THE DEBATABLE LANDS (OOC/Sign-Ups) [Closed]
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2014 10:08 am
Nationstatelandsville wrote:
- [Award for Best] Other Fantasy [RP]: The Debatable Lands, because holy shit you guys, actually read it. Norv, being himself an immortal ghost bound to defend the innocent as punishment for killing Abel, evidently remembers a lot of the borderlands. And fairies.... Seriously; it's like Lovecraft and Tolkien had a horrible baby and raised it in a Scottish bog.
THE DEBATABLE LANDS
BLOOD ON THE MOORS
BLOOD ON THE MOORS
The Border
O HAVE ye na heard o the fause Sakelde? O have ye na heard o the keen Lord Scroop? How they hae taen bauld Kinmont Willie, On Haribee for to hang him up?
The Ballad of Kinmont Willie, 16th Century
* * *
BLIND HAMISH ELLIOT
Aye, tis a cruel world we live in, and nae mistake.The Ballad of Kinmont Willie, 16th Century
* * *
BLIND HAMISH ELLIOT
They call us the Reivers, the milkdrinkers who live far from the Border and bow to kings, who imagine themselves English or Scottish and not free men bound to kith and kin and not to an iron chair. We know better. Here along the Border, in the year of our Lord 1567, we know who we are: na Scots and na English, but Border names all and sundry, bound one to the other by blood and feud and vengeance – aye, and by music and love and old, strong tales as well. We raid each other to survive, and the Border makes na difference to any of us.
How did it come to be this way? None now live who remember. Ever since William the Frenchmen conquered England all those hundreds of years ago, Scottish armies have marched south into England and English armies have marched north into Scotland. Tis not so far from the Border either to York or to Edinburgh and Glasgow – yet those cities always stood strong, even as our homes were burned. Five hundred years of war took its toll. Those who could leave, left. Those who could not stayed, and watched their homes and crops burned over and over again.
In the end, the land could na longer yield crops; it was bare rock and heather, empty moors. We who remained took to grazing cattle, for twas the only livelihood left to us. Na the king in London na the king in Edinburgh cared for us, save when they swept through wi fire and wi sword for to fight their damn wars. They appointed Wardens on the Borders ta keep the peace, and they left us ta our misery.
And so we took care of ourselves. We bound together, as families, and put our faith in our own strength and our own cunning. That was the start of the Names: Armstrong, Crozier, Scott, Douglas, Reed, Frasier, Graham, Kerr. The men and women wha shared that name would live together, sometimes in their hundreds or thousands, and protect each other and their land. The oldest and strongest and cleverest man who bears a name would be acclaimed the chieftain by all the others, and he would lead them, and he would be known only as “the Armstrong” or “the Kerr.” Some Names are so numerous that they are divided up; there are the Scotts of Buccleuch, great Wardens and men o’ law, and there are the Scotts of Harden, mighty raiders. Some small Names pay manrent to greater Names, promising ta fight for them in return for protection. But all Names have this much in common: they are bound by blood and not by money, and a man’s loyalty to them is absolute – for membership in a Name is the only thing that can keep a man alive on the Border.
But the land was barren, and there were never enough cattle to feed all of the Names at once. And so the Reiving began, ye ken, for a man who knew the land – the mountains and hills, the moors and the wee streams, the bracken and the forest – such a man could slip across the border of a night and make off with a hundred head of cattle before dawn broke. He could double his family’s fortune in a week, if another man didna steal the cattle in his own turn. And so the Names raided: back and forth across the border, cattle for cattle, blood for blood. Twas nothing ta do wi English or wi Scots; we do this for ta feed our families, and that is all.
But once ye start taking blood for blood, it never seems to end when it ought. When a man dies on the border, his property is divided equally among all his sons – and so enough cattle for one man is split among five men, and none o the five has enough ta live on – and so he raids because he must. But he does other things, too. He steals insight – that being silver or weapons or other goods that a man could carry off in his saddlebags. He burns homes, so that those who can now live in mighty tower houses of stone. He carries off the children of the other Names for ransom. He rapes their women. He kills. When a man is raised as we are, raised from birth ta raid and kill because tis the only life he’ll ever know – then a man kills because tis all that he is good for. And so blood piles on blood, and vengeance becomes a way of life.
