The Tidelace Coasts

Overview

The Tidelace Coasts are a broken littoral macro-region on the far side of Caeldon, a coast of inlets, island chains, tidal straits, cliff harbours, and fog belts where nobody enters the sea without reading it first. They are the first named homeland most strongly associated with Gnomes and the heartland of The Gaugeward Leagues, a league of harbour towns without a capital, held together by soundings, beacons, breakwaters, and old harbour families who say who may come in and when. It is a beautiful coast and a hungry one: the fog hides drowned crews, the shoals hide drowned harbours, and on the darkest nights there are fires on the headlands that no Gnome lit. Among the harbours live a few coastal Humans, descendants of bands that drifted along far shores in the Unrecorded Age, who fish from hamlets under Gnome harbour custom.

Lay of the Land

The Tidelace is the far side's north coast between the Soundchain Roads in the west and the river mouths of the Tidebound Reaches in the east. Island chains lie offshore, and beyond the outer isles to the north lies the Unrun Sea. South of the coast the terraces climb to the Leeward Folds, and short rivers come down from them to the estuaries.

The Lacework runs west to east behind the islands. Fathomstair, behind the Sounding Gate, is four or five weeks by pilot craft from the Turnwater Quays, and Truesound ten days or so further along the Lacework. The Counted Lee lies where the coast road comes down from the Folds, the Split Reed Mouth about three weeks' sail east of Fathomstair, and Lastlight on an outer isle north of the coast. See The Lay of the Land.

Land and Hazards

Seen from the sea, the coast is frayed rather than drawn: fingers of rock and long inlets, island chains strung offshore with straits between them, and behind everything the sea-cut terraces climbing to the cliffs. Little of it is open sea and little is soft shore. Most of it is water a hull can use only with knowledge: channels threaded between shoals, straits that run like rivers at mid-tide and lie still at slack, harbour mouths that are safe for an hour and wreck-ground for the next.

What the coast does to people:

• Fog. The great fog belt of the outer coast, which pilots call the Long Grey, rolls in off open water with little warning and can lie on the straits for days.
• Storm. In the storm season, gales drive surge into the inlets and break what the breakwater crews built in the calm months. Some harbours close their mouths entirely until spring.
• Moving ground. Shoals shift and channels silt, so a mark true last year may be false this one, and the shoals are paved with the hulls of crews who trusted an old one.
• What lives in the water. Congers as long as a man lie in the breakwater gaps and wrecks and take the fingers of anyone who reaches in; rays with venomous tail spines lie buried under the shallows; around the outer isles, blackfin pods hunt seals and will take a lone swimmer.
• The false fire. A beacon lit in the wrong place is a wrecker's fire.
• Drowned harbours. Old breakwaters lie under the water, signal towers stand in the sea, and lost ports sit at the heads of silted inlets, left by earlier Gnome lines.

Ordinary Life

A Tidelace harbour town is built upward. The breakwater and quays sit at the waterline; on the first terrace stand the sounding house, the gauge house where tide gauges and timing instruments are made and kept, and the tide hall; above them the stone houses of the harbour families climb the cliff with walled terrace gardens between them; and on the headland stands the beacon tower. Stairs join the levels more often than streets do. Larger towns gather several inlets behind one breakwater. The smallest are a single quay, a beacon, and a few dozen households.

Peoples and Power

The Leagues have no king and no harbour-capital. Each town rules itself, and the towns are bound to one another by shared beacons, common approach marks, and the duty to keep up what other harbours' lives depend on. A town that lets a beacon fail or a marker drift is shamed before the whole coast and finds its craft turned away at its neighbours' quays, and that, more than any council, holds the Leagues together. Between towns, quarrels over fishing grounds still end now and then in rammed boats and cut nets, and one feud between two Lacework harbours over a herring ground has outlasted every family that began it. Inside each town, the old harbour families divide the power between them:

• Harbour wards keep the harbour and its quays, receive traffic, and judge what the harbour can bear this week.
• Tide halls, the elders of the harbour families sitting together, settle quarrels over entry, fishing grounds, and repair duty. Their judgement usually favours the families that sit on them.
• Sounding houses and gauge houses hold the readings every other decision rests on.
• Beacon wardens keep the lights and the signal lines, and hunt the wreckers who light false ones.

Settlements

The Leagues have no harbour-capital. Each town rules itself, and the harbour all the others are measured against is the one behind the Sounding Gate, Fathomstair.

• Fathomstair. The harbour town behind the Sounding Gate, climbing its cliff in flights of stairs from the breakwater and quays to the sounding house on the first terrace, the families' stone houses and walled gardens above them, and the beacon tower on the headland.
• Truesound. The largest harbour town on the coast, some twenty thousand strong, gathering three inlets behind one breakwater on the Lacework.
• Lastlight. An outer-isle harbour of a single quay, a beacon, and a few dozen households of an island Gnome line that keeps lighter customs than the mainland towns.
• Saltrack. A Human fishing hamlet on a shingle cove between two harbours: a dozen timber houses above the tide line, boats drawn up on the shingle, drying racks, and a shrine to Maris at the water's edge.

