The Hammer of the Sun (72 page)

But a certain amount of teaching and advice was as much as the duergar would ever give, in the years before his coming, and these were exceptions. Even in their best relations with men they would rarely do more than dwell among them for a brief while, then return with relief to their own. Ultimately Ilmarinen's plan proved a failure - because, no doubt, much as he loved the race he had made the duergar, he understood them little better than their human cousins. The Elder Folk, buffeted by climate and destiny, had come to despise the outside world, and grown contemplative and inward-looking, suspicious even of their own kin from elsewhere. They forgot their purpose, or scorned it, and for the most part an enmity grew up between them and men that they made little effort to avoid. Instead they fled, shunning the animals, as they deemed them, and joined their kin in scattered halls elsewhere. In the end, as Andvar told, they fled halfway round the world to escape mankind; but they could not flee forever. Man was their destiny, and with him they were doomed to mingle, or perish in their own isolation; yet that bleak end was what many at last preferred, and it is doubtful whether any of that race yet walk the world. Yet some did join with men, and their influence was a good one. For it is known that members of that race which was born of their mingling sank to the simplest savagery ere they rose again; but what little we have of them speaks well. Even their crude stone tools were fairly made; and they buried their dead with care, and filled the graves with flowers.

The Duergar Languages

In earlier books of the chronicles mention is made of the sound of the duergar tongue - or tongues, for there were several - but few attempts are made to reproduce any of them; the Book of the Armring has more than the others that concern Elof, and that only a few scattered words and phrases, clumsily transliterated. Even these survive from a single text, probably the oldest surviving; in later copies they are omitted altogether. This probably indicates the reason; the tongues in which the chronicles were written were preserved long after they fell from use, first as a "classical" tongue of refined expression, and later as a "mystery" language guarding secrets only for the initiate. But the duergar languages no man of later ages knew. Even those duergar who, in the general changing of the world, chose to throw in their lot with men, never taught them any duergar tongue, lest it compromise the safety of their kin who remained apart. For this reason little can be made of what is left. The original author had no alternative but to transcribe it phonetically, using whatever ideographic characters sounded approximately right; and it must be remembered that each character in itself also stood for a word. The effect of this may be gauged by comparing the pseudonym a Japanese writer borrowed from his favourite Western author, Edogawa Rampo, to the original. He was referring to Edgar Allan Poe. What an immense span of time could do to this, in which characters and soundforms changed and mistakes and "improvements" were introduced into the copying, is best left to the imagination. So, to the later copysists, whatever duergar words were included must have seemed like meaningless gibberish. Sooner or later they were bound to be edited out. From what little remains, as has been said before, some deductions have been made. One or two words suggest some ancestral affinity with the rather unusual Finno-Ugric family of languages; but this cannot be proven. It seems to have sounded much more like a Slavic tongue, however, and for that reason it has been rendered into a Slavic form. Attempts have been made to make the meaning of what is spoken clear from the accompanying dialogue; though it should be noted that Ildryan's final comment appears to be moderately obscene. The duergar were never known for primness; and there are signs that some of Ils' more pungent comments have been censored by later generations - if so, most unfairly, as she was renowned even among her own folk for the imaginative nature of her insults.

In most cases where a human being was present, of course, duergar would speak the northern tongue. This was partly for reasons of secrecy, but also because they found it a very convenient
lingua franca
between themselves. Which of their languages took precedence could often have some social or political significance, and was hard to settle; the human tongue, which they found easy to master, avoided the question neatly. Why it was Svarhath they spoke is uncertain; Ils, who spoke both Svarhath ande Penruthya, claimed it was because the "furry" northern speech sat more easily in their mouths than the southern, which she thought sounded "slimy". This may well have been so, but it may have been adopted simply because duergar tended to prefer the same slightly cooler climates as the Svarhath, and so came into contact with them more often. By Elof s time almost all duergar spoke some Svarhath; even their names, though they originated in their own tongues, they habitually rendered into Northern form. And only in that form are they preserved.

