The Headwater Marches

Overview

The Headwater Marches are the foothill country between the Human farmland and the Dwarven mountains: steep valleys where the rivers of The Confluence Basins begin, walled towns at the crossings, and the escorted exchange roads that climb from basin granaries to the gates of The Ironspine. They belong to The Confluence Marches, the same Human civilization that holds the Basins, but they live by passage more than by the plough, and by the sword that guards it. Metal comes down these roads and grain goes up, and both draw outlaws, sellswords, and bears; above the valleys stand the broken works of giants, and in the south-east lies a burned valley nobody may dig.

Lay of the Land

The Headwater Marches are the foothills along the eastern face of the southern Ironspine, with the Stormcrown on the crest above them. To the south and south-west they fall into the Confluence Basins. To the north, beyond the March Wall, lie the Broken Marches, which wrap round their eastern side as well, and the Greyford Reach sits on that eastern edge. South-east, past the last farmed valley, lies the overgrown valley of the Wrongwood, and beyond it rough country nobody has mapped rises towards the unnamed range at the desert's edge.

The valleys come down off the mountains and bend south-west towards the basins, and their rivers with them. Oathfoot stands at a valley head below Thrumgate, half a day's climb from its gate, about two months by cart from Sheafmeet and a month from Greyford. Snowshut is the last stop on the upper road. Notchfield sits high under the Weatherline. The whole map is in The Lay of the Land.

Land and Hazards

The Marches climb. Coming up from the basins, the valleys narrow, the fields tilt onto terraces, and the rivers quicken. Above the last towns they become gorges and stream-cut spurs running up into the mountains. Every river here begins as Ironspine snowmelt, and much of it was channelled and bridged by Dwarven work before any Human town stood on its banks. Downstream the same water slows into the basin rivers.

Above the foothill valleys lie the heights of an older world, the Stormcrown. Broken ridge roads, terrace flights, and weather shrines of the Upland Colossal Civilization crown the uplands, and some foothill farms still plough colossal terraces whose retaining walls no living people could raise. Kindred caravans walk the high roads, and once in a long while someone reports a Giant on them.

• Fast water. Snowmelt and summer storms send floods down the gorges with little warning.
• Moving ground. Road cuts slide and rockfall closes valley heads.
• Beasts. Pass bears learn the waystations and come back every autumn for the stores, grey wolves take sheep and lone walkers in hard winters. Gluttons rob every trap-line, and crag eagles take lambs and, the valleys swear, now and then a child.
• Winter. Snow shuts the upper roads for months and cuts the highest towns off from the gates. A caravan caught late loses its animals first and then its people.
• Old works and older taboos. Colossal roads and terraces fail without warning.
• The Wrongwood. The burned valley where the Qzoth Incursion (c. 4,000-c. 3,500 BR) was stopped still breeds Kindless Broods, and dug or ploughed, its ground wakes the Changing Fever.
• Cargo. Metal and coin on a mountain road draw thieves and outlaw bands, who wait above the cuts and roll stone onto the leading cart.

Ordinary Life

Most Headwater people farm hard ground and sell what passes through. A valley household works narrow terraced fields of barley and oats, grazes sheep and cattle on the summer slopes, and cuts timber in the foothill woods. Little of it stays home. The holds above buy grain, salt meat, wool and cloth, lamp oil, and bracing timber, and Headwater farmers are their nearest sellers. The valleys rarely grow enough for themselves and the holds both, so basin grain comes up the Sheaf Road to make up the difference.

Foothill towns stand at crossings and valley heads. Each is walled, built around a market, a shrine, and a yard where caravans are made up and broken. The larger ones add a lord's tower or a hall where the leading families settle quarrels, smithies working to Dwarven methods, a burden house for the Ogre camps, and a house of the Mending Orders. Between the towns, walled waystations keep stores, fresh animals, and the escort, spaced so a laden caravan can reach the next before dark.