And so we live now. We raid anyone, on either side of the Border, so long as them that we raid have na protectors and na ties ta us – a man never raids folk of his own Name, or he will be disnamed, and a man without kin is naught but a dead man walking. Though we raid the whole year round, we ride the oftenest in the autumn and early winter months, when the nights be longest and the cattle have grown fat upon the summer grazing. We raid in groups of a few dozen, sometimes even a few hundred. We ride upon our ponies and nags – na mighty knights’ chargers, but they can run all night and pick their way over rock and bog where a larger horse would snap a leg or sink into the mud. We can ride like the wind – they call us the finest light cavalry in all of Europe, for all that we have but little steel between us. A man wears a jack o’ plaite – a doublet stitched wi wee pieces o steel for protection - and a steel helmet ta boot, if he be lucky. They call us the steel bonnets for that self-same reason. When a man goes a-reiving, he bears a lance and a buckler, a sword and dirk, and a wee one-handed crossbow called a latch. A few men carry pistols, but they are dear in price and rare ta find. And we ride wi hounds – sleuth hounds, they are called – that can follow a scent across stone and stream, and break a man’s arm in their jaws.
We live in bastle houses, wi roofs of slate and stone walls three foot thick. The houses have two stories: where the lower story keeps the cattle and horses safe and the upper story houses the people. A man can reach that upper story only by an outside ladder, the which can be pulled up at any time. The chieftain o a great Name can build a true tower house, many stories high.
We all know each other, ye ken. We have all married back and forth across the Border, and we have na loyalty ta any king. We say that we are “Scottish if forced, English at will, and Reiver by the grace o blood.” We care not ta fight for kings or armies, but we will fight for our kin and our cattle and the bond of vengeance. And we have our own law, the Border Law, drawn from our own traditions. A man who has been raided has the right to raid in return, after his lost cattle, so long as he does so within six days. This raid is called the Hot Trod, and it must make a deal of noise and go bearing torches, to distinguish it from a secret raid i’ the night.
More often, though, the Hot Trod is but the first blow in a feud. A Name is nothing if it does not show strength; if a man believes that he can quarrel with another without fear of retaliation, then the victim’s Name is worse than useless. And so we fight. A Reed quarrels with an Kerr on the road, so the Kerrs steals the Reeds’ cattle, so the Reeds burns the Kerrs’ homes, so the Kerrs kidnap the Reeds’ children, so the Reeds kill every Kerr they can find. Sometimes, feuds even break out between men o the same Name. Tis a rare Reiver who, like me, grows old enough to die in his bed.
And the kings in their courts? Sometimes they come with an army and try to stamp us out. We take our cattle and flee into the mountains, and endure. Sometimes they give us gifts and treasure, because we serve as the first line o defense against invasion by the king on the other side of the border. We take their money, and wait for the next war.
The kings on each side of the border each appoint three Wardens – a Warden of the West Marches, the Middle Marches, and the East Marches – six in all. If a feud grows sae terrible that it might set the whole border alight, the Wardens step in to force a truce. They are rarely good for aught. The Scottish Wardens are but the biggest Reivers of all; the English Wardens are milk-drinking southerners whom not a Borderer respects one whit. We raid despite them, and we pay blood back wi blood. But the Wardens do have one true use: they oversee the Days of Truce, when all raiding and feuding stops, and we meet together to trade our goods and betroth our children, and to see our kin by marriage who are enemies on every other day. A Day of Truce is all music and celebration; they are lovely times. On a Day of Truce, a man can put the blood aside for one day and share the old dream of peace.
* * *
The Otherworld
O drowsy, drowsy as I was! Dead sleep upon me fell; The Queen of Fairies she was there, And took me to hersell. The Elfins is a pretty place, In which I love to dwell, But yet at every seven years’ end The last here goes to hell; And as I am ane o flesh and blood, I fear the next be mysell.
The Ballad of Tam Lin, 16th Century
* * *
MITHER LILEAS ELLIOT
For all his talk o peace, old blind Hamish is still in love wi the killing. Next to all the men are, and how can ye find that surprising? When they were but babes, swords were pressed into their hands. But we women have another tale to tell: a tale of old truths and shadows in the dark, a tale of stories and songs around campfires in which the final true strength is found.The Ballad of Tam Lin, 16th Century
* * *
MITHER LILEAS ELLIOT
Women are the guardians of the old knowledge, the secret knowledge. Women are born, sometimes, with the Second Sight: the ability to see things hidden from the eyes of other folk. Women sing the ballads that contain our history and that teach us who we are. And in singing, and in remembering, we women preserve a humanity that all the killing and all the feuds is na strong enow to wipe out. We sing songs of love, and mercy, and compassion, and sacrifice. We sing songs that remind us of what we are, and what we are not.
We are the guardians of our history, as well. A hundred and fifty years ago, the Douglasses and the Percys clashed at Otterburn. We remember that battle now, and who fought there, and who fell, and where, and why. We remember it not because it was written down, but because we have sung the ballad of its carnage and its glory ever since. And the ballads hold darker histories too, disguised as myth and legend. Within the ancient words of the Ballad of Tam Lin lie many truths about the kingdom of the Fair Folk that exists in the empty lands of the Border, truths that we women remember only too well.
