Vuskar

A road with bones along it¶

To Vuskar the ocean is not a border. It is a road, and every people who failed to sail it is a marker beside the road.

Longships cut deeper than waves, and what they carve is memory. Skarrholm sits at the head of a cold fjord and is a smaller city than any of its rivals' capitals, and the harbour is bigger than the city, which tells you the whole of the arrangement. Vuskar does not measure itself by what it holds. It measures itself by where it has been, and by whether anyone got there first.

Vuskan colonies begin as almost nothing: a beachhead, a fire, some rope, and an unreasonable degree of confidence. Most fail. The ones that hold become ports where tide and law keep the same rhythm, and where the harbour is older than the town hall by a decade.

On the third tide we found a shore, and it had no name we were bound to honour.

Opening line of a Vuskan settlement saga, form unchanged in two centuries

The saga as an institution¶

Every mast raised abroad is a new verse. This is not sentiment. It is the record system.

Vuskar keeps its colonial history in recited verse rather than in chancery rolls. Each settlement has its saga, each saga has a keeper, and the keeper is a public office with a stipend and a successor. A claim is proved by recitation before witnesses who know the form well enough to catch an error, which makes the record much harder to forge than a document and much easier to embellish, and Vuskar has decided it can live with the second problem in exchange for the first.

The reverse also holds, and Vuskar spent seventy years proving it: a shore that is never recited is a shore that has no owner. See The Third Tide.

It also means a Vuskan colony cannot be quietly erased. Burn the port and the verse survives in four other ports, and the verse names the shore, and someone will come back to it, possibly two generations later, carrying the same claim word for word.

Drowning, professionally¶

The faith is the Tideborn, and Vuskar holds it in a way the Naahri find slightly indecent.

Thalyss is not someone to wait for. She is someone to sail on. Drowning is a professional risk rather than a tragedy, because the Drowned Queen keeps what she takes and there are worse places to be kept, and Vuskan verse is full of men who went over the side and are spoken of afterward in the present tense. Widows are not condoled with. They are congratulated, carefully, by people who mean it.

This is also the ground of the standing warmth with the Tidebound, twenty points above neutral. Two peoples who share a god and disagree completely about her turn out to trade very well.

Governing under this flag¶

Coastal sites suit you enormously and inland sites punish you.

Expect trade, expect ships, expect a population that will forgive a bad harvest, a bad law and a bad governor, and will forgive none of you the loss of a harbour. The saga records who held it. That is not a figure of speech, and the keeper is standing right there.

What the rolls record¶

Standing with other powers¶

Denied to its settlers¶

This people never builds: Wood Gatherer, Grove Shifter, Deep Mine.