The Confluence Marches

Overview

The Confluence Marches are the first major Human civilization on Caeldon: a loose civilization of connected towns, basin cores, marcher strongholds, and practical alliances across The Confluence Basins and The Headwater Marches. No crown holds it together. Shared habit does: the same gods, the same oaths, and the same way of ending a quarrel, by sworn word, blood-price, or the sword. Between the towns run long roads, wolf-haunted in hard winters, past ruins nobody has dug to the bottom. The Serathic League downriver is a civilization within the Marches.

Its organized religion is The Sworn Accord: a god is honoured in the towns only once the Accord has entered it on its sworn roster. Scribes and record-houses across the corridor world serve Annoth the Keeper of Scrolls, a god always imperilled by those who benefit from forgetting. Oaths and sealed bargains in the corridor's halls and town moots are sworn under Iskel the Scribe of the Silent, the god of kept secrets.

How It Holds Together

The Marches have no one shape. River towns behind palisades, basin farms that feed half the corridor, and marcher strongholds on the contested edges each borrow whatever works from their neighbours, Elf, Dwarf, or Reedfolk, and keep it until something better comes along. Humans are less bound than Elves or Dwarves to one old inheritance, and that quickness has long been their edge.

What the Marches cannot tame, they leave alone. A road that can be made safe is walked with escorts; a ford the Reedfolk call bad, a forest edge the Wood Elves call theirs, and a ruin nobody came back from are entered only by those paid or desperate enough. Such people gather wherever danger pays: in the caravan yard at Oathfoot, where sellsword captains hire out for the season, and in river-town taverns where a map of the Paling sells for a week's wage and is wrong in a different place every time.

Daily Life

The country itself, from the village granary and the threshing floor to the march-town and the year of the passes, is described under Ordinary Life in the Basins and in the Headwater Marches. What is particular to the Marches is how a household meets its lord and its gods, and it meets them mostly at the oath-house.

• A marriage is sworn at the oath-house under a god the town has entered, and written down.
• An inheritance, a land sale, or a boundary goes the same way: sworn and written.
• Record-day comes once a year, after the harvest levy is counted.
• Oath-days are when the lord or the town's elders hear oaths sworn and settle quarrels, mostly in favour of whoever stands closest to them.
• A stranger is asked early whose god they swear by, and whether that god is entered here. An oath under an unentered god is a private matter, not a bond.

What a household fears is near and plain: grey wolves at the folds in a hard winter, an outlaw band in the woods behind the fields, the lord's war and the lord's levy, Spurred Hounds bred for those wars that turn on their own kennels, and the River-Given, the unrited dead of the spring floods, come dripping up the landing steps to find their own doors.

Medieval Role

The Marches are the field in which most cradle-web Humans live, trade, and feud.

• A town may refuse a bargain sworn under a god it has never entered, and the other party has no choice but to swear again.
• A lord may levy a share of every harvest on the threshing floor and sell it upriver or uphill to whoever pays best.
• A march-town takes what a crossing will bear, and a ferry that sinks under a sworn guarantee owes a blood-price to the drowned man's kin, if they are strong enough to ask for it.
• A village may pay a beast-hunter in grain when wolves come down to the folds in a hard winter, and sing of her if she does not come back.
• A lord at feud with his neighbour may hire a sellsword company for the season, and the villages along the march pay for it twice: once in levy, and once when the company is not paid on time.
• A company of treasure-seekers may come back from the Paling with old silver and without that morning's memories, and the town will buy the silver anyway.
• A foothill lord may pay a bounty in silver for every beast that comes out of the Wrongwood, where the beasts of the burned valley still bear Kindless Broods.
• A basin bargemaster may carry the town's mark and still ask a Reedfolk household before the spring rise.

The Marches sing of their own: the ferrywoman who carried a whole village across the spring rise ahead of a burning lord's hounds, the miller's sons who held a bridge with flails until the bridge went and took them with it, the beast-hunter who walked into the woods after the wolf that took her brother and came back wearing it. Nobody can name them, and every valley swears they were its own. Basin children play the bridge with sticks for flails, and the one who falls in the millpond has won. At a Headwater wedding the last cup goes to the escort-captain who would not sell his caravan to the band he was hired against, and was found with it at the bottom of the Rattlecut; the guests spit for the band, whose name is long forgotten. And basin mothers hush a crying child with the drowned: quiet now, or the River-Given come up the steps for you.

History

Humans emerge on Caeldon long before they build anything as large as the Marches, in The First Human Emergence on Caeldon (c. 300,000-c. 220,000 BR). The basin and upland country takes its shape in The Shaping of the Confluence-Headwater World (c. 220,000-c. 90,000 BR), and a shared Confluence identity hardens in The Gathering of the Confluence (c. 120,000-c. 50,000 BR). The Marches cohere as one civilization in The Founding of the Confluence Marches (c. 40,000-c. 20,000 BR) and spread through The Confluence Rise (c. 24,000-c. 2,000 BR).

They rise among older worlds. Dwarven exchange through the Headwater Marches, beginning in The First Headwater-Ironspine Contacts, makes them materially and technically stronger. Clearings cut into the Elderweald from The First Confluence-Elderweald Contacts onward teach them the cost of the forest edge: a cut mark on a trunk, then an arrow in the woodpile, answered with fire and hired swords. The same forest edge teaches them that living beside Wood Elves reaches into mourning: see The Elderweald Funerary Accord.

Tensions

• Borrowed oaths. The Accord's swearing forms came by way of Reedfolk house-custom, and Reedfolk houses hold that much of what basin lords call their own custom was theirs first.
• The outlaw road. A band left lordless by the last feud holds a stretch of road through the woods and takes one cart in ten.
• What the Wrongwood breeds. Something with a boar's back and a hound's jaw has taken three flocks in the last foothill valley.
• The Paling's silver. A river-town house buys every coin that comes out of the Paling and now sends its own servants in, roped together so that one of them can lead the rest home.
• Grain. The Headwater roads and the Serathic towns both need more basin grain than the basins can safely give, and farmers who keep Anvelle's rest-year resist levies that force the fallow.
• The forest edge. Rootcrown stewards judge every clearing, whatever the nearest lord has granted, and woodcutters who cross the marked trees come home with arrows in their carts as a warning, or do not come home.
• Elven prestige. Crownbough embassies are admired and resented in the same towns, and mixed households still find their children's place argued over.
• Two copies. Records are always being lost.