The Crow (65 page)

As in the previous books,
The Naming
and
The Riddle,
these notes are intended to fill in a little background for those readers curious about the societies and cultures of EdilAmarandh, and are intended as complementary to the earlier appendices. In the first and second books of Pellinor, I outlined a short history of Edil-Amarandh and the Bardic institutions of Annar, and also looked briefly at the different peoples and societies encountered in the narrative. Those interested in the provenance and powers of the Speech and the Elidhu might also wish to consult my introductions to these fascinating subjects in the previous books.

I am very conscious as I write this of my limited ability to keep up with all the available work in Annaren studies, one of the fastestgrowing areas of contemporary scholarship. Translation of the Annaren scrolls and research into their implications in diverse fields of academic disciplines continues apace – most notably under the auspices of the University of Queretaro, which is currently leading the way in scholarship and publications, though many other institutions are contributing to our growing understanding of Edil-Amarandh. My thanks are due to all those whose work and conversation have enriched my understanding.

Once again, as an invaluable introduction to the field for the general reader I recommend Jacqueline Allison's pioneering study of the histories of Edil-Amarandh,
The Annaren Scripts: History Rewritten.

A Brief Introduction To The Suderain And Amdridh

The Suderain was the largest of the Seven Kingdoms, and for many eons the most powerful in influence, knowledge, and wealth. It was closely aligned, politically, economically, and culturally, with the coastal realm of Amdridh, and together these two kingdoms dominated the south of Edil-Amarandh. The autonomy of the Seven Kingdoms and their ability to resist the depredations of both the Nameless One and the Kings of Annar after the Restoration was due in great part to the ancient independent power of these two great southern realms.

The Suderain comprehended the major cities of Turbansk, Baladh, and Jerr-Niken, all famous centers of Bardic Lore and Knowing, which themselves had close ties to the Amdridh Schools of Zimek and Car Amdridh.

The almost total lack of archaeological artifacts and sites that is the great frustration of Annaren studies can make some things hard to determine – the great and still largely unexplored trove of Annaren documents discovered in Morocco in 1991 still remains the single source of knowledge of Edil-Amarandh. Consequently, the question of whether Turbansk predates Afinil is currently a focus of some dispute among Annaren authorities. Certainly, some fiercely disputed dating
¹
of the extant documents seems to point to the Suderain scrolls being among the oldest of those discovered, which suggests that its claim to be the first School in Edil-Amarandh may be not entirely unfounded. There is reason to believe that Turbansk was built at around the same time as the great Howes of the Pilanel in Zmarkan.
²

Among the many literary treasures uncovered in the past few years are some tantalizing fragments of what is undoubtedly the most ancient epic poem in human history,
The Epic of Eribu.
The poem is written in Suderain, and claims to be a translation of a much older text dating back to the Inela – or pre-Dawn – Age, about a quest taken by the king of the ancient undergound city Nal-Ak-Burat in order to save his city from approaching destruction. Sadly, so little of the poem remains – and that itself is badly scored with elisions – that it is impossible to descry much more information about Nal-Ak-Burat than is available in the
Naraudh Lar-Chane,
where its mystery is its chief characteristic, and there is no trace so far of the original text from which the translation is made. However, it is now generally agreed that an ancient civilization existed in the Suderain that predated Turbansk and that appeared to have close links to, or perhaps even to worship, the Elidhu Nyanar.

Although so far no records have been found of the fate of the inhabitants of Nal-Ak-Burat, some linguists argue that it is probable that their descendants were the peoples who lived in the Neera Marshes in Maerad's time. One theory – that remains controversial, though in some quarters it is rapidly gaining credence – is that Savitir, Nazar, and Den Raven in the eastern Suderain were settled by nomadic tribes from the deserts to the south, who later founded NalAk-Burat. According to this model, the peoples who populated the area around the Lamarsan Sea and the Amdridh peninsula represent a completely different racial and linguistic group.
³
The theory is that the nomadic tribes spoke a language that later diverged into several distinct tongues, including the language spoken in Den Raven and by the tribes of the Neera Marshes. This ur-language (known as NAB-1) would explain the marked differences between classical Suderain and the languages spoken by the tribes of the Neera Marshes, and the otherwise puzzling relationships between the languages of the Neera Marshes and that of Den Raven, which suggest a common root language of which, so far, no record can be found.

