Scythia

Scythia, a country of rolling plains and bleak steppe, is the largest single region in Mediterranea. To its west are Ku, Vir and Oggia; the Wilderness of Zin lies to the south; the Hyperborean Sea is on the north and the Sea of Baku on the east. Its southern shore on the Euxine Sea opens a route to the Mediterranean, but the dangerous straits of the Symplegades make that voyage a hazardous one.

The people are short, lean and a little bowlegged, with olive-brown skin. They shave their heads apart from a single scalplock, and the men grow thin, scraggly beards. Bathing is almost unknown among them, and cultured outsiders quip that a Scythian's horse smells sweeter than its rider. Their clothing is made of hides and skins: breeches, hair shirts and round fur hats, with ornaments of horn worn by men and women alike.

As horse-nomads they seldom linger in one place for more than a week. A band on the move resembles a city on wheels. Riders go first; then come yurts of felt and reeds built on pole frames and set on wheels, drawn by horses and carrying the women and children; last come spare horses and the herds of sheep and goats that meet most of their needs, driven along by further warriors. Every Scythian counts himself part of a single tribe divided into hundreds of bands, and anyone may join or quit a band at will, because the band is meant to serve the free horseman, not the other way round.

They are barbarians in the full sense. When not tending herds they hunt the way other peoples fight and fight the way they hunt, fanning out great lines of riders directed by horn calls and banners to drive their quarry ahead of them. They hunt wolves, elk, boars, bears, goblins (whom they count as beasts) and the Mediterranean mastodon, which is nearly extinct anywhere but Scythia and Draconea. As mounted archers they have no equal, loosing three-edged arrows while guiding their horses with their legs alone so both hands stay free, and their chiefs are shrewd masters of ambush and hit-and-run fighting; speed of movement and utter mercilessness lie at the core of how they make war. Once a battle is won, each killer cuts off his victims' heads and flays them, turns the skull caps into drinking cups and hangs the scalps from bridle, belt and cloak to show his standing. They drink the blood of anyone they slay, in war or in single combat, and on occasion eat the body too.

Religion takes the form of a fanatical shamanism serving the Old Gods. Their patron, ranked a little above the others, is Atta, who embodies human greatness and forms the bodily bridge joining men to the gods, for Scythians hold slaughter and warfare to be divine acts; their shamans are necromancers as well.

When a warrior dies his body is gutted, packed with galingale, parsley seed and anise, stitched closed and coated in wax as spells are chanted over it. He is then placed in a strengthened yurt piled with the dead, including his horses, wives, slaves and the enemies he killed, some of them mummified as he was, along with all his goods, and a huge earthen mound called a kurgen is raised over the whole. Relatives may go raiding for additional corpses until the yurt is buried, since these dead are supposed to stand guard over the grave for all time. It is rumored that shamans lay curses on the kurgens so that the guards rise as zombies or skeleton warriors and the mummified dead as Sahus, defending both the frequently rich hoards of gold inside and the honor of the people.

There are four classes. Warriors stand at the top, ranked by their scalps and skull-cups and after that by wives, slaves and gold, and whoever holds the most trophies leads the band. Shamans are honored almost as highly and counsel the chiefs; a handful of bands consist only of shamans, roaming at will to spread their necro-shamanist creed and to offer counsel and help in battle, and among them standing rests purely on magical might. Artisans, believed mostly to be of mixed Scythian and slave descent, are skilled metalsmiths who produce lovely gold masks and ornaments for rituals as well as excellent horn shortbows; nobody knows whether they are in truth a kind of higher slave caste, but most tribesmen who look foreign turn out to be artisans. The slave class takes in every woman, since the other three classes are made up entirely of men, along with captives; male prisoners are seldom spared unless a win has already yielded more corpses than the rites after the battle require.

Scythian revels are wild. They love strong wine, hashish and opium, and treasure lotus powder, which comes to them only now and then through raiding; in most bands a man's manhood is judged by how much of such intoxicants he can take. Scythian raiders have terrorized Zin, Yalak, Palasgea and Vir, and they are sworn enemies of Hyperborea's Vanir, who frequently raid them in turn for loot. Ancient ruins are scattered across the country, many already stripped but a few said to still hold their treasure, and a persistent legend speaks of Eridan, an underground city that the Atlanteans left empty early in the First Age, why nobody can say. It was lost long before the Scythians came and is said to contain wealth beyond imagining.