The Long Yarn: Newfoundland's Late Heroic Age (After The End Fan Fork AAR)

[Knud_den_Store]

THE LONG YARN

Newfoundland's Late Heroic Age

​

Table of Contents I: Origins II: Fragments from the First Centuries A: The Yarn of a New Name III: Morgan, First Queen in Avalon? B: Nettles IV: The Crumbling of the Maritimes

Foreword



THE FAY LINEAGE AND NEWFOUNDLAND’S AGE OF HEROES:

A NEW INTRODUCTION

Presented to the Ninth General Conference of the Atlantic Association of Historians,

June 17th, 3126​

Newfoundland’s “Heroic Age,” whose beginning most historians place around 2400 CE, gives us almost none of the kind of sources which today’s scholars value. My ancestors wrote little: when they did write, theirs were stories full of larger-than-life deeds and people and sprites they could never have seen themselves, in multiple alphabets and as many different spelling systems as there were writers. This is all rather dull to the new ocean-spanning network of fashionable writers in our century, who prefer literal telling of events, exploration of the narrator’s subjective experience, and conscious imitation of our few Pre-Calamity sources for language and style. Of course, Newfoundland and her neighbours are awash in oral traditions, but these have so far stayed in our mouths and out of our books precisely because of how many and how long they are. The yarns told by the folk in any one village are enough to fill ten thousand pages, and I haven’t yet spoken to a foreign scholar whom I think would be ready to read them as they are.

Still, I mean to present to you the written sources which we do have from the Heroic Age. Some were written on the Rock, but many concern Newfies who spent most of their time on the smaller islands round the Gulf and on the Mainland. I have found hardly any of these sources for the first 250 years of the age, from the time when the most widespread oral epics are set to the rise of the Fay rulers in Avalon. Starting at the time when the Fay seem to have first united the Rock and started projecting their power onto the Mainland, the writings grow steadily in number and detail.

The importance of the Fay dynasty in shaping the Late Heroic Age, from approximately 2650 CE to its end, cannot be overstated. Whatever origins they came up with for their right to rule as Queens and Kings of the Rock, we have no sign that the island was ever a unified kingdom before their time. Though their raiding fleets saw action from Toronto to Caracas, most of the Fay rulers’ wealth came from regular tributes paid in peacetime by foreign lords who’d been bested in battle. Many of these tributary relations ran smoothly from generation to generation, but the Fay would exploit conflict in tribute-paying lands to tighten their grip on these domains.

Over the 28th and 29th centuries, the Fay steadily reorganized the tribes and fiefs which paid them homage both on the Rock and abroad into an empire. This was the real nail in the coffin of the Heroic Age, a truth which is hard to prove in writing but which spoken tradition bears out. During the reign of Queen Nellie Appletree, which began around 2730, tales of bold adventurers and terrible beasts start to give way to political intrigues, ghost stories, and conspiracy theories. By the time Eliza the Great made the Empire official in 2865, the stream of new heroes had long run dry, and our bards had turned fully to rehashing the epics of earlier centuries.

It is also in the early years of the Empire, in the 2890s, that we get the first book which foreign scholars might recognize as a work of history. The Long Yarn of the Fay Queens and Kings (adjusted spelling) was written by a man named Setanta, who served as Seer to Empress Maude and was by all accounts one of the brightest minds of his time. Though he cannot have had access to as many resources and contacts as I do, Setanta’s erudition was enough to put to shame any scholar today. He seems to have read every Old World text he could get his hands on, and wrote in a comfortable Pre-Calamity style, though he greatly adapted his spelling and wording to the way people spoke in his own time and place. This comes out as follows, quoting now from the first lines of The Long Yarn:


HERES DE STERT OV de Lang Yarn odde Fay Queens an Qings, wat has ruled oer de Rock an de Main for a good two hunnerd yere, an now oer much land beyand, from de Straites ov Labrador down to de Sholes ov Nantucket. Most oddis family’s deeds are after being handed down from mout to mout since lang outte living memory, but now it seems rite dey be rote down as well, furte make shure nonnem ever get furgot an sink into de sea ov time.


As you can see, Setanta was selective in his imitation of the ancients, and made plenty of spelling choices which no Pre-Calamity reconstructionist today would venture. But I would ask my readers to bear in mind that this text is already far closer to Pre-Calamity English than it would be if the author had written as he no doubt actually spoke. I would even bet that Setanta’s spellings get us closer to the way the ancients spoke than we get with our current habit of pronouncing the ancient spellings letter for letter.

Setanta, author of The Long Yarn

When I first read the Long Yarn in my school days, the druids told us that Setanta’s desire to write down the deeds of the Fay rulers, “for to make sure none of them ever get forgot and sink into the sea of time,” was the first articulation of the principle of history-writing: that great deeds are worth remembering for their own sake. Even then, my problem with that reading of Setanta’s opening lines was that it made him say something which, it seemed to me, must already be obvious to anyone who has decided to write history. And I refused to believe that Setanta would say anything obvious.

Now I think I understand why he felt the need to save these stories from the “sea of time”: he was afraid that now, at his particular moment in history, many old tales which had long bobbed on the surface of that sea were about to sink into it. Setanta was writing the chronicle of an era which he realized had just ended. Though the Fay kept on ruling, there would be no more real Fay Queens and Kings. Setanta’s patron was not a queen, but an empress, one who wanted to model her empire on faraway Brazil and bygone California. And there were no tellers of epic tales stepping up to sing of this new age.

The Newfie Empire under Empress Maude, ca. 2890

But these are times that you will find well-recorded in recent history books, and it is not my mission here to dwell on them. Instead, I will work forwards from the earliest written sources we have, adding in bits from the oral traditions that I know when it feels necessary. And since I suspect my readers know little of it, I will start with an overview of the deep history of Newfoundland, going back to the Calamity and before.

 

[HistoryDude]

Newfoundland will rise. Will you write some events of dubious authenticity to add to the Mythic Age ambience?

Nice touch with the bastardized English. Really adds world building and sets the Post-Apocalyptic Scene.

 

[Specialist290]

Always up for a new After the End AAR, especially one from a setting I honestly haven't touched myself. Following with interest

 

[NarcomancerPL]

Oh After the End AAR not too common in AARland subbed

 

[Knud_den_Store]

Thanks you three, it's nice to see there's some interest in an AAR like this!

The main framing device for this AAR will be the "paper" I started in the foreword, written by a somewhat salty young Newfie historian in a future time when, with the Calamity over a millennium in the past, the Atlantic world is growing increasingly interconnected and scholars are mad crazy about studying and imitating fragmentary Pre-Calamity sources, with some vague similarity to how Renaissance scholars treated ancient Greek and Roman authors. There's a lot left for me to hash out in terms of which Pre-Calamity authors survived, and where, and in what forms.

I also plan to include some first-hand narrative bits, though I'm not sure how early on I'll start with those. I might even at one point take the perspective of Setanta himself - he's got an interesting set of traits, and when I saw him in my court I knew he was the perfect author for my main "source". (He also has twin one-year-old sons, both of them geniuses as well!)

And yes @HistoryDude, there will definitely be some dubious events and confused accounts, especially for the first centuries! Partly this is because my screenshots are spotty (I think there's a 70-year gap where I took none at all), so I'll be piecing back together what actually happened there from in-game records and the chronicle, which feels like a slightly more genuine way to go about it anyhow.

