The Chromatic Chord

The Chain-Camps

The span, c. 18,000-c. 8,000 BR, in which Ogre camps that came for seasonal work on the corridor roads were held there by debt and controlled food. See The Bridge Peoples.

Overview

The chain-camps were Ogre labour camps held by debt and doled-out food on the roads, walls, and floodworks of the growing Human river and road realms. The Hearth-Weight Compacts were founded as the Ogres' answer to them.

It overlaps The Headwater Exchange Roads and The Human Corridor Orders, whose roads, walls, and river works were the chain-camps' main labour.

Carrying under Debt

Driving roads through the Headwater Marches meant moving stone, timber, and earth through gorges and foothills at a scale the young Human realms could not manage with their own backs. Ogre camps could.

Camps that came for a season's work on hearth-house terms found the terms turned against them. Food came first, as a loan against the work, and the loan was never quite worked off. Camps that tried to leave lost their winter stores. Dependents were kept in road-settlements while the strong worked distant sections. The work killed: rockfall in the road cuts, floods down the gorges, winters in the high camps, pass bears at the stores. The camps were held by what hearth-weight asked of them, since a camp will carry almost anything to keep its weak fed. Ogres later called them chain-camps, though the chains were mostly ledgers.

The Compacts

The hearth-houses had answered hungry strength from within since The Long Hunger. The chain-camps needed an answer turned outward.

Around c. 15,000 BR, camps along the Headwater roads began binding themselves to shared terms that any employer had to accept before a band would work: food before labour, the burden counted openly, shelter after dangerous work, dependents kept with the camp, and the right to refuse work that would destroy it. Burden houses kept the tallies, and the camps sent their own to stand at every bargain. Overseers who cheated the Compacts were sometimes found in the road cuts with their ledgers burned, and the bounty a road-lord put on the killers was never once collected. A camp that broke the terms lost the protection of the rest; an employer who broke them found no Ogre band willing to work for him anywhere along the road.

Historical Significance

The chain-camps are why hearth-weight became terms held along a whole road rather than one camp's custom. They are also behind the chain-camp Ogres of later memory, every Compact's wariness of food advanced against labour, and why medieval Ogre strikes so often begin over stores rather than wages.

The roads the chain-camps built are still walked. Some Headwater road sections carry Compact marks naming the camps that built them, some burden houses still keep the old debt-ledgers, and Ogres say the road cuts where whole camps died are bad places to stop at night. Travellers who camp there anyway tell of loads shifting in the dark, of a tally being counted aloud by voices too deep for Humans, and of debt-ledgers found open on the road at dawn. Some lords' strongrooms still hold the camp debts in iron chests, and an Ogre who steals one back is no thief in any camp on the road.

In the Writers’ Guide

See Also