The Hammer of the Sun (69 page)

But it is said that on the morning King Keryn died, two black swans came to perch a brief while upon the heights of the palace, and then flew off to the southwest, filling the dawn air with cries that seemed not of sorrow, but of gladness. And the Chronicles affirm that two like them returned ever and again in later years, at the death of Roc and of all they had known, and of all the kings of Kermorvan's line, till at last the city was abandoned to the rising waters, and a lasting end was come of the days both dark and heroic of the long Winter of the World.

Appendix

Of the Land of Kerys, its form, nature and climate, and of its peoples and their several histories, such as are set forth in that volume of the Winter Chronicles called the Book of the Armring.

In reducing to a single tale the long span of years covered in the Book of the Armring, the many strands of lives and events that weave and intertwine throughout, the many details of people and places, much has had to be omitted, or told only from afar. For it was the Mastersmith Elof Valantor who proved, unknown even to himself, to be the prime mover in that troubled time, and his tale is the one that matters most. Also, as before, the authors of the Chronicles could scarcely help writing for their own times and their own folk; so, inevitably, they leave much unexplained that we no longer know, or explain at length matters we would today take for granted. This account cannot replace all that is missing, or has had to be curtailed; but it may at least paint in more detail the backdrop, like a remote and misty landscape, against which these events took place.

THE LAND

The land of Kerys, with which the Book of the Armring is principally concerned, was like no other in the world at that time, uniquely suited to provide a refuge for men against the ravages of the Long Winter, and a fit cradle for the birth of a great civilization. In form it was as Elof and Roc saw it, a river valley of immense size; in extent it must have been greater even than they realised, stretching at its widest some six or seven hundred leagues from the western oceans to its eastern margins, and from north to south over two hundred leagues at its widest. In former days, when it also included great regions of the hinterlands above its northern and southern walls, its area can only be guessed at; but these were gradually lost to the Ice, and to the desert that crept relentlessly northward, like its malign shadow. By the time of Elof s arrival the last of them had become the Wild Lands, home to none save the scattered remnants of the duergar.

The account given by Elof of the origin of Kerys is substantially correct; however, it had gone through many such changes before. Originally it appears to have been a low-lying landlocked basin, probably a barren desert, founded upon rock chiefly of granite and limestone types. It was held back from the oceans by a land barrier at its eastern end; grad-ually this was eroded away, until at last the seas came flooding in and over, in a waterfall of astonishing size and height. This probably created the ridge upon which the Gate was built; the shape depicted on surviving marginal sketches, though obviously much narrowed and steepened on its seaward side by men to make a defence, still suggests the shallow crescent typical of wide falls such as Niagara, or the awesome rockface, long dry, at Malham Cove in Yorkshire, England. The waters that poured over that fall turned the basin into an inland sea; but in the succession of Long Winters launched against the living world, enchaining more and more of the world's waters, its level sank and it became land once more, only to rise again as each Winter came to its end. This the duergar seem to have known, but among men, more recent arrivals, it was either never realised, or wholly forgotten.

These successive floodings were not without their effect on the once infertile land. The waters had eroded much hard rock to sand, and into this inflowing rivers, as well as diluting the salt content, poured rich loads of upland silt; fertile volcanic debris, distributed by the waters into which it fell, may also have played a part. As the level of the seas outside gradually declined, the waters drew back and left these deposits open to the air. Land plants came to grow on this new soil, bound it and enriched it with their remains, and after them trees and animals, establishing a whole fertile cycle. Certainly the result, by the time men first came there, was a black alluvial soil of remarkable richness, and on the higher ground "brown earths" of the podzol type, developed under the vast tracts of deciduous forest which then covered the land; in the more southerly areas the less fertile
terra rossa
soils formed on limestone. By later days, however, the richest soils had been exhausted by over-farming, and the forests cleared altogether from much of the land; the unity of the soil was destroyed, and much of it was simply blown or washed away. Even before its drowning Kerys, rich as it seemed, was a dying land.

The Great River

So it was that Kerys was in a very real sense created by the River. And the River continued to dominate it, as the name the Penruthya, or Sothran, peoples gave it,
Yskianas
, acknowledged.
Kian
was a rather poetic name for a vein, and so this meant
Vein of the Heartland
, or as it was understood,
River at the Heart of the World
. The Svarhath, inhabiting the north of the land, took a less central view and called it simply
Myklstavathan
, the Great River. As sea levels had declined, so the falls over the ancient barrier had ceased to flow, save for a small central cranny or channel that the river cut itself, probably by following some crack or flaw in the eroded rock, or some softer intrusion.

