In general this union of peoples was a strong one, each fulfilling somewhat different roles, each benefitting from what the other lacked and respecting the other for it; it was a strong foundation upon which to build such a realm. Such friction as there was appears to have been mild, easily contained by the Ysmerien kings who mingled the blood of both races; and it is noticeable that when serious factional problems did break out in Kerys the division was more social than racial. The plebeian and patrician factions that appeared among the Penruthya were reflected among the Northerners, though less aggressively; but then the distinctions between lord and commoner were never so important there. The factions plagued the land, but never seriously divided it. The real difficulties began when the might and wealth of Kerys were at their peak, and the land seemed a strength unassailable. It was then the menace of the Ice first began to make itself felt among the Svarhath lands, and the remotest northerners had to flee southwards, even into the Vale. Then, a generation later, a serious conflict of kinship and succession broke out for the first time among the Ysmerien.
The Sundering of the Peoples
The details are simple enough; a king, Gherannen, died leaving a son and a daughter by different wives. The laws of succession were strict. Daughters could inherit at need, but the son, Barech, was the elder, and there was never any doubt that he would be the rightful successor; but he died suddenly within days of his father. And though he was of mature years and his wife had recently borne him a son, there was grave doubt as to whether the child, though named for him, was in fact his; and what followed fed that doubt. His widow Amer immediately installed as regent not Barech's younger sister, Authe, as was customary, but their cousin Dormaidh, one of the most able and powerful southern lords. By a coincidence of ancestry he was a pure-blooded Ysmerien, a well-made man of great charm and vigour; and he was also a former suitor of Amer. The resultant furore threatened to split the country, for, if the child was not Barech's, then Authe was the rightful heir, and after her her son Keryn; but Dormaidh enjoyed great support among powerful men of both Penruthya and Svarhath, and of both ancestral factions. Fewer supported Authe, young widow of an Ysmerien landholder, and of no great distinction; but she showed great firmness in claiming the throne on behalf of her son. For many years the whole land simmered, without ever quite bursting into the flame of civil war. Even the ancestral factions were split down the middle, although the older aristocracy tended to support Authe and the newer Dormaidh. Dormaidh was the effective ruler, but his power was never absolute enough to put down his enemies; and to do him justice, he had no particular wish to, restraining the most hot-headed of his followers. It was charged he had murdered Barech, but his later behaviour made this less likely. Authe was less retrained, but could never whip up enough sure support; however, her supporters' minor insurrections seriously disrupted the trade of the land, and deepened divisions. When the garrison of the High Gate declared for her she occupied it and set up her own court there, and over a period of yeas intrigued to little effect against Dormaidh.
Meanwhile the two children were growing up, the younger Barech as a powerless shadow under Dormaidh's overwhelming personality, and Keryn as an independent and intelligent young prince; as he grew up it became obvious that he was the most attractive character in the whole tangle. When he reached his first manhood, in his sixteenth year as the custom then was, his mother was persuaded to hand over her claim to him, and swiftly he gained greater support than she ever had. Dormaidh himself, eager to end the disruption, offered him joint succession with Barech; but Barech, for the first time in his life, objected violently. He threatened Keryn's life, and swore bloody retribution against the least man who supported him. Civil war now began to seem inevitable when Dormaidh died, if not sooner, and men on either side began to arm and prepare, and break off what slight contact they had kept with their opponents; towns on one side or the other hounded out minorities lest they launch a surprise attack, and murders and brawls began to multiply. This prospect, on top of the years of squabbling he had known, saddened and disgusted Keryn; and the news of the advancing Ice brought by northern refugees, remote as it seemed to most, filled this far-sighted prince with alarm for the future. He was in the mood to find some new alternative, when one presented itself.
Mariners had long suspected the existence of another land across the oceans; wide-ranging fishermen claimed to have fished off its shores, though none had dared to land. Now some bold Svarhath shipowners, desperate for new profits after some fourteen years of decaying trade, set out to find it in earnest. One party succeeded, after great privations, and returned to tell of a vast new land of forests and high mountains, wild and uninhabitated as far they could tell, but fertile and full of promise. Most significantly of all, it was relatively untroubled by the Ice. For Keryn that was enough, and he resolved to seek out a new home in this land. To Dormaidh and Barech he sent a defiant challenge, saying that though he asserted his birthright still, he preferred to extend his realm rather than lay it waste with war; since the folk must be divided, let those who favoured his cause come with him to settle this new land. If Dormaidh would not hinder any who wished to go, but would assist them with ships and resources, then, rightfully or not, he might rule those who remained. Dormaidh accepted this with relief, for he too hated the prospect of war; he ignored the wrath of Barech, who foresaw, rightly, that many would desert the land rather than face his rule, shrinking his inheritance and injuring his pride. In fact, many even among his own supporters were piqued by the idea, and the taste of adventure; and the number who responded surprised even Keryn. Men and women of every quality, of every allegiance and faction joined with him, until the size of the expedition began to alarm Dormaidh; but by then events had gathered momentum, and there was little he could do. Barech's attempt to deter recruits by threatening the kin they were leaving behind simply swelled their numbers further, as he might have expected, and led to open conflict between Dormaidh and himself. In the end, some five years later, it is said that more than a fifth of the entire Penruthya population of Kerys chose to follow Keryn, and close to half the Svarhath; and the majority of these were able-bodied folk in their prime years, so that the loss to the land was far greater. Many more would have come, if they could have hoped to survive the voyage. More ships were needed than the land could possibly dispose of; and it may well be that the great clearing of forests began at this time, and that the timber taken was never fully replanted. There is no reason to doubt the chronicles' picture of the fleet at last assembled on the shores below the Gate, darkening the ocean and stilling its waves by the very number of its hulls; the number of people who sailed in them is harder to be sure of. But since at that time Kerys was mightier and better peopled than when Elof and Roc came there, it is possible that a hundred thousand at least set sail with Keryn that day, and like him looked their last upon the beacon of the Gate until even its last wisp of smoke had vanished utterly beneath the remorseless horizon.