The People

About 180,000 people live on the Tidelace. Some nineteen in twenty are Gnomes, Truesound and Fathomstair the largest of their towns. Coastal Humans, perhaps 10,000, live in the hamlets between harbours; Thaluren come to the estuaries in return season but do not live on the coast.

• Gnomes. Harbour dress is wool and felt from the Windscar trade, oiled against spray: short coats, close caps, and sea boots, with the family mark worn as a brass or stitched badge.
• Humans. Hamlet dress is oiled wool, hide, and bare feet on the shingle.

Neighbours and Borders

The Tidelace ends where Gnome harbour custom gives way to someone else's.

• Outward: the Soundchain Roads. Along the Windscar-facing edge runs The Soundchain Roads, the corridor of roadsteads, lee sounds, and pilot stations where escorted Windscar parties are received without entering the inner harbours.
• Landward: the Leeward Folds. Up through the terrace country lie the sheltered folds of the Foldward Commons.
• The estuaries: the Tidebound Reaches. Where rivers reach the sea, Tidelace water runs into The Tidebound Reaches of the Thaluren and The Returning Concord.
• Seaward: the outer isles. Offshore, the island chains thin into outer isles and then the open water of the Unrun Sea.

No road or sea-lane known on this coast leads to the cradle-web on the other side of the world.

Roads, Rivers, and Trade

The Tidelace has almost no roads worth the name. Its highways are water, and every one of them is marked.

• The Lacework. The inner channels behind the islands carry nearly all coastwise traffic from harbour to harbour in sheltered water, aboard Gnome coastal craft.
• The outer roads. Open water seaward of the islands is faster and takes heavier craft, but it closes first in fog and storm, and the Long Grey can shut it for days.
• The beacon lines. Signal towers on the headlands carry warnings, closures, and sailing windows along the coast far faster than any hull, and a harbour that misreads a neighbour's light, or trusts a wrecker's, pays for it.
• The river mouths. Short rivers come down through the terraces to the estuaries.

What moves is mostly the coast's own: fish dried and salted, shellfish, cordage, lamp oil, worked metal, and the gauges and timing instruments of the gauge houses. From the Folds come stored grain, orchard goods, and preserved stores in counted loads; from the Windscar, by way of the Soundchain Roads, come hides, felt, and wool. Human hamlets bring their catch to the harbour quays and take back cordage, tools, and grain.

At a harbour mouth the pilot families take the helm of any stranger's craft, and a stranger who refuses a pilot is assumed to be a smuggler, a wrecker's scout, or worse. Human boats work their own coves without pilots, but at a harbour mouth they wait on the window like everyone else.

Historical Memory

The Tidelace remembers being Gnome long before it was Gaugeward. Old Gnome harbour lines across the inlets and island chains bound themselves into a league in The Founding of the Gaugeward Leagues (c. 165,000-c. 146,000 BR), when shared beacons, common marks, and the duty of repair tied separate harbours together. The coast's first great argument followed at The Sounding Gate, a measured approach where receiving wards and sounding houses each accused the other of selling the coast's trust, and craft went down on the strength of a mark nobody had checked. The Quarrel (c. 155,000-c. 149,000 BR) left the saying every harbour child still learns: precise and true are not the same word. The Calibration Orders (c. 148,000-c. 132,000 BR) turned that saying into the rounds by which every mark is checked.

Belief

Maris of the Tides was born of the Decade of Storms, from the shared plea of Gnome harbour towns and coastal Humans, and she still belongs to both. Her shrines stand on Gnome quays and on Human beaches; pilots back from a hard passage pay her toll of story aloud at the shrine; the springs along the coast are said to be her tears; and she is said to be mediating a quarrel between two harbour towns over fishing rights. For the Humans she is nearly the whole of religion: they keep local cults of the shore and know nothing of The Sworn Accord that organizes Human belief in the cradle. At the estuaries her salt water meets Thaluren return-water, where the Way of Return lets her be honoured on the banks but never invoked over the ascent.

Tensions

• The black water. Near some river mouths the water is turning black and sour, fouled by something carried down from inland.
• A closed cove. A tide hall has closed the approach to a cove for resurvey after a winter of silting, by every proper form, with a day named to look again.
• The honoured mark. An approach marker kept by one of the oldest sounding families has not been moved in living memory, and the family says it has never needed to be.
• The ticking under the Grey. A Human diver from a hamlet near the outer roads came up out of the Long Grey with a brass gauge still ticking in her hands, and says she knows where the drowned gauge house lies.
• Fires on the headlands. Two coastal craft have gone onto the rocks this season following fires where no beacon stands.