The Leeward Folds

Overview

The Leeward Folds are a sheltered country of hollows, stepped terraces, orchard belts, and cistern-fed valleys on the far side of Caeldon, and the first named homeland of the Halflings. They lie well outside the Elderweald-Ironspine-Confluence cradle-web. Beside them, past a ridge that takes the wind for them, lies The Windscar Expanse, a world of exposed breadth and guarded passage. The Folds are its opposite: a world of shelter, full store-rooms, and blossom on still air, and that makes them a prize. In a dry year every hungry band on the far side remembers where the water is. Beside the Orcs and The Windscar Pacts, they are the far side's second great people.

Lay of the Land

The Folds lie in the middle of the far side, east of the Rimward Basins and south-east of the High Scars, behind the Lee Wall, the ridge that runs north to south along their western side. North of them the terrace country falls to the harbours of the Tidelace Coasts, and the short rivers run north with it to the estuaries. East and south the folds thin into dry spurs and the Dry Folds, and beyond those nothing is mapped.

Plumbfold is the windward fold where the Lee Road comes over the wall, seven or eight weeks from Deepdraw under escort. Evenlee lies in a deep hollow of the inner folds about two weeks further in, and the coast road runs about three weeks down from there to the Counted Lee. The Lay of the Land places the Folds among their neighbours.

Land and Hazards

A fold is a pocket of good ground held inside poorer country. Some are deep hollows with a spring at their head; others are long interior valleys whose slopes have been stepped from floor to rim with dry-stone retaining walls. The orchards take the warmer slopes, grain and garden plots the valley floors, and cisterns sit at the fold heads, cut into rock or walled in clay, where runoff and spring water can be caught and held. Between the folds run bare saddles and thin-soiled spurs that nobody bothers to terrace.

The Folds are never far from the dry country around them, and most of their dangers are the slow kind:

• Dry runs. A short wet season leaves the cisterns low by midsummer.
• Slips. A neglected retaining wall, or a cloudburst that overtops one, can bring a terrace down onto the terraces below it, and wall figs seed into the dry-stone and split it from within.
• Late frost. Cold air pools in the hollows on still spring nights, and one bad frost can take a year's blossom.
• Tired ground. A terrace pushed through too many harvests goes tired and needs years of fallow before it bears again.
• Swarms and stings. In a swarm year locusts blow in off the dry edges and strip a fold in a day, and hornets nest in the orchards and drive pickers off the ladders; the orchard leagues burn the nests at night.
• Raiders. The loud danger.
• Too many mouths. The danger Halflings name first is demand: more guests, more trade, more feasting than the fold can bear. It looks like prosperity until the reserve is gone.

Ordinary Life

A fold town is a close cluster of stone houses along the upper edge of the terraces, kept off the good ground, with store-rooms on the cool side of each house. Every household keeps its own stores and owes a share to the common reserve held at the fold's cistern hall, and everyone knows roughly what both amount to. Counting is household work before anything else. Children learn to tally the shelves, to tell which terraces rest this year, and to say how many days of water the cistern holds.

The year turns on two moments. In spring the planting rites open the terraces. In autumn the harvest is brought in, the reserve is counted aloud at the cistern hall, and only what lies beyond it goes to market. Winter is lived on stores, walls, and the arguments the count produced. In a dry run there are watchers on every saddle, and a horn from the rim sends the children to the cistern hall and the young to the walls.

Peoples and Power

Authority in the Folds is spread thin on purpose, so that no house, town, or cistern district can spend what the whole fold needs.

• The commons. Each fold runs itself through its households, the terrace wards that keep the walls and man them, the cistern circles that keep and release the water, and the orchard leagues that tie neighbouring folds together.
• The measure orders. The keepers of the cistern halls, the orchard tally houses, and the reserve-report circles, who make sure anyone with a stake can check a count.
• The receiving elders. At the fold markets and cistern halls, those who answer outsiders decide what reception can be given: exchange, rest, temporary shelter, rarely anything deeper, or nothing yet.

Under the Commons, three Halfling lifeways share the region. Foldward Halflings are most of it. Leeward folk, of the measure-heavy inner folds, are the ones outsiders meet across a tally bench. Edgefold or Outfold households hold the outer valleys along the roads and live closest to outside traffic, its profits and its raiders.

The order is fought over from inside, and always along the same line. Prestige-minded households and receiving elders hold that a fold too narrow in good years will lose trust and influence, and that reserve can harden into fear. Reserve-minded custodians answer that abundance is exactly when a people becomes dangerous to itself. Each side suspects the other: generosity that is really display, or caution that is really hoarding in clean language. In the present dry run a third quarrel sits on top of the old one: whether this is the run the long-cycle reserve was kept for.

Settlements

No town rules the Folds, and authority is spread thin on purpose. If they have a centre it is the great cistern halls of the inner folds, where the measure orders carry most weight, and the largest of those halls stands at Evenlee.

