Sharrukin's Palace

. . . and here we have the last of the maps I needed to build before getting started on revisions of The Curse of Steel. Over the past couple of months, I’ve gone from maps covering two whole continents (and their history) to a map covering a major region, and now down to this local map. The entire action of the novel will take place within the territory covered by this map.

This map focuses on the lands held by the Revatheni clan confederation of the Tremara people. The Revatheni (the name means something like “those who dwell by the sacred grove”) occupy most of the land between the Dugava and Kanta Rivers, a territory totaling about 11,500 square miles. The total population of the clan confederation is about 140,000, divided among five major clans and a dozen or so minor ones. The Revatheni are an unusually wealthy tribe, partaking in a lot of the trade coming up the rivers from the south. For the past couple of generations, their leaders have been putting on airs, claiming increased privileges and calling themselves sarai (“kings”).

As with the regional map, this is a fairly finished project – I’ve placed and named all the settlements and terrain features that are likely to play any part in the revised novel. The next step is to get busy with the second draft! I hope to have the novel ready for release sometime this fall.

Having finished the “historical atlas” series for the Great Lands, now I’m starting to focus on maps that will help me keep track of the environment in which my characters will be moving around. This is a map of the territory inhabited by Krava’s home culture and the surrounding region.

The Tremara inhabit the region between the Blue Mountains in the west, the Black River valley in the east, the great pine forests of the Northmen, and the Lake Country to the south. It’s an area of roughly 200,000 square miles, supporting a total population of about 2.4 million. The Tremara are at an early Iron Age level of development – mostly peasant villages, ruled by a warrior aristocracy who fight from chariots with bow and spear. They have some contact with Korsanari and Sea Kingdom merchants who bring in luxury goods and new ideas – these mostly come up the rivers from the Lake Country, or across the Blue Mountains at the Trader’s Pass.

This map is a reasonably finished project, although I expect I’ll continue to tweak and add to it in the future as I develop more details of the setting.

Next project will be to focus on a small area of this map, producing a local map that should cover all the territory that plays a part in The Curse of Steel. Once that’s done, I’m probably going to have everything I need to sit down and produce a second draft of the novel.

Technical Notes: My continent-wide map was put in an orthographic projection and narrowed down to this region using GProjector (Windows version 2.1.8). An image from there was imported as a tracing overlay, and the basic map here was produced, using Wonderdraft (version 1.1) with standard symbol libraries. The final Wonderdraft product was imported into Adobe Photoshop CC, where I added the latitude-longitude grid and all the place names. I have another overlay (not visible here) with national and tribal names.

As the Iron Age matures throughout the Great Lands, societies everywhere have begun to transform themselves. This will not be an era of tiny tribal states, leavened with the occasional “Great Kingdom” that is still small in territorial extent. New military technologies and social organizations are clearly giving rise to an age of empire.

The superpower of the day is the Anshan Empire, the largest and most populous single state in world history up to this point. The Anshani have conquered the entire core of the Kurani zone, along with most of the old Nesali heartland and all of the upper Mereti lands. By Krava’s time they are pressing down on the Korsanari city-states of the coast, and are in a constant state of low-level war with the resurgent Mereti Kingdom in the far east. No one is quite sure what further ambitions the Anshani hold, but their kings and their jealous god show no sign of slowing down.

With the Tukhari homeland under Anshani rule, many of the colonies in the east have banded together for mutual support and defense. The core of the alliance is the city of Tukhar Nakh (“New Tukhar”), which has grown to significant size on the basis of its prosperous trade links. The allies are nominally independent of Anshani rule, and would fight Anshan if the Empire ever forced them to it. In the meantime, their interests align with Anshan more often than not, especially when it comes to holding the other great sea-faring powers at bay.

