The Headwater Marches

The Headwater Marches are the foothill country between the Human farmland and the Dwarven mountains: steep valleys where the rivers of The Confluence Basins begin, walled towns at the crossings, and the escorted exchange roads that climb from basin granaries to the gates of The Ironspine. They belong to The Confluence Marches, the same Human civilization that holds the Basins, but they live by passage more than by the plough. What a Headwater place is worth usually depends on what it connects.

They are also the oldest shared country of Humans and Dwarves on Caeldon. Human bands settled these foothills slowly, c. 70,000-c. 35,000 BR, met the outer holds as patrols and guarded waystations, and over the following twenty-odd thousand years turned that contact into habit, custom, and road. The mixed households, fostered children, and two-step coming of age that grew out of it are the Marches' own inventions. So is the god who keeps company with the people caught between.

The Marches climb. Coming up from the basins, the valleys narrow, the fields tilt onto terraces, and the rivers quicken. Above the last towns they become gorges and stream-cut spurs running up into the mountains. Every river here begins as Ironspine snowmelt, and much of it was channelled and bridged by Dwarven work before any Human town stood on its banks. Downstream the same water slows into the basin rivers.

Above the foothill valleys lie the heights of an older world, the Stormcrown. Broken ridge roads, terrace flights, and weather shrines of the Upland Colossal Civilization crown the uplands, and some foothill farms still plough colossal terraces whose retaining walls no living people could raise. Kindred caravans walk the high roads, and once in a long while someone reports a Giant on them.

What kills people here:

Most Headwater people farm hard ground and sell what passes through. A valley household works narrow terraced fields of barley and oats, grazes sheep and cattle on the summer slopes, and cuts timber in the foothill woods. Little of it stays home. The holds above buy grain, salt meat, wool and cloth, lamp oil, and bracing timber, and Headwater farmers are their nearest sellers. The valleys rarely grow enough for themselves and the holds both, so basin grain comes up the Sheaf Road to make up the difference.

Foothill towns stand at crossings and valley heads. Each is walled, built around a market, a witness-house, and a yard where caravans are made up and broken. The larger ones add a lord’s tower or a chartered court, smithies working to Dwarven methods, a burden house for the Ogre camps, and a house of the Continuity Witness Orders. Between the towns, walled waystations keep stores, fresh animals, and the escort, spaced so a laden caravan can reach the next before dark.

Everyone works the road in some season: carting, escort, bridge and road repair, inn-keeping, hiring out. Ogre bands haul dressed stone and beams and keep the winter roads open. Human miners and hands go up into the holds for a season and come back with wages and Dwarven habits. The year follows the passes: up when they open, a long trading summer, a hurried autumn before the snow, and a winter of mending, waiting, and accounts.

Households are often mixed, and almost every family has ties uphill. Dwarven families live in the foothill towns, thickest near the gates. Children are fostered across the line, and now and then a Headwater fosterling goes up to live behind a hold’s gate for years. The rare Human-Elf child grows up here as well. Wrought, many of them descended from frames the road era carried out of the holds, work as smiths, haulers, and field hands and keep repair houses of their own.

Young people are recognized twice, under the custom set by The Headwater Rite of Dual Recognition (c. 23,000-c. 21,000 BR). Working standing comes first. It lets them carry messages, serve as caravan-hands and apprentices, and travel under recognized authority. Oath-standing comes later, and with it the right to swear, inherit, and bind in their own name. Every Headwater family knows the years between from experience and argues about them out of habit. Some mixed households mark the end of those years by having the young burn masks made for the selves they were told to be.

Headwater people are mostly Human, and power is a frontier patchwork within the Confluence Marches: marcher lords holding valleys from towers above them, chartered foothill towns with their own courts, and the Headwater courts that issue warrants and settle road disputes. Marriages, contracts, and warrants are entered and sworn at the witness-houses of the Witnessed Accord. Unlike basin lords, Headwater lords live on tolls and escort fees more than on grain levies, and none of them can keep a road open alone.

Others hold real weight beside them:

The holds stand over all of it. They do not rule the Marches, but they open and close the trade the Marches live on, and a foothill town that loses the confidence of its gate is soon a poor one.

