Of Wattle, Its Governance, and the Nature of Your Grace’s Position Within It

Wattle is a very important kingdom that has so far survived the Empire’s attentions because its present king is very good at what he does. Himakatupura, the Empire’s northernmost city, was built as a fort that would pay for itself: to push the Empire’s reach north, and to sell to Ealdorfold and the Rosantic League. Wattle is built upon those ruins, even more thoroughly than Daub is. Very little of the old Himakatupura culture remains; yet Wattle, under King Allant, has become very successful at doing precisely what the Empire originally intended.

This of course means that the Empire’s ambitions have been rekindled. Wattle is now a vassal, and remains largely unconquered for four reasons:

1) King Allant is clever, knowing how to make himself useful and how to fight viciously when cornered. The Empire cannot depose him, for that would let the old-blood nobles, and especially the Pendragons, move to open war. (The House speaks an old dialect and calls itself Pendraig; nobody else does.) The nobles cannot depose him, for then the citizens would revolt and Singhapura would burn everything to the ground. The common folk do not want him gone, for his mythos is large and he does genuinely care. The traders do not want him gone, because he keeps his taxes low and allows everyone a seat at the table. The Haugris Church cannot topple him: he is the reason they still have a foothold in the North. The Temple of Eighteen will not move against him; he keeps the Church off their backs.

He surrounds his enemies with allies and his allies (such as yourself) with enemies, and makes himself the one man whom everyone gets on with. In Singhapura he is sometimes called the Crocodile King. An insult, but also a mark of respect.

2) Wattle is geographically quite large, and home to a wide range of magics, including Relics. Any extended campaign in the North would quickly take the cities and then open Singhapura’s armies to decades of guerilla warfare. Wattle is therefore of immense use as a politically neutral state against a potential Ealdorfold or Rosantic invasion. Indeed, if one considers the Great Northern Waste, Wattle’s defences to the west, and Catherine’s Gate to the east, Wattle is practically a buffer pointing outward from the Empire. It is cheaper to keep it that way than to conquer it and rebuild it again.

3) The Empire badly needs steel, and cannot at present afford to destroy certain trade routes.

I have written more of this in the chapter on Singhapura’s economy; for now, note that every cart of Ealdorfold steel bound for the Empire comes through Queensgate and then up the Sut through Daub. The Taprobane Imperial University wants the Relics that Wattle and Daub export from the Waste, which are held to be a phenomenal source of untapped magical theory and application (at least the good ones are).

4) Culture. Wattle fascinates Singhapura. Singhapura’s theatres have made a lot of money out of Wattle. Doomed heroes, feuding lords and the cold winds of winter: superb stuff. The average Singhapura citizen does not know or care who runs what in Wattle, but wants that source of wonder and tall tales kept on the doorstep.

On paper Your Grace answers to Wattle, and through Wattle to the Empire. That holds only so long as Wattle can stand between Daub and Singhapura. I do not say this to run Wattle down, but you need to know how thick this wall really is.

Of What Wattle Is

Wattle is large, and split chiefly into Greater Wattle (where most of the wealth is) and Lesser Wattle (where most of the farms are). Lesser Wattle feeds a good part of the North. Ealdorfold buys its grain in lean years, as do the border territories, and Daub has been glad of Wattle’s harvest more than once.

Greater Wattle is more province than city: a natural harbour with a modest population spread over a great deal of ground, and nothing in it to compare with Valdermach or Basnapura. It was built piecemeal and rebuilt often, so it sprawls in fragments, and every district is somebody’s seat of power. Centuries of settlers from the North, the League and Lusia have given it a fragmented culture and an economy that Singhapura’s theorists find maddening - hence the term “loot-based economics”.

After consulting the maps, and conversing with many a caravan leader, I can trim Greater Wattle down to a few points of interest:

1) The Crown Quarter sits in what remains of the Palaces of Himakatupura, where the river Sut meets the sea. King Allant’s palace is here. So is Antler Hall, where ambassadors are received and feast-courts held; the Chancery, which handles letters to and from Singhapura; the Tower of the Constable, where the royal garrison lives; and the port. Most of Wattle’s wealth goes in and out through that port, and whoever holds the Crown Quarter holds the port.

We think the Crown Quarter also covers the old site of the notorious Empress Kudakaali II’s torture chambers. They may still be down there somewhere.

It also holds the Round Tiltyard, which seats six thousand and was built by Allant’s predecessor Aneirin for the yearly Tournament of the Table of Lords. The Tiltyard is a political stage as much as a sporting one. Knights fight for glory under their banners, and the Great Houses who pay for the prize armour compete for reputation. The Singhapura consulate looks down upon it all, keeping an eye on King Allant and his kingdom for the Empire.

2) Hauterive, a little way off, belongs to the lords and ladies of the Great Houses. These are well-guarded townhouses; the nobles keep their real estates elsewhere and use these for politics. The Table of Lords used to meet here until Allant moved its meetings to the Crown Quarter. Plenty of people will tell you nothing actually changed.

