did. It is also not unlikely that that child would reflect more of his mightier parent’s nature, absorb some of his power, or develop abilities of his own. If Tapiau did have some presence in the wood, he either felt unwilling to challenge Nightingale, or tolerated him as a barrier against encroaching mankind.
The servants of Taoune, who brought such terror upon the travellers, might well be counted as a race apart, for they were certainly not the individuals they appeared to represent. Yet they were not always the silent phantoms of the river, either. There are many accounts which suggest that they could talk and act like their dead models, well enough to deceive even close kin – at first. Yet after even a short while unease would grow, and finally distrust and loathing awaken in all around them, so inhuman their behaviour became in a thousand small ways, so alien the thoughts they gradually revealed.
How Taoune gave his creatures their physical form is not known. He could sometimes reanimate a dead body almost at once, as with Fazdshan, but it seems he did not need to, as long as it was dark or misty. Certainly he was in scope and power the mightiest of the Ice-lords, and remained inconceivably strong even after Louhi cast him down, though his will was broken. Under certain conditions he might easily have shaped something out of nothing, as humans would see it – as the Powers shaped their own solid forms. It has even been suggested he used his own substance to embody his creatures; that the phalanx of river guards, the newcomers included, were actually some part of Taoune himself. It would explain the uniformity with which they acted, and the silence.
From later accounts, Elof’s included, it appears that Taoune genuinely believed, or had persuaded hims
elf, that he was preserving human lives in this fashion, conferring immortality – to the part that he had most use and respect for, at any rate, the pure mind. He could evidently read that at the merest contact. Some suggest that he began the practice in order to persuade the Ekwesh to risk their lives freely in the Ice’s service; but even they do not appear to have been fooled.
Even so, he persisted in his attempts to make his creatures independent, perhaps the introverted obsession of a once mighty mind One ballad suggests that he sought once to breed his creatures, to improve upon humanity, as he saw it; but the children never grew or developed in body or mind, and he could not understand why. He had them exchanged for human children; but when they fled daylight, or otherwise revealed themselves, they were found to be changelings, and destroyed.
Of the Powers
Much is said of these extraordinary beings in other books of the Chronicles, and yet the greater part must remain unknown and perhaps unknowable. It is clear, though, that they were of great mind and strength to alter the world, and of daunting antiquity. To the eldest among them had been given, once, the charge of steering this world, and bringing it to some early stage of readiness which they themselves considered to be perfection.
What this may have been is suggested by the growth of controversial modern theories. With increasing authority they claim that the world was at least at one stage in its early development under the domination of ice – not merely gripped by the extended glaciation of so-called ‘Ice Ages’, which covered surprisingly little of the world, but completely encased, from poles to equator, land and water alike beneath a terrible shell many kilometres thick. Once this was thought impossible; but glacial rock deposits have been found in regions which even continental drift has maintained constantly within the tropics. It has lately become clear how this could be brought about. Any event which clouded the atmosphere with dust, be it unusual volcanism or a substantial meteor or comet strike such as is thought to have caused the famous Cretaceous extermination, would cool the world sufficiently to extend the range of the glaciers. As this ice-sheet expanded, so its white surface would increase the reflective surface of the world, its ‘albedo’, bouncing back increasing amounts of solar heat unabsorbed. When conditions were right this process could easily become self-reinforcing. The weight of glaciers upon the earth might increase volcanism sufficiently to spread dust; and there are occasional but alarming references to a greater body of ice somehow beyond the world, which could well refer to the cometary belt.
Shadow of the Seer Page 54
