Ku

Ku stretches along Mediterranea's northern shore on the Hyperborean Sea, with the Black Forest, Oggia and Scythia curving along its wide southern edge. It is a loose league of fishing and farming villages that work together without being truly united. Its fair-skinned, blond or brown-haired people look very like the Vanir of Hyperborea and may be related to them; they wear belted cloth tunics and tall boots, adding furs in winter.

The culture is fairly primitive and knows almost nothing of science. The Ku work three small mines in the wild interior for tin, lead and silver but are poor metalsmiths; their best local tools are of flint and polished stone, now giving way to imported bronze and iron. Their pottery is common and well made but purely practical. They excel in woodwork above all, building in oak and pine and even paving streets with wooden blocks, and are nearly as good at weaving, sailmaking and netmaking. Every village follows the same plan: an oval stone wall around linked rectangular buildings set in east-west rows. The main villages are Bisku, Krem and Gelen. Bisku, largest and nominal capital, covers the whole of a five-acre islet 130 yards offshore, linked by a wooden causeway to the mainland, where a small foreigners' quarter stands.

Ku's wealth rests on amber. Atlantis, Tharshesh, Ophir and other southern lands crave it, and though Ku has none of its own, the usually hostile Vanir let Ku ships sail their waters freely and swap amber for herbs, cloth, woodwork and luxuries the Ku buy elsewhere; the possible kinship between the two peoples may help keep the bond firm. Traders from Ys, chiefly Atlanteans and far-roving Tharshi, call to exchange metal tools and elven goods from Ys and Broceliande for this amber, and Ku also sells some tin and jewelry of silver, amber, shale, antler, bone, coal or shell. An overland route through Oggia, Vir and Targrim carries amber south as well. Ku gets on excellently with Ys and the Roms of Oggia, badly with the few Albans it has met, and well with most others, picking up the ways of more advanced cultures in a rather random and sometimes self-contradictory fashion.

Each village has a six-man council, and all the councils meet at Bisku from time to time to handle shared problems, settle quarrels between villages, set policy, fix trade prices and standardize wages; there is no other central government. At the yearly Summer Fish Festival, whoever lands the largest catch becomes King of Ku for 24 hours, treated like royalty and granted any reasonable wish, but a cruel or capricious 'King' is dragged from his mock throne, whipped and marched to the edge of the Dark Forest.

Their squat, broad ships are animal hides stretched over wooden frames lashed only with rope. The flexible treated-leather hulls shrug off rough seas and leak constantly but slowly enough to bail, while foreign shipwrights curse, laugh or shake their heads at them, and most outsiders spend the voyage clinging on. The Ku are expert cod fishermen, stringing lines and nets between boats; fish, shore-gathered shellfish and simple but effective farming feed them all year. They hunt without much skill, favoring bows, spears, harpoons, axes and mallets.

They keep a druidic faith in the Old Gods, headed by Eloah as the Sun and Hawwa as the Moon, and so count day and night as separate periods and keep both solar and lunar calendars. The dead are cremated and their ashes set in truncated cone-shaped pots, buried with great ceremony at the twilight of the full moon, when the Moon rises as the Sun sets, because they believe a Stairway to Heaven reaches down that one night each month to let wandering souls enter. The druids form an aloof elite in sacred groves along the Oggia border; the people provide everything they need because they are thought to plead with the gods for all, but the druids pay little attention to society or politics.