Ironwood

The City

Jacob was becoming used to riding all day, and he had taken to enjoying the exercise and the quiet time to think. His legs were still sore, but that was just the dull ache of a week without a chance to recoup, and he scarcely noticed the discomfort. One difference today was that the shadows were lengthening, and yet Ceann had no intention of calling a stop soon. Athena and Daniel still walked on the wings of the road ahead of the others, looking for tracks separating from the road, but with little expectation of finding them. Traffic was heavy enough to make tracking near-impossible. There really was nothing to do but trust Thane's word that that Sarronen was the right target. If the heavily pitted road and steadily increasing density of villages was any guide, that target was close.

The travelers were quiet as they watched the shabby structures of nearby villages pass them by. Despite a cooler, drier climate than Ironwood, the population was denser. It was a marked change from the solitary road they walked further west.

Once, everything between Kyr (where Ironwood now stood) and Talyk had been cultivated farmland for the Mirakan Empire. Now Great Road looked out on forest and wild plains. It was remarkable how long the devastation inflicted by a mad warlord's genocide could last. The Kharshe's scorched-earth offensive had eventually burned itself out, leaving its people scattered and starving in the land they had won. The remains of the original Kharshe horde had splintered into what now composed the Clan Kingdoms. Over the decades, they also incorporated waves of Eastern nomadic immigrants, each sparking a new wave of conflict. In the present, the members of the Clan Kingdoms remained dangerous warriors, but had become less ruthless neighbors, more concerned with battling nature than the descendants of Miraka.

The Sarronens dated from a splinter of the first terrible Horde, left behind to take the town of Tara. Tara had been well enough defended to make storming the walls very unattractive, and yet too small to delay the main thrust of the invasion. A group of clans under the leadership of a chieftain named Sarron had been left with strict orders to destroy the walls and houses of Tara, and to kill all its inhabitants: man, woman, and child. They had failed to obey.

Sarron besieged Tara for three long months, razing most of the surrounding villages to the ground. Greatly outnumbered, the desperate Tarans executed a daring (and suicidal, for its participants) night raid to poison Sarron's herds, leaving the Sarronens desperately short of food. The Kharshe were a semi-nomadic folk almost entirely dependent upon their herds, of which only a fraction a survived.

In return, the Sarronens were forced into a frontal assault in order to capture the food-stocks of Tara. At great cost, they managed to destroy the gate and take the city. Unfortunately for them, the Tarans were seed farmers: conquering them did not allow the Sarronens to replace their herds. Neither did they have the expertise to man Tara's fields or rebuild its economy. They had doomed themselves and Tara both.

Sarron, in an accommodation rare among the early Kharshe, ordered that those who did not resist his occupation be left alive. Unfamiliar with the practice of slavery, he offered the residents a choice: accept adoption into the Clan and teach them their arts of agriculture, or die. Most chose the former. In this way, the walled town of Tara had become the capitol city of the newborn Sarronnen kingdom. Thankfully for the new city of Sarronen, Kharshe himself never got the opportunity to punish Sarron's disobedience.

Therefore, Sarronen had been the first of the Clans to successfully adopt seed farming on a large scale. While still looked down upon for their barbaric ways and lack of learning among the Margonians and Travanians, their single city had flourished into a sizable kingdom, even if few of their towns had made it onto Margon maps. The capitol city, which the party now approached, was small compared to the cities of the West, but commanded a folk that was not to be underestimated. Trade had been very limited with the West, even after the road to Ironwood had been opened. However, the Sarronens had been, since that time, been relatively friendly towards the citizens of Ironwood.