“Should you like to hear it, my lord?” he asked, securing the strapping and testing his leg gingerly.
Roper said that he should, and Skallagrim stared into the fire for a moment, took a deep breath and began. The chant was often performed with drums and throat-singers accompanying it, but the only adornment that evening was the location; the sense of significance and anticipation that loaded the air. The men paused in the treatment of their equipment, leaned close, and tried to lose themselves in the tale.
It began fifteen thousand years before, with the arrival of the Sutherners. A small band of them emerged from the deserts to the east. Where from, exactly, and why they had arrived, nobody was sure. Some said that they were the forerunners of Catastrophe, the vast serpent that threatened to overturn the world. Others thought that the thousands of years of cold that had come before had isolated and ruined a band of Anakim, and that they had become these stunted Suthern men. Still others suggested that these creatures had burst from the ground and were the subterranean race of dwarves, forced to the surface by civil strife. Whatever the cause, the small band was followed by another larger one, and then a steady stream of men, women and children, pouring from some distant source. They came with their own language, their own tools, their own ways and their own history. A fully formed people, as shocked to encounter the Anakim as the Anakim were by them.
The first encounters between the two had not been hostile, but cautious. As they learned more, the caution turned to confusion. The Sutherners were restless, voracious and rootless; incomprehensible to an Anakim mind. The confusion was mutual, the Sutherners not understanding the crude Anakim art and their limited symbolism; despising the wilderness in which they delighted; scornful of the tools that they used and scarcely able to communicate with these giants. In those days too, the Anakim were vast; standing nearly nine feet in height and intimidating their smaller Suthern neighbours. Though differences can be overcome, the Sutherners were beginning to understand: theirs was not the only way to be human. The distinct place they occupied on the earth had been disturbed; the narrative of their civilisation had to adapt, and the Sutherner is nothing if not adaptable.
As the Sutherners bred, so did hostility, and through a hundred small clashes that spread and sowed distrust, the fleeting period where the two coexisted peaceably was truncated. So began the Uprooting. With a singular and voracious will, the Sutherners proceeded to strip the Anakim from Erebos. Their lands were taken, their wilderness destroyed and replaced by the order beloved of the Sutherner. The new arrivals were more numerous, they could infest the land more intensely, and their conflict with the Anakim had given an edge to their innovation. They copied the bow from an Anakim weapon, improving the arrows to make them more accurate, and matching their bone-plates with armour made from slate and boiled leather. This new form of man crept north; a tide that never ceases to rise, and the Anakim, who would not retreat, were overwhelmed.
From all sides, the Sutherners attacked as the disparate Anakim families were fragmented and pushed into refuges. Some fled to the very southernmost tip of Iberia. Others were pushed along the coast and into the north-east; to a land of darkness and ice. It was not just the Anakim who suffered. The Mountain Men, known as the Unhieru, were surrounded and destroyed, and now survived only in the hills and valleys in the west of Albion. The Haefingar and the Riktolk, the other two races who had shared Erebos, met the same treatment and were extinguished altogether. They would never again walk this earth.
The last Anakim in the west of Erebos found themselves pinned against the coast, and though their kind had never before taken to the water, they floated across that raging sea, and retreated into Albion. The Sutherners followed them, overrunning their defences, seeking not space but eradication.
For the Anakim, it seemed hopeless. Their options were to unify, or face oblivion. There was a single figure who frightened the Anakim enough to command their respect: Chlodowich, the mighty king of the Jormunrekur. A huge figure, known as “Roper” to his enemies for his habit of cutting the hair from those he had killed and weaving it into his own, forming a ghastly ponytail that wrapped around him twelve times in all to form a broad plaited belt. This was a leader to terrify the Sutherners, and beneath him the tribes united to name him the first Black Lord.
However, even together, even led by Chlodowich, a warrior so fearsome that the Sutherners began to shave their heads before battle so as not to join his ghastly belt, the Anakim were losing. They were driven further north through the land that would become known as Suthdal, fear hanging low over the hills thick as fog. His forces scattered, Chlodowich and his few remaining warriors stumbled across the Abus, a Suthern horde scenting after them.
It was the end for the Anakim. Chlodowich had just his three hundred household warriors remaining to him; his Sacred Guard. He retreated to Harstathur, climbing onto the Altar of Albion and, sacrificing his own horse, he prayed for the strength to defeat the Sutherners. He offered his own life in a pact with the Almighty, if he would preserve the Anakim.
And the Almighty answered his prayer.
Four hundred horsemen of the Oris tribe appeared on the plateau. Chlodowich sent them out in all directions, seeking reinforcements from his scattered army. They arrived in small groups; all the tribes. The Vidarr, the Baltasar, the Nadoddur,