• Evenlee. An inner fold town of two or three thousand Halflings in a deep hollow with a spring at its head, its stone houses packed along the upper edge of the terraces with their store-rooms on the cool side.
• Plumbfold. The windward fold that owns The Measure Cistern, where the Lee Road comes in from the Windscar over the saddle.
• Spurfold. An outer fold on a spur beside the Lee Road, home to Edgefold and Outfold households who live closest to outside traffic.
• Dewcup. A small hollow with a spring at its head and terraces stepped from floor to rim: half a dozen households, an orchard on the warm slope, and a cistern cut into the rock.

The People

About 240,000 Halflings live in the Folds, nearly everyone there. Most are Foldward Halflings. Leeward folk of the inner folds and Edgefold or Outfold households along the roads are smaller shares. Orc escorts at the terrace-edge grounds and Gnome traders at the Counted Lee are received, counted, and gone again; none of them lives in a fold.

• Halflings. Fold dress is home-woven wool and felt from the Windscar trade: smocks and aprons for terrace and orchard work, short coats in winter, and bare feet in the warm months.

Neighbours and Borders

• Windward: the Windscar Expanse. The Lee Road climbs from the fold markets over the Lee Wall towards the defended wells of the Rimward Basins, and parties under escort from the High Scars come down the same way.
• Coastward: the Tidelace Coasts. Towards the sea the outer folds face the harbour world of the Tidelace Coasts and the Gnomes of The Gaugeward Leagues.
• Elsewhere. No oath marks the other edges.

Roads, Rivers, and Trade

The Folds have no rivers to travel on. Water comes from springs, runoff, and seasonal streams, and it moves by channel and by release from cistern to terrace, never by boat. Inside the region, roads are stepped paths along the terraces and over the saddles between folds, walked and carried rather than driven.

• The Market Round is the seasonal circuit of fold markets.
• The Lee Road runs from the fold markets to the Rimward Basins under Windscar escort.
• The coast road runs down to the Counted Lee, carrying timed loads sorted into burden classes, so that a fold knows before it picks how much fruit a declared approach can take.

Dried fruit, grain, and other stored goods go out along both roads, but only from what lies beyond the counted reserve. Salt, hides, felt, and herd animals come back from the Windscar, along with escort service for anyone who needs it. Coastal goods come up from the Counted Lee, and some of them pass on along the Lee Road into Windscar hands. Water is the one thing the Folds will not bargain over. A party drinks what a cistern hall has said aloud it can spare, and not a cup more.

Historical Memory

The Folds remember in tallies: which hall counted honestly in the hard years, which one narrowed too quickly, which feast spent what it should not have. Their chain runs from long ages of sheltered fold life through the Founding (c. 170,000-c. 152,000 BR) and into the Leeward-Windscar Terms, and, while the Terms were still settling, to The Measure Cistern Reckoning (c. 154,000-c. 148,000 BR). There the Commons first admitted that "measured" and "just" are not the same word, and drew the line between honest and false narrowing. The Measure Cistern Crisis tested that settlement against Orc escorts while the measure orders (c. 146,000-c. 139,000 BR) were hardening out of it. On the coast the same lesson came quietly, through the Leeward-Tidelace Measures, The Counted Lee Timing Feud (c. 139,000-c. 136,000 BR), and the shared-loss rule of The Leeward-Tidelace Timing Oath (c. 136,000-c. 134,000 BR). Medieval cistern halls still recite these as old custom rather than add to them.

Belief

There is no Halfling church in the Folds and no clergy. Belief is household and commons custom, the alignment custom of bounded plenty, with one god at its centre. Tamsel the Season-Weaver keeps the turning year: spring planting rites, the thanks of autumn storing, and the Festival of the Turn, which is said to bring a good harvest if it is kept with true joy. Children are told the tale of the Long Summer, when Tamsel held the summer for a year and the winter after it emptied a fold to its last measure. It is the reason given for never spending the reserve on plenty. Tamsel's strength rises and falls with the health of the folds, and in the present dry run the god faces the same choice as the cistern halls: force the season and risk a seasonal debt that could ruin a fold for generations, or let the folds spend what they were taught to keep.

Tensions

The Gnome window that moved after a fold had already picked for it is still being argued at the Lee, and is told at The Counted Lee. Across the Folds:

• The year the reserve is for. The cisterns are falling for another year.
• Feast at the gate. A fold holds a lavish Festival of the Turn in the same week its cistern hall tells a waiting Windscar escort that the fold can spare water but no stores.
• Restoring the Dry Folds. A crowded fold proposes to rebuild abandoned terraces in a neighbouring Dry Fold.
• Swords on the saddle. Plumbfold wants to hire a Windscar escort kindred to hold its saddles against the struck bands through the dry run.
• Full jars in an empty fold. Treasure-diggers have broken into a sealed cistern in a Dry Fold and found the old store-jars still full.
• Lights in the Dry Folds. Fires have been seen at night in a Dry Fold nobody has lived in for ages.