The Confluence Basins

Overview

The Confluence Basins are the broad lowland heartland of Humans on Caeldon: a country of wide valleys, deep fields, and linked rivers that come down from the uplands, meet, and gather towards the Serath, the great river whose lower course is the Lower Serath. More Humans live by the plough here than anywhere else, and the corridor towns that live by roads and river-trade eat what the Basins grow. Plenty draws hunger: outlaws in the flood-forest, wolves at the folds in hard winters, lords who burn each other's barns, and the drowned who walk back out of the river in spring.

Lay of the Land

The Basins lie south of the forest and the foothills, with the Elderweald and the Crownboughs along their northern edge. The Briarreach closes the north-west, and the Headwater Marches rise in the north-east, where the Sheaf Road climbs out. Between Crownbough and Headwater country the last low spurs of the Ironspine die out among the northern ridges.

Even here, in the most settled country on Caeldon, people live in cores: the river valleys, each a chain of villages round its march-towns, with many more villages than any page names. Between the valleys lie fen, flood-forest, and high heath where wolves and wild boar run and no lord's peace holds, and outlaws who have fled some lord's judgement live off what passes, so carts on the Sheaf Road go in company under a march-town's escort. A village troubled by wolves hires a beast-hunter; one troubled by outlaws pays whoever has the spears.

Land and Hazards

The Basins are not one valley but a field of them: broad, gentle lowlands parted by low ridges, each carrying its own river, the rivers joining one another as they descend. On the upland side the valleys narrow and climb into foothill country. Towards the forest the fields run up to the edge of the Elderweald. Downstream the ground flattens, the water slows, and long reaches of reed, fen, and seasonal flood open where land and river never settle which is which. The largest is the Reedmere, above the Lower Serath, the main Reedfolk country inside the Basins.

The soil is deep and the seasons kind enough that a good year feeds far more than the village that grew it. The dangers are the price of that plenty:

• Flood. The spring rise renews the fields and drowns the careless.
• Moving water. Fords shift, banks slump, and a crossing that held last season may be a scour hole this one. The low wet ground breeds fever in the warm months.
• Tired soil. Where grain levies demand a second harvest and the fallow year is skipped, the land is wearing out, and in some districts crops have begun to fail.
• Altered water. A dike, weir, or drained fen made for one town moves the flood onto another. The drowned reed settlements of Reedfolk memory came from exactly such work.
• Beasts of the wet country. Great catfish longer than a barge pole lie under the landings, and bargemen tell of one taking a child; mud turtles take fingers at the eel-traps. Fen pitchers catch a dog's paw in the Reedmere, and past the Grey Line the bulls of the wild kine kill anyone on foot who comes too near.
• The dead who come back. As the spring rise falls, the River-Given walk out of the water and try to go home, and a death nobody swore leaves Unsworn Dead haunting the families it should have settled.
• The hanged and the buried. Lords hang outlaws at the crossroads, and on the Sheaf Road the Crossroad Hanged drag at night carters until a village quiets its own gibbet.
• The wolf at the door. At the field edges the Skin-Lost come at dusk to houses they once lived in, beasts now with a person's habits.
• The lords' hounds. Great lords keep Spurred Hounds, war dogs grown huge by magic, which turn without warning; every valley has a story of a kennel that broke loose.
• The Paling. A few days' walk of side river lies colourless round the walls of a nameless archive city, left by the Mnemosyne Null Incursion (c. 132,000-c. 130,000 BR).

Ordinary Life

Most basin people farm. A village is a few dozen households on a rise above the flood line, with fields running down towards the water and the wet meadows grazed in common. The year belongs to field and river: ploughing and sowing once the spring rise falls back, weeding and herding through the summer, harvest and threshing, then a winter of mending and waiting. The Festival of the First Sheaf, when the first stalk is cut and offered to Anvelle the Harvest-Mother, opens the harvest in every village that keeps her.

The granary sits at the centre of all of it. Each village keeps a store against the bad year, and the lord's or the town's share is counted out on the same threshing floor, which is where most basin quarrels start.

