The Ekwesh Empire
In fact, of course, human beings are neither so simple nor so easily coerced, whatever the Ice may have believed. Even under that yoke at its worst the Ekwesh kept many natural human virtues the Ice could not suppress; these it had to contain by channelling them inwards. Love was limited to the closest of kindred only, and became a fierce and jealous thing, that many times led to a slaying when it was in any way baulked or betrayed; man and wife, father and children, were linked by a bond whose very strength and rigidity made it perilous. Loyalty and respect extended only to the tribe, and no further; intermarriage was possible, but the wife was seldom well regarded - nor, sometimes, the children. Those outside the family could command no affection; those outside the tribe might be
foes or allies, but never friends. Those who were not Ekwesh were only
potential victims or thralls; and thralls were scarcely human. An Ekwesh might father children upon a thrall woman; but those children would be marked thralls, and so also their children's children to the end of their line, even if all the fathers were Ekwesh, and the blood be almost pure. An Ekwesh woman conceiving by a thrall, if something so unthinkable were to happen, would be slaughtered out of hand, and her child with her, by her closest kin, as being unfit even for sacrifice. Yet even in this harsh society, individual Ekwesh still retained surprising depths. Some families, especially among the Ravens, had a tradition of treating their thralls humanely; and though this earned them the contempt of others, it often gained them greater labour, and so greater riches. For slaves have little to gain by working harder; but these wished their master to prosper, if only for their own protection. So, such masters often became rich and powerful, and some slight force for better ways.
However, there were stronger voices set against them. For the Ice had chosen its chief spokesmen with cunning; these were the shamans, the wise men of the tribes. From the earliest days it had recruited them and trained them in its cult, arming them with arcane knowledge and teaching them to enhance and develop the innate power that men of Kerys called smithcraft, but which the Ice claimed was its gift. From their association with the Ice they derived great prestige and authority, and from presiding over the atrocious rites it prescribed. Often they became the true rulers behind the tribal chiefs, who became mainly warleaders; but sometimes they became chieftains themselves. The one whom Elof first encountered in Asenby seems to have been of this breed, as also their younger captor in Morvannec.
It was under the influence of the earliest and most charismatic of these leaders, men trained by the Ice powers or even the powers themselves in human form, that the most savage tribes in the north of the land first began
to
link up. Sometimes by alliance, most often by conquest, they gathered into a few very large tribes under the name-totem of whichever group had made itself dominant. The strength of unity gave them greater mastery of their land, and their numbers began to increase rapidly. Soon they were outstripping the land's ability to support them; and under the pressure of the Ice and the goading of necessity they began to raid their most southerly neighbours to live, and at last press down into their land. So the pattern of the Ekwesh expansion - grow, raid and then settle to grow again - was set in motion, and for a thousand years it did not change; the same process drove them over the seas to the Westlands and overland to Kerys.
Some of these southern tribes had abandoned a nomadic existence and developed the beginnings of agriculture, and the Ekwesh were not slow to see that this was a surer way of gaining food. But it posed a problem. To them hunting and warfare were proper occupations for men, and the practise of crafts; gathering was woman's work, at best, and the drudgery of cultivation inconceivably demeaning, not to say impossible for a nomad. So, perhaps with guidance from the Ice, their attitude began to change; instead of butchering their adversaries outright, they made thralls of them, and set them to produce food. They themselves remained semi-nomadic, and developed that mode of life to great heights; they moved as overlords between these communities of thrall sessors, still nomadic and free. They would oversee a planting and return to oversee the harvest, leaving the thralls to cultivate the land meanwhile, knowing that if they slacked or failed their masters would consume their own food, and perhaps them also. Though unusual, this society was a recognisable, if more extreme version of the periodic "taxing" rounds levied by the Rus of Kiev or the Norwegian Vikings upon the Slav towns of the interior, as described by the warrior Ohtere (Ottar) who visited the court of Alfred the Great. The Ekwesh, however, carried it further, extending the same principle to mines and shipyards, and even small manufactories and market towns; the thralls became almost a mercantile subclass, but always at the mercy of their fundamentally less civilised overlords. Any development more advanced, however, was always held back by the Ekwesh's understandable fear of giving thralls
too
much power, as the Spartans feared the Helots; and this goes some way to explain the Ekwesh's instant hatred of more civilised lands such as Kerys or Morvannec, or even rural Nordeney. To them they represented what might happen when thralls got out of hand, and were to be subjugated as soon as possible lest they set their own thralls a bad example. Any awe or impression civilization might have made upon them, that fear, encouraged no doubt by the Ice, swallowed up.
