The World of Dyrhal ◇ Dyrhal Map

The roads that still exist were built by dead men.

Three generations and more have passed since Solkaris burned. In the years after it, Dyrhal drew in on itself. Fields went unworked because there was no one to work them, and settlements emptied because there was no one to hold them. In some places the famine took more than the war had. In others the wilderness did, walking in over the unwatched fields as if it had only been waiting to be asked. That drawing-in is over. What remains is leaner, harder, and deliberate.

Men I Cannot Spare

Every man I send into those ruins is a man not standing the wall. Every man I lose to whatever lives in the old Aurikronton keep is a man I cannot replace before harvest season. My sworn men are for the hard tasks — the wall, the road, the lord across the river who has been eyeing the ford since spring. I will not spend that strength on rats and rubble.

What I will do is what I have always done. There are men in the cells who would prefer a hard road to a short one. There are desperate freemen at the gate every month who have run out of better options. I give them terms, a purse if they come back, and the understanding that whatever they find in there is theirs to keep above the fee. More than half of them do not come back. The ones who do are harder and usually willing to go again.

It is not a proud arrangement. But my walls are standing and my men are fed and I have not had to explain to any widow why her husband died clearing someone else’s century-old problem. I call that governance.

— Lord Hareth Vorn, Baron of Orchyvas, from a letter to his Alder-Reeve

Ask a heraldman and they will name you more than four score lordships on the continent: baronies, starostwa and jarldoms, each with its walled town, or two, and the fortified manors that ring it. Ask instead who can hold what he has named, and the count comes down, and nobody agrees where it stops. All of Dyrhal is claimed. Very little of it is held.

Authority here is a strong gate, a stone wall, a timber palisade, a score of men with spears and hauberks. A lord’s power reaches as far as his men can walk before dark and no farther, and it thins with every mile from the gate the way light thins from a doorway. A road unguarded for two tendays becomes dangerous. A watchtower left unmanned becomes a den.

The land past the patrolled roads is occupied, by things that keep no borders and answer to no lord, and that have grown bolder in the three generations since the legions stopped hunting them. A farmer working the last strip inside a barony’s patrols knows this better than any map can tell him. The treeline is the line between a world that can be defended and one that cannot, and on a still evening he can hear which side of it he is on.

Children learn where safety ends before they learn anything else. They learn the distance from the field to the nearest palisade the way children elsewhere learn prayers, by repetition. They learn which roads are walked and which are not. They learn to heed a fading sun’s light, and that a traveler who is not back by nightfall is usually not coming back.

None of this is a land without hope, and it should not be read as one. The towns endure. The harvests come in, most years. Children grow up and build things their parents did not have. But hope in Dyrhal is a thing done on purpose, against the evidence, by people who have decided that what they are holding is worth what it costs to hold it. Nobody here lives long beyond the reach of a wall, and nobody here mistakes the wall for the reason they are alive.

Read on ◇ The Introduction and Chapter I, as a PDF

If It Weren’t for the Beer

I plow the field the thane calls his, I sow the seed the baron owns, I reap the grain the reeve counts twice, and the wolves can have my bones.

So pour it out and count me in before the gate shuts up at dusk; the thane has the wall, the baron the thane, and I have the ale and the husk.

Nine days I owe the manor ditch, nine more I owe the road, the baron’s men eat at my board and call it a light load.

My brother cleared the baron’s road the spring the river rose; the river cleared my brother too, and that is how it goes.

And when the howling comes at night I lie behind his stone, I curse the thane with every breath and bless him with each bone.

So pour it out and count me in before the gate shuts up at dusk; the thane has the wall, the baron the thane, and I have the ale and the husk.

They say there is a kinder lord a tenday’s walk from here. I’d go tomorrow, so I would, if it weren’t for the beer.

— common tavern song