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 . . .