Hauterive strikes me as a militarily significant place. It’s obviously not a castle, but if I was a suspicious cat (and I am) I would point out that it is a fantastic staging ground for any of these nobles who wish to whip up some troops and send them where they might do the most damage.

3) Rubble, out of sight of Hauterive, is where most of Wattle’s poor and many of its newcomers live. The foundations are still old Himakatupura stone. The Haugris Church has its biggest building here, a basilica that serves as both hospital and grain-dole house.

Rubble is interesting because it is where most of Wattle’s disaffected and politically powerless live, and also because of its Night Market: they say anything that can be bought or sold turns up here. As for the disaffected, this was once King Allant’s power base (when he was nothing more than a roving bandit with dreams of revolution) and, now that he is King, it is his greatest unchecked weakness. All Singhapura has to do is improve the lot of the people who live here, and suddenly Greater Wattle will have another civil war in its heart.

4) Crowgarden, outside the older districts, has the mills, bakeries, market gardens, fullers and tanneries, and hardly any defences. Crowgarden Common doubles as a second tournament field when the Tiltyard is full. The farmland of Lesser Wattle surrounds it, and its far edge runs into the Waste. Here is another weakness: Wattle’s nobility does not care to protect the people who feed them, and Allant does not appear to understand the importance of it either.

5) Queensgate, across the river, is the market district proper. The Grain Exchange is here, along with the cloth halls, the money-changers, the factor-houses of the Wattle Merchants Guild and the Lusian and Rosantic consulates. So is the Wastewalkers’ Exchange, where salvage from the Waste is assayed, licensed and sold to buyers from near and far. The Twilight Road also ends in Queensgate, so goods from Daub, from Ealdorfold and from Singhapura all pass through here sooner or later.

This is probably the most interesting part of Greater Wattle: it is a flytrap for every economist and spymaster and mercenary and magician worth their salt in the North.

6) The Gontreach lies well to the north; mostly forest and a pile of great ruins, but now also the revival of magic in Greater Wattle. The Temple of Eighteen has built its new monastery out of the ruins, and around the monastery a whole population has gathered: hedge-wizards descended from banished magicians, a large share of Wattle’s scholars and magicians, Rosantic sorcerers who have fled their own lands, Lusian alchemists hunting for secrets and better prospects, and a great many people who study the Waste.

At the far end is the Keeper’s Gate, once said to be a fort on the outermost edge of Himakatupura’s lands. All that is left is a toll-arch over the road into the stretch of Waste that separates Wattle from Ealdorfold. It is Crown land on paper; in practice the Wastewalkers run it.

Beyond Greater Wattle, on the edge of the Waste, sit Harrow’s End, a grim fort-city, and beneath it the harbour of Wrymgate, which was built by Jon the Mispelled to stop a dragon. He was a tactical genius, and he could not spell, and the harbour has never once been used. Lesser Wattle is ringed by small market towns, Long Walk, Whitefield and Eldermoot, which Your Grace’s caravans will know better than I do.

Of King Allant and His Position

Much of Allant’s origins is well known: born the third son of a minor lord, he found his calling in war, and spent the best part of twenty years as a mercenary captain, building from nothing the company that became the Dukes of the North. Your Grace will know the details of that story better than I do, seeing as how you were his trusted lieutenant.

From the outside: the North was in a bad way in those early years. The death of Aneirin the Bard-King had left a generation of petty wars and petty tyrants. Read the stories of Pendragon Cador, Pendragon Loholt or Igraine the Elder. To the Empire they were small chieftains, but to the people under their heels they must have been terrible.

The common people of Wattle remember Allant as the man who came out of that mess and ended it. With his loyal band he protected villages the Great Houses had stripped bare for supplies, and he broke a good many cruel warlords. He had his faults, but he became the king the times needed, and in the end he united Greater Wattle, and with it the North.

Fewer people know how Allant got Singhapura’s attention. The Pendragons, House Carpenter and three other Great Houses had worn each other out. Allant arrived with his army intact and made himself useful to the Chancery, as the man who could explain Wattle’s endless squabbles to Singhapura and could be trusted to protect the trade the Empire cared about. With enough backing from the Merchants Guild, he won, if not the Empire’s approval, then at least its willingness to deal with the one sword in the North that seemed to be held by a sane man.

It was not bloodless, and again, Your Grace knows this side of it better than anyone. The Pendragons did not take it well, and for a time there was great trouble under Valerius the Ironhand. This is where Singhapura decided to commit to Allant and to Wattle: Singhapura’s armies swept the main Pendragon army aside, much as Makaraasoka’s had done in his day.

Then came years of slow public disgrace. There were ceremonies and handshakes in public, but the Pendragons kept losing arguments that had nothing to do with the succession: debts, disputed contracts, heavy trading losses, land cases and uprisings. I would credit those later defeats to Allant more than to Singhapura. From the records I have been able to read, Allant reminds me of the Lusian general Septimus and his epitaph: No friend has ever served me whom I did not treat with gold; no enemy has ever wronged me whom I did not repay with ashes. Thus all accounts are settled.