There will also be more post-apocalyptic English and probably some French too. I'm from Nova Scotia myself, but I've known a good number of people from Newfoundland and have some idea of the dialect(s). Still, what you see here will likely be one part real-ish local diction, five parts Post-Calamity shenanigans. Unfortunately, my Gaelic is super spotty and my Mi'kmaq is non-existent, so those will probably appear a bit less than you'd expect from the in-game cultural setup.

Nice to have yous along for the ride!

 

[Knud_den_Store]

I: Origins​

No one can agree as to who the first people on Newfoundland were, but all nations agree that it was not them. The Mi’kmaq, living mostly in the northern parts of the Rock long ruled by the Qalipu, say that they came over from the Mainland in times before the Calamity, though the Mi’kmaq who live on the Main still do not much credit the supposed bonds of kinship between the Qalipu and themselves.

Traditional distribution of cultures in the greater Northeast

Meanwhile, the Newfies – and even the Qalipu call us that, having different names for themselves – tell stories of fleeing to Avalon at the time of the Calamity from a land over the seas, sometimes called the Emerald Isle, sometimes the Isles of the Blessed. What chased them out of that land? The most common story tells us that it was the work of the four “horsemen”: Pestilence, War, Hunger, and Death. It is, in some parts, a story not far from that which is told in the holy writ of most Christian faiths. The version best known in Newfoundland dates at least to the codification of the druidic texts under Eliza the Calculator in the 2780s, but I have reason to believe at least some of the tale is much older:


Der wer foor riders come utte Arthures door,
Four riders came up to Arthur’s door,

De furse uppon a wite orse, wid a yewen bo dran tite,
The first upon a white horse, with a yew bow drawn tight,

N eshot sicken erros wa scaured de land,
And he shot arrows of pestilence which scoured the land,

Sodat in yis centry der was nath but disese ore d Erth.
So that in his century there was nothing but disease over the Earth.

Nex der come ote an orse red as fire,
Next a horse red as fire came out,

Wadde rider uppon un egot paure furde take de pese fra d Erth
And the rider upon him, he got power to take the peace from the Earth,

Sodat in yis centry neyber eshot neyber, son ejauled fadder
So that in his century neighbour shot neighbour, son took father by the throat,

N many died shakin sithes at Cannon, bureed widote shraud or coffin.
And many died shaking scythes at Cannon, buried without shroud or coffin.

Den der come up an orse blacker dan nite, wadde rider on un ehollerd:
The a horse blacker than night came up, and the rider on him, he cried:

Twonny quid fur a salt cod, twonny quid fur a lofe frum ore de sea.
Twenty quid for a salt cod, twenty quid for a loaf from over the sea.

N in yis centry de waters was bare, n de feles lid dedly braun.
And in his century the waters were empty, and the fields lay a deathly brown.

Alast I lookd n wo, an orse sickly pale,
At last I looked and behold, a sickly-pale horse,

N ewas cald deth wa sat uppon un.
And he who sat upon him was called death.


What tells me that this story must come from well before the time when it was written down? The eighth line, the last one about the rider who brings war. First of all, no one has yet been able to tell me what or who Cannon is. There are a couple other songs – very old ones – in which Cannon is said to thunder or roar and cause great fear, but they do not seem to be referring to a god or sprite or even a beast, since there would then be a cave or mountain or even a big rock somewhere in which Cannon was said to dwell, but there seems to be no such place. I have heard that in Yankee, “cannin” is a name for a long metal barrel, but I cannot see what link there might be to these verses.

Beyond this, though we know about shrouds and coffins, we have never used them in Newfoundland. Depending on the wealth and wishes of deceased, they are burnt at sea on a funeral barge, or burnt on land and scattered into the waves, or in some cases buried quietly in a white cloak under a tree. There were different customs in centuries past, but never a mention of a shroud or a coffin like so many Christians use. If a burial without shroud or coffin is reckoned as a great horror, then this yarn must come to us from very long ago, and possibly from very far away. For all we know, this could be our oldest written source on the history of Newfoundland and her people.

The Four Horsemen in their more familiar Christian guise

Going by this story, the Calamity was not an all-at-once event, but a whole age of the world: of the four horsemen, Pestilence, War, and Famine each get a full century, with Death closing the show perhaps quite suddenly.

As for the "Arthur" mentioned in the first line, he is said to have been the king of a people called the Britons, who were forced to flee their homeland during the struggle against the Four Horsemen, eventually taking refuge with Brian Boru, king of the Emerald Isle. In time, the Horsemen reached Brian’s kingdom as well. Brian accepted death so that his kingdom might survive, slaying the Horsemen in a final battle and leaving Arthur to rule both kings’ peoples. Yet the long struggle had left the Emerald Isle a desert, and Arthur’s seer, Merlin, told him that the land would have to be left fallow for seven thousand years before green could grow on it again.

And so Arthur determined to send the Britons and the folk of the Emerald Isle across the sea. Arthur himself took one half of the people and sailed to a distant land called the Antipodes; the other half went west, led by Arthur’s sister Morgan and their cousin Charlie, better known as the Bonnie Prince. Of this group, the Bonnie Prince took half and landed at Pictou on the Mainland, while Morgan took the other half and came ashore in Avalon. This is how the Newfoundlanders and the Maritimers came to be two nations.

Arthur sails across the sea

We will talk about Morgan at length later, and address the surprisingly tough question of whether she belongs to history or to myth. First, there is one more story of ancient Newfoundland to present. It is told mostly not on the Rock, but by the folk on the far shore of Lake Superior, who call themselves the Northlanders. A thousand years before the Calamity, they say, a leader of theirs, Leif Eriksson, sailed from Greenland to the northern tip of Newfoundland with a band of followers and took dominion over much of the island. There he met a people already living there, the Skrellings, who eventually drove his successors off Newfoundland. The Northlanders then made their way up the Saint Lawrence and across the Great Lakes to their current home.

The mysterious Jarl Leif

It is impossible to know if we can identify the Skrellings with the Beothuk, a people mentioned in some ancient Newfie tales as the first inhabitants of the Rock. In some tales, Morgan and her followers war briefly with the Beothuk upon arrival before making peace and taking spouses from each other. In other stories, Morgan's people do this with the Mi’kmaq while the Beothuk go unmentioned. And in yet other yarns, the few which do not mention Morgan, the Newfies massacre the Beothuk, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. In no stories do they survive as a distinct nation. If Newfoundland had a first people of her own, they are no more.

We can now turn to the first scraps of written material we have from after the Calamity, which will quickly take us through the Dark Ages and the time of the first heroes, before looking in greater depth at Morgan, queen in Avalon.

 

[Warlord Skorr]

The Newfie Empire, huh?

Hunter Focuses and dog pics for all!

This one's 'Hunter', obviously.

In a more serious note, more than half of the fun of ATE AARs are reading the weird and fun pop culture references that the players weave into their own history and myth of the Post-Calamity era. You have definitely delivered on that front.

I look forward to seeing what can happen in this area of the map in After The End.

 

[Knud_den_Store]

The Newfie Empire, huh?

Hunter Focuses and dog pics for all!

This one's 'Hunter', obviously.

In a more serious note, more than half of the fun of ATE AARs are reading the weird and fun pop culture references that the players weave into their own history and myth of the Post-Calamity era. You have definitely delivered on that front.

I look forward to seeing what can happen in this area of the map in After The End.

What a good boy, felling that tree all by himself!

Thanks, glad you're liking it - coming up with those weird references is half the fun for me too. Plenty more to come on that front.

