Yalak

Water surrounds Yalak on three sides, making it a peninsula: the Mediterranean on the south, the Euxine on the north and the Strait of the Symplegades on the northwest. On the east it borders territory claimed by the Tribes of Zin. The country is rough and volcanic, crossed by mountains, and wetter than the other Turanian lands. The Yalaku are its only true people: typically slender, of middling height, brown-skinned and black-haired, and clothed in plain robes of green or brown. Surrounded by warlike tribes, they have shut themselves off from the rest of the world. With one another they are friendly and candid, passionate about storytelling, painting, music and philosophy, and entirely able to provide for themselves. A few Yalaku of low standing exchange opium and hashish, both plentiful in the country, for gold, silver, bronze and iron. Tharshi merchants, who find a ready market for the drugs, control this commerce, yet it rests wholly on the moods of the handful of Yalaku prepared to deal with foreigners.

According to legend, Yalak was established late in the First Age by the First Sages, a band of discontented Atlantean scholars who wanted a perfect society given over to learning and culture, with no economics or politics. They recruited barbarian nomads and instructed them in farming, stock-raising, metalwork, philosophy, and the arts and sciences, but they did not anticipate that seclusion would lead to stagnation. What the Yalaku once knew of the wider world has nearly vanished, displaced by ancient stories, heroic songs and uninformed speculation. As a result they think the lands beyond their borders teem with savages, monsters and demons, and they wave away anything foreigners have achieved, above all when it clashes with tradition.

The people dwell in three enormous 'gateless cities', Huyuk, Kaymakl and Xanthus. Each is one vast beehive-like building of stone, wood and mud-brick that houses a whole community; there are no streets, and the only way in is through hatches in the roof reached by ladders, while the tall, massive walls get their light from little windows and skylights. Neither the Tribes of Zin nor the wandering Scythians have ever mounted a serious assault on them.

A person's standing depends on how little of their time must be spent outdoors. The Yalaku recognize six classes. Sages guard tradition and sit on a council in each city led by its oldest member, the Council Elder, and a High Council meets once a year. Citizens include craftsmen and laborers. Farmers and Herders tend the plains around the cities, and then there are the Hunters. Last are the Outcasts, marked with a brand for departing from tradition, forbidden to enter the cities, considered insane and avoided by all; ironically they are the Yalaku foreigners meet most often, and they run the drug trade. Herders and Hunters alone are allowed to travel far.

Yalak has no warrior class. Under threat the people withdraw indoors, where they keep rarely used swords and spears suited to close fighting inside, and the Hunters are expected to take charge of any defense. Raiders generally settle for burning the crops and killing or enslaving Outcasts, and once they leave, the lower classes emerge to set things right.

All property is held in common, and so is marriage: groups marry openly with no fixed membership, and children grow up communally among many 'aunts', 'uncles' and brothers and sisters. The Yalaku work leather, lead, copper, horn, bone, flint and obsidian with great skill, and traders prize their goods. They are remarkable in the arts and sciences, yet know nothing beyond their own narrow fields. Their faith mixes old Atlantean religion with the cults of the barbarian tribes that joined the First Sages, producing a clerical cult of Atlas, who is embodied in Mt. Attala, the mightiest volcano of the Tauru Mountains. They consider themselves Atlas's new chosen people and a race above all others.