The Wardlands and the Graith of Guardians
According to Gabriel McNally’s reconstruction (generally accepted by scholars of Ambrosian legend, always excepting Julian Emrys), the Wardlands were an anarchy with no formal government at all. According to legend, the Wardlands had not been a kingdom since the golden age at the beginning of time, when the King (usually identified with the divine aspect known as God Avenger) ruled in person in Laent and elsewhere. Since then it has been considered blasphemous, or at least irrationally presumptuous, for any person to assert a claim to rule the Wardlands. Those who try to do so are exiled or (in extreme cases) killed.
What in other cultures would have been state functions (national defense, dispute resolution, even road building and repair, etc.) were carried on by voluntary cooperatives: the Arbiters of the Peace, the Guild of Silent Men, the League of Rhetors, etc. Most famous in the unguarded lands was the Graith of Guardians, sworn to maintain the guard.
The Graith had three ranks of Guardian: the lowest and most numerous were the thains, wearing a gray cape of office. They were hardly more than candidates to the Graith proper, and they undertook to obey their seniors in the Graith, even more senior thains.
Vocates, in contrast, were full members of the Graith, privileged to stand and speak at the Graith’s councils (known as Stations). Their only obligation was to defend the Guard, and the Guarded, as they saw fit. Their cloak of office was blood red.
Most senior in the Graith were the Three Summoners. They had no power to command but were generally conceded the authority to lead the vocates of the Graith proper. The Summoner of the City convened and presided over Stations of the Graith. The Summoner of the Outer Lands was charged with watching for threats to the Guard from the unguarded lands. The Summoner of the Inner Lands was charged with watching for internal threats: those who would try to disrupt the fertile anarchy of the Wardlands and establish the sterility of political order.
The greatest danger to the anarchy of the Wardlands was obviously the Graith itself. Members of the Graith were pledged to abide by the First Decree, which forbade any acquisition of power or authority over those under the Guard. Nevertheless, Guardians were exiled more often than the Guarded for political aspirations to government (euphemistically referred to as “Impairment of the Guard”). Power corrupts, and the Guardians wielded power more often than their peers among the Guarded.
Appendix E
Note on Ambrosian Legend and Its Sources, Lost and Found
Readers of these collections of Ambrosian myth and legend are already aware that Morlock’s exploits beyond the northern edge of the world were not the end of his career as a hero. It took centuries for that to be evident to his contemporaries, however—or even to Morlock himself, and in that time his path took a number of severe turns, some sinister, some comic, many disgraceful.
The dwarves of Thrymhaiam cultivated his legend (as they are wont to do for their kin, whether harven or ruthen), but as far as they were concerned this was its final episode, and the various verse retellings of his deeds in the struggle against the Sunkillers apparently took the tone of an obituary, with one famous exception. We know that Defender Dervanion wrote up an account for the Graith of Guardians, although we don’t know if it went into general circulation, and the anonymous Seventh Scribe of New Moorhope wrote an alliterative epic of the entire matter, including the Balancer of the Two Powers.
All of these sources have been lost. What we have is a series of verse plays in Late Ontilian, which may have been based on one of the talkier Dwarvish song cycles, and an epic, if that’s not too strong a word, in rhyming verse by the pseudonymous Ninth Scribe of New Moorhope, and the Khroic ekshalva about Morlock, which purport to be based on direct visionary contact with the events they narrate.
I am not going to discuss the issue of whether the Ontilian plays are based on Dwarvish sources or whether they derive from a lost Mandragoric account of Morlock’s life. First, because Dr. Gabriel McNally and Reverend L. G. Handschuh have debated the matter at length in the columns of the Journal of Exoplenic Folklore, and their total inability to reach any kind of agreement indicates the matter is undecidable at our current state of knowledge. Second, because I don’t care.
I don’t care about the overly solemn lost Dwarvish song cycles, and I don’t care if there were any Mandragoric analogues or parallels, and I don’t care about the lost epic of the Seventh Scribe, and I really have no interest in daydreaming about the papers that may or may not be filed in the distant and inaccessible archives of the Graith of Guardians.
The only one of these lost sources that I regret is a version that is supposed to have been made in old age by Deortheorn for the benefit of his last son, Wyrththeorn. It would be good to have because Deor was a witness of and participant in many of these events, and someone who knew Morlock well enough not to idealize him. And it must have been Wyrth’s first real introduction to the career of his harven-kinsman Morlock. It must have had a great influence, and the time would come when Wyrth had a great influence over Morlock, both drunk and sober.
Some have questioned my attempt to re-create Deor’s lost account using the Khroic ekshalva as sources. Dr. McNally, indeed, has warned me that he will count me with the dead if I continue: he’ll never speak to me, write to me, or mention my name again on Facebook. That’s too much to hope for, but it would be reason enough to forge ahead on a task which has sometimes proved difficult.
Other reasons include the fact that I have a contract and have already banked the advance. But, though satisfyingly cynical, that doesn’t really account for my intermittent but persistent thirty-year quest to tell this particular story.
I think one reason I kept at it was an attempt to understand why: why the young hero Morlock syr Theorn became the old, embittered wonderworker and part-time monster Morlock Ambrosius. Maybe this is misguided: myth is multiform, and there’s no reason that characters have to be consistent between different versions. But if there was a Morlock, he took some particular path from his alpha to his omega, and this is my attempt to trace that path.
This reminds me of something Reverend Handschuh says about the Ambrosian cycle. He’s one of its most severe critics and considers it mere romance, not true epic. Like his hero W. P. Ker, and like many another gentle well-read scholar, he prefers the harsh, unforgiving world of classical or Germanic epic. In that tragic vision of life, heroes face their fate without hope of redemption or escape, and Reverend Handschuh rather scorns Ambrosian legend for its lack of tragic doom. “There is always hope,” he writes. “There is always hope.”
He means it as a criticism, but I don’t think it is a criticism.
About the Author
© J. M. Pfundstein
James Enge lives with his wife in northwest Ohio, where he teaches classical languages and literature at a medium-sized public university. His first novel for Pyr, Blood of Ambrose, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 2010. He is also the author of This Crooked Way and The Wolf Age, not to mention the Tournament of Shadows trilogy (consisting of A Guile of Dragons, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and the thing you’re reading here). His shorter fiction has appeared in the magazine Black Gate, in Swords and Dark Magic (Harper Voyager, 2010), in Blackguards (Ragnarok Publications, 2015), and elsewhere.