 

[Specialist290]

Pretty much seconding the above -- one of my favorite things, both about After the End generally and others' takes thereon, is seeing the "Future Imperfect" spin they put on things familiar to us and how they become so fascinatingly bizarre in a completely different context. I think your blend of traditional Christian apocalypticism, Arthurian romance, and the all-too-real travails of Irish history captures that spirit perfectly.

 

[Knud_den_Store]

Pretty much seconding the above -- one of my favorite things, both about After the End generally and others' takes thereon, is seeing the "Future Imperfect" spin they put on things familiar to us and how they become so fascinatingly bizarre in a completely different context. I think your blend of traditional Christian apocalypticism, Arthurian romance, and the all-too-real travails of Irish history captures that spirit perfectly.

Thank you!!! I hugely enjoy inventing this stuff, though it does mean a lot of time goes into producing a couple short matter-of-fact paragraphs. I'm sure things will speed up as I go and get into the actual gameplay.

 

[HistoryDude]

I agree that the mix of Arthurian legend, actual history, and Christian apocalypticism is interesting.

I wonder how many interpretations the Newfie have about Morgan Le Fay? Her traditional portrayal in Arthurian media is variable.

 

[Knud_den_Store]

I agree that the mix of Arthurian legend, actual history, and Christian apocalypticism is interesting.

I wonder how many interpretations the Newfie have about Morgan Le Fay? Her traditional portrayal in Arthurian media is variable.

Glad you're liking it so far! I'm still sorting out the characterization of Morgan. The funny thing is that my first character (the default character for Avalon, not a custom one) was called Morgan Fay. That's why I wanted our narrator to be unsure if she belonged to history or to myth, as I imagined the mythological figure would get mixed up with the historical ruler at least a bit. So there will definitely be some conflicting ideas about who she is and what she was like. This AAR is making me do some study of Arthurian myth myself.

 

[Knud_den_Store]

II: Fragments from the First Centuries​

As I have said, until about 2650, we have almost nothing by way of writings from the Rock. It seems that people knew how to write, as the Old World script never died out completely in Newfoundland like it did in some other places, though people in certain parts of the island seem to have ditched the ancient alphabet in favour of newly minted systems. We simply seem to have done most of our writing on birchbark. And though it is quite possible to keep birchbark dry and preserve it for great lengths of time, few people seem to have felt the need to do that, since it was easy enough to find a new piece of bark. The author of a paper book bound in leather is understandably much more concerned with keeping it preserved.

Locations of the inscriptions discussed below

Still, there were some early authors in Newfoundland who must have desperately wanted some few words of theirs to survive, and so carved them painstakingly into stone. By and large, these are not stories, but short declarations of various kinds. Of those carvings which I know, the one which is likely the oldest stands on a rockface near the ancient roadbed at a clearing known as Halfway House, in Avalon. The rock reads simply:

MY NAME IS LISA MACRAE​

Being perhaps the only carving found on the Rock in pure Old English, I hardly doubt this must be our oldest stone source. I find it easy to imagine the author of this brief message, one who before the Calamity might have had some hope of leaving a legacy, who had now seen her whole world turned upside down, who was perhaps an old woman already by the time she hacked into that rockface, set on leaving her name there for future generations if nothing else. There was a time when the folk of nearby harbours understood Lisa Macrae somehow to dwell in the rock itself, and local holy women would trek inland to leave offerings of food and oil underneath her inscription, offerings which always disappeared. But at one point it seems the site was forgotten, and by the time it was rediscovered the name of Lisa Macrae no longer meant much to anyone alive.


A much better-known “ancient” site is carved into a large rock in the forests north of Burin, on a large peninsula jutting off the southern coast of the Rock. Like Lisa Macrae’s inscription, it is short and written in pure Old English:

IF MAN IS 5

THEN THE DEVIL IS 6

AND IF THE DEVIL IS 6

THEN GOD IS 7​

Unlike Lisa Macrae’s rockface, however, this carving (known to some as the “Burin Spell”) is almost certainly a later fake. Its words are exactly those found on a holy rock in the forest around Boston, an inscription known as the Riddle of the Pixies. According to a local yarn which has spread far and wide – as yarns from Boston often do – the Pixies were a race of beings from the Spirit World who came to Boston in the form of bards just before the Calamity. They foretold the Calamity and the world to come in many Riddles such as this one, which most people of the Old World could not understand and so did not heed. Only a select few grasped some of the more basic meanings which hid within these mysteries, mysteries which proliferated in the years before the Calamity, pronounced not only by the Pixies but by hosts of prophets and bards and otherworldly visitors. Those who studied these mysteries became the first Adepts of the Occultist tradition.

A pixie from a sacred tapestry in an Augusta temple

Occultism never took hold in Newfoundland, where the Druids and Druidesses did their best to keep out “dark magic” from the continent. When Eliza the Great conquered the Yankee homelands in the 2860s, however, a wave of interest in the Occult swept the Rock. Many tried their hands at Yankee rites, which were rumoured to unlock powers and summon sprites which the Druidic orders were keeping jealously for themselves. By and large, these amateur spellcasters managed at most to visit minor injuries upon themselves and get fined by local courts on charges of Carrying On (mischief, basically; one of the lowest-level charges in our Common Law). The Burin Spell is almost definitely the work of a copycat from this time or later.


Besides Lisa Macrae’s rockface, then, I know of only one genuine old inscription in all of Newfoundland. It stands in the centre of the Portaport peninsula, on the west coast of the Rock, nearly surrounded by the Gulf. It is written in the old Stephenville Script, which I cannot read myself, but which a friend from Portaport was able to interpret for me:

Peace laws of the Portaport Men

With Lug Longarm, the handy skipper, as our witness

From now on,
When a man says that another has stolen his pig, or up to three of his sheep, or up to twenty of his chickens, or less than a tenth of his catch,
The two men will agree on a judge in their district, who will weigh the truth of the charge and decide what compensation is to be paid.
And when a man says that another has stolen several of his pigs, or more than three of his sheep, or more than twenty of his chickens, or more than a tenth of his catch,
The two men will bring the case to the Five Druids in the town, who will judge it and pronounce their verdict in public for all to hear.
The Druids will not judge the case unless both men are present and each has brought a friend who can vouch for him.

From now on,
Driftwood is free for all to take from the beaches. No man will bring charges against another for stealing his driftwood, unless the man robbed had actually taken care to pile up the driftwood near his house, in which case the procedures will be the same as they are for small-time chicken theft.

From now on,
Whenever a band of men go raiding on the Mainland, they will reach an agreement beforehand about how to split the loot, and state their agreement in front of the Five Druids in the town before setting off to sea.
When a man returns after having fought in Mainland wars, his wages are his to keep.

All Portaport men have gathered and agreed to these laws, and Chief Druid Kevin Shanks has sealed them with his blood, and he has not flinched.

​

The inscription records no date or year, but according to the family lines which the Portaport Druids have preserved, Kevin Shanks is the twenty-two- to twenty-four-times great-grandfather of most folk in Portaport today, so that he might have been Chief Druid around the year 2500. The yarn goes that he cut off his left arm to seal the new laws - a sacrifice called for only on the most solemn occasions - which were drawn up to end a generation of bloody infighting on the peninsula. The fact that these laws are written as if they only concern men is something which was normal in the western parts of the Rock, where women were long barred from public affairs. In Avalon and much of the east, while men still did most of the raiding and livestock theft and the like, litigation was largely a woman’s job. The Fay gradually blurred over these local differences with their law codes which rarely made any distinctions between women and men.

