The Gift (60 page)

After the wars, the Dhyllin settled the areas to the north later called Lirion and Imbral, and it is said in this time the
Dhillarearë
first appeared in Edil-Amarandh, but little is recorded until Afinil was first founded. This time is called the pre-Dawn, or Inela.

The Dawn Age dates from the Founding of Afinil, about a thousand years after the end of the Elemental Wars. Afinil was the first city founded and settled by the
Dhillarearë,
although they were by no means the only peoples who lived there. The city was founded by the great Bard Nelsor, who among other things invented letters, and was the first to write down and formalize the Speech. The script he invented was still the one most commonly used by Bards more than four thousand years later.
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Afinil was never a city of Kings, but of Bards, and it was built between Lirimal and Inchan, the major cities of the realms of Lirion and Imbral. Its site is long lost, but it was on the shores of a lake that was said to be so deep the stars were reflected there even in the daytime: the Ilimican, or Mirrormere. Afinil was reputed to be the most beautiful city ever to have been built in Edil-Amarandh and it became a center of high learning and culture. There were established great singing halls and libraries, and it was famous for its gardens and terraces, which were said to perfume the air for miles around.

This was the first great flowering of the Light. Afinil prospered for many years, and as it prospered, so did its surrounding lands. Bards began to travel widely, and found their kin in many places: most notably in Turbansk to the south, an ancient city founded before the end of the Age of Elementals, and also in the lands to the west, along the coast of Edil-Amarandh. People moved east as well over the Osidh Annova and established the Kingdom of Indurain in the fertile lands they found there.

The first sign of trouble occurred in A1567, when Sharma, the King of Dén Raven, a small mountainous realm to the south, traveled to Afinil and demanded tuition, offering gifts of gold and jewels. The Bards, who valued such things only for what beauty they found in them, laughed and gave him tuition for nothing. “What is the cold light of a gem next to the living Light?” asked Gel-Idhor, First Bard of Afinil, when Sharma approached him. “Nay, keep thy jewels.” Sharma, who was proud and quick-tempered, was deeply offended by the Bards’ gentle mockery; but he concealed his anger and bent his mind to study.
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Very soon it was apparent that Sharma was the most precociously talented Bard seen in Afinil since the days of Nelsor. He studied in particular the making of things of power, and also the mysteries of binding, and he was very curious about Arkan, the Ice Witch, and spent much time speaking with the Elidhu who came to Afinil of the history of those wars; but he concealed his intent. It only became clear later that Sharma was interested in making himself immortal and as powerful as the Elidhu, who could not be killed. There were those in Afinil, including the Lady Ardina, who were disturbed by Sharma’s questioning and did not trust his ambition, and who counseled against his education; but the Bards did not see why their Lore should be kept from such an apt pupil, and such disquiet was brushed aside.

When Sharma had made himself the most powerful Bard in Edil-Amarandh, he returned to his own kingdom; and it was then that he made the Spell of Binding that cast aside his Secret Name and ensured that he would never pass through the Gates to the Uncircled Open of Death.
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This was a great blasphemy; for a Bard to so challenge the Laws of Balance was unprecedented. The casting away of his Name and his abjuration of Death signaled the beginning of the grievous wars that ended, five hundred years later, in the overthrow of Afinil and the utter defeat and destruction of Lirion and Imbral and all the Lore and beauty that had existed there.

After he cast off his Secret Name, Sharma was called the Nameless One. He attracted followers, to whom he promised unending life and absolute power, and many Bards went to his side, betraying the Light; and these became Black Sorcerers, and were known as Hulls, for they were but the shells of Bards. The Nameless also made alliances with the remnants of the Elidhu who hated and feared the Light, most notably the Elidhu Karak, who held dominion over the realm of Indurain, east of the Osidh Annova, after the armies of the Nameless had destroyed it and slaughtered or enslaved those of the Dhyllin who had lived there.

The campaign of the Nameless One to overthrow the Light in Annar succeeded in A2041, when his forces overwhelmed the last desperate alliance of Lirion and Imbral on the Firman Plains near the Findol River. That defeat was the end of the Dawn Age, and the beginning of the Great Silence.

The Great Silence lasted from A2041 to A3234. At this time the Light retreated in hiding to the areas that later became known as the Seven Kingdoms: along the coast of Edil-Amarandh, and to the south. The Bards did not build cities or towns, and lived in great hardship, working always against the Dark; but they did not succeed in overthrowing the Nameless until the coming of Maninaë, heir of Laurelin, in A3157. Maninaë, a Bard, united resistance in the Seven Kingdoms and after many years — a story too complex to even begin to relate here — he succeeded in casting the Nameless off his throne and restoring the Light to Annar. He then became the first King in Norloch, and the first to rule over all Annar.

A new year-count, the Annaren Calendar, was then introduced. It was also called the Norloch Reckoning.

When peace was restored, Maninaë founded the citadel of Norloch and the system of the Schools. Twenty-five Schools were founded across Annar and the Seven Kingdoms, and roads were built across the country to allow free movement between all of them. At this time more areas of Annar were settled, although there were large regions of wilderness in the center of the land, and Edil-Amarandh was always a continent more thickly populated near its coast than at its center.

