Travel Log of a Raven
Day 17 - The Mountains of Tarralees
- Details
- Written by MIchelle McCollyer
The Mountains of Tarralees rise out of the woods like the ribs of a maggot-cleaned carcass from a freshly cut wheat field. Their valleys drop off into blackness, chasms crumbling deep into the wounds of the earth which appear as blackened veins streaked across the frozen peaks. A labyrinth of lumping, barren hills stretches fields upon fields, shoveled atop one another, dug up and pitted as a garden after a failed search for a buried coins. They tower unsteadily upward with their base not much wider than their plateau, as starkly striped in layers of reds and greys and browns as lard cooling in a jar. Both the hills and the mountains are a maze to the traveler and death to anyone who doesn't know the way.
Most travelers use the Miner's Pass to cross over the mountains. Many blood-splattered hooves and squeaking carts have etched away the tight passes on this road, as do the fraying boots of its many bandits. Thieves travel great lengths to bully a portion of the Miner's Pass, using the mountains' formidable passage to siphon riches off everyone, from the velvet curtained carriages, to the limping warrior returning home to his farm.
With the war ended, I don't know who rules that road now… Are the bandits whore-house rich with the warrior's loot? Have the region's guard restored it to safety? Or have some of our returning warriors overthrown the halfwit robbers and instilled war's more merciless tactics? I have yet to meet another traveler just come from the Pass to tell me its fate, and I'd rather not find out. Instead, I take my usual route through the Herder's Pass, where the only "bandits" daring enough to lurk up there are the mountain guides.
I travel this way to deliver a Valiant Scroll to the Mertington House. The Mertington family govern the southern region of the Warrior Kingdom, including the Tarralees Mountains. Their chateau resides near the coast, where most of their people live, on the other side of the mountains. They rule the mountains as well as anyone could, show up with swords, bark commands, collect taxes and disappear for another six months with all the pomp and circumstance of a rooster. The Tarraleesivians refer to them the Mer-to-do's.
Five times I've traveled the Herder's Passage from the north, and I still spend days crossing my own boot tracks searching for where the path begins. From the north, the indistinguishable landscape ensnares the mind: no trees, no ponds, no creeks, no landmarks. All the hills tower to about same height and mesh closely together, preventing you from getting a decent perspective. Choosing the wrong side of a chasm could cost you several days of rations. With no streams or vegetation, even a desperate meal on critters is hard to come by. As the mountains loom closer, remnants of doomed attempts from other travelers scatter frequently, their sun-bleached skulls glimmering white in the suffocating dust, eye sockets rolled upward to watch endlessly for changes in the sky. These hills are an excellent place to disappear into when you're being followed.
Summer burns now into its hottest days, where the grass husks surrender to the heat, waiting for the Autumn winds to blow. If I am to reach the King's Castle by Spring, I better travel to the southern regions now while the weather's fine. The Northern winters are warmer than the Southern regions, which sometimes see storms stacked from equinox to equinox. Even with delays in my journey, I should be well into the North or along the coast when Winter arrives. Also, autumn's cooling attracts storms to the Tarralees Mountains, turning a winter-cold journey into a trek of freezing rain pelting you sideways, shaping the crumbling passage into sudden landslides. Best to travel the mountains now before fall arrives.
It's a three-night ride through the Herder's Passage. Leave your carts; they won't fit the road. You can find a guide in Tarraleesovo, the town closest to the passage entrance, but bring your coins, and then some, especially if you look like you have coins to spare. The guides are infamous for claiming the weather is "not good" on the second day in, that the trek is "too dangerous" to go on. More coins will always persuade them to journey on. They will do this several times; you're completely at their mercy. You can't tell one blast of cold wind from a storm warning, or that the caved-in road you're stopped at hasn't been there for several years. It helps to treat them respectfully, like equals rather than servant guides. Those who show real compassion tend to lose less coin.
The town of Tarraleesovo is as simple and crude as any village. Perched on the edge of a small lake in a wedge between the base of the mountains and a break from the hills, the town houses a few huts, a small store, a gathering hut and a tavern. The lake grows and recedes according to season, leaving muck, grass and the occasional bush in its wake. It's the only sign of life on this side of the mountains. What was once an ancient gathering spot for these nomadic goat herders, has, in these times of war, grown into village and accommodating trap travelers.