Peoples and Power

No one rules the Basins. The Confluence Marches are a quarrelsome web of lords who hold land and the villages on it, towns run by their richest houses, and march-towns that keep crossings by their walls. Alliances shift with harvests and marriages, and feuds with burned barns, stolen herds, and a neighbour's son found in the river. What holds them together is shared habit more than any crown: the same gods, the same oaths, and the expectation that a bargain is sworn before it counts. Who then keeps it depends on who can be made to.

Lords' power is grain and the spears it feeds. They levy a share of every harvest, send it along the corridor roads, and in a bad feud hire a sellsword company for the season. Towns' power is the market, the crossing, and the wall. The priests of the Sworn Accord remember who swore what, and both sides heed them when neither is strong enough to ignore them.

• The fields. Farmers who keep Anvelle's rest-year resist levies that force the fallow, and the levy-setters are, by her worshippers' account, the slowest to listen.
• The water. Reedfolk houses hold the knowledge but not the decision.
• The corridors. The Headwater roads and the Serathic towns downstream both need more basin grain than the basins can safely give, and basin lords sell to whoever pays.
• The forest. At the Elderweald edge, Rootcrown stewards weigh every clearing, and settlers who cut without their leave find their fences down and their hunting gone, whatever the nearest lord has granted.
• The woods and heaths. Outlaw bands, many of them men left lordless by the last feud, hold stretches of road and fen, and the villages nearest them pay them in food to be left alone.

Settlements

No one rules the Basins, so they have no capital. The nearest thing to a centre is a handful of great march-towns where most of the harvest is reckoned, sold, and shipped, and the largest of them is Sheafmeet.

• Sheafmeet. A walled march-town where the Sheaf Road meets two joining rivers, with a long bridge, three mills, a granary larger than some villages, the valley's greatest oath-house of the Accord, and a record-house whose scribes keep second copies for half the valleys around.
• Chaffbridge. A smaller march-town at a bridge over a feeder river: a wall, a mill, a market square, and an oath-house, with no record-house of its own.
• Fallowrise. A village of some forty households on a rise above the flood line, its fields running down to the water and its wet meadows grazed in common.
• Ninefloods. A Reedfolk stilt settlement in the Reedmere: a few dozen households on stilts and reed islands, joined by boats, around a crossing shrine where the house's flood roll is spoken aloud each year.
• Flockturn. A handful of farmsteads and sheepfolds at the inland edge, where the fields thin towards the Witnessfields.

The People

Some 2.4 million people live in the Basins outside the Lower Serath, which counts its own, and that is more than in any other region of Caeldon. About nineteen in twenty are Humans. The Reedfolk of the Reedmere and the lower fens, perhaps 100,000 of them, are most of the rest; a few Wood Elf and mixed households at the forest edge, Goblin carters and hands in the march-towns, and the odd Wrought smith make up the remainder.

• Humans. Basin folk wear undyed wool and linen from their own sheep and flax: a long shirt, a belted tunic or kirtle, hose, a hooded cloak, and wooden-soled shoes for the wet months, and at harvest shirts and straw hats.
• Reedfolk. Reedfolk wear little that holds water: short, close-bound tunics of linen or reed fibre, bare legs and feet, and a reed cape against rain.

Neighbours and Borders

The Basins have no surveyed frontier. Their edges are where the ground, the custom, or the neighbour changes.

• Upstream, the Headwater Marches. The valleys narrow into foothills where the same Marches live harder, beside Dwarven roads.
• Downstream, the Lower Serath. The Lower Serath lies inside the Basins but is its own world: the dense lower-river corridor of The Serathic League, with fortified towns and written river guarantees.
• At the forest, the Elderweald. Basin settlement presses on the woodland of the Rootcrown Concord across a belt first touched in The First Confluence-Elderweald Contacts (c. 38,000-c. 24,000 BR) and argued over ever since The Elderweald Border Pressures (c. 26,000-c. 10,000 BR).
• Towards the canopy, the Crownboughs. Where the forest opens on the High Elf side, the basin road climbs towards The Crownboughs.
• Inland, the Witnessfields. Out towards the Lower Serath, the fields thin into the terraced, empty uplands of The Witnessfields, the sealed old country of the elder Archive-Law Civilization.