Peoples and Power

Headwater people are mostly Human, and power is a frontier patchwork within the Confluence Marches: marcher lords holding valleys from towers above them, foothill towns run by their leading families, and the Headwater lords' halls, gatherings where the lords of a stretch of road sit together over road quarrels and the lord with the most spears behind him usually carries the day. When the hall cannot settle it, the valleys feud: herds driven off, a waystation burned, an heir ambushed on the road home. Some feuds are older than the towers that wage them: the dead of both sides lie under one cairn at the ford where it began, with the score cut into the capstone and a fresh notch added whenever it is evened. Marriages, bargains, and grants of passage are sworn at the shrines of the Sworn Accord. Unlike basin lords, Headwater lords live on what they take at their bridges and on escort fees more than on grain levies, and none of them can keep a road open alone.

• Foothill Dwarves. Headwater-facing Dwarven households are more exchange-minded than the hold heartland.
• Threshold-keepers. Fosterage elders, oath-keepers, and the heads of mixed households often decide more than any lord about who a person is and what they may carry.
• The Iron Compacts. Hobgoblin compacts of the Iron Compacts hold road stretches, waystation watches, and fords on the warrants of the lords who need them held.
• The Hearth-Weight Compacts. No heavy road work is done without the Hearth-Weight Compacts.
• The Crossing-Oath Houses. Troll houses of the Crossing-Oath Houses hold a few of the worst passages, the Rattlecut among them, by oaths older than any lord's claim, and take their price there.
• The Edgeway Kindreds. The oldest circuits of the Edgeway Kindreds run on the colossal roads of these uplands, and their keepright puts them at odds with any lord who tries to take a cut on a high road.

Settlements

No town rules the Headwater Marches. Their centre is the string of walled foothill towns below the gates, where the escorts, sellswords, and caravans meet, and the largest of them, Oathfoot, is where a Headwater lords' hall sits most often.

• Oathfoot. A walled foothill town at a valley head below the gate of Thrumgate, the hold whose exchange road it serves.
• Snowshut. The last walled waystation on the upper road before the hold's wardens take over: stores, fresh animals, and the escort, a Hobgoblin compact watch, and a dozen households who keep the place.
• Notchfield. A high valley village of some thirty households ploughing colossal terraces whose retaining walls no living people could raise.
• Winterfire. An Ogre road-camp on a terrace above the main road: a few long timber-and-hide houses around one great fire, home to a band of a few dozen under Hearth-Weight terms.

The People

About 400,000 people live in the Headwater valleys and towns. Some five in six are Humans. Foothill Dwarves are about one in fifteen, thickest near the gates; Goblins, most of them of the Hobgoblin compacts, about one in thirty; Ogres of the road-camps about one in fifty; and the Wrought about one in a hundred, the largest share anywhere. A few Troll families keep the worst passages, Kindred circuits pass through, and the rare Human-Elf child grows up here too.

• Humans. Headwater dress is heavy: wool and sheepskin, felted cloaks, gaiters, and hobnailed boots of Dwarven make.
• Foothill Dwarves dress as hold Dwarves do in Human-woven cloth, and are named as in the Ironspine, with a short form for the valley: Durvel Ostgar is Durv on the road, and Hennik Dovrek is Henn.
• Ogres. Road crews wear thick leather and long hide coats, pad their shoulders for hauling, and go bareheaded.
• Goblins. Hobgoblin watches wear the compact's badge on matched coats, the only matched clothes most Goblins own.
• The Wrought. Most Wrought wear nothing for warmth.

Neighbours and Borders

Headwater edges are mostly handovers, the points where another people's keepers take charge.

• Upward, the Ironspine. The edge with the Ironspine Holds was made by use: the patrols and guarded waystations of The First Headwater-Ironspine Contacts (c. 34,000-c. 22,000 BR), the habit of cooperation built in The Headwater Alignments (c. 28,000-c. 14,000 BR), and the roads of The Headwater Exchange Roads (c. 16,000-c. 8,000 BR).
• Downstream, the Confluence Basins. There is no line here at all.
• Towards the ruins, the Broken Marches. This edge was drawn by Headwater greed rather than by the land: The Broken Marches are the country the frontier once called waste, free to whoever took it, and then pulled back from.
• The heights. Above the valleys and beside the holds, the uplands belong to no lord.