THE EKWESH PEOPLES

The various books of the Winter Chronicles contain much incidental lore concerning these savage folks, but the Book of the Armring most of all, probably because it tells of the first encounter with the Ravens; for that reason it is best gathered here. As with the duergar, examples of their speech are preserved in the oldest texts only; and no doubt for the same reasons.

The Ekwesh Tongues

It is known that there were many of these, three at least; they were naurally closely related, but not always mutually understandable because they had so many dialects. The majority tongue, like Mandarin Chinese, became almost universally spoken, but jealousies between tribes and clans ensured that it did not oust their own tongues; it became almost a point of honour to speak it or any foreign speech as badly and curtly as possible. The result was that most Ekwesh sounded crude and monosyllabic to outsiders. The Ravens, however, spoke the majority tongue as their own, in a particularly old-fashioned form much like the one Elof had learned a little of from the Mastersmith. It may have flattered the Raven chieftain to hear him speak it.

None, however, had any written form. A few Ekwesh could read and write the Kerys-born languages, but this was not an achievement highly regarded, even when it proved useful; it was, after all, something thralls regarded, even when it proved useful; it was, after all, something thralls could do. Even the shamans and chieftains preserved their lore orally, reinforced only by a mnemonic system, patterns of odd characters that operated as a more sophisticated equivalent of the Inca
quipu or
medieval tally sticks, totally unintelligible when its sphere of reference was unknown. It is thought that this was forced upon them by the Ice, to keep them dependent on it for dribs and drabs of knowledge which could be handed out over and over again as some new gift; and also, very probably, to prevent any true culture developing. For this reason even in the oldest texts of the chronicles only a few words of Ekwesh are preserved, spelt much as they sounded to Svarhath or Penruthya speakers; and since we cannot tell from an ideographic system exactly how those tongues sounded, the Ekwesh speech is well and truly lost. It appears to have been an agglutinative type, highly expressive but cumbersome and fiendishly complicated to those who had not grown up with it. The whole phrase "vault out of a boat" became a single verb "out-of-a-boat-with-one hand-to-leap", as it might in many "primitive" languages today, for example certain Inuit and Northwest Coast tongues. Such words as can be salvaged have been included in the text, but they amount at best to an informed guess.

The Ekwesh realm and its origins

Much information about the land and history of the Ekwesh peoples is put by the chroniclers into the mouth of their chieftain, speaking with Elof - more, certainly, than he would ever have told a prisoner, even one he had come to respect. But this is a common enough device in such histories, and it was undoubtedly from the Ravens that most such lore came; of their homeland, in particular, no outsider left any account. It is not hard to guess why.

It is known to have lain in the lands far east of Kerys, separated from it by a land so trackless and wild that the Ice actually became the safest means for the Ekwesh to cross, and to have reached the further shores of the oceans that lapped upon the Westlands of Bryhaine, where Elof and Kermorvan grew up. Its exact extent is unknown, but undoubtedly it covered more actual land than any other realm among men at that time -perhaps more than all the rest put together. But so miserable and barren was most of this land, barely able to sustain life, that population densities were very low. The Ekwesh people arose as hardy hunter-gatherers with only the simplest of cultures, living a nomadic, seasonal existence and making the best of the savage and hostile environment which was all they knew. At this stage they seem to have lived not unlike the natives of Tierra del Fuego, who astonished European explorers by their ability to live more or less naked, with only crude shelters of branches and grass; within five degrees of the South Polar icepack. The Ekwesh lands also lay in the proximity of the Ice, and it dominated their climate, adding to the long and terrible winters ft sent the brief fierce summer that was natural to the region. Each season brought extremes, from heavy snow to floods to drought to torrential rains and snow again, in a ruthless cycle. So bleak was their land that it is a marvel these ancestors of the Ekwesh survived; with only a little more effort the Ice might well have exterminated them entirely, as it sought to do to all other races of men. Why, then, did it fail to?

