Flora and Fauna:
It is an indication of the slow effect of the Ice, despite the "compression" of climatic zones mentioned earlier, that so much of the life in these lands was little different from recent forms—except that in many ways it was richer. What the Ice could not do, the settlements of men have achieved. So, many plants and animals mentioned in the Chronicles are easily identified and need no comment; they are much the same as modern forms inhabiting these areas, or similar areas elsewhere. This last is particularly true of regions like the Marshlands, whose sharp and sinister black rushes
(Juncus gerardii
and
roemerianus)
survive to torment walkers in many modern Saltmarshes. But even a slightly colder climate can dramatically alter habitats, and many strange creatures found places among these lands that now dwell elsewhere, or have vanished altogether.
The Creatures of the Ice:
As to the strange and fearful beasts unleashed by the Ice, little can be said with certainty. If they were not created by it, they were distorted and ruined, a living mockery and vengeance upon life itself. It is significant that the Chronicles give them names in the tongue of the duergar, who knew them of old; the dragon they called
arachek
, the giant lizard-thing
akszawan
. It is some witness to the terror they wielded that recognizable images of both name and beast yet survive in the folklore of what were once the Northlands. The same, let it be said, is true of Amicac, the Sea Devourer; but terror though he was, he was no servant of the Ice.
Domesticated Plants and Animals:
The Chronicles give us relatively little detail about most of these—whether the "goats" on the duergar's mountain pastures were some kind of mountain goat or sheep, for example. But in one or two cases it is possible to say more.
Horses These may have been a breed imported from Kerys, which did not survive the great changes that were to come. But a reference in one place to a stiff mane, and elsewhere to a small size, suggests that some, at least, were the primitive native breed, which probably resembled Przewalski's horse; it spread through these lands and into the far south, but became wholly extinct before modern times.
Cattle (Chapter i) The cattle the boy Alv herded resembled no modern breed. Indeed, their immense size and span of horns suggest that they were a very early domestication of the giant wild cattle, the aurochs; this only became extinct in 1627, and all domestic cattle are descended from it. It is interesting that the rare semi-wild cattle of the Chillingham breed, though much smaller, are this same off-white color; they are also so fierce as to be barely manageable without, perhaps, such a goad.
Wild Animals:
Carnivores (Chapter 2) The beasts that attacked the Mastersmith's party cannot be identified for certain. The description does not fit the commonest carnivores of the period,
Canis dims
, or dire wolves. More probably they were the rarer
Chasmaporthetes
, a relation of the hyena but with a build and dentition more like that of a cheetah.
Daggertooth (Chapter 2) Two beasts may have been known by this name—either
Smilodon
, the classic "saber-toothed tiger," or its slightly smaller relation
Homo-therium
. The "biting cat" that killed the large beaver
(Casteroides)
was probably a close ancestor of the puma.
Wisants (Chapter 4) Wisant or wisent is another name for the bison, then a newcomer to these lands and still evidently retaining its forest-dwelling habits. It was only after the end of the Long Winter that its descendants the buffalo spread out across the plains.
Hounds of Niarad (Chapter 9) These are correctly identified as whales. Their eerie songs reverberating through the hulls of small boats can still startle modern crews; they sing chiefly in calm water, though, not while hunting. Also, the description fits no known living breed. The elongated body twice the length of the boat (making it around sixty feet), the long jaws with large wide-spaced teeth, the dermal armor and apparent lack of any dorsal fin might, however, describe a member of the
Archae-oceti
, often called
zeuglodons
after their best-known member. These are an ancient family of whales parallel with, not ancestral to, modern forms, and believed to have been extinct for some millions of years. This would make them a startling anachronism in the relatively recent period of the Chronicles, but it is worth considering that creatures of serpentine shape are not uncommonly sighted at sea even yet.
Mammut (Chapter 9) The actual name used is
ksalhat
, but the old Russian form mammut has been substituted, as this beast sounds most like a species of woolly mammoth, probably
Mammuthus columbi
. Despite reconstructions showing it on snow-bound tundra, it was almost certainly a forest animal for most of the year. The sole doubt arises from the size of the beast described; some woolly mammoths were no larger than Indian elephants. It could instead have been some long-haired breed of mastodon. Several kinds were common in Brasayhal during the Long Winter, many larger than woolly mammoths, and the tusks of terrifying proportions. Interestingly enough, the Yukaghir tribes who today inhabit what must once have been part of the Ekwesh realm, still name the beast
xolhut
.
The Forests:
The coastal and giant redwoods
sequoia sempervirens
and
sequoiadendron giganteum
, seem to have dominated most of the western coastal forests at this period—as indeed they did until very recently. Understandably, therefore, the forests closely resembled those that survive there today, though naturally they lacked introduced species such as eucalyptus, whose fragrance floods modern woodlands. Then, they must have smelled largely of resiny evergreens, because beside the redwoods they had the almost equally gigantic cedars and firs found today, the bristlecone pine and many other kinds of evergreen; deciduous trees were a minority, but a substantial one. In northern areas, however, a kind of tree is described which can only be the so-called dawn redwood,
metasequoia
, an ancient cousin of the giants, and at about sixty feet high relatively small. It must already have been rare; until recently, when specimens were rediscovered in China, it was thought to have been long extinct.
Religion:
This is one of the hardest subjects to comment on, for although the peoples of Kerys were aware of forces at work in the world, feared some and respected others, they rarely turned to formal worship of either; when they did, it was usually to darker forces. These tendencies seem to have endured in their descendants.