Roads, Rivers, and Trade

The exchange roads are why the Marches look the way they do. They start at the valley rises where the basin Sheaf Road climbs out of the farmland. From there they run up through the foothill towns, past waystations and fortified crossings, to the outer gate of each foothill hold, and end in the oath-yard inside it, where every bargain is sworn before the hold's custodian. In places they are walled and paved with Dwarven stonework. Long stretches were cut and embanked by Ogre camps, and every stretch is mended each season by whoever holds it.

Who keeps the way:

• Escort below the gates is Human and Hobgoblin, drawn from town and lordly garrisons, from Compact watches, and from sellsword companies hired at Oathfoot.
• Every crossing takes its cut: a lord at his bridge, a town at its gate, the Troll house at the Rattlecut, and beyond the last waystation, the hold.
• Heavy haulage belongs to Ogre bands under Compact terms, sworn before any load moves.

The rivers are crossed, not travelled. Above the basin edge they are too steep and fast for boats, so bridges and fords decide where roads can go, and the oldest bridges are Dwarven. Between basin and mountain the Headwater roads are also the way around the Elderweald, whose groves let no road through.

• Up: grain from the Basins and the valleys, salt meat, wool and cloth, lamp oil, and bracing timber, much of it bound past the holds for the Deeps; hired hands for the mines; fosterlings.
• Down: metal, tools, and weapons, dressed stone, and the craft teaching that goes with them, carried on along the Sheaf Road to the basin towns.
• Across the heights: salvage from the colossal ruins, news, and warnings of rockfall, bears, and raiders on the Kindred circuits.

Historical Memory

The Marches remember being made, not found, though the ground was not new when they made it. The settlers came into uplands already marked by colossal roads and terraces, and Kindred circuits had walked those roads since The Walking of the Unkept Roads (c. 175,000-c. 140,000 BR). The Kindreds still mention this whenever a lord claims a high road as his own.

The deep war reaches the Marches only as memory. Headwater-facing Dwarves retell it more patiently than the holds do, explaining Dwarven severity to neighbours who were never underground, as described in The Burdened Seal Histories. That retelling is the Marches' small share of The Deep World.

The road keeps its own heroes. Snowshut's compact watch tells of the hard winter when a few dozen Hobgoblins held the upper ford against an outlaw host come to take the winter stores, until the hold's wardens came down through the snow; the lord whose warrant they held took the credit, and the watch still wears the scar-badge he never gave them.

Belief

Headwater belief gathers at thresholds. The town oath-houses keep the Sworn Accord, and Abrel the Changeling is honoured in them, as some oath-houses downriver still refuse to do. Abrel was born in these foothills from the longing of people who belong to two peoples at once. Humans call the god Abrel, frontier Dwarves call it Durrask, Goblins of the mixed crossings call it Ziv, and the same god answers all three. Fosterlings, apprentices, and everyone still waiting for oath-right pray to Abrel, and some old frontier shrines keep mirrors said to show a different face at every look.

At the gates the Held Covenant is kept in its outward-facing gate practice. Oath-right and every oath-yard bargain are sworn under Kerrund the Stone-Warden, who guards the oath not yet given, while Abrel keeps company with whoever is waiting to give it. In the terraced valleys Kerrund also contends with Anvelle the Harvest-Mother over whether corridor ground should be walled or planted. On the oldest terraces, farmers say, Haurûm's stone holds Anvelle's soil.

Tensions

• The grain sworn uphill. A foothill town has sworn in its hold's oath-yard to deliver grain the hold needs for the Deeps.
• An heir in waiting. A marcher lord's heir has lived for years as a fosterling behind a foothill gate and holds working right but not oath-right.
• The marked road. A lord wants to widen a chain-camp road section and take a cut of every cart on it.
• The wrong-born bear. Brood-hunters have tracked a wrong-born bear out past the Wrongwood watch into the last farmed valley, the first beast of that size to leave the burned ground in a lifetime.
• The band above the Rattlecut. An outlaw band has taken three caravans in one summer at the head of the Rattlecut, always on the day the river rose.