The Unsung Field

Overview

The Unsung Field is a shallow bowl of grassland on a shelf of the High Scars, in the Windscar Expanse, where a band was slaughtered and its names were never recited. Every Windscar kindred knows the field and none camps on it. It is one of the few off-key places known on Caeldon, where the Dissonance lies close under the true world.

The Place

From the cairn chain above, the field looks like good grazing: a bowl of grass a little greener than the shelf around it, out of the worst of the wind. Up close the grass grows in spirals, every tuft turned the same way round a centre that is never where it was the last time anyone looked. There are no bones, no cairn, and no sign of the fight.

Keepers and Users

No kindred claims the field, and no treaty-ground has ever shared its grass. The escort bands of the chain that runs past it keep it by keeping off it: the route bends a full day round its rim, and a captain who cuts across to save the day loses the party's trust, and often more.

The nearest treaty-ground keeps one custom for it. When an escort has to pass within sight of the field, in a storm or with raiders on the line, the whole party recites its own dead aloud from the moment the rim comes into view until it drops behind, captain first, then every kindred in the party, each name with its passage. Escorts say the low wind fails while the names go on. Nobody has tried stopping halfway to find out.

The Medieval Present

Most years the field is passed at a distance, and that is all. At every season's-end fire some kindred tells of a herder who went down after a strayed beast and came back up with the beast and without the day, or of one who did not come up. The grieving and the sleepless are the ones the field pulls: a warrior who has lost a sworn brother on the road is watched when the route nears the rim, and every camp-ring has a tale of one found at dawn walking down into the spirals.

Hire-spears and outlaws use the field's name. Struck-name bands are said to cross its rim to throw off war-bands that will not follow, and some of them do not come out the far side.

History

No kindred remembers who the slaughtered were, who killed them, or when. The tales disagree on the one point that matters: some say no one was left alive to recite the names, others that the kindreds who did the killing forbade it. Either way the names were never given to Ushkar the Ancestor-Warden, and the field has been wrong since.

Tensions

• The shortcut. A dry year has closed the wells on the long way round, and a captain short of water argues that a party reciting the whole way can cross the field in half a day.
• Two kindreds, one silence. Two kindreds each hold an old tale that their own forebears did the killing.
• A name found. A herder came up out of the field speaking a name no kindred knows and will not stop saying it.