It was a blow from which, perhaps, Kerys never quite recovered. Soon after the sailing Barech, supported by many who were suffering its consequences, raised a rebellion against Dormaidh and toppled him. He became king, and his heirs after him, and save for one act of cruelty he was not as bad a ruler as his beginning had promised; his worst fault was a certain weakness and indecision, which had perhaps been seen in Dormaidh also, and inability to restrain the warring factions. Yet it is not unlikely that he did indeed represent some altered strain in the Ysmerien. For though after him, as before, there were kings strong and weak, good and less good, that indecisive nature appeared more and more often, till in the end the kings were reduced to puppets of their powerful warlords and marshals, and were at the last overthrown by one such of the Lonuen line, who took their place; and his great-grandson was Nithaid.
That act of cruelty was significant. It is said that Barech took Dormaidh to the shore and mockingly sent the defeated regent and a few close companions to sea in an ill-equipped hulk, bidding
them also seek new kingdoms to conquer. Cruel as this was to a man very likely his own father, it is possible to understand the grievance he bore. The land was cruelly impoverished by losing so many, and the nature of its people changed. The Svarhath in particular dwindled from that time, becoming a far smaller adjunct to the Penruthya than they were anywhere in the new lands save only Kerbryhaine; and without them, as Elof suspected, Kerys began to follow the same downward slope. Together, both strains added up to a great people; but with their mutual influence removed, each followed their own particular downward paths, into harsh and demoralized decadence or sullen rusticity respectively. Clearly some more radical blending was needed in them both; and it may be that it was this, harsh as it seemed, that the downfall of all their lands in the ending of the Long Winter provided.
Of the fortunes of the folk of Kerys in its immediate aftermath a little is known, for one or two fortunate ships still managed to escape across the oceans to Morvanhal in the years that followed. Relatively few lives were lost, for in the wake of that unnatural winter a sudden and balmy summer followed, and a sudden explosion of growth. The Wild Lands, to which most in the north had escaped, took flower and fruited, and rough patches could be cleared and sown here and there, and shelters built against the coming winter; in the south the jungle also provided some food. So few if any starved; but the life they clung to was hard, with hardly a trace of its former luxury, or even of civilization. The duergar might have helped, fallen as they too were; but the gulf between them and men was grown too wide. Objects of fear they were and remained to -he sundered folk. Of the north the last that was heard, a generation later, spoke of a reversion to the levels of the stone age; and of the south, nothing. In so short a time was the glory of that land brought at last to the dust; yet against the span of time, even all the millennia of its rise and fall seem little longer, and are swallowed up in that greater river so thoroughly that they might as well never have been.
Languages
The tongues of Kerys were, like its peoples, very close to those of their kin in Brasayhal, and more has been said of these in earlier appendices. However, they were less close than would appear from the text of the chronicles, and it is likely that Roc and Elof had a great deal more trouble making themselves understood than the account suggests. The grammar of both versions of Penruthya appears to have remained substantially intact over the long period of their separation; but such matters as word termination had altered drastically, and even the meanings of many common words. The accents also had changed; Roc had the advantage here, for Elof s clear Northern accents sounded alien to the Penruthya, though not unpleasant, and startlingly august to northerners such as Trygvar. It was as if an Englishman of today were addressed by a fine speaker of Shakespeare's English. The Northern tongue had changed less, for its speakers had become an extreme minority, and as minorities do they guarded their tongue jealously, hugging it close to them and teaching and using it with meticulous care.
Arcane Beliefs and Arts
Of these also much else has been said earlier; but some points arise only in the Book of the Armring. In Kerys, for example, the probable origin of the River as a concept of time and the cycles of the world, and as a border and barrier to the land of the dead, are best seen, for to the first men who looked upon it that awesome flow must have seemed like the bounds of the world indeed. At some later date, though, the Milky Way seems to have become identified with the metaphysical River, and been given the same name. But by Kermorvan's day it was no longer seriously thought of in that sense, save by the least educated of folk, and the River had become a wholly philosophical concept. Yet nevertheless, that misty streak across the night skies persisted as a symbol of potent meaning, at least as significant as the Iceglow which seemed to be forever and futilely seeking to blot it out.