As for Lug Longarm, he is a god worshipped all over the Rock and even in parts of the Mainland; he is often prayed and sacrificed to by rulers for guidance, and he is invoked whenever new laws are passed. It is only in Portaport, however, that they call him “the handy skipper”.

Lug Longarm

As far as I know, this is the only time in the Age of Heroes that anyone felt the need to write down laws in stone. Though many people could read and write, the written word was looked on as a tool for trade or for messages that could easily be forgotten. The real important things, be they laws or spells or epic tales, could only be trusted to memory and to speech.

The Portaport peninsula

Most of the written sources on Newfoundlanders in the earlier part of the Heroic Age come from the Mainland, where the Newfie heroes of the old tales often travelled to make a name or a fortune for themselves in whatever way they could. The Portaport laws mention local men going abroad to raid or to hire themselves out to foreign lords, so it must have been a thing common enough in the time the laws were written. For the earliest heroes, whose stories seem to be set around 2400 though they were not written down until much later, going to the Main is usually quite a casual matter. Adventurers take up jobs, conduct business, and make friends among the Maritimers and the other peoples they meet – sometimes they even settle down on the Mainland and start families. If they raid and fight, it is in the same way the people of the Main raid and fight each other. The various Maritime chroniclers also mostly talk about them in this way.

Sometime in the 25th century, things begin to sour. The gradual turn of the Maritimers towards the Anglican church may have played a part: in the early years especially, the Ministers of Christ tried to preach peace and love among neighbours, virtues which do not mesh well with the turf wars and livestock theft which employed our heroes. Raiding and feuding were also becoming a less viable way of life as the Maritimers emerged from the chaos which had engulfed their lands for two centuries. In the words of Phyllis Munro, the late 27th century chronicler to the Beaton family (translated from courtly Gaelic):

In the ages after the kingdom of the Irvings first fell, the lords of the provinces first set crowns upon their own heads; then the lesser lords rose up against these provincial kings, and each county was a kingdom unto itself; and in some places it happened that the towns or clans cast away the authority of the lords, so that it appeared as if these lands would continue to splinter forever until each family was left as a law of its own. And in these times just as there were no great wars, there was never true peace, as neighbours carried on bloody feuds with neighbours and chiefs slaughtered their rivals before falling to the spear themselves. But even before the cursed king Tarleton briefly restored the Irvings to power, the winds had already turned: counties were reunited either by great warriors or by the common agreement of the people, and some of these counties were yoked together under new kings who made the common folk pledge to leave off their deadly squabbles.

The Maritimes on the eve of Tarleton Irving's wars, 2460 CE

Onto this scene stepped one of the most famous warriors of the Avalon Cycle of heroes: Edgar Coates. According to the oral tradition, which may have begun shortly after his death, Edgar was from Conception Bay, in the Fay heartlands of northern Avalon. Though he was bright and brawny, more than able to hold his own in the Grand Banks fishery, Edgar loathed life at sea, and when he was nineteen boarded a ship for Halifax, at first working as a day labourer. Spending his free days in one of the city’s wrestling clubs, he fell in with a band of dishonest livestock traders who offered him a more lucrative job in the country. After spending a couple years cattle-rustling for these traders in the Annapolis Valley, Edgar was seen and almost caught by a local lord’s bodyguards.

No longer sure he could keep up his business safely in the Valley, he fled by ship to Moncton with a band of fellow robbers. There they offered their services to Tarleton Irving, one of the most powerful lords in the Maritimes, who was at war with the Cobequid League. Edgar quickly distinguished himself in a series of battles, leading Tartleton’s men in the sack of Truro in 2468. Most of the lords and mayors in the Cobequid League were converts to the Anglican church, while Tarleton and his men, including Edgar, followed the old gods and the Druids. We know how much anxiety Tarleton’s advance caused the Anglican ministry from a letter sent by Katherin Leveck, first Bishop of Dartmouth in what was then the Kingdom of Scotia, to the Archbishop of Canterbury:

Othe many poor solls who now streeme in from the North, neer all is Christian, but more than 1 has tolld me they finde it hard to beleeve in ar gud Lord’his mercee after what they seen at Truro. Ten Churches has aredy puffd up in flame ithe wake othe heethen’his armee. I now dote if ar Mission will survive this mad dog of Hell and his Newfee retaaners, who creepe closer to ar seet daybiday.

Not long after, Bishop Katherin’s worst fears came true: Tarleton’s armies stormed Halifax, and Edgar’s company personally burned the seat of the Anglican diocese in Dartmouth. The bishop herself fled south and found shelter with the lord of Pubnico, but many clerics were massacred. After Tarleton has subjugated most of the Maritimes and reached the peek of his power, he rewarded Edgar with a swathe of land around Pictou for his service.

Edgar hardly ever had time to enjoy his new estates, however, as Tarleton’s harsh rule spawned one revolt after another. After remaining loyal to Tarleton for twenty years, Edgar had a different feeling about the Beaton Rising of 2488; sensing that the rebels would topple the king no matter what he did, the now middle-aged warrior joined forces with the Beaton armies and helped them find a safe passage through Tantramar Marsh to Tarleton’s castle.

The Beaton Rebellion, which toppled Tartleton the Mad and sealed the christianization of the Maritimes.

After the king had been killed in battle and the Irving family cowed, however, Edgar found himself next on the chopping block: a band of rebels raised from his own lands around Pictou stabbed him to death as he slept in the dead king’s own bed. The old yarn says that Ivor, leader of the Beaton rebellion and newly-crowned King of the Maritimes, had Edgar’s body packed in a barrel of salt and sent to his family in Avalon; on this point the Mainland chronicles say nothing.

If King Ivor did in fact send Edgar’s body packed in salt to Newfoundland, it was likely with mind to letting his family bury him properly, something which the king may have felt it was his Christian duty to allow. Yet we can imagine Edgar’s startled relatives, who had not seen him in over twenty years, seeing the gesture quire differently: they may have understood that Newfies were no longer welcome to stay on the Mainland, not even in death, not even if they had been killed in battle. For over 150 years, that is more or less how it went: ships would set out from Newfoundland, arrive on the Main, pillage what they could for a season, then leave, careful not to leave their own bodies behind. This began to change in the late 27th century, a change which seems to begin with a queen in Avalon by the name of Morgan.

 

[vandevere]

II: Fragments from the First Centuries


As I have said, until about 2650, we have almost nothing by way of writings from the Rock. It seems that people knew how to write, as the Old World script never died out completely in Newfoundland like it did in some other places, though people in certain parts of the island seem to have ditched the ancient alphabet in favour of newly minted systems. We simply seem to have done most of our writing on birchbark. And though it is quite possible to keep birchbark dry and preserve it for great lengths of time, few people seem to have felt the need to do that, since it was easy enough to find a new piece of bark. The author of a paper book bound in leather is understandably much more concerned with keeping it preserved.

Still, there were some early authors in Newfoundland who must have desperately wanted some few words of theirs to survive, and so carved them painstakingly into stone. By and large, these are not stories, but short declarations of various kinds. Of those carvings which I know, the one which is likely the oldest stands on a rockface near the ancient roadbed at a clearing known as Halfway House, in Avalon. The rock reads simply:

MY NAME IS LISA MACRAE​

Being perhaps the only carving found on the Rock in pure Old English, I hardly doubt this must be our oldest stone source. I find it easy to imagine the author of this brief message, one who before the Calamity might have had some hope of leaving a legacy, who had now seen her whole world turned upside down, who was perhaps an old woman already by the time she hacked into that rockface, set on leaving her name there for future generations if nothing else. There was a time when the folk of nearby harbours understood Lisa Macrae somehow to dwell in the rock itself, and local holy women would trek inland to leave offerings of food and oil underneath her inscription, offerings which always disappeared. But at one point it seems the site was forgotten, and by the time it was rediscovered the name of Lisa Macrae no longer meant much to anyone alive.


