Goetern

The people at the valley mouth¶

The Goetern want nothing from you.

This is the hardest thing about them for any colonial power to swallow, because a people who want nothing cannot be bought, and a people who cannot be bought must be either respected or fought. Envoys arrive with the usual instruments: trade concessions, titles, protection against a threat nobody in the valley had been worrying about. They are heard politely all the way through, given a meal, and shown the road.

Note that it is the same sentence both times. That is the whole of Goetern diplomacy: you are genuinely welcome, and the path is genuinely that way, and which half of it applies to you today is your own business.

A valley at a time¶

There is no Goetern nation and there never has been. The unit is the valley, and a valley of four hundred people with its own headwoman, its own bone garden and no obligation past the next ridge is the ordinary condition of Goetern life rather than an exception to it.

The Steadfast Crag is the largest confederation of those valleys and speaks for perhaps half the Goetern in the world on a generous count, which it has never once inflated. Beyond it are smaller alliances two or three valleys deep, formed for a single bad winter and never dissolved, and a great many settlements that belong to nobody at all. They trade with the Crag. Some send hunters when the Crag calls. Most simply carry on, and would be astonished to hear a foreign clerk describe them as Crag subjects.

The practical consequence is one every expedition learns late: beating the Crag does not settle the mountains. The unaffiliated valleys watched what you did, and they are under no treaty whatsoever.

Patience, and where it stops¶

They are mountain folk, careful farmers and disciplined hunters, and they take life only when there is a reason to. Patience is the entire civic virtue, taught to children, expected of elders, worn like a coat.

It has a limit, and the limit has an address. It is the valley mouth.

When a Goetern settlement is threatened, its farmers and hunters do not become soldiers. This is the error that has ended more than one expedition budgeted for a village. They go on being farmers and hunters, together, at speed, on ground they have walked their whole lives, with every ditch and deer path already known to them and to nobody else. There is no army to defeat. There is a valley, and it stops cooperating.

The hunger beneath the grass¶

Their faith is Verdantism, and outsiders who have only heard it described as a nature religion tend to be badly unprepared for the reality of it.

Rot and bloom are one holy cycle. The dead feed the field. The field is the reason anyone is standing here at all, and the druids who tend the bone gardens are not being metaphorical when they speak of the hunger beneath the grass. Verdantism does not preach that life is precious. It preaches that life is owed, that the weak are the meal of the worthy, and that a field which has been fed properly will feed you back.

This sits inside the gentlest, most restrained people in Valdrin without the slightest friction, and if you find that unsettling, so does everyone.

In your settlement¶

Goetern are patient, capable, quick-handed and bound tightly by tradition. They make superb farmers and hunters and thoroughly miserable urban labour, and no wage will fix the second thing.

They tolerate most peoples at a workable distance and none warmly. Expect no bloc, no agitation, and no affection either.

Hire them for the land. Expect to be asked where their dead may be buried, and understand that the question is not sentimental and the answer will decide what your fields yield. Do not expect them to love the town, and do not stand between them and the valley they consider theirs.