The Sea Kingdom remains relatively peaceful in strategy and intent . . . although in recent generations it has developed a truly formidable capacity for self-defense against the various “barbarians” it finds across the world. Sea Kingdom ships go wherever they choose and trade with whoever is willing, and not even Anshan has quite mustered the courage to try to oppose them. As a result, the lords of Dar-ul-Hakum have become fabulously wealthy, trading in all the luxury goods of the world. With wealth comes great power, which the Sea Kingdom has not yet decided how to use . . .

One unique facet of the Sea Kingdom’s holdings is the appearance of the Island-folk, finally reunited with all their distant cousins after tens of thousands of years. The Island-folk embraced the arrival of the Sea-Kingdom’s first ships in their distant homeland, and enthusiastically volunteered to serve aboard Sea-Kingdom ships. Over the last few generations, they have set up small communities in almost every port town in the world. Their clever minds and nimble hands make them valuable in a variety of professions: sailors, craftsmen, messengers and thieves.

The third of the great sea-faring powers is the Korsanari city-states. Like a shadow of the ancient Kavrian Matriarchy, the Korsanari have begun to build a sophisticated urban civilization of their own. The Korsanari are not venturesome sailors like the Tukhari or the Sea-Kingdom, rarely willing to sail out of sight of land. Even so, they have set up their own trade networks throughout the Sailor’s Sea and beyond. These networks are supported by a plethora of small colonies, established wherever a decent harbor and a sheltered hinterland can be found, and the local barbarians are not too hostile.

The Korsanari have also begun to trade well inland on the northern continent, seeking markets where the Tukhari and even the Sea Kingdom do not bother to go. Korsanari merchants have penetrated as far as the Lake Country and beyond, bringing the Tremara and even some of the skatoi tribes into their trade network.

As for the Tremara, Krava’s people? They are thoroughly established between the Blue Mountains and the skatoi lands across the Black River, with the pale Mervirai tribes to the north and the prosperous Lake Country to the south. Compared to the vibrant cultures around the Sailor’s Sea, they are certainly barbarians – but sophisticated barbarians, with superb visual art, even better poetry and music, and the beginnings of a literary tradition. Most of the peoples of the Great Lands know little about them and care less, but (in the persons of Krava the Swift and her friends) they are about to shake the world . . .

Late in the Bronze Age, iron-working technology appeared in two wide-separated places. The growing Sea-Kingdom was the first to mass-produce iron for tools and weapons, guided by the occasional instruction of the Elder Folk. The late Nesali Empire developed the new technology as well, with input from the Smith-folk enclave in their territory. The chaos of the Bronze Age collapse spread the new technique far and wide.

By the time the völkerwanderung faded, the world had changed. Almost all of the Great Kingdoms at the core of the civilized region had collapsed. The Mereti Kingdom had fallen down to a small rump state, due not to foreign invasion, but to internal decadence and anarchy. The Empire of Shuppar was gone, only its capital city remaining behind to testify to faded glory. The Nesali Empire had vanished entirely from history, leaving behind a patchwork of petty kingdoms and tribal states.

Yet new powers were also on the rise.

The Kingdom of Anshan applied iron weaponry and innovative tactical systems to place most of Shuppar’s old territory under heavy tribute. The Anshani people were soon cordially hated by all of their subjects and neighbors . . . but their armies and ruthless administration made them the new imperial power.

Meanwhile, mercantile power was making its appearance for the first time. To be sure, the high Bronze Age had boasted extensive trade networks, but these mostly involved traffic among kings and aristocrats in luxury goods. Now the Kurani city-states of the coast, most notably the towns of Buradh and Tukhar, began to trade far out across the Sailor’s Sea. The Tukhari, in particular, established trading posts and small colonies along both shores of the sea, reaching as far as the open Sunset Ocean. In part, this movement was driven by Anshani pressure; the coastal towns needed to raise great wealth to hold off imperial armies. Yet it was noteworthy that these trading ventures were led and manned by commoners, men and women of no noble blood.