A much better-known “ancient” site is carved into a large rock in the forests north of Burin, on a large peninsula jutting off the southern coast of the Rock. Like Lisa Macrae’s inscription, it is short and written in pure Old English:

IF MAN IS 5

THEN THE DEVIL IS 6

AND IF THE DEVIL IS 6

THEN GOD IS 7​

Unlike Lisa Macrae’s rockface, however, this carving (known to some as the “Burin Spell”) is almost certainly a later fake. Its words are exactly those found on a holy rock in the forest around Boston, an inscription known as the Riddle of the Pixies. According to a local yarn which has spread far and wide – as yarns from Boston often do – the Pixies were a race of beings from the Spirit World who came to Boston in the form of bards just before the Calamity. They foretold the Calamity and the world to come in many Riddles such as this one, which most people of the Old World could not understand and so did not heed. Only a select few grasped some of the more basic meanings which hid within these mysteries, mysteries which proliferated in the years before the Calamity, pronounced not only by the Pixies but by hosts of prophets and bards and otherworldly visitors. Those who studied these mysteries became the first Adepts of the Occultist tradition.

View attachment 848485
A pixie from a sacred tapestry in an Augusta temple

Occultism never took hold in Newfoundland, where the Druids and Druidesses did their best to keep out “dark magic” from the continent. When Eliza the Great conquered the Yankee homelands in the 2860s, however, a wave of interest in the Occult swept the Rock. Many tried their hands at Yankee rites, which were rumoured to unlock powers and summon sprites which the Druidic orders were keeping jealously for themselves. By and large, these amateur spellcasters managed at most to visit minor injuries upon themselves and get fined by local courts on charges of Carrying On (mischief, basically; one of the lowest-level charges in our Common Law). The Burin Spell is almost definitely the work of a copycat from this time or later.


Besides Lisa Macrae’s rockface, then, I know of only one genuine old inscription in all of Newfoundland. It stands in the centre of the Portaport peninsula, on the west coast of the Rock, nearly surrounded by the Gulf. It is written in the old Stephenville Script, which I cannot read myself, but which a friend from Portaport was able to interpret for me:

Peace laws of the Portaport Men

With Lug Longarm, the handy skipper, as our witness

From now on,
When a man says that another has stolen his pig, or up to three of his sheep, or up to twenty of his chickens, or less than a tenth of his catch,
The two men will agree on a judge in their district, who will weigh the truth of the charge and decide what compensation is to be paid.
And when a man says that another has stolen several of his pigs, or more than three of his sheep, or more than twenty of his chickens, or more than a tenth of his catch,
The two men will bring the case to the Five Druids in the town, who will judge it and pronounce their verdict in public for all to hear.
The Druids will not judge the case unless both men are present and each has brought a friend who can vouch for him.

From now on,
Driftwood is free for all to take from the beaches. No man will bring charges against another for stealing his driftwood, unless the man robbed had actually taken care to pile up the driftwood near his house, in which case the procedures will be the same as they are for small-time chicken theft.

From now on,
Whenever a band of men go raiding on the Mainland, they will reach an agreement beforehand about how to split the loot, and state their agreement in front of the Five Druids in the town before setting off to sea.
When a man returns after having fought in Mainland wars, his wages are his to keep.

All Portaport men have gathered and agreed to these laws, and Chief Druid Kevin Shanks has sealed them with his blood, and he has not flinched.

​

The inscription records no date or year, but according to the family lines which the Portaport Druids have preserved, Kevin Shanks is the twenty-two- to twenty-four-times great-grandfather of most folk in Portaport today, so that he might have been Chief Druid around the year 2500. The yarn goes that he cut off his left arm to seal the new laws - a sacrifice called for only on the most solemn occasions - which were drawn up to end a generation of bloody infighting on the peninsula. The fact that these laws are written as if they only concern men is something which was normal in the western parts of the Rock, where women were long barred from public affairs. In Avalon and much of the east, while men still did most of the raiding and livestock theft and the like, litigation was largely a woman’s job. The Fay gradually blurred over these local differences with their law codes which rarely made any distinctions between women and men.

As for Lug Longarm, he is a god worshipped all over the Rock and even in parts of the Mainland; he is often prayed and sacrificed to by rulers for guidance, and he is invoked whenever new laws are passed. It is only in Portaport, however, that they call him “the handy skipper”.

View attachment 848495
Lug Longarm

As far as I know, this is the only time in the Age of Heroes that anyone felt the need to write down laws in stone. Though many people could read and write, the written word was looked on as a tool for trade or for messages that could easily be forgotten. The real important things, be they laws or spells or epic tales, could only be trusted to memory and to speech.

View attachment 848487
The Portaport peninsula

Most of the written sources on Newfoundlanders in the earlier part of the Heroic Age come from the Mainland, where the Newfie heroes of the old tales often travelled to make a name or a fortune for themselves in whatever way they could. The Portaport laws mention local men going abroad to raid or to hire themselves out to foreign lords, so it must have been a thing common enough in the time the laws were written. For the earliest heroes, whose stories seem to be set around 2400 though they were not written down until much later, going to the Main is usually quite a casual matter. Adventurers take up jobs, conduct business, and make friends among the Maritimers and the other peoples they meet – sometimes they even settle down on the Mainland and start families. If they raid and fight, it is in the same way the people of the Main raid and fight each other. The various Maritime chroniclers also mostly talk about them in this way.

Sometime in the 25th century, things begin to sour. The gradual turn of the Maritimers towards the Anglican church may have played a part: in the early years especially, the Ministers of Christ tried to preach peace and love among neighbours, virtues which do not mesh well with the turf wars and livestock theft which employed our heroes. Raiding and feuding were also becoming a less viable way of life as the Maritimers emerged from the chaos which had engulfed their lands for two centuries. In the words of Phyllis Munro, the late 27th century chronicler to the Beaton family (translated from courtly Gaelic):

In the ages after the kingdom of the Irvings first fell, the lords of the provinces first set crowns upon their own heads; then the lesser lords rose up against these provincial kings, and each county was a kingdom unto itself; and in some places it happened that the towns or clans cast away the authority of the lords, so that it appeared as if these lands would continue to splinter forever until each family was left as a law of its own. And in these times just as there were no great wars, there was never true peace, as neighbours carried on bloody feuds with neighbours and chiefs slaughtered their rivals before falling to the spear themselves. But even before the cursed king Tarleton briefly restored the Irvings to power, the winds had already turned: counties were reunited either by great warriors or by the common agreement of the people, and some of these counties were yoked together under new kings who made the common folk pledge to leave off their deadly squabbles.

View attachment 848488
The Maritimes on the eve of Tarleton Irving's wars, 2460 CE

Onto this scene stepped one of the most famous warriors of the Avalon Cycle of heroes: Edgar Coates. According to the oral tradition, which may have begun shortly after his death, Edgar was from Conception Bay, in the Fay heartlands of northern Avalon. Though he was bright and brawny, more than able to hold his own in the Grand Banks fishery, Edgar loathed life at sea, and when he was nineteen boarded a ship for Halifax, at first working as a day labourer. Spending his free days in one of the city’s wrestling clubs, he fell in with a band of dishonest livestock traders who offered him a more lucrative job in the country. After spending a couple years cattle-rustling for these traders in the Annapolis Valley, Edgar was seen and almost caught by a local lord’s bodyguards.