The discovery of NAB-1 – and, one would hope, its subsequent decipherment – would resolve many controversies in Annaren studies, since so far arguments for its existence have depended wholly on secondary evidence. The fragmentary Suderain translations of
The Epic of Eribu
remain so far the most significant pieces of this fascinating puzzle; if a parallel text of the original could be unearthed, it would be as significant to our understanding of Edil-Amarandh as the Rosetta Stone was to deciphering hieroglyphs.

Comprehensive written records in the Suderain and Amdridh seem to have been kept from around A2200, when the Library of Turbansk – along with the Library of Thorold, one of the oldest in Edil-Amarandh – was founded by Bards anxious to keep the Knowing alive after the destruction of Afinil. The Library of Car Amdridh was founded around a century later, while those of the other southern Schools seem to date from after the Restoration. Unfortunately, very few of the southern records have survived; the Annaren Scrolls are generally agreed to have been the contents of the great library of Norloch which, although it held copies of what the Bards considered the most significant documents from all the Bardic Libraries, by no means reproduced the contents of all of them.

The Southern Monarchies

Both the Suderain and Amdridh were ruled by monarchs, respectively the Ernani of Turbansk and the Po of Car Amdridh.
⁴
The non-Bardic rulers in the other cities of the kingdoms were consuls, answerable to the Ernani or the Po. After the foundation of the School of Turbansk, the dual system of government that held sway through most of EdilAmarandh meant that the monarchs were equal in authority and power to the First Bards of Turbansk and Car Amdridh. Before the collapse of the Annaren monarchy in the Long Wars, and the subsequent conflation of the triple scepter of the Annaren Kingship into the role of the First Bard of Norloch, this situation made the First Bard of Turbansk the most politically powerful Bard in Edil-Amarandh.

The inheritance of the monarchies of Turbansk and Amdridh was in general determined by primogeniture, regardless of the sex of the oldest child. There were, however, exceptions; succession was ultimately determined by the reigning monarch, and in rare cases he or she bestowed the crown elsewhere among his or her children or, in the event that the monarch was childless, to another branch of the ruling family. Given this, and given also that neither the Ernani nor the Po married but instead chose a consort (sometimes, as in the case of HarYtan, a succession of consorts), it is perhaps surprising that there are no records of wars of succession like those that destroyed the Annaren monarchy. Perhaps the authority of the rulers was such that any decision of succession was considered unarguable; or perhaps the wealth of the Suderain and Amdridh, together with the strict application of the social rules of the Balance, gave the kingdom a stability the northern monarchy lacked. Certainly, many extant records claim as a matter of pride that even in times of famine and hardship – at the height of the struggle with the Nameless One during the Great Silence, for example – starvation and privation among the common people of the Suderain was almost unknown.
⁵
There is only one account of civil unrest against the monarchy: after Aleksil the Tyrant forcibly imposed crippling taxes to fund his luxurious court, he was overthrown in a bloodless coup in A1333 by a popular uprising that was, intriguingly, supported by the Bards of Turbansk. This underlines how crucial the support of the Bard Schools was to the maintenance of political power in Edil-Amarandh.