I have the Sight. A fair number of other women have it as well. Many are born with it; in a few, it is cultivated through training by older women, or through the experience of suffering. But there are a very, very few women – women in whom the Sight is strong indeed, and who have suffered greatly, and who have been raised by wise women themselves – who have power beyond merely seeing the hidden world within our own. They can reach out to it, touch it, command it. They can speak with the Fair Folk and bind them to their will; eight times they can transform into a great black cat with a white spot upon its chest, but if they do so a ninth time, then they are doomed to remain a cat forever. Such women are witches, and did they live anywhere else, the church would burn them. But this is the Border, and if such women bear a Name, then they have a hundred swords who will stand between them and any angry priest.
What do we see, in that world beyond? We see that there is life teeming all around us, life that is hidden from the eyes of men until it chooses to reveal itself. Some of these dwellers behind the veil are benign. Billy Blind is a spirit of hearth and home, a wee man clad in a red hood, who appears to offer advice and council. The dunnies are spirits – some say that they are the ghosts of men who died alone in the high fells – who will take the form of a horse or ox, and lead a man to treasure or to doom. The Green Man o’ the Wood is a shy spirit, kind to children, yet terribly strong; he appears at night, amid birch groves. The shellycoats are bodiless voices that dwell in streams; they lead travellers astray, but they also whisper secrets. Water bulls may take the form of a bull or of a young man, and dwell in lakes; they mate with cows to produce cattle of great strength and beauty, with distinctive stunted ears. And there is the gigelorum: a creature so tiny that it can live within the ear of a flea, and pass unseen in the chambers of kings.
But there are also creatures of terrible power and malice in the Otherworld: we call them wirry-cows, monsters that mean ill to mankind. The greatest of these are the Fair Folk, a whole race of beings of terrible magical might. They are beautiful to gaze upon, but can change at a moment’s notice to forms of horrible hideousness. They have their own queens, and armies, and cities beneath the Earth in the land of Elfhame. The Folk are strong in hawthorne groves, and among standing stones, and in the high desolate places of the Earth; it does not do to tarry in such places, lest ye attract their wrath, and never be seen again. No one knows why the Fair Folk hate us mortals, but hate us they do, and they will ever seek to work us ill. They will abduct a child from the mother’s breast and replace him with an elfen bairn, whom the witless mother will raise as her own whilst her own flesh and blood grows up in Elfhame; such children are known as changelings. Witches can sometimes call upon the Fair Folk and make common cause against some mortal foe that the Fair Ones and the witch have in common. With the help of the Folk, a witch can slay a man with a whisper, or bottle a baby up in the womb, or change a child into a heather bush.
And there are more terrible wirry-cows still. The Washer at the Ford is a ghostly woman who stands in a stream, and washes the blood from the grave-clothes of those who are about to die. To see her is to know that your death is nigh. The bodachs are demons who appear in great numbers to finish a man off when he is already near to death; they carry off children in the night from locked bastle houses. Trolls live beneath bridges and in caves, and are great horny monsters twice the size of a man – but they do na attack unless ye approach. The Green Wolf, a creature the size of a bull, will stalk men and let out three barks that can be heard for miles around; if a man does not reach the safety o a threshold afore the third bark, then he will be overcome wi terror ta the point o death. The Green Lady, a beautiful woman wi the legs o a goat hidden beneath her skirt, will appear to men and lure them to her lair, and then drink their blood. The kelpies are great black horses that dwell in pools and streams; they emerge ta devour a man whole, and spit his entrails out ta the water’s side. They can take the form o a handsome young man wi water weeds in his hair, and they fall apart ta green pulp when they die.
Aye, the world is full o more terrible things than swords and guns, my child – and most terrible of all is that the Otherworld’s creatures are invisible to all but a few o us, until they choose ta make themselves known. But we have wisdom by which ta ken them, preserved in ballad and tale. And for those few women wi the Second Sight, the Otherworld can be seen as clear as day – in all its beauty, and its terror.
* * *
Clan Elliot and the Debatable Lands
This began on a Monday at morn, In Cheviot the hills so hye; The child may rue that is unborn, It was the more pity…They were twenty hundred spearmen good, Withouten any fail: They were borne along by the water o’Tweed I’ the boun’s o’ Teviotdale.