Elsewhere the Basins simply thin into rougher country, and nothing like the Grey Line fixes where.

Roads, Rivers, and Trade

The rivers are the first roads. Barges and flatboats carry grain downstream at harvest, and every ford, ferry, and bridge has a keeper who takes his cut. Upstream travel is slower and goes mostly by land.

• The Sheaf Road is the basin grain road, running along the valley rises above the flood line from granary to granary and march-town to march-town.
• The lower rivers and fens run towards the Serath. No sensible boat crosses the Reedmere without a Reedfolk pilot, though the landing-fee goes to whoever holds the landing.
• The embassy road runs from the forest edge to the Understorey Courts at the foot of the Crownbough canopy, where basin envoys and supplicants are received and seldom taken higher.

What moves:

• Outward: grain above all, then flour, livestock, and labour hired out for the season.
• Inward: worked metal and Dwarven craft down the Headwater roads, river goods up from the Serath, and Crownbough grafts and ceremony, given as gifts and measured as prestige.
• Both ways: oath-rolls and the second copies scribes keep, travelling with every convoy, and the sellsword companies that follow the money from feud to feud.

Passage belongs to whoever holds the crossing: a lord at a ford, a town at its bridge, a march-town at its ferry, and below the old edge, the League, whose guarantees are kept by its walls and boats. The Reedfolk who know where the channel actually runs are paid wages, and seldom thanked.

Feud and plenty keep a whole crowd of sword-trades in work. Sellsword companies winter in Sheafmeet's lower town and hire out by the season, and a company that changed sides mid-feud is remembered in three valleys by the same curse. Beast-hunters follow the bounties on wolves, on a kennel's runaway, or on the great catfish of a landing. Bounty-takers work the gibbet roads, and Paling silver is sold quietly at the back of march-town smithies, at a price that counts the risk and not the weight.

Historical Memory

The Basins think of themselves as the original Human answer. Before there were Serathic guarantees or Headwater roads there was the Confluence way, deep fields joined to a hard edge, and later Human orders are still measured against it. Behind that lies a long dimness: Human bands gathering slowly across the basins in The Gathering of the Confluence (c. 120,000-c. 50,000 BR), during the Unrecorded Age, keeping history in speech. Writing came back into common use only as the Marches formed, so basin memory begins with the written roll, and basin people trust what is written more than their neighbours think wise. What they sing is older. Every basin feast ends with a toast to the ford, and the man in it: the lord who held a ford alone until the flood took him and his enemies together. Mothers tell of the girl who led a whole village out of the Paling and remembered none of it.

Belief

Basin belief is the Sworn Accord at its most ordinary. Anvelle the Harvest-Mother stands first: she was born here, from basin farmers' dependence on soil and season, and the oldest fields are said to grow her signs. Beside her stands Serovan the River-King, whose spring-rise rites the basin keeps even though his heart is the Serath. Scribes swear to Annoth the Keeper of Scrolls, and the dead go to Ennor the Grave-Watcher. Country shrines and household gods are tolerated rather than entered, and beneath all of it lies the seasonal alignment custom of sowing and harvest.

The Reedfolk keep their own river-memory rites, refuse Serovan's claim on the water, and remember Hesserin the Shattered Saint, who shattered when their houses accepted service. Older still is the First Man, the god of the first Human self-awareness in these valleys, long faded, with no name left to pray to.

Tensions

• The second harvest. A lord orders a village's resting field sown again to meet a corridor buyer who has already paid.
• Draining the fen. A march-town wants to embank a reach of the Reedmere for new fields.
• The burned roll. A record-house fire takes the only boundary roll for a whole valley.
• The keep on the ridge. A lord's men digging for the war-chest under a burned keep broke into an old fever-pit, and two of the diggers are dead of a wasting the priests say is no plague they know.
• The captain's head. An outlaw captain who robbed a levy convoy on the Sheaf Road has a price on his head at Sheafmeet, and the villages along his stretch of road feed him and lie for him.
• The hound that got out. A Spurred Hound broke from a lord's kennel in the autumn and has been taking sheep and one shepherd in the high heath since.