Up to that point, however, the Ekwesh prospered. The surpluses created increased their population still further, and redoubled their need to expand. By now many of their remaining neighbours, who were mostly along the eastern seaboard, saw what was coming, and fled oversea, or even, in desperation, over the Ice. These were the hapless fugitives who poured into Nordeney only a brief time after the Svarhath refugees from Morvan, and made common cause with them. Those who did not flee were swiftly overwhelmed. But as the Ekwesh ran out of land and neighbours to conquer, they ran into their first serious check; and it was one of the Ice's own making. It had bred the Ekwesh to be its conquerors, spreading savagery over the other realms of men; but for them to expand into those realms they had to achieve some degree of unity, some semblance of empire, or organise their armies. And it was precisely those aspects of human nature which make unity possible that the Ice had suppressed. The tribes had always fought one another, making and breaking alliances as the moment's advantage dictated; but for centuries it had been chiefly their thralls who suffered, and that too drove the Ekwesh outwards. A defeated tribe would lose some possessions, then seek to conquer some more. But now, with none left to conquer, save far off over unknown lands and seas, they were beginning to turn on each other in savage earnest. The ties of common kinship had been made too slack to restrain them. The Ice had to tighten its grip somehow, and force unity upon them; and to do so it sought to rely upon the influence it had long wielded over men, the sheer superstitious awe it could evoke.
The Hidden Clan
The Hidden Clan, therefore, which came into being around this time, seems to have been wholly a development of the Ice, a secret blood-brotherhood of chosen shamans and shaman-chieftains from all the tribes, in which the bonds established through elaborate ordeal and ceremonial, and reinforced by shared purpose, overrode the limited interests of individual tribes. In this it somewhat resembled the intertribal "freemasonry" practised among the Australian aborigines, being signified by elaborate patterns of cicatrice scars, but in a much more organized form, and wholly sinister in its practises and aspirations. At first, as its name suggests, it had to remain secret, so strong was the intertribal distrust; many members were lynched outright by their own followers. But as time passed and the benefits of some degree, at least, of coordination between tribes became clearer to the ordinary clansmen, membership commanded first tolerance and then respect and fear. Many initiates came to display and even to vaunt their status as a point of pride, by negative means such as bearing an abstract pattern (perhaps with an arcane meaning) instead of their totem. Lesser men began to copy them, and such secret societies grew up at a lower level between the tribes, but without seriously affecting the barriers between them; when there was conflict, tribe still told over society almost every time.
It was the Hidden Clan that organised the armies that crossed the Ice to begin the centuries of campaign against Kerys, and a century or two later developed the arts of shipbuilding and sailing that sent the black ships raiding oversea on the trail blazed by the fugitives, to assail the Westlands of Kerbryhaine and Nordeney. These were achievements; but they were slow in coming, many times hindered by intertribal jealousy and strife, even within the Clan itself. Some lesser clans, of which the Ravens were the most significant, distrusted its domination by the larger tribes, and held aloof. The Hidden Clan and its imitators were an imper-feet means to an end, and the Ice was forever in search of something better. But none came, until the Mastersmith Mylio appeared on the scene.
The Mastersmith's Design
Over the centuries the Ice had seduced a number of men to its side, including smiths of greater power than he; but never before such a scholar. His fanatical energy drove him to acquire the greatest library of any man living at his time, to seek ancient knowledge among the duergar, and among the Ekwesh themselves, at his continual peril. This he found, as the Book of the Sword recounts, chiefly from observation and study of the subtle ways in which the shamans had refined the magecraft taught them by the Ice to help them control their folk. He synthesized this knowledge with others, as the shamans could not do; and he applied it to human minds with a finesse the Ice could never match. So he conceived the mindsword; and so, equally, his inability to forge such a thing. He sought one who could do the work for him, leaving only the last and simplest for him to complete; but when he tricked Elof into doing so, he was startled by the boy's ability to complete it, and even more so by the power Of the result. With such a force in his hands he set out to second-guess his masters, and rather than turning the sword over to Louhi, leaving him no more than a useful appendage, to unite the Ekwesh under his own leadership, making him indispensable. Almost certainly he hoped to gain status among the powers, even to be made one of them; for such promises they often made to their useful dupes, producing images of the dead as proof. If so, it was a deluding hope, for they were only the mindless shades of Taoune, constructs of memories with no controlling intelligence at their heart save the rebel powers. But those who wished to believe were easy to delude, and the Mastersmith undoubtedly won great status by uniting the Ekwesh; Louhi may have-meant to keep him alive, at least, or to bring him more securely under her domination. The changes in him, that eerie "bleaching" may have been caused by some spiritual exhaustion of his powers in Louhi's service, but equally they may have been intended to change his body, to fit him for life in a cold environment as Tapiau altered men for the forests. For there are living things even today that may survive in such conditions, icefish for example that live in freezing water, by having no haemoglobin in the blood; and they have just that white and pallid look.