No longer sure he could keep up his business safely in the Valley, he fled by ship to Moncton with a band of fellow robbers. There they offered their services to Tarleton Irving, one of the most powerful lords in the Maritimes, who was at war with the Cobequid League. Edgar quickly distinguished himself in a series of battles, leading Tartleton’s men in the sack of Truro in 2468. Most of the lords and mayors in the Cobequid League were converts to the Anglican church, while Tarleton and his men, including Edgar, followed the old gods and the Druids. We know how much anxiety Tarleton’s advance caused the Anglican ministry from a letter sent by Katherin Leveck, first Bishop of Dartmouth in what was then the Kingdom of Scotia, to the Archbishop of Canterbury:

Othe many poor solls who now streeme in from the North, neer all is Christian, but more than 1 has tolld me they finde it hard to beleeve in ar gud Lord’his mercee after what they seen at Truro. Ten Churches has aredy puffd up in flame ithe wake othe heethen’his armee. I now dote if ar Mishon will survive this mad dog of Hell and his Newfee retaaners, who creepe closer to ar seet daybiday.

Not long after, Bishop Katherin’s worst fears came true: Tarleton’s armies stormed Halifax, and Edgar’s company personally burned the seat of the Anglican diocese in Dartmouth. The bishop herself fled south and found shelter with the lord of Pubnico, but many clerics were massacred. After Tarleton has subjugated most of the Maritimes and reached the peek of his power, he rewarded Edgar with a swathe of land around Pictou for his service.

View attachment 848494

Edgar hardly ever had time to enjoy his new estates, however, as Tarleton’s harsh rule spawned one revolt after another. After remaining loyal to Tarleton for twenty years, however, Edgar had a different feeling about the Beaton Rising of 2488; sensing that the rebels would make topple the king no matter what he did, the now middle-aged warrior joined forces with the Beaton armies and helped them find a safe passage through Tantramar Marsh to Tarleton’s castle.

View attachment 848498

The Beaton Rebellion, which toppled Tartleton the Mad and sealed the christianization of the Maritimes.

After the king had been killed in battle and the Irving family cowed, however, Edgar found himself next on the chopping block: a band of rebels raised from his own lands around Pictou stabbed him to death as he slept in the dead king’s own bed. The old yarn says that Ivor, leader of the Beaton rebellion and newly-crowned King of the Maritimes, had Edgar’s body packed in a barrel of salt and sent to his family in Avalon; on this point the Mainland chronicles say nothing.

If King Ivor, called Ivor the Just by his family’s later chroniclers, actually did send Edgar’s body packed in salt to Newfoundland, it was likely with mind to letting his family bury him properly, something he may have felt was his Christian duty. Yet we can imagine Edgar’s startled relatives, who had not seen him in over twenty years, seeing the gesture quire differently: they may have understood that Newfies were no longer welcome to stay on the Mainland, not even in death, not even if they had been killed in battle. For over 150 years, that is more or less how it went: ships would set out from Newfoundland, arrive on the Main, pillage what they could for a season, then leave, careful not to leave their own bodies behind. This began to change in the late 27th century, a change which seems to begin with a queen in Avalon by the name of Morgan.

Very interesting...

 

[HistoryDude]

Well, that law code is almost certainly legitimate.

I wonder if some of those other inscriptions are graffiti?

 

[Knud_den_Store]

Very interesting...

Thanks, interesting is what we aim for!

Well, that law code is almost certainly legitimate.

I wonder if some of those other inscriptions are graffiti?

That's certainly what our narrator thinks of the second one - some kids who might've had vague plans to summon a demon with it, but were mostly just being edgy. The first one could be called graffiti too, I suppose, he just thinks it's very ancient and revered graffiti.

Maybe there could be a part of the continent where "graffiti" has become the name of a sacred art style, used for decorating the walls of temples. Among the Rust Cultists in the Midwest perhaps?

 

[Superstorm]

Ah, After the End? That is a mod I've always wanted to try out sometime, mainly so I can make Rust Cultists become the Adeptus Mechanicus. Keep up the good work!

 

[Knud_den_Store]

Α: The Yarn of a New Name​

The girl’s family lived alone on a small island in a place called Lears Cove, on the southwest side of Conception Bay. The main dwelling was a big, sturdy thing of fir, girded by a ring of storehouses and by huge nets drying in the sun. There were two launches on the lee side of the island, but no boats save for a couple dories turned belly-up in the sun: all the others were gone for the fishing on the day we reached the island and called to the shore from our sloop.

It was the girl’s mother, the lady of the house, who heard us. She was outside with her youngest child, packing cabbage into a barrel while the boy, who looked about six, ripped off bits of the cabbages she hadn’t shredded yet. He was no doubt supposed to be helping his mother, but she didn’t seem to mind that he was taking his time and stuffing many of the big green leaves down his own gullet instead of passing them on to her. It was early in the season to be pickling anyway, and nobody who’d stayed home from the fishing that day seemed too set on work. The lady called back and waved at us, pointing us over towards the bigger of the two launches. She came down to greet us there with big, welcoming strides, though her brow stayed furrowed and her eyes scanned our faces warily.

“Afternoon,” she called as we bumped into the launch and prepared to fasten the sloop to a spike. “It’s rare to see a crew like yourselves in these parts; pull in closer if you like, there won’t be any other boats coming in today, they’re all out on the Banks.” Though she kept smiling broadly, the lady didn’t move to help us fasten the sloop. She would have known by the boat’s rig that we’d come from the Town, and by now she must have had a peek at the fine clothes under our sea-jackets. She no doubt meant to let us know: Make no mistake, I might be happy to be seen receiving important guests, but round here it’s me people come to for help, it’s me who calls the shots, and I don’t have to stoop over to pick up anyone’s ropes unless it pleases me.

As we’d agreed, I was the first of us up on the launch, and the first to speak: “Thank you ma’am, and might I say you’ve got as fine a set of nets as I’ve seen anywhere from Bonavista to Lamaline.” It was true, and I suspect the lady knew it. She gave me a gratified nod without thanking me in return.

“My husband used to make nets for every family on the Spit,” she declared, pointing at the homes along the stretch of land to the west of her island. “And my girls have taken well to the trade. Well, most of them,” she added with a little shake of the head. “But come on in. You can hang up your jackets right yonder while you’re at it,” she said and nodded towards what must have been the family’s clothes-drying rack. Clearly the lady didn’t want our sea salt in her kitchen.

As she led the four of us through her plump garden, I thought how much work it must have taken to make decent soil on a cold rock like this. No wonder the family’s good name was known all around the bay, no wonder people from the harbours around asked this woman’s counsel when they quarrelled. When we came close, the young boy looked up from the cabbage he was munching, then ran and hid behind the big barrel.

“Don’t mind the gaffer,” the lady told us. “He’s not used to visitors.”

That’s when Druid Pratt decided to pipe up: “Where I grew up, we didn’t call a boy a gaffer til he was strong and wise enough to go fishing with his father and brothers.” The lady chuckled and made no reply. I looked to Merlin, wanting to say: I told you, we should’ve left the big man back in the Town, he must think his mouth’s a sock the way he puts his foot in it. Merlin smiled at me, as if to answer: Yes, yes, I know, but what can you do, he’s still the Chief Druid, and when the lady learns who he is it’ll hardly matter what he says.

