The Sworn Accord

Overview

The Sworn Accord is the organized religion of the Human corridor world: the Confluence Marches and the Serathic League.

It took shape during the corridor orders of c. 18,000-c. 7,000 BR, as the river towns' habit of swearing oaths before witnesses was carried from bargains between men to the gods themselves. Its shape is usually dated to around c. 15,000 BR, when the first river towns swore a shared roster of the gods they would honour in common.

The Accord treats the gods the way the river towns treat strangers. A god is honoured in common once the town has sworn to it and entered it on the roster; until then it is someone else's god, kept at someone else's hearth, and nobody will defend its shrine when the raiders come.

The Accorded Gods

The roster is long and varies by town, but a core of gods is entered everywhere the Accord is kept.

• First among the accorded: Anvelle the Harvest-Mother, power of the basin fields, and Serovan the River-King, power of the Serath and of those who hold its fords.
• The gods of oath and judgement: Iskel the Scribe of the Silent, by whom oath-breakers are cursed; Annoth the Keeper of Scrolls, who remembers what was promised; and Ostrin the Lantern-Bearer, who drags hidden wrongs into the light.
• The god of the dead: Ennor the Grave-Watcher is entered on the roster as Ennor, though most other peoples of the cradle-web who are not Human honour the same god under other names.
• A frontier god: Abrel the Changeling is entered in the Headwater Marches but not everywhere downriver, where some oath-houses regard a god of in-between people as too unsettled to enter.

Oath-Houses and Witnesses

The Accord's temples are oath-houses: squat stone halls by the landing, with the town's roster cut into the lintel and its oath-rolls kept in iron chests below the floor. Its priests are witnesses, sworn to attend and remember rather than to command. They are feared more than loved. A witness's word can hang a man, disinherit a widow, or turn a whole town against a neighbour's god, and the proudest boast of any house is that no lord has ever made its word give way.

Entry, Toleration, and Striking

The Accord sorts local devotion by its roster.

• Entered cults are honoured in common: their shrines are kept openly and defended by the town's spears, their festivals fill the calendar, and an oath sworn under their gods is one the town will hold a man to, with a rope if it must.
• Tolerated cults are not entered but are left alone: household gods, country shrines, and the devotions of neighbouring peoples that make no claim on the river towns.
• Unentered and struck cults count for nothing in the towns, and their shrines are fair game.

The bloodiest quarrels come from unentered devotion that refuses to stay private. Reedfolk flood-keepers hold that the river belongs to those who remember it, not to the god of whoever holds the ford, and their remembering is older than the Accord's own; see The Last Keeping. Goblin songs to Tavi the Bard of the Broken keep alive the memory of promises the towns broke, in a religion that has no place for them, and a goblin caught singing them in a market can lose his tongue. Prayers to Varn the Shadow-Stalker are, by their nature, made by people the towns' lords are hunting: outlaws in the reed-beds, runaways, poachers, and the thieves who rob the oath-chests of the oath-houses themselves.

Place in Medieval Life

For corridor Humans, the Accord shapes the ordinary year: sowing and harvest under Anvelle, the spring rise under Serovan, oath-days, record-days, and the rites of the dead. Most of its members never think about the roster at all. They meet it when a marriage, bargain, inheritance, or boundary needs to be sworn under an entered god; when an oath-breaker is cursed from the steps and his neighbours stop speaking to him; when the drowned walk up the landing and the rites for the River-Given must be kept; and when a neighbour's god turns out not to count.

The Accord's buried shame is that it is a religion of the sworn word built on remembering-ways it did not invent and on a river its lords took from others by the sword. Some witnesses know this. Fewer say it.

Rolls, Ordeals, and Torches

The oath-chests are treasure. An old roll can win a manor or lose one, and rival houses pay thieves to lift a roll from a chest, or burn it, before a claim is sworn. Old witnesses sleep on the chest, and an oath-house robbed in the night rings its bell until the town turns out with torches and dogs.

The ordeal-field. When an oath is denied and no witness can settle it, the Accord lets the entered gods decide by ordeal: hot iron, the river, or combat before the oath-house. A rich man may name a champion, and corridor sellswords make a trade of it; the town still talks of the hired sword who won three ordeals in a summer and drowned in the fourth, the river ordeal, with every coin he had earned sewn into his coat.

Tensions

• Too unsettled to enter. Each oath-house keeps its own town's roster, and none can enter a god for another.
• Sealed rolls. Iskel, Annoth, and Ostrin are all entered, and their followers fight over every sealed roll.
• Oaths under a struck god. Marriages, bargains, and inheritances were sworn under gods later struck from a roster.
• A paid sword before the gods. Hired champions fight most ordeals the rich are party to.
• Witness or retainer. A witness swears to remember, not to command.