The Ballad of Chevy Chase, 15th Century
* * *
RED DUNCAN ELLIOT
Now the Elliots might not be the equal o’ kings, like the Percys or the Douglasses, and they might not be mad war-dogs like the Armstrongs or the Scotts, and they might not be great castle-lords like the Hepburns o’ the Hermitage. But what we are, we are: proud reivers of the Debatable Lands, and there is no man alive as can claim to be our lord or master.The Ballad of Chevy Chase, 15th Century
* * *
RED DUNCAN ELLIOT
As Blind Hamish told ye, the whole of the Borderlands are a fierce and lawless land. But there is one place in particular that is bloodier than all others: the Debatable Lands. A stretch of the western Border running from the Solway Firth and the River Sark to the River Esk and the River Liddel. It is ten miles from north to south and four miles wide. And no one knows who owns it – on which account they call it Debatable. Oh, ten years back the kings in Edinburgh and London agreed upon a border, and they put up stones, and dug a ditch, but we all know that that was but a legal fiction. The Debatable Lands are so called because for three hundred years, the two kings could not agree on which country the Lands belonged in. For three hundred years, the Border Names governed themselves in these lands. And a king cannot wipe away three hundred years of history wi a treaty and a few ditches. We are the Elliots of the Debatable Lands. Never in our history have we bent the knee to any crown, English or Scottish. And we never will.
The great towers of the Elliots lie in Roxburghshire, at the far end of the Border, and so do our origins: we came originally from Redheugh, north of Newcastle, on the shores of the North Sea. Our lands there and in Liddesdale were first given to us by Robert, bastard son o the great Bruce himself. But there has been a branch of our Name active in the Debatable Lands for centuries – here, a man can raid without any fear of the authorities at all, and if he has the strength to resist being raided in return, then he can grow prosperous as nowhere else. As time went by, we grew strong; our towers dot the cliffs of the Debatable Lands, and from our stronghold here at Harelaw Tower we reive against the small English Names across the border – the Nixons, the Olivers, the Bells. Our neighbors are the Armstrongs, and they are stronger and more numerous than we, and vicious ta boot. They can put three thousand men in the saddle, and they feud to the death, and tis better ta kill your women than to let them take her. But we and they have a long-honored understanding: the Armstrongs do na touch us, and we do na give them reason to do so. Much blood is thus avoided.
But we Elliots have our own feuds. Two years ago, the Scott of Buccleuch, acting as Warden o the Crown, executed four of our own for cattle thievery. No man o a great name has been executed on the border for such a crime within living memory – twas an attack by the Scotts, not the king’s justice. We will avenge it. And Little Jock Elliot o Park, not one year past, did wound James Hepburn o the Hermitage in the Cheviot Hills – aye, and Hepburn was the love of Mary the queen in Edinburgh, and sure the Queen’s men will come to avenge him, soon or late.
Even here, though, the world has changed greatly in my lifetime. It all began wi the birth o wee Mary the Queen o Scots. Henry the king in London wanted her ta grow up ta wed the prince of England, Edward, and so he took his army north ta force the Scots ta agree. They wouldna, and so Henry laid waste the Border for seven long years; the war began twenty-four years ago, and ended seventeen years ago. Henry swept through wi thousands o soldiers, killing all the cattle, tearing the bastle houses stone from stone, hanging all who wouldna cooperate wi him from the nearest tree. Twas a new kind o war, a war fought by mercenaries and cannon, and we in the Borderlands knew not how ta fight it. In the end, the king in Edinburgh and his French allies drove mad Henry back – but he left the Border in ruins, and we Reivers had to fight more bloodily than ever for the few cattle and good grazing lands that remained. They call it the Rough Wooing.
And then came the religious troubles. We on the Border are pious folk, after our fashion, but we care but little for the squabbles of priests. Our faith is simpler: God brings us onto the Earth, guards us safe in battle, lays us softly in the ground when our time is come. The pope is nothing to us, and the high talkers in Geneva are even less. And so I do na fully ken what it was that the Protestant lords fought so fiercely for. They took up arms against the Queen Regent, Mary of Guise, who ruled in the place o her wee daughter, and they won: for seven years now, Scotland has been a Protestant country. We on the Border care little for such matters, for the most part, but there are exceptions: while we Elliots have largely accepted the new faith, the Scotts are obstinate papists. And when Protestants reive, we now smash the stained-glass windows and idolatrous statues of Roman churches. Perhaps we believe that it it is God’s work to do so, and perhaps we do not. But either way, it is another blow that we can strike against our enemies.
The future is dark. Soon, the queen’s men will ride against all Elliots in vengeance for Little Jock’s attack on James Hepburn. In these lean times after the Rough Wooing, our truce with the Armstrongs wears thin. Religious strife turns brother against brother, and threatens to tear our own Names apart. We must ride soon against the mighty Scotts, and all those who back them, or see our name dishonored and our homes made easy targets. And the old wise women whisper around the hearthfires of things moving in the dark, of ancient evil on the rise, of the veil drawing thin and the Otherworld pushing through.
There are terrible days ahead. I feel it in my bones. But we will weather them as we have always done: our knee unbent, standing together as one. That is the Elliot way.