And as the Tukhari venturers reached the Sunset Ocean, they encountered the men of the Sea Kingdom coming the other way.

After a thousand years of isolated development, the Sea Kingdom was ready to explore the whole world. Huge ocean-worthy ships returned to the Great Lands, establishing trading posts all up and down the western coasts, some of them venturing as far as the Mereti coast in the far east. From these outposts, wild tales came of strange lands no other man had ever seen, on the far side of the Sunset Ocean and even on the other side of the world.

The Sea Kingdom was peaceful to a fault in this era, refusing to use force to compete for trade or territory. But then, their arts and sciences were far enough beyond those of the Great Lands that they had no need to use force. No one, not even the most ruthless Anshani prince or Tukhari merchant, dared lift a hand against them. And where the sailors of the Sea Kingdom went, iron-working and the arts of civilization followed. Even the Muri cultures of the deep south came into the world community at last, picking up advanced technology and social systems from visiting Sea Kingdom ships. Several Muri tribal confederations became full kingdoms in this era, and a Muri dynasty established itself in the new Ka realm that had arisen as a rival to the Mereti.

In the north, the skatoi had settled down in what was once Rudanai territory, splitting the Maras cultures almost in half. They proved poor neighbors, although the Maras soon found that they spent as much time fighting one another as raiding outsiders.

The eastern Maras peoples established a stable status quo. The Haleari even built a network of city-states, reminiscent of the Tamiri civilization that had fallen in the same area a thousand years before. In the west, the Chariot People continued to expand, taking over the remaining Zari lands east of the Blue Mountains. One branch of the northern Kardanai were destined for special significance. These were the Tremara (Classical Korsanai trenāras, the “Mighty Folk”) – Krava’s own people, out on the historical stage at last.

Just as in our own world, the end of the Bronze Age came amid chaos.

The first act took place in the west, where the Targut Horde of the skatoi sought to move south into warmer and more fertile lands. At first they tried to invade the fringes of Zari territory, near the Standing Stones. An alliance of Zari villagers, Maras charioteers from the south, and the Elder Folk turned back this invasion at the famous Battle of the Plain. This turned the Targut aside, forcing them to stick to the eastern side of the Black River.

About a generation later, a civil war among the far-northern Akyat Horde caused about two-thirds of that people to move southward, pushing aside the Marut Horde. The Marut responded by allying themselves with the Targut, mounting a great war-migration into the Maras lands north and east of the Great Lakes. The Rudanai tribes who dwelt there soon found that they no longer had a military advantage over the skatoi, who had tamed horses and built war-chariots of their own.

While this was going on, the Korsanari of the south fell into a trap of their own. Using divine blessings and the power of a mighty Smith-folk-forged sword, one of the palace-lords unified most of the Korsanari for the first time in history. Unfortunately, his arrogance led to a war against the very Smith-folk who had aided him in his youth. This led to his downfall under a curse, and the collapse of his High Kingdom. After his death, his vassals turned against one another, fighting over the scraps until there was little left. His sword vanished from history, only to fall into the hands of Krava the Swift centuries later.

Like the fall of a cascade of dominoes, the migrations continued southward. Attracted by the chaos in Korsanari lands, the Rudanai moved southward, sacking palace after palace as they went. Some of them surged out across the narrows of the sea, capturing islands and carving big chunks out of the Nesali Empire. After a generation of this, the Nesali themselves collapsed, setting off a further wave of migration that rushed into Kurani lands.

The Second Empire of Shuppar had managed to hang on until this point, although much of its old territory had already fallen away by the time the wave of Rudanai and Nesali migrants arrived. Now the empire collapsed entirely, although the city of Shuppar itself survived the wave of destruction. The only beneficiary of this chaos was the kingdom of Anshan, which broke violently away from Shuppar early in the chaos, and managed to hold the Maras migrations at bay. Driven by their blood-thirsty god and a massive sense of racial superiority, the Anshani suddenly saw their own chance for empire . . .