We hung our coats where the lady told us to, took off our shoes at the door, then stepped inside. Once we’d sat down, she said with a little smile:

“Right. Pardon me now, I haven’t yet asked your names. It’s been years since I went to the Town, so I can’t say I know your faces either. Would you do me the pleasure?”

We introduced ourselves one by one: Druid Pratt first, then Lady Tibbo, then Merlin, then me. Her face didn’t change colour when she heard Pratt’s name and position, nor that of Lady Tibbo, owner of the biggest fishing fleet in the Town. I introduced myself only as Kenny Fifield “the helmsman,” but the lady of the house replied:

“But I know that name. You’re Kenny Fifield the bard, aren’t you? There’s a ditty of yours the kids on the spit are awful fond of these days, the one about the lassie who thinks she’s a bear.”

I smiled. “The very same, ma’am.” It was my silly songs that I liked best, and it was always my silly songs that spread the farthest.

“Now,” she continued, “I’d imagine you all know my name if you’ve come to see me, though frankly I still can’t fathom what for.”

Now Merlin spoke: “It would be hard for anyone who’d spent time in this part of Avalon not to know your good name, Lady Fay. A fine name, too: a holy name, wouldn’t you say?”

Lady Fay chuckled, but only a little. “Maybe so, but a name’s nothing but a name, and we don’t really know where we got ours. I doubt we’re any closer related to Morgan and Arthur than you are to the ancient druid you’re named for yourself.”

Merlin smiled meekly, as if he’d missed his mark. But I knew things would work out fine: even when he felt awkward himself, others couldn’t help but find Merlin charming.

“Well then,” Lady Fay continued, “will you tell me what brings you here? Of course,” she added quickly, realizing she’d been a bit curt, “you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. With the fellers away there’s plenty of empty beds, and things are a bit slow when it’s just me with the girls and little Garrett who you saw outside.”

“Very kind of you,” Merlin replied, “though I’m afraid we can’t be staying more than a day or two: Druid Pratt has business back in the Town, as you can imagine. But as a matter of fact, it’s to talk about one of your daughters that we have come here – the second oldest, I believe her name is Mabel?”

Immediately Lady Fay’s look grew darker. “Is that so?” she nearly shouted. “Mabel!!” she actually shouted, looking up at the ceiling. For a moment there was silence, then the girl came down the steep steps from the loft. She looked a bit short for her age, with her dark red hair done up in an elaborate braid, wearing a dress a bit too heavy and a bit too nice, I would’ve thought, for a regular summer’s day. Though she seemed prepared to be annoyed, she straightened up when she saw our company, and spoke to us in an adult tone, with finer manners than her mother felt the need to:

“Good afternoon, dear uhm, dear guests. Mabel Fay, pleased to meet you. Can I offer you anything to drink, to eat?”

Lady Fay chortled a bit. “Go get our guests some ale, will you? From the good barrel in the storehouse, not the cheap hopped stuff.”

“I don’t know,” Mabel snapped back, “would our guests like some ale?” She looked at us, but only for a moment before staring back at her mother. A pause.

“That would be lovely, thanks,” I said at last, being as usual the one to break the silence. Mabel strode off to the storehouse, gratified. We’ve just stepped into an ongoing war, I thought, between mother and daughter, a war that’s likely been raging for months or even years to see who calls the shots in this house. And if we get what we want, we’ll be ending that war sooner than either party had hoped for.

Lady Fay smiled and shook her head. “And what,” she asked us, “might you be wanting with that one?”

This time it was Lady Tibbo who spoke up. “The girl’s got spirit,” she began with an unusually kind smile. “It might feel like torture to you now, but it’ll serve her well, I’ll be bound. How old is she?”

“Just gone fifteen. She’s at the age, you know. She hates rowing, but she’ll row over to the Spit every chance she gets to carry on with the boys there.”

“Ever thought about sending her off to school?”

“To be a druidess? You know that’s not how we do it round here, don’t you?” Lady Fay seemed confused. This far from the Town, most of the druids and druidesses didn’t go to school, they just learned and practiced until their mentors decided they were ready to serve the gods. Besides, at fifteen, Mabel was a bit old to be just starting out. “No,” Lady Fay continued, “odds are she’ll stay right here and be running this island when I’m gone.”

“And what,” Lady Tibbo asked, “does she think of that?”

Lady Fay laughed through her nose, but didn’t answer. Merlin stepped back in.

“What we have in mind,” he began, “is not exactly school. I know Druid Curt over on the Spit, and he told me that Mabel’s doing plenty more than carrying on with the boys when she’s there. She asks him all kinds of things about the stars and the holy rites, and she’s learnt all his yarns in half the time it normally takes a druidess.”

“Has she now?” Lady Fay straightened herself up. Something she didn’t know about her daughter.

“We’re going around to the leading families in all Avalon,” Lady Tibbo jumped back in, “getting gals and gaffers like your Mabel to come to the Town and learn more than they could ever learn in their own homes. How to read fate in the stars, how to reckon big sums, how to fight with swords, things like that.”

Lady Fay hadn’t blushed to hear that hers was one of the “leading families in all Avalon,” though like all the things we were telling her, it was at best half-true. Lady Tibbo had turned to talking about the big picture just in time, because at that moment Mabel returned with six tall wooden mugs of beer balanced carefully in her hands. Six? Her mother looked furious. The girl set a mug down for each of us four, only then placing one in front of her mother, and then, with a cool grin, she sat down at the empty spot across from Druid Pratt with the sixth mug. Lady Fay had eyes of fire and her cheeks flushed, but she said nothing; she wasn’t ready to lose her temper in front of us so easily.

As there was silence, Lady Tibbo continued: “Times are changing, my dear,” and it was unclear if her dear was the furious mother or the triumphant daughter. “You might have heard of a feller named Jack Holwell. He’s from round Anguille in the west. Well, he got a big band of fighters to follow him for the promise of free land, and now they’re after sweeping up and down the whole coast from Corner Brook to Burin. And they’re not leaving with spoils either, they’re all set up on their new lands with this Holwell at their head, they call him Chief. Who’s to say they’ll stop there? Next it’s Avalon they’ll be coming for. We can’t go on with each harbour, each family fending for itself, or in a couple years we’ll be mince meat.”

Lady Fay seemed unimpressed. “We’ve had war here before,” she said, “nigh fifty year ago, right before I was born. I can’t see how carrying off a bunch of kids to learn star-reading and sum-reckoning and sword-fighting in the Town is gonna stop that.”

“Because this time,” Lady Tibbo continued, “we won’t fight each other, we’ll fight together. If the brightest of every house in Avalon are in one place, they won’t be split up when Holwell comes knocking, they’ll fight for each other because they’ll have learnt from each other.”

“Learnt from each other?” Lady Fay echoed.

“Yes dear.”

“Oh lordamighty.”

This time I agreed with Lady Fay: Lady Tibbo was getting ahead of herself, dreaming up some great battle against the Holwells that sounded like it was straight out of an old yarn. Merlin decided to bring things back on track:

“There is another important difference between what we are proposing and a school. You would pay no fees, not in work nor in fish nor in oil nor anything else. Instead, we would give you a hand in procuring any gear you need around here. I hope you won’t mind that I glanced at your toolshed as we were coming in. It’s a great testament to your hard work and skill that you keep the house so well-maintained with those old things, but have you thought that it might be time to find some replacements?”

Lady Fay snorted. Clearly she didn’t like to feel bribed.