There is some suggestion that the Ekwesh lands were a reservation created by the Ice - or, more properly, an arena. By pushing the lands to the limits of habitability, therefore, they sought to create a breed of men apt to their ways. Whether this is so, or whether some among the Powers of the Ice simply seized upon what they found, the fact remains they soon began to take an active part in the shaping of the Ekwesh folk. Formerly they had relied for warriors upon the lesser powers among their own numbers, forcing them into strange and fearsome forms, and upon lesser creatures they had bred and deformed into monsters, and only secondarily upon men; they had recruited such renegades as can always be found, individuals or tribes, but these proved rare and highly undependable, and often at a crucial moment chose the kinship of their true kind. For even in the worst among men some small spark may not be wholly extinguished. So, after a series of formidable defeats - not least those inflicted by Kerys in the days of its first grandeur - they seem to have concluded that only men could defeat men, and sought to reshape these troublesome creatures to their own ideas. And, perhaps, their own preconceptions.

The Cult of the Ice

Undoubtedly these rebel Powers saw men as substantially base, brutish and vicious; and this judgement may have been reinforced by the urges which came to bedevil them whenever they assumed human form, and which they had never learned to control. So they began to force these strong but unformed folk, whose society already had all the savagery and ruthlessness necessary to hunters who must kill to live, into a society that, so they thought, would best express this human baseness, and channel it in ways useful to them. In subtle ways they began to take hold of the ancestors of the Ekwesh, and to lead them along the paths they chose.

These were often very dark, for it was among the depths of the human mind that the Ice sought its hold, and among the blacker desires and pleasures of men. Perhaps it amused those cold minds to dominate those they despised by what harmed them most, by unleashing their own worst urges, by cruelty and torture and the bonds that bind those who have done a thing unthinkable to others. The Ekwesh under the tutelage of the Ice became a folk bloody and fell, to whom the causing of pain and the shedding of blood were not an evil, not even a means to an end, but an end in themselves, a propitiation to be offered and a pleasure to be shared. From Elof's intimacy with the Mastersmith we know that it enforced austerities upon its highest initiates, no doubt, as the chronicler suggests, to direct their energy and avoid distractions, and fearsome journeys into the heart of the Ice to commune there with its rulers, which must have involved the initiate forcing himself to survive in an environment that made little or no concession to the human body. The lives of the Hidden Clan lost in its march eastward over the Ice to Morvannec were simply what it expected of dedicated men. From Bryhon's revelations we know that self-torment or even mutilation was demanded of them, and from accounts of Ekwesh captives, and grisly discoveries aboard their ships and in their camps, we know that it demanded human torture and sacrifice from its followers. But of the actual rites of its worship, we know only the most general details, mostly from thralls who were fortunate enough to see them and survive to be freed. As was mentioned in earlier appendices, the shamans relied on ecstatic and visionary rites, dancing themselves into a frenzy to drumbeats to release their inner powers; this appears to have been a cruder analogue of the concentration and labour of smithcraft, and its effects, naturally, were more transient. This their followers appeared to have imitated, but to what end, and in what ways, is unknown.

Unless, perhaps, we may see some distant reflection of them in the many strange rites of veneration and fear still associated with glaciers, such as those practised, in a thinly Christian guise, by native South Americans across a wide range of the Andes in the
Cholleriti
festival. In this the participants, the so-called
Ucucu
dancers, wear bear masks; carrying a great cross, they climb up to the glaciers that loom over their mountain homes and there spend a night above the snowline in a vigil, initiated by a symbolic whipping. This is intended to propitiate the
condenados
, ghoul-spirits (now said to be those of the damned) who are supposed to inhabit the glacier, and protect the festival pilgrims from them. In the morning they use their whips as saws to cut out huge lumps of the glacier, and these they carry as a penance down to the festival sanctuary, in a procession accompanied by the pilgrims with wild hooting cries. This ritual destruction of the glacier is thought to enact the penance of the
condenados
and release both them and their intended victims. In this and many other examples some relic of the dominion and terror of the Ice may yet remain.