Headwater edges are mostly handovers, the points where another people’s keepers take charge.

The exchange roads are why the Marches look the way they do. They start at the valley rises where the basin Sheaf Road climbs out of the farmland. From there they run up through the foothill towns, past waystations and fortified crossings, to the outer gate of each foothill hold, and end in the oath-yard inside it, where every bargain is sworn before a custodian. In places they are walled and paved with Dwarven stonework. Long stretches were cut and embanked by Ogre camps, and every stretch is mended each season by whoever holds it.

Who keeps the way:

The rivers are crossed, not travelled. Above the basin edge they are too steep and fast for boats, so bridges and fords decide where roads can go, and the oldest bridges are Dwarven. Between basin and mountain the Headwater roads are also the way around the Elderweald, whose groves let no road through.

What the roads carry:

The Marches remember being made, not found, though the ground was not new when they made it. The settlers came into uplands already marked by colossal roads and terraces, and Kindred circuits had walked those roads since The Walking of the Unkept Roads (c. 175,000-c. 140,000 BR). The Kindreds still mention this whenever a lord claims a high road as his own.

The founding memory is the alignment with the holds. Headwater people tell it as a partnership between two peoples who needed each other. The holds tell it as teaching. Both agree it began with need rather than friendship. The quarrel over who taught whom belongs to the Elder and Young thread. The mixed custom that came out of it belongs to Standing and Record. It began with The Headwater Fosterage Dispute (c. 24,000-c. 23,000 BR), in which a Human foster child, trusted and useful in a hold-linked community, was refused oath-standing and both sides believed they were acting rightly. The same thread holds the Marches' less comfortable legal invention, the waste-ground doctrine, which Goblins of the ruin-belt remember as the moment their homes became empty by decree.

The roads carry the heaviest memory. Many of them were built by debt-bound Ogre camps during The Chain-Camps (c. 18,000-c. 8,000 BR), and the Hearth-Weight Compacts formed along these roads as the camps' organized refusal. Some road sections still carry Compact witness-marks naming the camps that built them. That memory sits on the Burden and Bonded Labour thread. Who the roads belong to sits on Roads and Crossings, and here it has four answers: Dwarven archives record the roads as Dwarven work, Headwater charters as lordly work, Ogre witness-marks as camp work, and the Kindreds point out that the oldest of them were colossal work before anyone else arrived.

The deep war reaches the Marches only as memory. Headwater-facing Dwarves retell it more patiently than the holds do, explaining Dwarven severity to neighbours who were never underground, as described in The Burdened Seal Histories. That retelling is the Marches' small share of The Deep World.

Arguments still open:

Headwater belief gathers at thresholds. The witness-houses keep the Witnessed Accord, and Abrel the Changeling holds standing here, which some witness-houses downriver still refuse. Abrel was born in these foothills from the longing of people who belong to two peoples at once. Humans call the god Abrel, frontier Dwarves call it Durrask, Goblins of the mixed crossings call it Ziv, and the same god answers all three. Fosterlings, apprentices, and everyone still waiting for oath-standing pray to Abrel, and some old frontier shrines keep mirrors said to show a different face at every look.

At the gates the Held Covenant is kept in its outward-facing gate practice. Oath-standing and every oath-yard bargain are sworn under Kerrund the Stone-Warden, who guards the oath not yet given, while Abrel keeps company with whoever is waiting to give it. In the terraced valleys Kerrund also contends with Anvelle the Harvest-Mother over whether corridor ground should be walled or planted. On the oldest terraces, farmers say, Haurûm’s stone holds Anvelle’s soil.

Ogre camps keep Ghessa the Hearth-Mother at their fires. They also remember Haggun the Wall-Breaker, the god of the chain-camps, who faded once refusal became lawful, and say that on the chain-camp roads at dawn the sound of cracking stone can still be heard. Goblin compacts sing for Tavi the Bard of the Broken, the Kindreds bring Corrow the Gale-Runner up the high roads, and where corridor trade reaches the frontier the cult of Ostrin the Lantern-Bearer meets Abrel’s.