Allant stays safe by making sure every faction has something to gain while he lives and something to lose if he dies. He deals with Singhapura, the Merchants Guild, the Great Houses, the Temple, Lusian money, Rosantic ambitions and Ealdorfold interests all at the same time, and he keeps them balanced by making sure each one believes he is the only man who can hold things together. The common people and the lesser houses love him as a man of no great birth who saved the North when it needed saving. The Great Houses treat him with caution and respect, because they remember how publicly the Pendragons fell.

There is a weakness in this, though, and time will find it. The Dukes of the North, the company of people like Your Grace and Jerem the Red, are a generation older now, and your children are a different sort. Loyalty made in war is not the same as loyalty made in peace and plenty.

The Great Houses are still a threat. The Pendragons remind everyone of the old days, and House Carpenter owns enormous amounts of land and industry. The old aristocracy (Wulfstane, Clavering, Hollow, Pelhamor, Gautierre, Garlande, Balaain and Morgaunt) makes up the Table of Lords. As Allant has turned their attention to trade, much of their power has moved out of their soldiers and into the Wattle Merchants Guild. So most of Wattle’s money is now in hands other than the king’s.

Allant knows this. I suspect it is one reason he has spent so much on the Concordant College and on his arrangements with the Merchants Guild. Allant seems to be trying to build a rival to Taprobane and the LTU under his own aegis. From what I have heard, the Concordant College takes in sorcerers and alchemists from Lusia, and people Taprobane has turned away, and puts them to studying and reworking artefacts from the Waste.

I believe the Great Houses have begun to see what a finished College would do to the balance of power, and they do not like it. Neither does Taprobane, and so neither does Singhapura. The College is not yet what Allant wants it to be. The LTU and Taprobane can afford a friendly rivalry because the same state built both of them. This College will either implode, or eventually force Singhapura to reach out and grab it for its own.

Of the Temple and the Church

The Haugris Church is well known in Wattle, but it holds relatively little power. Wattle nobles have always been responsible for schooling the people on their lands, and they seem to have effectively prevented the Church from its usual playbook of schools and hospitals.

I believe, also, that the Temple of Eighteen is changing, and that Wattle is a crucible. The Temple has, for the last few centuries, more or less kept to an isolationist policy: little cells that keep the teachings but do not involve themselves in worldly affairs.

The Wattle Temple seems to have taken lessons from its Lusian counterparts. It is widely known that it collects the knowledge of the Vedics and of non-Singhapura magicians, and I have heard that it now teaches it. Priests sit on many of Allant’s highest councils, often arbitrating and acting as judges for commoners and nobles alike, and the Temple is rebuilding the ruins in the Gontreach with Lusian money.

Why do the Empire and the Haugris Church tolerate this, you may ask. Well, Your Grace, it reminds me of a general who said that a guaranteed enemy is guaranteed job security. Perhaps the Adhiraj wants the Church to have something to spend its energies on, instead of rivalling him for power. Perhaps Lusian influence is really leading a new religious renaissance.

Of Tourism and the Great Northern Romance

I spoke earlier of Singhapura’s fascination with Wattle.

The Great Northern Romance is a whole genre in Singhapura. Your Grace would find most of it pure fantasy, but it is familiar enough for Singhapura audiences to follow and foreign enough to thrill them. As a result, ordinary people in Singhapura are sentimentally attached to Wattle staying just as it is.

As long as Singhapura believes in its romantic North, that belief does some of the work of walls and armies. Writers and poets make a poor living, so they cost far less than soldiers and arrows; and yet the ballads of Robert Holdbrook, Bloody Ygrain and the rest travel further, and are sung loudest by the very people who could wipe Wattle off the map. It is also very hard to attack a story without looking ridiculous.

Of What This Means for Daub

Three matters follow for Your Grace.

First, to be blunt: Wattle is a thin wall, and Your Grace’s vassals hold their legitimacy from King Allant, not from Daub. So long as Allant lives, the arrangement holds. His successor will not be bound by his friendships, and the children of the Dukes of the North are not their parents. I urge Your Grace to bind the vassals to Daub by interest before that day comes.

Second, I would advise Your Grace to watch the Concordant College closely. If it succeeds, the LTU will have a rival that the Empire did not build and cannot easily manage, and Daub’s magicians will be tempted north by it. If it fails, its sorcerers and alchemists will need somewhere to go, and Daub might do well to be that place.

Third, remember that the Empire has been here before. Makaraasoka took Wattle by defeating the Pendragons in the field, and then bound it with Merchant credit, Church schools and forced marriages between the nobility of Udanuwara and Wattle. Kaaryasundara sent troops during the Violet Wars with strict orders not to meddle in the politics. The Empire knows how to take Wattle and how to leave it alone, and for now it has chosen the second course. Your Grace should watch for any sign that it is reconsidering.