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- Scattered Fires
- The Drum Ring
- Water at the Cairns
Oakdrum
Oakdrum is what the Grimcrag Satyr call home, and anyone who calls it a town has never seen it. There are no walls, no streets and no square. Across the wide green floor of Grimcrag Valley, a long way apart from one another, sit low huts of stacked stone roofed with hide and brush, rock shelters dug in under overhangs, dry-stone folds for the goats, and fire circles ringed with flat sitting stones. A family keeps two or three shelters and moves between them with the seasons, and a hut nobody slept in last winter belongs to whoever sleeps in it next.
Above the valley floor, under the oldest oaks on the ridge, lies the Drum Ring: a wide circle of beaten earth where the clans meet. The great drums sit there, hollowed from fallen oak trunks, and when they are played from the Ring they carry the length of the valley and well past it. Disputes are settled in the Ring, horn-rings are cut there when the young earn them, and the chieftain's horn is passed there from one bearer to the next. Kregath Bloodhorn took it in the Ring after his elder fell, and his own hut is no bigger than anyone else's, set at the foot of the ridge path where nobody can climb to the Ring without passing him.
Outsiders are met at the cairns, the waist-high stacks of stones that mark where the valley floor begins. A stranger waits at a cairn until someone comes down, and nobody hurries. The one who comes brings a cup of water from the iron-tasting wells. Drinking it means the stranger keeps the clans' law while in Oakdrum and answers to the Ring if they break it. Refusing it is allowed, and it means the stranger is a softskin passing through, with until sundown to be gone.
Since the Army of Light came, Oakdrum has been crowded. The camps on the valley's edges burned, and clans that never shared a fire now sleep a stone's throw from old enemies. The drums sound most nights, Kregath counts the living every dawn, and the fire circles hold as many grudges as they do people.
Above the valley floor, under the oldest oaks on the ridge, lies the Drum Ring: a wide circle of beaten earth where the clans meet. The great drums sit there, hollowed from fallen oak trunks, and when they are played from the Ring they carry the length of the valley and well past it. Disputes are settled in the Ring, horn-rings are cut there when the young earn them, and the chieftain's horn is passed there from one bearer to the next. Kregath Bloodhorn took it in the Ring after his elder fell, and his own hut is no bigger than anyone else's, set at the foot of the ridge path where nobody can climb to the Ring without passing him.
Outsiders are met at the cairns, the waist-high stacks of stones that mark where the valley floor begins. A stranger waits at a cairn until someone comes down, and nobody hurries. The one who comes brings a cup of water from the iron-tasting wells. Drinking it means the stranger keeps the clans' law while in Oakdrum and answers to the Ring if they break it. Refusing it is allowed, and it means the stranger is a softskin passing through, with until sundown to be gone.
Since the Army of Light came, Oakdrum has been crowded. The camps on the valley's edges burned, and clans that never shared a fire now sleep a stone's throw from old enemies. The drums sound most nights, Kregath counts the living every dawn, and the fire circles hold as many grudges as they do people.