The Bards of the Suderain

Unlike Afinil, the Bard Schools of the Suderain were never destroyed in the millennium-long Great Silence after the conquest by the Nameless One. This meant that traditions of the Light in the Suderain had continued unbroken for some thousands of years, and that in the south the Reformation under Maninae had minimal impact – unlike in Annar, where the
Paur Libridha
(Maninae N23) was the most influential and authoritative text on the constitution of the Schools. The
Paur Libridha
was in many ways a reforming text, written out of an urgency to ensure that the Light was never threatened again as it had been during the Great Silence and, as Alannah Casagrande points out, some of its innovations – for one, the explicit outlawing of dialogue with Elementals – were never quite accepted in Schools in the Seven Kingdoms. In Thorold, for instance, where the people believed that they owed their defeat of the Nameless One's forces to the mountain Elidhu Lamedon, this proscription was quietly ignored.
⁶
The Suderain also continued to use the Afinil year count, rather then the Norloch count instituted by Maninae, but for clarity I will use the Annaren convention here.

The southern Schools were therefore run on southern lines, which sometimes led to conflicts between the northern and southern Bards. The most striking cultural difference between Annar and the Suderain was the persistence in the south of forms of worship of the Light (although Bards were seldom strongly associated with this) and, sometimes, of what appear to be Elemental figures. This is to say that a tradition of organized religion existed in the south that was completely unheard of in Annar, and was inflected subtly through Bardic culture. It is no accident that the mysticism of the Way of the Heart originated in Turbansk.
⁷

Another key – and perhaps, given the above, paradoxical – difference was in the considerable sophistication of what we would think of as scientific and mathematical discourses in the Schools of the south. Of course, given the constant communication between Bard Schools, the discoveries and theories of the southern Bards became influential in the north, but many documents attest to the fact that any Bard interested in these areas of the Knowing would travel south to study.

Jerr-Niken and Turbansk, in particular, were considered leading centers of theoretical exploration in mathematics and science, and we know that the Suderain Bards had a sure theoretical grasp of many surprisingly modern concepts. Although often practiced for its own sake, as part of the play of thought that was understood between Bards to be an expression of the Light, recent evidence also compellingly suggests that this knowledge was often applied practically: in medical techniques, for example, that show that the Bards had an accurate understanding of bacterial and viral infections, or in the field of astronomy. The science of optics was highly developed in Jerr-Niken and Turbansk, and researchers have unearthed star maps of considerable complexity, rivaling those of the astronomers of the Maya. It also appears that the southern Bards had developed a workable theory of evolution, and we know Malikil of Jerr-Niken theorized genetic inheritance in N755,
⁸
recording her meticulous observations of breeding and cross-pollinating ikil plants. Discoveries such as these allowed Intathen of Gent to theorize an evolutionary model of competing populations of species, using the game of Gis, a complex board game using counters, which was very popular among Annaren Bards.
⁹
Some scholars argue that the prevalence of the spiral or double helix in the artwork and even the architecture of the south (the floor plan of the Ernan of Turbansk, the great palace of the Ernani, was, for example, famously based on a two-dimensional representation of a double helix) suggests that the southern Bards were aware of the existence of DNA.

Many of the most interesting recent discoveries have been in the area of mathematics. The Suderain worship of Light led to intense Bardic studies of its properties, which in turn resulted in an early discovery of refraction. As early as A2500, Mulgar of Jerr-Niken described Snell's Law (that when light bends as it passes from one medium to another, the angles are related trigonometrically – the sine of the angle of incidence equals the sine of the angle of refraction). This meant that trigonometry and spherical geometry became a focus of mathematical thinking early on and led, among other things, to the precocious discovery two centuries later of Fourier Analysis by the mathematical genius Abin-Kan of Jerr-Niken. Abin-Kan's discovery, which he called
Edhi-Delar
(in the Speech, "light building") meant that Bards could represent any arbitrary shape in terms of an aggregation of simpler sinusoidal waves. Abin-Kan also, almost simultaneously, discovered that light is a wave, by means of a device very like Young's slit apparatus (a glass slide blacked by soot, with two lines scraped very close to each other). Together, these two discoveries permitted later Bardic thinkers to sketch out what appears to be a full mathematical basis for quantum mechanics, despite the fact that they had not made the physical hypotheses.