This admitted a relatively restricted flow of seawater, but it was soon swelled, and its salt diluted, by inflows from various tributaries to north and south. Some of these were created, or swelled, by meltwater directly from the Ice, and this brought with it the same terrors as did the upper reaches of the Gorlafros to the Marshlands in Nordeney. But the Great River dispersed these in its vastness as it rode peaceably through the centre of the land; and if some trace of darker influence remained, a slow poison for the minds and spirits of the people, it cannot now be said. Past the warm lands where men founded Kerys the River flowed, until at last it broadened to become a great lake, more properly an inland sea,. Those waters were little navigated or frequented. The lands around their shores were hot and unwelcoming when men first arrived there, with many regions of marsh along the coasts, and tempted nobody to settle save the most desperate of outlaws. By Nithaid's time, thousands of years later, the marshes had spread and the rest degenerated into barrens in the north and near desert in the south. Through those marshes, along many small streams and channels, the waters of the Yskianas drained southward, and though much was lost by sheer evaporation at least one river was thought to reach the mysterious oceans to the south. But it was not navigable, and its course, if it ever was known, had long been lost. Adventurers in those lands had brought back little of worth, but many plagues and spreading maladies, until the reputation of the area for disease was such that landing there was forbidden on pain of death. If any ventured it, therefore, they left no records, and no certain maps have survived.

The High Gate

Such was the course of the Great River, and a vein it was indeed to the land of Kerys, bearing its heart's blood, the water that fed its rich fields and the ships that carried their produce to feed the great city at its heart, and at need their soldiers to enforce its defence and royal authority. That so many of their towns were built along its shores and at its confluences is ample witness of this. Its importance was obvious to the people of the land even from the earliest years. Very soon they began building, over that narrow crevice in the ancient barrier and the falls that came through it, the first stages of what was to become the High Gate. They had many reasons for siting such a fortress there, but high among them was the desire to protect the source of the river that was their land's life. At that time they had not yet grown complacent, and lost their awareness of what the Ice or some other enemy might do. Generation after generation built the Gate higher and grander, and as the sea-level fell outside they cut down and narrowed the ancient barrier into a well too steep for any enemy to scale. In the end the Gate towered high over the ancient ridge, an imposing palace atop walls smooth and utterly unscaleable, guarding the River that thundered through its depths; and it became a sign in the minds of men, a symbol of the fountainhead of the land they loved. A fire was set on its roof, guiding mariners by day with its smoke, and by night with its flame, and to them in particular it became an almost sacred sight, their last upon setting sail and their first upon their return. Since it was the greatest and most adventurous mariners who discovered the new lands across the ocean, it became especially important to them; and for those who fled into exile to found a new realm there, it was a poignant memory, the last they were ever to see of Kerys. So it was that even when with the decline of Kerys the Gate had ceased to mean so much to its people, their kin beyond the seas were still invoking its name.

Climes

The compression of climes that the Long Winter created throughout the world was particularly acute in Kerys at the time of Elof s coming. This was because the Ice had been able to distribute itself very differently than in Brasayhal. To onlookers such as Elof and Roc the great icesheets appeared at first to have extended far further south; but in fact the borders of the main sheets followed much the same parallel as across the oceans. What they had been able to do, however, was create an advance guard of secondary icesheets by the means Ansker described in the Book of the Sword, "colonizing" the heights of more southerly mountain ranges by extending glaciations from mountain snowcaps.

The land immediately beyond the main ice-sheets had no such peaks, but was hilly and uneven enough to impede their advance; it became the
tundra
landscape of Taoune'la, snowy, bleak and haunted, an evil place in whose northern reaches nothing save the hardiest lichens could live. Over this, however, cold airs and subtler influences spread to the mountain-peaks beyond; gradually their icecaps swelled and gathered strength and gave birth to glaciers that flowed down below the snowlines, joined and became vast enveloping icesheets that no longer changed with the seasons, but were as permanent as the main body of the Ice. In fact, it was the Iceglow from these, and not from the main body, that Elof and Roc saw from Elan Ghorhenyan.