But the Tarraleesovians are not a bad folk. Before the Warrior Kingdom captured these mountains, the Tarraleesovians ruled themselves. Faced daily with the awesome dangers of the sky and mountain, they cultivated kindness and positivity to survive against the abrupt blizzards that could throw them into a mountain crevice for days. The treachery of the mountains isolated them from other peoples, and as such their culture grew into such an anomaly that even the first Unification into Spiritual Kingdom couldn't meld them into their ways. The Spiritual Kingdom never claimed the territory. Since the Tarraleesovians valued peace and kindness, the Spiritual Kingdom could not justify conquering them, so the Spiritual Kingdom let them be.
In the ancient days of the Warrior Kingdom's growing dominion, the Mertington House claimed these mountains to mine metals for weapons. Back then, they always had enough men to work the mines, so the authority of the Mertington House barely existed to the Tarraleesovians. In fact, after the Mertington House claimed the mountains, several decades passed before they even knew Tarralessovians lived on this side of the Tarralees. Even after they "conquered" Tarralesovo, they hardly even stopped by to collect taxes because they had a such a hard time finding the place.
When the late Warrior King began the Kingdom's Expansion forty years ago, the Mertington House expanded its mining operations into every known iron vein in the mountains. Short on men for their new operations, the Mertington House forced all Tarraleesovian men into the mines. The Tarraleesovians herded goats. Generations upon generations had spent their lives outside surrounded by wet wirely fir and bleating kids. The mines' darkness wore them down. Then the men started dying. They died from exhaustion. They died from poor food. They died from a longing to watch the clouds shift and to feel fresh goat milk splash from their pail onto their shins. As the men died, the Mertington House sent younger and younger boys to work the mines. Their families began to fray. With such a staggering drop in the male population, the Tarralesovian woman did what we all did during the war; they birthed more children. But with families of one woman raising several children and goats while her husband works the mines, in their exhaustion and lack of time, their culture began to dilute as well. You can best see this dilution in the younger Tarralessovian ladies.
Tarralessovian ladies are some of the most brash, soft-spoken, witty women you'll ever meet. Though their tongues speak lightly, almost fluttering across the words, what they say is almost always blunt and poignant, often twisting towards some sort of joke that you can't quite grasp. The Tarralessovian woman emerges somewhere between the bitterness of raising their family alone, and the positive, hopeful attitude their culture passed down to them. Whether they're really jesting or jeering, I find myself hanging off their every word, trying to catch what they'll say next.
The Tarraleesovians are not a bad folk; they use most of the money they swindle from travelers to buy back their men from the mines. If you spend more than a night in the Tarraleesovo tavern, you'll hear a fine mix of mining balades and herdering folk songs. As both the Tarrelees Mountains and mine caverns produce astounding echoes, both their mining and herding songs greatly accentuate these echoes by singing with random abrupt "TA" and "DA" sounds as well as extending the notes on the ends of phrases as long as their breath holds out.
Their Tarrel-Ale is also the strangest ale that will ever cross your tongue. Made with goat's milk, it's like drinking pond water, with its earthy tastes, before launching into a soft cheese blob that ends up tasting salty at the end. One of those, and you're either puking in the grasses or you're done for the night. It's stronger than wine and will often put a man out of his wits, as well as his coin purse.
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This evening, the usual assortment of songs at the tavern got interrupted by some news from a Tarraleesovian man. Seemed like he came from a long ways. He panted for several moments before he spoke Tarralessovian in a rushed, excited tone, verging on frightening. From what I could gather, a mighty goat pushed over a large rock… not sure what quite happened. Perhaps somebody got hurt, but the news cleared out nearly every native Tarraleesovian at the tavern so it was just me and some asshole from the Merchant Kingdom. Even the bartender had left, leaving the bar open for that merchant to loot extra jugs of Tarrel-Ale. I told him put the jugs back, but he didn't understand me. Following him to his cart, I "drank" with him from my flask (of water) 'til he rolled sick on the ground. Then, I dragged him back to the bar with his bottles for the Tarraleesovians to find. I'm not about to chance the gods on the deadliest mountain pass in the Warrior Kingdom by standing aside as some stranger robs the mountains' people of their sacramental ale.