“If you think we’re trying to buy you,” I jumped in, “I can tell you right now it’s nothing of that. It would only be a little sign of gratitude to you for having helped us, helped us in a way much greater than we can express.”

The words felt clumsy in my mouth, and Merlin gave me a wary look. I was banking on Lady Fay, who’d been so straight to the point herself, liking it best when others didn’t beat around the bush with her either. She said nothing. I was worried that I’d pushed it too far, that she didn’t know anymore what it was we wanted with her daughter, that she’d fear something awful dark was afoot and throw us out the door. At last she talked:

“It’s a good thing I know you all are who you say you are. Even if I’ve never seen your faces, nobody would come around pretending to be you four, not in Avalon – they’d be found out before too long. Well alright,” she sighed, “I guess it’s down to what she thinks of it all.”

It seems it only then hit Mabel that it was her we’d been talking about. After all, why would we be talking about her, what could anything we’d been saying about the stars and war and Jack Holwell have to do with her? But now that our eyes were on her, the girl perked right up and, smiling nervously, asked:

“Beg your pardon, but what would you like my opinion on?”

“See?” her mother pounced. “She doesn’t know, she’s not even following!” But somehow the lady sounded desperate, like she knew it was lost. When we suggested taking her daughter off the island, she’d resisted out of reflex, but now I wondered if she’d really be so sad to see Mabel go.

“Mabel dear,” Lady Tibbo asked, “do you feel ready to move out?”

Mabel’s eyes lit up, but she thought better of it and reined herself in, saying, “I suppose I am, yes ma’am, for sure, if an opportunity has come up.”

“It’s awful small here,” Lady Tibbo continued, “for a bright girl like yourself, don’t you think?” Getting no reply, she went on: “Don’t you feel cramped, like the space outside your head is somehow too small to hold what’s inside it?”

“Oh chrissakes,” Lady Fay snapped, “doesn’t everyone feel that way?”

Again I found myself siding with Lady Fay, but I saw that Mabel was looking at her with a touch of real surprise in her eyebrows. Something she didn’t know about her mother.

“We’re offering to take you to the Town,” Merlin jumped in. “If all goes well, you could hold a very special position, where you would be at once serving the gods and tending to public affairs.” He was coming a bit closer to telling her what was really going on.

“For now, there’s a place prepared for you in the druids’ quarters,” Pratt jumped in. “You would be housed there at my expense.” Those were the first words he’d said since we’d come inside.

“That’s… very kind of you,” Mabel answered, and I realized she’d missed the introductions and had no clue who Pratt was. Since no one else filled the silence, I jumped in again:

“He’s the Chief Druid.”

Mabel gave me and Pratt a smile and a nod, while Pratt, Merlin, and Lady Tibbo gave me that shocked look which people who don’t know how to cut through silence cast on those who do.

“If you would like to accept, and you’re absolutely sure,” Merlin came back in, “we can leave tomorrow.”

“I am,” said Mabel.

With her cheeks back to their normal colour and her look much softened, Lady Fay sighed and announced that we could stay the night.

Mabel’s two younger sisters came in with little Garrett in tow. We had supper, a cod stew like you’ll find in most good homes at that time of year, with cabbage and potato and a bit of radish. I saw there was a guitar hanging on the wall, which Lady Fay told me belonged to her cousin who lived with them but was gone for the fishing. I took it down and, once I figured out how this cousin had tuned the thing, played some songs I thought the children might like. Before the sun was down, Lady Fay declared it was time for the kids to get to bed, then said there were fish to be gutted in the shed. Mabel acted like neither one of these statements could have anything to do with her. Her mother went out to gut the fish without saying a word more.

That’s when Merlin asked Mabel if she knew the Yarn of King Arthur. She laughed and nodded, yes, of course she did. He then asked her if she could tell it to us all, right then and now. He looked surprised when she sang the whole thing, with a voice unlike the voice she spoke in, which was tart and snappy like her mother’s. I improvised on the guitar as she went. Every bard or druid tells it a bit differently, but in Mabel’s telling, it seemed the yarn was less about Arthur than about Morgan, who traded barbs with the Horsemen, fought in the great battle alongside Brian Boru, and gave her cousin the Bonnie Prince a special cloak which hid him from his enemies’ sight as he fled from Culloden. Morgan was also the one who brought her brother Arthur to the Antipodes, which Mabel called the Land Down Under, a name I’ve heard used by bards in Bonavista as well. This must have been the way Druid Curt had taught her to sing it, but I thought some of the details had to be her own.

When she finished, Merlin smiled and nodded deeply, giving Pratt one of his thousand-word looks: See, what did I tell you, you thought I was making things up, but I knew it all along, she’s the one we need and here you have the proof. Then he thanked the girl, said he’d never heard it told like that, then told her that she could do as she pleased now, but if he were in her place he’d go out and help her mother, it was likely the last time she’d ever have to gut fish. Mabel frowned a bit, but she liked the sound of never gutting fish again enough that she agreed to help her mother this one last time. We headed off to the beds Lady Fay had offered us.

The next morning Mabel was ready early, with her two better sets of clothes and a few baubles wrapped in an old blanket. Everything else she gave to her younger sisters. Her mother insisted on sending her off with a warmer coat, and tried to hand her jugs full of pickled eggs and cod liver oil and the like, as if you couldn’t get these things in the Town. Lady Fay’s face was much changed from the day before: she wore a worried smile and her cheeks were drained white, and I wondered more than once if she was holding back tears. She waved a long goodbye, walking backwards towards the house as we pulled away from the launch. Once we’d cleared the island, I took one look back from where I sat at the helm: I saw her bent double over the cabbage barrel as if she couldn’t stand.

Mabel was sitting in the bottom of the sloop, wrapped in her mother’s huge coat, with her hair tied up in the same complicated braid as the day before. Merlin gave Pratt a knowing look, so clear that even Pratt could understand it. The Chief Druid nodded, and Merlin spoke up:

“Tell me, Mabel, do you like your name?”

The girl calculated for a second. “It’s not bad,” she shrugged, “I’ve known worse. But I’ve got no clue what it means, and neither did my parents, it’s just a family name.”

“And what,” Merlin went on, “if your name was Morgan from now on? Could you live with that?”

A pause, a chuckle. “Alright,” Morgan said, “I suppose I could.” I doubt she took Merlin seriously at the time, but nobody would call her Mabel again for the next thirty years.

Morgan’s sisters tried to teach the songs I played that night to the kids on the Spit. A few of them seem to have caught on, and the kids remembered the gist of them if not the words or the real tune. Those kids are grown now and I’m an old man, but I’ve tried to tour out there whenever I’ve had the chance.

 

[Knud_den_Store]

Well there it is, I'm doing narrative bits too! I hope it's neither too clear nor too vague what's going on in the above section. We'll see how much I can keep the story at that pace, I know I'll eventually have to jump huge spans of time.

Ah, After the End? That is a mod I've always wanted to try out sometime, mainly so I can make Rust Cultists become the Adeptus Mechanicus. Keep up the good work!

Thanks! Yeah the mod's definitely worth a try. If you have a whole whack of time on your hands at least

 

[vandevere]

Well there it is, I'm doing narrative bits too! I hope it's neither too clear nor too vague what's going on in the above section. We'll see how much I can keep the story at that pace, I know I'll eventually have to jump huge spans of time.

Thanks! Yeah the mod's definitely worth a try. If you have a whole whack of time on your hands at least

Not only is this a very interesting AR. You're also one hell of a writer! I loved this!