There were now two of them, each the size of a substantial country, and steadily growing by the same process. Each winter the cold fingers of the glaciers would spread further along the more southerly peaks, and leave them that fraction colder; and though with the thaw they would retreat again, it would not be all the way. Each year they had gained a little more ground, until now in winter they thrust deep into what had been the north of Kerys, and spun their webs of frost and snow over valleys that had once been high green pastures, home to hardy farmers of the Svarhath folk. Now they were miserable barrens, and even when the snow had drawn back many evils stalked them under the shadow of those peaks.

South of these troubled lands the land was still fertile and rich, though it suffered from severe winters that killed off a great part of its game. Once it had been the main home of the Svarhath, who were for the most part free landholders and cultivators save when they lived by the sea. Then it had held their pastures and grainfields, for they raised both, and many other crops besides; there had even been orchards for the more robust fruits, and a few vineyards on the most southerly slopes. But most of that people had fled the advance of the Ice thousands of years since, and now these were the Wild Lands, overgrown and tangled, home only to the duergar and human outlaws, and much feared on that account. From time to time, under some more vigorous king, attempts had been made to clear and resettle parts of them, but in winter these little colonies were isolated for long periods, and sooner or later they came to a bad and mysterious end. Many blamed the duergar rather than the Ice; and it is not impossible that they were right.

But to the people of the Vale its steep sides, in many places impass-able cliffs, remained an effective barrier against the worsening conditions above; and for centuries this seemed to be so. In their shelter the land north of the Great River enjoyed a warm temperate climate, growing gradually warmer as the river angled away to the southeast. The lands of the southern shore were much the same in the regions about the Gate; but as they sloped away sharply southward they grew increasingly warm and humid, basking in a warmth semi-tropical and even fully tropical, with high humidity. A great belt of dense rainforest covered the southernmost slopes of the vale and extended out to envelop the southern mountains. Beyond these, however, the land grew equally swiftly hot and dry, and the forest gave way to parched scrubland, sunbaked barrens and at last sheer desert; and though it was hardly noticeable at first, this too was advancing, as the Ice drained more and more of the free water from the cycle of life, and bound it in chill and sterile chains. Thus the extremes of clime that had first brought Kerys into being were all the millennia of its existence closing upon it like the jaws of a nutcracker; and all the while the shell was growing rotten from within.

The Last Winter

This was the closing of the jaws, the disordering of climes in whose fell grip the fleets of Morvannec found Kerys. It began soon after Nithaid's death and Elof s flight, as if either or both of them had been holding it somehow at bay; and this may be the case. It started as an early, fierce autumn, with stormy rains that ruined the harvest, and frosty nights that froze the sodden ground hard. Bitter blasts whipped the southern forests, blowing ever more of their tenuous topsoil from the great areas that man had cleared for his own husbandry, or simply laid waste. The first snows for thousands of years fell there, and the plants shrivelled. In the North the snows fell heavier, and the River began to slow and freeze; then at last men saw their folly in neglecting the Gate, and cursed the Lonuen line that had let it slip from the grasp. Somehow men managed to survive the winter, though food was scarce and many dark perils stalked the land, eagerly awaiting the spring, and some kind of a thaw. But the time came, and there was no thaw the snows did not slacken, nor did the glaciers relinquish their hold upon the mountains high above the walls. Ice stopped the inflow of the Great River at last, and its level began to fall. What was happening to the northward can only be guessed at; but it is likely that the main body of the Ice was beginning
its
long-delayed advance at last, and setting in motion the final stages of Louhi's plan. Certainly the hilly
tundra was
more densely covered in snow than ever before. With the weather so propitious, in a very short time, weeks or days even, it might be about to form a solid sheet, and allow the main body to reach and merge with its two offshoots, and they in turn to stretch forward and join up with the enclave of ice around the Gate, where Louhi was exerting her own power. From there the path of the Ice would have been easy and obvious; down the Great River, and into the heart of Kerys. Formerly its sheer size must have made it almost impossible to freeze, keeping a constant temperature in its depths, and also its salinity. Ever since its flow had been reduced at the Gate falls, however, only its tributaries were feeding it, and it had been growing fresher; this may explain the dearth of fish Elof found around the island. Now, with many of the northern tributaries themselves frozen, it was also dwindling in size; already half-frozen, with the Ice itself behind her she could undoubtedly transform it almost at a stroke from river to glacier, from a bearer of life to a harbinger of death, overwhelming a vast area of land. Whether this in itself would have been enough to overturn the climatic balance of the world, and make the Ice permanent, we cannot now tell; but from the urgency all the Powers seem to have sensed, it almost certainly was the crucial point.