By the time of the Chronicles, though, the settlers in the north were already losing their ancient knowledge of the powers, both favorable and hostile, and the will that lay behind them. That knowledge was absorbed into the animistic beliefs of the newcomers, more comprehensible to a simple peasant society, and relegated to folk legend. For example, the royal banner of the Lost Lands showed Raven flying across the sun, leading men to its light. But this eventually became transmuted to a tale of Raven stealing the sun for mankind, and so it has endured.
In the Southlands greater wisdom was preserved, but it had hardened—or fossilized—into patriotic and civic ritual. To a sophisticated Sothran such as Kermorvan an appearance of Raven would be like a statue stepping down off its pedestal, Athena appearing to Pericles.
Common to both countries, though, was a concept of afterlife they called the River. This they saw as a barrier to an afterworld beyond perception or return, except possibly by dark arts. That image may in part derive from the dark regions of tundra and taiga forest that always spread ahead of the Ice, lands crossed by a network of rivers icy with meltwater. For these were the realm and preserve of Taoune, and there the dead were ever to be found.
Ekwesh religion:
Though a full account of the Ekwesh society, and the strange forces at work within it, belongs in later volumes, some account of their religion should be given here; its blacker side was well known, but Kermorvan had evidently learned something more. In its original form it was the same simple animism as that of the other peoples of their land, but as the Ekwesh grew stronger their religion came to be dominated by the shamans who became powers in the clans second only to the chieftains; in some cases they wielded more real power. Their rites involved dancing to drums and ecstatic, visionary frenzies in which their pronouncements were regarded as oracular. At this stage they still retained some recognition and reverence of the powers, but a new element gradually began to intrude itself: the outright worship of the advancing Ice. This was organized as a kind of secret society or mystery religion among the upper echelons of the clans, to which only the elect and powerful were admitted, and it drastically changed the character of their society.
The cannibalism that made them so greatly loathed and dreaded was apparently an ancient custom, probably encouraged by the dwindling of food supplies as the Ice overran their lands. But originally it had been a funeral rite, intended to honor and perpetuate the dead by absorbing their wisdom and bravery. The new cult made it a rite of debasement and domination, battening on thralls. It fits the pattern of a society being systematically corrupted and turned against its neighbors. And, indeed, it appears that the Ice cult made deliberate use of even greater atrocities in its rituals to create a dark bond among its votaries and heighten their ruthlessness. Similar ideas have been attributed to recent cults, such as thuggee in India and the An-ioto and Mau Mau in Africa.
Smithcraft:
True smithcraft had a definite religious significance in the Northlands; smith's work was an act of secondary creation linking them to the shaping powers and their creator. Though by the time of the Chronicles it was somewhat taken for granted, it kept a great civic importance. The town smith was a privileged citizen, responsible more to his guild than the town authorities; he was usually the best-educated man in small villages, and through his journeyman's wanderings the most widely traveled. He would marry couples over his anvil, symbolically joining them as the rings he forged for them. Later he would name their children, and in the smaller towns might also give them an elementary education. Most smiths, though, remained little more than smiths, never achieving mastership. Those who did might simply be accomplished craftsmen, like Hjoran, but often they were already wealthy enough to rise above the day-to-day business of smiths, and devote themselves to civic affairs, fine art or even scholarship and natural philosophy; a few individuals, however, turned to personal ambition.
The people of Bryhaine regarded smithcraft as mere superstition, but nonetheless flocked to buy the work of northern smiths in preference to their own. Certainly it had a fixed base of ritual in the introduction of music, verse, pattern and shaping at various stages of the creative process; these were seen as expressing and harnessing the power or talent latent within the smith. Music or verse might come first. Music was generally held to be the more intense influence on the work, but for that reason the less finely controlled; the words gave direction to the intensity. The pattern caught and bound the influence thus expressed, and the completed shaping of the piece gave it the necessary identity.
In the duergar the power of true smithcraft seems to have been more evenly spread than in ordinary men, with fewer troughs and peaks among individuals. That, and the immense reserve of experience maintained in a long-lived and stable society, gave them an advantage. But a truly powerful human smith could often achieve much more, and create work of startling intensity, if only he had the skill.
True smithcraft did not automatically confer skill in working metal, but the greater the skill, the more it was intensified. And such skill there must certainly have been; in the years of the Chronicles, metalworking, especially among the duergar, reached heights that have barely been equaled. The making of Kermorvan's sword, as recounted in Chapter 7, is a fair summing-up of the process by which
bulat
steel was made, the secret of the ancient sword-smiths of Damascus; the oiled-silk patterns and the golden sheen were characteristic. That technique produced a carbon steel, combining elasticity with great strength, that even advanced industrial processes have not matched. The Damascus smiths did not understand how their process achieved this, and neither did modern researchers, until recently. Elof and his duergar master evidently understood it perfectly.
It is worth noting that metalworking long remained something of a separate and mysterious art, even in societies that had lost all memory of true smithcraft. Among the Touareg of North Africa, the smiths form a separate caste, in some ways inferior but respected in others; the curse of a smith is not taken lightly. And in our own society the village smith was a powerful figure in folklore, and especially folk medicine, a "kenning man" by virtue of his profession.
THE CHRONICLES
In Kerbryhaine the recording of history was something of a religious exercise, drawing moral guidance and lessons from the errors of the past, and it was probably some surviving aura of this that caused the Winter Chronicles to be preserved when so much else was lost, numinous things to be copied and recopied even when their meaning had entirely faded.