By that time the rather vague concept of reincarnation the peoples of Kerys favoured had coalesced, and for that also the River became a symbol. As something set afloat upon the Yskianas' waters would eventually find shore elsewhere, so might the returning spirit; unless it were weighted or dragged down. It is interesting that Elof is not made by the chroniclers to endorse that, as one might expect; but to declare his ignorance of it. Evidently they wished to stress that within this world even the Powers have bounds, for better or for worse.
Smithcraft
In the chronicles the nature of Elof s smithcraft is discussed and debated at every turn, as to whether it was an attribute of a human or a power; but this these present accounts could hardly reflect, without revealing more than Elof himself knew at the time. The conclusion come to is the one that Elof suggests in passing; that all smithcraft in humanity was a gift of the Powers, a counterbalance to what they knew its foes would one day hurl against it. Whether or not that gift was reclaimed or exhausted, or simply lies dormant for want of knowledge to awaken it, cannot be said. But Elof s case is clearer. Those who came before him had been more than human, and that was their glory and all too often their downfall; so Elof had, by the very nature of his mission, to be no more than human if he was to succeed. So though the power he had was great, it must have been no more than the most a human might have had, albeit an exceptional one; or, more probably, it was as great as any human might have found within himself, had he only the will to awaken it.
It was a great endowment; yet without the dedication to learn its uses and the skills to exploit them, it would have been meaningless. It was in these that Elof s true achievement lay, and in these that his mastery truly surpassed any other of that time. Certainly the materials and processes he used, though mysterious, are not wholly beyond our own comprehension.
The mirror-shields seem to have been no more than some light and hard alloy, perhaps upon a bracing frame of wood or metal tube. Their chiefest subtlety lay in their shape which caught and concentrated the sun so well, and in the truly mysterious influence that held them in such unison both as shieldwall and as solar mirror. Such tight coordination and focussing is the problem which bedevils modern solar furnaces; they are capable of astonishing temperatures, such is the power the sun sheds upon us, but are very clumsy at concentrating it. Nevertheless there is evidence that some part of this problem was solved in ancient times. The Greek philosopher Archimedes, among the defences he created for his home city of Syracuse, is said to have fired enemy ships by just such a burning-glass, a feat historians have long sneered at because of the problems such mirrors involve. But recently a more practical archaeologist realised that he might have used the long Greek shields, highly polished, and tried an experiment with some twenty modern replicas of these, representing quite a good-sized area of reflector. Under the noon sun their combined beams were well able to set afire the timbers of a boat moored in the harbour. Elof s shields represented a surface thousands of times greater, and much more carefully and uniformly shaped. In such greater numbers and more skilfully shaped, and with their beams concentrated by the mastershields into near-perfect intensity, they must have achieved astonishing temperatures. It is ironic that the Ice's ultim-ate plan was to raise the world's albedo and so reflect away the life-giving solar energy; for Elof simply reflected it back at them.
That fine fibre of which both Gorthawer and his wings were shaped is rather more mysterious to our eyes. Yet essentially it was almost certainly more refinement of carbon or graphite fibres, many varieties of which we can produce under a very great and sustained heat; and of such a heat, in his day, some kinds of lava-flow would have been an adequate source. Such fibres depend for their remarkable properties upon their crystalline structure, and the ability the duergar taught him to study this under heat must have given him wide control over them. This, incidentally, the chronicles speak of as if it was a natural ability; but more probably he made use of some device, and his own subtlety lay in the true interpreting of it. For in this, as in all else, he was as he wished his friends to think him, a man only.
Such signposts as he left himself, all those generations past, would
have been meaningless as his power without the will and daring to exploit them, and the sheer disregard of himself. Had he not shed his old life willingly, it is likely his labours, and most of all those in the furnace would have curtailed it, or at any rate brought on him a miserable and suffering old age; but the greater flame that burned within him spared him that.
THE DUERGAR
In the Book of the Sword some brief glimpses remain of the Duergar people at what, in these latter years, was very probably their peak. In the Book of the Helm their decline and disappearance is hinted at; and in the Book of the Armring its progress is seen. They were undoubtedly a very ancient folk, and equally a very strange one by the standards of ordinary men. To grasp something of how alien they were, one needed only consider a race who were aware of many of the possibilities of science and technology, up to and including some grasp of the structure of matter and the potential energies it could unleash; yet who chose not to pursue or exploit that knowledge. Neither their dwelling underground, nor their characteristic physical shape, can set them further apart from men than that; for they were enough like us to interbreed, and they had not always dwelt beneath the earth. Some of them could understand men, and even become friends with them and more, as has been seen; in the end, as the world changed about them, many united with men, and brought with them their many virtues. But these were always a small minority. Ildryan, as he is shown to us, is much more characteristic of the majority of duergar, a cold and remote personality, with his concept of ethics governed by payment and return, even in a forced bargain. Elof s assessment of him shows how well he understood these people, for reasons that he could not have realised at the time. It is ironic that, when he first sought their help, he was himself, without knowing it, demanding a quid pro quo; for it was to the Power he had once been that the whole race owed its very survival.
The Hammer of the Sun Page 53