Once again there was a great flowering of Bardic culture, and the tenets of Afinil were restored. But Maninaë also gave thought to martial strategies, and the culture of Norloch was warlike, unlike that of Afinil. For Afinil had never been a city of Kings, and although all Bards were routinely trained in the arts of the sword, they never gave them especially high honor.

The Restoration lasted for 300 years. After that came a period of consolidation, called the Middle Years, in which all the Arts flourished in peace and harmony. At about the year N720 came the first promptings of disquiet, and also the last King; for the heirs to the throne made war on each other in an argument about succession, and in the strife the ruling line of Norloch was destroyed. The Seven Kingdoms at this time revised their alliances with Norloch and restated their autonomies.

After this, the Bards ruled alone in Norloch, incorporating into the authority of the White Flame the triple scepter of the Kings of Norloch; and after the destruction caused by the rivalries of Kings, it seemed to some this was better, and that the Bards, constrained by their vows to the Light and the Balance, would rule more wisely. But there were others who said this was a distortion of the Balance; and they also pointed out that women were no longer placed in authority in Norloch, as they continued to be in most other Schools, and saw this as another symptom of imbalance.

Gradually, over the next two hundred years, it became clear that things were amiss in Annar. The fortresses in Dén Raven were rebuilt, and the sorcerer Imank made war on the Suderain, although he was fiercely resisted. There were other signs of imbalance: the White Sickness, never seen before, began to ravage parts of Annar, and some Schools began to be estranged from their people, demanding high tithes and begrudging their services, which caused an enormous loss of the Bards’ prestige in many parts of Annar, and sometimes outright and violent resentment. There were more frequent sightings of wers and other servants of the Dark, and for the first time since the Restoration, Hulls were seen in Annar. More disturbingly, some Bards began to report a disturbance in the Speech itself, which they found impossible to express, but which troubled them deeply; they said that it seemed to them the Speech was losing its ancient virtue. However, it was not until the School of Pellinor was sacked and burned to the ground in N935, followed by Baladh and Jerr-Niken in the south within the next four years, that a few Bards began to suggest that the Nameless One had at last returned.

ANNAR, sometimes called the Inner Kingdom, was the greater part of the continent of Edil-Amarandh, and was generally held to be that land south of the Lir River, west of the Osidh Annova (the Mountains of the Earth) and north of the Southern Deserts.

The Seven Kingdoms were smaller, situated in a loose ring around Annar along the western coast: from the north, they were Lirhan, Culain, Ileadh, the Isle of Thorold, Lanorial, Amdridh, and the Suderain. The Suderain was close to the realm of Dén Raven — sometimes called the Lost Kingdom — a poisoned country that was the stronghold of the Nameless One, and that continued to be the biding place of Hulls and his surviving servants even after his defeat by Maninaë the Great and the Restoration of the Light in Annar.
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Maninaë united all of the Seven Kingdoms under one rule for the first time after the Nameless One was thrown down, ushering in a long peace. Maninaë was unusual in that he was both a King and a Bard, although in him the Barding was not strong and he forswore Barding when he became King. With one other exception, the Kings and Queens of Norloch had never been Bards; and this was considered a crucial element of the Balance.

The Monarch’s authority over the Seven Kingdoms was extremely limited, and was freely given rather than asserted by force; the situation parallels more closely an alliance of city-states and the loose autonomous regions surrounding them. It is telling that the only name for the whole continent was the extremely archaic Edil-Amarandh, which dated from before the Dawn Age, and that this name was seldom used. The unity of Edil-Amarandh was a result of the influence of Barding, rather than any enforcement under Kings. The Bards were also a source of the relatively loose hierarchies in Edil-Amarandh; since a Bard might come from anywhere, even the poorest of communities, it was entirely conceivable — and commonly happened, especially in the first centuries after the Restoration — that the lowest might hold sway over the Wise.
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The regions were called kingdoms, but they were not strictly kingdoms or principalities in the generally accepted sense. This was because of the dual authorities of Barding and ruling authorities, both of which shared governance of their various peoples, and which by their complex nature mitigated against absolute rule. Over many years this evolved into a complex political and social system, differing in each region, of mutually interdependent autonomous structures. It appears that in many Fesses — the regions around the Schools — and other regions there operated a variation of democracy: stewards were elected by popular vote, and all adults over twenty-five, no matter what their social status, had the right to vote. Only the monarchy operated on a system of hereditary rule, and many Bards saw this as a primitive system, tracing from this “original sin” the subsequent demise of the monarchy.
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However, it has to be admitted that the monarchy, within its limited powers, governed over a peaceful kingdom for several centuries before it degenerated into civil war.

The dual system — which only roughly parallels the medieval division of secular and religious power between church and state, although it is a tempting syllogism — was considered to be at its most ideal in the community of the Dhyllin, where Bards and the community lived and worked closely together, to their mutual benefit and pleasure. It was not in practice always ideal, and at times disagreements or rivalries led to bickerings and even war, sometimes between Bards and monarchs, sometimes between rival regions. All such occurrences were regarded by the Wise as a corruption of the Light.
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