He had undoubtedly earned some reward, if reward this was; for it was he who, as the old chieftain told Elof and Kermorvan, first united the tribes into a single solid fighting force. And, ironically, it was an achievement that his death only reinforced. When Elof destroyed him and the mindsword together the sudden slackening of the sword's hold on their minds, added to the sheer shock of seeing one they had thought a demigod slain and cast down, caused the Ekwesh to flee in panic. But such was the humiliation of this that for the first time it gave the tribes a common cause strong enough to outweigh their mutual mistrust, the more so as Louhi played upon it. When less than two years later the elite troops of the Hidden Clan, to a man chieftain's and shaman's sons from many tribes, were wiped out in Morvannec, she had no trouble in bringing them together at last. Even the Ravens, who still scorned the Hidden Clan, and had never shared in the assaults on the Westlands or the madness of the mindsword, joined in the oaths to avenge that defeat; and without the witness of Raven himself even Elof probably could not have swayed them. With Kara to set their hearts ablaze with battle-fury the Ekwesh were in Louhi's grip as much as they had ever been in the Mastersmith's; and when that grip broke many a mind and heart among them shattered with it, and the old hierarchy of the tribes was broken for ever.
The Aftermath
In the time that followed, the fate of the Ekwesh became joined once again to that of other men. The Ravens became more humane as the influence of the fee over them dwindled; but they kept much of their stern pride, and gathered the other Ekwesh who joined them under their sway. They posed Kermorvan something of a problem in settling them among his own folk, but to him and his line they remained fiercely loyal, and never forgot that allegiance. As the generations passed they mingled increasingly with their ancient foes, and in particular with the Northerners who resembled them; but their blood was always the hardiest and best suited to life in the increasingly harsh conditions of the declining land. They came to dominate it, until it was in the end wrested from them, with cruelties as great as any the Ekwesh practised; but that, alas, is the way of men, in which the Ice was not wholly mistaken. In the areas of that land they settled longest, some echoes of that terrible time may still linger; for there it is said of some tribes that they once earned a dark name among their neighbours, peaceful, hunter-gatherers and fishers for the most part, for dark practises, grim pride, fell magic, the taking of thralls and the eating of man's flesh. Today there is so little evidence of this that it has been disputed; and it may be that such tales are simply an ancestral memory, harking back to times more remote than any can now imagine. In their own homeland, so far as can be told, their empire fragmented and fell apart far more swiftly, for most of those who had held it together perished in the Battle of the Gate, or subsequently. Every major clan was shorn of at least half its leaders, generally the more energetic and fanatical ones, and its most accomplished and dedicated warriors; and from those who remained the grip of the Ice was lifted. At first, perhaps, there was little outward change in their way of life; but as the years passed and new generations arose, and it became clear that the Ice was retreating, the old concerns soon lost their force, and the fierce energy waned. The remaining shamans lost much of their power and dominance; hierarchies of tribe and clan withered, and the barriers between master and thrall softened. Little by little the realm fragmented as the rising sea swallowed its coasts, and the Ekwesh as a people fragmented with it. Many still sailed over sea to Nordeney, but as settlers rather than reivers; and it is from them, through the tenuous links to the East, that the last was heard of the once-feared Ekwesh realm. All else was silence; but those lands have since been the cradle of many a formidable and conquering people, whose names have become as great a byword for savagery in their time as the Ekwesh were in theirs. Yet they rarely deserved it quite so thoroughly as did the Ekwesh, and it may be that there also some faint memory of their forgotten ancestors has ridden before them like a ghostly banner. Which, perhaps, is the memorial they would have wished.